She wished he were with her now, under this real sky rather than the artificial one on the hospital’s crowded recreation deck, with his mind his own, its professional concerns forgotten, and his attention concentrated entirely on her. But, she supposed, being the life-mate of the renowned Conway, Sector General’s Diagnostician-in-Charge of Other-Species Surgery, had to have a few disadvantages. He couldn’t take a vacation of opportunity like this just because she wanted to and he probably needed it. She sighed and continued walking.
Beside her Danalta rolled silently over the sand. In keeping with the occasion, and because it liked to give gratuitous exhibitions of its shape-changing prowess, it had adopted the form a recreational plaything much-favored by Earth-humans, a large beach ball. It was covered overall by triangles of garish red, – yellow and blue; the eye, ear, and mouth were inconspicuous -. the visual effect was quite realistic, but the track that it made in the sand was too deep to have been made by an air-filled ball. Danalta regardless of the shape it took, was unable to reduce its considerable body-weight. The pretty ball would never bounce. Would you like to move inland?” said Danalta, stopping suddenly an<} extruding a bright green, Earth-human hand and index finger to point. “That hill is only a mile away and seems to be the highest point on the island. From there we might be able to see features of special interest to explore later, and possibly the nearer islands.” As well as being a show-off, the polymorph was intensely curious about everything regardless of shape or size, and the harder it was to mimic, the better it liked it. “Fine,” said Murchison. “But in case we’re needed urgently I want to stay as close as possible to our patients. There’s a stream that runs past the med station into the sea. We’ll go back and follow it inland to its source, which should be on high ground. Do you agree?” It was a rhetorical question, and even though she wasn’t in the habit of pushing her rank, they both knew it. For the first hundred meters or so, the nearby environment could have been that found on any sun-drenched, tropical island on her home world. The stream was less than two meters wide but fast-flowing so that the stones on its bed were washed clean and showed many different colors and patterns of veining. It was only when her walk, and Danalta’s roll, took them inland and under the trees that the differences began to show. The chlorophyll-green of the leaves looked the same but the shapes were subtly different as was the soft carpet which was not of grass that grew along the banks of the stream from damp earth that was not of Earth. A little shiver of pure wonder made her twitch her shoulders, as it always did when she encountered a completely alien planet that looked and felt so entirely familiar. Then as they moved deeper under the trees, the amount of vegetation bearing large, sunflower-like blooms increased. The petals on many of them had dropped away to reveal clusters of pale green . fruit buds. There would be no problem with cross-pollination here, she thought as the insects began to swarm. Very definitely they were like nothing on Earth. They ranged in size from the virtually invisible to several stick-insect varieties whose bodies were nearly six inches long. A few of them were rounded, black and shiny, with wings that beat so rapidly that they seemed to be surrounded by a grey fog, but majority were brightly colored in concentric circles of yellow and red with multiple sets of wide, slower-beating gossamer wings that threw back constantly changing, iridescent highlights. They were gorgeous, she thought, and some of them made even Prilicla look dowdy. Most of them were heading towards Danalta, obviously attracted by the garishly colored beach-ball body it had adopted. “They seem to be curious rather than hungry,” said the shape-changer. “None of them has tried to bite me.” “That’s sensible of them,” said Murchison nervously as they lost interest in Danalta and began moving towards her. “Maybe they’ve realized that you’re indigestible.”