_The talented author of "The Fishdollar Affair"
returns with another compelling story of a frontier
world--grim New Cornwall of the Black Learning._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Red-haired Flinter Cole sipped his black coffee and looked around the
chrome and white tile galley of Space Freighter _Gorbals_, in which he
was riding down the last joint of a dogleg journey to the hermit planet
of New Cornwall.
"Nothing's been published about the planet for the last five hundred
years," he said in a nervous, jerky voice. "You people on _Gorbals_
at least _see_ the place, and I understand you're the only ship that
does."
"That's right, twice every standard year," said the cook. He was a
placid, squinting man, pink in his crisp whites. "But like I said, no
girls, no drinks, nothing down there but hard looks and a punch in the
nose for being curious. We mostly stay aboard, up in orbit. Them New
Cornish are the biggest, meanest men I ever did see, Doc."
"I'm not a real doctor yet," Cole said, glancing down at the scholar
grays he was wearing. "If I don't do a good job on New Cornwall I
may never be. This is my Ph. D. trial field assignment. I should be
_stuffing_ myself with data on the ecosystem so I can ask the right
questions when I get there. But there's nothing!"
"What's a pee aitch dee?"
"That's being a doctor. I'm an ecologist--that means I deal with
everything alive, and the way it all works in with climate and
geography. I can use _any_ kind of data. I have only six months until
_Gorbals_ comes again to make my survey and report. If I fumble away my
doctorate, and I'm twenty-three already...." Cole knitted shaggy red
eyebrows in worry.
"Well hell, Doc, I can tell you things like, it's got four moons and
only one whopper of a continent and it's low grav, and the forest there
you won't believe even when you see it--"
"I need to know about _stompers_. Bidgrass Company wants Belconti U. to
save them from extinction, but they didn't say what the threat is. They
sent travel directions, a visa and passage scrip for just one man. And
I only had two days for packing and library research, before I had to
jump to Tristan in order to catch this ship. I've been running in the
dark ever since. You'd think the Bidgrass people didn't really care."
"Price of stomper egg what it is, I doubt that," the cook said,
scratching his fat jaw. "But for a fact, they're shipping less these
days. Must be some kind of trouble. I never saw a stomper, but they say
they're big birds that live in the forest."
"You see? The few old journal articles I did find, said they were
flightless bird-homologs that lived on the plains and preyed on the
great herds of something called darv cattle."
"Nothing but forest and sea for thousands of miles around Bidgrass
Station, Doc. Stompers are pure hell on big long legs, they say."
"There again! _I_ read they were harmless to man."
"Tell you what, you talk to Daley. He's cargo officer and has to go
down with each tender trip. He'll maybe know something can help you."
The cook turned away to inspect his ovens. Cole put down his cup and
clamped a freckled hand over his chin, thinking. He thought about
stomper eggs, New Cornwall's sole export and apparently, for five
hundred years, its one link with the other planets of Carina sector.
Their reputedly indescribable flavor had endeared them to gourmets on a
hundred planets. They were symbols of conspicuous consumption for the
ostentatious wealthy. No wonder most of the literature under the New
Cornwall reference had turned out to be cookbooks.
Orphaned and impecunious, a self-made scholar, Cole had never tasted
stomper egg.
The cook slammed an oven door on the fresh bread smell.
"Just thought, Doc. I keep a can or two of stomper egg, squeeze it from
cargo for when I got a passenger to feed. How'd you like a mess for
chow tonight?"
"Why not?" Cole said, grinning suddenly. "Anything may be data for an
ecologist, especially if it's good to eat."
* * * * *
The stomper egg came to the officers' mess table as a heaped platter
of bite-sized golden spheres, deep-fried in bittra oil. Their
delicate, porous texture hardly required chewing. Their flavor was
like--cinnamon? Peppery sandalwood? Yes, yes, and yet unique....
Cole realized in confusion that he had eaten half the platterful and
the other six men had not had any. He groped for a lost feeling--was it
that he and the others formed a connected biomass and that he could eat
for all of them? Ridiculous!
"I'm a pig," he laughed weakly. "Here, Mr. Daley, have some."
Daley, a gingery, spry little man, said "By me" and slid the platter
along. It rounded the table and returned to Cole untouched.
"Fall to, Doc," Daley said, grinning.
Cole was already reaching ... lying in his stateroom and he _was_ the
bunk cradling a taut, messianic body flaming with imageless dreams.
He dreamed himself asleep and slept himself into shamed wakefulness
needing coffee.
It was ship-night. Cole walked through dimmed lights to the galley and
carried his cup of hot black coffee to main control, where he found
Daley on watch, lounging against the gray enamel computer.
"I feel like a fool," Cole said.
"You're a martyr to science, Doc. Which reminds me, Cookie told me you
got questions about Bidgrass Station."
"Well yes, about stompers. What's wiping them out, what's their habitat
and life pattern, oh anything."
"I learned quick not to ask about stompers. I gather they're twenty
feet high or so and they're penned up behind a stockade. I never saw
one."
"Well dammit! I read they couldn't be domesticated."
"They're not. Bidgrass Station is in a clearing the New Cornish cut
from sea to sea across a narrow neck of land. On the west is this
stockade and beyond it is Lundy Peninsula, a good half-million square
miles of the damndest forest ever grew on any planet. That's where the
stompers are."
"How thickly settled is this Lundy Peninsula?"
"Not a soul there, Doc. The settlement is around Car Truro on the east
coast, twelve thousand miles east of Bidgrass. I never been there, but
you can see from the air it isn't much."
"How big a city is Bidgrass? Does it have a university?"
Daley smiled again and shook his head. "They got fields and pastures,
but it's more like a military camp than a town. I see barracks for the
workers and egg hunters, hangars and shops, a big egg-processing plant
and warehouses around the landing field. I never get away from the
field, but I'd guess four, five thousand people at Bidgrass."
Cole sighed and put down his cup on the log desk.
"What is it they import, one half so precious as the stuff they sell?"
Daley chuckled and rocked on his toes. "Drugs, chemicals, machinery
parts, hundreds of tons of Warburton energy capsules. Pistols,
blasters, cases of flame charge, tanks of fire mist--you'd think they
had a war on."
"That's no help. I'll make up for lost time when I get there. I'll beat
their ears off with questions."
Daley's gnomish face grew serious. "Watch what you ask and who you ask,
Doc. They're suspicious as hell and they hate strangers."
"They need my help. Besides, I'll deal only with scientists."
"Bidgrass isn't much like a campus. I don't know, Doc, something's
wrong on that planet and I'm always glad to lift out."
"Why didn't you and the others eat any of that stomper egg?" Cole asked
abruptly.
"Because the people at Bidgrass turn sick and want to slug you if you
mention eating it. That's reason enough for me."
Well, that was data too, Cole thought, heading back to his stateroom.
* * * * *
Two days later Daley piloted the cargo tender down in a three-lap
braking spiral around New Cornwall. Cole sat beside him in the cramped
control room, eyes fixed on the view panel. Once he had the bright and
barren moon Cairdween at upper left, above a vastly curving sweep of
sun-glinting ocean, and he caught his breath in wonder.
"I know the feeling, Doc," Daley said softly. "Like being a giant and
jumping from world to world."
Clouds obscured much of the sprawling, multi-lobed single continent.
The sharpening of outline and hint of regularity Cole remembered noting
on Tristan and his own planet of Belconti, the mark of man, was absent
here. Yet New Cornwall, as a human settlement, was two hundred years
older than Belconti.
The forests stretched across the south and west, broken by uplands and
rain shadows, as the old books said. He saw between cloud patches the
glint of lakes and the crumpled leaf drainage pattern of the great
northeastern plain but, oddly, the plain was darker in color than the
pinkish-yellow forest. He mentioned it to Daley.
"It's flowers and vines and moss makes it that color," the little man
said, busy with controls. "Whole world in that forest top--snakes,
birds, jumping things big as horses. Doc, them trees are _big_."
"Of course! I read about the epiphytal biota. And low gravity always
conduces to gigantism."
"There's Lundy," Daley grunted, pointing.
It looked like a grinning ovoid monster-head straining into the western
ocean at the end of a threadlike neck. Across the neck Bidgrass Station
slashed between parallel lines of forest edge like a collar. Cole
watched it again on the landing approach, noting the half-mile of
clearing between the great wall and the forest edge, the buildings and
fields rectilinear in ordered clumps east of the wall, and then the
light aberration of the tender's lift field blotted it out.
"Likely I won't see you till next trip," Daley said, taking leave.
"Good luck, Doc."
Cole shuffled down the personnel ramp, grateful for the weight of his
two bags in the absurdly light gravity. Trucks and cargo lifts were
coming across the white field from the silvery warehouses along its
edge. Men also, shaggy-haired big men in loose blue garments, walking
oddly without the stride and drive of leg muscles. Their faces were
uniformly grim and blank to Cole, standing there uncertainly. Then a
ground car pulled up and a tall old man in the same rough clothing got
out and walked directly toward him. He had white hair, bushy white
eyebrows over deep-set gray eyes, and a commanding beak of a nose.
"Who might you be?" he demanded.
"I'm Flinter Cole, from Belconti University. Someone here is expecting
me."
The old man squinted in thought and bit his lower lip. Finally he said,
"The biologist, hey? Didn't expect you until next _Gorbals_. Didn't
think you could make the connections for this one."
"It left me no time at all to study up in. But when species extinction
is the issue, time is important. And I'm an ecologist."
"Well," the old man said. "Well. I'm Garth Bidgrass."
He shook Cole's hand, a powerful grip quickly released.
"Hawkins there in the car will take you to the manor house and get you
settled. I'll phone ahead. I'll be tied up checking cargo for a day or
two, I expect. You just rest up awhile."
He spoke to the driver in what sounded like Old English, then moved
rapidly across the field toward the warehouses in the same strange walk
as the other men. As far as Cole could see, he did not bend his knees
at all.
Hawkins, also old but frail and stooped, took Cole's bags to the
car. When the ecologist tried to follow him he almost fell headlong,
then managed a stiff-legged shuffle. Momentarily he longed for the
Earth-normal gravity of Belconti and the ship.
They drove past unfenced fields green with vegetable and cereal crops,
and fenced pastures holding beef and dairy cattle of the old Earth
breeds. It was a typical human ecosystem. Then they passed a group of
field workers, and surprise jolted the ecologist. They were huge--eight
or nine feet tall, both men and women, all with long hair and some of
them naked. They did not look up.
Cole looked at Hawkins. The old man glared at him from red-rimmed eyes
and chattered something in archaic English. He speeded up, losing the
giants behind a hedge, and the manor house with the palisade behind it
loomed ahead.
The great fence dwarfed the house. Single baulks of grassy brown timber
ten feet on a side soared two hundred feet into the air, intricately
braced and stayed. High above, a flyer drifted as if on sentry duty.
Half a mile beyond, dwarfing the fence in its turn, arose the
thousand-foot black escarpment of the forest edge.
The manor house huddled in a walled garden with armed guards at the
gate. It was two-storied and sprawling, with a flat-roofed watch tower
at the southeast corner, and made of the same glassy brown timber.
Hawkins stopped the car by the pillared veranda where a lumpy, gray,
nondescript woman waited. Cole got out, awkwardly careful in the light
gravity.
The woman would not meet his glance. "I'm Flada Vignoli, Mr. Bidgrass's
niece and housekeeper," she said in a dead voice. "I'll show you your
rooms." She turned away before Cole could respond.
"Let me carry the bags, I need to," he said to Hawkins, laughing
uncertainly. The old man hoisted his skinny shoulders and spat.
The rooms were on the second floor, comfortable but archaic in style.
The gray woman told him that Hawkins would bring his meals, that Garth
Bidgrass would see him in a few days to make plans, and that Mr.
Bidgrass thought he should not go about unescorted until he knew more
about local conditions.
Cole nodded. "I'll want to confer with your leading biologists, Mrs.
Vignoli, as soon as I can. For today, can you get me a copy of your
most recent biotic survey?"
"Ain't any biologists, ain't any surveys," she said, standing in the
half-closed door.
"Well, any recent book about stompers or your general zo├Âlogy. It's
important that I start at once."
The face under the scraggly gray hair went blanker still. "You'll have
to talk to Mr. Bidgrass." She closed the door.
Cole unpacked, bathed, dressed again and explored his three rooms. Like
a museum, he thought. He looked out his west windows at the palisade
and forest edge. Then he decided to go downstairs, and found his door
was locked.
The shock was more fear than indignation, he realized, wondering at
himself. He paced his sitting room, thinking about his scholarly status
and the wealth and power of Belconti, until he had the indignation
flaming. Then a knock came at the door and it opened to reveal old
Hawkins with a wheeled food tray.
"What do you mean, locking me in?" Cole asked hotly.
He pushed past the food tray into the hall. Hawkins danced and made
shooing motions with his hands, chattering shrilly in the vernacular.
Cole walked to the railing around the stairwell and looked down. At the
foot of the stair a giant figure, man or woman he could not say, sat
and busied itself with something in its lap.
Cole went back into his room. The food was boiled beef, potatoes and
beets, plain but plentiful, plus bread and coffee. He ate heartily and
looked out his windows again to see night coming on. Finally he tried
the door and it was not locked. He shrugged, pushed the food tray into
the hall and closed the door again. Then he shot the inside bolt.
In bed, he finally dropped off into a restless, disturbed sleep.
* * * * *
Emboldened by morning and a hearty tray breakfast, Cole explored. He
was in a two-floor wing, and the doors into the main house were locked.
Through them he heard voices and domestic clatter. Unlocked across the
second-floor hall was another suite of rooms like his own. Downstairs
was still another suite and along the south side a library. The door
into the garden was locked.
My kingdom, Cole thought wryly. Prisoner of state!
He explored the library. Tristanian books, historical romances for the
most part, none less than three hundred years old. No periodicals,
nothing of New Cornwall publication. He drifted from window to window
looking out at the formal garden of flower beds, hedges and white sand
paths. Then he saw the girl.
She knelt in a sleeveless gray dress trimming a hedge. Her tanned and
rounded arms had dimpled elbows, he noted. She turned suddenly and he
saw, framed by reddish-brown curls, her oval face with small nose and
firm chin. The face was unsuitably grave and the eyes wide.
She was not staring at his window, Cole decided after a qualm, but
listening. Then she rose, picked up her basket of trimmings and glided
around the corner of the house. Before he could pursue her plump vision
to another window, a man appeared.
He looked taller than Cole and was built massively as a stone. Straight
black hair fell to his shoulders, cut square across his forehead and
bound by a white fillet. Under the black bar of eyebrow the heavy
face held itself in grim, unsmiling lines. He moved with that odd,
unstriding New Cornish walk that suggested tremendous power held in
leash.
Cole crossed the hall and watched the blue-clad form enter a door in
the wing opposite. The girl was nowhere. Again Cole felt a twinge of
fear, and boiled up anger to mask it.
Inside looking out, he thought. Peeping like an ecologist in a bird
blind!
When Hawkins brought lunch Cole raged at him and demanded to see Garth
Bidgrass. The old man chattered incomprehensibly and danced like a
fighting cock. Thwarted, the ecologist ate moodily and went down to
the library. The garden was empty and he decided on impulse to open a
window. A way of retreat, but from what and to where, he wondered as
he worked at the fastenings. Just as he got it free, a woman stooped
through the library door. She was at least seven feet tall.
Cole stood erect and held his breath. Not looking at him, the woman
dropped to her knees and began dusting the natural wood half-panelling
that encircled the room between bookcases. She had long blonde hair and
a mild, vacant face; she wore a shapeless blue dress.
"Hello," Cole said.
She paid no attention.
"Hello!" he said more sharply. "Do you speak Galactic English?"
She looked at him out of empty blue eyes and went back to her work.
He went past her gingerly and up to his room. There he wrote a note to
Garth Bidgrass, paced and fanned his indignation, tore up the note and
wrote a stronger one. When Hawkins brought his dinner, Cole beat down
his chattering objections and stuffed the note into the old man's coat
pocket.
"See that Bidgrass gets it at once! Do you hear, at once!" he shouted.
After nightfall, nervous and wakeful, Cole looked out on the garden by
the pale light of two moons. He saw the girl, wearing the same dress,
come out of the opposite wing, and decided on impulse to intercept her.
As he climbed through the library window he said to himself, "Anything
may be data to an ecologist, especially if it's pretty to look at."
* * * * *
He met her full face at the house corner and her hands flew up,
fending. She turned and he said, "Please don't run away from me. I want
to talk to you."
She turned back with eyes wide and troubled, in what nature had meant
to be a merry, careless face.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
She nodded. "Uncle Garth says I'm not to talk to you." It was a little
girl's voice, tremulous.
"Why? What am I, some kind of monster?"
"N-no. You're an outworlder, from a great, wealthy planet."
"Belconti is a very ordinary planet. What's your name?"
"I'm Pia--Pia Vignoli." The voice took on more assurance, but the
plump body stayed poised for flight.
"Well I'm Flinter Cole, and I have a job to do on this planet. It's
_terribly_ important that I get started. Will you help me?"
"How can I, Mr. Cole? I'm nobody. I don't know anything." She moved
away, and he followed, awkwardly.
"Girls know all sorts of things that would interest an ecologist," he
protested. "Tell me all you know about stompers."
"Oh _no_! I mustn't talk about stompers."
"Well talk about nothing then, like girls do," he said impatiently.
"What's the name of that moon?" He pointed overhead.
Tension left her and she smiled a little. "Morwenna," she said. "That
one just setting into Lundy Forest is Annis. You can tell Annis by her
bluish shadows that are never the same."
"Good girl! How about the other two, the ones that aren't up?"
"One's Cairdween and the other, the red one--oh, I daren't talk about
moons either."
"Not even _moons_? Really, Miss Vignoli--"
"Let's not talk at all. I'll show you how to walk, you do look so funny
all spraddled and scraping your feet. I was born off-planet and I had
to learn it myself."
She showed him the light down-flex of the foot that threw the body more
forward than up, and he learned to wait out the strange micropause
before his weight settled on the other foot. With a little practice
he got it, walking up and down the moonlit path beside her in an
effortless toe dance. Then he learned to turn corners and to jump.
"Pia," he said once. "Pia. I like the sound, but it doesn't suit this
rough planet."
"I was born on Tristan," she murmured. "Please don't ask--"
"I won't. But no reason why I can't talk. May I call you Pia?"
He described Belconti and the university, and his doctorate, at stake
in this field assignment. Suddenly she stopped short and pointed to
where a red moon lifted above the dark cliff of the eastern forest.
"It's late," she said. "There comes Hoggy Darn. Good night, Mr. Cole."
She danced away faster than he could follow. He crawled back through
his window in the reddish moonlight.
* * * * *
Next afternoon Cole faced Garth Bidgrass in the library. The old man
sat with folded arms, craggy face impassive. Cole, standing, leaned his
weight on his hands and thrust his sharp face across the table. His
freckles stood out against his angry pallor, and sunlight from the end
window blazed in his red hair.
"Let me sum up," he said, thin-lipped. "For obscure reasons I must
be essentially a prisoner. All right. You have no education here, no
biologists of any kind. All right. Now here is what they expect of me
on Belconti: to rough out the planetary ecosystem, set up a functional
profile series for the stomper and its interacting species, make energy
flow charts and outline the problem. If my report is incorrect or
incomplete, Belconti won't send the right task group of specialists.
Then you spend your money for nothing and I lose my doctorate. I must
have skilled helpers, a clerical staff, _masses_ of data!"
"You've said all that before," Bidgrass said calmly. "I told you, I can
provide none of that."
"Then it's hopeless! Why did you ever send for an ecologist?"
"I sent for help. Belconti sent the ecologist."
"Help me to _help_ you, then. You must try to understand, Mr. Bidgrass,
science can't operate in a vacuum. I can't work up a total planetary
biology. I must _start_ with that data."
"Do what you can for us," Bidgrass said. "They won't blame you on
Belconti when they know and we won't blame you here if it doesn't help."
Cole sat down, shaking his head. "But Belconti won't count it as a
field job, not in ecology. You _will_ not understand my position. Let
me put it this way: suppose someone gave you a hatchet and told you,
only one man, to cut down Lundy Forest?"
"I could start," the old man said. His eyes blazed and he smiled
grimly. "I'd leave my mark on one tree."
Colt felt suddenly foolish and humbled.
"All right," he said. "I'll do what I can. What do you think is wiping
out the stompers?"
"I know what. A parasite bird that lays its eggs on stomper eggs. Its
young hatch first and eat the big egg. The people call them piskies."
"I'll need to work out its life cycle, look for weak points and natural
enemies. Who knows a lot about these piskies?"
"I know as much as anybody, and I've never seen a grown one. We believe
they stay in the deep forest. But there are always three to each
stomper egg and they're vicious. Go for a man's eyes or jugular. Egg
hunters kill dozens every day."
"I'll want dozens, alive if possible, and a lab. Can you do that much?"
"Yes. You can use Dr. Rudall's lab at the hospital." Bidgrass stood up
and looked at his watch. "The egg harvest should start coming in soon
down at the plant and there may be a dead pisky. Come along and see."
* * * * *
As Hawkins guided the car past a group of the giant field workers, Cole
felt Bidgrass' eyes on him. He turned, and the old man said slowly,
"Stick to piskies, Mr. Cole. We'll all be happier."
"Anything may be data to an ecologist, especially if he overlooks it,"
Cole murmured stubbornly.
Hawkins cackled something about "Hoggy Darn itha hoose" and speeded up.
In the cavernous, machinery-lined plant Cole met the manager. He
was the same powerful, long-haired man Cole had seen in the garden.
"Morgan," Bidgrass introduced him with the one name, adding, "He
doesn't use Galactic English."
Morgan bent his head slightly, unsmiling, ignoring Cole's offered hand.
His wide-set eyes were so lustrously black that they seemed to have no
pupils, and under the hostile stare Cole flushed angrily. They walked
through the plant, Morgan talking to Bidgrass in the vernacular. His
voice was deep and resonant, organ-like.
Bidgrass explained to Cole how stomper egg was vac-frozen under biostat
and sealed in plastic for export. He pointed out a piece of shell, half
an inch thick and highly translucent. From its radius of curvature Cole
realized that stomper eggs were much larger than he had pictured them.
Then someone shouted and Bidgrass said a flyer was coming in. They went
out on the loading dock.
The flyer alongside carried six men forward of the cargo space and
had four heavy blasters mounted almost like a warcraft. As the dock
crew unloaded two eggs into dollies, other flyers were skittering in,
further along the dock. Bidgrass pointed out to Cole on one huge four
by three-foot egg the bases of broken parasite eggs cemented to its
shell. Through a hole made by piskies, the ecologist noted that the
substance of the large egg was a stiff gel. Morgan flashed a strong
pocket lamp on the shell and growled something.
"There may be a pisky hiding inside," Bidgrass said. "You are lucky,
Mr. Cole."
Morgan stepped inside and returned almost at once wearing goggles
and heavy gloves, and carrying a small power saw. He used the light
again, traced an eight-inch square with his finger, and sawed it out.
The others, all but Cole, stood back. Morgan pulled away the piece and
something black flew up, incredibly swift, with a shrill, keening sound.
Cole looked after it and Morgan struck him heavily in the face,
knocking him to hands and knees. Feet stamped and scraped around him
and Cole saw his own blood dripping on the dock. He stood up dazed and
angry.
"Morgan saved your eye," Bidgrass told him, "but the pisky took a
nasty gouge at your cheekbone. I'll have Hawkins drive you to the
hospital--you wanted to meet Dr. Rudall anyway."
Cole examined the crushed pisky on the way to the hospital. Big as his
fist, with a tripartite beak, it was no true bird. The wings were flaps
of black skin that still wrinkled and folded flexibly with residual
life. It had nine toes on each foot and seemed covered with fine scales.
Dr. Rudall treated Cole's cheek in a surprisingly large and well
appointed dressing room. He was a gray, defeated-looking man and
told Cole in an apologetic voice that he had taken medical training
on Planet Tristan many years ago ... out of touch now. His small lab
looked hopelessly archaic, but he promised to biostat the dead pisky
until Cole could get back to it.
Hawkins was not with the ground car. Cole drove back to the plant
without him. He wanted another look at the mode of adhesion of pisky
egg on stomper egg. He drove to the further end of the plant and
mounted the dock from outside, to freeze in surprise. Twenty feet away,
the dock crew was unloading a giant.
He was naked, strapped limply to a plank, and his face was bloody. Half
his reddish hair and beard was singed away. Then a hand hit Cole's
shoulder and spun him around. It was Morgan.
"Clear out of here, you!" the big man said in fluent, if plain,
Galactic English. "Don't you ever come here without Garth Bidgrass
brings you!" He seemed hardly to move his lips, but the voice rumbled
like thunder.
"Well," thought Cole, driving back after Hawkins, "datums are data, if
they bite off your head."
* * * * *
"For your own safety, Mr. Cole, you must not again leave the company
of either Hawkins or Dr. Rudall when you are away from the house,"
Bidgrass told Cole the next morning. "The people have strange beliefs
that would seem sheer nonsense to you, but their impulsive acts, if you
provoke them, will be unpleasantly real."
"If I knew their beliefs I might know how to behave."
"It is your very presence that is provoking. If you were made of salt
you would have to stay out of the rain. Here you are an outworlder and
you must stay within certain limits. It's like that."
"All right," Cole said glumly.
He worked all day at the hospital dissecting the pisky, but found
no parasites. He noted interesting points of anatomy. The three-part
beak of silicified horn was razor sharp and designed to exert a double
shearing stress. The eye was triune and of fixed focus; the three
eyeballs lay in a narrow isosceles triangle pattern, base down, behind
a common triangular conjunctiva with incurved sides and narrow base.
The wings were elastic and stiffened with a fan of nine multi-jointed
bones that probably gave them grasping and manipulating power in the
living organism. None of it suggested the limit factor he sought.
Dr. Rudall helped him make cultures in a sterile broth derived from the
pisky's own tissues. In the evening a worker from the plant brought
eleven dead piskies and Cole put them in biostat. He rode home with
Hawkins to his solitary dinner feeling he had made a start.
Day followed day. Cole remained isolated in his wing, coming and going
through his back door into the garden. He became used to the mute
giant domestics who swept and cleaned. Now and then he exchanged a few
words with the sad Mrs. Vignoli, Pia's mother, he learned, or with
old Bidgrass, in chance meetings. He watched Pia through his windows
sometimes and knew she fled when he came out. There was something
incongruous in the timid wariness with which her plump figure and
should-be-merry face confronted the world.
Once he caught her and held her wrist. "Why do you run away from me,
Pia?"
She pulled away gently. "I'll get you in trouble, Mr. Cole. They don't
trust me either. My father was a Tristanian."
"Who are _they_?"
"Just they. Morgan, all of them."
"If we're both outworld, we should stick together. I'm the loneliest
man on this planet, Pia."
"I know the feeling," she said, looking down.
He patted her curls. "Let's be friends then, and you help me. Where do
these giant people come from?"
Her head jerked up angrily. "That has nothing to do with your work! I'm
inworld too, Mr. Cole. My mother is of the old stock."
Cole let her go in silence.
He began working evenings in the lab, losing himself in work. Few of
the blue-clad men and women he encountered would look at him, but he
sensed their hostile glances on the back of his neck. He felt islanded
in a sea of dull hatred. Only Dr. Rudall was vaguely friendly.
Cole found no parasites in hundreds of dissected piskies, but his
cultures were frequently contaminated by a fungus that formed dark red,
globular fruiting bodies. When he turned to cytology he found that what
he had supposed to be an incredibly complex autonomic nervous system
was instead a fungal mycelium, so fine as to be visible only in phase
contrast. He experimented with staining techniques and verified it in a
dozen specimens, then danced the surprised Dr. Rudall around the lab.
"I've done it! One man against a planet!" he chortled. "We'll culture
it, then work up mutant strains of increasing virulence--oh for a
Belconti geno-mycologist now!"
"It's not pathogenic, I'm afraid," Dr. Rudall said. "I ... ah ...
read once, that idea was tried centuries ago ... all the native fauna
have fungal symbiotes ... protect them against all known pathogenic
microbiota ... should have mentioned it, I suppose...."
"_Yes_, you should have told me! My God, there go half the weapons
of applied ecology over the moon ... my time wasted ... _why_ didn't
you tell me?" The ecologist's sharp face flushed red as his hair with
frustrated anger.
"You didn't ask ... hardly know what ecology means ... didn't realize
it was important ..." the old doctor stammered.
"_Everything_ is important to an ecologist, especially what people
won't tell him!" Cole stormed.
He tried to stamp out of the lab, and progressed in a ludicrous
bouncing that enraged him even more. He shouted for Hawkins and went
home early.
* * * * *
In his rooms he brooded on his wrongs for an hour, then went downstairs
and thundered on the locked door into the main house, shouting Garth
Bidgrass' name. The sounds beyond hushed. Then Garth Bidgrass opened
the door, looking stern and angry.
"Come into the library, Mr. Cole," he said. "Try to control yourself."
In the library Cole poured out his story while Bidgrass, standing with
right elbow resting atop a bookcase, listened gravely.
"You must understand," Cole finished, "to save the stompers we must
cut down the piskies. Crudely put, the most common method is to find a
disease or a parasite that affects them, and breed more potent strains
of it. But that won't work on piskies, and I could have and should have
known that to begin with."
"Then you must give up?"
"_No!_ Something must prey on them or their eggs in their native
habitat, a macrobiotic limit factor I can use. I must learn the adult
pisky's diet; if its range is narrow enough that can be made a limit
factor."