He tried for some seconds to make himself disbelieve her, but it was clear that she spoke the truth. He looked at their faces, addressed Odun. “You used our language. How did you learn it?”
“I’ve made a study of the Malatlo-Raceel relationship for some years,” Odun said. “The last ship to return from the system provided me with language tapes.” He looked at his companions. “I believe Azard has told us as much as we need or wish to know.”
They nodded.
“Then,” Odun resumed, “it’s time to take the final steps in this.”
His hand moved. And darkness closed in with a rush around Azard.
He came awake again presently and looked about in dimness. He was seated in another chair, again unable to move his limbs or body, and the three were busy with something not far from him.
After some seconds he realized they were in the atmosphere cruiser. The screen showed the surface of one of the planetary oceans. The two eld cases stood near it.
Azard discovered he could speak and asked aloud, “What are you doing?”
They looked around. Griliom said matter-of-factly, “We’ll dispose of the elds here.”
In spite of everything, Azard felt a shock of incredulous rage.
But at least, he thought, these three would also die! Released simultaneously, the eld hordes would struggle furiously for possession of their bodies as well as his own. And neither the inhabiting elds nor the physical bodies could survive such an onslaught.
He said, “You have no authority to make such a decision!”
“We do have that authority, Azard,” said Odun. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Then,” Azard told him, “you’re worse than we ever were. We destroyed only the population of a world. You’re taking it on yourselves to destroy an intelligent species.”
They didn’t respond immediately. They were watching the screen now, and Azard was able to shift his head far enough to watch it too. After a moment the rim of a glowing yellow formation came drifting into the screen. He realized it was a spawning swarm of billions of tiny sea creatures such as the one they’d seen earlier that night.
Griliom said without looking around at him, “Down there is an endless supply of bodies which have neither elds nor intelligence. I’ve set the controls on these cases so that the Raceel elds will be released within a minute after the cases strike the surface of the water. They’ll emerge and enter host bodies in which they can live for something less than a standard year—the life span of these creatures. And then they’ll die with them. That’s the way we’re settling this.”
Odun added, “But you’re mistaken in one basic respect, Azard. We’re preserving the stored Raceel ova, and a new generation will be raised from them under our supervision. Only some terrible necessity would force us to destroy a species. So your species will not die. Its history, its traditions and its attitudes will die.”
Azard asked, “And what are we if not our history, our traditions, and our attitudes?”
The humans didn’t reply, and he wasn’t certain then whether he’d asked the question aloud. He discovered he was indifferent about the matter, and that the question itself had been an indifferent one. Then he noticed that the cruiser had moved close to the surface of the sea, and that someone was opening a hatch. The eld cases were dropped out, and the hatch closed again.
It occurred to Azard that he had no emotional feeling about this or about anything else. By their skills, they’d drained his emotions from him. He realized next that his senses were dimming and that he was dying. But he remained indifferent to that, too. He decided that in their way they were merciful.
Then he died.
Down below, the open eld cases bobbed in the glowing water. The elds, conscious and terribly hungry for physical existence, discovered abruptly that they had been released. They flashed out of the cases and found life in abundance about them. They entered, took possession, affixed themselves. Perhaps for an instant some of them retained awareness enough to understand they had become joined to a form of life which provided no vehicle for consciousness. But then, with nothing to give it support, their own consciousness drained away.
However, they would live on for a while. For something less than a standard year.
Trouble Tide
I
When Danrich Parrol, general manager of the Giard Pharmaceutical Station on Nandy-Cline, stepped hurriedly out of an aircab before the executive offices, he found Dr. Nile Etland’s blazing blue PanElemental already parked on the landing strip next to the building entrance.
Parrol pushed through the door, asked the receptionist, “When did she get here, and where is she now?”
The girl grinned, checked her watch. “She arrived four minutes ago and went straight into Mr. Weldrow’s office. They called in Freasie immediately. Welcome home, Mr. Parrol! We’ve had a dull time since you left—at least until this thing came up.”
Parrol smiled briefly, said, “Put any calls for me on Weldrow’s extension, will you?” and went down the hall. At the far end, he opened the door to an office. The three people standing in front of a wall map looked around at him. Ilium Weldrow, the assistant manager, appeared relieved to see him.
“Glad you’re here, Dan!” he said heartily. “It seems that . . . ”
“Dan, it’s a mess!” Dr. Nile Etland interrupted. The head of Giard’s station laboratory appeared to have dressed hastily after Parrol called her at the spaceport hotel—she would have had to, to show up here within ten minutes. Her coppery hair was still piled high on her head; the intent face with its almost too perfectly chiseled features was innocent of make-up. She nodded at the heavily built woman beside Weldrow. “Apparently it isn’t an epidemic. Freasie says there’s been no trace of disease in the specimens and samples that came through the lab.”
“Naturally not!” the lab’s chief technician said sourly. “If the material hadn’t been absolutely healthy, it would have been returned with a warning to the ranches that supplied it.”
“Of course. And there’ve been no reports of sea beef carcasses seen floating around,” Nile Etland went on.
Parrol asked, “Exactly what does seem to have happened? The news report I picked up at the hotel just now didn’t tell much, but it didn’t sound like an epidemic. The man talked of `mysterious wholesale disappearances’ among the herds in this area. The way he put it almost implied that one or the other of the local ranchers is suspected of rustling stock.”
Nile turned to the wall map. “That’s darn improbable, Dan! Here, let me show you. The trouble started there . . . a hundred and fifty miles up the coast. Eight days ago. Throughout the week the ranches south of that point have been hit progressively.
“The worst of it is that the estimated losses are going up fast! It was five to ten per cent in the first herds affected. But the report this morning was that Lipyear’s Oceanic is missing almost sixty per cent of its stock.”
“Lipyear’s? Sixty per cent!” Parrol repeated incredulously. “The newscast said nothing of that.”
“I called the Southeastern Ranchers Association on my way here,” Nile told him. “That’s the figure Machon gave me. They haven’t put it out yet. It’s a big jump over yesterday’s estimate, and Machon seemed to be in a state of shock about it. There are plenty of wild rumors but no useful explanation of what’s happening.”
Parrol looked at Weldrow, asked, “What have you done so far, Weldrow?”
The assistant manager frowned. Nile Etland said impatiently, “Weldrow’s done exactly nothing!” She turned to the door, added, “Come on, Freasie! Let’s get things set up in the lab. Be back in ten minutes, Dan.”
Ilium Weldrow was a chubby, pink-faced man, Parrol’s senior by ten years, whose feelings were easily bruised. As an assistant manager on a world like Nandy-Cline he was pretty much of a dead loss; but a distant relative on Giard’s board of directors had made it impossible to ship him quietly back to the Federation’s megacities where he should have been more in his element.
He was disturbed now by Nile Etland’s comment, and Parrol spent a few minutes explaining that the coastal ranchers—particularly the ones under contract to Giard—depended on the company’s facilities and expensively trained trouble-shooters to help them out in emergencies . . . and that if anything serious should happen to the local sea beef herds, Giard would drop a fortune in the medicinal extracts obtained by its laboratory from the glands of the specific strain of sea beef grown on Nandy-Cline and obtainable nowhere else.
Weldrow seemed to get the last point; his expression shifted from petulance to concern.
“But, Dan, this problem . . . whatever it turns out to be . . . appears to affect only this area of the eastern coast! What is to keep us from getting the required materials from sea beef ranches on the other side of the continent?”