The Jack Vance Treasury

by Jack Vance

  Fletcher disengaged the pump; water rammed in through the nose, converted to steam, spat aft.

  Bio-Minerals became a gray blot in the pink haze, while the outlines of the barge and the shelves became hard and distinct, and gradually grew large. Fletcher de-staged the power; the launch surfaced, coasted up to the dark hull, grappled with magnetic balls that allowed barge and launch to surge independently on the slow swells.

  Fletcher slid back the dome, jumped up to the deck.

  “Raight! Hey, Carl!”

  There was no answer.

  Fletcher looked up and down the deck. Raight was a big man, strong and active—but there might have been an accident. Fletcher walked down the deck toward the control cabin. He passed the No. 1 hold, heaped with black-green barnacles. At the No. 2 hold the boom was winged out, with the grab engaged on a shelf, ready to hoist it clear of the water.

  The No. 3 hold was still unladen. The control cabin was empty.

  Carl Raight was nowhere aboard the barge.

  He might have been taken off by helicopter or launch, or he might have fallen over the side. Fletcher made a slow check of the dark water in all directions. He suddenly leaned over the side, trying to see through the surface reflections. But the pale shape under the water was a dekabrach, long as a man, sleek as satin, moving quietly about its business.

  Fletcher looked thoughtfully to the northeast, where the Pelagic Recoveries raft floated behind a curtain of pink murk. It was a new venture, only three months old, owned and operated by Ted Chrystal, former biochemist on the Bio-Minerals raft. The Sabrian Ocean was inexhaustible; the market for metal was insatiable; the two rafts were in no sense competitors. By no stretch of imagination could Fletcher conceive Chrystal or his men attacking Carl Raight.

  He must have fallen overboard.

  Fletcher returned to the control cabin, climbed the ladder to the flying bridge on top. He made a last check of the water around the barge, although he knew it to be a useless gesture—the current, moving through the gap at a steady two knots, would have swept Raight’s body out over the Deeps. Fletcher scanned the horizon. The line of shelves dwindled away into the pink gloom. The mast on the Bio-Minerals raft marked the sky to the northwest. The Pelagic Recoveries raft could not be seen. There was no living creature in sight.

  The screen signal sounded from the cabin. Fletcher went inside. Blue Murphy was calling from the raft. “What’s the news?”

  “None whatever,” said Fletcher.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Raight’s not out here.”

  The big red face creased. “Just who is out there?”

  “Nobody. It looks like Raight fell over the side.”

  Murphy whistled. There seemed nothing to say. Finally he asked, “Any idea how it happened?”

  Fletcher shook his head. “I can’t figure it out.”

  Murphy licked his lips. “Maybe we ought to close down.”

  “Why?” asked Fletcher.

  “Well—reverence to the dead, you might say.”

  Fletcher grinned crookedly. “We might as well keep running.”

  “Just as you like. But we’re low on the barnacles.”

  “Carl loaded a hold and a half—” Fletcher hesitated, heaved a deep sigh. “I might as well shake in a few more shelves.”

  Murphy winced. “It’s a squeamish business, Sam. You haven’t a nerve in your body.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference to Carl now,” said Fletcher. “We’ve got to scrape barnacles sometime. There’s nothing to be gained by moping.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” said Murphy dubiously.

  “I’ll be back in a couple hours.”

  “Don’t go overboard like Raight now.”

  The screen went blank. Fletcher reflected that he was in charge, superintendent of the raft, until the arrival of the new crew, a month away. Responsibility, which he did not particularly want, was his.

  He went slowly back out on deck, climbed into the winch pulpit. For an hour he pulled sections of shelves from the sea, suspended them over the hold while scraper arms wiped off the black-green clusters, then slid the shelves back into the ocean. Here was where Raight had been working just before his disappearance. How could he have fallen overboard from the winch pulpit?

  Uneasiness inched along Fletcher’s nerves, up into his brain. He shut down the winch, climbed down from the pulpit. He stopped short, staring at the rope on the deck.

  It was a strange rope—glistening, translucent, an inch thick. It lay in a loose loop on the deck, and one end led over the side. Fletcher started down, then hesitated. Rope? Certainly none of the barge’s equipment.

  Careful, thought Fletcher.

  A hand-scraper hung on the king-post, a tool like a small adze. It was used for manual scraping of the shelves, if for some reason the automatic scrapers failed. It was two steps distant, across the rope. Fletcher stepped down to the deck. The rope quivered; the loop contracted, snapped around Fletcher’s ankles.

  Fletcher lunged, caught hold of the scraper. The rope gave a cruel jerk; Fletcher sprawled flat on his face, and the scraper jarred out of his hands. He kicked, struggled, but the rope drew him easily toward the gunwale. Fletcher made a convulsive grab for the scraper, barely reached it. The rope was lifting his ankles, to pull him over the rail. Fletcher strained forward, hacked, again and again. The rope sagged, fell apart, snaked over the side.

  Fletcher gained his feet, staggered to the rail. Down into the water slid the rope, out of sight among the oily reflections of the sky. Then, for half a second, a wave-front held itself perpendicular to Fletcher’s line of vision. Three feet under the surface swam a dekabrach. Fletcher saw the pink-golden cluster of arms, radiating like the arms of a starfish, the black patch at their core which might be an eye.

  Fletcher drew back from the gunwale, puzzled, frightened, oppressed by the nearness of death. He cursed his stupidity, his reckless carelessness; how could he have been so undiscerning as to remain out here loading the barge? It was clear from the first that Raight had never died by accident. Something had killed Raight, and Fletcher had invited it to kill him too. He limped to the control cabin, started the pumps. Water sucked in through the bow orifice, thrust out through the vents. The barge moved out away from the shelves; Fletcher set the course to northwest, toward Bio-Minerals, then went out on deck.

  Day was almost at an end; the sky was darkening to maroon; the gloom grew thick as bloody water. Geideon, a dull red giant, largest of Sabria’s two suns, dropped out of the sky. For a few minutes only the light from blue-green Atreus played on the clouds. The gloom changed its quality to pale green, which by some illusion seemed brighter than the previous pink. Atreus sank and the sky went dark.

  Ahead shone the Bio-Minerals mast-head light, climbing into the sky as the barge approached. Fletcher saw the black shapes of men outlined against the glow. The entire crew was waiting for him: the two operators, Agostino and Murphy, Mahlberg the barge-tender, Damon the biochemist, Dave Jones the steward, Manners the technician, Hans Heinz the engineer.

  Fletcher docked the barge, climbed the soft stairs hacked from the wadded seaweed, stopped in front of the silent men. He looked from face to face. Waiting on the raft they had felt the strangeness of Raight’s death more vividly than he had; so much showed in their expressions.

  Fletcher, answering the unspoken question, said, “It wasn’t an accident. I know what happened.”

  “What?” someone asked.

  “There’s a thing like a white rope,” said Fletcher. “It slides up out of the sea. If a man comes near it, it snaps around his leg and pulls him overboard.”

  Murphy asked in a hushed voice, “You’re sure?”

  “It just about got me.”

  Damon the biochemist asked in a skeptical voice, “A live rope?”

  “I suppose it might have been alive.”

  “What else could it have been?”

  Fletcher hesitated. “I looked over
the side. I saw dekabrachs. One for sure, maybe two or three others.”

  There was silence. The men looked out over the water. Murphy asked in a wondering voice, “Then the dekabrachs are the ones?”

  “I don’t know,” said Fletcher in a strained sharp voice. “A white rope, or fiber, nearly snared me. I cut it apart. When I looked over the side I saw dekabrachs.”

  The men made hushed noises of wonder and awe.

  Fletcher turned away, started toward the mess hall. The men lingered on the dock, examining the ocean, talking in subdued voices. The lights of the raft shone past them, out into the darkness. There was nothing to be seen.

  Later in the evening Fletcher climbed the stairs to the laboratory over the office, to find Eugene Damon busy at the micro-film viewer.

  Damon had a thin, long-jawed face, lank blond hair, a fanatic’s eyes. He was industrious and thorough, but he worked in the shadow of Ted Chrystal, who had quit Bio-Minerals to bring his own raft to Sabria. Chrystal was a man of great ability. He had adapted the vanadium-sequestering sea-slug of Earth to Sabrian waters; he had developed the tantalum-barnacle from a rare and sickly species into the hardy high-yield producer that it was. Damon worked twice the hours that Chrystal had put in, and while he performed his routine duties efficiently, he lacked the flair and imaginative resource which Chrystal used to leap from problem to solution without apparent steps in between.

  He looked up when Fletcher came into the lab, then applied himself once more to the micro-screen.

  Fletcher watched a moment. “What are you looking for?” he asked presently.

  Damon responded in the ponderous, slightly pedantic manner that sometimes amused, sometimes irritated Fletcher. “I’ve been searching the index to identify the long white ‘rope’ which attacked you.”

  Fletcher made a noncommittal sound, went to look at the settings on the micro-file throw-out. Damon had coded for ‘long’, ‘thin’, dimensional classification ‘E, F, G’. On these instructions, the selector, scanning the entire roster of Sabrian life forms, had pulled the cards of seven organisms.

  “Find anything?” Fletcher asked.

  “Not so far.” Damon slid another card into the viewer. ‘Sabrian Annelid, RRS-4924’, read the title, and on the screen appeared a schematic outline of a long segmented worm. The scale showed it to be about two and a half meters long.

  Fletcher shook his head. “The thing that got me was four or five times that long. And I don’t think it was segmented.”

  “That’s the most likely of the lot so far,” said Damon. He turned a quizzical glance up at Fletcher. “I imagine you’re pretty sure about this…long white marine ‘rope’?”

  Fletcher ignored him, scooped up the seven cards, dropped them back into the file, looked in the code book, reset the selector.

  Damon had the codes memorized and was able to read directly off the dials. “‘Appendages’—‘long’—‘dimensions D, E, F, G’.”

  The selector kicked three cards into the viewer.

  The first was a pale saucer which swam like a skate, trailing four long whiskers. “That’s not it,” said Fletcher.

  The second was a black, bullet-shaped water-beetle, with a posterior flagellum.

  “Not that one.”

  The third was a kind of mollusk, with a plasm based on selenium, silicon, fluorine and carbon. The shell was a hemisphere of silicon carbide, with a hump from which protruded a thin prehensile tendril.

  The creature bore the name ‘Stryzkal’s Monitor’, after Esteban Stryzkal, the famous pioneer taxonomist of Sabria.

  “That might be the guilty party,” said Fletcher.

  “It’s not mobile,” objected Damon. “Stryzkal finds it anchored to the North Shallows pegmatite dikes, in conjunction with the dekabrach colonies.”

  Fletcher was reading the descriptive material. “‘The feeler is elastic without observable limit, and apparently functions as a food-gathering, spore-disseminating, exploratory organ. The monitor typically is found near the dekabrach colonies. Symbiosis between the two life forms is not impossible.’”

  Damon looked at him questioningly. “Well?”

  “I saw some dekabrachs out along the shelves.”

  “You can’t be sure you were attacked by a monitor,” Damon said dubiously. “After all, they don’t swim.”

  “So they don’t,” said Fletcher, “according to Stryzkal.”

  Damon started to speak, then noticing Fletcher’s expression, said in a subdued voice, “Of course there’s room for error. Not even Stryzkal could work out much more than a summary of planetary life.”

  Fletcher had been reading the screen. “Here’s Chrystal’s analysis of the one he brought up.”

  They studied the elements and primary compounds of a Stryzkal Monitor’s constitution.

  “Nothing of commercial interest,” said Fletcher.

  Damon was absorbed in a personal chain of thought. “Did Chrystal actually go down and trap a monitor?”

  “That’s right. In the water-bug. He spent lots of time underwater.”

  “Everybody to their own methods,” said Damon shortly.

  Fletcher dropped the cards back in the file. “Whether you like him or not, he’s a good field man. Give the devil his due.”

  “It seems to me that the field phase is over and done with,” muttered Damon. “We’ve got the production line set up; it’s a full-time job trying to increase the yield. Of course I may be wrong.”

  Fletcher laughed, slapped Damon on the skinny shoulder. “I’m not finding fault, Gene. The plain fact is that there’s too many avenues for one man to explore. We could keep four men busy.”

  “Four men?” said Damon. “A dozen is more like it. Three different protoplasmic phases on Sabria, to the single carbon group on Earth! Even Stryzkal only scratched the surface!”

  He watched Fletcher for a while, then asked curiously: “What are you after now?”

  Fletcher was once more running through the index. “What I came in here to check. The dekabrachs.”

  Damon leaned back in his chair. “Dekabrachs? Why?”

  “There’s lots of things about Sabria we don’t know,” said Fletcher mildly. “Have you ever been down to look at a dekabrach colony?”

  Damon compressed his mouth. “No. I certainly haven’t.”

  Fletcher dialled for the dekabrach card.

  It snapped out of the file into the viewer. The screen showed Stryzkal’s original photo-drawing, which in many ways conveyed more information than the color stereos. The specimen depicted was something over six feet long, with a pale seal-like body terminating in three propulsive vanes. At the head radiated the ten arms from which the creature derived its name—flexible members eighteen inches long, surrounding the black disk which Stryzkal assumed to be an eye.

  Fletcher skimmed through the rather sketchy account of the creature’s habitat, diet, reproductive methods, and protoplasmic classification. He frowned in dissatisfaction. “There’s not much information here—considering that they’re one of the more important species. Let’s look at the anatomy.”

  The dekabrach’s skeleton was based on an anterior dome of bone with three flexible cartilaginous vertebrae, each terminating in a propulsive vane.

  The information on the card came to an end. “I thought you said Chrystal made observations on the dekabrachs,” growled Damon.

  “So he did.”

  “If he’s such a howling good field man, where’s his data?”

  Fletcher grinned. “Don’t blame me, I just work here.” He put the card through the screen again.

  Under ‘General Comments’, Stryzkal had noted, Dekabrachs appear to belong in the Sabrian Class A group, the silico-carbo-nitride phase, although they deviate in important respects. He had added a few lines of speculation regarding dekabrach relationships to other Sabrian species.

  Chrystal merely made the comment, “Checked for commercial application; no specific recommendation.”

  Flet
cher made no comment.

  “How closely did he check?” asked Damon.

  “In his usual spectacular way. He went down in the water-bug, harpooned one of them, dragged it to the laboratory. Spent three days dissecting it.”

  “Precious little he’s noted here,” grumbled Damon. “If I worked three days on a new species like the dekabrachs, I could write a book.”

  They watched the information repeat itself.

  Damon stabbed out with his long bony finger. “Look! That’s been blanked over. See those black triangles in the margin? Cancellation marks!”

  Fletcher rubbed his chin. “Stranger and stranger.”

  “It’s downright mischievous,” Damon cried indignantly, “erasing material without indicating motive or correction.”

  Fletcher nodded slowly. “It looks like somebody’s going to have to consult Chrystal.” He considered. “Well—why not now?” He descended to the office, where he called the Pelagic Recoveries raft.

  Chrystal himself appeared on the screen. He was a large blond man with a blooming pink skin and an affable innocence that camouflaged the directness of his mind; his plumpness similarly disguised a powerful musculature. He greeted Fletcher with cautious heartiness. “How’s it going on Bio-Minerals? Sometimes I wish I was back with you fellows—this working on your own isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “We’ve had an accident over here,” said Fletcher. “I thought I’d better pass on a warning.”

  “Accident?” Chrystal looked anxious. “What’s happened?”

  “Carl Raight took the barge out—and never came back.”

  Chrystal was shocked. “That’s terrible! How…why—”

  “Apparently something pulled him in. I think it was a monitor mollusk—Stryzkal’s Monitor.”

  Chrystal’s pink face wrinkled in puzzlement. “A monitor? Was the barge over shallow water? But there wouldn’t be water that shallow. I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t either.”

  Chrystal twisted a cube of white metal between his fingers. “That’s certainly strange. Raight must be—dead?”