IX

The geological and paleontological history of the planet Tupelo is not well understood, due to the paucity of land areas available for digging. No fossils have ever been discovered. However, it is generally believed that sometime in the relatively recent past, perhaps circa 2 to 4 million years BP, the planet underwent an extinction event similar to the ones which on Earth ended the Cretaceous and other ages. The causative event—whether a bolide impact, an episode of very large-scale vulcanism, or something unique to Tupelo—is not known. However, the result is clear. Whatever large land animals existed on Tupelo disappeared at that time. Life in the ocean, however, is quite another matter.

—BRITANNICA ONLINE, “TUPELO.”


It was a sparkly dawn day, with dew beaded on the “grass,” the sun still hidden behind the great mountains to the east, the air cool but comfortable. Altogether it was just the right kind of day for a chopper trip to Energy Island . . . except that there was no chopper. Hoak Hagbarth apologized profusely to the VIP woman from Earth. The gyrocopter, unfortunately, was in the shop. So if Dr. Patroosh didn’t mind, they would have to take a Delt skimmer to the island. Either Dr. Patroosh really didn’t mind or she was being a good sport about it. “Let’s just do it, all right?” she said.

When they reached the lakeshore the Delt skimmer turned out to be a much larger ground-effect vehicle than the one that had taken Giyt to see the polar rocket land. Giyt’s first look at it made his eyes pop. Startlingly, the thing was gleaming in metallic gold and ten or twelve meters long. It came complete with a Delt pilot sitting on the rail impatiently tapping his long fingers on his knee. When Rina politely thanked him for agreeing to transport them, the Delt turned one wandering eye on her, the other wavering between Giyt and Dr. Patroosh, and gargled something that the translator turned into, “Imposition no greater than expected, happening at all times without considerateness. Board now. Sit. Strap in for bumps.”

There weren’t any bumps, though, at least not at first. The skimmer lifted on its air cushion and slid out onto the surface of the lake, heading swiftly for the hills at the far side. Giyt was glad for the moving air, which diluted that Delt aroma from the driver. Rina didn’t seem to mind the smell. She was squeezing Giyt’s hand in excitement, staring around at everything—back at the low buildings of the town; at the approaching hills; at the barely visible rim of the old Slug dam that long ago had created Crystal Lake for their own first colonists; at the fittings of the Delt skimmer. Those were pure nonhuman technology, all right: corrugated seats that pressed cruelly into human buttocks, double view screens for the pilot—one for each eye?—and an instrument panel that kept whispering and beeping constantly. Even the safety straps were woven of some kind of glass-like fiber, and where they rubbed against the bare skin of Giyt’s throat they scratched.

Then they were across the lake, the skimmer gliding easily onto the shore and entering the rude roadway through the woods Giyt had seen on his previous trip. There was plenty to stare at there.

Ground-effect vehicles worked splendidly on flat surfaces. but they did poorly on grades. In order to ease the slope on the far side of the dam the skimmer roadway was a series of switchbacks, and yes, now there were plenty of the bumps the pilot had warned against. There was no real road there at all, just a bulldozed track littered with knocked-down logs. Every time the skimmer crossed one the jolt relayed itself to the bruisable bottoms of the human passengers.

But it was a small price to pay. These were not the woods Giyt had seen on the slopes of the mountain. There were flickers of color darting about among the trees—barely glimpsed before the skimmer had left them behind; birds? insects? The trees themselves were not of any variety Giyt had ever seen before. Some were almost branchless until they expanded into an umbrella of fronds at the top, almost turning the roadway into a tunnel as they met overhead. Some hardly looked like trees at all; they resembled the stumps of even huger trees, four or five meters thick, no more than half a dozen meters tall. When Rina exclaimed over them, the VIP woman looked up from the palmtop she had been intently studying and said, kindly enough, “That’s how they grow. It’s what you get when you don’t have any large animals to knock them down; there are trees like that where my grandparents come from, on the Indian Ocean islands of Earth.”

“That’s right,” Rina said sociably. “There aren’t any large animals at all on Tupelo, are there?”

“Not on land,” the woman said. “But if you want to see large animals, wait till we’re crossing the strait.”

Then they reached the bottom of the slope. The skimmer left the roadway to slide onto the surface of the river below the dam. A pair of huge steel whales were moored at the side of the stream. Though Giyt had never seen one before, he recognized them. They were the submersible cargo vessels that carried goods to and from the polar complex. The skimmer pilot, who had ignored his passengers as he concentrated on making the turns in the road, jerked a long thumb back upriver. “Place where Slugs live, under dam. They like wet.” He thought for a moment, then added, “Slugs not so bad, though. Not like damn Petty-Primes, get all crazy when somebody comes near damn tiny young. Just the other day my ex-brother have much abuse from Responsible One—you know, you saw whole thing, right?”

“I guess I did,” Giyt admitted.

“So you know. Totally without warranted crapola, right? Kit not hurt. Purely accidental stepping-on, anyway. Sure, he only ex-brother, but still kind of family, you know? So must stick up for.” He shook his head judgmentally, the eyes wandering in all directions. Then he added warningly, “Gets stinky now.”

Giyt twisted his neck to peer behind them, but caught only a glimpse of igloo-shaped mud structures, far back. He was turning over in his mind the curious fact that a Delt would describe anything else as stinky. Then the odor hit them. “Christ,” he said, gasping.

Dr. Patroosh gave him a tolerant smile. “See that pipe?” she offered. It was a meter across, jutting out into the river, with an ooze of foul-looking sludge coming out of it. “Sewage. It comes from the town. Whatever you do, don’t dabble your fingers in the water.”

At least on the river the ride was smoother than on that terrible jungle trail. Slowly the appalling stench dwindled to bearable proportions—or else, Giyt thought, they were getting used to it. The stream broadened. The woods surrounding it diminished and then disappeared. The skimmer left the channel that had been dredged out for the cargo subs and glided out onto a broad beach.

Rina gasped in alarm, and Giyt saw why. The great waves of Ocean were pounding in on the pebbly shore. Creatures were riding them, like surfers on a Hawaiian beach. Big creatures. Nasty ones, some that looked like the “sharks” that Hagbarth had mentioned, letting themselves be thrown up on the beach and floundering around on their pectoral fins for a while before lumbering back into the water; some like lizards that dug in the pebbles with their long, sharp-toothed jaws—looking for something to eat?—and were careful to stay as far as possible from the sharks.

“It’s the sewage that brings them,” Dr. Patroosh said, without pleasure. “You always see them here.”

And the pilot called, “You bet! Mean bastards. Eat you up, one bite, quick-quick. Get bad bellyache after, sure, but what you care? By then you dead. Now everybody shut up, must catch wave,”

He had throttled back the skimmer’s thrusters, though keeping the fans that raised them above the water level at full power. They idled for a moment in the shallows where the river broadened out to enter the sea. Then he poured on the power, the skimmer leaped ahead, and they slid over the froth deposited by one breaking wave and climbed the next before it crested. Finally they were in deep water.

Nonchalantly the pilot stood up, swaying easily in the motion of the sea. From a compartment in the wall he took out a thing that looked more like a pocket camera than anything else and held it to one eye as he began to study the sea. Something in the control board began to hum and stutter; Giyt hoped it was an autopilot of some kind. At least, though the pilot was paying no attention at all to what the skimmer did, they seemed to be moving steadily toward a smudge on the horizon. Giyt supposed it was Energy Island, As the skimmer rose and fell over the vast Ocean swells, Rina began to look uncomfortable. The pilot took the thing away from one eye long enough to stare at her. “You think you going to puke? Okay, over side. Ocean don’t mind; only don’t lean over too far, Christ’s sake. Got no way to pull you out before, you know, gobble-gobble.”

By the time they reached Energy Island—sliding right up into a dock as behind them a great steel-wire gate closed to keep the shore animals out—Dr. Patroosh had explained why she preferred the skimmer to the gyrocopter. Under its gold skin the skimmer was built of a sort of foam plastic, so light that if anything went wrong the vessel would simply float until rescue arrived. The chopper had its own flotation devices, but swells would overwhelm them quickly enough. Then it would sink like a rock, and, she said positively, nodding toward the hungry creatures on the far side of the gate, “You can see why you don’t want to go swimming in Ocean.”

Whoever built the power plant seemed to like gold as much as the builder of the skimmer did. The plant was a collection of hemispherical golden domes. There was a twenty-meter-tall giant hemisphere in the middle and there were smaller ones, which gave off a sound of big engines running, nested around it. Every one of them was bright with a golden skin. The difference was that what the power plant’s skin covered wasn’t foam plastic. It was something hard and solid. Cement, maybe. Steel, more likely, Giyt thought.

The Delt pilot was watching him. He tapped Giyt on the shoulder with a long-fingered hand and said with pride, “Good electric, true? You know who build plant? Us. Not stinky Slug, Centaurian, Kalkaboo; when we come they have zero but damn pitiful hydroelectric dam for power. Delts laugh and laugh. Too tiny. Us build good one here. Fuse atoms, fine Delt designings. Then plenty electric, you bet, except now so many immigrants coming in need more. Oh,” he added quickly, not meaning to give offense, “not just you Earth-creature guys, you understand? Damn Petty-Primes even worse.”

Dr. Patroosh scowled at him. “Wait for us here,” she ordered; and to Giyt and Rina, “Come on.” And a moment later, when they were out of earshot, “You know what they want? They want us to dig the damn foundations for the new plant, while they supply all the high-tech stuff that we don’t even get to look at. Like we were some damn Third World country that doesn’t know anything about technology.” She shook her head gloomily. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ve got to talk to the head controller—he’ll be another damn Delt, of course. You two can look around. There ought to be a few Earth people on the shift; maybe you can get one of them to show you what’s what.”


Evesham Giyt had never been in a power plant before. He had never thought much about what one might be like, either. Electricity was what you got when you turned a switch. Here inside the belly of the plant it was something else, something that shook the walls with low-frequency rumbling and hurt the ears with high-pitched whines. And , those, he knew, were only the sounds of the turbines that turned steam into electricity. The source of the infernal heat that distilled Ocean’s water and then flashed it into steam to spin the turbines was silent. But it was there. Somewhere no more than a few dozen meters away, Giyt knew, incalculable numbers of hydrogen nuclei were madly coupling with each other to make helium. It was the same nuclear fusion that made the old H-bombs so terminally lethal—no, it was scarier than any H-bomb, because what was happening inside the biggest dome wasn’t a single explosion. It was a process rather than an event, and it went on and on.

It did not seem to Giyt that this was a thing that should be left to run itself, however good the automatic controls. But there seemed to be nobody in sight. As he and Rina walked along the golden corridors they passed a sleeping Kalkaboo, curled against a wall. He woke up long enough to glare at them, then returned to sleep. It was only after a ten-minute search that they heard a whirring sound. It came from where a human shift worker was watching a porn film on his handset as he followed the cleaning machines around.

When Giyt asked the man for guidance he gave Giyt an injured look. “You don’t recognize me, do you? Colly Detslider. I’m the relief driver on Pumper Three in the fire company.”

But after Giyt apologized and shook his hand, the man was happy enough for an excuse to leave the machines to do their job on their own. Yes, he told them, there was a full shift on duty—thirty persons, five of them human like himself. No, he didn’t know where the others were. Sure, he’d show them around, although it was only fair to warn them that his own job here was janitorial and he didn’t know much about the machinery.

He knew enough, though, to keep them from going near the central chamber where the tokamak held its fusing plasma in an unbreakable magnetic grip. They saw the pumps that sucked cool water in from Ocean, to make steam and then to condense it when spent; they saw the gratings that kept the creatures of Ocean from being sucked in along with it; they saw the remarkably slim cables, wrapped in the chilling jackets that made them superconducting, that carried the power plant’s output down under the strait to the community that used it. They even peeped into the control room, every wall a mosaic of screens and signals, where they saw Dr. Patroosh furiously arguing with a pair of uninterested Delt controllers. They would have seen more, probably, but Detslider was watching the time. He was due for his lunch break, he informed them, and they were welcome to come along if they wanted to.

Lunch was machine-served in a large room filled with tables, couches, and Kalkaboo tree-rests, sparsely occupied by beings who paid no attention to the human visitors. To Giyt’s displeasure the human lunch menu turned out to be creamed chipped beef on toast. “It’s always something the machines can dispense. Real crap,” Detslider told him. “Come on. Take your plate and we’ll go someplace that smells better to eat it.” A Delt, sipping some thick yellow liquid from a shallow bowl by the door, turned one eye to glare at Detslider as they left, but the man ignored him. Five meters down the corridor there was a smaller room, with two human women and a man playing pinochle at one table and space for the visitors at another. While Giyt doggedly ate his lunch Rina made polite conversation with all of them. Detslider came from Pasadena, he said, but left it for Tupelo because there was too much crime in California. Like his job? Well, it was all right, but boring. The others, respectively from Tucson, Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and Boston, agreed, the woman from Pottsville adding, “The damn Delts push you around here, like they owned the place.” But it wasn’t just the Earth humans that suffered, she conceded; the Delts acted superior to everybody.

When they went back to the control room Dr. Patroosh spied them, snapped some final argument at the Delt controllers, and swept past them at the door. Over her shoulder she called, “Come on, we’ll go home. I’m not doing any good here.” And crossing the strait in the skimmer she was silent and morose. When Rina asked her sociably how her mission had gone. Dr. Patroosh snapped, “Lousy. They’ve got this whole fusion section locked up, nobody but Delts allowed in—because of radiation danger, they say, but for Christ’s sake we know all about radiation danger.” She glanced at the Delt pilot, who seemed to be paying them no attention, but lowered her voice. “I’m going home to report. We’ll see what happens . . . but I’ll bet we’ll cave in again and dig their damn foundation for them.” Then she was silent. So were Giyt and Rina until their pilot, sweeping the surface of Ocean with his glass, cried out joyfully and began pulling something heavy and harsh-looking out of a locker. With one hand he steered the skimmer toward dimples of disturbed water; with the other he was locking the object from the locker to a mount on the skimmer’s rail.

“Now what?” Dr. Patroosh demanded irritably.

Giyt had no answer for her, but Rina piped up. “Do you know what that looks like. Shammy? That long gold thing with the barbs on the head?” And then of course he did. It was a harpoon, and the Delt proved it a moment later by firing it at the little whirlpools—no, at something under the whirlpools, something red and many-eyed that gasped and snorted as the shaft struck home and it rose briefly to the surface.

The pilot shrieked in exultation, something that the translator did not even try to put into English. The creature sounded, pulling a hundred meters of supple, braided cable out of the harpoon’s reel. The pilot made an adjustment on the reel, darted to the controls, and started the skimmer at high speed toward the coast. Then he turned to his passengers, grinning. “Good eating, you bet! But maybe too far out for any good.”

“Too far out for what good?” Rina asked, but the Delt had already turned away. He was talking rapidly on the communicator to someone ashore, keeping one eye on the skimmer’s wake, where the cable was stretched out almost horizontally. At the end of it Giyt could see the quarry flailing about for a moment, then it disappeared below the surface. Ominous whirls appeared all around it, and then something else was in the water. Blood?

It was blood, all right.

By the time the skimmer reached the river’s mouth a Delt vehicle built like an armored car was waiting for them, but it was too late. When the pilot hauled his catch in to retrieve his harpoon most of the creature was gone, slashed away by the horde of predators.

The pilot laughed and spoke into the communicator; the tanklike thing lumbered away as he turned the skimmer upstream toward the town. He said philosophically, “Too far out, you understand? Too bad. Wonderful to eat, only not just for Delts.” Then he pursed his everted lips, as though trying to remember something, then brightened. “Hey, I know Earth thing! You know Earth-human liar Kepigay?”

“Who?” Giyt asked, and the Delt tried the name several times more before Rina said, “Oh, do you mean Ernest Hemingway?”

“Yes. Excellent liar, Kepigay. Greatly enjoy Earth-human lies; Earth humans such excelling liars. You know Kepigay old Earth romance lie, Man Approaching Death in Relationship to Ocean?”

“I think he means The Old Man and the Sea,” Rina offered. “We had it in American lit in Wichita.”

The pilot nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, I had volume also in aboriginal folk lie study. Damn good lie, that one. You see? Same thing here; catch fish too far, sharks eat. Aboriginals have much native lore which persons can learn from, I say always—though not,” he added, with one eye wandering over to fix on Dr. Patroosh, “on subject nuclear fusion.”

And all the way back to the town their pilot entertained them with stories of his fishing exploits while Dr. Patroosh glowered silently into space. When the pilot let them out on the shore of Crystal Lake, he said cheerfully, “Survive well until dark.”

Rina giggled. “I think he means have a nice day.”

“Yes, exactly. Do not shoot brain fragments all over house like famous Earth-human liar Kepigay.”


They dropped Dr. Patroosh off at the Hagbarth home. Then, in the cart going to their own house, Rina said thoughtfully, “You know what’s funny, hon?”

“What?”

“Well, Colly’s from California, right? We’re from Kansas. Matya comes from a little town on the Jersey shore, Lupe from just outside of Albuquerque, those other guys—”

“What’s funny about that? Everybody has to come from someplace.”

“Well, sure, Shammy, but they’re all from America. Wouldn’t you think there’d be some people from South America or Asia or somewhere?”

He thought for a moment, then brightened. “What about Dr. Patroosh? She said she was from some island in the Indian Ocean.”

“No, not exactly. She said her grandparents were. She’s an American, all right. So I just think it’s funny that there isn’t anybody from the rest of the world, that’s all.”

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