"Left with the creature," Patton Bretano said, with a sinking heart, and Pardino, down on the surface, went on about how they'd gotten radio transmission, they were still getting it, and they wanted a decision from the station.

Patton Bretano sat with the receiver in his hand, listening to it, asking himself why it was his son, and what kind of craziness had sent Ian out by himself, or why Ian hadn't run for the base instead of away from it, but he feared he knew that answer already.

Ian wouldn't risk the project, wouldn't risk it.  Working near the perimeter, Pardino said.  In an area where they thought they had years yet to find the answers.

But the answers had found them.  Found Ian, on the edges and unprotected.  Pardino talked about how the radio was still open, and if it stayed that way they had a chance to track them.

But, How can I tell Joy? was the thought chasing through Patton's mind, scattering saner notions.  The father's instincts were to mount a search party, to curse Ian for doing what he'd done, the father's instincts didn't damn care what risks the search would run.

The father didn't give a damn how a rescue attempt would play politically with the Guild.  The politician was thinking of the risks they knew they'd run, where they'd put the base... God, of course there were dangers, and there were procedures for avoiding them.  They'd created an electronic perimeter.  The natives weren't advanced enough to bypass it.  They'd been down there for months without an incident.  They'd never let their precautions lapse, and Ian hadn't been in the first team down, he'd pulled every string he had and absolutely made sure that Ian wasn't in the first team....

"Pat," Pardino said, "Pat, are you there?"

"Yes," he said, thinking, God help us, it's happened, hasn't it?  Contact's made.  Irrevocable from this point.  But my son...

"We can't go after him," Pardino said.  "The staff's in consensus, we can't go after him, we aren't in that kind of position here..."

"I want the transmissions."  He was trembling.  The shock was still richocheting through his neRVES, saying nothing was real.  But that open radio was the only fragile link to Ian, and he wanted to be hearing that, not Pardino; he wanted to hear for himself that Ian was all right, never mind what the Guild was going to make of it, never mind that the news was going to be all over the station with the speed of the phone system, and somehow he had to break the news to Joy and get some kind of official news release out.

Had to take a position before the Guild released the story on its own.

He wasn't a bad man.  He told himself he wasn't a bad man.  He was walking a narrow line between a Pilots' Guild that wouldn't scruple to use the story against everything their hopes rested on, and a council skittish of opposing them too radically... and now Ian had gone and put himself in the middle of what, God help him, he'd planned.

Because he knew and the committee knew there were inhabitants in that area of the island, non-technological as they needed, as they'd wanted the first contact to be, not to bring them face-to-face with the savviest politicians and the most advanced technology on the planet... but he hadn't on any terms wanted Ian in the middle of that encounter.

Pardino was saying something about the patch on channel B, and he couldn't but think how the Guild was going to be monitoring their transmissions the instant they realized there was something happening.  Everything they said, everything Ian said, was going to the Guild the same as it went to them, bet on it.