Enough there, Parrol thought, watching the dark slop stream by beneath the swaying gun, more than enough, to bury not only the harvester stationed against the wall, but the two other ships in the nidith bed with it. And burying any one of them with a nidith load on board was all that was necessary. Some of the divers outside might get away if they moved fast enough. The rest of the work gang was caught. They’d live because ships and suits were designed to preserve life even under the smashing blow of a deep-water muck avalanche; but they’d stay exactly where they were until somebody came along to dig them out.
* * *
V
On the surface above the Tuskason Rift the cropper tender Attris rode the long, slow swells, anchor engines humming. Duse had set, and cloud banks were spread over half the night sky. To the north and west, fog was forming. For most of the past hour, the ship’s communicator had been babbling excitedly. The Attris’ captain looked distracted and harried.
From the edge of one of the nearby herds of pelagic croppers a single machine began moving toward the west, slowly at first but increasing speed as it drew farther away from the Attris.
Thirty minutes later, the wandering cropper reached a point eight miles west of the tender. In the Attris’ chase-plane an automatic buzzer woke the pilot. He looked up at the glowing location chart above his bunk, saw the flashing red dot at the fringe of the eight-mile circle, swore sleepily, climbed out of the bunk and got on his direct line to the tender.
“What do you want?” his skipper’s voice inquired hoarsely.
“Got a stray showing,” the pilot began. “I—”
“Go after it, stupid! You know things are supposed to look right around here!” The line went dead.
The pilot scowled, yawned, sat down at the controls. The chase-plane slithered past the bow of the Attris, lifted into the air. Within a few minutes it was hovering above the cropping machine. The pilot directed an override beam at the cropper’s engine shed, twisted the override control knobs and discovered that the cropper’s automatic steering mechanisms were not responding. He muttered in annoyance. He’d have to reset them manually.
He brought the plane down, tethered the cropper to it, walked along a planking to the machine shed, opened the door and stepped inside. An instant later, there was a wild screech from within the shed, then a brief, violent splashing in the water beneath it. That ended, was followed presently by deep, croaking noises with odd overtones of human speech.
A sea hag appeared in the door of the shed, the unconscious and half-drowned pilot slung across its shoulder. Another hag came out behind it. They were breathing air with apparent difficulty, but they were breathing. The first one climbed into the plane with the pilot. The other detached the cropper, kicked it off, and joined its companion.
The plane swung about, rose from the surface and sped away, due west.
Shortly before daybreak, heavy fog rolled in over the shore ranches of the continental coast, drifted inland. The Giard Pharmaceuticals Station was thickly blanketed by it. Inside, most sections of the station were dark and deserted. But Parrol’s office was lit; and in it a bulky figure with a grotesquely ugly, gray-mottled head, encased in a cloaklike garment which appeared to have been cut in haste out of a length of canvas, was painstakingly at work before a stenog machine. The screen above the machine showed the enlargement of a lengthy coded message. A number of minor deletions and revisions were being produced in it now. Finally, the cloaked shape switched off the machine. The screen disappeared, and a bloated-looking gray forefinger pushed at a tab on the side of the stenog. Two cards covered with microprint popped out on the table. The figure picked them up, glanced at them, came heavily to its feet.
From the open door to the office, a harsh, roughened voice, which nevertheless was recognizably the voice of Nile Etland, said, “I was finally able to contact Freasie, Dan. She’s on her way to the hospital to set things up. Thirty minutes from now, we’ll be able to get in quietly any time by the service entrance. Nobody but Freasie and Dr. Tay will know we’re there or what condition we’re in.”
Parrol said, “Half an hour is about what it should take here.” His voice was as distorted as hers but also recognizable. “I’ll tell Fiawa, of course, that we’ll be at the hospital.”
“Yes, he should know.”
“Did you explain to Freasie what happened?”
“Not in detail.” Nile came into the room. She, too, wore a makeshift cloak covering everything but her head yet not adequately concealing the fact that the body beneath it was a ponderous caricature of her normal shape. “I told her we picked up the infection that hit the sea beef herds, and that when she sees us we’ll look as if we’d been dead and waterlogged for the past two weeks.”
Parrol grunted. “Not a bad description! We were prettier as deep-water sea hags than in this half-way state!”
“Do you still seem to be swelling?”
He held up his deformed fingers, studied them. “Apparently. I don’t believe they looked as bad as that half an hour ago. I also feel as if most of my innards were being slowly pulled apart.”
“I have that, too,” Nile said. “I’m afraid we may be in for a very unpleasant time, Dan. But we definitely are changing back.”
“Trying to change back?”
“Yes. No way of knowing exactly what will happen. But the sea beef may have been able to reverse the process successfully. Perhaps we can, too. And perhaps we can’t.” She looked across the room to an armchair in which the chase-plane pilot sprawled. His clothing, the chair, and the carpet beneath were soaked with water, and his eyes were closed. “How’s our trigger-happy friend doing?”
“I don’t know,” Parrol said. “I haven’t paid him any attention since I dumped him there. He doesn’t seem to have moved. I expect dragging him in through the shore swamps on the last stretch didn’t do him much good.”
Nile went over to the pilot, reached for his wrist, announced after a moment, “He’s alive, anyway. I picked up some dope in the lab office. I’ll give him a shot to make sure he stays quiet until the police come for him. Any immediate plans for Ilium Weldrow?”
“No,” Parrol said. “I was hoping we’d find him still here. I would have enjoyed seeing his face when we walked in on him. But we’ll leave him to Fiawa. Let’s get out our reports and get the show on the road.”
Nile brought a dope gun out from under her cloak, bent briefly over the pilot with it, replaced it and joined Parrol at the communicator. He was feeding the cards into the telewriting attachment.
“They’re for Dabborn at Narcotics,” he said. “I used his personal code. I’ve warned him there may be a leak in the office and that if he tries to talk to me from there, the higher-ups in the nidith business could get the word immediately and take steps to avoid being implicated. We’ll talk to Fiawa at his home. He and Dabborn can get together then and work out the details of the operation.”
Nile nodded. Parrol turned on the communicator, dialed a number. The connection light went on immediately. He depressed the transmission button on the telewriter.
A woman’s voice said quietly, “Message received. Do you want to wait for a reply?”
Parrol remained silent. Some ten seconds later, the connection light went out.
“Dabborn’s secretary,” he said. “So he’s in the office. Now let’s get our chief of police out of bed, and things should start moving.” He flicked out the cards, dropped them into a disposer, dialed another number.
It took Fiawa about a minute to get to the communicator. Then his deep, sleep-husky voice announced, “Fiawa speaking. Who is it?”
“For a man,” Machon observed, “who’s just put in seven weeks in the hospital—too deathly ill to see visitors—you seem remarkably fit!”
Parrol grinned across the dinner table at him.
“I had a few visitors,” he said. “Dabborn and Fiawa dropped in from time to time to let me know how they were coming along with the nidith operation.”
“They’ve done a bang-up job of rounding up the Agenes gang!” the secretary of the Ranchers Association assured him. “A couple of the big shots just might get off. The rest of them are nailed down!”
“I know it—and I’m glad I’ll be there as a prosecution witness.” Parrol hesitated, added, “Strictly speaking, neither Nile nor I have been ill. We were extremely uncomfortable for a while, but we could have received visitors any time after the first two weeks in the hospital. But Nile insisted no one should see us until we were ready to be discharged, and except for talking to Dabborn and Fiawa I’ve gone along with her in that. I think I can tell you about it privately now. She’s prepared a paper for her xenobiological society covering the whole affair, and the paper will be out in a few weeks. But I warn you Nile still wouldn’t want the details of our experience to become general knowledge.”