“What I’m going to do tomorrow,” Thilling resumed, “is a pure gamble, but if I’m right in my guess, then … But wait a moment. My new apprentice is pretty quick on the uptake, so let’s ask him. Awb, in my position, what would you do?”
Awb’s pulsations seemed to come to a complete halt. Here in the dark his mind felt sluggish, and with his maw empty the problem was worse yet. Struggling with all his mental forces, fighting to distinguish what he could rationally justify from what was seeping up from wild imagination or even the utterly logic-free level of dreamness, he reviewed everything he had been told at the observatory site, and what he had seen on the way, and what Thilling had had time to teach him…
The silence stretched and stretched. Eventually, reverting to her usual mood, Phrallet said, “Not much use asking him, was it? Now if you’d asked me—”
“But I didn’t,” said the picturist with point. “Well, young’un?”
That insult from his budder had been like dawn breaking inside his mind. Awb said explosively, “Take some of your leaves and just lay them around the dam, see what shows on them without being put in a fixer!”
“Well, well, well!” Thilling said. “You got it! It looks as though that’s the only way to detect the effects of the poison short of letting something be killed by it. I like Byra’s idea that it’s a kind of burning, I like the idea that it may have something to do with hot rocks and volcanoes, and I don’t like the idea that it’s getting to my insides without my being able to sense it. But that’s about all we’ll be able to do on this trip, isn’t it, Drotninch?”
“I’m afraid so,” the scholar confirmed. “We’ll have to bring safe food not only for ourselves but for the mounts on our next visit, and someone is going to have to travel all the way to the headwaters of the warmest stream, and one way and another I’m not sure we can tackle the job properly before next year. And—Lesh—you know what I’m going to have to say next, don’t you?”
“The work we’ve done at the observatory has gone for nothing,” was the bitter answer. “It will have to be sited somewhere else.”
She clenched her mantle tight around the branch she lay on, like a mariner preparing for a gale. They left her alone with her thoughts. But it was with deliberate loudness that Drotninch continued, “Still, one all-important purpose has been served. We have found something totally new on our own planet, which we sometimes imagine to have been exhaustively explored. It’s well for us to be reminded now and then that the unforeseen can break out under our very pads. If we don’t keep that constantly in mind, what’s going to become of us when we venture into space?”
Very softly, and for Awb alone, Thilling said, “Spoken like one of the Jingfired…! Think about that, young’un. You still haven’t told me what I’m most waiting to hear.”
She stretched out and parted the overhanging leaves, and they all gazed up, except for Lesh, at the beautiful and terrifying fires of the Major Cluster, where since tune immemorial new stars had, slowly and implacably, crept into view.
VIII
“Might as well use my entire stock of leaves on this,” Thilling told Awb as dawn broke. “If anything more important turns up during the trip, I shan’t want to know … We’ll time the job by the sun; every score degrees it moves, we bring in one batch of ’em. Leave the bower set up so I can develop them as they come in.”
Still baffled by the implied question the picturist expected him to answer, Awb helped her to lay out unexposed sheets by groups of five along the dam. But he found himself far more fascinated by what was happening in and on the lake. It was impossible to see more than a padlong below the surface, but here and there bubbles rose, and drifts of steam puffed up, and peculiar pale blue water-walkers scuttled hither and thither, avoiding the hottest spots but far more active than their cousins on cool rivers. As soon as Thilling let him go, he gathered up a few and offered them to Byra, who was packing every available container with specimens of flora and fauna.