The cubs sat still and waited while the things approached, and Grevan watched them, amused and momentarily distracted from his worries. The shaggy appetites reached the foot of the cliff at length and came moving down through the jungle. Heavy-footed but accomplished stalkers, Grevan decided. The local species of king-beast probably, who knew the need of a long, cautious approach before their final rush upon nimbler prey—he filed the fact away for future consideration that a campfire seemed to mean such prey to them.
On a rocky ridge two hundred yards above the fire, the stalkers came to a sudden halt. He had an impression of great, gray, shadowy forms and two sets of staring red eyes.
It would be interesting, he thought, to know just what sort of intuitive alarms went off in the more intelligent forms of alien carnivores whenever they got their first good look at the Group. The cubs still hadn’t moved, but the visitors seemed to have come almost immediately to the conclusion that they weren’t nearly as hungry now as they had thought. They were beginning a stealthy withdrawal—
And then Eliol suddenly threw back her head and laughed, a quick, rippling sound like a flash of wicked white teeth; a yell of pure mirth went up from the others, and the withdrawal turned instantly into ludicrously panicky flight.
* * *
The incident had brought them awake and put them into a talkative mood. It might be a good time to find out what they really thought of their chances of breaking free of CG tomorrow. Grevan sat up, waiting for an opening in an impassioned argument that had started up on the other side of the fire.
There had been a bet involved, it seemed, in that impulsive five-fold plunge into the ocean on landing. Last one in to be tomorrow’s K.P.—and Vernet had come out on the sticky end of the bet.
Everybody else agreed thoughtfully that it just hadn’t been Vernet’s day. Vernet appeared unreconciled.
“You knew my gun belt was stuck again,” she accused Eliol. “You had it planned so I’d be last!”
Eliol, having postponed her own turn at the Group’s least-favored chore for one day by issuing the challenge, permitted herself a gentle chuckle.
“Teach you to keep your equipment in regulation condition! You didn’t have to take me up on it. Weyer didn’t.”
“Well, anyway,” said Vernet, “Lancey will help Vernet live through it. Won’t he?”
“Uh-huh!” beamed Lancey. “You bet!”
“How he dotes!” Eliol remarked critically. “Sometimes it gets a little disgusting. Take Cusat there—flat on his back as usual. There’s a boy who shows some decent restraint. Nobody would guess that he’s actually a slave to my slightest whim.”
Cusat, stretched out on the sand nearby, opened one eye to look at her. “Dream on, little one!” he muttered and let the eye fall shut again.
The others were off on another subject. There had been an alien awareness, Grevan gathered, which had followed the five swimmers about in the water. Not a hostile one, but one that wondered about them—recognized them as a very strange sort of new life, and was somewhat afraid. “They were thinking they were so very—edible!” Eliol said and laughed. “Perhaps they knew the swim was making us hungry! Anyway they kept warning one another to stay out of our sight!”
“Plankton eaters,” Lancey added lazily, “but apparently very fast swimmers. Anyone else get anything on them?”
“Cave builders,” said Freckles, from behind Weyer, only a few feet from Grevan. She propped herself up on an elbow to point across the fire. “That big drop-off to the west! They’ve tunneled it out below the surface. I don’t think they’re phosphorescent themselves, but they’ve got some method of keeping light in the caves—bacterial, possibly. And they cultivate some form of plankton inside.”
“Sounds as if they might be intelligent enough to permit direct contact,” Grevan remarked, and realized in the moment of silence that followed that it must have been an hour since he’d last said a word.
“They’re easily that,” Freckles agreed. Her small face, shaded by the rather shapeless white hat she favored, turned to him. “If Klim hadn’t been cooking, I’d have called her to give it a try. I was afraid of frightening them off myself.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” promised Klim, who had much the deftest touch of them all for delicate ambassadorial work.
* * *
There was another pause then—it might have been the word “tomorrow.”
“Going to make contact tomorrow, Grevan?” Freckles inquired in a light, clear voice, as if it had just occurred to her.
“Unless,” nodded Grevan, “somebody has a better idea.”
It seemed nobody did until Muscles grumbled, “It’s CG who’s likely to have the ideas. If it were up to me, I’d just smash that set, tonight!”
Grevan looked at him thoughtfully. “Anybody else feel the same way?”
They shook their heads. “You go ahead, Grevan.” That was Weyer’s calm voice. “We’ll just see what happens. Think there’s a chance of jolting any worthwhile information out of them at this stage?”
“Not if they’re on guard,” Grevan admitted. “But I think it will be safest for us if we’re right there when it dawns on CG that this Exploration Group has resigned from its service! And it might prod them into some kind of informative reaction—”
“Well, I still think,” Muscles began, looking worriedly at Klim, “that we . . . oh, well!”
“Vote’s eight to one,” Klim said crisply.
“I know it,” growled Muscles and shut up.
The rest seemed to have become disinterested in the matter again—a flock of not quite human cubs, nearly grown and already enormously capable of looking out for themselves. They’d put themselves into the best possible position to face the one enemy they’d never been able to meet on his own ground.
And until things started happening, they weren’t going to worry about them.
* * *
A few of them had drifted off to the beach below, when Grevan saw Klim stop beside Cusat and speak to him. Cusat opened both eyes and got to his feet, and Klim followed him over to Grevan.
“Klim thinks Albert is beginning to look puny again,” Cusat announced. “Probably nothing much to it, but how about coming along and helping us diagnose?”
The Group’s three top biologists adjourned to the ship, with Muscles, whose preferred field was almost-pure mathematics, trailing along just for company. They found Albert II quiescent in vitro—as close a thing to a self-restoring six-foot sirloin steak as ever had been developed.
“He’s quit assimilating, and he’s even a shade off-color,” Klim pointed out, a little anxiously.
They debated his requirements at some length. As a menu staple, Albert was hard to beat, but unfortunately he was rather dainty in his demands. Chemical balances, temperatures, radiations, flows of stimulant, and nutritive currents—all had to be just so; and his notions of what was just so were subject to change without notice. If they weren’t catered to regardless, he languished and within the week perversely died. At least, the particular section of him that was here would die. As an institution, of course, he might go on growing and nourishing his Central Government clients immortally.
Muscles might have been of help in working out the delicate calculations involved in solving Albert’s current problems, but when they looked round for him, they found him blinking at a steady flow of invisible symbols over one wall of the tank room, while his lips moved in a rapid, low muttering; and they knew better than to interrupt. He had gone off on impromptu calculations of his own, from which he would emerge eventually with some useful bit of information or other, though ten to one it would have nothing to do with Albert. Meanwhile, he would be grouchy and useless if roused to direct his attention to anything below the level of an emergency.
They reset the currents finally and, at Cusat’s suggestion, trimmed Albert around the edges. Finding himself growing lighter, he suddenly began to absorb nourishment again at a very satisfactory rate.
“That did it, I guess,” Cusat said, pleased. He glanced at the small pile of filets they’d sliced off. “Might as well have a barbecue now.”
“Run along and get it started,” Grevan suggested. “I’ll be with you as soon as I get Albert buttoned up.”
Klim regarded Muscles reflectively. “Just nudge my genius awake when you’re ready to come,” she instructed Grevan. “He looks so happy right now I don’t want to disturb him.”
* * *
It was some minutes later, while Grevan was carefully tightening down a seal valve, that Muscles suddenly yawned and announced, “Thirty-seven point oh two four hours! Checks either way, all right, boss. Say—where’s Klim gone?”
“Down to the beach, I suppose.” Grevan didn’t look up. He could find out later what Muscles was referring to. “Drowned dead by now, for all you seem to care!” he added cruelly.