"Come on, shake."
"Okay, we're buddies. Do I actually have to pump your clammy paw?"
"Please!"
"Oh, for Pete's sake!" Ellik turned around and kissed Chon on the
forehead.
Ellik was just sore, of course. But the manual warns against that sort
of horseplay when you've been out a long time.
"Satisfied now?" Ellik asked.
"No." Chon's voice was strained tight. "It should have been me to kiss
you." Chon turned to me. "Luck out there, Johnny."
I grabbed his hand and levered it fast, before he could decide I needed
kissing. "Sure thing, Lee. Thanks."
* * * * *
The buildings weren't much to see, but they were a step above primitive
huts. They were adobe, or maybe plastic. The aliens understood the
stress principles of the dome, Ellik said, because all the buildings
had curved roofs. Unbaked pottery was what they looked like to me,
and they looked as if they would be brittle as coffee-colored chalk.
Actually, their ceramic surfaces were at least as hard as steel.
The Azure had welcomed Ellik with an outstretched hand. Mike wasn't one
to jump to conclusions, so he just held out his own hand. The native
grabbed and let it go after pulling it some.
The alien saw me apparently carrying Ellik on a seat cushion with one
hand, and he kicked me in the leg. To test my muscles, I guess. I
managed to keep from yelling or jumping. The Azure looked impressed and
the Indigos did a bad job of hiding a lot of envy and hate.
As the Indigos toted their man along on the litter and I guided Ellik's
seat cushion along the channel of magnetic feedback, the two riders
began talking. Ellik's translator collar broke the language barrier,
of course. It was a two-way communicator on a direct hook-up to our
cybernetic calculator on the ship. The brain analyzed the phonetic
structure of the alien language under various systems of logic or
anti-logic and fed the translation into Ellik's ear. Then it went
through its memory banks and played back the right sounds to translate
Ellik's talk into the alien language. I understand things like that.
I'm a pretty good mechanic.
I didn't have my translator turned on, but it seemed to me that somehow
I could understand what the plug-uglies, the Indigos, were saying.
Ellik told me that it was because all their speech was based on the
one universal humanoid sound, "mama." Everything good in the way of
nouns and verbs (there were no other particles of speech) was some
inflection of "m-m" and everything bad was "uh-m-m."