“Explosives! There was dynamite used? I saw no evidence—”
“No. That’s what bothers me. I don’t like all those felled trees you describe. We used to use TDX to get a cutting blast; it has a property of exploding in a flat plane.”
Miramon goggled. “Impossible. An explosion has to expand evenly in the open.”
“Not if it’s a piperazo-hexybitrate built from polarized carbon atoms. Such atoms can’t move in any direction but at right angles to the gravity radius. That’s what I mean. You people are up to dynamite, but not to TDX.”
He paused, frowning. “Of course some of our losses have just
been by bandit raids, with arrows and crude bombs—your friends from Fabr-Suithe and their allies. But these camps where there was an explosion and no crater to show for it—”
He fell silent. There was no point in mentioning the gassed corpses. It was hard even to think about them. Somebody on this planet had a gas which was a regurgitant, a sternutatory and a vesicant all in one. The men had been forced out of their masks—which had been designed solely to protect them from volcanic gases—to vomit, had taken the stuff into their lungs by convulsive sneezing, and had blistered into great sacs of serum inside and out. That, obviously, had been the multiplebenzene ring Hawkesite; very popular in the days of the Hruntan Empire, when it had been called “polybathroomfloorine” for no discoverable reason. But what was it doing on He?
There was only one possible answer, and for a reason which he did not try to understand, it made Amalfi breathe a little easier. All around him, the jungle sighed and swayed, and humming clouds of gnats made rainbows over the dew-laden pinnae of the fern. The jungle, almost always murmurously quiet, had never seemed like a real enemy; now Ainalfi knew that that intuition had been right. The real enemy had declared itself, stealthily, but with a stealth which was naïveté itself in comparison with the ancient guile of the jungle.