Things were beginning to look rather hopeful.
Thin, crying voices drifted overhead, like the voices of curious cats, as Cord knotted his clothes into a tight bundle, shoes inside. He looked up. There were four of them circling there; magnified seagoing swamp bugs, each carrying an unseen rider. Probably harmless scavengers—but the ten-foot wingspread was impressive. Uneasily, Cord remembered the venomously carnivorous rider he’d left lying beside the station.
One of them dipped lazily and came sliding down toward him. It soared overhead and came back, to hover about the raft’s cone.
The bug rider that directed the mindless flier hadn’t been interested in him at all! Grandpa was baiting it!
Cord stared in fascination. The top of the cone was alive now with a softly wriggling mass of the scarlet, wormlike extrusions that had started sprouting before the raft left the Bay. Presumably, they looked enticingly edible to the bug rider.
The flier settled with an airy fluttering and touched the cone. Like a trap springing shut, the green vines flashed up and around it, crumpling the brittle wings, almost vanishing into the long soft body—
Barely a second later, Grandpa made another catch, this one from the sea itself. Cord had a fleeting glimpse of something like a small, rubbery seal that flung itself out of the water upon the edge of the raft, with a suggestion of desperate haste—and was flipped on instantly against the cone, where the vines clamped it down beside the flier’s body.
It wasn’t the enormous ease with which the unexpected kill was accomplished that left Cord standing there, completely shocked. It was the shattering of his hopes to swim to shore from here. Fifty yards away, the creature from which the rubbery thing had been fleeing showed briefly on the surface, as it turned away from the raft; and the glance was all he needed. The ivory-white body and gaping jaws were similar enough to those of the shark of Earth to indicate the pursuer’s nature. The important difference was that, wherever the white hunters of the Zlanti Deep went, they went by the thousands.
Stunned by that incredible piece of bad luck, still clutching his bundled clothes, Cord stared toward shore. Knowing what to look for, he could spot the telltale roilings of the surface now—the long, ivory gleams that flashed through the swells and vanished again. Shoals of smaller things burst into the air in sprays of glittering desperation and fell back.
He would have been snapped up like a drowning fly before he’d covered a twentieth of that distance!
But almost another full minute passed before the realization of the finality of his defeat really sank in.
Grandpa was beginning to eat!
Each of the dark slits down the sides of the cone was a mouth. So far only one of them was in operating condition, and the raft wasn’t able to open that one very wide as yet. The first morsel had been fed into it, however: the bug rider the vines had plucked out of the flier’s downy neck fur. It took Grandpa several minutes to work it out of sight, small as it was. But it was a start.
Cord didn’t feel quite sane any more. He sat there, clutching his bundle of clothes and only vaguely aware of the fact that he was shivering steadily under the cold spray that touched him now and then, while he followed Grandpa’s activities attentively. He decided it would be at least some hours before one of that black set of mouths grew flexible and vigorous enough to dispose of a human being. Under the circumstances, it couldn’t make much difference to the other human beings here; but the moment Grandpa reached for the first of them would also be the moment he finally blew the raft to pieces. The white hunters were cleaner eaters, at any rate; and that was about the extent to which he could still control what was going to happen.
Meanwhile, there was the very faint chance that the weather station’s helicopter might spot them—
Meanwhile also, in a weary and horrified fascination, he kept debating the mystery of what could have produced such a nightmarish change in the rafts. He could guess where they were going by now; there were scattered strings of them stretching back to the Straits or roughly parallel to their own course, and the direction was that of the plankton-swarming pool of the Zlanti Basin, a thousand miles to the north. Given time, even mobile lily pads like the rafts had been could make that trip for the benefit of their seedlings. But nothing in their structure explained the sudden change into alert and capable carnivores.
He watched the rubbery little seal-thing being hauled up to a mouth next. The vines broke its neck; and the mouth took it in up to the shoulders and then went on working patiently at what was still a trifle too large a bite. Meanwhile, there were more thin cat-cries overhead; and a few minutes later, two more sea bugs were trapped almost simultaneously and added to the larder. Grandpa dropped the dead seal-thing and fed himself another bug rider. The second rider left its mount with a sudden hop, sank its teeth viciously into one of the vines that caught it again, and was promptly battered to death against the platform.
Cord felt a resurge of unreasoning hatred against Grandpa. Killing a bug was about equal to cutting a branch from a tree; they had almost no life-awareness. But the rider had aroused his partisanship because of its appearance of intelligent action—and it was in fact closer to the human scale in that feature than to the monstrous life-form that had, mechanically, but quite successfully, trapped both it and the human beings. Then his thoughts had drifted again; and he found himself speculating vaguely on the curious symbiosis in which the nerve systems of two creatures as dissimilar as the bugs and their riders could be linked so closely that they functioned as one organism.
Suddenly an expression of vast and stunned surprise appeared on his face.
Why—now he knew!
Cord stood up hurriedly, shaking with excitement, the whole plan complete in his mind. And a dozen long vines snaked instantly in the direction of his sudden motion, and groped for him, taut and stretching. They couldn’t reach him, but their savagely alert reaction froze Cord briefly where he was. The platform was shuddering under his feet, as if in irritation at his inaccessibility; but it couldn’t be tilted up suddenly here to throw him within the grasp of the vines, as it could around the edges.
Still, it was a warning! Cord sidled gingerly around the cone till he had gained the position he wanted, which was on the forward half of the raft. And then he waited. Waited long minutes, quite motionless, until his heart stopped pounding and the irregular angry shivering of the surface of the raft-thing died away, and the last vine tendril had stopped its blind groping. It might help a lot if, for a second or two after he next started moving, Grandpa wasn’t too aware of his exact whereabouts!
He looked back once to check how far they had gone by now beyond the Straits Head Station. It couldn’t, he decided, be even an hour behind them. Which was close enough, by the most pessimistic count—if everything else worked out all right! He didn’t try to think out in detail what that “everything else” could include, because there were factors that simply couldn’t be calculated in advance. And he had an uneasy feeling that speculating too vividly about them might make him almost incapable of carrying out his plan.
At last, moving carefully, Cord took the knife in his left hand but left the gun holstered. He raised the tightly knotted bundle of clothes slowly over his head, balanced in his right hand. With a long, smooth motion he tossed the bundle back across the cone, almost to the opposite edge of the platform.
It hit with a soggy thump. Almost immediately, the whole far edge of the raft buckled and flapped up to toss the strange object to the reaching vines.
Simultaneously, Cord was racing forward. For a moment, his attempt to divert Grandpa’s attention seemed completely successful—then he was pitched to his knees as the platform came up.
He was within eight feet of the edge. As it slapped down again, he threw himself desperately forward.
An instant later, he was knifing down through cold, clear water, just ahead of the raft, then twisting and coming up again.
The raft was passing over him. Clouds of ti
ny sea creatures scattered through its dark jungle of feeding roots. Cord jerked back from a broad, wavering streak of glassy greenness, which was a stinger, and felt a burning jolt on his side, which meant he’d been touched lightly by another. He bumped on blindly through the slimy black tangles of hair roots that covered the bottom of the raft; then green half-light passed over him, and he burst up into the central bubble under the cone.
Half-light and foul, hot air. Water slapped around him, dragging him away again—nothing to hang on to here! Then above him, to his right, molded against the interior curve of the cone as if it had grown there from the start, the froglike, man-sized shape of the yellowhead.
The raft rider—
Cord reached up and caught Grandpa’s symbiotic partner and guide by a flabby hind leg, pulled himself half out of the water, and struck twice with the knife, fast while the pale-green eyes were still opening.
He’d thought the yellowhead might need a second or so to detach itself from its host, as the bug riders usually did, before it tried to defend itself. This one merely turned its head; the mouth slashed down and clamped on Cord’s left arm above the elbow. His right hand sank the knife through one staring eye, and the yellowhead jerked away, pulling the knife from his grasp.
Sliding down, he wrapped both hands around the slimy leg and hauled with all his weight. For a moment more, the yellowhead hung on. Then the countless neural extensions that connected it now with the raft came free in a succession of sucking, tearing sounds; and Cord and the yellowhead splashed into the water together.
Black tangle of roots again—and two more electric burns suddenly across his back and legs! Strangling, Cord let go. Below him, for a moment, a body was turning over and over with oddly human motions; then a solid wall of water thrust him up and aside, as something big and white struck the turning body and went on.
Cord broke the surface twelve feet behind the raft. And that would have been that, if Grandpa hadn’t already been slowing down.
After two tries, he floundered back up on the platform and lay there gasping and coughing a while. There were no indications that his presence was resented now. A few vine tips twitched uneasily, as if trying to remember previous functions, when he came limping up presently to make sure his three companions were still breathing; but Cord never noticed that.
They were still breathing; and he knew better than to waste time trying to help them himself. He took Grayan’s heat-gun from its holster. Grandpa had come to a full stop.
Cord hadn’t had time to become completely sane again, or he might have worried now whether Grandpa, violently sundered from his controlling partner, was still capable of motion on his own. Instead, he determined the approximate direction of the Straits Head Station, selected a corresponding spot on the platform, and gave Grandpa a light tap of heat.
Nothing happened immediately. Cord sighed patiently and stepped up the heat a little.
Grandpa shuddered gently. Cord stood up.
Slowly and hesitatingly at first, then with steadfast—though now again brainless—purpose, Grandpa began paddling back toward the Straits Head Station.
<
* * * *
MOTHER OF INVENTION
by Tom Godwin
The human mind is adaptable and can condition itself to acknowledge the existence of any circumstance, even such an unpleasant circumstance as the certainty of death.
The human mind is stubborn, and while it will acknowledge the existence of unpleasant circumstances, it refuses to accept such circumstances as unalterable.
The human mind can be very ingenious at altering unpleasant circumstances.
(From Variations Among Our Galactic Cultures, by the Antarean philosopher, B’Ral Gethan.)
* * * *
It was hot in the drive room of the Star Scout and Jim Bran-non, Ship’s Drive Technician, was sick. It had started as another siege of his chronic indigestion, somewhat aggravated by the lecture his wife had given him that morning on his mental, physical and financial insignificance, greatly increased by an ill-chosen meal at the Spaceport’s cafeteria, and now rapidly becoming a serious attack of acute indigestion. Of all the factors, the heat was the worst. The drive room portholes were open and a blower fan mounted in one of them was forcing great volumes of air through the room, but the air was being scooped from no more than ten feet above the scorched surface of Spaceport I and it was hot and smothering with the humidity of tropical New Earth in midsummer.
He made a checkmark on the pad of ship’s drive-inspection forms in his hand to show that the generator had been inspected and found to be in perfect operating condition, then returned the pad and pencil to his pocket before wiping the sweat off his forehead. The Bern nuclear converter was the last item in the drive room to be checked and he carried his box of tools and testing equipment over to it; a small, mousy man who usually moved with slow precision but hurrying now as he felt the first dizziness that was sometimes the forerunner of a faint spell.
The nuclear converter, which supplied both the fissionable fuel for the drive rockets and powered the ship’s generator, was a fairly compact and self-contained unit of which only its fuel inlet required inspection. He extracted the special wrench from his tool box that unlatched the clamps on the fuel inlet’s metal cover and undid them. A thorough and methodical man who believed a good workman could be told by the care he gave his tools, he laid the clamp wrench back in its form-fitting recess in his tool box, rather than on the gritty floor.
He dropped the flat hinged clamps down against the sides of the inlet box and lifted off the metal cover, then checked the metering devices that regulated the intake of the reel of tungsten thread. He hurried, as the feeling of faintness increased, to check the delicate device that controlled the intake of catalytic carbon. This done, he returned all his tools and instruments to their proper recesses in his tool box and withdrew the inspection forms from his pocket to check the last spaces on them. He returned pad and pencil to his pocket and picked up the fuel inlet’s metal cover, setting it in place on its soft gasket that would render it airtight when the clamps were secured.
The faintness increased as he reached out to lift up the clamps and he dropped back on his heels, trying to draw a deep breath and drive away the black dizziness. The dizziness increased and he had half-turned to shout for the other technician in the control room above when it swept over him in a black wave. He fell to the floor with his mouth wordlessly open.
A few minutes later the ship’s elevator dropped to the drive room floor and the technician he had tried to call stepped out of it. ‘Hey, Jim, did you—’
The technician gawked a moment at the still figure on the floor, then ran over to him. A quick inspection showed Jim to be still alive and the technician hurried back to the elevator, dropping it to the boarding ramp.
‘Call the ambulance,’ he yelled at a passing workman. ‘Jim’s fainted again.’
He waited until the ambulance arrived, then extracted Jim’s pad of inspection forms from his pocket before they carried him away. The chief inspector appeared shortly afterward, his own master inspection form in his hand.
‘Hello, Pete,’ he said. ‘I hear Jim fainted again.’
‘This makes the third time that’s happened,’ Pete said, disgust in his voice. ‘It’s his own fault - his wife’s always nagging him to make more money so he puts in all the overtime he can, and between the overwork, the nagging, the heat and the sort of food they have at lunch at the cafeteria - and him being a puny little guy, anyway - it’s no wonder his stomach rebels now and then.’
‘My stomach would rebel if I had the shrew he has for a wife,’ the inspector said. ‘Jim’s a good sort - I like him, but that wife of his! Anyway’ - the inspector mopped his florid and steaming face - ‘it’s hot enough in this drive room to make anybody pass out.’
‘I still say a man’s a fool to let a woman nag him into indigestion and even acute indigestion and try to work overtime when he’s not
able to,’ Pete, a bachelor, insisted.
‘Well, maybe you’re right,’ the married chief inspector admitted, ‘but he’s the most reliable man I have. He’s slow, but when he marks down a ship’s drive as having been inspected, you can be sure that he missed nothing. Which brings up ... what did he lack in here when he fainted?’
‘Nothing,’ Pete said. ‘Here’s his inspection form - he has every item checked off. He had already put all his tools back in his box, too, so he must have been done.’
The chief inspector took the inspection form and ran his eyes down it. ‘He has everything checked, all right. So, let’s get out of this oven. The old tub is now ready for flight so far as Port Inspection is concerned, and they want to take off the minute we clear them.’
Spectrum 5 - [Anthology] Page 14