Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  Parrol removed the earphones, glanced at the speed indicator which showed the Hunter already moving along at its best clip, chewed his lip speculatively.

  That meant, rather definitely, that a human agency was involved in the sea beef problem! Which didn’t in itself disprove his latest conclusions but added another angle to them. Nile liked to dramatize matters on occasion but wasn’t given to sending out false alarms. Guns . . . the possibility of an attack by air, water, or land. By whom? She didn’t know or she would have told him. She’d called from the surface of the sea, fifty-eight miles east of the Giard Station, forty-six miles to the north. That would put her due east of the upper edge of the Lipyear’s Oceanic ranch, beyond the shallows of the shelf, well out above the half-mile-deep canyon of the Continental Rift.

  Parrol slid out the Hunter’s swivel-gun, turned on the detection screens, dropped to a water-skimming level, and sped on in a straight course for Lipyear’s.

  Fog banks lay above the Rift. Except for a slow swell, the sea was quiet. Half a mile from the location she had given him, Parrol settled the Hunter on the surface, rode the swells in to the approximate point where Nile should be waiting. He snapped the car’s canopy back, waited another minute, then tapped the Hunter’s siren. As the sound died away, there came an answering brief wail out of the eddying fog. Dead ahead, simultaneously, a spark of blurred light flared and vanished. Parrol grinned with relief, turned on the Hunter’s running lights and came in on the PanElemental lying half submerged in the swells. Its canopy was down; an anchor engine murmured softly. The subdued glow of instrument lights showed Nile standing in her swim rig in the front section, hands on her hips, watching him move in.

  Parrol cut his drive engine and lights, switched on the sea anchor as the cars nosed gently together.

  “Everything all right here?” he asked.

  “More or less.”

  “From whom are you hiding?”

  “I’m not sure. At a guess, Agenes Laboratories is the villain in the act, as you suspected. Come into my car, Dan.”

  Parrol grunted, stepped across and down into the PanElemental. He asked, “What makes you think so?”

  “The fact that around noon today somebody scorched my beautiful left ear lobe with a needle beam.”

  “Huh? Who?”

  Nile shrugged. “I never saw him at all. I was checking out ranch beef about a hundred miles south, and this character fired out of a bunch of reeds thirty feet away. He’d sneaked up under water obviously. I peppered the reed bed with the UW. Probably missed him, but he must have got discouraged and dived, because there was no more shooting.”

  “You reported it?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  Parrol looked at her suspiciously. “Where were the otters?”

  “The otters? Well . . . they may have gone after him, I suppose. Matter of fact, I remember there was some little screeching and splashing back among the reeds. I didn’t go look. Blood upsets me.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed,” Parrol said. “Where are the otters now?”

  “Turned them loose in their sea run at Lipyear’s before I came out here. I thought it would be best if whoever sent a needle-beam operator after me didn’t find out for a while that the trick hadn’t worked. It might keep them from trying something new immediately. But it’s a cinch somebody doesn’t want us to poke around too far into the mystery of the vanishing beef. You were right about that.”

  Parrol frowned. “Uh-huh. The fact is I’d just finished convincing myself I’d been wrong—that there was no human agency back of this.”

  “What gave you that idea?” Nile reached under the instrument shelf, brought out a sandwich, asked, “Have you eaten? I’ve a stack of these around.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Parrol said gratefully, taking the sandwich. “I’ve been getting downright ravenous the past couple of hours.”

  She watched him reflectively while he told her about his visit to the Tuskason Sleds. “Now here’s the point,” he continued. “The sledmen think their animals were hit by a couple of subs which released something like a nerve gas beneath them. The gas killed the frayas, reached the surface and dissipated instantly into the air.”

  Nil nodded. “Could be done just like that, Dan.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Parrol said. “But for the past half hour my theory has been that it wasn’t done by something that dissipated instantly into the air.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the spot where this happened is near the northern edge of the Meral Current. The pack was destroyed around two and a half months ago, shortly after we’d left for the Hub. Anything drifting on from there with the Meral would reach the Continental Rift, and this section of the coast, in approximately that time.”

  Nile frowned, rubbed the tip of her nose. “Meaning that the trouble with the sea beef wasn’t intended—that it was an accidental aftermath of poisoning the fraya pack?”

  “That’s what I was assuming,” Parrol said. “That whatever hit the Tuskason pack two months or so ago has been hitting the local sea beef during the past week. It didn’t have anything like the same instantaneously deadly effect here because it was widely dispersed by now. But suppose the stuff is brought into the shallows with the tides. Some of the beef absorbs enough of it to get very uncomfortable and starts moving out to sea to escape from what’s bothering it. The nearest drift-weed beds are around a hundred and ten miles out. The tubs could make the trip if they got the notion, and until they were discovered there they would seem to have disappeared.

  “But the fact that a direct attempt has been made to kill you changes the picture in one important respect. Somebody else evidently knows what’s going on—and that makes it appear that Giard may have been the real target throughout. If the beef herds on our contract ranches can be destroyed and the sleds that work for us starved out of their area, our operations on Nandy-Cline would be shot, perhaps permanently. Agenes and a few others would have the field to themselves.

  “My guess is now that the business with the Tuskason pack and the trouble with the sea beef were two different maneuvers, though carried out by the same people, and that the stuff that’s affected the beef was scattered out over the Continental Rift not far north of the coastal ranches with the idea of letting the Meral carry it south.”

  Nile shook her head.

  “I think you came closer with your other idea,” she said.

  “What makes you say so?”

  “Two things I discovered while you were gone. I’ll let you see for yourself.” She nodded toward the rear of the car. “You’ll find your trunks and diving gear back there. If you’ll climb into them, we’ll go for a dip.”

  “Here? Why?”

  “To get your unprejudiced impression of something I noticed a few hours ago. Use the helmet instead of the breather so we can talk.”

  The water was comfortably warm. Quite dark, but the combined pulse of the two anchor engines made a beacon of sound behind them. A glimmer of phosphorescence came from the surface fifteen feet above. Nile Etland was a vague shadow on Parrol’s left.

  “All right, we’re here,” Parrol said. “Now what?”

  “Let’s circle around the cars at about this level,” the helmet communicator told him.

  Parrol turned to the left, aware that she was turning with him. He stroked along twenty or thirty yards was about to speak impatiently again when Nile asked, “You can hold your breath just under four minutes, can’t you, Dan?”

  “As you know.”

  “Just establishing the fact. Start holding it now and keep on swimming.”

  “What’s the . . .” Parrol broke off. She seemed dead serious about this. He stopped breathing, stroked on, turning gradually to keep the sound of the sea anchors at the same distance to his lift. The shadow-shape of Pile dropped back behind him.

  Irritation was simmering in Parrol, but so was curiosity. He was quite certain—certain in a somehow unpleasant way—that Nile
wasn’t playing some game in order to be mysterious. He kept moving along, jumbled questions and surmises flashing through his mind. After a time, his lungs labored heavily for breath, became quiet again. The sea water suddenly seemed colder. He realized the double pulse of the anchor engines had receded somewhat, turned in more sharply towards them. How long had he been swimming by now? It must be—

  “Dan?”

  He opened his mouth, took in a lungful of air.

  “Yes?” he said hoarsely.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Fine.”

  “Liar! You’re scared spitless! I don’t blame you. You’ve been holding your breath since I asked you to?”

  “Yes—until now.”

  “That’s been”—a pause—“eight minutes and fifteen seconds, Dan!” For a moment it made no sense. Then it did. Parrol felt numbed. He said at last, “That was the unprejudiced observation you wanted me to make?”

  “Yes. Let’s go up and get back into the car.”

  She swung herself into the Pan-Elemental ahead of him, turned as he started to follow her. “Better stay out till you’re dry, Dan. You’d soak the upholstery. Climb on the hood and I’ll toss you a towel.” Parrol inquired presently, drying himself, “Same thing with you?”

  “It would have been if I’d been holding my breath.”

  “That old herd bull we were monkeying with this morning . . .”

  “Uh-huh. He might come to the surface occasionally but not because he had to breathe. Same thing again with a lot of the other beef that’s stayed on the ranches. That’s why the spot checks were so far off. Something the matter?”

  Parrol had sworn aloud in surprise. The towel in his hand was dripping wet now, while he didn’t seem to be any drier. “Toss me another towel, will you?”

  Nile made an odd, choking sound. “Here it is, Dan.”

  He caught it, looked over at her suspiciously, looked down again at himself. Water was trickling over every portion of his skin as freely as if he’d just climbed out of the sea.

  “What the devil’s going on?” he demanded.

  She made the choked sound again. “I . . . don’t worry about it, Dan! It’ll stop in a minute or two. The same thing happened to me this afternoon. I’d probably have to dissect you under a microscope to be able to say exactly what’s happening.”

  “An educated guess will do for now.”

  “An educated guess? Well—the thing that we, and the beef, picked up has developed some biological mechanism for drawing water in through our skin, extracting the oxygen from the water, and expelling the water again. We’ve become gills all over, so to speak. Did you feel your lungs start trying to work while you were holding your breath?”

  Parrol reflected, nodded. “For just an instant.”

  “That,” Nile said, “seems to be what brings the water-breathing mechanism into action—the first oxygen-shortage reflex. I think you can dry yourself and stay dry now. by the way. You noticed a feeling of cold immediately afterwards?”

  Parrol asked distastefully, “That was the sea water coming through my skin?”

  “Yes. As I say, I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. The mechanism should dissolve again in a day or two if we don’t pick up any more of the stuff.”

  “No permanent changes?”

  “At a guess again, no. If you hadn’t held your breath while you were under water just now, you probably never would have known there had been any change in you. You look like you’re going to stay dry now, so come on inside.”

  III

  She held out a sandwich as he swung down into the car’s interior. “Still hungry?”

  “No. I—” Parrol broke off, looked surprised. “I certainly am! Like that bull beef stuffing himself, eh?”

  “Yes. Whatever that breathing mechanism is, it eats up a lot of energy fast. Here, take it—I’ve been piling away calories all afternoon. And here’s my other piece of evidence.”

  She thrust the sandwich into his hand, swung a camera recorder out of its compartment, settled it on the instrument shelf before Parrol. Her fingers spun the dial setting back a few turns, pushed the start button. The front surface of the recorder turned into a viewscreen.

  “Fire forest,” Parrol said, chewing. A flat stretch of sea floor had appeared in the screen, shot from a slight angle above it. Dotting the silt were clumps of shrublike and treelike growths, burning eerily with all the colors of the spectrum. Towards the background they blended into a single blanket of blazing white which forced the gloom of the abyss up a hundred feet above the floor. Parrol asked, “The local one?”

  “Yes,” Nile said. “The section immediately beneath us. I put in the last couple of hours prowling around the floor of the Rift. Now watch!”

  The pickup swung about to a point where a cluster of giant yellow blooms was being slowly agitated by something dark moving through them. The view blurred for an instant as magnification cut in, then cleared.

  Parrol paused on a bite of the sandwich, swallowed, leaned forward.

  “Oh, no!” he said. “The floor’s over a half-mile down! That isn’t . . . but it is, of course!”

  “Sea beef down in the Rift, alive—and feeding!” Nile agreed.

  “That’s where something like eighty per cent of the missing stock seems to be now. I can show you whole herds in a minute. They’re thickest a little farther south. Here’s a closer look at this specimen.”

  The magnification stepped up again. After a moment Parrol said, “You get the impression it’s lost half its blubber! No wonder the thing’s gorging on fire plants. Energy loss through adaptation again, I suppose?”

  “Of course,” Nile said. “There’d be rather drastic changes needed to let sea beef live even a minute down there.”

  “Lungs, ears, sinuses . . . yes, there would. It’s almost unbelievable! But wait a second! Supposing we—”

  “Apparently,” Nile said, “the process is similar to that of the development of the underwater breathing mechanism. The outer stimulus is required. As the beef moved down into the Rift, it adapted to deep-water living. The ones that stayed in the ranches weren’t subjected to the same succession of stimuli, therefore didn’t change.” Parrol cleared his throat. “So you think that if we started swimming down without suits . . .”

  “Well, we might find ourselves starting to adapt. Care to try it?”

  “Not for anything!”

  “Nor I. The sea beef’s taking it, evidently. What would happen to a human body is something I don’t care to discover in person. That’s the end of the sequence. Want to see the herds to the south now?”

  Parrol shook his head. “Skip that. I’ll take your word that most of them are down there.”

  She turned the recorder off, swung it back into the compartment. “What do you make of it all, Dan?”

  “Just what you’re making of it, apparently,” Parrol said. “When the Tuskason frayas turned belly up and died, they were around a hundred miles southwest of their breeding ground, headed there. And the breeding ground—the Tuskason Rift—lies inside the Meral Current. There’s that symbiotic relationship between the frayas and the chalot, their food plant during the breeding period. The chalot produces mobile spores as the frayas start arriving. Spore enzymes produce reactions in the frayas to turn them into their deep-water breeding form—”

  He paused, scowling. The frayas were living anachronisms among Nandy-Cline’s present animal forms, the last of a class of pelagic browsers in whose life cycle certain luminants of the fire forests had been intricately involved. “The chalot spores are assumed to actively seek out the frayas when they appear in the breeding grounds,” he went on slowly. “But this time, when the chalot released its spores into the Tuskason Rift the fraya pack didn’t show up. Eventually the Meral carried the free spores off, and eventually it brought them along the Continental Rift and into the shore ranches. Terran mammals—sea beef and humans, in this case—are a much closer approximation to frayas than any
of Nandy-Cline’s modern life strains. So the chalot spores settled for us! And we’ve responded to their enzymes almost as the frayas did.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Nile agreed.

  After a moment Parrol asked, “What makes you so sure the changes won’t be permanent?”

  “Simply the fact that the chalot doesn’t grow here. The frayas maintain their deep-water form as long as there is chalot around for them to feed on. By the time the seasonal supply is exhausted, they’ve bred and are ready to return to their pelagic shape. The spores bring about only the initial reaction. It’s maintained by contact with the parent plants. Some of the sea beef that went down into the Rift here may already be losing the effect and coming back to the surface, for that matter.”

  “All right,” Parrol said. “We know now that the trouble with the beef wasn’t planned. It was an accidental result of wiping out the fraya pack. But we’re still thinking of Agenes. If they killed the frayas, their biochemists would realize soon enough what’s happening now—and that would be a good enough reason to send needle-beam men after us before we worked it out. But why kill the frayas in the first place?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering,” Nile said. “Agenes has all the sea harvest territory it can use.”

  Parrol said, “So it does. But it occurs to me now that the Grenley Banks are about two hundred miles north of the Tuskason Rift.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “You may remember,” Parrol said, “that a week or two before we left Orado there was a report that Giard had lost a submarine harvester here which was working along the Grenley Banks the last time it gave its position.”

  Nile’s eyes widened an instant. “I’d forgotten! That does look interesting. Agenes knocks off one of our harvesters roughly three hundred miles north of the point they knocked off the fraya pack. Why? They had something going in the area they didn’t want the sub to stumble over—or maybe it did stumble over it. Why kill the pack before that, three hundred miles to the south?”

  “To keep it from going on toward the breeding grounds,” Parrol said.