Anywhen by James Blish Page A

images of each other. Then Roche began to speak once more, and now his urgency showed through at last.
    I doubt that I could have followed him and Mwenzio even if I'd known the language; but I know now how it went, from the transcripts:
    "Warrior, I charge you hear me, for the love of your children who may be kings. We have not come into the world to condemn. We have come to help."
    "That is my name, demon."
    "Then I bind you by it, for your children's sake."
    "I am conquered," Mwenzio said. "Sorcery is sorcery; I bow the head. But my children are not yours to command, nor ever shall be."
    "I promise you, in the name of your name, that I seek no such thing. It is the ill that I brought before that I come here to undo. To this I bind myself by my own name."
    Both Captain Motlow and Doc Bixby stiffened at Roche's assumption of blame for what the first expedition had done, but Roche sensed it at once and drove them back with a slashing gesture, just below the level of the screen. Mwenzio said:
    "What may I call your
    "Mbote." ["Life."]
    "Lokuta te?" ["This is no lie?"]
    "Lokuta te, Mwenzio."
    There was a long silence. Mwenzio stood still, with head bowed. Finally he said:
    "Notice me, Mbote, your servant."
    "Then it is this. I have told you of the plague and what needs to be done to combat it. Credit me now, for the time is very short. We will release you and all your clan, and you must carry the word to all the tribes and kingdoms. You must persuade your kings and chieftains that those who brought the plague have come back with the cure, but only if all do exactly as we say it must be done. Above all, it must start at once, before the children are born. It would be best if all the mothers in the area where we put you down, all that can reach it by hard riding, should come to us."
    "As we have done," Mwenzio said. "But then it is already too late."
    "No, it can't be. Not for everyone. If we make haste—"
    "No one can make haste backwards," Mwenzio said, and with a quick motion the short arms crossed above the bullet head, pulled the rough shirt up and off, and threw it to the floor of the tank. Without any visible signal, the other seven warriors shucked their shirts too, at the same moment.
    In the cradle of each middle pair of arms, held low and flat across each narrow ventrum, six to eight Savannahan cubs squirmed over each other in a blind, brainless fury of nursing. They were about the size of chipmunks.
    "We are the mothers," the warrior said. "And here are our children. They are already born. If it is not too late, then we give them to you, Mbote; cure them."
    Nobody can know everything. The data about the Savannahans which the remains of the first expedition had brought back were reasonably complete—good enough to let Dr. Roche fill the parameters of his equations almost completely. But only almost. The first expedition hadn't been on Savannah long enough before the explo sion to find out that the savages were six-limbed, let alone that the women were the warrior caste. As for us, we were culpable too—Doc Bixby most of all, for he had known the essential biological facts before Roche did, and had been keeping them to himself for the simple stupid pleasure of seeing Roche's face turn grey when the truth came out. I had felt that impulse myself now and then on Savannah, as I've already confessed, but I never did understand why the surgeon let it drive him —and all of us—so close to the rim of disaster. Roche only irritated me by being so knowing; but Bixby must really have hated him.
    Bixby isn't with us any more, so I can't ask questions. Luckily for him, he had a great deal more up his sleeve than a simple surprise; otherwise he might have lost his licence, as well as been transferred, when the Chisholm got home. He took only a moment or so to savour Dr. Roche's shock and despair, and then said, loud enough for the savages to hear him ( though not to understand him, because he said it in English):
    "It's all