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Renée is gone in the morning, a pot of maple oatmeal for the girls and Trouble cooling on the stove and a note on the fridge, she's going to be gone all day on a day trip to Tucson with her friends.
Andi wakes up first. Bella's not far behind.
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Robin produces her notes.
They are exquisitely detailed, colour-coded, organized, indexed, and written with exacting neatness.
They are exquisitely detailed, colour-coded, organized, indexed, and written with exacting neatness.
"Seriously, beautiful notes. Ethan thinks you might not like my next proposed research project, though."
"When we find Yeerk pools, I want to know what's obtainable, relatively compact, and likely to disagree with the inhabitants. I don't know if the right answer looks more like 'elemental sodium' or more like 'bleach' or what."
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"You're right," she says after a pause, "I don't like it. But if I don't help you're just going to do it anyway, aren't you?"
Bella shrugs. "They might turn out to be too heavily protected. For all I know there are force fields around the damn things. But from the sound of it there's two ways to find Yeerks. Lots of them, vulnerably swimming around in pools. Or one at a time. Hiding behind their hosts."
"If I ever think of something better to do with Yeerks than kill them, I will be all over it," Bella promises.
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Robin sighs again. "Great. ...No, I mean that, that is good, it's just..." She shrugs helplessly.
Bella spreads her hands. "I don't have a way to put them on a comfy space prison colony. If I were handed a lot of Yeerks in slug form who wanted to be Yeerk Switzerland and sit out the conflict, I could sit them on the blue box and then give them all pigeons and supervise them for two hours to make sure they could wreak only limited havoc if they changed their minds, but I have no way to be sure we can trust any given Yeerk with even the powers of flight and thoughtspeech, given what they as a group or a political unit or whatever are doing with the powers they currently have. I don't have a way to render them magically incapable of infesting people. I might be able to kill them, and as long as that's all I have, this planet needs to be as uninhabitable-to-Yeerks as I can make it until the Andalites come along to save the day, if ever they do."
