As the pain haze began to thin out, Ticos Cay was somewhat surprised to find he was still on his feet. This had been a brutally heavy treatment—at moments it had seemed almost impossible to control. However, he had controlled it. The white-hot sensations, which hadn't quite broken through with full impact into consciousness, faded to something like a sullenly lingering glow. Then that faded too. His vision began to clear.
Cautiously he allowed himself to accept complete awareness of his body again. It was still an unpleasant experience. There were sharp twinges everywhere, a feeling of having been recently pierced and sliced by tiny hot knives; the residue of pain. The lasting damage caused by one of these pain treatments to the human nervous system and sensory apparatus was slight but measurable. The accumulative effect of a series of treatments was no longer slight; and there had been over twenty of them during the past weeks. Each time now, taking stock of the physical loss he had suffered during the process, Ticos wondered whether he would be forced to acknowledge that the damage had spread to the point where it could no longer be repaired.
However, it hadn't happened on this occasion. His mind was fogged over; but it always was for a short while after a treatment. Reassured, he shifted attention from his internal condition to his surroundings.
The big room had come back into focus. Most of it was dark because the demons had cut out all but a central section of the ceiling illumination. There remained a pool of light which enclosed most of the long worktable against which he leaned and the raised platform twenty feet away, from which they were watching him. The shelves and walls beyond, the rows of biological specimens, the arrays of analyzing and recording equipment, were in darkness.
Ticos Cay looked about, taking it in, drawing the trappings of reality back around him. He looked last at the demons.
"You succeeded again in avoiding the feeling of pain?" asked the small one of the three.
Ticos considered. The identity of the small demon was still blurred but coming clear. Yes, his name was Koll . . . the Great Palach Koll. One of the most influential among the leaders of the Everliving. Second in command of the Voice of Action. . . .
Ticos admonished himself: Be very careful of Koll!
He made a sound between what might have been a muttering attempt to speak and a groan. He could have replied immediately. But it wouldn't do to think foggily while being interrogated—and particularly not while being interrogated by Koll.
The three stared silently, unmoving. Their skins, harnesses and other equipment gleamed wetly as if they had come out of the sea only minutes before entering the room. Which might be the case; salt water was the demons' element, and they became sick and uncomfortable if they remained too long away from it. The one to the right of Koll held a device with a glowing blue eye. When the glow brightened, a pain treatment was about to begin. The one at the left of Koll had a weapon trained on Ticos. These two were squat heavy creatures hunkering on muscular hopping legs. Ticos had been obliged to watch one of their kind wrap his arms around the rib cage of a man and crush the man slowly to death without apparent effort.
It had been done at Koll's direction. The big demons were underlings; they were called Oganoon by the Palachs. Koll was of the same species but not large or heavy. Like many of the Great Palachs, he was a wrinkled miniature, not much more than a foot high. Cloaked and hooded, he looked like a shrunken mummy. But he could move like springing steel. Ticos had seen Koll leap eight feet to plunge a paralyzing needle into the eye of an Oganoon who had angered him. He struck five or six times, so quickly that the victim seemed to stiffen in death without understanding what had occurred.
Ticos strongly preferred not to anger Koll. But he needed as long a period of silence as Koll would permit to clear his head for the questions that would be directed at him. He had been maintaining a precarious balance between considerations on that order for some time. He waited until the speaking slit above Koll's eyes writhed open, then said unsteadily, "I could not avoid all the pain. But it remained tolerable."
"It remained tolerable!" the speaking slit repeated as if Koll were musing over the statement. Ticos was accustomed to the fact that many of the Everliving had an excellent command of human speech, but Koll's voice still seemed unnatural to him. It was a deep warm voice, rich and strong, which shouldn't be issuing from such a malevolent little entity. "These children are afraid of you, Dr. Cay," it told him. "Did you know that?"
"No, I didn't," Ticos said.
"At a tenth of the setting used here," Koll explained, "these instruments are employed to punish them for serious offenses. They are in terror of them. They are afraid of you because you seem able to bear agony beyond their comprehension. And there are other reasons. . . . Your communicator has recorded six call signals during the past two days."
Ticos nodded. "So I heard."
"You predicted that one of the so-called Tuvelas would attempt to contact you here."
Ticos hesitated, said, "The term Tuvela is yours. The person to whom you refer is known to me as a Guardian."
"Apparently the same class of creature," said Koll. "A creature assumed by some to possess abnormal qualities. Among them the quality of being invincible. Dr. Cay, what do you know of these remarkable qualities—if they exist?"
Ticos shrugged. "As I've told you, I've known of the Guardians and of their function in our civilization for a relatively short time. They operate very secretly. I've had personal contacts with only one of them. She appears to me to be an exceptionally capable human being. But if she or the Guardians generally have abnormal qualities, I don't know of them." He added, "Evidently the Everliving know more about the Guardians than I do."
"That is possible. You said they claim to be immortal."
Ticos shook his head. "I was told they've developed methods of restoring youthful health to an organism and maintaining it for a long period. I was not told they were immortal. To me the word does not have significant meaning."
"The concept of immortal entities is meaningless to you, Dr. Cay?"
Ticos hesitated again because this could become dangerous ground in speaking to a Palach. But he said, "Who can prove he is immortal before he's reached the end of time?"
Koll's dark face twitched. He might have been amused. "Who indeed?" he agreed. "Describe to me your relationship with these Guardians."
Ticos had described that relationship to Koll several times before. He said, "Two years ago I was asked whether I would enter their service. I accepted."
"Why?"
"I'm aging, Great Palach. Among my rewards was to be instruction in the Guardian's methods of obtaining longevity and regaining the advantages of youth."
"They've given you such instructions?"
"I've been instructed in some of the fundamental approaches. My progress evidently is satisfactory."
"In what way do you serve them, Dr. Cay?"
"I'm still undergoing a training process and haven't been told what my service is to be. I assume that my scientific background will play a part in it."
"The nerve controls you practice to distort the effects of the pain-giver were acquired through the longevity exercises?"
"Yes, they were."
A long pause followed his reply. Koll's speaking slit had closed and he remained unmoving. The lower sections of his double-lensed eyes were lidded; the upper sections stared with a kind of baleful blankness at Ticos. The hulking servitors had become equally immobile, probably as a sign of respect. Ticos wasn't sure what the pause meant. The same thing had occurred during earlier interrogations. Perhaps the tiny monster was simply reflecting on what had been said. But he appeared sunk in a remote trance. If he was addressed now he would ignore it, and he seemed unaware of motion about him. Ticos suspected there was the equivalent of human insanity in Koll. Even Great Palachs of his own rank seemed afraid of him, and he treated them with barely veiled contempt. His dark cowl and cloak were of utilitarian material and often indifferently clean, while they concealed their dwarfish bodies under richly ornamented garments, gleaming with jewels. Apparently they preferred to avoid Koll's company; but his influence on them was very strong.
The speaking slit above the eyes twisted open again.
"Dr. Cay," Koll's voice said, "I become increasingly inclined to add you to my museum of humanity. You have seen my collection?"
Ticos cleared his throat. "Yes," he said.
"Of course you have," Koll said, as if the fact had just occurred to him. "I showed it to you. As a warning not to lie to us. In particular, not to lie to me."
Ticos said warily, "I have been quite careful not to lie to you, Great Palach."
"Have you? I'm not at all certain of it," said Koll. "Do you believe that the person who is attempting to reach you by communicator is the Guardian of whom you told us?"
Ticos nodded. "Yes. The Guardian Etland."
"Why should it be she?"
"No one else has the call symbol of my communicator."
"Because you were to remain isolated here?"
"Yes."
"The Guardian Etland supervises your training?"
"Yes."
"You describe her as a young female," said Koll.
"I said she appears young," Ticos corrected him. "I don't know her age."
"You say that these Guardians or Tuvelas have developed a form of longevity which provides even the appearance of their species' youth. . . . "
"The Guardian Etland has implied that."
"And yet," said Koll, "you tell us the Guardians assigned you the task of searching here for substances among the life forms of this world which promote longevity. What interest could the Guardians have in research which yields them no more than they possess?"
Ticos shrugged. "I know they're testing me in various ways, and it may be that this is their manner of testing my ability as a biochemist. But it's also possible that they're still interested in finding simpler or more dependable methods of gaining longevity than their present ones."
"What part does the use of chemicals play in their present methods?"
"I don't know. I've described the basic approaches I was told to practice. I've been given no hint of the nature of more advanced longevity procedures. My research is confined to the observation of effects in my test material."
"You've suggested that research at this level could be of value to the Everliving. . . . "
"I haven't suggested it," Ticos said. "I realize, of course, that a number of Palachs observe my test results and analyze the substances involved."
"Don't let yourself assume their scientific interest assures your continuing safety, Dr. Cay. Our methods of obtaining individual longevity require no improvement. I'm certain you are lying to us. I intend to determine in what manner you are lying. Why did you request permission to respond to the Guardian's call?"
"I explained my purpose to the Palach Moga," Ticos said.
"Explain it to me."
Ticos indicated the equipment and specimens in the darkened recesses of the room. "This project is the Guardian Etland's responsibility. I and my training are her responsibility. Until your arrival she came here at very regular intervals to inspect the progress I made. Since then she hasn't come here."
"What do you deduce from that?"
"It's possible that the Guardians know of your presence."
"I don't consider that a possibility, Dr. Cay."
Ticos shrugged. "It's the only explanation I see for the Guardian Etland's failure to maintain her schedule. The Guardians may prefer you to leave quietly before there is a general disturbance. If I'm permitted to turn on the communicator when she signals again, we may learn that the Guardian is on her way here to speak to the Everliving rather than to me. . . . "
"She would come knowingly into the area we hold?" said Koll.
"From what several Palachs have told me," Ticos remarked, "it would not be surprising conduct in a Tuvela. If it is true—"
"We'll assume it isn't true, Dr. Cay."
"Then," said Ticos, "I should still be permitted to take the call and attempt to divert her from visiting me at this time. If she does not know you are here and arrives, she will discover you are here. And even if you are able to prevent her from leaving again—"
Koll made a hissing sound. "If we are able to prevent her from leaving?"
"Your own records, as you've implied to me, indicate that Tuvelas are extremely resourceful beings," Ticos observed mildly. "But if you should capture or kill the Guardian, others will come promptly in search of her. Eventually your presence must be revealed." He shrugged. "I don't want these things to happen. As a servant of the Guardians, it is my duty to prevent them from happening if I can. As you're aware, I've been attempting to persuade some of the Everliving that your plans against my species must be abandoned before a general conflict becomes inevitable."
"I know that," said Koll. "You've had an astonishing—and shameful—degree of success. The Voice of Caution becomes increasingly insistent. Even the suggested use of your communicator is supported. Is it possible, Dr. Cay, that you are a Guardian who allowed himself to be captured in order to confuse the Everliving and weaken their resolution?"
"No," Ticos said. "I'm not a Guardian."
"You're a Hulon?"
"Since that's the name you give the general run of humanity, yes, I'm a Hulon."
"It was the name we had for a vicious and stupid creature we encountered in our past," Koll remarked. "We destroyed the creature, so the name was free to be bestowed again. Despite your efforts, our plans won't be abandoned, Dr. Cay. I know you're lying. Not too clumsily, but it will not be long before we put your story to the test. . . . Now attend to your collection here—and reflect occasionally on mine. . . . "
Ticos did not see him make any gesture, but the Oganoon on Koll's right snapped the nerve-torture instrument to one of the harness straps about its bulky body and half turned. The tiny cowled mummy made one of its startlingly quick leaps and was perched on the underling's shoulder. The group moved off the platform and along a raised walkway toward the exit door, the armed servitor bringing up the rear, backing off in short powerful hops, weapon still pointed alertly at Ticos Cay. The lighting brightened back to normal in the big room.
Ticos watched the three vanish through the door, heard the heavy click of its locks. He drew a somewhat shaky breath, picked up a boxed device from the worktable and fastened it by its strap to his belt. It was a complicated instrument through which he controlled temperature, humidity, radiation absorption levels and various other matters connected with his biological specimens in different sections of the room.
His hands were unsteady. The interrogation hadn't gone to his liking. Koll wasn't his usual savagely menacing self—and that in spite of some deliberate provocation. He'd made use of the pain-giver only once. Koll, for Koll, had been affable.
It seemed a bad sign. It indicated that Koll was as confident as he appeared to be that he could dispel the doubts Ticos was nourishing in other leading Palachs by proving their prisoner had misinformed them. And, as a matter of fact, Ticos had totally misinformed them. Over a course of weeks he'd created a carefully organized structure of lies, half-truths and disturbing insinuations designed to fill the Everliving with the fear of Man, or at any rate with the fear of Tuvelas. Who, as far as Ticos Cay knew, didn't exist. Sometimes he'd been hard put to remain consistent, but by now the pattern was so familiar that it held an occasional illusion of truth even for him.
It had been effective in restricting their plans until now. In spite of Koll, it might remain effective—but that depended on a large factor of chance. Ticos sighed inaudibly. He'd reduced the factor as much as possible, but it was still too large. Far too large!
He moved slowly about the room, manipulating the studs of his device now and then, tending to the needs of the biological specimens. He'd never been able to determine whether he was under visual observation or not, but it was possible, and he must not appear too concerned. Occasionally he felt the floor lift and sink under him like the deck of a great ship, and then there would be a heavy sloshing of sea water in the partitioned end of the room. His communicator was in there. A permanent post of Oganoon guards was also in there to make sure he didn't get near the communicator unless the Everliving decided to permit it. And the water covering most of the floor was there because the guards had to keep their leathery hides wet.
From the energy-screened ventilator window near the ceiling came dim sounds like the muted roaring of a beast. That and the periodic heaving of the floor were the only indications Ticos had been given for the past several days that the typhoons still blew outside. . . .
Rain squalls veiled half the sea below the aircar. It was storm season in the southern latitudes of Nandy-Cline . . . the horizon loomed blue-black ahead; heavy swirling cloud banks drove across the ocean to the south. The trim little car bucked suddenly in twisting torrents of air, was hauled about on its controls and, for the moment, rode steady again along a southeasterly course.
Inside the cabin, Nile Etland stabbed at a set of buttons on the panel communicator, said sharply into the transmitter, "Giard Pharmaceuticals Station—come in! Nile Etland calling . . . Giard, come in!"
She waited a moment, tanned face intent. A hum began in the communicator, rose to a wavering howl, interspersed with explosive cracklings. Impatiently, Nile spun the filter control right, then left. Racketing noise erupted along the scale. She muttered bitter comment. Her fingers flicked over the call buttons, picked out another symbol.
"Danrich Parrol—Nile calling! Come in! Dan, can you hear me? Come in!"
Silence for an instant. Then meaningless sound spat and spluttered again. Nile's lips twisted in angry frustration. She muted the speaker, glanced down at the animal curled in a thick loop of richly gleaming brown fur on the floorboards beside her. It lifted a whiskered head, dark eyes watching Nile.
"Dan?" it asked, in a high thin voice.
"No Dan! No anybody!" snapped Nile. "We keep hitting a soup of static anywhere beyond twenty miles all around."
"Soup?"
"Forget it, Sweeting. We'll try calling the sledmen. Maybe they can help us find Ticos."
"Find Tikkos!" Sweeting agreed. The furred shape shifted, flowed, came upright. Bracing short sturdy forelegs against the control panel, Sweeting peered at the sections of seascape and sky in the viewscreens, looked over at Nile. Seven and a half feet in length from nose to the tip of her muscular tail, she was the smaller of Nile's pair of mutant hunting otters. "Where's sledmen?"
"Somewhere ahead." Nile had swung the car fifteen degrees to the east. "Settle down."
The sled she'd sighted in the screens several minutes earlier presently came to view again, now only a few miles away. The car's magnification scanners showed a five hundred foot floatwood raft with flattened, streamlined superstructure, riding its runners twelve yards above the surging seas. The central heavy-weather keel was down, knifing through the waves between runners. On a day of less violence, the sled would have been drifting with an illusion of airy lightness over the water, keel withdrawn, sails spread. Now the masts were hauled flat to the deck, and it was the set of cannon drives along the sled's edges which sent it rushing toward the moving front of the storm. The rain-darkened afterdeck was emblazoned with a pair of deep-blue triangles—the Blue Guul symbol of the Sotira Fleet.
As the sled vanished below the next cloud bank, Nile switched the communicator to ten mile close-contact band, said into the transmitter, "Dr. Nile Etland of Giard Pharmaceuticals calling Sotira sled! Acknowledge, please!" Close-contact seemed to have stayed operational. And they should know her by name down there. The Sotira sleds did regular sea-harvest work for Giard.
The communicator said suddenly, "Captain Doncar of Sotira sled acknowledging. Go ahead, Dr. Etland. . . . "
"I'm in the air behind you," Nile announced. "May I come aboard?"
A moment of silence. Then Doncar's voice said, "If you wish. But we'll be running through heavy storm in less than fifteen minutes."
"I know—I don't want to lose you in it."
"Come down immediately then," Doncar advised her. "We'll be ready for you."
They were. Almost before Nile could climb out of the aircar, half a dozen men in swimming gear, muscular naked backs glistening in the slashing rain, had the small vehicle strapped securely against the sled's deck beside a plastic shrouded object which might be an oversized harpoon gun. It was a disciplined, practiced operation. As they stepped back, a brown-skinned girl, dressed down for the weather like the crewmen, hurried up from the central row of cabins. She shouted something almost lost in the din of wind and rain.
Nile turned. "Jath!"
"This way, Nile! Before the slop drowns us—"
They sprinted back to the cabins through the solid downpour. The otter loped easily after them, given plenty of room by the deck hands. Many of Sweeting's relatives preferred the unhampered freedom of Nandy-Cline's ocean to a domesticated life; and the seagoing mutant otters were known to any sledman at least by reputation. Nothing was gained by asking for trouble with them.
"In here!" Jath hauled open a door, slipped into the cabin behind Nile and the otter and let the door slam shut. Towels lay ready on a table; she tossed two to Nile, dabbed a third perfunctorily over her copper skin. Sweeting shook spray from her fur with a twist that spattered half the cabin. Nile mopped at her dripping coveralls, handed back one of the towels, used the other to dry hair, face and hands. "Thanks!"
"Doncar can't get away at the moment," Jath told her. "He asked me to find out what we can do for you. So—what brings you out in this weather?"
"I'm looking for somebody."
"Here?" There was startled surprise in Jath's voice.
"Dr. Ticos Cay."
A pause. "Dr. Cay is in this area?"
"He might be—" Nile checked momentarily. Jath, in a motion as quick as it was purposeful, had cupped her right hand to her ear, lowered it again.
They knew each other well enough to make the point of the gesture clear. Someone elsewhere on the sled was listening to what was being said in the cabin.
Nile gave Jath the briefest of understanding nods. Evidently there was something going on in this section of the sea which the Sotira sleds regarded as strictly sledman business. She was a mainlander, though a privileged one. An outsider.
She said, "I had a report from meteorological observers this morning about a major floatwood drift they'd spotted moving before the typhoons around here. The island Dr. Cay's been camping on could be part of that drift. . . . "
"You're not sure?"
"I'm not at all sure. I haven't been in touch with him for two months. But the Meral may have carried him this far south. I've been unable to get in contact with him. He's probably all right, but I've begun to feel worried."
Jath bit her lip, blue-green eyes staring at Nile's forehead. Then she shrugged. "You should be worried! But if he's on the floatwood the weather men saw, we wouldn't know it."
"Why not? . . . And why should I be worried?"
"Floatwood's gromgorru this season. So is the water twenty miles around any island. That's Fleet word."
Nile hesitated, startled. "When was the word given?"
"Five weeks ago."
Gromgorru . . . Sledman term for bad luck, evil magic. The malignant unknown. Something to be avoided. And something not discussed, under ordinary circumstances, with mainlanders. Jath's use of the term was deliberate. It was not likely to please the unseen listeners.
A buzzer sounded. Jath gave Nile a quick wink.
"That's for me." She started for the door, turned again. "We have Venn aboard. They'll want to see you now."
Alone with Sweeting, Nile scowled uneasily at the closed door. What the gromgorru business in connection with the floatwood islands was she couldn't imagine. But if Ticos Cay was in this ocean area—and her calculations indicated he shouldn't be too far away—she'd better be getting him out. . . .
Ticos Cay had showed up unannounced one day at the Giard Pharmaceuticals Station on Nandy-Cline, to see Nile. He'd been her biochemistry instructor during her final university year on Orado. He was white-haired, stringy, bouncy, tough-minded, something of a genius, something of a crank, and the best all-around teacher she'd ever encountered. She was delighted to meet him again. Ticos informed her she was responsible for his presence here.
"In what way?" Nile asked.
"The research you've done on the floatwood."
Nile gave him a questioning look. She'd written over a dozen papers on Nandy-Cline's pelagic floatwood forests, forever on the move about the watery planet where one narrow continent and the polar ice massifs represented the only significant barriers to the circling tides of ocean. It was a subject on which she'd been acquiring first-hand information since childhood. The forests she'd studied most specially rode the great Meral Current down through the equatorial belt and wheeled with it far to the south. Many returned eventually over the same path, taking four to ten years to complete the cycle, until at length they were drawn off into other currents. Unless the polar ice closed about it permanently or it became grounded in mainland shallows, the floatwood organism seemed to know no natural death. It was an old species, old enough to have become the home of innumerable other species adjusted in a variety of ways to the climatic changes encountered in its migrations, and of temporary guests who attached themselves to forests crossing the ocean zones they frequented, deserting them again or dying as the floatwood moved beyond their ranges of temperature tolerance.
"It's an interesting subject," she said. "But—"
"You're wondering why I'd make a three weeks' trip out here to discuss the subject with you?"
"Yes, I am."
"It isn't all I had in mind," said Ticos. "I paid a visit to Giard's Central in Orado City a month or so ago. I learned, among other things, that there's a shortage of trained field biologists on Nandy-Cline."
"That's an understatement," said Nile.
"Evidently," Ticos remarked, "it hasn't hampered you too much. Your lab's held in high esteem by the home office."
"I know. We earn their high esteem by keeping way ahead of the competition. But for every new item we turn up with an immediate practical application for Giard, there are a thousand out there that remain unsuspected. The people who work for us are good collectors but they can't do instrument analysis and wouldn't know what to look for if they could. They bring in what you tell them to bring in. I still go out myself when I can, but that's not too often now."
"What's the problem with getting new hire?"
Nile shrugged. "The obvious one. If a man's a good enough biologist, he has his pick of jobs in the Hub. He'd probably make more here, but he isn't interested in coming all the way out to Nandy-Cline to do rough field work. I . . . Ticos, you don't happen to be looking for a job here with Giard?"
He nodded. "I am, as a matter of fact. I believe I'm qualified, and I have my own analytical laboratory at the spaceport. Do you think your station manager would consider me?"
Nile blinked. "Parrol will snap you up, of course! . . . But I don't get it. How do you intend to fit this in with your university work?"
"I resigned from the university early this year. About the job here—I do have a few conditions."
"What are they?"
"For one thing, I'll limit my work to the floatwood islands."
Why not, Nile thought. Provided they took adequate precautions. He looked in good physical shape, and she knew he'd been on a number of outworld field trips.
She nodded, said, "We can fit you up with a first-class staff of assistants. Short on scientific training but long on floatwood experience. Say ten or—"
"Uh-uh!" Ticos shook his head decidedly. "You and I will select an island and I'll set myself up there alone. That's Condition Two. It's an essential part of the project."
Nile stared at him. The multiformed life supported by the floatwood wasn't abnormally ferocious; but it existed because it could take care of itself under constantly changing conditions, which included frequent shifts in the nature of enemies and prey, and in the defensive and offensive apparatus developed to deal with them. For the uninformed human intruder such apparatus could turn into a wide variety of death traps. Their menace was for the most part as mindlessly impersonal as quicksand. But that didn't make them any less deadly.
"Ticos Cay," she stated, "you're out of your mind! You wouldn't last! Do you have any idea—"
"I do. I've studied your papers carefully, along with the rather skimpy material that's available otherwise on the planet's indigenous life. I'm aware there may be serious environmental problems. We'll discuss them. But solitude is a requirement."
"Why in the world should—"
"From a personal point of view, I'll be involved here primarily in longevity research."
She hesitated, said, "Frankly I don't see the connection."
Ticos grunted. "Of course you don't. I'd better start at the beginning."
"Perhaps you should. Longevity research . . . " Nile paused. "Is there some, uh, personal—"
"Is the life I'm interested in extending my own? Definitely. I'm at a point where it requires careful first-hand attention."
Nile felt startled. Ticos was lean but firmly muscled, agile and unwrinkled. In spite of his white hair, she hadn't considered him old. He might have been somewhat over sixty and not interested in cosmetic hormones. "You've begun extension treatments?" she asked.
"Quite a while ago," Ticos said dryly. "How much do you know about the assorted longevity techniques?"
"I have a general understanding of them, of course. But I've never made a special study of the subject. Nobody I've known has—" Her voice trailed off again.
"Don't let it embarrass you to be talking to a creaky ancient about it," Ticos said.
She stared at him. "How old are you?"
"Rather close to two hundred standard years. One of the Hub's most senior citizens, I believe. Not considering, of course, the calendar age of old-timers who resorted to longsleep and are still around."
Two hundred years was the practical limit to the human biological life span. For a moment Nile didn't know what to say. She tried to keep shock from showing in her face. But perhaps Ticos noticed it because he went on quickly, his tone light. "It's curious, you know, that we still aren't able to do much better along those lines! Of course, during the war centuries there evidently wasn't much attention given to such impractical lines of research."
"Impractical?" Nile repeated.
"From the viewpoint of the species. The indefinite extension of individual life units isn't really too desirable in that respect. Natural replacements have obvious advantages. I can agree in theory. Nevertheless, I find myself resenting the fact that the theory should also apply to me. . . . "
He'd started resenting it some two decades ago. Up to then he'd been getting by exceptionally well on biochemical adjustments and gene manipulations, aided by occasional tissue transplants. Then trouble began—so gradually that it was a considerable while before he realized there was a real problem. He was informed at last that adjustment results were becoming increasingly erratic and that there was no known way of balancing them more accurately. Major transplants and the extensive use of synthetics would presently be required. It was suggested that he get his memory stores computerized and transferred to an information bank for reference purposes—and then perhaps check in for longsleep.
Ticos found he didn't like any of the prospects. His interest level hadn't diminished noticeably, and he didn't care to have his activities curtailed by a progressively patched-up body or suspended indefinitely by longsleep. If he didn't take longsleep, he might make it past the two hundred year mark but evidently not by much. Previously he hadn't given a great deal of attention to regeneration research. Those problems were for other men—he had a large variety of pet projects of his own going. Now he thought he'd better start investigating the field and look for more acceptable alternatives to the prognosis offered him.
"You've been doing that for the past twenty years?" Nile asked.
"Very nearly. Some thousands of lines of research are involved. It makes for a lengthy investigation."
"I thought most of those lines of research were over on the crackpot side," she remarked.
"A great many are. I still had to check them out. One problem here is that nobody can prove his method is going to work out indefinitely—no method has been practiced long enough for that. For the same reason it's difficult to disprove the value of any approach, at least to those who believe in it. So egos and individualism run rampant in that area. Even the orthodox work isn't well coordinated."
"So I understand," Nile said. "You'd think the Federation would take a hand in it."
"You might think so," Ticos agreed. "However, there may be a consensus of opinion at Overgovernment levels that, because of economic and other factors, the unlimited prolongation of life in human beings would have questionable value. At any rate, while the Federation doesn't discourage longevity research, it doesn't actively support it. You could say it tolerates it."
"What about their own lives? They're human."
He shrugged. "They may be putting their trust in longsleep—some happy future in which all such problems will be solved. I wouldn't know. Of course, a good many people suspect that if you're one of the elect, you'll have treatments that work indefinitely. It seems a little improbable. Anyway I'm betting largely on biochemistry now. The individual cells. Keep them cleared of degenerative garbage, and other problems may no longer be too significant. I made some improvements in that area a few years ago. An immediate result was improvements in myself. As a matter of fact, I've been given to understand they're probably the reason I'm still operational."
"You've written that up?" Nile asked.
"Not under my name. The university handles that end of it. I've kept the biochemical research going, but I've also been working on new slants since. It struck me frequently in the course of all this that our instincts evidently aren't in favor of letting us go on indefinitely."
She frowned. "What gives you that impression?"
"For one thing, the fact that we generally won't put out very much effort for it. A remarkable number of my earlier associates dropped out on treatments simply because they kept forgetting to do, or refused to do, the relatively simple things needed to stay alive. It was as though they'd decided it wasn't important enough and they couldn't be bothered."
Nile said doubtfully, "You aren't exaggerating?"
"No. It's a common picture. The instincts accept the life and death cycle even when we're consciously opposed to it. They work for the species. The individual has significance to the species only to the point of maturity. The instincts support him until he's had an opportunity to pass along his genetic contribution. Then they start pulling him down. If a method eventually is developed to retain life and biological youth with no effort, it might be a different matter. Longsleep provides an illusion of that at present. But longsleep shelves the problem. I began to suspect longevity research itself is hampered by the instincts. And I'm not sure it isn't . . . we really should be farther along with it. At any rate, I decided to check with people who are interested in the less accessible areas of the mind. They're working in a major playground of the instincts, and they might have information. . . . "
He'd found two groups who were obtaining longevity and rejuvenation effects as a by-product of mental experimentation. One was the Psychovariant Association. Nile knew as much about their work as they'd chosen to publish in the digests she followed. They used assorted forcing procedures to extend and modify mental experience. "Don't they make heavy use of synthetics?" she asked.
Ticos nodded. "Yes. Not only to replace failing organs but to improve on healthy ones. That's their view of it. I don't fancy the approach myself. But they have systems of basic mind exercises directed at emotional manipulation. Longevity's a secondary interest, but they've accumulated plenty of evidence that the exercises support it. . . . "
The other project was a branch of the Federation's Psychology Service. Its goal was a total investigation of the mind and the gaining of conscious controls over its unconscious potential. The processes were elaborate. In the course of them, deep-reaching therapeutic adjustments were required and obtained. Physical regeneration frequently was a result—again not as a primary objective but as a beneficial side-effect.
Ticos decided this approach also went beyond his own aims. His interests were outward-directed; his mind was an efficient instrument for that purpose, and he demanded no more of it. However, the goals of both organizations were as definitely bent on overcoming normal human limitations as longevity research. They were aware of the type of inherent resistances he had suspected and had developed methods of dealing with them.
"The matter of mind-body interaction," he said. "I can learn to distinguish and control instinctual effects both in my mind and in associated physical processes. And that's what I've started to do."
He'd presented his problem to members of the two groups, and a modified individual schedule of mind-control exercises was worked out for him. He'd practiced them under direction until his mentors decided he was capable of continuing on his own. Then he'd closed out the final phases of his university work. His search for more effective biochemical serums would continue; he was convinced now it was the basic key to success.
"Keep the instincts from interfering and who knows—we might have it made!"
"Immortality?" asked Nile.
He gave her his quick grin. "Let's try for a thousand standard years first."
She smiled. "You almost have me believing you, Ticos! And how does becoming a floatwood hermit fit in with it all?"
"Nandy-Cline evidently is a simmering hotbed of life. I know the general type of substances I'll be looking for next, and I think I'm at least as likely to find them here as anywhere else."
Nile nodded. "You might find almost anything here. Why make it a one-man job?"
"Planned solitude," said Ticos.
"What will that do for you?"
"The mind exercises. Does it seem to mean anything if I say that at the stages at which I'll now be working I step outside the standard mental patterns of the species?"
She considered. "It doesn't seem to mean much. Very advanced stuff, eh?"
"Depends on the viewpoint. The people I dealt with consider it basic. However, it's difficult work. There's seepage from other mind patterns about you, and if they're established human ones they jar you out of what you're doing. They're too familiar. It's totally disruptive. So until I become sufficiently stable in those practices, it's necessary to reduce my contacts with humanity to the absolute minimum."
Nile shrugged. "Well, that's obviously out of my line. Still, I'd think . . . you can't just go into a room somewhere and shut the doors?"
"No. Physical distance is required. Plenty of it."
"How long is it going to be required?"
"The estimates I've had range from three to four years."
"In the floatwood?"
"Yes. It's to be both my work place and my source of materials. I can't park myself in space somewhere and continue to do meaningful research. And I think that adequate preparations should reduce any risks I'll encounter to an acceptable level. A reasonable degree of risk, as a matter of fact, will be all to the good."
"In what way?"
"The threat of danger is a great awakener. The idea in this is to be thoroughly alert and alive—not shut away in a real or symbolical shell of some kind."
Nile reflected. "That makes a sort of sense," she agreed. She hesitated. "What's your present physical condition? I'll admit you look healthy enough. . . . "
"I'm healthier now than I was ten years ago."
"You don't need medical supervision?"
"I haven't needed it for several years. I've had one arterial replacement—the cultured product. That was quite a while ago. Otherwise, except for a few patches from around the same and earlier periods, my internal arrangements are my own. Nothing to worry about in that department."
Nile sighed.
"Well—we'll still have to convince Parrol it isn't suicide. But you're hired, Ticos. Make it a very high salary and nail down your terms, including your interests in anything that could classify as a longevity serum. After we've settled that, I'll start briefing you on the kind of difficulties you're likely to run into on your island. That can't be done in a matter of days. It's going to take weeks of cramming and on-the-spot demonstrations."
Ticos winked at her. "That's why I'm here."
She made it a very stiff cramming course. And Ticos turned out to be as good a student as he'd been an instructor. He had an alert, curious mind, an extraordinarily retentive memory. Physically he proved to be tough and resilient. Nile kept uprating his survival outlook, though she didn't mention it. Some things, of course, she couldn't teach him. His gunmanship was only fair. He learned to use a climb-belt well enough to get around safely; but to develop anything resembling real proficiency with the device required long practice. She didn't even attempt to instruct him in water skills. The less swimming he did around floatwood the better.
They moved about the Meral from one floatwood drift to another, finally selected a major island complex which seemed to meet all requirements. A shelter, combining Ticos' living quarters, laboratory and storerooms, was constructed and his equipment moved in. A breeding group of eight-inch protohoms and cultures of gigacells would provide him with his principal test material; almost every known human reaction could be duplicated in them, usually with a vast advantage in elapsed time. The structure was completely camouflaged. Sledmen harvesting parties probably would be about the island from time to time, and Ticos didn't want too many contacts with them. If he stayed inside until such visitors left again, he wouldn't be noticed.
He had a communicator with a coded call symbol. Unless he got in touch with her, Nile was to drop by at eight week intervals to pick up what he had accumulated for the Giard lab and leave supplies. He wished to see no one else. Parrol shook his head at the arrangement; but Nile made no objections. She realized that by degrees she'd become fiercely partisan in the matter. If Ticos Cay wanted to take a swing at living forever, on his feet and looking around, instead of fading out or sliding off into longsleep, she'd back him up, however he went about it. Up to this point he hadn't done badly.
And somewhat against general expectations then, he lasted. He made no serious mistakes in his adopted environment, seemed thoroughly satisfied with his life as a hermit, wholly immersed in his work. The home office purred over his bi-monthly reports. Assorted items went directly to the university colleagues who had taken over his longevity project there. They also purred. When Nile had seen him last, he'd been floating along the Meral for eighteen months, looked hale and hearty and ready to go on for at least the same length of time. His mind exercises, he informed Nile, were progressing well. . . .
There were three men waiting in the central cabin of the Sotira sled to which Jath presently conducted Nile. She knew two of them from previous meetings, Fiam and Pelad. Both were Venn, members of the Fleet Venntar, the sledman center of authority: old men and former sled captains. Their wrinkled sun-blackened faces were placid; but they were in charge. On a sled a Venn's word overrode that of the captain.
Doncar, the sled captain, was the third. Quite young for his rank, intense, with a look of controlled anger about him. Bone-tired at the moment. But controlling that too.
Jath drew the door shut behind Nile and the otter, took a seat near Doncar. She held a degree of authority not far below that of the others here, having spent four years at a Hub university, acquiring technical skills of value to her people. Few other sledmen ever had left Nandy-Cline. Their forebears had been independent space rovers who settled on the water world several generations before the first Federation colonists. By agreement with the Federation, they retained their independence and primary sea rights. But there had been open conflict between the fleets and mainland groups in the past, and the sleds remained traditionally suspicious of the mainland and its ways.
Impatience tingled in Nile, but she knew better than to hurry this group. She answered Pelad's questions, repeating essentially what she had told Jath.
"You aren't aware of Dr. Cay's exact location?" Pelad inquired. Ticos had become a minor legend among the sled people who knew of his project.
Nile shook her head.
"I can't say definitely that he's within four hundred miles of us," she said. "This is simply the most likely area to start looking for him. When I'm due to pay him a visit, I give him a call and he tells me what his current position is. But this time he hasn't responded to his call symbol."
She added, "Of course there've been intensive communication interferences all the way in to the mainland in recent weeks. But Dr. Cay still should have picked up my signal from time to time. I've been trying to get through to him for the past several days."
Silence for a moment, then Pelad said, "Dr. Etland, does the mainland know what is causing the interferences?"
The question surprised, then puzzled her. The interferences were no novelty; their cause was known. The star type which tended to produce water worlds also produced such disturbances. On and about Nandy-Cline the communication systems otherwise in standard use throughout the Federation were rarely operable. Several completely new systems had been developed and combined to deal with the problem. Among them, only the limited close-contact band was almost entirely reliable.
Pelad and the others here were as aware of that as she. Nile said, "As far as I know, no special investigation has been made. Do the sleds see some unusual significance in the disturbances?"
"There are two views," Jath told her quietly. "One of them is that some of the current communication blocks are gromgorru. Created deliberately by an unknown force. Possibly by an unnatural one. . . . "
Pelad glanced at Jath, said to Nile, "The Venntar has decreed silence in this. But young mouths open easily. Perhaps too easily. We may have reason to believe there is something in the sea that hates men. There are those who hear voices in the turmoil that smothers our instruments. They say they hear a song of hate and fear." He shrugged. "I won't say what I think—as yet I don't know what to think." He looked at Fiam. "Silence might have been best, but it has been broken. Dr. Etland is a proven friend of the sleds."
Fiam nodded. "Let the captain tell it to our guest."
Doncar grinned briefly. "Tell it as I see it?"
"As you see it, Doncar. We know your views. We shall listen."
"Very well." Doncar turned to Nile. "Dr. Etland, so far you've been asked questions and given no explanation. Let me ask one more question. Could human beings cause such communication problems?"
"By duplicating the solar effect locally?" Nile hesitated, nodded. "It should be possible. Is there reason to believe it's being done?"
"Some of us think so," Doncar said dryly. "We've lost men."
"Lost them?"
"They disappear. . . . Work parties harvesting a floatwood island—small surface craft and submersibles in the immediate vicinity of floatwood. Later no traces are found. Whenever this occurred, communication in the area was completely disrupted."
"To keep the men from reporting attackers?"
"That's what's suspected," Doncar said. "It's happened too regularly to make coincidences seem probable. You understand, Dr. Etland, that this isn't a problem which affects only the Sotira sleds. There have been similar disappearances near floatwood islands in many sea areas of late."
Nile asked for details, her mind beginning to race. She and Parrol were known as accomplished trouble shooters. They considered it part of their job; it was in Giard's interest to keep operations moving as smoothly as possible on Nandy-Cline. The sledmen had benefited by that in the past, as had the mainland. And trouble—man-made trouble—was always likely to arise. The planet's natural riches were tempting . . . particularly when some new discovery was made and kept concealed.
This then might be such trouble on a large scale. The pattern of disappearances had begun north of the equator, spread down through the Sotira range. It had started three months ago. And the purpose, she thought, presumably was to accomplish precisely what it had accomplished—to keep the sleds away from the islands. For a period long enough to let whoever was behind the maneuver clear out whatever treasure of rare elements or drugs they'd come across and be gone again.
No local organization was big enough to pull off such a stunt. But a local organization backed by a Hub syndicate could be doing it—
Gromgorru? Nile shrugged mentally. The deeps of Nandy-Cline were only sketchily explored; great sections of the ocean floor remained unmapped. But she had very little faith in unknown malignant powers. In all her experience, whenever there was real mischief afoot, human operators had been found behind it.
The others here were less sure. There was something like superstitious dread unspoken but heavy in the air of this cabin, with the deck shuddering underfoot and the typhoon howling and thudding beyond the thick walls. She thought Doncar and Jath weren't free of it. Jath had acquired a degree of sophistication very uncommon among the sledmen. But she still was a woman of the sea sleds, whose folk had drunk strangeness from the mysteries of ocean and space for centuries. Space life and sea life didn't breed timid people. But it bred people who would not go out of their way to pit themselves against forces they could not understand.
Nile said to Pelad, "You spoke of those who hear voices of hate when the communicators are blanked out."
The Venn's eyes flickered for an instant. He nodded.
"Do the other-seeing"—Nile used the sledmen term for psi sensitives—"connect these voices with the disappearances in the floatwood drifts?"
Pelad hesitated, said, "No. Not definitely."
"They haven't said this is a matter men can't handle?"
"They haven't said it," Pelad agreed slowly. "They don't know. They only know what they've told us."
So the witch doctors had suggested just enough to stall action. Nile said, "Then there may very well be two things here. One, what the other-seeing sense. The second, a human agency which is responsible for the present trouble in the floatwood. What if the sleds learn that is the case?"
Doncar said, "There're six spaceguns mounted on this sled, Dr. Etland, and men trained in their use."
"I myself," said Pelad, "am one of those men."
Fiam added, "There are two other Sotira sleds not far from here. Each armed with four spaceguns—very old guns but in excellent working order." He gave Nile a brief smile. "The mainland may recall them."
"The mainland does," Nile agreed. "You'll fight if you know you're not fighting gromgorru?"
"We'll fight men," Pelad said. "We have always fought men when necessary. But it would be unwise to challenge blindly an evil which may not be affected by guns and which might be able to wipe the sleds from the sea." His face darkened again. "Some believe there is such an evil at no great distance from us."
She must be careful at this point. Still, so far, so good. In their minds the Venn were committed now to fight, if shown an enemy with whom weapons could deal. Too early to ask them to cooperate with mainland authorities in this. Their distrust was too deep.
Five minutes later she knew what she must do. Her immediate concern was to get Ticos out of harm's way. The big floatwood drift for which she had been looking was eighty miles south of this point. A Sotira seiner had been missing for several days, and the last reports from it indicated it might have moved too near the drift in the storm and become another victim of whatever menace haunted floatwood waters. Doncar's sled had been hunting for the seiner in the vicinity of the drift but found no clue to what had happened. The search had now been abandoned.
There were no other sizable floatwood islands within two hundred miles. Therefore the one on which Ticos had set up his project should be part of the drift. It was almost a certainty. If she took her aircar there at once, she could identify the island while daylight remained. The risk shouldn't be too great. Aircars hadn't come under attack, and the one she had was a fast sports model. If there was a suggestion of hostile action, she could clear out very quickly. If there wasn't, she'd try to wake Ticos up on the close contact channel and establish what the situation down there was. She might have him out inside an hour.
If that didn't work, she wasn't equipped to do much more by herself; and she needed reinforcements in any case before trying to determine who might have been turning the floatwood islands into death traps.
She asked, "Can you get a message through to the mainland for me?"
They nodded, the Venn warily. Jath said, "It may take a number of hours. But so far the fleets have always been able to relay messages through disturbance areas."
Fiam inquired, "What's the message, Dr. Etland? And to whom will it go?"
"It goes to Danrich Parrol," Nile told him. "The Giard Station will be able to locate him." She couldn't become too specific about gromgorru matters or the message would be blocked before it reached the mainland. "Give Parrol the location of the floatwood drift south of us. I'll wait for him there. Tell him I may have a problem getting Dr. Cay off his island, and that I'd like him to come out with full troubleshooting equipment—"
"And Spiff!" a thin voice interrupted emphatically from the corner of the room.
The sledmen looked around, startled. Sweeting blinked at them, began nosing her chest fur disinterestedly. People who didn't know Sweeting well frequently were surprised by the extent to which she followed the details of human discussions.
"And Spiff, of course," Nile agreed. "If we find out what's been happening around the floatwood, we'll try to get word to you at once."
Fiam nodded quickly. "Six hours from now we'll have a racing sled in the drift. Any close-contact messages should be picked up. Code Sotira-Doncar, on the sledmen frequencies. . . . "
"The Great Palach Koll," said the demon on the platform, "has persuaded the Everliving to permit him to test the Tuvela Theory."
Ticos Cay didn't reply immediately. His visitor was the Palach Moga, one of the Everliving, though of lower grade than the Great Palachs and somewhere between them and the Oganoon in physical structure, about Ticos' size and weight. Moga didn't squat but stood upright, long hopping legs stretched out, and walked upright when he walked, with short careful awkward steps. His torso was enclosed in an intricate close-worked harness of silver straps. In what was happening here he and Ticos Cay had become cautious allies. Ticos was aware that the alliance might be of very temporary nature.
"I was under the impression," he told Moga, "that the Voice of Caution was able to keep the reckless demands of the Great Palach from being given a hearing."
Moga's speaking slit twisted in agitation.
"We have done it until now," he said. "But the Great Palach has assumed control of the Voice of Action. He accused his predecessor of a Violation of Rules, and the Everliving found the accusation valid. The predecessor was granted the death of a Palach. You must understand that in his new position Koll's demands can no longer be silenced."
"Yes, I see . . . " Advancement usually came the hard way among the demons. Two favored methods were a ritualized form of assassination and having one's superior convicted of a Violation of Rules. They had the same practical result. Ticos swallowed. Bad—very bad. . . . He leaned back against the worktable to avoid revealing that his legs were trembling. "How does the Great Palach propose to test the Tuvela Theory?"
"The Guardian Etland is again attempting to contact you," Moga said.
"Yes, I know." The communicator in the partitioned end of the room had signaled half a dozen times during the past half hour.
"The signals," Moga explained, "are on the cambi channel."
The close-contact band! Ticos said thickly, "She already is in the area?"
"Could anyone else be seeking for you here?"
"No."
"Then it is the Guardian. There is a human airvehicle high overhead. It is very small but rides the storm well. It moves away, returns again."
"The island growth has changed since she was here last," said Ticos. "She may not have determined yet on which of these islands I should be." He added urgently, "This gives us a chance to forestall actions by Koll! I have the Guardian's call symbol—"
Moga gave the whistle of absolute negation.
"It is now quite impossible to approach your communicator," he said. "I would die if I attempted it unless it were under open orders of the Everliving. Koll will be allowed to carry out his plan. He has arranged tests to determine whether a Tuvela is a being such as the Tuvela Theory conjectures it to be. The first test will come while the Guardian is still in the air. At a selected moment the Great Palach will have a device activated which is directed at her vehicle. If she responds promptly and correctly, the vehicle will be incapacitated, but the Guardian will not be harmed. If she does not respond promptly and correctly, she dies at that point."
Moga stared at Ticos a moment. "The significance of her death, of course, will be the Everliving's conclusion that Tuvelas lack the basic qualities ascribed to them. The Great Plan is now in balance. If the balance is to shift again in favor of the Voice of Caution, the Guardian must not fail. Her class is being judged in her. If she fails, the Voice of Action attains full control.
"Let us assume she passes this first test. The vehicle will descend to a point where Koll's personal company of Oganoon await the Guardian. Unless she has weapons of great effectiveness, she must surrender to them. Note that if she does not surrender and is killed, it will be judged a failure. A Tuvela, as Tuvelas are assumed to be, will not make such mistakes. A Tuvela will surrender and await better opportunities to act to advantage."
Ticos nodded slowly. "I'll be able to speak to the Guardian if she is captured?"
"No, Dr. Cay. Only the Great Palach Koll will speak to the Guardian following her capture. The tests will continue at once and with increasing severity until the Guardian either dies or proves to the Everliving beyond all doubt that the Tuvela Theory is correct in all its implications—specifically, that the Tuvelas, individually and as a class, are the factor which must cause us, even at this last moment, to halt and reverse the Great Plan. Koll is staking his life on his belief that she will fail. If she fails, he will have proved his point. The Everliving will hesitate no longer. And the final stages of the Plan will be initiated."
"In brief," Ticos said slowly, "the Great Palach intends to discredit the Tuvela Theory by showing he can torture the Guardian to death and add her to his collection of trophies?"
"Yes. That is his announced plan. The torture, of course, is an approved form of test. It is in accord with tradition."
Ticos stared up at him, trying to conceal his complete dismay. There was no argument he could advance. This was the way they were conditioned to think. Before a Palach became a Palach he submitted to painful tests which few survived. As he progressed toward the ultimate form of existence which was a Great Palach, he was tested again and again. It was their manner of evaluation, of judgment. Ticos had convinced a majority of them that Tuvelas were at least their human counterpart. Some were convinced, however unwillingly, that the counterpart was superior to the greatest of the Great Palachs—opponents too deadly to be challenged. Koll's move was designed to nullify that whole structure of thought. . . .
"I'll keep you informed of what occurs, Dr. Cay," Moga concluded. "If you have suggestions which might be useful in this situation, have word sent to me immediately. Otherwise we now see no way to block Koll's purpose—unless the Guardian herself proves able to do it. Let us hope that she does."
The Palach turned, moved off down the walkway toward the exit door. Ticos gazed after him. There was a leaden feeling of helplessness throughout his body. For the moment it seemed difficult even to stir from where he stood.
He didn't doubt that Nile Etland was the operator of the aircar they were watching—and he had been hoping very much she wouldn't arrive just yet.
Given even another two weeks, he might have persuaded the Everliving through the Voice of Caution to cancel the planned attack on Nandy-Cline and withdraw from the planet. But Nile's arrival had precipitated matters and Koll was making full use of the fact. The one way in which Ticos could have warned her off and given her a clue to what was happening was closed completely.
Four words would have done it, he thought. Four words, and Nile would have known enough, once he'd switched on the communicator. He'd made preparations to ensure nobody was going to stop him before he got the four words out.
But now—without Moga's help, without the permission of the Everliving—he simply couldn't get to the communicator. It wasn't a question of the guards. He'd made other preparations for the guards. It was the devastatingly simple fact that the partitioning wall was twelve feet high and that there was no door in it. Ticos knew too well that he was no longer in any condition to get over the wall and to the communicator in time to do any good. They'd turn him off before he turned it on. He didn't have the physical strength and coordination left to be quick enough for such moves. . . .
If Nile had arrived a couple of weeks earlier, he could have done it. He'd counted then on being able to do it. But there'd been a few too many of their damned pain treatments since.
And if she'd delayed coming out by just two weeks, no warning might have been necessary.
But she was punctual as usual—right on time!
Well, Ticos told himself heavily, at least he'd arranged matters so that they wouldn't simply blast her out of the air as she came down to the island. It left her a slim chance. However, it seemed time to start thinking in terms of last-ditch operations—for both of them. He had his preparations made there too. But they weren't very satisfactory ones. . . .
"Hungry," Sweeting announced from the aircar's floor beside Nile.
"So starve," Nile said absently. Sweeting opened her jaws, laughed up at her silently.
"Go down, eh?" she suggested. "Catch skilt for Nile, eh? Nile hungry?"
"Nile isn't. Go back to sleep. I have to think."
The otter snorted, dropped her head back on her forepaws, pretended to close her eyes. Sweeting's kind might be the product of a geneticist's miscalculation. Some twenty years before, a consignment of hunting otter cubs had reached Nandy-Cline. They were a development of a preserved Terran otter strain, tailored for an oceanic existence. The coastal rancher who'd bought the consignment was startled some months later when the growing cubs began to address him in a slurrily chopped-up version of the Hub's translingue. The unexpected talent didn't detract from their value. The talkative cubs, playful, affectionate, handsomely pelted, sold readily, were distributed about the sea coast ranches and attained physical maturity in another year and a half. As water hunters or drivers and protectors of the sea herds, each was considered the equivalent of half a dozen trained men. Adults, however, sooner or later tended to lose interest in their domesticated status and exchanged it for a feral life in the sea, where they thrived and bred. During the past few years sledmen had reported encounters with sizable tribes of wild otters. They still spoke in translingue.
Nile's pair, hand-raised from cubhood, had stayed. She wasn't quite sure why. Possibly they were as intrigued by her activities as she was by theirs. On some subjects her intellectual processes and theirs meshed comfortably. On others there remained a wide mutual lack of comprehension. She suspected, though she'd never tried to prove it, that their overall intelligence level was very considerably higher than was estimated.
She was holding the aircar on a southwest course, surface scanners shifting at extreme magnification about the largest floatwood island in the drift, two miles below, not quite three miles ahead. It looked very much like the one Ticos Cay had selected. Minor differences could be attributed to adaptive changes in the growth as the floatwood moved south. There were five major forest sections arranged roughly like the tips of a pentacle. The area between them, perhaps a mile across, was the lagoon, a standard feature of the islands. Its appearance was that of a shallow lake choked with vegetation, a third of the surface covered by dark green leafy pads flattened on the water. The forests, carrying the semi-parasitical growth which clustered on the floatwood's thick twisted boles, towered up to six hundred feet about the lagoon, living walls of almost indestructible toughness and density. The typhoon battering through which they had passed had done little visible damage. Beneath the surface they were linked by an interlocking net of ponderous roots which held the island sections clamped into a single massive structure.
The island was moving slowly to the south, foam-streaked swells running past it on either side. This might be the southern fringe of the typhoon belt. The sky immediately overhead was clear, a clean deep blue. But violent gusts still shook the car, and roiling cloud banks rode past on all sides.
Ticos Cay's hidden arboreal laboratory should be in the second largest section of the floatwood structure, about a third of the way in on the seaward side. He wasn't responding to close-contact communicator signals; but he might be there in spite of his silence. In any case it was the place to start looking. There'd been no sign of intruders—which didn't mean they weren't there. The multiple canopies of the forests could have concealed an army. But intruders could be avoided.
Nile thought she might be able to handle this without waiting for Parrol. It was late afternoon now, and even if there were no serious delays in getting her message to him, it would be at best the middle of the night before he could make it out here. To drop down openly to the floatwood would be asking for trouble, of course, though there had been no reports of attacks on aircars as yet. But she could circle south, go down to sea level, submerge the car and maneuver it back underwater to the island through the weed beds which rode the Meral. If she'd had her jet diving rig with her, she wouldn't have hesitated. She could have left the car a couple of miles out, gone in at speed and brought Ticos out with her if he was in his hideaway, with almost no risk of being noticed by whoever else might be about. But she didn't have the rig along. That meant working the car in almost to the island, a more finicky operation.
But it could be done. The submerged weed jungles provided the best possible cover against detection instruments.
Nile checked course and altitude, returned her attention to the magnification scanners. Everything down there looked normal. There was considerable animal activity about the lagoon, including clouds of the flying kesters which filled the role of sea and shore birds in Nandy-Cline's ecological pattern. In the ocean beyond the floatwood at the left, two darkly gleaming torpedo-shaped bodies appeared intermittently at the surface. They were kesters too, but wingless giants: sea-havals, engaged in filling their crops with swarms of skilts. Their presence was another good indication that this was Ticos' island. There'd been a sea-haval rookery concealed in the forest section next to the one he'd selected—
An engine control shrieked warning, and a sullen roaring erupted about them. Nile saw a red line in the fuel release gauge surge up toward explosion as her hand flicked out and cut the main engine switch.
The shrieking whistle and the roar of energies gone wild subsided together. Losing momentum, the car began to drop.
"Nile?"
"We're in trouble, Sweeting." The otter was on her feet, neck fur erect, eyes shifting about. But Sweeting knew enough to stay quiet in emergencies that were in Nile's department.
Energy block . . . it could be malfunction. But that type of malfunction occurred so rarely it had been years since she'd heard of a case.
Someone hidden in the floatwood had touched the car with a type of weapon unknown to her, was bringing her down. The car's built-in antigrav patterns would slow their descent. But—
Nile became very busy.
When she next looked at the altimeter, it told her she had approximately three minutes left in the air. Wind pressure meanwhile had buffeted the car directly above the island, a third of the way out across the lagoon. That would have been the purpose of killing her engines at the exact moment it was done. When the car splashed into the lagoon's vegetation, she'd find a reception committee waiting.
She was in swim briefs by now for maximum freedom of action in water or in the floatwood. Fins and a handkerchief-sized breather mask lay on the seat. Most of the rest of what she was taking along had been part of the floatwood kit she'd flung into the back of the car on leaving the Giard Station. Various items were attached to a climb-belt about her waist—knife, lightweight UW gun, grip sandals, a pouch containing other floatwood gear she didn't have time to sort over. The otter caller she used to summon Sweeting and Spiff from a distance was fastened to her wrist above her watch. Her discarded clothing was in a waterproof bag.
"Remember what you're to do?"
"Yesss!" Sweeting acknowledged with a cheery hiss, whiskers twitching.
Sweeting would remember. They were going to meet some bad guys. Not at all a novel experience. Sweeting would keep out of sight and trouble until Nile had more specific instructions for her.
The bad guys hadn't showed yet. But they must be in the lagoon, headed for the area where the car seemed about to come down. It was rocking and lurching in the gusts toward a point some three hundred yards from the nearest floatwood. Not at all where Nile wanted it to go. But she might be able to improve her position considerably.
She sat quiet throughout the last moments, estimating the force of the wind, eyes shifting between the altimeter and a landing area she'd selected on the far side of the water. Then, at hundred yards from the surface, she pushed down a stud which slid out broad glide-vanes to either side of the car.
The fringes of a typhoon were no place for unpowered gliding. Like the blow of a furious fist, wind slammed the vehicle instantly over on its side. Seconds of wild tumbling followed. But she had the momentum now to return some control of the car's motion to her. To hostile watchers in the lagoon and the floatwood it must have looked like a futile and nearly suicidal attempt to escape—as it was intended to look. She didn't want them to start shooting. Twice she seemed within inches of being slammed head-on into the water, picked up altitude at the last instant. Most of the width of the lagoon lay behind her at that point, and a section of forest loomed ahead again. A tall stand of sea reeds, perhaps three hundred yards across, half enclosed by gnarled walls of floatwood, whirled by below.
Wind force swept the car down once more, too fast, too far to the right. Nile shifted the vane controls. The car rose steeply, heeled over, swung sideways, its momentum checked—and that was almost exactly where she wanted to be. She slapped another stud. The vanes folded back into the vehicle. It began to drop, antigrav effect taking over. Nile reached for the fins, snapped them on her feet. Green tops of the reeds whipped suddenly about the car. She drew the transparent breather mask over her face, pressed its audio plugs into her ears. Car door open, set on lock . . . dense vegetation swaying jerkily with wet crashing sounds on all sides as the car descended through it—
Thump and splash!
Sweeting slithered past Nile's feet, flowed down over the doorsill, vanished into the lagoon without a sound. Nile pitched the clothing bag through the door, swung about on the seat, slid out into cool water. Turning, she caught a handgrip on the side of the car, reached up, slammed the door shut on its lock.
She saw the bag floating beside her, caught its strap and went down. . . .
The sea reeds, rising from layers of muck packed into the matted root system of the island thirty feet below, grew thick and strong. Almost in moments after leaving the car, Nile knew she was relatively safe from immediate pursuit. On her way across the lagoon she'd had a flashing glimpse of an enclosed boat coming about in a tight circle among the pads to follow her. It wouldn't be long before it reached the reeds, and it might have divers aboard. In open water a jet diver advancing behind a friction-cutting field would have overhauled her in seconds. But jet rigs gave little real advantage when it came to slipping in and out of slime-slick dense growth; and if one had been in operation within a hundred yards, her audio plugs would have distinguished its thin hissing through the medley of sea sounds. She moved on quickly toward the forest. Small life scuttled and flicked away from her gliding shape. A school of eight-inch skilts exploded suddenly about her in a spray of silver glitters. . . . Sweeting, out of sight but somewhere nearby, might have turned aside for a fast snack. Something large and dark stirred ahead; a dorashen, some five hundred pounds of sluggish ugliness, black armor half concealed by a rusty fur of parasites, was backing off from her advance, pulling itself up along the reed stems, multiple jaws working in menacing snaps.
Sudden darkening of the water told her she'd reached the base of the forest. The reed growth ended and thick twisted floatwood trunks appeared through murky dimness. She stroked up to them, paused to look back. A dim regular rumbling had began in the audio pickups. The sound of engines. But they weren't close.
Ticos Cay's hidden dwelling was less than a quarter-mile from here. Getting there unobserved would be the next move. A few minutes later, deep within the forest, in the maze of dark caverns formed by huge supporting trunks above the submerged roots, Nile lifted her head above the surging ocean surface, pulled off the breather. The otter's head appeared a dozen feet away.
"People here?" Nile asked.
"Smell no people."
"Boats?"
"Skilt boat. Coming slow."
"How big?"
"Big as three cars, heh."
No divers, and nobody upwind of them in the forest. Sweeting used nostrils in air, sensitive olfactories in the lining of her mouth in water. What she couldn't scent usually wasn't there. Skilt boat meant a submersible. It might have been the boat Nile had glimpsed in the lagoon. When Sweeting saw it, it was approaching the reed bed under water. Its crew should discover the ditched aircar in not too many minutes.
"Kill?" the otter asked.
"Not yet. Go back and watch what they're doing till I call you."
Sweeting vanished. Nile moved on through dark shifting water, avoiding contact with the giant trunks. They were coated with slime, heavily populated with crawling things. Not a pleasant place to be; but this level provided a quick route to the seaward side of the forest, and she intended to make her ascent from there. Presently she saw daylight flash intermittently through the snaky tangles of floatwood ahead.
Far enough. . . . She found a place to get out of the water, scrambled up to a horizontal perch and knotted the strap of the bag containing her discarded coveralls and other personal items around a spike of wood. The fewer clues to the car's occupants left for investigators, the better. She exchanged fins for grip sandals, fastened the fins to her climb-belt, switched the belt to its quarter-weight setting and stood up on the trunk.
There was a partial gravity shield about her now. Ordinary progress in a floatwood forest was an activity somewhere between mountaineering and tree climbing. With a climb-belt and sufficient practice in its use, it became not much more arduous than motion along level ground. Nile started up. The forest had no true floor, but a thick carpet of parasitic growth, trailing drinking roots to the sea, stretched out overhead. She pushed through the stuff, came into a relatively open area.
She stood glancing about, letting senses and mind adjust again to what was here. It was long-familiar territory. She'd been born in one of the shallows settlements of Nandy-Cline, halfway around the globe from the mainland; and whenever one of the swimming islands moved near, her people had gone to harvest from it what was in season, taking their children along to teach them the floatwood's bounty and perils. Making the islands the subject of extensive studies later on had been a natural consequence.
Though this was less densely growth-infested than the central forest levels, vision was restricted to at most a hundred feet in any direction. In the filtered half-light, the host organism was represented by unbranched reddish-brown boles, sloping and twisting upward—enormously massive, as they had to be to support all the rest. Sprouting or hanging from the trunks, or moving slowly along their coarse-furred surface, was the many-shaped secondary growth, in the inhis and tacapu categories, with plant or plant-animal characteristics. Gliding and hopping through the growth, fluttering about it, were small specimens of the animal population.
Nile's eyes and nostrils took it all in with only superficial conscious responses. A definite conscious reaction would come if she encountered something she didn't know or knew might harm her—or if she detected any trace of the intruders who had forced her down from the sky. Listening was a waste of effort; the booming winds drowned minor sounds. She started up the ascending curve of the trunk by which she had climbed from the sea. Presently it branched, then branched again. Now the floatwood's great oblong leaves began to appear among the other growth, shifting green curtains which closed vision down to the next few dozen steps ahead. It was more to her advantage than not. In the constant stirring, her lean body, tanned almost to the tint of the floatwood branches, would be next to impossible to detect if hostile watchers were about.
She was nearly four hundred feet above the ocean before sunlight began to play through the forest in wavering flashes, filtered through the canopy above. By then Nile was moving along an interlaced network of lesser branches. She knew she was somewhat above Ticos' dwelling and had been watching for its camouflaged outlines in the vegetation below. It was a sizable structure, but anyone who didn't know it was there might stare at it for minutes and not realize what he saw. It had been built of the materials growing about it and blended into them.
A great wet mass of fernlike stuff, sadly bent and tattered by the typhoons, caught at Nile's memory. The hideout should be thirty feet below, off to the left.
She reached the soggy greenery, clambered through, found a spot where she could look down. Nothing but more waving growth beneath her. She jumped over to a sloping trunk, caught at it with flexing grip sandals and hands, moved along to a horizontally jutting branch and stepped out on it to look around the trunk.
A broad spear of sunlight blazed past her, directly into the concealed entrance of the hideout. A naked man sat cross-legged in the entrance, staring up, mouth stretched wide as if in a frozen shriek of laughter.
Nile's next awareness—at the moment it seemed a simultaneous one—was of the UW in her hand, stubby muzzle pointed down at the grotesquely distended mouth of the figure.
The figure didn't move. For seconds then, neither did she. The eyes seemed fixed on her and her skin crawled with something very close to superstitious terror. The sunlight winked out suddenly. The forest shook and groaned in renewed surges of wind.
She was looking at a dead man, her mind told her belatedly. Not Ticos; he didn't show the slightest resemblance to Ticos . . . but what had frozen this unknown dead man here in that position, head twisted back, facial muscles distorted into an expression of grisly mirth? Her eyes began to shift about, returning every few seconds to the seated shape, as if she expected it to gain sudden life and come leaping up at her. The forest boomed, danced, rustled and snapped in the wind. She saw and heard nothing else. The figure remained unmoving. It had been there unmoving, she decided, for a considerable time. Days, at least. It was streaked with dirt, as if rain had run down on it and it had dried while the storm whipped forest debris about it, and rain presently washed it again.
She stepped back behind the trunk, moved down along it. A minute later her left hand carefully parted the cluster of plants encircling the platform to let her look beyond the man-shape into the structure. The entrance door was gone. Not torn away by storm violence. Removed deliberately. The entrance had been widened, cut back on either side.
The interior was dim, but part of the wall lighting was on, and after a moment she could see enough. Except for a few tables and wall shelves, the place seemed to have been stripped. The partitions were gone; only the thick outer framework remained. But the structure wasn't empty. There might be between twenty and thirty of them inside. They crouched on hands and knees, squatted, lay about. Their rigid immobility said there was no more life in them than in the figure on the platform. Nile moved slowly forward, gun out before her.
She paused by the seated man in the entrance, prodded his shoulder with a finger. The skin was cool, gummy; the flesh beneath it unyielding as lead. She started past, checked again, stomach contracting. A wide gash laid open the figure's back. It appeared to have been gutted completely through the gash. She stared a moment, went inside.
The others weren't very different. Ticos wasn't one of them. Dead eyes stared at Nile as she moved among the bodies. Dead mouths snarled, pleaded, grinned. All were savagely mutilated in one way or another. A few had been women. One of the women had the Blue Guul symbol of the Sotira sleds etched on her forehead—a good luck charm. Several wall sections were still covered with Ticos Cay's scribbled work notations and sketches. Nothing else of his seemed here. Nothing else seemed to be here at all except what the wet winds had swept in through the entrance. . . .
Then her eyes checked on something the wind hadn't blown in. It sat in the shadows on a wall shelf to one side of what had been the main room. Puzzled, she went slowly over to it.
It looked like a featureless black cloth figure, a hooded lumpy little doll, less than fifteen inches high. It had been placed on a crumpled dark cloth spread along the shelf. As Nile came up, she saw that the hood and cloak were coverings. There was something beneath them. She pushed the hood back with the UW's muzzle, looked at the wrinkled blackish unhuman face which might have been carved out of wood, with considerable skill. The bulging heavy-lidded eyes were closed. A narrow mouth slit was the only other feature. In its miniature ugliness it was impressive. It was as if a small demonic idol had been set up to preside over what had become of Ticos Cay's laboratory. Nile let the hood fall into place, started toward the entrance.
One more discovery then . . . she saw something stir in the dirt piled against one wall and moved the dirt aside with her foot. Three of Ticos' protohoms lay in a pile, mutilated and slashed almost beyond recognition, still moving. As cruelty it was meaningless; they had no awareness and no sensitivity to pain. But it fitted the pattern of grotesque ugliness here. The UW hissed quickly three times, taking their semblance of life from them.
There seemed no reason to stay longer. The structure held a feeling of nightmare, heavy, almost tangible. At moments it seemed difficult to breathe and her head would begin to swim. But she had a recurrent nagging feeling of missing something. She glanced about once more. The dead shapes were there in their frozen postures. The dark little idol dreamed above them on its littered shelf. No . . . nothing else but unanswered questions.
In a thicket a hundred yards from the structure entrance, where she could watch the stretch along which she had come, Nile tried turning over the questions. Her mind moved sluggishly at first, blurred by fear and surges of pity and sick anger. She had to keep forcing all that to the back of her awareness. What she'd seen didn't fit the overall pattern she'd assumed. A very different type of mentality seemed involved. A mentality which systematically tortured human minds and bodies, leaving the victims degraded in death and carefully preserving their degradation, as if that were a goal in itself. . . .
It made no sense as yet. But the immediate situation hadn't changed. If Ticos had known about these intruders before they discovered his laboratory and converted it to the insanity in there, he might still be at large. He'd had a small boat with which he could have slipped away unnoticed to other sections of the island, or even to another island in the floatwood drift. He knew she'd be coming presently and would have tried to leave a message where she could find it, hoping she'd be able to escape capture in turn. Something to tell her what was going on, where he was.
A message where she could find it. Some place she'd associate naturally with Ticos . . . Nile shook her head. There were simply too many such places. She couldn't waste time checking them over at present. If Ticos was still in the island area, Sweeting might be able to pick up traces of him.
Her thoughts veered. The aircar. They'd have reached it by now, but door and engine keys were in the pouch at her belt. If they hadn't sunk the car or towed it away, they should still be busy around it. Watching them might tell her more about this group than she could get from Sweeting's reports. She set off quickly.
When she caught glimpses of the wind-whipped surface of the lagoon through the growth, she paused, calculating her position. The reed bed where she'd touched water should be on her right, not far away. She angled toward it, ran up a thick sloping branch stretching out above the water, turned and went on hands and knees along a lesser branch until she reached a point where sheaves of floatwood foliage overhung the lagoon. Here she straddled the branch, grasped two of the leaf stems, drew them cautiously apart and was looking down on the swirling reed tops two hundred feet below.
The area where she'd set down the car had been widened, the plants thrust aside and mashed down so that she could see a patch of open water. There were other indications that a surface craft had broken a way in from the lagoon. Nile saw nothing else, thought for a moment the car already had been destroyed or hauled off. But then she heard a series of clanging metallic sounds, partly muffled by the wind. Somebody was down there, perhaps engaged in forcing open the car's doors.
She waited, upper lip clamped between her teeth, heard no more. Then one end of the aircar edged into view, turning slowly as if it were being pushed about. A moment later all of it suddenly appeared in the open area—and on the canopy—
Nile's thoughts blurred in shock.
Parahuans. . . .
Some seventy years ago they'd come out of space to launch almost simultaneous attacks against Nandy-Cline and a dozen other water worlds of the Hub. They'd done considerable damage, but in the end their forces were pulled back; and it was believed that by the time the Federation's warships finished hunting them through space, only insignificant remnants had survived to return to their undiscovered home worlds. It had been the last open attack by an alien civilization against a Federation planet—even planets as far out from the Hub's center as Nandy-Cline.
And we became careless, Nile thought. We felt we were so big no one would dare come again. . . .
With a kind of frozen fascination, she stared at the two bulky amphibious creatures squatting on the car, thickly muscled legs bent sharply beneath them. A swarm of reflections based on various old descriptions of Parahuans went through her mind. The bluish-gray torsos and powerful arms were enclosed by webbings of straps, holding tools and weapons. The bulging eyes on the big round heads were double-lensed, the lower sections used for underwater vision and lidded in air, as they now were. A vocal orifice was connected to a special air system above the eyes. The two Parahuans below seemed to be gabbling at others outside her range of vision, though the wind drowned most of the sounds they were making.
Well, they had dared come again . . . and they already must be in considerable number on the unsuspecting planet, establishing themselves in and under the floatwood islands in recent months. The little figure in the gutted laboratory, the small devil brooding vengefully over the mutilated husks of human bodies, was made in their image.
It changed her immediate plans. In this storm-swept multileveled mountain of dense vegetation she'd felt reasonably safe from human searchers. But she could take no chances with these aliens until she knew their capabilities. She shifted back on the branch, then halted watchfully. In the water of the lagoon beyond the reeds something was moving. Nile couldn't make out details, but it was a very large creature, dirty white in color. As she stared, it sank slowly below the surface and was gone.
She scrambled back along the branch under cover of the leaves, got to her feet as soon as she reached more solid support, and retreated hurriedly into the forest. In their first campaign the Parahuans had brought a formidable creature along with them which took part effectively in the fighting. It was animalic in behavior, though there was some evidence that it was a gigantic adaptation of the Parahuan life form. Reportedly it had sharp senses, was equally agile on land and in water, and difficult to stop with ordinary weapons.
What she'd seen out in the lagoon just now was one of those creatures—a Parahuan tarm.
Eyes shifting quickly about as she moved on, she paused here and there for an instant. Her knife reached out, slashed stem, seed pod, blossom, fleshy leaf, chunky tentacle from one or another familiar tacapu or plant form. They bled tinted dust, tinted sap, quickly turning to streaks and blots of green, shadow blue, cinnamon, chocolate brown, gray and white on Nile's body, arms, legs, face, hair, equipment. Breaking outline, blending form into background . . . a trick used in stalking floatwood species wary and keen-sighted enough to avoid undisguised human hunters.
It might not be sufficient disguise now. Humans had a variety of life detection instruments. No doubt, Parahuans had them. For many such devices, one human being in the floatwood became simply one life form blurred among many life forms. But the distinctive human scent remained, and sharp senses read it as well as instruments. She could take care of that presently. To do it, she'd have to get back to the area of Ticos' laboratory. . . .
Her mind halted a moment. Ticos' laboratory! Nile made a sound of muted fury. If he'd left a clue for her anywhere, given any time to do it, he'd left it there! She'd felt she was overlooking something. She hesitated. If she hadn't been in partial shock because of what she'd come upon—
She returned along the route she'd followed from the laboratory to the lagoon, staying some thirty feet above what should be her actual trail.
And presently: a special minor area of agitation in the mass of wind-shaken growth below and ahead. A shimmer of blue-gray.
Nile sank smoothly to the floatwood branch she was crossing, flattened herself against it, then carefully shifted position enough to let her peer down.
The Parahuan was coming out of a thicket beneath her, following another branch. He crept along on all fours. It looked awkward, but his motion was fairly rapid and showed no uncertainty. He came to a parallel bough, paused, took a short hop over to it, went on. He seemed indifferent to the fact that he was several hundred feet above the sea. So they were capable climbers. As he reached a curtain of secondary growth, another Parahuan appeared, trailing the leader by twenty-five feet, and vanished behind him. Nile checked two minutes off on her watch. No more aliens had showed up—the pair seemed to be working alone. She went up twenty feet, hurried back in the direction of the lagoon.
It had startled her that they'd been able to pick up her trail so promptly in this vast green warren. The odds seemed all against that, but there was no question that they were following it. Both carried guns, heavy-looking thick-barreled devices fastened to the web of straps about their trunks. The one in the lead had a curved box attached to the top of his head, a number of tubes projecting from its sides and twisting about in the air with a suggestion of sentient searching. The second Parahuan carried a much smaller instrument directly above the vocal slit in the upper part of his head. That probably was a communicator.
Nile dropped back down, found a place to wait. There'd been a practical detail in the information contained in the old war records: the lower half of a Parahuan's head was the best point to aim at to put them out of action quickly. Second choice was the lower torso. . . .
The leading Parahuan came into sight again on a lower branch, edging out of a wind-tossed cluster of great leaves she'd been watching. He paused there, staring about and ahead. Nile held her breath, wondering what signals he was getting from his tracking instrument, until he started forward along the branch. She let him pass below. Parahuan Number Two showed up punctually in turn. As he came within twenty-five feet, Nile sighted along the UW, squeezed the trigger carefully. The big body turned sideways, rolled off the branch without a sound.
Nile twisted left, aimed again. The leader had noticed nothing. Moments later he too plunged down into the waving vegetation and was gone.
The buti was an unremarkable shrublike growth in the inhis category, with lacy fronds and thick woody stems, living as a semi-parasite on the floatwood. Its stems were hollow, and the creamy sap they oozed when cut had the quality of nullifying a wide variety of smells, though the sap had no pronounced odor of its own. Specifically, in this case, it nullified the scents of a human body. When floatwood had been hunted over enough to make some of its harvestible life shy of human visitors, anointing oneself with buti sap, if it was obtainable, was a common move among experienced collectors.
The buti stand Nile had remembered from earlier visits was not much more than a hundred yards from Ticos' laboratory, and somewhat above it. She let herself drop thirty feet into the center of the shrubs against the antigrav effect of the belt, then spent several minutes meticulously adding a coating of the sap to her color camouflage and to the various articles of her equipment. Her nerves were on edge; she did not like at all being in the immediate vicinity of the laboratory. They might know she'd been here before—the laboratory in fact was likely to be the point where their tracking instrument had picked up the fresh human trail and started them in pursuit. There might be a swarm of the creatures not far away at the moment.
But the job with the buti couldn't be hurried too much. Nile finished it at last, cut off a two foot section of the stem, seared its ends shut with the UW and added it to the items already attached to her climb-belt. Salt water dissolved the sap; and she should have swimming to do presently. Her scent trail ended now thirty feet above the buti shrubs. If they followed it that far and could not pick it up again, they might conclude she'd lost her footing and fallen through the forest into the ocean. At any rate, she'd become as nearly indetectable as she could be.
She moved out of the stand, approached the laboratory with quick caution, conscious of a growing urgency to be out of this area. When she reached the platform, nothing seemed changed. The interior looked undisturbed; she could make out no marks of webbed Parahuan feet in the debris on the floor.
She came in quietly, gun held out before her, eyes shifting about. The rigid human exhibits watched her walk past toward Ticos' former work area. As she went by the tiny hooded idol, dreaming its dreams on the shelf, she glanced over at it.
Two thoughts flashed simultaneously into her mind.
She was in abrupt motion almost before she became fully conscious of them—spinning around toward the shelf, dropping the gun. An instant later she had whipped up both ends of the leathery cloth on which the Parahuan manikin sat, brought them together with a twist over the hooded head, gripped them hard in both hands and swept the bundled figure from the shelf.
By then there was a great deal of activity inside the cloth, a furious jerking and twisting, carried out with such amazing vigor that it nearly tore the cloth from her hands. But she swung the bundle up, slammed it down hard against the floor, brought it up, slammed it down again. The bundle stopped jerking. Nile scooped up her gun, spilled the inert thing inside the cloth out on the floor. She stood gasping and shaking in fright and hate, staring down at it.
It had shifted its position on the shelf since she'd seen it last. Not much, perhaps three or four inches. As her mind had recorded the fact, memory brought up another datum from the old records. Some rescued human prisoners had reported that the Parahuan leaders were dwarfed creatures by comparison with their fellows.
She recalled no mention of their being dwarfed to this improbable extent. But if she hadn't killed it, she might have a useful captive.
She dropped to her knees, pulled off the hood. Something attached to the thing's chest—a flat dark disk with studs in it, metallic or plastic. Attached how? Nile gripped the disk in her fingers, tugged, then slid the point of her knife in sideways between the device and the Parahuan's body, pried upward. There was a momentary resistance. Then four prongs in the underside of the instrument pulled suckingly out of the wrinkled skin. A communicator? She turned it over quickly in her hand. That was how the first trackers had known how to start on her trail. And it probably had been used again as she appeared in the entrance a minute ago, to call other searchers back to the laboratory—
She opened the kit pouch with flying fingers. There was stuff in there ordinarily used to secure some vigorously active floatwood specimen which was wanted alive—and it should hold this specimen. She pulled out flat strips of tanglecord, taped the Parahuan's small wiry arms to the dumpy body, taped the webbed feet together, sealed the narrow vocal orifice above the eyes with a section of cord. She turned the midget quickly around, looking it over for other trick devices. Nothing but a few dozen brightly colored small jewels set in the wrinkled top of the head in what might be a symbol of rank or a decorative pattern. She bundled the captive back into the cloth, knotted the ends of the cloth together, spent another dragging minute nicking the buti stem and giving the bundle the sap treatment.
She left the bundle on the floor, went over to the section of Ticos' work area and found his message to her almost at once, scrawled blandly and openly among the many notations that decorated the wall:
Nile note. The sestran stand should be carefully studied.
Now out of here—fast!
She nearly, very nearly, was not fast enough. She pitched the communicator, wrapped in the midget's cloak, off the laboratory platform as she came out on it. The packaged midget himself rode her back, secured by a tanglecord harness. It was a minor nuisance; in the antigrav field his weight was nothing. . . . Less than a hundred yards from the laboratory, she ducked quietly into cover.
It was a good dense thicket. From where she crouched she could see only a limited section of the forest above. She watched that, waited for indications of anything approaching the thicket itself. A group of three Parahuans moved presently through the area above the thicket—then two more.
After that, Parahuans were simply around for a while. It was a large search party, congregating now on the laboratory. Nile kept on the move herself as much as she could, edging in the opposite direction. Most of them were climbing up from below, so she couldn't simply drop down through the forest to get out of their way. They came close enough so that she heard their voices for the first time: an oddly mellow modulated hooting, interspersed with hissing sounds. Two swarmed up the line of a grapple gun a dozen feet from her. Then she saw none for a while. By that time she had worked the green blanket of an intermediate forest canopy between herself and the main body of the searchers. She decided she was clear of them and began to climb more quickly.
Something crashed down from the upper levels ahead—a great broken branch, accompanied by assorted litter torn loose in its descent. Nile looked up, and her mind went bright with terror. She took one slow step to the side, thumbed the antigrav up high. Nothing beneath her feet now . . . she was falling limply, bonelessly, turning over slowly, toward the shelter of the canopy below. No human motions. No voluntary motions of any kind. Be a leaf, an undefinably colored uninteresting small dead dropping part of the forest. She reached the canopy, settled through it, went drifting down until she touched a solid branch and motion stopped. She huddled there, clutching the growth on either side of her. Fear still stormed along her nerves.
The tarm had been like the tip of a fog bank swirling into sight around a floatwood bole above her. It was rushing by overhead as she dropped, so close that it seemed almost impossible she'd remained unnoticed—close enough, she thought, for one of its pale tentacles to have reached down and plucked her from the air. But it had moved on. She listened to the receding sounds of its passage through the forest long enough to make sure it wasn't returning, then set off hastily, still shaking. She wasn't nearly as far from the laboratory as she should be before the search fanned out again. They must have discovered by now that their midget was missing. Nile told herself they were least likely to come back to an area already hunted over by the tarm.
She might have been right. Ten minutes passed without further signs of her pursuers, and her nerves steadied again. If they'd shifted to the eastern areas of the forest, it could keep them futilely occupied until nightfall. Flashes of fading sunlight began to reach her. She wasn't far now from the forest roof on the seaward side and should not be far either from the sestran stand to which Ticos Cay's note had directed her. Eight months before, they'd brought sestran shoots from another part of the island and established them here for his studies. He'd known his use of the term would tell her exactly where to look.
She discovered the stand presently—and discovered also that chaquoteels had built a colony nest above it since she'd been here last. The tiny kesters greeted her with a storm of furious whistlings. Nile ducked quickly into the sestran, but not quickly enough. The chaquoteels were on her in a darting rainbow swarm, and her back smarted from dozens of jabs before they decided she'd been sufficiently routed and left her alone in the vegetation. Then the racket quieted quickly again.
Her search was a short one; Ticos had done what she'd expected. The tiny script recorder was in weatherproof sealing, taped to the side of one of the thickest sestran stems. Nile freed herself of her prisoner and laid the bundle down where she could watch it. The midget hadn't stirred yet, but that didn't mean he wasn't awake.
She considered briefly. There was cover all about. If Parahuans, or the tarm, showed up, she could fade away in any direction without stepping into the open. And with a few hundred bad-tempered chaquoteels scattered around the vicinity, she couldn't be taken by surprise.
Yes—as good a place as any to find out what Ticos had to tell her. . . .
Nile settled down, fitted the recorder to her eye, and started it.
Long before she put the recorder down for the last time Nile had decided that Ticos Cay ranked among the great liars of history.
He was still alive. At least he'd been alive less than a week ago when he left the last of the four recorder disks which contained his report here for her.
She sat still, sorting over the information.
Some seventy years ago the Parahuan leadership had been smarting in defeat and trying to understand how defeat could have been possible. In their minds they were the race which had achieved perfection at all levels, including individual immortality for those with the greatness to attain it. They were the Everliving. None could match them. The water worlds of the galaxy which met their requirements were destined to be their own.
Since they first moved out from Porad Anz, their home world, the Sacred Sea, they had encountered nothing to contradict that assumption.
But now an inferior land-dweller which was in possession of a number of such worlds had flung back and almost completely destroyed the Parahuan forces sent to occupy them. The experience stunned the Everliving. It affronted logic.
Before the attack they had made what seemed a sufficiently comprehensive study of the Federation of the Hub. This human civilization was huge. But it was a heterogeneous, loosely organized, loosely governed mass of individuals quite normally in serious conflict among themselves. The analysis of captured humans confirmed the picture.
That muddled, erratic, emotionally swayed creature had routed the disciplined Parahuan forces. Something was wrong—it simply shouldn't have happened.
What had been overlooked?
They went back to studying the enemy in every way they could. The creature was blocking the orderly procession of the goals of Porad Anz. That was intolerable. The secret of its ability to do it must be found—and then means devised to destroy the ability.
Presently, in the creature's relatively recent history, a clue was discovered.
It developed into the Tuvela Theory. . . .
Nile made a snorting, incredulous sound. Not much more than two centuries ago—not many decades before Ticos Cay was born—the Hub still had been one of the bloodiest human battlegrounds of all time. It was the tail end of the War Centuries. A thousand governments were forming and breaking interstellar alliances, aiming for control of the central clusters or struggling to keep from being overwhelmed.
The Tuvelas belonged in the later part of that pre-Federation period. They were a sophisticated equivalent of ancient warlords. Some believed they arose from well-defined genetic strains at a high genius level. Legends clustered about their activities. But the fact was that the records of those muddled times were contradictory and thoroughly unreliable. In any event, the Tuvelas were long gone.
The Parahuan Palachs, searching for an explanation of their own defeat, decided they weren't long gone. The mysterious superhuman Tuvelas not only were still around, they were now the true secret rulers of the Federation of the Hub. They had organized and guided the operation which resulted in the defeat of the Parahuan expeditionary forces.
The Everliving, or at least a majority of them, didn't intend to let the matter rest there. They now had a rationalization of the past disaster, and it restored to some extent their shattered pride. To have been bested by a foe of abnormal ability whose existence hadn't been suspected, that could be accepted. The human species as such was inferior to Porad Anz. Its apparent strength lay in the fact that its vast masses were directed and controlled by these freakish monsters.
To even the score with the Tuvelas, to bring them down and destroy them, became an abiding obsession with the Everliving—or again, at least with a majority of them. Some evidently felt from the beginning that the Tuvelas might be such dangerous opponents that it would be better not to come into conflict with them a second time. The view never became popular, but it was agreed that all reasonable precautions should be taken to avoid another debacle. The majority opinion remained that since a Parahuan Great Palach was the ultimate development of life, the human Tuvela could not possibly be his superior. The advantage of the Tuvelas had been solely that the Everliving hadn't known they were there—and naturally hadn't considered such a remote possibility in preparing the first attack.
Out of this situation grew the Great Plan, aimed at the ultimate destruction of the Hub's rulers and the Hub as a civilization. The conflicting opinions were represented by the groups known as the Voice of Action and the Voice of Caution. Between these opposed factions, the uncommitted ranks of the Everliving maintained the wisely flexible Balance.
The Voice of Caution had determinedly dragged its heels from the start and continued to drag them for seventy years. In spite of such resistance, the Great Plan gradually matured. The Parahuans found allies—the Hub had more enemies with long memories among the stars than it might know. But they were wary enemies. If the Parahuans could take and hold a number of Federation worlds and engage a major portion of the Federation's forces . . . then a score of alien civilizations would attack other points in the Hub simultaneously, splitting and weakening the human defenses until they were shattered. But only if the Parahuans succeeded.
The Voice of Action argued that this was good enough. The Voice of Caution argued that it wasn't. In the Balance between them an initial test was decreed—a potential invasion force was maneuvered with careful secrecy into the seas of Nandy-Cline.
This force was regarded as expendable. On the face of it, it should be able to take Nandy-Cline with relative ease in a coordinated surprise attack. Careful study had established the fact beyond a doubt. But its primary purpose was to flush the Tuvelas to view and test their alertness and ability. If it should be established that they were indeed entities against whom the Everliving were outmatched—if, for example, the invasion force, in spite of its apparent superiority, again was destroyed or obliged to retreat, the most disconcerting aspects of the Tuvela Theory must be considered proved. Then the Great Plan would be canceled and Porad Anz would resign itself to a future of circumspect obscurity.
But if Nandy-Cline fell as scheduled, the Tuvelas could be dealt with, now that their influence on humanity was known; and the Voice of Action would receive full authority to proceed with the further operations designed to end in the destruction of the Hub.
In the course of preparing for the attack on the planet, the hidden invasion force ran head-on into Dr. Ticos Cay. . . .
Ticos had been tracked to his laboratory and taken by surprise. A study of the lab's equipment told his captors that here was a human with advanced scientific knowledge who might have useful information. He was treated with care, questioned at length. Many Palachs had acquired a faultless command of translingue as an aid to their understanding of the enemy. They interrogated Ticos under drugs and with the application of calculated pain. His acquired level of mental control enabled him to withstand such pressures; and the Palachs considered this to be of great interest. No other human prisoner had shown a similar ability.
They were further intrigued to discover he had been working, among other things, at the development of longevity drugs. All reports indicated that humans had never attained an unlimited life span; the lack of an overall immortality program was in fact the most definite indication that the Hub's civilization, in spite of its accomplishments in other fields, stood basically at a low level. Among themselves, the science of immortality in all its branches was held sacred, its study restricted to Palachs. Evidently it was at this point they decided Ticos might belong to a class of humanity which knew at least something about the Tuvelas. Earlier prisoners had been totally ignorant even of the existence of their anonymous rulers.
Ticos was puzzled at first by the new direction the interrogations were taking. He framed his replies very carefully in a manner designed to draw more revealing questions. Presently his concept of the Palachs' Tuvela Theory grew clear—and now he was able to suggest possibilities which seemed to confirm the worst fears of his inquisitors. He could claim convincingly that the specific information he had was quite limited, but the implications in what he said matched to a disturbing degree the blackest calculations made concerning the nature of Tuvelas. The majority of the Everliving connected with the expeditionary force found their faith in themselves again shaken. Endless bitter debates were unleashed between the opposed groups, while the Balance, temporarily at least, shifted toward the views of the Voice of Caution. The invasion was not actually called off, but all immediate attack plans were stalled for the time being.
Ticos meanwhile had been in an anxious quandary of his own. Nile's next scheduled visit was some weeks away; but she was bound to come then, and that he would have been able to persuade the Palachs to abandon the planet before she arrived seemed hardly possible. If he did nothing, she either would be killed out of hand as she came down from the air or captured and put to death in some very unpleasant manner. The Parahuans were not at all gentle with ordinary prisoners. As far as he knew, he was the only one picked up on Nandy-Cline who had lived more than a few days in their hands.
So he'd turned Nile into a Tuvela. It made one thing certain: the Palachs wouldn't kill her while they saw a chance of taking her alive—and knowing Nile as he did he felt that might very well give her an opportunity to escape into the forests. Parahuan scientists were studying the results of his longevity experiments; and he was allowed to go about the floatwood under guard at regular intervals to collect the materials he wanted. On such occasions he would deposit the significant information he had gathered where she should find it. After reading this report, she should do what she could to get away from the island and alert the planet. However, if she was captured, they might still be able to maintain the Tuvela bluff together and bring about a withdrawal of the alien forces. Success was questionable; but it was the best course he could suggest. . . .
Nile inhaled shakily, blinking at the knotted cloth containing a Parahuan Palach. A Great Palach, she corrected herself. She'd better have her information well memorized in case events made it necessary to attempt to play the role of Tuvela Ticos had bestowed on her. Going by the descriptions he'd given of his principal interrogators, she thought she could even call this particular Great Palach by name.
She pursed her lips, thinking it over. She already had plans for escaping from the island presently, with Danrich Parrol's help. But the plans didn't make provision as yet for getting Ticos out, and she didn't intend to leave without him.
Besides, the general situation had evidently become one which could take an unpredictable turn at any time. The Everliving, already sufficiently overwrought as a result of Ticos' machinations, had tipped their hand in trying to take her alive and failing to do it. If they suspected she could get away from the island again and warn Nandy-Cline, it might stampede them into launching the overall attack immediately, before they lost the advantage of surprise. At best that would cost a great many human lives. . . .
Lives that would be saved if the aliens could be talked into withdrawing.
Nile's reflections checked there a moment. She didn't like the line they were taking—but the line was an inevitable one. As things had worked out, the Palachs had reason to believe that in her they were dealing with a genuine Tuvela. If Ticos had come close to persuading them to retreat from the planet, a genuine Tuvela should be able to finish the job.
But that meant putting herself voluntarily in the power of those creatures. And the thought was enough to dry her mouth. . . .
A chaquoteel whistled a dozen feet away, and Nile started violently, then cursed her jittering nerves. It hadn't been an alarm call. Nothing of significance to the chaquoteels, and therefore to her, had come near the sestran stand since she'd been sitting here.
She looked at the bundled Great Palach again. He was awake. There'd been occasional cautious stirrings under the cloth. One question was simply whether she could play the part of a Tuvela-Guardian well enough to keep the aliens deceived. The midget in there was a highly aggressive representative of the Voice of Action. If she could sell him the idea that Porad Anz was doomed if it persisted in challenging the Tuvelas, there was a good chance she could bluff the Everliving as a whole.
Why not find out?
She'd have to believe it herself first. Quit being Nile Etland and be a Tuvela. The more outrageously, the better. No small lies—big ones. Keep the creature surprised.
She moistened her lips, fished the tanglecord's release key from her pouch, placed her gun on the chunk of floatwood supporting the thicket. The tanglecord strips securing the cloth about the Parahuan came away at the touch of the key. She dropped them in the pouch, unknotted the cloth and drew it cautiously from the captive.
The atmosphere sections of the Parahuan's eyes were open. They watched her steadily. The tanglecord clamped about his arms and feet was tight and in place. Nile pulled the strip away from the vocal slit, set him upright against a clump of sestran, backed away eight or nine feet, and sat down, holding the gun loosely before her. She studied the alien for some seconds.
He didn't look too formidable, but Ticos' caution against underestimating Palachs of any grade probably was well founded. Their approach to immortality involved a progressive induced metamorphosis. The muscular structure became condensed and acquired extreme efficiency. Most of the thinking apparatus was buried inside the chunky torso; presumably it did not undergo physiological changes. Reduced to essentials, Ticos had said. Very well, she'd watch this Great Palach. . . .
What did he see in her? A Tuvela? Nile had a mental picture of herself—lean, next to naked, smeared with colorful plant sap. Hardly the most impressive image. But it couldn't be helped. She was a Guardian of the Federation of the Hub, a Tuvela. To him, she was gromgorru. A mysterious, powerful being, with information sources beyond her captive's knowledge. The last, at any rate, she had.
She said, "I believe I am addressing the Great Palach Koll."
The manikin stared a long moment. At last the vocal slit moved. "And I believe" a voice like golden velvet told her, "that I address a Hulon named Etland."
Hulon—Parahuan term signifying low-grade human. There'd been no suggestion of alien inflection in the words. They had studied humanity in patient detail.
"You have another name for us," the Tuvela said indifferently. "Call me Hulon if you wish. Where are you holding Dr. Cay at present?"
"Not far from here. What is your interest in Dr. Cay?"
"Our interest in Dr. Cay," Nile said, "is less than it was. He has not performed well in this test."
"Test?" Koll's voice had thinned. Nile regarded him a moment.
"Surely you must have wondered from time to time," she remarked, "why no one came here to inspect Dr. Cay's activities. Yes, a test. Not that it's your concern, Great Palach, but Dr. Cay was a candidate for the true-life. I'm not sure he will remain one. When we saw you had discovered him, we waited to observe how capably he would handle this unexpected situation. I'm disappointed in him."
Koll's vocal slit opened and closed silently twice. The Tuvela scowled absently.
"However, I'm more than disappointed in the Everliving," she resumed. "If you didn't find Dr. Cay sufficiently persuasive, very moderate intelligence alone should have told you to be long gone from here . . . and glad to be away! Haven't you felt the snare this world represents waiting about you? Has the Sacred Sea grown senile instead of immortal?"
She shrugged. A Tuvela, after all, was not greatly interested in the limitations of Porad Anz.
"You'll be told to go now," she stated. "You've been butchering the ones you call Hulons a little too freely. That disgusts me. It seems you fear even the human shape so much you revert to your animal beginnings when you meet it. We don't choose to see our people wasted—and Dr. Cay has had time enough to demonstrate his present lack of satisfactory potential."
Silence. Long silence. The sestran shrubs rustled. Wind roaring rose and ebbed in the distance. The air was darkening quickly. The wizened manikin sat motionless, staring.
Gromgorru, Nile thought. It had been weighing on both sides. It should weigh heavily on the Parahuans now. A Tuvela was about, an invisible ghost in the floatwood. It had plucked the Great Palach Koll from his grisly command post. Bear down on those fears. Yes, it might very well work. . . .
The velvet voice said suddenly, "I see and hear a creature lying in clever desperation to conceal its helplessness. You can't escape and you can't contact your kind. You did not come here to tell the Everliving they must leave. You're here because you were trapped."
Nile's lips curled. "The sken beam? If the technicians who examined my car understood what they saw, they must know I could have blocked such a device. And by the true-life, I believe I can play the hunting game against a mob of Oganoon and stupid animals! Great Palach Koll, Voice of Action—look around! Who is trapped here, and who is helpless?"
She leaned forward. "The stupidity of Porad Anz! It tampered with our worlds and was thrown out. All it learned was to look for allies before it tried to come back. No doubt you'd need allies—more than you can find. But you've already found too many to make the Great Plan possible! Even if we'd had no other methods of information, your secret was spread too far to remain a secret—"
She broke off. Koll was quivering. The vocal slit made spitting sounds.
"We'd been minded to spare you," the Tuvela began again. "But—"
"Guardian, be silent!" The voice was squeezed down to an angry whine. "Lies and tricks! The Everliving will not listen!"
The Tuvela laughed. "When I come to them with a Great Palach tied in a rag, dangling headdown from my belt, they won't listen?"
Koll squealed—and became a blur of rubbery motion.
The long legs swung up, brought the fettered feet to his shoulder. Something projected in that instant from the shoulder, a half-inch jet of fire. It touched the tanglecord, and the tanglecord parted. The webbed toes of one foot gripped one of the jewels on Koll's head, pulled it free. The other leg was beneath him again; it bent, straightened; and he came toward Nile in a long, one-legged hop, quick and balanced. The jewel-handled needle gripped in his foot leveled out. . . .
Nile was in motion herself by then, dropping back, rolling sideways—
The needle spat a thread of pink radiance along her flank as she triggered the UW.
And that was that. The UW's beam was hot, and Koll was in mid-jump, moving fast, as it caught him. His lumpy torso was very nearly cut in two.
Nile got up shakily, parted the sestran stems through which he had plunged, and looked down from the floatwood branch. Nothing but the waving, shadowy greenery of the vertical jungle below . . . and no point in hunting around for the body of the Great Palach down there. Ticos had neglected to mention that the thick Parahuan hide could be used to conceal an arsenal, but after seeing the communicator Koll carried grafted to himself, the possibility should have occurred to her.
Why had he attacked at that particular moment? She hadn't convinced him Porad Anz faced destruction unless the invading force withdrew—or else he had such a seething hatred for mankind that the fate of his own race was no longer of sufficient consideration. But apparently she had convinced him that a majority of the Palachs would accept what she said.
He should know, Nile thought. She'd lost her prisoner, but the Great Palach Koll dead, silenced, vanished, remained an impressive witness to the Tuvelas' capability and stern ruthlessness.
Let the Everliving stew in the situation a while. She'd give them indications presently that she was still around the island. That should check any impulse to launch a hasty military operation. Meanwhile she'd try to find out where Ticos was held, and prepare to carry out other plans . . . And now it was time to check with Sweeting and learn what her water scouting had revealed.
Nile dropped quietly down out of the sestran thicket to lower branches to avoid arousing the chaquoteels, and slipped away into the forest.
Back down at the water's edge, she looked out from a niche between two trunks at the neighboring island section. It was the largest of the five connected forests, a good half wider and longer than this one and lifting at least a hundred yards farther into the air. From the car she'd seen thick clusters of a dark leafless growth rising higher still from a point near the forest's center, like slender flexible spear shafts whipping in the wind. Oilwood it was called. Weeks from now, when the island rode into the electric storm belts of the polar sea, the oilwood would draw lightning from the sky to let its combustible sheathing burn away and the ripened seeds beneath tumble down through the forest into the ocean.
Set ablaze deliberately tonight, it should provide a beacon to mark the island for Parrol and let him know where she was to be found.
The water between the two forests wasn't open. The submerged root system extended from one to the other; and on the roots grew the floatwood's aquatic symbiotes, pushing out from the central lagoon, though their ranks thinned as they approached the rush of the open sea. The Parahuans wouldn't have stopped hunting for her, and ambushes could easily be laid in that area. The sea south of the forest seemed to offer a safer crossing, now that evening darkened the sky and reduced surface visibility. The Meral Current carried weed beds: dense moving jungles which provided cover when needed.
Nile gave the otter caller on her wrist another turn. Sweeting should be here quickly. A receiver embedded in her skull transmitted the signals to her brain, and she homed in unerringly on the caller.
"Nile—"
"Over here, Sweeting!"
Sweeting came up out of the water twenty feet away, shook herself vigorously, rippled along the side of the floatwood bole and settled beside Nile.
"These are new bad guys!" she stated.
"Yes," said Nile. "New and bad. They don't belong on our world. What can you tell me about them?"
"Much," Sweeting assured her. "But found two Nile-friends. They tell you more."
"Two—" Nile broke off. In the surging sea five yards below, two dark whiskered heads had appeared on the surface, were looking up at her.
Wild otters.