She looked down at Frazer’s long, muscular body once more, with almost clinical curiosity, and then left the room and locked it behind her. She had no intention of entering it again; but there was evidence here that would be of interest to others—provided she found herself capable of operating the type of communicators used by the station.
Thirty minutes later, with no particular difficulty, she had contacted the area headquarters of the Bureau of Agriculture. She gave them her story coherently; and even if they didn’t believe her, it was obvious they would waste no time in getting a relief crew to the station. Which was all Lane was interested in. After the Bureau concluded its investigations, somebody might do something about providing psychological treatment for the Frome colonists; but she wasn’t concerned about that. She was returning to the Hub Systems.
She remained seated in the dim light of the communications cell for a time, watching her dark reflection in the polished surfaces of its walls and listening to the intermittent whirring of a ventilator in the next office, which was all that broke the silence of the station now. She wondered whether she would have become suspicious of Frazer soon enough to do her any good, it she hadn’t known for the past few weeks that she was carrying a child of the Nachief of Frome. For the past three days, she had been wondering also whether saving her life, at least for a while, by informing the Nachief of the fact, would be worth while! It was easy to imagine what a child of his might grow up to be.
Unaware, detail by detail since their meeting, Frazer had filled out her mental picture of that. So she had known enough to survive the two feral creatures in the end-
As soon as she returned to the easy-going anonymity of the Hub Systems, this other one of their strain would die unborn! The terrible insistence on life on their own terms which Frazer and the Nachief had shown was warning enough against repetition of the nightmare.
Lane caught herself thinking, though, that there had been something basically pitiful about that inward-staring, alien blindness to human values, which forced all other life into subservience to itself because it could see only itself; and she stirred uneasily.
The ventilator in the next office shut off with a sudden click.
“Of course, it will die!” she heard herself say aloud in the silence of the station. Perhaps a little too loudly . . .
After that, the silence remained undisturbed. A new contemplation grew in Lane as she sat there wondering about Frazer’s mother.
1955
GRANDPA
The really appropriate epitaph for many and many a man is “Why, it’s obvious . . . Like it was obvious that Grandpa was just a vast, stupid vegetable, and no more . . .
A green-winged, downy thing as big as a hen fluttered along the hillside to a point directly above Cord’s head and hovered there, twenty feet above him. Cord, a fifteen-year-old human being, leaned back against a skipboat parked on the equator of a world that had known human beings for only the past four Earth-years, and eyed the thing speculatively. The thing was, in the free and easy terminology of the Sutang Colonial Team, a swamp bug. Concealed in the downy fur back of the bug’s head was a second, smaller, semiparasitical thing, classed as a bug rider.
The bug itself looked like a new species to Cord. Its parasite might or might not turn out to be another unknown. Cord was a natural research man; his first glimpse of the odd flying team had sent endless curiosities thrilling through him. How did that particular phenomenon tick, and why? What fascinating things, once you’d learned about it, could you get it to do?
Normally, he was hampered by circumstances in carrying out any such investigation. The Colonial Team was a practical, hard-working outfit—two thousand people who’d been given twenty years to size up and tame down the brand-new world of Sutang to the point where a hundred thousand colonists could be settled on it, in reasonable safety and comfort. Even junior colonial students like Cord were expected to confine their curiosity to the pattern of research set up by the Station to which they were attached. Cord’s inclination towards independent experiments had got him into disfavor with his immediate superiors before this.
He sent a casual glance in the direction of the Yoger Bay Colonial Station behind him. No signs of human activity about that low, fortresslike bulk in the hill. Its central lock was still closed. In fifteen minutes, it was scheduled to be opened to let out the Planetary Regent, who was inspecting the Yoger Bay Station and its principal activities today.
Fifteen minutes was time enough to find out something about the new bug, Cord decided.
But he’d have to collect it first.
He slid out one of the two handguns holstered at his side. This one was his own property: a Vanadian projectile weapon. Cord thumbed it to position for anaesthetic small-game missiles and brought the hovering swamp bug down, drilled neatly and microscopically through the head.
As the bug hit the ground, the rider left its back. A tiny scarlet demon, round and bouncy as a rubber ball, it shot towards Cord in three long hops, mouth wide to sink home inch-long, venom-dripping fangs. Rather breathlessly, Cord triggered the gun again and knocked it out in mid-leap. A new species, all right! Most bug riders were harmless plant eaters, mere suckers of vegetable juice—
“Cord!” A feminine voice.
Cord swore softly. He hadn’t heard the central lock click open. She must have come around from the other side of the station.
“Hi, Grayan!” he shouted innocently without looking around. “Come see what I got! New species!”
Grayan Mahoney, a slender, blackhaired girl two years older than himself, came trotting down the hillside towards him. She was Sutang’s star colonial student, and the station manager, Nirmond, indicated from time to time that she was a fine example for Cord to pattern his own behavior on. In spite of that, she and Cord were good friends, but she bossed him around considerably.
“Cord, you dope!” she scowled as she came up. “Quit acting like a collector! If the Regent came out now, you’d be sunk. Nirmond’s been telling her about you!”
“Telling her what?” Cord asked, startled.
“For one,” Grayan reported, “that you don’t keep up on your assigned work. Two, that you sneak off on one-man expeditions of your own at least once a month and have to be rescued—”
“Nobody,” Cord interrupted hotly, “has had to rescue me yet!”
“How’s Nirmond to know you’re alive and healthy when you just drop out of sight for a week?” Grayan countered. “Three,” she resumed, checking the items off on slim fingertips, “he complained that you keep private zoological gardens of unidentified and possibly deadly vermin in the woods back of the station. And four . . . well, Nirmond simply doesn’t want the responsibility for you any more!” She held up the four lingers significantly.
“Golly!” gulped Cord, dismayed. Summed up tersely like that, his record didn’t look too good.
“Golly, is right! I keep warning you! Now Nirmond wants the Regent to send you back to Vanadia—and there’s a starship coming in to New Venus forty-eight hours from now!” New Venus was the Colonial Team’s main settlement on the opposite side of Sutang.
“What’ll I do?”
“Start acting like you had good sense mainly.” Grayan grinned suddenly. “I talked to the Regent, too—Nirmond isn’t rid of you yet! But if you louse up on our four of the Bay Farms today, you’ll be off the Team for good!”
She turned to go. “You might as well put the skipboat back; we’re not using it. Nirmond’s driving us down to the edge of the Bay in a treadcar, and we’ll take a raft from there. Don’t let them know I warned you!”
Cord looked after her, slightly stunned. He hadn’t realized his reputation had become as bad as all that! To Grayan, whose family had served on Colonial Teams for the past four generations, nothing worse was imaginable than to be dismissed and sent back ignominiously to one’s own home-world. Much to his surprise, Cord was discovering now that he felt exactly the same way about it!
Leaving his newly bagged specimens to revive by themselves and flutter off again, he hurriedly flew the skipboat around the station and rolled it back into its stall.
Three rafts lay moored just offshore in the marshy cove, at the edge of which Nirmond had stopped the treadcar. They looked somewhat like exceptionally broad-brimmed, well-worn sugar-loaf hats floating out there, green and leathery. Or like lily pads twenty-five feet across, with the upper section of a big, gray-green pineapple growing from the center of each. Plant animals of some sort. Sutang was too new to have had its phyla sorted out into anything remotely like an orderly classification. The rafts were a local oddity which had been investigated and could be regarded as harmless and moderately useful. Their usefulness lay in the fact that they were employed as a rather slow means of transportation about the shallow, swampy waters of the Yoger Bay. That was as far as the Team’s interest in them went at present.
The Regent had stood up from the back seat of the car, where she was sitting next to Cord. There were only four in the party; Gray an was up front with Nirmond.
“Are those our vehicles?” The Regent sounded amused.
Nirmond grinned, a little sourly. “Don’t underestimate them, Dane! They could become an important economic factor in this region in time. But, as a matter of fact, these three are smaller than I like to use.” He was peering about the reedy edges of the cove. “There’s a regular monster parked here usually—”
Grayan turned to Cord. “Maybe Cord knows where Grandpa is hiding.”
It was well-meant, but Cord had been hoping nobody would ask him about Grandpa. Now they all looked at him.
“Oh, you want Grandpa?” he said, somewhat flustered. “Well, I left him . . . I mean I saw him a couple of weeks ago about a mile south from here—”
Grayan sighed. Nirmond grunted and told the Regent, “The rafts tend to stay wherever they’re left, providing it’s shallow and muddy. They use a hair-root system to draw chemicals and microscopic nourishment directly from the bottom of the bay. Well—Grayan, would you like to drive us there? “
Cord settled back unhappily as the treadcar lurched into motion. Nirmond suspected he’d used Grandpa for one of his unauthorized tours of the area, and Nirmond was quite right.
“I understand you’re an expert with these rafts, Cord,” Dane said from beside him. “Grayan told me we couldn’t find a better steersman, or pilot, or whatever you call it, for our trip today.”
“I can handle them,” Cord said, perspiring. “They don’t give you any trouble!” He didn’t feel he’d made a good impression on the Regent so far. Dane was a young, handsome-looking woman with an easy way of talking and laughing, but she wasn’t the head of the Sutang Colonial Team for nothing. She looked quite capable of shipping out anybody whose record wasn’t up to par.
“There’s one big advantage our beasties have over a skipboat, too,” Nirmond remarked from the front seat. “You don’t have to worry about a snapper trying to climb on board with you!” He went on to describe the stinging ribbon-tentacles the rafts spread around them under water to discourage creatures that might make a meal off their tender underparts. The snappers and two or three other active and aggressive species of the bay hadn’t yet learned it was foolish to attack armed human beings in a boat, but they would skitter hurriedly out of the path of a leisurely perambulating raft.
Cord was happy to be ignored for the moment. The Regent, Nirmond and Grayan were all Earth people, which was true of most of the members of the Team; and Earth people made him uncomfortable, particularly in groups. Vanadia, his own home world, had barely graduated from the status of Earth colony itself, which might explain the difference. All the Earth people he’d met so far seemed dedicated to what Grayan Mahoney called the Big Picture, while Nirmond usually spoke of it as “Our Purpose Here.” They acted strictly in accordance with their Team Regulations—sometimes, in Cord’s opinion, quite insanely. Because now and then the Regulations didn’t quite cover a new situation, and then somebody was likely to get killed. In which case, the Regulations would be modified promptly, but Earth people didn’t seem otherwise disturbed by such events.
Grayan had tried to explain it to Cord:
“We can’t really ever know in advance what a new world is going to be like! And once we’re there, there’s too much to do, in the time we’ve got, to study it inch by inch. You get your job done, and you take a chance. But if you stick by the Regulations you’ve got the best chances of surviving anybody’s been able to figure out for you—”
Cord felt he preferred to just use good sense and not let Regulations or the job get him into a situation he couldn’t figure out for himself.
To which Grayan replied impatiently that he hadn’t yet got the Big Picture—
The treadcar swung around and stopped, and Grayan stood up in the front seat, pointing. “That’s Grandpa, over there!”
Dane also stood up and whistled softly, apparently impressed by Grandpa’s fifty-foot spread. Cord looked around in surprise. He was pretty sure this was several hundred yards from the spot where he’d left the big raft two weeks ago; and, as Nirmond said, they didn’t usually move about by themselves.
Puzzled, he followed the others down a narrow path to the water, hemmed in by tree-sized reeds. Now and then he got a glimpse of Grandpa’s swimming platform, the rim of which just touched the shore. Then the path opened out, and he saw the whole raft lying in sunlit, shallow water; and he stopped short, startled.
Nirmond was about to step up on the platform, ahead of Dane.
“Wait!” Cord shouted. His voice sounded squeaky with alarm. “Stop!”
He came running forward.
They had frozen where they stood, looked around swiftly. Then glanced back at Cord coming up. They were well-trained.
“What’s the matter, Cord?” Nirmond’s voice was quiet and urgent.
“Don’t get on that raft—it’s changed!” Cord’s voice sounded wobbly, even to himself. “Maybe it’s not even Grandpa—”
He saw he was wrong on the last point before he’d finished the sentence. Scattered along the rim of the raft were discolored spots left by a variety of heat-guns, one of which had been his own. It was the way you goaded the sluggish and mindless things into motion. Cord pointed at the cone-shaped central projection. “There—his head! He’s sprouting!”
“Sprouting?” the station manager repeated uncomprehendingly. Grandpa’s head, as befitted his girth, was almost twelve feet high and equally wide. It was armor-plated like the back of a saurian to keep off plant suckers, but two weeks ago it had been an otherwise featureless knob, like those on all other rafts. Now scores of long, kinky, leafless vines had grown out from all surfaces of the cone, like green wires. Some were drawn up like tightly coiled springs, others trailed limply to the platform and over it. The top of the cone was dotted with angry red buds, rather like pimples, which hadn’t been there before either. Grandpa looked unhealthy.
“Well,” Nirmond said, “so it is. Sprouting!” Grayan made a choked sound. Nirmond glanced at Cord as if puzzled. “Is that all that was bothering you, Cord?”
“Well, sure!” Cord began excitedly. He hadn’t caught the significance of the word “all”; his hackles were still up, and he was shaking. “None of them ever—”
Then he stopped. He could tell by their faces that they hadn’t got it. Or rather, that they’d got it all right but simply weren’t going to let it change their plans. The rafts were classified as harmless, according to the Regulations. Until proved otherwise, they would continue to be regarded as harmless. You didn’t waste time quibbling with the Regulations—apparently even if you were the Planetary Regent. You didn’t feel you had the time to waste.
He tried again. “Look—” he began. What he wanted to tell them was that Grandpa with one unknown factor added wasn’t Grandpa any more. He was an unpredictable, oversized life form, to be investigated with cautious thoroughness till you knew what the unknown factor meant.
&n
bsp; But it was no use. They knew all that. He stared at them helplessly.
Dane turned to Nirmond. “Perhaps you’d better check,” she said. She didn’t add, “—to reassure the boy!” but that was what she meant.
Cord felt himself flushing terribly. They thought he was scared—which he was—and they were feeling sorry for him, which they had no right to do. But there was nothing he could say or do now except watch Nirmond walk steadily across the platform. Grandpa shivered slightly a few times, but the rafts always did that when someone first stepped on them. The station manager stopped before one of the kinky sprouts, touched it and then gave it a tug. He reached up and poked at the lowest of the budlike growths. “Odd-looking things!” he called back. He gave Cord another glance. “Well, everything seems harmless enough, Cord. Coming aboard, everyone?”
It was like dreaming a dream in which you yelled and yelled at people and couldn’t make them hear you! Cord stepped up stiff-legged on the platform behind Dane and Grayan. He knew exactly what would have happened if he’d hesitated even a moment. One of them would have said in a friendly voice, careful not to let it sound too contemptuous: “You don’t have to come along if you don’t want to, Cord!”
Grayan had unholstered her heat-gun and was ready to start Grandpa moving out into the channels of the Yoger Bay.
Cord hauled out his own heat-gun and said roughly, “I was to do that!”
“All right, Cord.” She gave him a brief, impersonal smile as if he were someone she’d met for the first time that day, and stood aside.
They were so infuriatingly polite! He was, Cord decided, as good as on his way back to Vanadia right now.
For a while, Cord almost hoped that something awesome and catastrophic would happen promptly to teach the Team people a lesson. But nothing did. As always, Grandpa shook himself vaguely and experimentally when he felt the heat on one edge of the platform and then decided to withdraw from it, all of which was standard procedure. Under the water, out of sight, were the raft’s working sections: short, thick leaf-structures shaped like paddles and designed to work as such, along with the slimy nettle-streamers which kept the vegetarians of the Yoger Bay away, and a jungle of hair roots through which Grandpa sucked nourishment from the mud and the sluggish waters of the Bay, and with which he also anchored himself.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 46