[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

weren t very satisfactory ones. . . .
 Hungry, Sweeting announced from the aircar s floor beside Nile.
 So starve, Nile said absently. Sweeting opened her jaws, laughed up at her
silently.
 Go down, eh? she suggested.  Catch skilt for Nile, eh? Nile hungry?
 Nile isn t. Go back to sleep. I have to think.
The otter snorted, dropped her head back on her forepaws, pretended to close
her eyes. Sweeting s kind might be the product of a geneticist s
miscalculation. Some twenty years before, a consignment of hunting otter cubs
had reached
Nandy-Cline. They were a development of a preserved Terran otter strain,
tailored for an oceanic existence. The coastal rancher who d bought the
consignment was startled some months later when the growing cubs began to
address him in a slurrily chopped-up version of the Hub s translingue. The
unexpected talent didn t detract from their value. The talkative cubs,
playful, affectionate, handsomely pelted, sold readily, were distributed about
the sea coast ranches and attained physical maturity in another year and a
half. As water hunters or drivers and protectors of the sea herds, each was
considered the equivalent of half a dozen trained men. Adults, however, sooner
or later tended to lose interest in their domesticated status and exchanged it
for a feral life in the sea, where they thrived and bred. During the past few
years sledmen had reported encounters with sizable tribes of wild otters. They
still spoke in translingue.
Nile s pair, hand-raised from cubhood, had stayed. She wasn t quite sure why.
Possibly they were as intrigued by her activities as she was by theirs. On
some subjects her intellectual processes and theirs meshed comfortably. On
others there remained a wide mutual lack of comprehension. She suspected,
though she d never tried to prove it, that their overall intelligence level
was very considerably higher than was estimated.
She was holding the aircar on a southwest course, surface scanners shifting at
extreme magnification about the largest floatwood island in the drift, two
miles below, not quite three miles ahead. It looked very much like the one
Ticos Cay had selected. Minor differences could be attributed to adaptive
changes in the growth as the floatwood moved south. There were five major
forest sections arranged roughly like the tips of a pentacle. The area between
them, perhaps a mile across, was the lagoon, a standard feature of the
islands. Its appearance was that of a shallow lake choked with vegetation, a
third of the surface covered by dark green leafy pads flattened on the water.
The forests, carrying the semi-parasitical growth which clustered on the
floatwood s thick twisted boles, towered up to six hundred feet about the
lagoon, living walls of almost indestructible toughness and density. The
typhoon battering through which they had passed had done little visible
damage. Beneath the surface they were linked by an interlocking net of
ponderous roots which held the island sections clamped into a single massive
structure.
The island was moving slowly to the south, foam-streaked swells running past
it on either side. This might be the southern fringe of the typhoon belt. The
sky immediately overhead was clear, a clean deep blue. But violent gusts still
Page 163
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
shook the car, and roiling cloud banks rode past on all sides.
Ticos Cay s hidden arboreal laboratory should be in the second largest section
of the floatwood structure, about a third of the way in on the seaward side.
He wasn t responding to close-contact communicator signals; but he might be
there in spite of his silence. In any case it was the place to start looking.
There d been no sign of intruders which didn t mean they weren t there. The
multiple canopies of the forests could have concealed an army. But intruders
could be avoided.
Nile thought she might be able to handle this without waiting for Parrol. It
was late afternoon now, and even if there were no serious delays in getting
her message to him, it would be at best the middle of the night before he
could make it out here. To drop down openly to the floatwood would be asking
for trouble, of course, though there had been no reports of attacks on aircars
as yet. But she could circle south, go down to sea level, submerge the car and
maneuver it back underwater to the island through the weed beds which rode the
Meral. If she d had her jet diving rig with her, she wouldn t have hesitated.
She could have left the car a couple of miles out, gone in at speed and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]