The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  There was no point Cord could see in letting her stay awake, because they weren’t going anywhere near shore. The reed beds and the channels were already behind them, and Grandpa hadn’t changed direction by the fraction of a degree. He was moving out into the open bay—and he was picking up company!

  So far, Cord could count seven big rafts within two miles of them; and on the three that were closest he could make out a sprouting of new green vines. All of them were traveling in a straight direction; and the common point they were all headed for appeared to be the roaring center of the Yoger Straits, now some three miles away!

  Behind the straits, the cold Zlanti Deep—the rolling fogs, and the open sea! It might be seeding time for the rafts, but it looked as if they weren’t going to distribute their seeds in the bay….

  For a human being, Cord was a fine swimmer. He had a gun and he had a knife; in spite of what Dane had said, he might have stood a chance among the killers of the bay. But it would be a very small chance, at best. And it wasn’t, he thought, as if there weren’t still other possibilities. He was going to keep his head.

  Except by accident, of course, nobody was going to come looking for them in time to do any good. If anyone did look, it would be around the Bay Farms. There were a number of rafts moored there; and it would be assumed they’d used one of them. Now and then something unexpected happened and somebody simply vanished—by the time it was figured out just what had happened on this occasion, it would be much too late.

  Neither was anybody likely to notice within the next few hours that the rafts had started migrating out of the swamps through the Yoger Straits. There was a small weather station a little inland, on the north side of the straits, which used a helicopter occasionally. It was about as improbable, Cord decided dismally, that they’d use it in the right spot just now as it would be for a jet transport to happen to come in low enough to spot them.

  The fact that it was up to him, as the Regent had said, sank in a little more after that! Cord had never felt so lonely.

  Simply because he was going to try it sooner or later, he carried out an experiment next that he knew couldn’t work. He opened the gun’s anesthetic chamber and counted out fifty pellets—rather hurriedly because he didn’t particularly want to think of what he might be using them for eventually. There were around three hundred charges left in the chamber then; and in the next few minutes Cord carefully planted a third of them in Grandpa’s head.

  He stopped after that. A whale might have showed signs of somnolence under a lesser load. Grandpa paddled on undisturbed. Perhaps he had become a little numb in spots, but his cells weren’t equipped to distribute the soporific effect of that type of drug.

  There wasn’t anything else Cord could think of doing before they reached the straits. At the rate they were moving, he calculated that would happen in something less than an hour; and if they did pass through the straits, he was going to risk a swim. He didn’t think Dane would have disapproved, under the circumstances. If the raft simply carried them all out into the foggy vastness of the Zlanti Deep, there would be no practical chance of survival left at all.

  Meanwhile, Grandpa was definitely picking up speed. And there were other changes going on—minor ones, but still a little awe-inspiring to Cord. The pimply-looking red buds that dotted the upper part of the cone were opening out gradually. From the center of most of them protruded now something like a thin, wet, scarlet worm: a worm that twisted weakly, extended itself by an inch or so, rested and twisted again, and stretched up a little farther, groping into the air. The vertical black slits between the armor plates looked somehow deeper and wider than they had been even some minutes ago; a dark, thick liquid dripped slowly from several of them.

  Under other circumstances Cord knew he would have been fascinated by these developments in Grandpa. As it was, they drew his suspicious attention only because he didn’t know what they meant.

  Then something quite horrible happened suddenly. Grayan started moaning loudly and terribly and twisted almost completely around. Afterwards, Cord knew it hadn’t been a second before he stopped her struggles and the sounds together with another anesthetic pellet; but the vines had tightened their grip on her first, not flexibly but like the digging, bony green talons of some monstrous bird of prey. If Dane hadn’t warned him—

  White and sweating, Cord put his gun down slowly while the vines relaxed again. Grayan didn’t seem to have suffered any additional harm; and she would certainly have been the first to point out that his murderous rage might have been as intelligently directed against a machine. But for some moments Cord continued to luxuriate furiously in the thought that, at any instant he chose, he could still turn the raft very quickly into a ripped and exploded mess of sinking vegetation.

  Instead, and more sensibly, he gave both Dane and Nirmond another shot, to prevent a similar occurrence with them. The contents of two such pellets, he knew, would keep any human being torpid for at least four hours. Five shots—

  Cord withdrew his mind hastily from the direction it was turning into; but it wouldn’t stay withdrawn. The thought kept coming up again, until at last he had to recognize it:

  Five shots would leave the three of them completely unconscious, whatever else might happen to them, until they either died from other causes or were given a counteracting agent.

  Shocked, he told himself he couldn’t do it. It was exactly like killing them.

  But then, quite steadily, he found himself raising the gun once more, to bring the total charge for each of the three Team people up to five. And if it was the first time in the last four years Cord had felt like crying, it also seemed to him that he had begun to understand what was meant by using your head—along with other things.

  Barely thirty minutes later, he watched a raft as big as the one he rode go sliding into the foaming white waters of the straits a few hundred yards ahead, and dart off abruptly at an angle, caught by one of the swirling currents. It pitched and spun, made some headway, and was swept aside again. And then it righted itself once more. Not like some blindly animated vegetable, Cord thought, but like a creature that struggled with intelligent purpose to maintain its chosen direction.

  At least, they seemed practically unsinkable….

  Knife in hand, he flattened himself against the platform as the straits roared just ahead. When the platform jolted and tilted up beneath him, he rammed the knife all the way into it and hung on. Cold water rushed suddenly over him, and Grandpa shuddered like a laboring engine. In the middle of it all, Cord had the horrified notion that the raft might release its unconscious human prisoners in its struggle with the straits. But he underestimated Grandpa in that. Grandpa also hung on.

  Abruptly, it was over. They were riding a long swell, and there were three other rafts not far away. The straits had swept them together, but they seemed to have no interest in one another’s company. As Cord stood up shakily and began to strip off his clothes, they were visibly drawing apart again. The platform of one of them was half-submerged; it must have lost too much of the air that held it afloat and, like a small ship, it was foundering.

  From this point, it was only a two-mile swim to the shore north of the straits, and another mile inland from there to the Straits Head Station. He didn’t know about the current; but the distance didn’t seem too much, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave knife and gun behind. The bay creatures loved warmth and mud, they didn’t venture beyond the straits. But Zlanti Deep bred its own killers, though they weren’t often observed so close to shore.

  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 anymore. 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 tiny 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 slapp
ed 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 awhile. 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.