THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

“Where from exactly?” she demanded. “Near the dam? But how far from it?”

Why, she was a worse precisian than Axwep trying to balance Voosla’s food-and-people accounts! But Awb preserved a courteous meekness.

“Between four and five padlongs from the thickest part of the yellow mud, where the bubbles rise most often.”

“Hmm! That’ll do very well! One thing I must give you, young’un: you have a keen eye on you. Yesterday that mutated winget, now this lot … What I’d really like to find, though, is a thriving root-mass of the spillway plants. We need some clue to resistance against this poison. Without that I don’t know what we’ll do.”

But could any resistance be found to it among the folk? What if the only possible adjustment they could make in this region was the one adopted by the natives, able to feed and breed but nothing more?

However, Awb kept such thoughts to himself. After all, the scientists did have behind them the resources of one of the planet’s greatest centers of knowledge.

It was time to take Thilling the first batch of exposed leaves. When he delivered them, she said, “Drotninch wants you to collect samples of the yellow mud. She’s going to load one of the mounts with it. I told her to make sure it’s the one furthest from my stuff.”

“How did yesterday’s images come out?” Awb inquired.

“What makes you think they came out at all?” Thilling countered sourly, but fanned a quarter-score of them for his inspection. All were weirdly streaked and smeared.

“What am I looking at?” Awb whispered.

“Something scarcely any eye has seen before,” was the muttered answer. “The telescopes they meant to build on Fangsharp Peak were supposed to gather so much light from such faint sources, no one could possibly sit and register it. So they planned to make them deliver their light to sheets like these, using astrotropes whose growth is controllable to a laqth of a clawide to keep the image steady. Oh, the effort they’ve wasted on breeding those ‘tropes!”

“You sound as though the observatory is never going to be built, not here, not anywhere!” Awb cried.

“Maybe it won’t. Because the only time I saw patternless faults like these on an unexposed image-leaf…”

She shook her mantle, returning the sheets to their pack. “It makes common-type sense, doesn’t it, to grow observatories on mountain-tops? There are four or five such, and I’m an advisor to the one near Chisp. They called me in because even when they’re using the finest leaves things go wrong. There are smudges, there are blurs, there are distortions. Often they spoil a whole dark’s work, especially when the telescope is aimed at the Major Cluster.”

“What causes them?” Awb clenched his claws.

“We think it’s tiny particles of matter blasted out from the new stars forming so far away. And they carry with them something of the terrible stellar heat. At any rate, they burn their way into the leaves. But I never imagined that something at the bottom of a valley … Hmm!”

As though struck by sudden insight, she turned back to the dark-bower, intent on developing the latest sheets.

“Go get Drotninch’s mud-samples,” she ordered. “But remember to time the next lot of leaves, too.”

Awb hastened to comply. At least, down by the dam, he could be sure of avoiding Phrallet, who still seemed to harbour the suspicion that her heat-sore pads were owed to some sinister plot by Drotninch and the other scientists.

But there was something amiss.

He fought the knowledge for a long while, digging up the yellow mud, collecting the rest of the leaves at proper intervals and bringing them to the dark-bower, making himself as useful as he could to everybody.

Then, tiny as a falling star viewed through the wrong end of a spyglass, a spark crossed his eye.

Puzzled, he looked for more, but found only a red trace across his field of vision, rather as though he had gazed too long at something very bright but very narrow, like—

Like what? There was nothing it was like at all.

Simultaneously he became aware of a sensation akin to an itch, except that it wasn’t one. It was just as annoying, but he couldn’t work out where it was, other than very vaguely. And whoever heard of an itch in red-level pith, anyway? Determinedly he went on with his work, and shortly was rewarded by spotting another mutated water-walker, not blue this time, but pure white.

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