“Of course! The Tuskason herd sleds were following the frayas. If somebody attacked the sleds, the whole planet would hear about it. But with the frayas dead, the sleds has no reason to go on to the breeding grounds, and didn’t. Now . . .”
“The breeding grounds!” Parrol said. “A fire forest, Nile!”
She was silent a moment, said, “You’re right, Dan! It has to be that.
A new nidith bed Narcotics hasn’t found out about!”
It was almost certainly the answer, Parrol thought. The luminant nidith plant was the source of a drug of unique medical properties when used with strict safeguards, viciously habit-forming when not. It could be harvested legally only under direct government supervision and in amounts limited to the actual medicinal demand. The nidith beds required for that purpose were patrolled; in the other fire forests on the planet Narcotics teams had painstakingly exterminated the plant.
But if a fresh bed had sprung up and been discovered by the wrong people . . .
“Agenes would take a chance on it!” he said. “Two or three seasonal hauls would be worth everything else they could expect to get out of the planet.”
“That’s what it is!” Nile said. She stared at him a moment, teeth worrying her upper lip. “How do we pin it on them, Dan?”
Parrol said, “This is about the peak of the nidith harvest season, isn’t it?”
“Of course. They should be working there right now! Whom do we give it to? Fiawa and the cops? Narcotics? No, wait . . .”
“Uh-huh,” Parrol agreed. “I just had that thought, too.”
“They can harvest it on the quiet,” Nile said, “at the expense of a few murders if somebody happens by. But they can’t haul it off Nandy-Cline unless they’ve got people both in Narcotics and among the mainland police bought and paid for. This thing’s organized to the hilt! If we blow our horn and nobody happens to be at the nidith bed at the moment, we’ll never hang it on Agenes. We’re got to be sure they’re caught with the goods before we make another move.”
Ilium Weldrow appeared disturbed. He had stared at Parrol and Nile with unconcealed disapproval when they called him into Parrol’s office on their return to the station. By contrast with the assistant manager in his trimly proper business suit, the pair looked like criminally inclined beachcombers. Both wore their guns, and Parrol hadn’t troubled to do more than pull his trousers back on over his swim trunks, while Nile had added only a short jacket to her swimming attire. But it was more than the lack of outer respectability in his colleagues that had upset Weldrow.
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Dan,” he said, frowning. “I’m to stay in your office, glued—as you say—to your private communicator, while the station is to remain darkened and locked after you leave. Why the latter?”
“Because if you indicate you’re here during the next few hours, somebody might blow that pointed little head off your shoulders,” Nile told him inelegantly.
Weldrow’s face showed alarm. “But what is this desperate business all about?”
“If you don’t know what it’s about, you won’t be involved in it,” Parrol said. “And you’ll be in no danger if you simply carry out your instructions and don’t stick your neck out of the station before we get back. Let’s go over the instructions now to make sure you’ve got them straight.”
The assistant manager complied grudgingly. He was to wait here for a call from a Captain Mace, on the Giard cropper tender Attris. The call should come within three to six hours and would be an innocuous request to have certain spare parts flown out to the tender. This would be Weldrow’s cue to dial two emergency call numbers of Parrol’s communicator. One would put him in contact with Chief of Police Fiawa, the other with a Federation Narcotics man with whom Parrol had worked before. When they responded, he was to press the transmission button on the communicator’s telewriter, which contained certain coded information Parrol had fed into it, and silently switch the machine off again.
Weldrow appeared to have absorbed the instructions well enough, Parrol decided. Even if he slipped up, it shouldn’t do more than delay action by a few hours.
The night sky was clear above the Meral Current and Duse floodlighted the sky. “You’re sure that’s the Attris ahead?” Nile Etland asked.
Parrol said, “Uh-huh. Mace is around forty miles off his check point, but it’s the Attris. I know that tub.” The magnified image of the cropper tender eight thousand feet below was centered in the ground-view screen. Two flocks of pelagic cropping machines near it rose and sank slowly on the shimmer of the swells. The croppers were restless in the full moonlight, and the tender’s chase-plane was circling beyond the farther of the two flocks, guiding a few runaways back to the fold.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Nile asked.
Parrol glanced over at her. “You’ve checked your position chart?”
“Of course. The ship’s anchored above the north third of the Tuskason Rift. I see. You feel she’d be in danger if somebody spots the Pan snooping around the floor of the Rift?”
“She might be in danger, and in any case she’s too close to where we want to operate,” Parrol said. “If they’re loading nidith down there, they’re nervous people. They know a ship of that type can’t spot them, but the mere fact the tender’s at anchor here will make them that much more ready to dump the evidence and run at the first hint that something’s wrong.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Go aboard, tell Mace to move his croppers fifty miles west and wait for us there. That will get him out of everybody’s hair. He’ll know something unusual is up, but he never asks questions. Give them the visual signal.”
Nile’s hand moved, and the Giard identification light . . . blue . . . blue . . . red . . . flashed out beneath the PanElemental. After a ten-second pause it was repeated. The communicator burred.
“Negative,” Nile muttered. Her fingers shifted on the signal box; a purple glow appeared beneath them. As it faded, the communicator burr ended and Giard’s blue-blue-red flickered up at them from the tender.
Nile said, “He’s got the idea that we don’t want conversation.” She flashed the coming-in signal. A few moments later a clear green spark showed on the Attris.
Nile snapped off the signal box. “That’s it! Let’s go down.” She shoved the car’s nose over and fed it speed as Parrol switched off the ground-view plate. The sea was rising towards them, moonlit and stirring; then it tilted sharply up to the right, swung back and was level again just below. Water hissed under them as the Pan knifed lightly through the back of a swell. The tender’s stern appeared ahead, its details outlined in Duse’s light. Several men stood about the deck. Two of them . . .
“NILE! TURN—”
Parrol had no time to complete the warning. On the deck of the Attris a piece of shielding had dropped. Behind it stood a squat gun, nose pointed at them. Nile saw the trap in the moment he did, reacted instantly. The Pan shot down toward the water.
A blaze of light filled the screen and a giant fist rammed the car up and around. Nile was flung heavily over on Parrol, dropped away. He was struggling to reach the flight controls while the car flipped through the air, engine roaring wildly. In the screen, he had a flashing glimpse of the bow of the Attris receding from them, another of the tender’s chase-plane darting past. A hail of steel rattled and tore at the PanElemental for an instant. Then the engine was dead. He had the car under partial control for the moment needed to straighten it out before it crashed into the sea.
The water was pitch-black all around. The PanElemental, sinking tail first now, ruined engine section flooded, settled heavily against some yielding obstruction, dropped again a few feet, was checked once more. It swayed over slowly into something close to a horizontal position, turned sideways and lay still in a grappling tangle of the vegetation that rode the Meral Current below the surface.
Parrol, out of his trousers and shoes, tightened the dive belt around his waist, groped ab
out for the scattered rest of their diving equipment, cursing the darkness, the treachery of the Attris crew, his own stupidity. With an illegal source of drugs, that could make millionaires out of a thousand men, to exploit, Agenes would have had no difficulty in finding all the useful confederates it needed. Now he and Nile had one slim chance to outlive their blunder at least for a short while. They had to be out of the crippled car and away in the sea before the Attris got divers down to make sure they were finished off.
Nile lay doubled half across the slanted instrument board at his feet. There had been no time to find out how badly she was injured. She was certainly unconscious. But he could handle her in the water.
Parrol found the two sets of flippers behind the seat, had just finished slipping his on when there was a flicker of light in the blackness. He glanced around, startled, saw above and to the right what might have been a moving cluster of fireflies. Comprehension came instantly . . . the vision screen was showing him a group of jet divers approaching from the Attris.
Which left him perhaps thirty seconds to be away from here—
Swearing savagely, Parrol snapped the other set of flippers to his belt, squirmed around the front seat, picked up Nile and clamped her against him. His free hand groped about for the manual canopy release, found it. He pulled down the rear release first, instantly grasped the other and wrenched at it.
There was a roar, a momentary cold brutal pounding that smashed the air from his lungs, whirled him upwards.
He rolled over in water above the car, clutching Nile, came up against the rubbery trunk of a giant drift plant and straightened out. The fireflies were bigger and brighter here, turning toward the uprush of air from the PanElemental, moving closer through the great sodden underwater thicket in which it hung, gradually illuminating it. Parrol swung away from the lights, floated behind the car, saw a patch of empty blackness before and below him. He shifted Nile to his left arm, grasped the lower edge of the car’s open section, reached down with his legs and gripped two of the plant trunks between his thighs. Locking himself to the plants, he hauled at the car. It swung around heavily, then began to turn, was suddenly sliding past him. In an instant, it had plunged out through the thicket and disappeared below.
Parrol turned around with Nile and went stroking steadily down at a steep slant into the chilled night of the Tuskason Rift.
IV
It had been horribly hungry and weak; and now it was eating. Its memory and awareness covered almost nothing but that. There were blurred visual impressions—light, darkness, color—indicating other things out there which interested it not at all. There were booming, whistling, chirping sounds; and those it also ignored.
Taste and touch held interest, however. The eating process was a simple one. Something was put into its mouth, and it swallowed; and as soon as it had swallowed, something was put into its mouth again, and it swallowed again. Occasionally there would be a pause before something new came into its mouth; and then it had a feeling of anxiety. But the pauses were always short.
Its awareness of taste and touch was connected with whatever was brought into its mouth. There would be one kind of thing for a while, then another. There were variations in flavor, in saltiness, in slipperiness, degree of firmness. But it was all very good.
“I must have been nearly starved to death!” it thought suddenly. It wondered then what “I” was, but almost at once forgot the matter again.
A while later, it had another thought. It decided it didn’t want to eat any more, at least not just now. Something was being pushed into its mouth, but it ejected the something and closed its mouth firmly. There was no impulse to do anything else. It remained exactly where it was, contentedly unmoving.
Now its other senses began to click in. It discovered the blue was gone from its vision and that there was a wide, colorful vista out there, full of individual details. There were things that moved, and many more things that stood still. It became aware of sounds again and for a while tried unsuccessfully to connect them to things it could see. Then there was a sudden awareness of buoyancy, of near-weightlessness. At once it knew what that meant!
“I’m under water . . .
“. . . And I’m me, of course!”
Nile Etland concluded, with a pleased sense of summing up the situation.
She was sitting here, upright, in the underwater ooze. Not quite upright—she was leaning back a little, against something hard.
Something moved. Nile tilted her head to look down at it. It was an arm. A repulsive arm—thick, mottled-gray, with corrugated, oily-looking skin. It was reaching around from behind her, and the cupped hand at its end held some bluish, sloppy oblongs, lifting them toward her face.
She realized that the hard thing she learned against was the monster to which this arm was attached.
Nile jerked upward convulsively to get away from the thing. Somewhat to her surprise she succeeded. Next a powerful stroke of flipper-tipped legs that knocked up a cloud of ooze, and she was driving straight across the bottom towards an electric-blue stand of fan-shaped luminants.
Luminants! Where . . .?
Memory blazed up. The stern deck of the Attris, ghostly clear in white moonlight, the sudden appearance of the gun. They’d been hit—
Nile twisted about, braking her forward momentum, got her legs under her and turned, looking back.
The gray thing which had to be Danrich Parrol was on its feet but making no attempt to follow. Nile’s gaze went beyond him, to the dense, multihued ranks of a fire forest burning coldly in endless night on the floor of the Tuskason Rift.
Slowly—shocked, horrified, oddly fascinated—she brought up her hands and stared at them, twisted and turned briefly to inspect as much as she could of her body, ran palms like hard rubber over her rubbery face and head. The sense of shock drained away. Aesthetically she had nothing on Parrol; the pattern of modifications seemed much the same, was presumably identical. It still beat, by a long way, being dead.
He wasn’t moving from where he stood, probably to avoid alarming her again. Nile went stroking back, stopped a few feet away, a little above him. The changed, ugly face turned toward her; otherwise he remained motionless. Armies of tiny luminous feeders darted about his trunklike legs, crept in the soft mud, swarming about the litter of smashed shells, cracked carapaces and other remnants of their own ravenous feeding.
She studied him quickly, no longer repelled by what she saw. There were transparent horny sheaths over the eyes, bulging outward a little. She had them, too. The lids wouldn’t close over them, but there was no discomfort involved with that. Their outer ears were covered by a bone-hard growth like a thick, curved sausage. Whatever the internal arrangement was, the growths were excellent sound conductors. Broadened noses with no indications of nostrils. When she tried to expand or compress her lungs, nothing happened. Lungs were out of the picture here. The shape remained humanoid if not human, thickened, coarsened, grotesque, but functional, at least temporarily, beneath more than a thousand feet of water. She felt strong and vigorous; the awkward-looking body had responded to her purpose with agile ease. It was better, miraculously so, than they could have had any reason to expect!
She drifted closer to Parrol, touched his shoulder with her hand. His face split in a rather grisly grin; then he turned, momentarily scattering the feeders, and crouched beside a creamy luminous globe protruding from the ooze a few feet away. Nile floated down to see what he was doing.
Parrol laid a fingertip on the plant-animal’s surface. The luminant shuddered. A dark spot appeared where the finger touched it. The finger moved slowly up along the glowing surface, curved down again. A line of darkness followed it as the creature’s surface cells reacted to the touch. Parrol was, Nile realized suddenly, writing on his living parchment. After a few seconds she read:
RATIONAL NOW?
She moved her head irritably up and down, telling herself it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable question. The transformed Parrol produc
ed his unpleasantly transformed grin again, detached something from his belt, held it up to her. With a shock of pleasure Nile recognized her gun. She clipped the sheathed UW to her belt while he resumed writing, then shifted to where she could read over his shoulder.
The two words of the question had almost faded out. New words appeared gradually;
OUR FRIENDS ARE HERE.
Nile gave him a startled glance. He nodded, motioned her to follow, turned and swam toward the thicket of brilliant-blue luminants for which she had headed when she broke away from him. Half crawling, half swimming, he moved into the thicket, Nile close behind. After some fifty feet they came into a less dense but much taller stand of a darkly red growth; here Parrol moved more cautiously. Presently he stopped, beckoned Nile up to him, pushed a few soggy armfuls of the red fronds apart.
Nile found herself looking down a sharply slanted rock slope at another section of the Rift floor a hundred yards below. The fire forest began again at the foot of the shelf, stretched away, clearly detailed nearby but blurring quickly as distance increased into a many-colored glow. Following Parrol’s pointing finger, she could barely make out the long dark hull of a submarine harvester grounded along the towering wall of the side of the Rift on the right. Two other harvesters lay farther out among the luminants. Together the ships formed a rough triangle, within which Nile now began to detect the moving figures of men, bulky in deep-water armor.
There was no mistaking the nature of their activity. The nidith was pale blue, a slender two-foot structure, individually unobtrusive among the greater luminants. But from the top of the shelf it was apparent that there must be millions of them in the bed which stretched away up the floor of the Rift, forming an unbroken carpet of undergrowth among the thickets and groves of the fire forest.
Parrol pointed to the right. About halfway between their position and the harvesters, a single armored figure sat astride a beam-gun floating just off the bottom, its short snout pointed upwards.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 162