Cord settled back unhappily as the treadcar lurched into motion. Nirmond suspected he’d used Grandpa for one of his unauthorized tours of the area, and Nirmond was quite right.
“I understand you’re an expert with these rafts, Cord,” Dane said from beside him. “Grayan told me we couldn’t find a better steersman, or pilot, or whatever you call it, for our trip today.”
“I can handle them,” Cord said, perspiring. “They don’t give you any trouble!” He didn’t feel he’d made a good impression on the Regent so far. Dane was a young, handsome-looking woman with an easy way of talking and laughing, but she wasn’t the head of the Sutang Colonial Team for nothing. She looked quite capable of shipping out anybody whose record wasn’t up to par.
“There’s one big advantage our beasties have over a skipboat, too,” Nirmond remarked from the front seat. “You don’t have to worry about a snapper trying to climb on board with you!” He went on to describe the stinging ribbon-tentacles the rafts spread around them under water to discourage creatures that might make a meal off their tender underparts. The snappers and two or three other active and aggressive species of the Bay hadn’t yet learned it was foolish to attack armed human beings in a boat, but they would skitter hurriedly out of the path of a leisurely perambulating raft.
Cord was happy to be ignored for the moment. The Regent, Nirmond, and Grayan were all Earth people, which was true of most of the members of the Team; and Earth people made him uncomfortable, particularly in groups. Vanadia, his own homeworld, had barely graduated from the status of Earth colony itself, which might explain the difference. All the Earth people he’d met so far seemed dedicated to what Grayan Mahoney called the Big Picture, while Nirmond usually spoke of it as “Our Purpose Here.” They acted strictly in accordance with their Team Regulations—sometimes, in Cord’s opinion, quite insanely. Because now and then the Regulations didn’t quite cover a new situation and then somebody was likely to get killed. In which case, the Regulations would be modified promptly, but Earth people didn’t seem otherwise disturbed by such events.
Grayan had tried to explain it to Cord:
“We can’t really ever know in advance what a new world is going to be like! And once we’re there, there’s too much to do, in the time we’ve got, to study it inch by inch. You get your job done, and you take a chance. But if you stick by the Regulations you’ve got the best chances of surviving anybody’s been able to figure out for you—”
Cord felt he preferred to just use good sense and not let Regulations or the job get him into a situation he couldn’t figure out for himself.
To which Grayan replied impatiently that he hadn’t yet got the Big Picture—
The treadcar swung around and stopped, and Grayan stood up in the front seat, pointing. “That’s Grandpa, over there!”
Dane also stood up and whistled softly, apparently impressed by Grandpa’s fifty-foot spread. Cord looked around in surprise. He was pretty sure this was several hundred yards from the spot where he’d left the big raft two weeks ago; and as Nirmond said, they didn’t usually move about by themselves.
Puzzled, he followed the others down a narrow path to the water, hemmed in by tree-sized reeds. Now and then he got a glimpse of Grandpa’s swimming platform, the rim of which just touched the shore. Then the path opened out, and he saw the whole raft lying in sunlit, shallow water; and he stopped short, startled.
Nirmond was about to step up on the platform, ahead of Dane.
“Wait!” Cord shouted. His voice sounded squeaky with alarm. “Stop!”
He came running forward.
They had frozen where they stood, looked around swiftly. Then glanced back at Cord coming up. They were well trained.
“What’s the matter, Cord?” Nirmond’s voice was quiet and urgent.
“Don’t get on that raft—it’s changed!” Cord’s voice sounded wobbly, even to himself. “Maybe it’s not even Grandpa—”
He saw he was wrong on the last point before he’d finished the sentence. Scattered along the rim of the raft were discolored spots left by a variety of heat-guns, one of which had been his own. It was the way you goaded the sluggish and mindless things into motion. Cord pointed at the cone-shaped central projection. “There—his head! He’s sprouting!”
“Sprouting?” the station manager repeated uncomprehendingly. Grandpa’s head, as befitted his girth, was almost twelve feet high and equally wide. It was armor-plated like the back of a saurian to keep off plant-suckers, but two weeks ago it had been an otherwise featureless knob, like those on all other rafts. Now scores of long, kinky, leafless vines had grown out from all surfaces of the cone, like green wires. Some were drawn up like tightly coiled springs, others trailed limply to the platform and over it. The top of the cone was dotted with angry red buds, rather like pimples, which hadn’t been there before either. Grandpa looked unhealthy.
“Well,” Nirmond said, “so it is. Sprouting!” Grayan made a choked sound. Nirmond glanced at Cord as if puzzled. “Is that all that was bothering you, Cord?”
“Well, sure!” Cord began excitedly. He hadn’t caught the significance of the word “all”; his hackles were still up, and he was shaking. “None of them ever—”
Then he stopped. He could tell by their faces that they hadn’t got it. Or rather, that they’d got it all right but simply weren’t going to let it change their plans. The rafts were classified as harmless, according to the Regulations. Until proved otherwise, they would continue to be regarded as harmless. You didn’t waste time quibbling with the Regulations—apparently even if you were the Planetary Regent. You didn’t feel you had the time to waste.
He tried again. “Look—” he began. What he wanted to tell them was that Grandpa with one unknown factor added wasn’t Grandpa any more. He was an unpredictable, oversized lifeform, to be investigated with cautious thoroughness till you knew what the unknown factor meant.
But it was no use. They knew all that. He stared at them helplessly. “I—”
Dane turned to Nirmond. “Perhaps you’d better check,” she said. She didn’t add,—”to reassure the boy!” but that was what she meant.
Cord felt himself flushing terribly. They thought he was scared—which he was—and they were feeling sorry for him, which they had no right to do. But there was nothing he could say or do now except watch Nirmond walk steadily across the platform. Grandpa shivered slightly a few times, but the rafts always did that when someone first stepped on them. The station manager stopped before one of the kinky sprouts, touched it, and then gave it a tug. He reached up and poked at the lowest of the budlike growths. “Odd-looking things!” he called back. He gave Cord another glance. “Well, everything seems harmless enough, Cord. Coming aboard, everyone?”
It was like dreaming a dream in which you yelled and yelled at people and couldn’t make them hear you! Cord stepped up stiff-legged on the platform behind Dane and Grayan. He knew exactly what would have happened if he’d hesitated even a moment. One of them would have said in a friendly voice, careful not to let it sound too contemptuous: “You don’t have to come along if you don’t want to, Cord!”
Grayan had unholstered her heat-gun and was ready to start Grandpa moving out into the channels of the Yoger Bay.
Cord hauled out his own heat-gun and said roughly, “I was to do that!”
“All right, Cord.” She gave him a brief, impersonal smile, as if he were someone she’d met for the first time that day, and stood aside.
They were so infuriatingly polite! He was, Cord decided, as good as on his way back to Vanadia right now.
For a while, Cord almost hoped that something awesome and catastrophic would happen promptly to teach the Team people a lesson. But nothing did. As always, Grandpa shook himself vaguely and experimentally when he felt the heat on one edge of the platform and then decided to withdraw from it, all of which was standard procedure. Under the water, out of sight, were the raft’s working sections: short, thick leaf-structures shaped like paddles and designed to work as such, along with the slimy nettle-streamers which kept the vegetarians of the Yoger Bay away, and a jungle of hair roots through which Grandpa sucked nourishments from the mud and the sluggish waters of the Bay, and with which he also anchored himself.
The paddles started churning, the platform quivered, the hair roots were hauled out of the mud; and Grandpa was on his ponderous way.
Cord switched off the heat, reholstered his gun, and stood up. Once in motion, the rafts tended to keep traveling unhurriedly for quite a while. To stop them, you gave them a touch of heat along their leading edge; and they could be turned in any direction by using the gun lightly on the opposite side of the platform.