Parrol shook his head. “Skip that. I’ll take your word that most of them are down there.”
She turned the recorder off, swung it back into the compartment. “What do you make of it all, Dan?”
“Just what you’re making of it, apparently,” Parrol said. “When the Tuskason frayas turned belly up and died, they were around a hundred miles southwest of their breeding ground, headed there. And the breeding ground—the Tuskason Rift—lies inside the Meral Current. There’s that symbiotic relationship between the frayas and the chalot, their food plant during the breeding period. The chalot produces mobile spores as the frayas start arriving. Spore enzymes produce reactions in the frayas to turn them into their deep-water breeding form—”
He paused, scowling. The frayas were living anachronisms among Nandy-Cline’s present animal forms, the last of a class of pelagic browsers in whose life cycle certain luminants of the fire forests had been intricately involved. “The chalot spores are assumed to actively seek out the frayas when they appear in the breeding grounds,” he went on slowly. “But this time, when the chalot released its spores into the Tuskason Rift the fraya pack didn’t show up. Eventually the Meral carried the free spores off, and eventually it brought them along the Continental Rift and into the shore ranches. Terran mammals—sea beef and humans, in this case—are a much closer approximation to frayas than any of Nandy-Cline’s modern life strains. So the chalot spores settled for us! And we’ve responded to their enzymes almost as the frayas did.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Nile agreed.
After a moment Parrol asked, “What makes you so sure the changes won’t be permanent?”
“Simply the fact that the chalot doesn’t grow here. The frayas maintain their deep-water form as long as there is chalot around for them to feed on. By the time the seasonal supply is exhausted, they’ve bred and are ready to return to their pelagic shape. The spores bring about only the initial reaction. It’s maintained by contact with the parent plants. Some of the sea beef that went down into the Rift here may already be losing the effect and coming back to the surface, for that matter.”
“All right,” Parrol said. “We know now that the trouble with the beef wasn’t planned. It was an accidental result of wiping out the fraya pack. But we’re still thinking of Agenes. If they killed the frayas, their biochemists would realize soon enough what’s happening now—and that would be a good enough reason to send needle-beam men after us before we worked it out. But why kill the frayas in the first place?”
“That’s what I’m wondering,” Nile said. “Agenes has all the sea harvest territory it can use.”
Parrol said, “So it does. But it occurs to me now that the Grenley Banks are about two hundred miles north of the Tuskason Rift.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“You may remember,” Parrol said, “that a week or two before we left Orado there was a report that Giard had lost a submarine harvester here which was working along the Grenley Banks the last time it gave its position.”
Nile’s eyes widened an instant.
“I’d forgotten! That does look interesting. Agenes knocks off one of our harvesters roughly three hundred miles north of the point they knocked off the fraya pack. Why? They had something going in the area they didn’t want the sub to stumble over—or maybe it did stumble over it. Why kill the pack before that, three hundred miles to the south?”
“To keep it from going on toward the breeding grounds,” Parrol said.
“Of course! The Tuskason herd sleds were following the frayas. If somebody attacked the sleds, the whole planet would hear about it. But with the frayas dead, the sleds has no reason to go on to the breeding grounds, and didn’t. Now . . . ”
“The breeding grounds!” Parrol said. “A fire forest, Nile!”
She was silent a moment, said, “You’re right, Dan! It has to be that. A new nidith bed Narcotics hasn’t found out about!”
It was almost certainly the answer, Parrol thought. The luminant nidith plant was the source of a drug of unique medical properties when used with strict safeguards, viciously habit-forming when not. It could be harvested legally only under direct government supervision and in amounts limited to the actual medicinal demand. The nidith beds required for that purpose were patrolled; in the other fire forests on the planet Narcotics teams had painstakingly exterminated the plant.
But if a fresh bed had sprung up and been discovered by the wrong people . . .
“Agenes would take a chance on it!” he said. “Two or three seasonal hauls would be worth everything else they could expect to get out of the planet.”
“That’s what it is!” Nile said. She stared at him a moment, teeth worrying her upper lip. “How do we pin it on them, Dan?”
Parrol said, “This is about the peak of the nidith harvest season, isn’t it?”
“Of course. They should be working there right now! Whom do we give it to? Fiawa and the cops? Narcotics? No, wait . . . ”
“Uh-huh,” Parrol agreed. “I just had that thought, too.”
“They can harvest it on the quiet,” Nile said, “at the expense of a few murders if somebody happens by. But they can’t haul it off Nandy-Cline unless they’ve got people both in Narcotics and among the mainland police bought and paid for. This thing’s organized to the hilt! If we blow our horn and nobody happens to be at the nidith bed at the moment, we’ll never hang it on Agenes. We’re got to be sure they’re caught with the goods before we make another move.”
Ilium Weldrow appeared disturbed. He had stared at Parrol and Nile with unconcealed disapproval when they called him into Parrol’s office on their return to the station. By contrast with the assistant manager in his trimly proper business suit, the pair looked like criminally inclined beachcombers. Both wore their guns, and Parrol hadn’t troubled to do more than pull his trousers back on over his swim trunks, while Nile had added only a short jacket to her swimming attire. But it was more than the lack of outer respectability in his colleagues that had upset Weldrow.
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Dan,” he said, frowning. “I’m to stay in your office, glued—as you say—to your private communicator, while the station is to remain darkened and locked after you leave. Why the latter?”
“Because if you indicate you’re here during the next few hours, somebody might blow that pointed little head off your shoulders,” Nile told him inelegantly.
Weldrow’s face showed alarm. “But what is this desperate business all about?”
“If you don’t know what it’s about, you won’t be involved in it,” Parrol said. “And you’ll be in no danger if you simply carry out your instructions and don’t stick your neck out of the station before we get back. Let’s go over the instructions now to make sure you’ve got them straight.”
The assistant manager complied grudgingly. He was to wait here for a call from a Captain Mace, on the Giard cropper tender Attris. The call should come within three to six hours and would be an innocuous request to have certain spare parts flown out to the tender. This would be Weldrow’s cue to dial two emergency call numbers on Parrol’s communicator. One would put him in contact with Chief of Police Fiawa, the other with a Federation Narcotics man with whom Parrol had worked before. When they responded, he was to press the transmission button on the communicator’s telewriter, which contained certain coded information Parrol had fed into it, and silently switch the machine off again.
Weldrow appeared to have absorbed the instructions well enough, Parrol decided. Even if he slipped up, it shouldn’t do more than delay action by a few hours.
The night sky was clear above the Meral Current and Duse floodlighted the sky. “You’re sure that’s the Attris ahead?” Nile Etland asked.
Parrol said, “Uh-huh. Mace is around forty miles off his check point, but it’s the Attris. I know that tub.” The magnified image of the cropper tender eight thousand feet below was centered in the ground-view screen. Two flocks of pelagic cropping machines near it rose and sank slowly on the shimmer of the swells. The croppers were restless in the full moonlight, and the tender’s chase-plane was circling beyond the farther of the two flocks, guiding a few runaways back to the fold.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Nile asked.
Parrol glanced over at her. “You’ve checked your position chart?”
“Of course. The ship’s anchored above the north third of the Tuskason Rift. I see. You feel she’d be in danger if somebody spots the Pan snooping around the floor of the Rift?”
“She might be in danger, and in any case she’s too close to where we want to operate,” Parrol said. “If they’re loading nidith down there, they’re nervous people. They know a ship of that type can’t spot them, but the mere fact the tender’s at anchor here will make them that much more ready to dump the evidence and run at the first hint that something’s wrong.”