“Hereafter,” Lavon said, “that’s to be standard procedure
with every Eater you kill.”
“Not the males,” one of the Para pointed out.
“Para, you have no sense of humor. All right, not the males
but nobody kills the males anyhow, they’re harmless.” He
looked down grimly at the inert mass. “Rememberdestroy
the eggs. Killing the beasts isn’t enough. We want to wipe out
the whole race.”
“We never forget,” Para said emotionlessly.
The band of over two hundred humans, with Lavon and Shar
and a Para at its head, fled swiftly through the warm, light
waters of the upper level. Each man gripped a wood splinter,
or a fragment of lime chipped from stonewort, as a club; and
two hundred pairs of eyes darted watchfully from side to
side. Cruising over them was a squadron of twenty Didins,
and the rotifers they encountered only glared at them from
single red eyespots, making no move to attack. Overhead,
near the sky, the sunlight was filtered through a thick layer of
living creatures, fighting and feeding and spawning, so that
all the depths below were colored a rich green. Most of this
heavily populated layer was made up of algae and diatoms,
and there the Eaters fed unhindered. Sometimes a dying
diatom dropped slowly past the army.
The spring was well advanced; the two hundred, Lavon
thought, probably represented all of the humans who had
survived the winter. At least no more could be found. The
othersnobody would ever know how manyhad awakened
too late in the season, or had made ‘their spores in exposed
places, and the rotifers had snatched them up. Of the group,