The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  But it was no use. They knew all that. He stared at them helplessly. “I—”

  Dane turned to Nirmond. “Perhaps you’d better check,” she said. She didn’t add, “to reassure the boy!” but that was what she meant.

  Cord felt himself flushing terribly. They thought he was scared—which he was—and they were feeling sorry for him, which they had no right to do. But there was nothing he could say or do now except watch Nirmond walk steadily across the platform. Grandpa shivered slightly a few times, but the rafts always did that when someone first stepped on them. The station manager stopped before one of the kinky sprouts, touched it, and then gave it a tug. He reached up and poked at the lowest of the budlike growths. “Odd-looking things!” he called back. He gave Cord another glance. “Well, everything seems harmless enough, Cord. Coming aboard, everyone?”

  It was like dreaming a dream in which you yelled and yelled at people and couldn’t make them hear you! Cord stepped up stiff-legged on the platform behind Dane and Grayan. He knew exactly what would have happened if he’d hesitated even a moment. One of them would have said in a friendly voice, careful not to let it sound too contemptuous: “You don’t have to come along if you don’t want to, Cord!”

  Grayan had unholstered her heat-gun and was ready to start Grandpa moving out into the channels of the Yoger Bay.

  Cord hauled out his own heat-gun and said roughly, “I was to do that!”

  “All right, Cord.” She gave him a brief, impersonal smile, as if he were someone she’d met for the first time that day, and stood aside.

  They were so infuriatingly polite! He was, Cord decided, as good as on his way back to Vanadia right now.

  For a while, Cord almost hoped that something awesome and catastrophic would happen promptly to teach the Team people a lesson. But nothing did. As always, Grandpa shook himself vaguely and experimentally when he felt the heat on one edge of the platform and then decided to withdraw from it, all of which was standard procedure. Under the water, out of sight, were the raft’s working sections: short, thick leaf-structures shaped like paddles and designed to work as such, along with the slimy nettle-streamers which kept the vegetarians of the Yoger Bay away, and a jungle of hair roots through which Grandpa sucked nourishments from the mud and the sluggish waters of the bay, and with which he also anchored himself.

  The paddles started churning, the platform quivered, the hair roots were hauled out of the mud; and Grandpa was on his ponderous way.

  Cord switched off the heat, reholstered his gun, and stood up. Once in motion, the rafts tended to keep traveling unhurriedly for quite a while. To stop them, you gave them a touch of heat along their leading edge; and they could be turned in any direction by using the gun lightly on the opposite side of the platform.

  It was simple enough. Cord didn’t look at the others. He was still burning inside. He watched the reed beds move past and open out, giving him glimpses of the misty, yellow and green and blue expanse of the brackish bay ahead. Behind the mist, to the west, were the Yoger Straits, tricky and ugly water when the tides were running; and beyond the straits lay the open sea, the great Zlanti Deep, which was another world entirely and one of which he hadn’t seen much as yet.

  Suddenly he was sick with the full realization that he wasn’t likely to see any more of it now! Vanadia was a pleasant enough planet; but the wildness and strangeness were long gone from it. It wasn’t Sutang.

  Grayan called from beside Dane, “What’s the best route from here into the farms, Cord?”

  “The big channel to the right,” he answered. He added somewhat sullenly, “We’re headed for it!”

  Grayan came over to him. “The Regent doesn’t want to see all of it,” she said, lowering her voice. “The algae and plankton beds first. Then as much of the mutated grains as we can show her in about three hours. Steer for the ones that have been doing best, and you’ll keep Nirmond happy!”

  She gave him a conspiratorial wink. Cord looked after her uncertainly. You couldn’t tell from her behavior that anything was wrong. Maybe—

  He had a flare of hope. It was hard not to like the Team people, even when they were being rock-headed about their Regulations. Perhaps it was that purpose that gave them their vitality and drive, even though it made them remorseless about themselves and everyone else. Anyway, the day wasn’t over yet. He might still redeem himself in the Regent’s opinion. Something might happen—

  Cord had a sudden cheerful, if improbable, vision of some bay monster plunging up on the raft with snapping jaws, and of himself alertly blowing out what passed for the monster’s brains before anyone else—Nirmond, in particular—was even aware of the threat. The bay monsters shunned Grandpa, of course, but there might be ways of tempting one of them.

  So far, Cord realized, he’d been letting his feelings control him. It was time to start thinking!

  Grandpa first. So he’d sprouted—green vines and red buds, purpose unknown, but with no change observable in his behavior patterns otherwise. He was the biggest raft in this end of the bay, though all of them had been growing steadily in the two years since Cord had first seen one. Sutang’s seasons changed slowly; its year was somewhat more than five Earth years long. The first Team members to land here hadn’t yet seen a full year pass.

  Grandpa then was showing a seasonal change. The other rafts, not quite so far developed, would be reacting similarly a little later. Plant animals—they might be blossoming, preparing to propagate.

  “Grayan,” he called, “how do the rafts get started? When they’re small, I mean.”

  Grayan looked pleased; and Cord’s hopes went up a little more. Grayan was on his side again anyway!

  “Nobody knows yet,” she said. “We were just talking about it. About half of the coastal marsh-fauna of the continent seems to go through a preliminary larval stage in the sea.” She nodded at the red buds on the raft’s cone. “It looks as if Grandpa is going to produce flowers and let the wind or tide take the seeds out through the straits.”

  It made sense. It also knocked out Cord’s still half-held hope that the change in Grandpa might turn out to be drastic enough, in some way, to justify his reluctance to get on board. Cord studied Grandpa’s armored head carefully once more—unwilling to give up that hope entirely. There was a series of vertical gummy black slits between the armor plates, which hadn’t been in evidence two weeks ago either. It looked as if Grandpa were beginning to come apart at the seams. Which might indicate that the rafts, big as they grew to be, didn’t outlive a full seasonal cycle, but came to flower at about this time of Sutang’s year and died. However, it was a safe bet that Grandpa wasn’t going to collapse into senile decay before they completed their trip today.

  Cord gave up on Grandpa. The other notion returned to him—perhaps he could coax an obliging bay monster into action that would show the Regent he was no sissy!

  Because the monsters were there, all right.

  Kneeling at the edge of the platform and peering down into the wine-colored, clear water of the deep channel they were moving through, Cord could see a fair selection of them at almost any moment.

  Some five or six snappers, for one thing. Like big, flattened crayfish, chocolate-brown mostly, with green and red spots on their carapaced backs. In some areas they were so thick you’d wonder what they found to live on, except that they ate almost anything, down to chewing up the mud in which they squatted. However, they preferred their food in large chunks and alive, which was one reason you didn’t go swimming in the bay. They would attack a boat on occasion; but the excited manner in which the ones he saw were scuttling off toward the edges of the channel showed they wanted to have nothing to do with a big moving raft.

  Dotted across the bottom were two-foot round holes which looked vacant at the moment. Normally, Cord knew, there would be a head filling each of those holes. The heads consisted mainly of triple sets of jaws, held open patiently like so many traps to grab at anything that came within range of the long, worm
like bodies behind the heads. But Grandpa’s passage, waving his stingers like transparent pennants through the water, had scared the worms out of sight, too.

  Otherwise, mostly schools of small stuff—and then a flash of wicked scarlet, off to the left behind the raft, darting out from the reeds! Turning its needle-nose into their wake.

  Cord watched it without moving. He knew that creature, though it was rare in the bay and hadn’t been classified. Swift, vicious—alert enough to snap swamp bugs out of the air as they fluttered across the surface. And he’d tantalized one with fishing tackle once into leaping up on a moored raft, where it had flung itself about furiously until he was able to shoot it.

  No fishing tackle. A handkerchief might just do it, if he cared to risk an arm—

  “What fantastic creatures!” Dane’s voice just behind him.

  “Yellowheads,” said Nirmond. “They’ve got a high utility rating. Keep down the bugs.”

  Cord stood up casually. It was no time for tricks! The reed bed to their right was thick with yellowheads, a colony of them. Vaguely froggy things, man-sized and better. Of all the creatures he’d discovered in the bay, Cord liked them least. The flabby, sacklike bodies clung with four thin limbs to the upper sections of the twenty-foot reeds that lined the channel. They hardly ever moved, but their huge, bulging eyes seemed to take in everything that went on about them. Every so often, a downy swamp bug came close enough; and a yellowhead would open its vertical, enormous, tooth-lined slash of a mouth, extend the whole front of its face like a bellows in a flashing strike; and the bug would be gone. They might be useful, but Cord hated them.

  “Ten years from now we should know what the cycle of coastal life is like,” Nirmond said. “When we set up the Yoger Bay Station there were no yellowheads here. They came the following year. Still with traces of the oceanic larval form; but the metamorphosis was almost complete. About twelve inches long—”

  Dane remarked that the same pattern was duplicated endlessly elsewhere. The Regent was inspecting the yellowhead colony with field glasses; she put them down now, looked at Cord, and smiled. “How far to the farms?”

  “About twenty minutes.”

  “The key,” Nirmond said, “seems to be the Zlanti Basin. It must be almost a soup of life in spring.”

  “It is,” said Dane, nodding. She had been here in Sutang’s spring, four Earth years ago. “It’s beginning to look as if the basin alone might justify colonization. The question is still”—she gestured toward the yellowheads—“how do creatures like that get there?”

  They walked off toward the other side of the raft, arguing about ocean currents. Cord might have followed. But something splashed back of them, off to the left and not too far back. He stayed, watching.

  After a moment, he saw the big yellowhead. It had slipped down from its reedy perch, which was what had caused the splash. Almost submerged at the waterline, it stared after the raft with huge pale-green eyes. To Cord, it seemed to look directly at him. In that moment, he knew for the first time why he didn’t like yellowheads. There was something very like intelligence in that look, an alien calculation. In creatures like that, intelligence seemed out of place. What use could they have for it?

  A little shiver went over him when it sank completely under the water and he realized it intended to swim after the raft. But it was mostly excitement. He had never seen a yellowhead come down out of the reeds before. The obliging monster he’d been looking for might be presenting itself in an unexpected way.

  Half a minute later, he watched it again, swimming awkwardly far down. It had no immediate intention of boarding, at any rate. Cord saw it come into the area of the raft’s trailing stingers. It maneuvered its way between them with curiously human swimming motions, and went out of sight under the platform.

  He stood up, wondering what it meant. The yellowhead had appeared to know about the stingers; there had been an air of purpose in every move of its approach. He was tempted to tell the others about it, but there was the moment of triumph he could have if it suddenly came slobbering up over the edge of the platform and he nailed it before their eyes.

  It was almost time anyway to turn the raft in toward the farms. If nothing happened before then…

  He watched. Almost five minutes, but no sign of the yellowhead. Still wondering, a little uneasy, he gave Grandpa a calculated needling of heat.

  After a moment, he repeated it. Then he drew a deep breath and forgot all about the yellowhead.

  “Nirmond!” he called sharply.

  The three of them were standing near the center of the platform, next to the big armored cone, looking ahead at the farms. They glanced around.

  “What’s the matter now, Cord?”

  Cord couldn’t say it for a moment. He was suddenly, terribly scared again. Something had gone wrong!

  “The raft won’t turn!” he told them.

  “Give it a real burn this time!” Nirmond said.

  Cord glanced up at him. Nirmond, standing a few steps in front of Dane and Grayan as if he wanted to protect them, had begun to look a little strained, and no wonder. Cord already had pressed the gun to three different points on the platform; but Grandpa appeared to have developed a sudden anesthesia for heat. They kept moving out steadily toward the center of the bay.

  Now Cord held his breath, switched the heat on full, and let Grandpa have it. A six-inch patch on the platform blistered up instantly, turned brown, then black—

  Grandpa stopped dead. Just like that.

  “That’s right! Keep burn—” Nirmond didn’t finish his order.

  A giant shudder. Cord staggered back toward the water. Then the whole edge of the raft came curling up behind him and went down again, smacking the bay with a sound like a cannon shot. He flew forward off his feet, hit the platform facedown, and flattened himself against it. It swelled up beneath him. Two more enormous slaps and joltings. Then quiet. He looked round for the others.

  He lay within twelve feet of the central cone. Some twenty or thirty of the mysterious new vines the cone had sprouted were stretched out stiffly toward him now, like so many thin green fingers. They couldn’t quite reach him. The nearest tip was still ten inches from his shoes.

  But Grandpa had caught the others, all three of them. They were tumbled together at the foot of the cone, wrapped in a stiff network of green vegetable ropes, and they didn’t move.

  Cord drew his feet up cautiously, prepared for another earthquake reaction. But nothing happened. Then he discovered that Grandpa was back in motion on his previous course. The heat-gun had vanished. Gently, he took out the Vanadian gun.

  A voice, thin and pain-filled, spoke to him from one of the three huddled bodies.

  “Cord? It didn’t get you?” It was the Regent.

  “No,” he said, keeping his voice low. He realized suddenly he’d simply assumed they were all dead. Now he felt sick and shaky.

  “What are you doing?”

  Cord looked at Grandpa’s big armor-plated head with a certain hunger. The cones were hollowed out inside; the station’s lab had decided their chief function was to keep enough air trapped under the rafts to float them. But in that central section was also the organ that controlled Grandpa’s overall reactions.

  He said softly, “I’ve got a gun and twelve heavy-duty explosive bullets. Two of them will blow that cone apart.”

  “No good, Cord!” the pain-racked voice told him. “If the thing sinks, we’ll die anyway. You have anesthetic charges for that gun of yours?”

  He stared at her back. “Yes.”

  “Give Nirmond and the girl a shot each, before you do anything else. Directly into the spine, if you can. But don’t come any closer….”

  Somehow, Cord couldn’t argue with that voice. He stood up carefully. The gun made two soft spitting sounds.

  “All right,” he said hoarsely. “What do I do now?”

  Dane was silent a moment. “I’m sorry, Cord. I can’t tell you that. I’ll tell you what I
can….”

  She paused for some seconds again. “This thing didn’t try to kill us, Cord. It could have easily. It’s incredibly strong. I saw it break Nirmond’s legs. But as soon as we stopped moving, it just held us. They were both unconscious then….

  “You’ve got that to go on. It was trying to pitch you within reach of its vines or tendrils, or whatever they are, too, wasn’t it?”

  “I think so,” Cord said shakily. That was what had happened, of course; and at any moment Grandpa might try again.

  “Now it’s feeding us some sort of anesthetic of its own through those vines. Tiny thorns. A sort of numbness…” Dane’s voice trailed off a moment. Then she said clearly, “Look, Cord—it seems we’re food it’s storing up! You get that?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Seeding time for the rafts. There are analogues. Live food for its seed probably; not for the raft. One couldn’t have counted on that. Cord?”

  “Yes. I’m here.”

  “I want,” said Dane, “to stay awake as long as I can. But there’s really just one other thing—this raft’s going somewhere. To some particularly favorable location. And that might be very near shore. You might make it in then; otherwise it’s up to you. But keep your head and wait for a chance. No heroics, understand?”

  “Sure, I understand,” Cord told her. He realized then that he was talking reassuringly, as if it weren’t the Planetary Regent but someone like Grayan.

  “Nirmond’s the worst,” Dane said. “The girl was knocked unconscious at once. If it weren’t for my arm— But, if we can get help in five hours or so, everything should be all right. Let me know if anything happens, Cord.”

  “I will,” Cord said gently again. Then he sighted his gun carefully at a point between Dane’s shoulder blades, and the anesthetic chamber made its soft, spitting sound once more. Dane’s taut body relaxed slowly, and that was all.