• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Quite. None of them were toxic, a conclusion now confirmed by our mutual planet of origin. I told Paskutti, so you don’t need to be so particular about personal force-screens when in close contact. Where are you keeping the other specimens? Nearby?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

Trizein frowned. He’d started and abandoned any number of lines of thought, and was now being brought up sharp.

“Why? Because I got the distinct impression from Paskutti that he was worried about actual contact with these creatures. Of course, not much can penetrate a heavy-worlder’s hide, but I could appreciate his worrying that you might get a toxic reaction, Varian. So I assumed that the beasts were nearby, or wounded like that herbivore when we first landed. Did you ever show me a frame of that one?”

“Yes,” Varian replied, absently because her mind was revolving about more pressing identities, like the name of the game the heavy-worlders were playing. “One of the hadrasaurs. I think that’s what you called it.”

“There were, in fact, quite a variety of hadrasaur, the crested, the helmeted, the . . .”

“Mabel had a crest,” said Bonnard.

“You know, Varian, I think that Kai would be interested in Trizein’s identification of Dandy,” said Lunzie.

“You’re quite right, Lunzie,” said Varian, moving woodenly toward the lab’s comunit.

She was relieved when Kai answered instead of Bakkun, though she’d prepared herself to deal with the heavy-worlder, too. She was conscious of Bonnard holding his breath as he wondered what she was going to say, and of Lunzie’s calm encouraging expression.

“Trizein has just identified our wild life, Kai, and explained the anomaly. I think you’d better come back to base right now.”

“Varian . . .” Kai sounded irritated.

“Cores are not the only things planted on this stinking ball of mud, Kai, or likely to be planted!”

There was silence on the other end of the comunit. Then Kai spoke. “Very well then, if Trizein thinks it’s that urgent. Bakkun can carry on here. The strike is twice the size of the first.”

Varian congratulated him but wondered if he oughtn’t to insist that Bakkun return with him. She’d a few questions she’d like to put to that heavy-worlder on the subject of special places and the uses thereof.

10

BAKKUN made no comment on Kai’s recall. He was apparently too engrossed in the intricacies of setting the last core for the shot that would determine the actual size of the pitchblende deposit.

“You’ll come back to the base when you finish?” Kai asked as he placed the lift-belt for the heavy-worlder by the seismimic.

“If I don’t, don’t worry. I’ll lift over to the secondary camp.”

There was just the slightest trace of emphasis on the personal pronoun. Bakkun’s behavior had been grating on Kai all day, nothing he could really point to and say Bakkun was being contemptuous or insolent, but the entire work week Kai had sensed a subtle change in the heavy-worlder geologist.

Varian’s ambiguous remark about things planted or likely to be planted dominated his nebulous irritation with Bakkun. The coleader was unlikely to panic over trivia, and the fact that she had bothered him on a field trip indicated the seriousness of the matter. What on earth could she mean by that cryptic remark? And how could Trizein’s identification of the life forms clear up anomalies?

Maybe there’d been a message from the Theks and Varian had not wanted anyone, patching in on his sled’s code, to know. He recalled her exact phrasing. She’d separated Trizein’s achievement from the request for him to return. So, it wasn’t Trizein’s discovery in itself.

Rather than worry needlessly, Kai occupied his mind with estimating the probable wealth of energy materials on this planet, as computed by sites already assessed and the probability of future finds based on the extended orogenic activity in the areas as yet unsurveyed.

By the time he reached the base, he decided that Ireta was undoubtedly one of the richest planets he had ever heard about. It quite cheered him to realize that sooner or later EV would find this out, too.