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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
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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 were 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,
wormlike 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
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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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]