It was simple enough. Cord didn’t look at the others. He was still burning inside. He watched the reed beds move past and open out, giving him glimpses of the misty, yellow and green and blue expanse of the brackish Bay ahead. Behind the mist, to the west, were the Yoger Straits, tricky and ugly water when the tides were running; and beyond the Straits lay the open sea, the great Zlanti Deep, which was another world entirely and one of which he hadn’t seen much as yet.
Suddenly he was sick with the full realization that he wasn’t likely to see any more of it now! Vanadia was a pleasant enough planet; but the wildness and strangeness were long gone from it. It wasn’t Sutang.
Grayan called from beside Dane, “What’s the best route from here into the farms, Cord?”
“The big channel to the right,” he answered. He added somewhat sullenly, “We’re headed for it!”
Grayan came over to him. “The Regent doesn’t want to see all of it,” she said, lowering her voice. “The algae and plankton beds first. Then as much of the mutated grains as we can show her in about three hours. Steer for the ones that have been doing best, and you’ll keep Nirmond happy!”
She gave him a conspiratorial wink. Cord looked after her uncertainly. You couldn’t tell from her behavior that anything was wrong. Maybe—
He had a flare of hope. It was hard not to like the Team people, even when they were being rock-headed about their Regulations. Perhaps it was that purpose that gave them their vitality and drive, even though it made them remorseless about themselves and everyone else. Anyway, the day wasn’t over yet. He might still redeem himself in the Regent’s opinion. Something might happen—
Cord had a sudden cheerful, if improbable, vision of some Bay monster plunging up on the raft with snapping jaws, and of himself alertly blowing out what passed for the monster’s brains before anyone else—Nirmond, in particular—was even aware of the threat. The Bay monsters shunned Grandpa, of course, but there might be ways of tempting one of them.
So far, Cord realized, he’d been letting his feelings control him. It was time to start thinking!
Grandpa first. So he’d sprouted—green vines and red buds, purpose unknown, but with no change observable in his behavior-patterns otherwise. He was the biggest raft in this end of the Bay, though all of them had been growing steadily in the two years since Cord had first seen one. Sutang’s seasons changed slowly; its year was somewhat more than five Earth years long. The first Team members to land here hadn’t yet seen a full year pass.
Grandpa then was showing a seasonal change. The other rafts, not quite so far developed, would be reacting similarly a little later. Plant animals—they might be blossoming, preparing to propagate.
“Grayan,” he called, “how do the rafts get started? When they’re small, I mean.”
Grayan looked pleased; and Cord’s hopes went up a little more. Grayan was on his side again anyway!
“Nobody knows yet,” she said. “We were just talking about it. About half of the coastal marsh-fauna of the continent seems to go through a preliminary larval stage in the sea.” She nodded at the red buds on the raft’s cone. “It looks as if Grandpa is going to produce flowers and let the wind or tide take the seeds out through the Straits.”
It made sense. It also knocked out Cord’s still half-held hope that the change in Grandpa might turn out to be drastic enough, in some way, to justify his reluctance to get on board. Cord studied Grandpa’s armored head carefully once more—unwilling to give up that hope entirely. There were a series of vertical gummy black slits between the armor plates, which hadn’t been in evidence two weeks ago either. It looked as if Grandpa were beginning to come apart at the seams. Which might indicate that the rafts, big as they grew to be, didn’t outlive a full seasonal cycle, but came to flower at about this time of Sutang’s year and died. However, it was a safe bet that Grandpa wasn’t going to collapse into senile decay before they completed their trip today.
Cord gave up on Grandpa. The other notion returned to him— Perhaps he could coax an obliging Bay monster into action that would show the Regent he was no sissy!
Because the monsters were there, all right.
Kneeling at the edge of the platform and peering down into the wine-colored, clear water of the deep channel they were moving through, Cord could see a fair selection of them at almost any moment.
Some five or six snappers, for one thing. Like big, flattened crayfish, chocolate-brown mostly, with green and red spots on their carapaced backs. In some areas they were so thick you’d wonder what they found to live on, except that they ate almost anything, down to chewing up the mud in which they squatted. However, they preferred their food in large chunks and alive, which was one reason you didn’t go swimming in the Bay. They would attack a boat on occasion; but the excited manner in which the ones he saw were scuttling off toward the edges of the channel showed they wanted to have nothing to do with a big moving raft.
Dotted across the bottom were two-foot round holes which looked vacant at the moment. Normally, Cord knew, there would be a head filling each of those holes. The heads consisted mainly of triple sets of jaws, held open patiently like so many traps to grab at anything that came within range of the long, wormlike bodies behind the heads. But Grandpa’s passage, waving his stingers like transparent pennants through the water, had scared the worms out of sight, too.
Otherwise, mostly schools of small stuff—and then a flash of wicked scarlet, off to the left behind the raft, darting out from the reeds! Turning its needle-nose into their wake.
Cord watched it without moving. He knew that creature, though it was rare in the Bay and hadn’t been classified. Swift, vicious—alert enough to snap swamp bugs out of the air as they fluttered across the surface. And he’d tantalized one with fishing tackle once into leaping up on a moored raft, where it had flung itself about furiously until he was able to shoot it.
No fishing tackle. A handkerchief might just do it, if he cared to risk an arm—
“What fantastic creatures!” Dane’s voice just behind him.
“Yellowheads,” said Nirmond. “They’ve got a high utility rating. Keep down the bugs.”
Cord stood up casually. It was no time for tricks! The reed bed to their right was thick with yellowheads, a colony of them. Vaguely froggy things, man-sized and better. Of all the creatures he’d discovered in the Bay, Cord liked them least. The flabby, sacklike bodies clung with four thin limbs to the upper sections of the twenty-foot reeds that lined the channel. They hardly ever moved, but their huge, bulging eyes seemed to take in everything that went on about them. Every so often, a downy swamp bug came close enough; and a yellowhead would open its vertical, enormous, tooth-lined slash of a mouth, extend the whole front of its face like a bellows in a flashing strike; and the bug would be gone. They might be useful, but Cord hated them.
“Ten years from now we should know what the cycle of coastal life is like,” Nirmond said. “When we set up the Yoger Bay Station there were no yellowheads here. They came the following year. Still with traces of the oceanic larval form; but the metamorphosis was almost complete. About twelve inches long—”
Dane remarked that the same pattern was duplicated endlessly elsewhere. The Regent was inspecting the yellowhead colony with field glasses; she put them down now, looked at Cord, and smiled. “How far to the farms?”
“About twenty minutes.”
“The key,” Nirmond said, “seems to be the Zlanti Basin. It must be almost a soup of life in spring.”
“It is,” nodded Dane, who had been here in Sutang’s spring, four Earth years ago. “It’s beginning to look as if the Basin alone might justify colonization. The question is still—” she gestured towards the yellowheads— “how do creatures like that get there?”
They walked off toward the other side of the raft, arguing about ocean currents. Cord might have followed. But something splashed back of them, off to the left and not too far back. He stayed, watching.
After a moment, he saw the big yellowhead. It had slipped down from its reedy perch, which was what had caused the splash. Almost submerged at the water line, it stared after the raft with huge pale-green eyes. To Cord, it seemed to look directly at him. In that moment, he knew for the first time why he didn’t like yellowheads. There was something very like intelligence in that look, an alien calculation. In creatures like that, intelligence seemed out of place. What use could they have for it?