“Mainly,” Parrol said, “the fact that those ranches are under contract to outfits like Agenes. Can you see Agenes loosening up on its contract rights to help out Giard?”
Again the point seemed to sink in. Even Weldrow couldn’t help being aware that Agenes Laboratories was Giard’s most prominent competitor and one with a reputation for complete ruthlessness.
“Well,” he said defensively, “I haven’t had an easy time of it during the two and a half months you and Dr. Etland were in the Hub, Dan! My duties at the station have absorbed me to the extent that I simply haven’t been able to give much attention to extraneous matters.”
Parrol told him not to worry about it. On the way out, he instructed the receptionist, “If there are any calls for me during the next few hours, I’ll be either at the Southeastern Ranchers Association or in Dr. Etland’s car. That’s the new job she had shipped out from Orado with us. She’s had its call number registered here.”
A few minutes later, he was easing Nile Etland’s PanElemental off the landing terrace and into the air, fingering the controls gingerly and not without misgivings, while the doctor took care of her makeup.
“Don’t be timid with the thing,” she advised Parrol, squinting into her compact. “There’s nothing easier to handle, once you get the hang of it.”
He grunted. “I don’t want to cut in its spacedrive by mistake!”
“That’s impossible, dope . . . unless you’re in space. Put up the windscreen, will you? Fourth button, second row, left side. Agenes? Well, I don’t know. If those beef things were dying instead of disappearing, I’d be wondering about Agenes, too, of course.”
Parrol found the windscreen button and shoved at it. The air whistling about them was abruptly quiet. Somewhat reassured about the PanElemental’s tractability—nobody but Nile would sink two years’ salary into a quadruple-threat racing car—Parrol stepped up their speed and swung to the right, towards the sea. A string of buildings rushed briefly towards them and dropped below, and the sun-bright blue rim of Nandy-Cline’s world-spanning ocean came into view.
“Would there be chemical means of inducing a herd of sea beef to move out of a specific body of water?” Parrol asked.
“Naturally. But who’s going to give that kind of treatment to a body of water a hundred and fifty miles long and up to eighty miles wide? Besides, they haven’t all moved out.” She loosened her hair, fluffed, shook and stroked it into place. “Better try another theory, Danny,” she added.
“Do you have one?”
“No. We’ll see what goes on at the ranchers’ emergency meeting first.” Nile motioned with her head towards the back of the car. “I dumped some testing equipment in there, in case we want to go for a dip afterwards.”
There was silence for some seconds; then Parrol said, “Looks about normal down there, doesn’t it?”
He had swung the PanElemental left again, slowing and dropping towards the shoreline of the continental shelf. Near low tide at present, the shelf stretched away for almost sixty miles to the east, a great saline swamp and, from this altitude, a palette of bilious pigments. A number of aircars cruised slowly over it, and power launches were picking their way through the vegetation of the tidal lakes.
“Lipyear’s Oceanic,” Nile observed, “seems to have about every man they employ out spot-counting what’s left!” She hesitated, added, “You’re right about the herds we can see showing no sign of disturbance. Of course, nothing does disturb sea beef much.”
Parrol sighed, said, “Well, let’s get on to the meeting.”
* * *
By midmorning the sun was getting hot on the shelf, turning the air heavy with mingled smells of salt water and luxuriating vegetation. Escorted by a scolding flock of scarlet and black buzzbirds, Danrich Parrol brought a water scooter showing the stamp of Lipyear’s Oceanic down to the edge of an offshore tidal pool. The buzzbirds deserted him there. The scooter settled to the water, drifted slowly across the pool towards Nile’s PanElemental, berthed on the surface between two stands of reeds.
Parrol looked thoughtfully about. Passing overhead through the area half an hour earlier, he had seen the slender, long-legged figure of Dr. Etland standing in swim-briefs and flippers on her car. At the moment she was nowhere in sight. An array of testing equipment lay helter-skelter about on the Pan’s hood, and the murkily roiled water indicated sea beef was feeding below the surface.
Parrol stepped over into the big car and tethered the scooter to it. He was wearing trunks and flippers; attached to his belt were an underwater gun and knife. The shelf ranchers were rarely invaded by the big deep-water carnivores, but assorted minor vermin wasn’t too uncommon. He reached back to the rack of the scooter, fished cigarettes out from among a recorder, a case of maps and charts, a telecamera, a breather and a pocket communicator. As he was lighting a cigarette, a flat, brown animal head, fiercely whiskered and carrying a ragged white scar-line diagonally across its skull, broke the surface twenty feet away and looked at him.
“Hi, Spiff,” Parrol said conversationally, recognizing the larger of the two hunting otters Nile kept around as bodyguards when engaged in water work. “Where’s the boss?”
The otter grunted, curved over and submerged his nine-foot length again with a motion like flowing dark oil. Parrol waited patiently. A minute or two later there was a splash on his left. The face that looked at him this time showed the patrician features of Dr. Nile Etland. She came stroking over to him, and Parrol held a hand down to her. She grasped it, swung herself smoothly up on the hood of the PanElemental, squeezed water out of her hair and pulled off the transparent breather which had covered her face and the front part of her head.
She glanced at the watch on her wrist, inquired, “Well, did you find out anything new during the past hour and a half?”
“I picked up a few items. Just how meaningful—” Parrol checked himself. Slowly and almost without sound, a vast, pinkish-gray bulk rose above the surface near the center of the tidal pool. A pair of bulging, morose eyes regarded the humans and their vehicles suspiciously. Terra’s hippopotamus amphibious, adapted to a salt water life with its richer food and increased growth potential, enlarged, tenderized and reflavored, had become the sea beef which provided the worlds of the Federation with a considerable share of their protein staples. This specimen, Parrol saw, was an old breed bull, over thirty feet long, with a battle-scarred hide and Oceanic’s three broad white stripes painted across its back.
“Is that ancient monster what you’re messing around with here?” Parrol asked.
“Uh-huh.” Nile was taking an outsized hypodermic from a flap in one of her flippers. She placed it on the hood. “He’s a bit reluctant to let me have a blood sample.”
“Why bother with him?”
She shrugged. “Just a hunch. What were you about to say?”
“Well, there’s one detail about the big beef disappearance I can’t see as a coincidence,” Parrol told her. “The thing started at the north bend of the continent. It’s taken it a week to move a hundred and fifty miles down the coast to Lipyear’s Oceanic. That’s almost the exact rate of speed with which the edge of the Meral Current passes along the shelf of the Continental Rift.”
Nile nodded. “That’s occurred to me. If it’s only a coincidence, it’s certainly an odd one. But deciding the Meral’s involved doesn’t answer the big question, does it?”
“Where have the stupid things gone? No, it doesn’t.” Parrol scowled. “None of the theories brought up at the meeting made sense to me. Animal predators can’t have caused it. I’ve checked with half the northern ranches, and they’ve noticed no unusual numbers of dead or wounded beef floating around—or obviously sick ones either. And nobody’s been running them off. There’d be no place to hide them in quantities like that, even if they could be moved off the ranches without attracting attention.
“I did hear about one thing I intend to look into immediately. Somewhat over two months ago—almost immediately after we’d left for the Hub, as a matter of fact—the Tuskason Sleds reported to mainland authorities that something had killed off their entire fraya pack.”
Nile whistled soundlessly. “That’s bad news, Dan! I’m sorry to hear it. You think there’s a connection?”
“I don’t know. The authorities sent investigators who couldn’t find anything to show the pack hadn’t died of natural causes. The sledmen claimed the frayas were deliberately poisoned, but they had no significant evidence to offer. The feeling here is they were fishing for federal indemnification. I’ve asked Machon to find out where the Tuskason fleet is cruising at present. He’ll let me know as soon as it’s been located, and I’ll fly out there.”