His immediate problem was the ticklish one of establishing the exact circumstances under which Commissioner Ramog was to murder Holati Tate. It was an undertaking which could only too easily be fumbled, and he still wasn’t at all certain of a number of details. Brow furrowed with worried thought, he kicked the hopper at last into a moderately rapid vertical ascent and unpackaged the bio-signal record Trigger Argee had transcribed for him. He fed it carefully into the hopper’s broadcast system.
Floating presently in the tinted evening air of the lower fringes of Manon’s aerial plankton zone, Holati Tate sat a while scanning the area about and above him. A few hundred yards away a sluggishly moving stream of the Drift was passing overhead. A few stars had winked on; and hardly a thousand miles out, a ribbon of Moon Belt dust drew thin glittering bands of fire across the sky. Here and there, then, Holati began to spot the huge greenish images of mankind’s established competitors for the protein of the Plankton Drift: the Harvesters of Manon.
* * *
In a couple of minutes he had counted thirty-six Harvesters within visual range. As he watched, two of them were rising until they dwindled and vanished in the darkening sky. The others continued to hover not far from the streams of the Drift, as sluggish at this hour as their prey. The sausage-shaped, almost featureless giant forms hardly looked menacing, but three venturesome biologists had been electrocuted by a Harvester within a week after the Project was opened on the planet; and the usual hands-off policy had been established until Project work advanced to the point where the problem required a wholesale solution.
Holati tuned in the bio-receiver. Around midday both Harvesters and plankton were furiously active, but there was only the barest murmur of signal now. He eased down the broadcast button on the set and waited.
He’d counted off eight seconds before he could determine any reaction. The plankton stream nearest him was losing momentum, its component masses began curving down slowly from all directions towards the hopper. Holati was not sure that the nearest Harvesters had stirred at all; keeping a wary eye on them, he gradually stepped up the signal strength by some fifty per cent. The hopper was a solid little craft, spaceworthy at interplanetary ranges, but he was only slightly curious about what would happen if he allowed it to accompany a mass of plankton into a Harvester’s interior. And he wasn’t in the least interested in stimulating one of the giants into cutting loose with its defensive electronic blasts.
The Harvesters were definitely moving toward him when the first streamers of the plankton arrived, thumped squashily upon the hopper’s viewplate receivers and generally proceeded to plaster themselves about the front part of the machine. Blinded for the moment, Holati switched on a mass-scope, spotted an oncoming Harvester at five hundred yards and promptly stopped the broadcast. Somewhat nervously, he watched the Harvester drift to a stop while the butterfly-sized plankton life, dropping away from what had become an uninteresting surface again, made languid motions at clustering into a new formation.
He hesitated, then eased the hopper backward out of the disturbed area. A mile off he stopped again and swept his glance once more over what he could see of the gliding clouds of the Drift. Then he jammed down the broadcast button, sending the bio-signal out with a bawling force the planet had never experienced before.
Throughout the area, the Drift practically exploded. Great banks of living matter came rolling down through the sky toward the hopper. Behind, through and ahead of the sentient tides, moving a hundred times faster than the plankton, rushed dozens of vast sausage shapes, their business ends opened into wide, black gapes.
Holati Tate hurriedly knocked off the hopper’s thunderous Lorelei song and went fast and straight away from there. Far behind him, he watched the front lines of the plankton clouds breaking over a converged mass of Harvesters. A minute later the giants were plowing methodically back and forth through the late evening snack with which he had provided them.
The experiment, he decided, had to be called a complete success. He got his bearings, turned the hopper and sent it arrowing silently down through the shadowy lower air, headed for Warehouse Center on the southern side of the local arm of Great Gruesome Swamp.
* * *
Supply Manager Essidy was a tall, handsome man with a small brown beard and a fine set of large white teeth, who was disliked by practically everybody on the Project because of his unfortunate reputation as Commissioner Ramog’s Number One stooge. Perhaps to offset the lonely atmosphere of his main office at Warehouse Center, Essidy was industriously studying the finer points of a couple of girl clerks through his desk viewer when he was informed that Senior Assistant Commissioner Tate had just parked his hopper at Dome Two.
Essidy clicked his teeth together alertly, lifted one eyebrow, dropped it again, cleared the viewer, clipped a comm-button to his left ear and switched the comm-set to “record.” Of the eight hundred and thirty-seven people on the Manon Project, there were nine on whom the commissioner wanted immediate reports concerning even routine supplies withdrawals. Holati Tate was one of the nine.
Essidy’s viewer picked up the S.A.C. as he walked down the central corridor of Dome Two and followed him around a number of turns, into a large storeroom and up to a counter. Essidy adjusted the comm-button.
” . . . Not just for atmospheric use,” Holati was saying. “Jet mobility, of course. But I might want to use it under water.”
The counter clerk had recognized the S.A.C. and was being respectful. “Well, sir,” he said hesitantly, “if it’s a question of pressure, that would have to be a Moon-suit, wouldn’t it?”
Holati nodded. “Uh-huh. That’s what I had in mind.”
Back in the office, Essidy lifted both eyebrows. He couldn’t be sure of the Bio Station’s current requirements, but a Moon-suit didn’t sound routine. The clerk was dialing for the suit when Holati added, “By the way, got one of those things outfitted with a directional tracker?”
The clerk looked around. “I’m sure we don’t, sir. It isn’t standard equipment. We can install one for you.”
Holati reflected, and shook his head. “Don’t bother with it, son. I’ll do that myself . . . Uh, high selectivity, medium range, is the type I want.”
* * ** * *
” . . . That’s all he ordered,” Essidy was reporting to Commissioner Ramog fifteen minutes later, on the commissioner’s private beam. “He checked the suit himself—seemed familiar with that—and took the stuff along.”
The commissioner was silent for almost thirty seconds and Essidy waited respectfully. He admired the boss and envied him hopelessly. It wasn’t just that Commissioner Ramog had Academy training and the authority of the Academy and the home office behind him; he also had three times Essidy’s brains and ten times Essidy’s guts and Essidy knew it.
When Ramog finally spoke he sounded almost absent-minded, and Essidy felt a little thrill because that could mean something very hot indeed was up. “Well, of course Tate’s familiar with Moon-suits,” Ramog said. “He put in a sixteen-year hitch with the Space Scouts before getting assigned to Precol.”
“Oh?” said Essidy.
“Yes.” Ramog was silent a few seconds again. “Thanks for the prompt report, Essidy.” He added casually, “Keep the squad on alert status until further notice.”
Essidy asked no foolish questions. The matter might be hot right now, and it might not. He’d hear all he needed to know in plenty of time. That was the way the boss worked; and if you worked the way he liked, another bonus would be coming along quietly a little later to be quietly stacked away with previously earned ones. Essidy looked forward to retiring from the service early.
* * *
Commissioner Ramog, in his private rooms at Headquarters, let the tiny beam-speaker slip back into a desk niche and shifted his gaze toward a slowly turning three-dimensional replica of Manon which filled the wall across the room. The commissioner was a slender man, not very big, with a wiry, hard-trained body, close-cropped blond hair and calm gray eyes. At the moment he looked intrigued and a trifle puzzled.
The obvious first item here, he told himself, was that there simply wasn’t any spot on the surface of this planet where the use of a Moon-suit was indicated. The tropical lakes were too shallow to present a pressure problem—and the fauna of those lakes was such that he wouldn’t have cared to work there himself without both armor and armament. He could assume therefore that Senior Assistant Commissioner Tate, having checked out neither armor nor armament, wasn’t contemplating such work either.
The second item: a directional tracker had a number of possible uses. However, it had been developed as a space gadget, and while it could be employed on a planet to keep a line on mobile targets, either alive or mechanical, it looked as if Tate’s interest actually might be centered on something in space—