Nile turned. “Jath!”
“This way, Nile! Before the slop drowns us—”
They sprinted back to the cabins through the solid downpour. The otter loped easily after them, given plenty of room by the deck hands. Many of Sweeting’s relatives preferred the unhampered freedom of Nandy-Cline’s ocean to a domesticated life; and the seagoing mutant otters were known to any sledman at least by reputation. Nothing was gained by asking for trouble with them.
“In here!” Jath hauled open a door, slipped into the cabin behind Nile and the otter and let the door slam shut. Towels lay ready on a table; she tossed two to Nile, dabbed a third perfunctorily over her copper skin. Sweeting shook spray from her fur with a twist that spattered half the cabin. Nile mopped at her dripping coveralls, handed back one of the towels, used the other to dry hair, face and hands. “Thanks!”
“Doncar can’t get away at the moment,” Jath told her. “He asked me to find out what we can do for you. So—what brings you out in this weather?”
“I’m looking for somebody.”
“Here?” There was startled surprise in Jath’s voice.
“Dr. Ticos Cay.”
A pause. “Dr. Cay is in this area?”
“He might be—” Nile checked momentarily. Jath, in a motion as quick as it was purposeful, had cupped her right hand to her ear, lowered it again.
They knew each other well enough to make the point of the gesture clear. Someone elsewhere on the sled was listening to what was being said in the cabin.
Nile gave Jath the briefest of understanding nods. Evidently there was something going on in this section of the sea which the Sotira sleds regarded as strictly sledman business. She was a mainlander, though a privileged one. An outsider.
She said, “I had a report from meteorological observers this morning about a major floatwood drift they’d spotted moving before the typhoons around here. The island Dr. Cay’s been camping on could be part of that drift. . . . ”
“You’re not sure?”
“I’m not at all sure. I haven’t been in touch with him for two months. But the Meral may have carried him this far south. I’ve been unable to get in contact with him. He’s probably all right, but I’ve begun to feel worried.”
Jath bit her lip, blue-green eyes staring at Nile’s forehead. Then she shrugged. “You should be worried! But if he’s on the floatwood the weather men saw, we wouldn’t know it.”
“Why not? . . . And why should I be worried?”
“Floatwood’s gromgorru this season. So is the water twenty miles around any island. That’s Fleet word.”
Nile hesitated, startled. “When was the word given?”
“Five weeks ago.”
Gromgorru . . . Sledman term for bad luck, evil magic. The malignant unknown. Something to be avoided. And something not discussed, under ordinary circumstances, with mainlanders. Jath’s use of the term was deliberate. It was not likely to please the unseen listeners.
A buzzer sounded. Jath gave Nile a quick wink.
“That’s for me.” She started for the door, turned again. “We have Venn aboard. They’ll want to see you now.”
Alone with Sweeting, Nile scowled uneasily at the closed door. What the gromgorru business in connection with the floatwood islands was she couldn’t imagine. But if Ticos Cay was in this ocean area—and her calculations indicated he shouldn’t be too far away—she’d better be getting him out. . . .
Chapter 2
Ticos Cay had showed up unannounced one day at the Giard Pharmaceuticals Station on Nandy-Cline, to see Nile. He’d been her biochemistry instructor during her final university year on Orado. He was white-haired, stringy, bouncy, tough-minded, something of a genius, something of a crank, and the best all-around teacher she’d ever encountered. She was delighted to meet him again. Ticos informed her she was responsible for his presence here.
“In what way?” Nile asked.
“The research you’ve done on the floatwood.”
Nile gave him a questioning look. She’d written over a dozen papers on Nandy-Cline’s pelagic floatwood forests, forever on the move about the watery planet where one narrow continent and the polar ice massifs represented the only significant barriers to the circling tides of ocean. It was a subject on which she’d been acquiring first-hand information since childhood. The forests she’d studied most specially rode the great Meral Current down through the equatorial belt and wheeled with it far to the south. Many returned eventually over the same path, taking four to ten years to complete the cycle, until at length they were drawn off into other currents. Unless the polar ice closed about it permanently or it became grounded in mainland shallows, the floatwood organism seemed to know no natural death. It was an old species, old enough to have become the home of innumerable other species adjusted in a variety of ways to the climatic changes encountered in its migrations, and of temporary guests who attached themselves to forests crossing the ocean zones they frequented, deserting them again or dying as the floatwood moved beyond their ranges of temperature tolerance.
“It’s an interesting subject,” she said. “But—”
“You’re wondering why I’d make a three weeks’ trip out here to discuss the subject with you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“It isn’t all I had in mind,” said Ticos. “I paid a visit to Giard’s Central in Orado City a month or so ago. I learned, among other things, that there’s a shortage of trained field biologists on Nandy-Cline.”
“That’s an understatement,” said Nile.
“Evidently,” Ticos remarked, “it hasn’t hampered you too much. Your lab’s held in high esteem by the home office.”
“I know. We earn their high esteem by keeping way ahead of the competition. But for every new item we turn up with an immediate practical application for Giard, there are a thousand out there that remain unsuspected. The people who work for us are good collectors but they can’t do instrument analysis and wouldn’t know what to look for if they could. They bring in what you tell them to bring in. I still go out myself when I can, but that’s not too often now.”
“What’s the problem with getting new hire?”
Nile shrugged. “The obvious one. If a man’s a good enough biologist, he has his pick of jobs in the Hub. He’d probably make more here, but he isn’t interested in coming all the way out to Nandy-Cline to do rough field work. I . . . Ticos, you don’t happen to be looking for a job here with Giard?”
He nodded. “I am, as a matter of fact. I believe I’m qualified, and I have my own analytical laboratory at the spaceport. Do you think your station manager would consider me?”
Nile blinked. “Parrol will snap you up, of course! . . . But I don’t get it. How do you intend to fit this in with your university work?”
“I resigned from the university early this year. About the job here—I do have a few conditions.”
“What are they?”
“For one thing, I’ll limit my work to the floatwood islands.”
Why not, Nile thought. Provided they took adequate precautions. He looked in good physical shape, and she knew he’d been on a number of outworld field trips.
She nodded, said, “We can fit you up with a first-class staff of assistants. Short on scientific training but long on floatwood experience. Say ten or—”
“Uh-uh!” Ticos shook his head decidedly. “You and I will select an island and I’ll set myself up there alone. That’s Condition Two. It’s an essential part of the project.”
Nile stared at him. The multiformed life supported by the floatwood wasn’t abnormally ferocious; but it existed because it could take care of itself under constantly changing conditions, which included frequent shifts in the nature of enemies and prey, and in the defensive and offensive apparatus developed to deal with them. For the uninformed human intruder such apparatus could turn into a wide variety of death traps. Their menace was for the most part as mindlessly impersonal as quicksand. But that didn’t make them any less deadly.
“Ticos Cay,” she stated, “you’re out of your mind! You wouldn’t last! Do you have any idea—”
“I do. I’ve studied your papers carefully, along with the rather skimpy material that’s available otherwise on the planet’s indigenous life. I’m aware there may be serious environmental problems. We’ll discuss them. But solitude is a requirement.”
“Why in the world should—”
“From a personal point of view, I’ll be involved here primarily in longevity research.”
She hesitated, said, “Frankly I don’t see the connection.”
Ticos grunted. “Of course you don’t. I’d better start at the beginning.”
“Perhaps you should. Longevity research . . . ” Nile paused. “Is there some, uh, personal—”
“Is the life I’m interested in extending my own? Definitely. I’m at a point where it requires careful first-hand attention.”
Nile felt startled. Ticos was lean but firmly muscled, agile and unwrinkled. In spite of his white hair, she hadn’t considered him old. He might have been somewhat over sixty and not interested in cosmetic hormones. “You’ve begun extension treatments?” she asked.