“So what do you want to do?”
“Go aboard, tell Mace to move his croppers fifty miles west and wait for us there. That will get him out of everybody’s hair. He’ll know something unusual is up, but he never asks questions. Give them the visual signal.”
Nile’s hand moved, and the Giard identification light . . . blue . . . blue . . . red . . . flashed out beneath the PanElemental. After a ten-second pause it was repeated. The communicator burred.
“Negative,” Nile muttered. Her fingers shifted on the signal box; a purple glow appeared beneath them. As it faded, the communicator burr ended and Giard’s blue-blue-red flickered up at them from the tender.
Nile said, “He’s got the idea that we don’t want conversation.” She flashed the coming-in signal. A few moments later a clear green spark showed on the Attris.
Nile snapped off the signal box. “That’s it! Let’s go down.” She shoved the car’s nose over and fed it speed as Parrol switched off the ground-view plate. The sea was rising towards them, moonlit and stirring; then it tilted sharply up to the right, swung back and was level again just below. Water hissed under them as the Pan knifed lightly through the back of a swell. The tender’s stern appeared ahead, its details outlined in Duse’s light. Several men stood about the deck. Two of them . . .
“NILE! TURN—”
Parrol had no time to complete the warning. On the deck of the Attris a piece of shielding had dropped. Behind it stood a squat gun, nose pointed at them. Nile saw the trap in the moment he did, reacted instantly. The Pan shot down toward the water.
A blaze of light filled the screen and a giant fist rammed the car up and around. Nile was flung heavily over on Parrol, dropped away. He was struggling to reach the flight controls while the car flipped through the air, engine roaring wildly. In the screen, he had a flashing glimpse of the bow of the Attris receding from them, another of the tender’s chase-plane darting past. A hail of steel rattled and tore at the PanElemental for an instant. Then the engine was dead. He had the car under partial control for the moment needed to straighten it out before it crashed into the sea.
The water was pitch-black all around. The PanElemental, sinking tail first now, ruined engine section flooded, settled heavily against some yielding obstruction, dropped again a few feet, was checked once more. It swayed over slowly into something close to a horizontal position, turned sideways and lay still in a grappling tangle of the vegetation that rode the Meral Current below the surface.
Parrol, out of his trousers and shoes, tightened the dive belt around his waist, groped about for the scattered rest of their diving equipment, cursing the darkness, the treachery of the Attris crew, his own stupidity. With an illegal source of drugs, that could make millionaires out of a thousand men, to exploit, Agenes would have had no difficulty in finding all the useful confederates it needed. Now he and Nile had one slim chance to outlive their blunder at least for a short while. They had to be out of the crippled car and away in the sea before the Attris got divers down to make sure they were finished off.
Nile lay doubled half across the slanted instrument board at his feet. There had been no time to find out how badly she was injured. She was certainly unconscious. But he could handle her in the water.
Parrol found the two sets of flippers behind the seat, had just finished slipping his on when there was a flicker of light in the blackness. He glanced around, startled, saw above and to the right what might have been a moving cluster of fireflies. Comprehension came instantly . . . the vision screen was showing him a group of jet divers approaching from the Attris.
Which left him perhaps thirty seconds to be away from here—
Swearing savagely, Parrol snapped the other set of flippers to his belt, squirmed around the front seat, picked up Nile and clamped her against him. His free hand groped about for the manual canopy release, found it. He pulled down the rear release first, instantly grasped the other and wrenched at it.
There was a roar, a momentary cold brutal pounding that smashed the air from his lungs, whirled him upwards.
He rolled over in water above the car, clutching Nile, came up against the rubbery trunk of a giant drift plant and straightened out. The fireflies were bigger and brighter here, turning toward the uprush of air from the PanElemental, moving closer through the great sodden underwater thicket in which it hung, gradually illuminating it. Parrol swung away from the lights, floated behind the car, saw a patch of empty blackness before and below him. He shifted Nile to his left arm, grasped the lower edge of the car’s open section, reached down with his legs and gripped two of the plant trunks between his thighs. Locking himself to the plants, he hauled at the car. It swung around heavily, then began to turn, was suddenly sliding past him. In an instant, it had plunged out through the thicket and disappeared below.
Parrol turned around with Nile and went stroking steadily down at a steep slant into the chilled night of the Tuskason Rift.
* * *
IV
It had been horribly hungry and weak; and now it was eating. Its memory and awareness covered almost nothing but that. There were blurred visual impressions—light, darkness, color—indicating other things out there which interested it not at all. There were booming, whistling, chirping sounds; and those it also ignored.
Taste and touch held interest, however. The eating process was a simple one. Something was put into its mouth, and it swallowed; and as soon as it had swallowed, something was put into its mouth again, and it swallowed again. Occasionally there would be a pause before something new came into its mouth; and then it had a feeling of anxiety. But the pauses were always short.
Its awareness of taste and touch was connected with whatever was brought into its mouth. There would be one kind of thing for a while, then another. There were variations in flavor, in saltiness, in slipperiness, degree of firmness. But it was all very good.
“I must have been nearly starved to death!” it thought suddenly. It wondered then what “I” was, but almost at once forgot the matter again.
A while later, it had another thought. It decided it didn’t want to eat any more, at least not just now. Something was being pushed into its mouth, but it ejected the something and closed its mouth firmly. There was no impulse to do anything else. It remained exactly where it was, contentedly unmoving.
Now its other senses began to click in. It discovered the blue was gone from its vision and that there was a wide, colorful vista out there, full of individual details. There were things that moved, and many more things that stood still. It became aware of sounds again and for a while tried unsuccessfully to connect them to things it could see. Then there was a sudden awareness of buoyancy, of near-weightlessness. At once it knew what that meant!
“I’m under water . . . ”
” . . . And I’m me, of course!” Nile Etland concluded, with a pleased sense of summing up the situation.
She was sitting here, upright, in the underwater ooze. Not quite upright—she was leaning back a little, against something hard.
Something moved. Nile tilted her head to look down at it. It was an arm. A repulsive arm-thick, mottled-gray, with corrugated, oily-looking skin. It was reaching around from behind her, and the cupped hand at its end held some bluish, sloppy oblongs, lifting them toward her face.
She realized that the hard thing she leaned against was the monster to which this arm was attached.
Nile jerked upward convulsively to get away from the thing. Somewhat to her surprise she succeeded. Next a powerful stroke of flipper-tipped legs that knocked up a cloud of ooze, and she was driving straight across the bottom towards an electric-blue stand of fan-shaped luminants.
Luminants! Where . . . ?
Memory blazed up. The stern deck of the Attris, ghostly clear in white moonlight, the sudden appearance of the gun. They’d been hit—
Nile twisted about, braking her forward momentum, got her legs under her and turned, looking back.
The gray thing which had to be Danrich Parrol was on its feet but making no attempt to follow. Nile’s gaze went beyond him, to the dense, multihued ranks of a fire forest burning coldly in endless night on the floor of the Tuskason Rift.
Slowly—shocked, horrified, oddly fascinated—she brought up her hands and stared at them, twisted and turned briefly to inspect as much as she could of her body, ran palms like hard rubber over her rubbery face and head. The sense of shock drained away. Aesthetically she had nothing on Parrol; the pattern of modifications seemed much the same, was presumably identical. It still beat, by a long way, being dead.