“Why not?”
“I think we can lose the tarm here. It may not be too healthy by now anyway.”
He looked up briefly, made a sound that was almost a laugh.
“More Tuvela work?”
“This Tuvela has little helpers.” Nile switched on the otter-caller, moved quickly toward the lagoon. At the edge of the water she stood glancing about, listening. Nothing significant to be seen. The blurred snarling of engines came for a moment from the general direction of the blockhouse. Then Sweeting broke the surface below her.
“Nile, you watch out! Tarm’s coming!”
Nile rejoined Ticos moments later. The tarm was approaching through the floatwood above water level. It might be casting about for their trail, or might be on the move simply because it was beginning to feel the effects of the wild otters’ weed poison. They’d succeeded in planting a considerable number of the thorns in it under the blockhouse. Sweeting reported its motions seemed sluggish. But for a while it could still be dangerous enough.
She postponed further explanations, and Ticos didn’t press for any. They hurried down to the lagoon together. If the tarm didn’t turn aside, it should come across their human trail. Then the lagoon must be where the trail seemed to end. If it began searching for them in the water, the otters would try to finish it off. Evidently the tarm didn’t realize that the small elusive creatures might be dangerous to it. After it found it couldn’t catch them, it hadn’t paid them much attention.
They rubbed buti sap into the soles of their shoes, waves lapping a few feet below. Nile thought the last coating she’d given herself should be adequate otherwise. Her stock of the sap was running out; she might need some later and didn’t know whether she could find another stand. By the time they finished, otter whistling had begun again, not far off. She led the way back into the forest, moving upward. Ticos crowded behind her, tarm fear overriding his fatigue. Perhaps a hundred feet on, Nile suddenly checked.
“Down, Ticos! Flatten out!”
She dropped beside him on the bough along which they had been moving. There was a disturbance in the forest below that wasn’t caused by the wind. Vegetation thrashed heavily. The noise stopped for some seconds, then resumed. It seemed to be approaching the area they’d left. They watched, heads raised, motionless.
Then Nile saw the tarm for the third time. Ticos stiffened beside her. He’d detected it too.
Even with the dark-lenses she couldn’t make out many details. There was growth between them. The great thing moving among the boles of the forest looked like a fat gliding worm. Its nearness had an almost numbing effect on her again. She stared at it in fixed fascination; and it was some moments then before she realized it had stopped—about at the point where they had gone down to the water, where the human scent lay and where it should end, blotted out by the buti.
They both started at an abrupt series of loud sucking noises. The pale mass seemed to swell, then flattened. It had turned, was flowing up into the forest. Ticos swallowed audibly.
“It’s—”
“Going back the way we came. It isn’t following us.”
He sighed with relief. They watched the tarm move out of sight. Long seconds passed. Finally Ticos looked over at Nile. She shook her head. Better not stir just yet. . . .
And then the tarm reappeared, following the line of their trail back to the water’s edge. Now it slid unhesitatingly down into the lagoon and sank below the surface. Otter whistles gave it greeting.
They got to their feet at once, hurried on. The wind noises had become allies, covering the sounds of their retreat. Nile selected the easiest routes—broad boughs, slanted trunks. Ticos simply wasn’t up to much more; he stumbled, slipped, breathed in wheezing gasps. At last she stopped to let him rest.
“Huh?” he asked. “What’s the delay?”
“We don’t have to kill you at this stage,” Nile told him. “They may not even know yet that we aren’t lying dead in the laboratory. They’ve probably sealed the doors to keep half their fort from becoming contaminated.”
He grunted. “If they haven’t searched the lab yet, they soon will! They can get protective equipment there in a hurry. And someone should have thought of that window by now.”
Nile shrugged. The tarm could chill her, but she was no longer too concerned about Parahuan trackers. “We have a good head start,” she said. “If they trail us to the lagoon, they won’t know where to look next. We could be anywhere on the island.” She hesitated. “If they have any sense left, they won’t waste any more time with us at all. They’ll just get their strike against the mainland rolling. That’s what I’m afraid they’ll do.”
Ticos made a giggling sound. “That’s the one thing they can’t do now! Not for a while.”
“Why not?”
“It’s the way their minds work. The only justification the Voice of Action had for what it’s done was the fact that it could deliver your head. Proof of the argument—Tuvelas can be destroyed! They’ve lost the proof and they’ll be debating for hours again before they’re up to making another move. Except, of course, to look for you. They’ll be doing that, and doing it intensively. We’d better not wait around. They might get lucky. How far is it still to the incubator?”
Nile calculated. “Not much more than four hundred yards. But it includes some pretty stiff scrambling.”
“Let’s scramble,” Ticos said. “I’ll last that far.”
Chapter 8
The incubator was a loosely organized colony-animal which looked like a globular deformity of the floatwood bough about which it grew. The outer surface of the globe was a spiky hedge. Inside was a rounded hollow thirty feet in diameter, containing seed pods and other vital parts, sketchily interconnected. The hedge’s spikes varied from finger-long spines to three foot daggers, mounted on individually mobile branches. Only two creatures big and powerful enough to be a potential threat to the incubator’s internal sections were known to have found a way of penetrating the hedge. One of them was man.
The other was no enemy. It was a flying kester, a bony animal with a sixteen foot wingspread, at home among the ice floes of the south, which maintained a mutually beneficial relationship with the incubator organism. Periodically it flew northward to meet floatwood islands coming along the Meral, sought out the incubators installed on them, left one of its leathery eggs in a seed pod on each, finally returned to its cold skies. In the process it had distributed the incubators’ fertilizing pollen among the colonies, thereby carrying out its part of the instinctual bargain. When the young kester hatched, the seed pod produced a sap to nourish the future pollinator until it left its foster parent and took to the air.
Man’s energy weapons could get him undamaged through the hedge. The simpler way was to pretend to be a polar kester.
“It’s right behind these bushes,” Nile said. She indicated a section of the guard hedge curving away above the shrubbery before them. “Don’t get much closer to it.”
“I don’t intend to!” Ticos assured her. Their approach had set off a furious rattling as of many dry bones being beaten together. The incubator was agitating its armament in warning. Ticos stood back watching as Nile finished trimming a ten foot springy stalk she’d selected to gain them passage through the hedge. Another trick learned in childhood—the shallows settlers considered incubator seeds and polar kester eggs gourmet items. Spiky fronds at the tip of the stalk were a reasonable facsimile of the spines on the kesters bony wing-elbow. Confronted by an incubator’s challenge, the kester would brush its elbow back and forth along one of the waving hedge branches. A number of such strokes identified the visitor and admitted it to the globe’s interior.
Nile moved up to the shrubs standing across their path on the floatwood bough, parted them cautiously. The rattling grew louder and something slashed heavily at the far side of the shrubs. She thrust out the stalk, touched the fronds to an incubator branch, stroked it lightly. After some seconds the branch stiffened into immobility. Moments later, so did the branches immediately about it. The rattling gradually died away. Nile continued the stroking motion. Suddenly the branches opposite her folded back, leaving an opening some five feet high and three wide.
They slipped through, close together. Nile turned, tapped the interior of the hedge with the stalk. The opening closed again.
Unaided human eyes would have recorded blackness here. The dark-lenses still showed them as much as they needed to see. “Over there,” Nile said, nodding.
The interior of the colony-animal was compartmentalized by sheets of oily tissue, crisscrossed by webbings of fibrous cables. In a compartment on their left were seven of the big gourd-shaped seed pods. The caps of all but two stood tilted upward, indicating they contained neither fertilized seeds nor an infant kester.