I said to Sara, “We can look. I don’t think we’ll find him, but we still could have a look.”
“I’d feel better if we did,” she said. “It doesn’t seem quite right not to even try.”
“You disbelieve this thing I tell you?” Hoot inquired. “I don’t think we do,” I said. “What you say most undoubtedly is true. But there is a certain loyalty in our race-it’s a hard thing to explain. Even when we know there is no hope, we still go out to look. It’s not logical, perhaps.”
“No logic,” said Hoot, “assuredly and yet a ragged sense and admirable. I go and help you look.”
“There is no need to, Hoot.”
“You withhold me from sharing of your loyalty?”
“Oh, all right, then. Come along.”
Sara said, “I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “We need someone to watch the camp.”
“There is Tuck,” she said.
“You should know very well, Miss Foster,” Tuck said, petulantly, “that he would not trust me to watch anything at all. Besides, it all is foolish. What this creature says is true. You won’t find George, no matter where you look.”
EIGHT
We had gone only a short distance into the interior of the building when Hoot said to me, “I came to carry news, but I did not divulge it, its import seeming trivial with the lamented absence of your companion. But perhaps you hear it now.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“It concerns the seeds,” said Hoot. “To this feeble intellect, great mystery is attached.”
“For the love of Christ,” I said, “quit talking around in circles.”
“I improve upon mere talk,” said Hoot. “I point it out to you. Please veer slightly with me.”
He started off at an angle and I veered slightly with him and we came to a heavy metal grating set into the floor. He pointed at it sternly with a tentacle. “Seeds down there,” he said.
“Well, what about it?”
“Please observe,” he said. “Illuminate the pit.”
I got down on my hands and knees and shone the flashlight down into the pit, bending down to see between the gratings until my face was pressed against the metal.
The pit seemed huge. The beam of light did not reach the walls. Underneath the grating, seeds lay in a massive heap- many more of them, I was certain, than the ratlike creatures had carried in the day before.
I looked for something that might explain the great importance Hoot attached to the pit, but I failed to find anything.
I got up and flicked out the light. “I don’t see anything too strange,” I told him. “It’s a cache of food. That is all it is. The rats carry the seeds and drop them through the grating.
“Is no cache of food,” Hoot contradicted me. “Is cache of permanent. I look. I stick my looker down into the space between the bars. I wiggle it around. I survey the well. I see that space is tight enclosed. Once seeds get in no way to get them out.”
“But it is dark down there.”
“Dark to you. Not dark to me. Can adjust the seeing. Can see to all sides of space. Can see through seeds to bottom. Can do more than simple eye. Can explore surface closely. No opening. No opening even closed. No way to get them out. Our little harvesters harvest seeds, but for something else.”
I had another look and there were tons of seeds down there.
“Is not only storage place,” Hoot grated at me. “There be several others.”
“What else?” I asked, irritated. “How many other things have you turned up?”
“Is piles of worn-out commodities such as one from which you obtained the wood,” he said. “Is marks upon the floor and walls where furnishings uprooted. Is place of reverence...”
“You mean an altar?”
“I know not of altar,” he said. “Place of reverence. Smell of holy. And there be a door. It leads into the back.”
“Into the back of what?”
“Into outdoors,” he said.
I yelled at him, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?’
“I tell you now,” he said. “I hesitate before in respect of missing person.”
“Let’s have a look at it.”
“But,” said Hoot, “first we search more carefully for lost comrade. We comb, however hopelessly. .”
“Hoot.”
