“Not a complete dead stop,” Wam objected. “Another such calamity, and…!”
“Now you’re arguing for Galdu’s most extreme ideas!” crowed Ugant. “A moment ago—Still, that’s of no significance right now. What is important is that once again young Chybee here has clawed hold of something most people overlook even when they have access to the evidence. I’m impressed by this girl, you know!”
“Save the compliments,” Wam grunted. “Stick to the point she originally set out to make. Yes, Chybee, there was a change in us too, and the only reason we can conceive for it is that some of our ancestors must have arranged it. Compared with that gigantic achievement, what use are our petty undertakings unless they result in the exportation to space of our entire culture?”
“I thought we were going to sink our differences for the time being!” Ugant began.
But Chybee had already burst out, “How? How was it done?”
“We think most of the food-plants we rely on had been modified,” came Ugant’s sober answer. “We think they had been so far modified that merely by eating them we arrested part of what until then had been our normal evolutionary adaptation. We think—some people think, in deference to Wam’s reservations, but I’m an admirer of Galdu—that had it not been for this most important of all inventions, we would have long ago become extinct. If you and I met one of our male ancestors right now, for instance, we couldn’t bud together. We’d been used for generations to believing that evolution took place over countless score-score years. Suddenly it turns out that someone, long ago, must have ensured a change in us such that next tune a crisis of habitability occurred on this planet—”
“Stop! Stop!” Chybee cried, and a moment later added in an apologetic tone, “You did tell me that if you started to use too many technical terms…”
Ugant relaxed with a mantle-wide grin.
“Point well taken,” she murmured. “Well, a crisis of habitability is what follows, for instance, a meteorite fall or an ice-age. What, with deference and respect to our forepadders, we are trying to avoid by creating such research projects as the one you can now see yonder.”
She gestured with one claw, and Chybee turned her eye as the scudder relaxed into a crotch at journey’s end. What met it dismayed and baffled her. Across a broad and level plain flanked by low hills, not familiar plants but objects unlike anything she had encountered before extended nearly to the skyline.
“All this has been created,” Ugant said, “because what saved us last time may all too easily not save us twice.”
V
“How much do you know about the dual principles of flight?” Ugant inquired of Chybee as they padded between countless huge and glistening globes, each larger than any unmodified bladder she had ever seen. Because pumplekins were forcing them full of pure wetgas, and there was inevitable leakage—though it was not poisonous—their surroundings were making the girl’s weather-sense queasy. Sensing her distress, the professor went on to spell out information most of which in fact she knew.
“The first clues must have come from cloudcrawlers so long ago we have no record of it. Archeological records indicate that we also owe to the study of natural floaters the discovery that air is a mixture of several elements. Of course, it was a long time before the lightest could be separated out by more efficient means than occur in nature. And floaters drift at the mercy of the wind, so it again took a considerable while before we invented bellowers like those over there”—with a jab of one claw towards a bank of tubular creatures slumped in resting posture on a wooden rack. “How did you travel from Hulgrapuk to Slah?”
“I flew,” Chybee told her, wide-eyed with wonder.
“So you’ve seen them in operation, gulping air and tightening so as to compress it to the highest temperature they can endure, and then expelling it rearward. We got to that principle by studying the seeds emitted by certain rock-plants. But of course it’s also how we swim, isn’t it? And there’s even a possibility that our remotest ancestors may have exploited the same technique by squirting air from under their hind mantles. You know we evolved from carnivores that haunted the overgrowth of the primeval forest?”
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