“Do you have one?”
“No. We’ll see what goes on at the ranchers’ emergency meeting first.” Nile motioned with her head towards the back of the car. “I dumped some testing equipment in there, in case we want to go for a dip afterwards.”
There was silence for some seconds; then Parrol said, “Looks about normal down there, doesn’t it?”
He had swung the PanElemental left again, slowing and dropping towards the shoreline of the continental shelf. Near low tide at present, the shelf stretched away for almost sixty miles to the east, a great saline swamp and, from this altitude, a palette of bilious pigments. A number of aircars cruised slowly over it, and power launches were picking their way through the vegetation of the tidal lakes.
“Lipyear’s Oceanic,” Nile observed, “seems to have about every man they employ out spot-counting what’s left!” She hesitated, added, “You’re right about the herds we can see showing no sign of disturbance. Of course, nothing does disturb sea beef much.”
Parrol sighed, said. “Well, let’s get on to the meeting.”
By midmorning the sun was getting hot on the shelf, turning the air heavy with mingled smells of salt water and luxuriating vegetation. Escorted by a scolding flock of scarlet and black buzzbirds, Danrich Parrol brought a water scooter showing the stamp of Lipyear’s Oceanic down to the edge of an offshore tidal pool. The buzzbirds deserted him there. The scooter settled to the water, drifted slowly across the pool towards Nile’s Pan-Elemental, berthed on the surface between two stands of reeds.
Parrol looked thoughtfully about. Passing overhead through the area half an hour earlier, he had seen the slender, long-legged figure of Dr. Etland standing in swimbriefs and flippers on her car. At the moment she was nowhere in sight. An array of testing equipment lay helter-skelter about on the Pan’s hood, and the murkily roiled water indicated sea beef was feeding below the surface.
Parrol stepped over into the big car and tethered the scooter to it. He was wearing trunks and flippers; attached to his belt were an underwater gun and knife. The shelf ranchers were rarely invaded by the big deep-water carnivores, but assorted minor vermin wasn’t too uncommon. He reached back to the rack of the scooter, fished cigarettes out from among a recorder, a case of maps and charts, a telecamera, a breather and a pocket communicator. As he was lighting a cigarette, a flat, brown animal head, fiercely whiskered and carrying a ragged white scar-line diagonally across its skull, broke the surface twenty feet away and looked at him.
“Hi, Spiff,” Parrol said conversationally, recognizing the larger of the two hunting otters Nile kept around as bodyguards when engaged in water work. “Where’s the boss?”
The otter grunted, curved over and submerged his nine-foot length again with a motion like flowing dark oil. Parrol waited patiently. A minute or two later there was a splash on his left. The face that looked at him this time showed the patrician features of Dr. Nile Etland. She came stroking over to him, and Parrol held a hand down to her. She grasped it, swung herself smoothly up on the hood of the PanElemental, squeezed water out of her hair and pulled off the transparent breather which had covered her face and the front part of her head.
She glanced at the watch on her wrist, inquired, “Well, did you find out anything new during the past hour and a half?”
“I picked up a few items. Just how meaningful—” Parrol checked himself. Slowly and almost without sound, a vast, pinkish-gray bulk rose above the surface near the center of the tidal pool. A pair of bulging, morose eyes regarded the humans and their vehicles suspiciously. Terra’s hippopotamus amphibious, adapted to a salt water life with its richer food and increased growth potential, enlarged, tenderized and reflavored, had become the sea beef which provided the worlds of the Federation with a considerable share of their protein staples. This specimen, Parrol saw, was an old breed bull, over thirty feet long, with a battle-scarred hide and Oceanic’s three broad white stripes painted across its back.
“Is that ancient monster what you’re messing around with here?” Parrol asked.
“Uh-huh.” Nile was taking an outsized hypodermic from a flap in one of her flippers. She placed it on the hood. “He’s a bit reluctant to let me have a blood sample.”
“Why bother with him?”
She shrugged. “Just a hunch. What were you about to say?”
“Well, there’s one detail about the big beef disappearance I can’t see as a coincidence,” Parrol told her. “The thing started at the north bend of the continent. It’s taken it a week to move a hundred and fifty miles down the coast to Lipyear’s Oceanic. That’s almost the exact rate of speed with which the edge of the Meral Current passes along the shelf of the Continental Rift.”
Nile nodded. “That’s occurred to me. If it’s only a coincidence, it’s certainly an odd one. But deciding the Meral’s involved doesn’t answer the big question, does it?”
“Where have the stupid things gone? No, it doesn’t.” Parrol scowled. “None of the theories brought up at the meeting made sense to me. Animal predators can’t have caused it. I’ve checked with half the northern ranches, and they’ve noticed no unusual numbers of dead or wounded beef floating around—or obviously sick ones either. And nobody’s been running them off. There’d be no place to hide them in quantities like that, even if they could be moved off the ranches without attracting attention.
“I did hear about one thing I intend to look into immediately. Somewhat over two months ago—almost immediately after we’d left for the Hub, as a matter of fact—the Tuskason Sleds reported to mainland authorities that something had killed off their entire fraya pack.”
Nile whistled soundlessly. “That’s bad news, Dan! I’m sorry to hear it. You think there’s a connection?”
“I don’t know. The authorities sent investigators who couldn’t find anything to show the pack hadn’t died of natural causes. The sledmen claimed the frayas were deliberately poisoned, but they had no significant evidence to offer. The feeling here is they were fishing for federal indemnification. I’ve asked Machon to find out where the Tuskason fleet is cruising at present. He’ll let me know as soon as it’s been located, and I’ll fly out there.” He added. “Then something occurred to me that might help explain the problem on the ranches. There’s a possibility that it’s chiefly the spot-counts on the beef that are way off at the moment. The computers figure that beef which is feeding submerged or napping on the bottom will, on the average, surface every ten minutes to breathe.
“But say something’s happened to poison them mildly, make them exceptionally sluggish. If every animal in the herds is now surfacing only when it absolutely has to breath, it might almost make up for the apparent drop in their numbers.”
“That’s an ingenious theory,” Nile said. “You’ve suggested an underwater check?”
“Yes. It will be a monstrous job, of course, particularly in an area the size of Lipyear’s, but some of the ranchers are going at it immediately. You didn’t . . .”
She shook her head. “So far there’s been nothing in the water and blood samples I’ve sent in to the lab to suggest poisoning of any kind as a causative agent in the disappearances. But, as a matter of fact, I have noticed something which supports your idea.”
“What’s that?”
“The old bull who showed up just now,” Nile said. “I don’t know if you were watching him, but he went down again almost immediately. And one reason I wanted a blood sample from him is that he did not surface to breathe in anything like ten minutes after I’d started checking the pool. When you arrived, he’d been under water for better than half an hour. However, he isn’t acting sluggish down there. He’s busy feeding his face. In fact, I don’t remember seeing a beef stuff away with quite that much steady enthusiasm before.”
“Now why,” Parrol said, puzzled, “would that be?”
Nile shrugged. “I don’t know—yet.” She picked up the king-sized syringe again. “Like to come down and help me get that sample? He doe
sn’t want to let me get behind him, and Spiff and Sweeting aren’t much help in this case because he simply ignores them.”
The bull was stubborn and belligerent, not unusual qualities in the old herd leaders. Parrol wasn’t too concerned. He and Nile Etland were natives of Nandy-Cline, born in shallows settlements a thousand miles from the single continent, quite literally as much at home in the water as on land. Nile, if one could believe her, had been helping herd her settlement’s sea beef by the time she was big enough to toddle. She slipped away from the bull’s ponderous lunges now with almost the easy grace of her otters; then, while Parrol began to move about near the gigantic head, fixing the beef’s attention on himself, she glided out of sight behind it.
She emerged a minute or two later, held the blood-filled hypodermic up for Parrol to see, and stroked up to the surface.
Parrol followed. They climbed back up on the Pan, leaving the sea beef to return to its surly feeding, and pulled off their breathers.
“I’m going to pack up here now, Dan, and move on,” Nile said. She’d stored the hypodermic away, was arranging her equipment inside the car. “I’ll drop this stuff off at the lab for Freasie to work over, then run eighty miles south and duplicate the samplings in an area where the herds don’t seem to be affected yet. That might give us a few clues. Want to come along, or do you have other immediate plans?”
“I . . . just a moment!” The communicator on the rack of Parrol’s borrowed scooter was tinkling. He reached over, picked up the instrument, said, “Parrol here. Go ahead!”
“Machon speaking.” It was the voice of the secretary of the Ranchers Association. “We’ve contacted the Tuskason Sleds, Dan, and they very much want to see you! They’ve been waiting for you to get back from Orado. Here’s their present location.
Parrol scribbled a few notes on the communicator’s pad, thanked Machon and switched off. “I’ll fly out at once,” he told Nile. “Typhoon season—I’d better take the Hunter. Give me a call if you hit on anything that looks interesting.”
She nodded, said, “Throw your stuff in the back while I get in Sweeting and Spiff. I’ll give you a ride to the station . . .”
II
The sun wasn’t far from setting when Parrol took his Hunter up from the deck of the Tuskason headquarters sled and started it arrowing back towards the mainland. He was glad he hadn’t decided on a flimsier vehicle. The Tuskason area lay well within the typhoon belt, and the horizon ahead of him was leaden gray and black, walls of racing cloud banks heavy with rain.
He had let himself be delayed longer than he’d intended by his discussions with the sledmen; and the information he’d gained did not seem to be of any immediate value. The probability was that he’d simply burdened himself with a new and unrelated problem now. The Tuskason Sleds handled a fleet of chemical harvesting machines for Giard Pharmaceuticals and in consequence regarded Parrol and Nile Etland as their only dependable mainland contacts. The destruction of their fraya pack was a very serious economic loss to them.
The frayas were Nandy-Cline’s closest native approximation of rich red mammalian meat, ungainly beasts with a body chemistry and structure which almost paralleled that of some of Terra’s sea-going mammals, but with a quite unmanmalian life cycle. Their breeding grounds lay in ocean rifts and trenches half a mile to a mile deep, and each pack had its individual ground to which it returned annually. Here the fraya changed from an omnivorous, air-breathing surface swimmer to a bottom-feeder, dependent on a single deepwater plant form. Within a few weeks it had doubled its weight, had bred, and was ready to return to the surface. Every pack was the property of one of the sledmen communities, and at the end of the breeding period as many frayas as were needed to keep the sleds’ mobile storehouses filled were butchered. Then the annual cycle began again. The animals weren’t the sledmen’s only food source by any means, but they were the principal one, the staple.
The Tuskason Sleds were certain their pack had been killed deliberately by a mainland organization, either one of the sea-processing concerns or a big rancher, with the intention of forcing them out of their sea area and taking over the chemical harvesting work there. The frayas had been within a hundred miles of their breeding ground and hurrying toward it when the disaster occurred. The following herd sleds were unaware of trouble until they found themselves riding through a floating litter of the beasts. The entire pack appeared to have died within minutes. It was a genuine calamity because the breeding ground could not be restocked now from other fraya packs. There was a relationship of mutual dependency between the animals and the chalot, the food plant they subsisted on during the breeding season. Each was necessary in the other’s life cycle. If the frayas failed to make their annual appearance, the chalot died; and it could not be re-established in the barren grounds.
If some mainland outfit was found to be responsible, the Tuskason Sleds could collect a staggering indemnification either from those who were guilty or from the Federation itself. But aside from the reported blips of what might have been two submersible vessels moving away from the area, they had no proof to offer. Parrol promised to do what he could in the matter, and the sledmen seemed satisfied with that.
Otherwise, the afternoon had not brought him noticeably closer to answering the question of what was happening to the coastal ranchers’ sea beef. The frayas had died outright, either through human malice or through the eruption of some vast bubble of lethal gas from the depths of the ocean—which seemed to Parrol the more probable explanation at the moment. The beef, so far as anyone could tell, wasn’t dying. It simply wasn’t around any more.
Parrol battered his way through typhoon winds for a while, then made use of the first extensive quiet area to put calls through to the mainland. At the Southeastern Ranchers Association, he was routed at once to the secretary’s office. Machon was still on duty; his voice indicated he was close to exhaustion. He had one favorable fact to report: Parrol’s hunch that a underwater check might reveal some of the missing stock had been a good one. At Lipyear’s Oceanic, the estimated loss might be cut by almost a quarter now, and some of the northern ranches were inclined to go above that figure. But that left approximately seventy-five per cent of the vanished animals to be accounted for; and reports of new disappearances were still coming in from farther down the coast.
Parrol called the Giard Pharmaceuticals Station next. Nile Etland had been in and out during the day; at the moment she was out. She had left no message for him, given no information about where she might be reached. Freasie, at the laboratory, told him the checks Nile had them running on the sea beef specimens had been consistently negative.
He switched off as fresh gusts of heavy wind started the Hunter bucking again, gave his full attention for a time to the business of getting home alive. He’d already buzzed Nile’s PanElemental twice and received no response. She could have called the Hunter if she’d felt like it. The fact that she hadn’t suggested she had made no progress and was in one of her irritable moods.
By the time the Hunter had butted through the last of the typhoon belt, Parrol was becoming somewhat irritable himself. He reached for one of the sandwiches he’d brought along for the trip, realized he’d long ago finished the lot and settled back, stomach growling emptily, to do some more thinking, while the car sped along on its course. Except for scattered thunderheads, the sky was clear over the mainland to the west. He rode into the gathering night. Zetman, the inner moon, already had ducked below the horizon, while Duse rode, round, pale and placid, overhead.
An annoyingly vague feeling remained that there should be a logical connection between the two sets of events which had occupied him during the day. The disappearing herds of beef. The Tuskason Sleds’ mysteriously stricken fraya pack . . .
Details of what the sledmen had told him kept drifting through Parrol’s mind. He gave his visualization of the events they had reported free rein. Sometimes in that way—
The scowl cleared suddenly from his face. He s
at still, reflective, then leaned forward, tapped the listings button on the communicator.
“ComWeb Service,” said an operator’s voice.
“Give me Central Library Information.”
A few moments later, Parrol was saying, “I’d like to see charts of the ocean currents along the east coast, to a thousand miles out.”
He switched on the viewscreen, waited for the requested material to be shown.
Another hunch! This one looked hot!
The location indicator showed a hundred and three miles to the Giard Station. Parrol was pushing the Hunter along. He was reasonably certain he had part of the problem boxed now, but he wanted to discuss it with Nile, and that annoying young woman still had not made herself available. The Pan-Elemental did not respond to its call number, and it had been three hours since she last checked in at the station.
Mingled with his irritation was a growing concern he was somewhat reluctant to recognize. Nile was very good at taking care of herself, and the thing he had discovered with the help of Central Library made it seem less probable now that human criminality was directly responsible for what had happened to the herds. But still . . .
The communicator buzzed. Parrol turned it on, said, “Parrol speaking. Who is it?”
A man’s voice told him pleasantly, “My mistake, sir! Wrong call number.”
Parrol’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t reply—the voice was a recording, and a signal from Nile. He snapped a decoder into the communicator’s outlet, slipped on its earphones and waited. The decoder was set to a system they had developed to employ in emergencies when there was a chance that unfriendly ears were tuned to the communicators they were using.
After some seconds the decoder’s flat, toneless whisper began:
“Alert. Alert. Guns. Air. Water. Land. Nile. Water. East. Fifty-eight. North. Forty-six. Come. Caution. Caution. Call. Not.”
After an instant the message was repeated. Then the decoder remained silent.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 160