For some reason known only to the hierarchy, the captain of the first ship had been disgraced. Hal thought that this could be because he had failed to get samples of the blood of the natives. From what little Hal had learned, and this was only through some rumors, the wogs had just refused to allow their blood to be taken. Perhaps, this was because the suspicious behavior of the Haijacs had infected the wogs. When the Terrestrial scientists had then asked for corpses to dissect – for purely scientific reasons, of course – the wogs had again refused. All of their dead, they claimed, were cremated and their ashes strewn on the fields. It was true that they were often dissected by their own doctors before cremation, but it was part of their religion that this be done ritually. And a wog physician-priest had to perform it.

The captain had considered abducting some wogs just before the takeoff. But he'd felt that it wouldn't be wise to antagonize them at this time. He knew that a second expedition in a much larger vessel would be sent to Ozagen after he'd made his report. If its biologists couldn't talk the wogs into supplying blood samples, then force would be used.

While the Gabriel was being built, a top-echelon linguist had read the notes and listened to the recordings of his predecessor. But he'd spent too much time in trying to make comparisons with various aspects of Siddo to those of Terran languages, dead or alive. Where heshould have been setting up a system by which the crew could learn Siddo in the quickest manner, he'd indulged his scholarly inclinations. Maybe this was the reason he wasn't going on the ship. Hal didn't know. He'd been given no explanation of why he was a last-minute substitute.

So Hal swore and bent to his work. He listened to the sounds of Siddo and studied their waveforms on the oscilloscope. He labored at reproducing them with his un-Ozagenian tongue, lips, teeth, palate, and larynx. He worked on a Siddo-American dictionary, an essential which his predecessor had somewhat neglected.