He switched off as fresh gusts of heavy wind started the Hunter bucking again, gave his full attention for a time to the business of getting home alive. He’d already buzzed Nile’s PanElemental twice and received no response. She could have called the Hunter if she’d felt like it. The fact that she hadn’t suggested she had made no progress and was in one of her irritable moods.
By the time the Hunter had butted through the last of the typhoon belt, Parrol was becoming somewhat irritable himself. He reached for one of the sandwiches he’d brought along for the trip, realized he’d long ago finished the lot and settled back, stomach growling emptily, to do some more thinking, while the car sped along on its course. Except for scattered thunderheads, the sky was clear over the mainland to the west. He rode into the gathering night. Zetman, the inner moon, already had ducked below the horizon, while Duse rode, round, pale and placid, overhead.
An annoyingly vague feeling remained that there should be a logical connection between the two sets of events which had occupied him during the day. The disappearing herds of beef. The Tuskason Sleds’ mysteriously stricken fraya pack . . .
Details of what the sledmen had told him kept drifting through Parrol’s mind. He gave his visualization of the events they had reported free rein. Sometimes in that way—
The scowl cleared suddenly from his face. He sat still, reflective, then leaned forward, tapped the listings button on the communicator.
“ComWeb Service,” said an operator’s voice.
“Give me Central Library Information.”
A few moments later, Parrol was saying, “I’d like to see charts of the ocean currents along the east coast, to a thousand miles out.”
He switched on the viewscreen, waited for the requested material to be shown.
Another hunch! This one looked hot!
The location indicator showed a hundred and three miles to the Giard Station. Parrol was pushing the Hunter along. He was reasonably certain he had part of the problem boxed now, but he wanted to discuss it with Nile, and that annoying young woman still had not made herself available. The PanElemental did not respond to its call number, and it had been three hours since she last checked in at the station.
Mingled with his irritation was a growing concern he was somewhat reluctant to recognize. Nile was very good at taking care of herself, and the thing he had discovered with the help of Central Library made it seem less probable now that human criminality was directly responsible for what had happened to the herds. But still . . .
The communicator buzzed. Parrol turned it on, said, “Parrol speaking. Who is it?”
A man’s voice told him pleasantly, “My mistake, sir! Wrong call number.”
Parrol’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t reply—the voice was a recording, and a signal from Nile. He snapped a decoder into the communicator’s outlet, slipped on its earphones and waited. The decoder was set to a system they had developed to employ in emergencies when there was a chance that unfriendly ears were tuned to the communicators they were using.
After some seconds the decoder’s flat, toneless whisper began:
“Alert. Alert. Guns. Air. Water. Land. Nile. Water. East. Fifty-eight. North. Forty-six. Come. Caution. Caution. Call. Not.”
After an instant the message was repeated. Then the decoder remained silent.
Parrol removed the earphones, glanced at the speed indicator which showed the Hunter already moving along at its best clip, chewed his lip speculatively.
That meant, rather definitely, that a human agency was involved in the sea beef problem! Which didn’t in itself disprove his latest conclusions but added another angle to them. Nile liked to dramatize matters on occasion but wasn’t given to sending out false alarms. Guns . . . the possibility of an attack by air, water, or land. By whom? She didn’t know or she would have told him. She’d called from the surface of the sea, fifty-eight miles east of the Giard Station, forty-six miles to the north. That would put her due east of the upper edge of the Lipyear’s Oceanic ranch, beyond the shallows of the shelf, well out above the half-mile-deep canyon of the Continental Rift.
Parrol slid out the Hunter’s swivel-gun, turned on the detection screens, dropped to a water-skimming level, and sped on in a straight course for Lipyear’s.
Fog banks lay above the Rift. Except for a slow swell, the sea was quiet. Half a mile from the location she had given him, Parrol settled the Hunter on the surface, rode the swells in to the approximate point where Nile should be waiting. He snapped the car’s canopy back, waited another minute, then tapped the Hunter’s siren. As the sound died away, there came an answering brief wail out of the eddying fog. Dead ahead, simultaneously, a spark of blurred light flared and vanished. Parrol grinned with relief, turned on the Hunter’s running lights and came in on the PanElemental lying half submerged in the swells. Its canopy was down; an anchor engine murmured softly. The subdued glow of instrument lights showed Nile standing in her swim rig in the front section, hands on her hips, watching him move in.
Parrol cut his drive engine and lights, switched on the sea anchor as the cars nosed gently together.
“Everything all right here?” he asked.
“More or less.”
“From whom are you hiding?”
“I’m not sure. At a guess, Agenes Laboratories is the villain in the act, as you suspected. Come into my car, Dan.”
Parrol grunted, stepped across and down into the PanElemental. He asked, “What makes you think so?”
“The fact that around noon today somebody scorched my beautiful left ear lobe with a needle beam.”
“Huh? Who?”
Nile shrugged. “I never saw him at all. I was checking out ranch beef about a hundred miles south, and this character fired out of a bunch of reeds thirty feet away. He’d sneaked up under water obviously. I peppered the reed bed with the UW. Probably missed him, but he must have got discouraged and dived, because there was no more shooting.”
“You reported it?”
She shook her head. “No.”
Parrol looked at her suspiciously. “Where were the otters?”
“The otters? Well . . . they may have gone after him, I suppose. Matter of fact, I remember there was some little screeching and splashing back among the reeds. I didn’t go look. Blood upsets me.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed,” Parrol said. “Where are the otters now?”
“Turned them loose in their sea run at Lipyear’s before I came out here. I thought it would be best if whoever sent a needle-beam operator after me didn’t find out for a while that the trick hadn’t worked. It might keep them from trying something new immediately. But it’s a cinch somebody doesn’t want us to poke around too far into the mystery of the vanishing beef. You were right about that.”
Parrol frowned. “Uh-huh. The fact is I’d just finished convincing myself I’d been wrong—that there was no human agency back of this.”
“What gave you that idea?” Nile reached under the instrument shelf, brought out a sandwich, asked, “Have you eaten? I’ve a stack of these around.”
“Glad to hear it,” Parrol said gratefully, taking the sandwich. “I’ve been getting downright ravenous the past couple of hours.”
She watched him reflectively while he told her about his visit to the Tuskason Sleds. “Now here’s the point,” he continued. “The sled-men think their animals were hit by a couple of subs which released something like a nerve gas beneath them. The gas killed the frayas, reached the surface and dissipated instantly into the air.”
Nil nodded. “Could be done just like that, Dan.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Parrol said. “But for the past half hour my theory has been that it wasn’t done by something that dissipated instantly into the air.”
“Why not?”
“Because the spot where this happened is near the northern edge of the Meral Current. The pack was destroyed around two and a half months ago, shortly after we’d left for the Hub. Anything drifting on from there with the Meral would reach the Continental Rift, and this section of the coast, in approximately that time.”
Nile frowned, rubbed the tip of her nose. “Meaning that the trouble with the sea beef wasn’t intended—that it was an accidental aftermath of poisoning the fraya pack?”
“That’s what I was assuming,” Parrol said. “That whatever hit the Tuskason pack two months or so ago has been hitting the local sea beef during the past week. It didn’t have anything like the same instantaneously deadly effect here because it was widely dispersed by now. But suppose the stuff is brought into the shallows with the tides. Some of the beef absorbs enough of it to get very uncomfortable and starts moving out to sea to escape from what’s bothering it. The nearest drift-weed beds are around a hundred and ten miles out. The tubs could make the trip if they got the notion, and until they were discovered there they would seem to have disappeared.