After a while Steerforth joined Grimes in the letter's day cabin. He announced indignantly, "I finally got rid of the sanctimonious old bastard. You certainly didn't help matters by showing up with no less than three girls flaunting their nudity. In fact I'm wondering how I can bring myself to serve under such an unprincipled, atheistical lecher as yourself. Sir."
"I'm sorry," said Grimes, not without sincerity. "But he'd started on you, before I got back, so I let him finish on you. You knew what it was all about. I didn't. Had I stayed I should only have been dipping my oar into unknown waters."
"Into troubled waters," said the chief officer. "Into waters made even more troubled by yourself. And those blasted girls."
The blasted girls made their entrance. Shirl and Darleen were in correct uniform and Seiko was wearing her Madam Butterfly outfit. But either her wig had been replaced by a less formal one or it had been shorn to a page boy bob. With them came Calamity Cassie, ostensibly to make some minor repairs to the small refrigerator in Grimes' bar. ("Are you sure that you want her?" Ms. Scott had asked. "Do you like your beer warm, captain, or having to do without ice cubes?")
"Sit down, everybody," ordered Grimes. "Yes, you too, Seiko. But first of all fetch us drinks."
"And for myself, Captain-san?" asked the robot sweetly.
"If you want one. What do you fancy? Battery acid?"
Cassie laughed. "She'll find none of that aboard this ship. But, believe it or not, there are some archaic wet storage cells over in that apology for a workshop . . . "
Over the drinks Grimes told the story, from his viewpoint, to Steerforth and Cassie. Shirl and Darleen told their almost identical stories. Seiko told her story.
"So, sir," said Steerforth at last, "it seems certain that the silkies can be classified as intelligent beings, even disregarding the claims—which I do not doubt—that Shirl, Darleen and Seiko have been in some sort of telepathic communication with them, there is that gruesome business of their gnawing off people's hands . . . ."
Grimes shuddered. "Gruesome," he said, "is rather too mild a word."
"Could be, sir. But it's a very apposite act of revenge, the sort of revenge that only an intelligent being could conceive." He was warming up to his theme. "What gave us our imagined superiority over certain other intelligent inhabitants of the Home Planet, Earth? The cetacea, I mean. Our hands. Our tool-making, weapon-making, weapon-using hands. With our hands we built the whaling ships, made the harpoons and the harpoon guns. With our hands we launched the harpoons— and continued to do so even after it was generally accepted that the whales are intelligent beings. There was too much money, big money, tied up in the whaling industry for it to be brought to an immediate stop."
"And there's big money tied up in the silkie industry," said Grimes. "Luckily most of it is El Doradan money, and in the Terran corridors of power the El Doradans have at least as many enemies as they have friends. And the silkies have precious few of either. Mphm."
"We . . . " began Shirl, " . . . could be their friends," finished Darleen.
"And I," said Seiko.
"And in any case," said Steerforth, "all of us here are being paid to be the silkies' friends."
"Not enough," complained Grimes, on principle. "And I still don't feel inclined to extend the right hand of friendship to a being who, only a short while back, was going to chew it off."
"But he didn't," said either Shirl or Darleen.
"No thanks to the pair of you," grumbled Grimes ungraciously. "If it hadn't been for Seiko . . . "
"I did only what I had been programmed to do, by your honored father. To look after you," said the automaton in deliberate imitation of the sort of intonation usually employed by not truly intelligent robots, humanoid or not.
Grimes felt that he was being ganged up on by the female members of his crew.
He said, "We can't hang around indefinitely, even though you, Cassie, might be able considerably to delay the progress of the repairs. We have to bring matters to a head, somehow, to engender some sort of situation that will require Federation action . . . "
"But don't forget, sir," pointed out Steerforth, "that Sister Sue is not a unit of the Survey Service's fleet, and that only the few of us, gathered here in your day cabin, are commissioned officers of the Survey Service." He smiled briefly at Seiko. "With one exception, of course. But you are, in every way that counts, one of us."
"Should I feel flattered?" she asked.
Steerforth ignored this. "We are not entitled," he went on, "to put the lives of the civilian crew members at risk, any more than we have done already. You're a very skillful saboteuse, Cassie, but even with sabotage accidents can and do happen. I had my fingers crossed during our near-crash landing."
Grimes drew reflectively on his pipe. "What about this?" he asked at last. "Shirl and Darleen— and Seiko—can talk to the silkies. Once a line of communication has been established it's bound to improve. Suppose that the girls are able to persuade the silkies to abandon the rookeries within easy reach, by schooner, of Port Salem and to re-establish themselves on the other side of the planet . . . "
"That, sir," said Steerforth, "would be only a short-term solution to the problem. These local schooners would be quite capable of making long ocean voyages—just as the whalers did on Earth's seas. And as for finding the new rookeries—your old friend Drongo Kane could instruct his captains to use their boats to carry out aerial surveys."
"And people," put in Cassie, "are conservative, no matter where they live, on the land or in the sea. How many villagers, for generation after generation, have continued to live on the slopes of volcanoes, despite warnings and ominous rumblings, even after devastating eruptions? Quite a few, Captain, quite a few. Members of my own family are such villagers." She smiled. "I ran away to Space because I thought I'd be safer."
"You might be," Steerforth told her, "but those of us in the same ship as you very often aren't."
"The rookeries are sacred sites," said Shirl. "They were sacred sites long before the first Earthmen came to New Salem. Even when we, Darleen and I, have full command of the silkies' language we do not think that we shall be able to persuade them to migrate elsewhere."
"You can try," said Grimes. "You might be able to. And if they do migrate it will buy them time and save the lives of possibly hundreds of pups. And by the time that the next season rolls around something else might have turned up."
"As long as you're still around, sir," said Steerforth, "something will. Probably something quite disastrous."
"As long as it's disastrous to the right people," Grimes told him cheerfully.