Freckles

there—flat

look at her. “Dream on, little one!” he muttered and let the eye fall shut again.
The others were off on another subject. There had been an alien awareness, Grevan gathered, which had followed the five swimmers about in the water. Not a hostile one, but one that wondered about them—recognized them as a very strange sort of new life, and was somewhat afraid. “They were thinking they were so very—edible!” Eliol said and laughed. “Perhaps they knew the swim was making us hungry! Anyway they kept warning one another to stay out of our sight!”
“Plankton eaters,” Lancey added lazily, “but apparently very fast swimmers. Anyone else get anything on them?”
“Cave builders,” said Freckles, from behind Weyer, only a few feet from Grevan. She propped herself up on an elbow to point across the fire. “That big drop-off to the west! They’ve tunneled it out below the surface. I don’t think they’re phosphorescent themselves, but they’ve got some method of keeping light in the caves—bacterial, possibly. And they cultivate some form of plankton inside.”
“Sounds as if they might be intelligent enough to permit direct contact,” Grevan remarked, and realized in the moment of silence that followed that it must have been an hour since he’d last said a word.
“They’re easily that,” Freckles agreed. Her small face, shaded by the rather shapeless white hat she favored, turned to him. “If Klim hadn’t been cooking, I’d have called her to give it a try. I was afraid of frightening them off myself.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” promised Klim, who had much the deftest touch of them all for delicate ambassadorial work.

There was another pause then—it might have been the n