He added, “Then something occurred to me that might help explain the problem on the ranches. There’s a possibility that it’s chiefly the spot-counts on the beef that are way off at the moment. The computers figure that beef which is feeding submerged or napping on the bottom will, on the average, surface every ten minutes to breathe.
“But say something’s happened to poison them mildly, make them exceptionally sluggish. If every animal in the herds is now surfacing only when it absolutely has to breath, it might almost make up for the apparent drop in their numbers.”
“That’s an ingenious theory,” Nile said. “You’ve suggested an underwater check?”
“Yes. It will be a monstrous job, of course, particularly in an area the size of Lipyear’s, but some of the ranchers are going at it immediately. You didn’t . . . ”
She shook her head. “So far there’s been nothing in the water and blood samples I’ve sent in to the lab to suggest poisoning of any kind as a causative agent in the disappearances. But, as a matter of fact, I have noticed something which supports your idea.”
“What’s that?”
“The old bull who showed up just now,” Nile said. “I don’t know if you were watching him, but he went down again almost immediately. And one reason I wanted a blood sample from him is that he did not surface to breathe in anything like ten minutes after I’d started checking the pool. When you arrived, he’d been under water for better than half an hour. However, he isn’t acting sluggish down there. He’s busy feeding his face. In fact, I don’t remember seeing a beef stuff away with quite that much steady enthusiasm before.”
“Now why,” Parrol said, puzzled, “would that be?”
Nile shrugged. “I don’t know—yet.” She picked up the king-sized syringe again. “Like to come down and help me get that sample? He doesn’t want to let me get behind him, and Spiff and Sweeting aren’t much help in this case because he simply ignores them.”
The bull was stubborn and belligerent, not unusual qualities in the old herd leaders. Parrol wasn’t too concerned. He and Nile Etland were natives of Nandy-Cline, born in shallows settlements a thousand miles from the single continent, quite literally as much at home in the water as on land. Nile, if one could believe her, had been helping herd her settlement’s sea beef by the time she was big enough to toddle. She slipped away from the bull’s ponderous lunges now with almost the easy grace of her otters; then, while Parrol began to move about near the gigantic head, fixing the beef’s attention on himself, she glided out of sight behind it.
She emerged a minute or two later, held the blood-filled hypodermic up for Parrol to see, and stroked up to the surface.
Parrol followed. They climbed back up on the Pan, leaving the sea beef to return to its surly feeding, and pulled off their breathers.
“I’m going to pack up here now, Dan, and move on,” Nile said. She’d stored the hypodermic away, was arranging her equipment inside the car. “I’ll drop this stuff off at the lab for Freasie to work over, then run eighty miles south and duplicate the samplings in an area where the herds don’t seem to be affected yet. That might give us a few clues. Want to come along, or do you have other immediate plans?”
“I . . . just a moment!” The communicator on the rack of Parrol’s borrowed scooter was tinkling. He reached over, picked up the instrument, said, “Parrol here. Go ahead!”
“Machon speaking.” It was the voice of the secretary of the Ranchers Association. “We’ve contacted the Tuskason Sleds, Dan, and they very much want to see you! They’ve been waiting for you to get back from Orado. Here’s their present location . . . ”
Parrol scribbled a few notes on the communicator’s pad, thanked Machon and switched off. “I’ll fly out at once,” he told Nile. “Typhoon season—I’d better take the Hunter. Give me a call if you hit on anything that looks interesting.”
She nodded, said, “Throw your stuff in the back while I get in Sweeting and Spiff. I’ll give you a ride to the station . . . ”
II
The sun wasn’t far from setting when Parrol took his Hunter up from the deck of the Tuskason headquarters sled and started it arrowing back towards the mainland. He was glad he hadn’t decided on a flimsier vehicle. The Tuskason area lay well within the typhoon belt, and the horizon ahead of him was leaden gray and black, walls of racing cloud banks heavy with rain.
He had let himself be delayed longer than he’d intended by his discussions with the sledmen; and the information he’d gained did not seem to be of any immediate value. The probability was that he’d simply burdened himself with a new and unrelated problem now. The Tuskason Sleds handled a fleet of chemical harvesting machines for Giard Pharmaceuticals and in consequence regarded Parrol and Nile Etland as their only dependable mainland contacts. The destruction of their fraya pack was a very serious economic loss to them.
The frayas were Nandy-Cline’s closest native approximation of rich red mammalian meat, ungainly beasts with a body chemistry and structure which almost paralleled that of some of Terra’s sea-going mammals, but with a quite unmammalian life cycle. Their breeding grounds lay in ocean rifts and trenches half a mile to a mile deep, and each pack had its individual ground to which it returned annually. Here the fraya changed from an omnivorous, air-breathing surface swimmer to a bottom-feeder, dependent on a single deepwater plant form. Within a few weeks it had doubled its weight, had bred, and was ready to return to the surface. Every pack was the property of one of the sledmen communities, and at the end of the breeding period as many frayas as were needed to keep the sleds’ mobile storehouses filled were butchered. Then the annual cycle began again. The animals weren’t the sledmen’s only food source by any means, but they were the principal one, the staple.
The Tuskason Sleds were certain their pack had been killed deliberately by a mainland organization, either one of the sea-processing concerns or a big rancher, with the intention of forcing them out of their sea area and taking over the chemical harvesting work there. The frayas had been within a hundred miles of their breeding ground and hurrying toward it when the disaster occurred. The following herd sleds were unaware of trouble until they found themselves riding through a floating litter of the beasts. The entire pack appeared to have died within minutes. It was a genuine calamity because the breeding ground could not be restocked now from other fraya packs. There was a relationship of mutual dependency between the animals and the chalot, the food plant they subsisted on during the breeding season. Each was necessary in the other’s life cycle. If the frayas failed to make their annual appearance, the chalot died; and it could not be re-established in the barren grounds.
If some mainland outfit was found to be responsible, the Tuskason Sleds could collect a staggering indemnification either from those who were guilty or from the Federation itself. But aside from the reported blips of what might have been two submersible vessels moving away from the area, they had no proof to offer. Parrol promised to do what he could in the matter, and the sledmen seemed satisfied with that.
Otherwise, the afternoon had not brought him noticeably closer to answering the question of what was happening to the coastal ranchers’ sea beef. The frayas had died outright, either through human malice or through the eruption of some vast bubble of lethal gas from the depths of the ocean—which seemed to Parrol the more probable explanation at the moment. The beef, so far as anyone could tell, wasn’t dying. It simply wasn’t around any more.
Parrol battered his way through typhoon winds for a while, then made use of the first extensive quiet area to put calls through to the mainland. At the Southeastern Ranchers Association, he was routed at once to the secretary’s office. Machon was still on duty; his voice indicated he was close to exhaustion. He had one favorable fact to report: Parrol’s hunch that an underwater check might reveal some of the missing stock had been a good one. At Lipyear’s Oceanic, the estimated loss might be cut by almost a quarter now, and some of the northern ranches were inclined to go above that figure. But that left approximately seventy-five per cent of the vanished animals to be accounted for; and reports of new disappearances were still coming in from farther down the coast.
Parrol called the Giard Pharmaceuticals Station next. Nile Etland had been in and out during the day; at the moment she was out. She had left no message for him, given no information about where she might be reached. Freasie, at the laboratory, told him the checks Nile had them running on the sea beef specimens had been consistently negative.