ing the blood-smeared killers, for the ocean teemed with
‘life.
Yet it was rare to see more than six buzzards to every
wolfshark. By twos and threes, they would sate them-
selves and flap heavily away, while others took their
place, the total number in the sky remaining roughly
constant. And there were reasons why those that roamed
furthest north were followed usually only by two or
three buzzards: first, the sea offered fewer victims and
hence less carrion; second, the birds were still feeding
their young at this time of year, and could not wander
too far from their breeding-mats, the vast raft-like as-
semblies of Cyclops kelp which occurred only in a nar-
row belt around the planet’s centre.
Nonetheless, here it was: a wolfshark so big, so fast,
and so murderous that a hundred miles away from home
it was killing in quantities great enough to tip the bal-
ance in the buzzards’ dim minds on the side of greed
rather than loyalty to their offspring.
He pursed his lips and eased his harpoon-gun closer to
the firing-notch out in the forward gunwale of the skim-
mer. Would one shot do the )ob? Would it be better to
load first with an unlined harpoon, to weaken the killer,
before risking a shot with line attached and the conse-
quent danger of being dragged to the bottom? Had this
enormous beast been attacked and escaped beforeif it
had, how many times? The more often, the warier it
would be of an approaching skimmer, and the more
likely” it would be to attack even if there was easy prey
closer to hand.
He weighed possibilities with half his mind, while with
the other half he reviewed the area where he found him-
self.
This was the water-hemisphere of Cyclops, insofar as
the differentiation was meaningful. It was a shallow-sea
planetits moon being rather small, and incapable of
raising large tides either in the cnistal material or in the
oceans, although its sun exerted considerable tidal influ-
ence.
The shallowness of the sea, combined with a total vol-
ume of water close to the average for Class A planets
(those on which human beings could survive, eating
some of the vegetation and at least a few of .the native
animals) meant that the dry-land area was chopped up
into small sections. The other half of the planet boasted
some quite sizeable islands, and even a quasi-conrinent
consisting of a score of large islands linked by isthmuses.
This side was sparsely inhabited, and the largest island
within hundreds of miles was officially not even part of
Cyclops, but a repair and recreation base for the Corps
Galactica.
A certain amount of fishing; a certain amount of
scrap-reclamation; some terrafarms on islands isolated
enough to be worth maintaining as pure-human ecologi-
cal units against the risk of drifting seeds and wandering
fauna from the Cyclops-normal islands around them
that was the sum of human engagement with this hemi-
sphere, apart from solar and tidal power installations
operating with a minimum of manned supervision.
Kolb hesitated. Then he gave a harsh laugh. Was he
going to let the risk of dying alone and far from rescue
prevent him from going after this record-breaking wolf-
shark? He would never be able to face his image in the
mirror again.’
In any case, out in space he had faced death not
hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of miles from the
nearest other humans.
His mind darkened briefly. He never cared to recall
the circumstances that had brought him back from space
to a planet-bound existence, and forbidden him to com-
bine his lust for danger with valuable work. There was
nothing of value to anyone but himself in this single-
handed hunting; men had shared Cyclops with wolf-
sharks for long enough to determine the limits within
which they could be a nuisance, and if the necessity
arose, the species was culled efficiently and with preci-
sion by teams working from the air.
In fact, thought Kolb greyly, there’s damned little
value to anybody in anything I’ve done with my life
lately. Least of all to me…
Slowly, as the wing-glints came closer, following a line