“Yes?”
“If you see that sub, don’t try to tag it!”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s ours, idiot! I was looking down on it just now. It’s a Narcotics Control boat! And at a guess the reason it’s been beating around here is that it has its detectors locked on the Parahuan command ship—”
The receiver made a muffled sound of surprise. Then, quickly: “It’s probably not alone!”
“Probably not. How far do you register from your car?”
“Nine hundred yards,” Parrol’s voice said. “By the time we get together and make it there, we might—”
“We might be in the middle of a hot operation!”
“Yes. Let’s get back upstairs and see what we can see.”
Nile jetted up through the water, trailed by darting otter shapes, broke surface in a surging tangle of drift growth, began splashing and crawling out of the mess. Morning sun blazed through wind-whipped reeds about and above her.
“Nile,” snapped the intercom, “their ship’s here!”
“Their ship?”
“It’s got to be the Parahuan. Something beneath me—lifting! Looks like the bottom of the ocean coming up. Keep out of the way—that thing is big! I’m scrambling at speed.”
The intercom went silent. Nile stumbled across a pocket of water, lunged through a last tangle of rubbery brown growth, found open sea before her. The drift was rising sluggishly on a great swell. She shoved the goggles up on her head. Something shrieked briefly above. An aircar swept past, was racing back into the sky. Higher up, specks glinted momentarily, circling in the sun. A chain of patrol cars, lifting toward space, cutting through the aliens’ communication blocks—
The swell had surged past; the weed bed was dropping toward its trough, shut off by a sloping wall of water to the south. Nile knifed into the sea, cut in the rig, swept upward, reached and rode the shifting front of the wave. View unobstructed.
“Sleds coming, Dan! Three of them.”
His voice said something she didn’t catch. Off to the right, less than half a mile away, the black hull of the Parahuan command ship lifted glistening from the sea. Rounded back of a giant sea beast. Nile tried to speak again and couldn’t. Wind roar and sea thunder rolled about her. Out of the west, knifing lightly through the waves like creatures of air, the three sleds came racing in line on their cannon drives. On the foredeck of the one in the lead, the massive ugly snouts of spaceguns swiveled toward the Parahuan ship, already a third clear of the water and rising steadily. Pale beams winked into existence between the sled’s guns and the ship, changed to spouts of smashing green fire where they touched the dark hull. The following sleds swung left, curving in; there were spaceguns there too, and the guns were in action. About the spaceship the ocean exploded in steam. Green fire glared through it. A ragged, continuous thundering rolled over Nile. The ship kept lifting. The sleds’ beams clung. There was no return fire. Perhaps the first lash of the beams had sealed the ship’s gunports. It surged heavily clear of the sea, fled straight up into the sky with an enormous howling, steam and water cascading back from it. The beams lifted with it, then winked out in turn, ceasing their thunder.
Nile’s ears still rang with the din. Lying back in the water, she watched the ship dwindle in a brilliant blue sky.
Run, Palachs, run! But see, it’s too late!
Two thin fire lines converged in the blue on the shrinking dot of the Parahuan ship. Then a new sun blazed in white fury where the dot had been. The fire lines curved away, vanished.
Federation warships had come hunting out of space. . . .
She swung about in the water, saw a section of a broken floatwood bough twenty feet away, caught it and clambered aboard. A wave lifted the bough as she came to her feet, sent it rushing south. Nile rode it, balanced against a spur, gaze sweeping the sea . . . a world of brilliance, of dazzling flashes, of racing wind and tumbling whitecaps. Laughter began to surge in her, a bubbling release. One of the great sleds knifed past, not a hundred yards away, rushing on humming drives toward the island. A formation of CA patrol cars swept above it, ports open. Jet chutists would spill from the ports in minutes to start cleaning the abandoned children of Porad Anz from the floatwood.
Details might vary considerably. But as morning rolled around the world, this was the scene that was being repeated now wherever floatwood drifts rode the ocean currents. The human demon was awake and snarling on Nandy-Cline. . . .
“Nile—”
“Dan! Where are you?”
“On the surface. just spotted you. Look southwest. The aircar’s registering. Dr. Cay’s all right. . . . ”
Flick of guilt—I forgot all about Ticos! Her eyes searched, halted on a swell. There he was.
She flung up an arm and waved, saw Parrol return the salute. Then she cut in the rig, dived from the floatwood, went down and flashed through the quivering crystal halls of the upper sea to meet him.
Chapter 10
“You are not,” said the blonde emphatically, “Dr. Ticos Cay. You are not Dr. Nile Etland. There are no great white decayed-looking monsters chasing you through a forest!”
Rion Gilennic blinked at her. She was an attractive young creature in her silver-blue uniform; but she seemed badly worried.
“No,” he told her reassuringly. “Of course not.”
The blonde brightened. “That’s better! Now, who are you? I’ll tell you who you are. You’re Federation Council Deputy Rion Gilennic.”
“Quite right,” Gilennic agreed.
“And where are you?”
He glanced about. “In the transmitter room.”
“Anybody can see that. Where’s this transmitter room?”
“On the flagship. Section Admiral Tatlaw’s flagship. Oh, don’t worry! When I’m myself, I remember everything. It’s just that I seem to slide off now and then into being one of the other two.”
“You told us,” the blonde said reproachfully, “that you’d absorbed recall transcriber digests like that before!”
“So I have. I realize now they were relatively minor digests. Small doses.”
She shook her head. “This was no small dose! A double dose, for one thing. A twenty-six minute bit, and a two minute bit. Both loaded with emotion peaks. Then there was a sex crossover on the two minute bit. That’s confusing in itself. I think you’ve been rather lucky, Deputy! Next time you try out an unfamiliar psych machine, at least give the operators straight information. On a rush job like this we had to take some things for granted. You could have stayed mixed up for weeks!”
“My apologies,” said Gilennic. Then he made a startled exclamation.
“Now what?” the blonde asked anxiously.
“What time is it?”
She checked her watch. “Ship or standard?”
“Standard.”
She told him. Gilennic said, “That leaves me something like ten minutes to get straightened out before Councilman Mavig contacts me.”
“I can give you a shot that will straighten you out in thirty seconds,” the blonde offered.
“Then I won’t remember the digests.”
“No, not entirely. But you should still have the general idea.”
Gilennic shook his head. “That’s not good enough! I need all the details for the conference.”
“Well, I understand the Councilman’s absorbed the digests too. He may not be in any better shape.”
“That’ll be the day!” said Gilennic sourly. “Nothing shakes the Councilman.”
She reflected, said, “You’ll be all right, I think. You’ve been coming out of it fast. . . . Those two subjects had some remarkable experiences, didn’t they?”
“Yes, remarkable. Where are they at present?”
She looked concerned again. “Don’t you remember? They left ship almost an hour ago. On your order. Dr. Etland wanted to get Dr. Cay back to the planet and into a hospital.”
Gilennic considered. “Yes, I do remember now. That was just before this stuff began to take effect on me, wasn’t it? I suppose—”
He broke off as the entrance door slid open. A trim young woman stepped in, smiled, went to the transmitter stand, placed a sheaf of papers on it, and switched on the screen. She glanced about the other items on the stand and looked satisfied.
“These are the reports you wanted for the conference, Mr. Gilennic,” she announced. “You’ll have just time enough to check them over.”
“Thanks, Wyl.” Gilennic started for the stand.
“Anything else?” Wyl asked.
“No,” he said. “That will be all.”
Wyl looked at the blonde. “We’d better be leaving.”
The blonde frowned. “The Deputy isn’t in good condition!” she stated. “As a Psychology Service technician, I have a Class Five clearance. Perhaps—”
Wyl took her arm. “Come along, dear. I’m Mr. Gilennic’s confidential secretary and have a Class Two clearance. That isn’t good enough to let me sit here and listen.”
The blonde addressed Gilennic. “If you start running hallucinations again—”
He smiled at her. “If I do, I’ll buzz for help. Good enough?”