“Oh, well, it is not all that essential,” she said, now taking the role of comforter. “After all, there is no counterfeiting me,” she said, giggling as she swept her hand down her obviously alien length.
“Yes, but the glyphs … they might establish your lineage or rank or something.”
“We have holos of them in the files. For that matter, I can draw them quite well, you know.”
“Yes, petal, I know you can.” Calum absently patted her arm. But he, too, was shaken by the disappearance of the pod-not crucial in itself, but what else might they have overlooked in their eagerness to get away?
The second shock to their seemingly smooth escape was the failure of the legume crops to sprout any pods as they should have done by this point in their growth, followed the next day by a decided yellowing in the stalks of alfalfa. Acorna spent a good deal of time on the agri channel and the microscope, trying to determine why that crop was failing.
“Somehow, the valve to the nutrient reservoir has been tampered with. Damn it.”
Her mild cussword surprised Calum enough, but the fact that she had not spotted the problem earlier was even more unnerving to him. Acorna was usually instantly aware of the slightest change in atmosphere or water.
“It’s just fed the entire stock of trace elements into the water supply at once-zinc sulfate, copper sulfate … no wonder the chard looks so sick!” Acorna sighed deeply.
“Something the matter with your famous nose?” Calum asked, since Acorna could often just smell an imbalance.
“The ship has many new smells, most of them chemical. I guess I thought it was just normal.” She paused, thinking. “Maybe we should listen to Provola’s entire message. ‘Ace* … where you shut her off, could have been the beginning of ‘accident’ as well as the start of my name.”
“So we will now dutifully listen.” Calum keyed in the interrupted message.
Urgent you return to Dehoney. Supervisors report lists a. broken valve in the hydroponics’ unit, which was to have been repaired first thing this morning. Only you left before they couQ repair It. There was a hint of humor in that final sentence, and Acorna winced. Advise immediate return to effect such minor repairs which cou0 totally Damage entire hydroponics ano grazings if not maae. It won’t take long.
The plea was unmistakable even in Provola’s unmistakably prosaic tone.
“Now, now, petal,” Calum reassured her. “At least it was a mistake.”
“Like unloading my pod?” Acorna asked, then thinned her lips over her front teeth.
“How bad is it?” Calum asked anxiously.
“Well, the chard could be toxic. The old, tough spinach leaves”-Acorna wrinkled her nose-“should be okay since they were fully grown when we left, and one vat of timothy was well grown before the trace-element dump, but the rest I’m not sure about. I’ll have to purify the rest of the ‘ponies … and the alfalfa will have to go; if it’s picked up even a small percentage of that zinc, I’ll come out in spots.”
“Now just a moment,” Cal said soothingly, and twirled his chair around to the astrogation-control panel. A flash of knowing fingers across the touch pads, and he beamed. “We’re not that far, spatially speaking, from Rushima. We can stop there … two, three days. Basic agri world, colonized by the Shenjemi Federation. It’ll have everything we could possibly need.”
“Well, I suppose I can exist on what’s available,” Acorna said with a sigh. She swallowed hard and scratched a bit, thinking about how near she’d been to chewing her way through her original notion of lunch-a long swath down the alfalfa bed.
SI ~~ he unused ‘ponies tank was cold and hard. The lightweight protective mat that covered it and hid Markel also blocked the warmth of the sunlamps that fed the plants in the working tanks with a steady diet of golden, artificially balanced light. He had padded his sleeping place as best he could with fragments of worn-out mats, but it was still so cold that he was unable to take advantage of the space he’d exulted in when he found this hideout. He slept, when he slept at all, curled around himself like a sprout coiled within its pod, trying to hold on to the warmth of his own body. It was so dark and cold under the mats … almost as cold as the empty space that surrounded the Haven… . He was not, he told himself firmly, going to think about that. He curled up, arms wrapped around his knees, and drifted off into an uneasy doze. The hard white surface of the tank was soft, he was floating, spinning, and the stars floated around his head. … No, they didn’t. If you were spaced without protective suiting, your eyes and everything else exploded, and you couldn’t see anything!