For a researcher, “When in Rome…” can’t take on decidedly peculiar meanings!
Their marriage was widely believed to be one of convenience, the contract renewable on a year-to-year basis. Every year they surprised their colleagues by signing on for another stint.
“Dammit, will you take it easy, Claire! You spilled my bloody coffee!”
Claire Alvarez-Linstrom turned her head and grinned at her husband from the blindship’s piloting station, a console and chair bolted to the blue shag carpeted floor near the bay window. “We’re making a planetfall, Arthur dear, not doing brunch. You should expect a little turbulence.”
As if to back up her assertion, the craft shied violently. The gravdampers could have compensated, but she insisted on leaving them on at the bare minimum needed to keep the place from coming apart at the seams.
Professor Arthur Linstrom tried to make himself ignore the look on his wife’s face. In repose her wide coffee-and-cream features, shaped by her unknown part-Latino parentage, could show a timeless and demure beauty that took his breath away. But other times, like now, one look into her dark eyes and words like
“If the air is that rough,” he replied with a poor imitation of patient tolerance, “Then swop over to auto. This trip doesn’t have to be a blasted roller coaster ride.”
She gave him a look like he’d just suggested that they get out and walk. “This is quite possibly a rescue mission, remember? Which means we’re in a hurry. Auto’s just too slow and cautious.”
“For you, maybe,” he grumbled half under his breath as he swiveled his chair back toward the science station’s main board. Groping blindly behind him he snagged whatever it was draped over the back of his chair to use for mopping up the spilled coffee. A mean-spirited grin appeared on his long Nordic face when he realized it was her sweatshirt.
“Besides, I need to practice my piloting,” Claire continued blithely as the craft suddenly plummeted at least two hundred meters in less than four seconds. “Ya
“You think I haven’t noticed?” Arthur moaned as he tried to peel his stomach back off his tonsils and empty his mind of thoughts of what hitting the unforgiving ground below at just over Mach 2 would be like. Theoretically the sfhere, the bubble-shaped stasis field wrapped around their craft, would protect them. He remembered the time back on Glacia IV when she had broken up the ice jam which had flooded an ancient city by playing human cannonball, ramming into the keystone berg at somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 kph—her only warning a somewhat inadequate and rather gratuitous
The only ice on the planet below was a thin frosting at its polar caps. Given the working name of Pitstop, it was fourth from the sun in a system of fourteen planets and sixty-one moons. A small, dense, metal-rich world, its surface bore a vague resemblance to the caps of the morel mushrooms he d picked as a boy in southern Ontario: high, barren and nearly airless rock ridges separating deep, roughly conical valleys—the pits which had inspired its name. Planetologists and geologists were scheduled to begin studying how it got that way sometime next week.
However it had formed, there was enough atmosphere and water to support even human life at the bottom of these pits, and a somewhat limited but quite robust variety of life abounded in a broad band of them circling the planet at its equatorial temperate zone, each pit an apparently self-con-tained ecosystem. A sentient species inhabited this niche, one of the three the Expedition had found in the system, and the most primitive.
There were almost four hundred people on this Expedition, and so far only one professor studying Pitstop—partly because the initial survey had pegged it on the ho-hum side when compared to some of the other places, and partly because no one would work with the aforementioned and legendarily disagreeable professor.
A professor who now seemed to be missing.
“Any sign of old Whaletits?” Claire called, pushing her dark hair out of her eyes and squinting out the bay window as if looking for someone to dogfight.
“No. I’m reading indigenes and the usual flora and fauna in each pit we pass over, but no sign of Professor Whalsitz.”
“Well, be sure to sing out
Getting out of the sky and onto solid ground sounded like an exceptionally good idea to Arthur. “How long until we get there?”
“Splashdown in five minutes.”
His broad forehead furrowed in a warning scowl. “Will you stop calling it that, Claire! We are going to alight, gently as a settling thistledown. Right?
She snickered. “Whatever you say, my rooster.”
The craft suddenly sideslipped and began plunging downward. Arthur’s cup went skidding across the board and off the edge, tumbling to the shag-carpeted floor.
“That’s it, we’re getting a divorce on our next anniversary,” he growled darkly as he tightened the straps of his crash harness. On the biggest science station screen before him a jagged rocky scarp flashed beneath them with what appeared to be only a whisker to spare and they began descending into the pit.
Their landing was not, as Arthur had feared, a reenactment of Dorothy’s famous filmic house-drop into Oz, This was an especially apt image considering their craft’s appearance.
Much as he hated to, he had to give Claire credit. When she wanted to, she could settle a blindship in with as close to zero disturbance as could be expected from landing what was essentially a two-bedroom, one-bath, single-story modular house wrapped in a Whugg sfhere. When she wanted to. Today she did. Next time, who knew?
“We’re down,” she announced, a faint vibration passing through the building as it settled in. “Welcome to Pitstop.” She punched in a command for automatic shutdown, stood and stretched her tall, chunky body. “How’re we looking?”
“Seriously not here.” The spytes had deployed while they were descending, and, site integration complete, four had arrayed themselves to relay a blindage check. Claire sauntered over to stand behind her husband and look over his shoulder at the display.
Seen from the outside their ungainly vinyl-sided craft was effectively invisible. The spytes had scanned the landing site down to the micron level. Now a virtual copy of the unoccupied site was being projected by holo-cloak, the ship’s Whugg computer constantly adjusting the image to compensate for changing light levels, wind and other environmental factors. Nor was the visible light spectrum the only band covered. Any creature that used radar, sonar, charge-sense, magnetic imaging or other perceptive method would likewise be fooled. Like most Whugg technology, humans had only the vaguest idea how the damned stuff worked and even less compunction about using it.
Still, placement of a blindship was critical. Invisible or not, if you parked it dead square across the alien equivalent of a footpath an indigene was bound to walk right into the repeller field, thumping its alien equivalent of a head and going
“Looks good,” she agreed. “Well, Cap’n Ahab, you ready to go after the great white Moby Maud?”
“You better knock that off,” Arthur warned as he shrugged off the harness and stood up. “She’s a Protected Lifestyle Minority.”
Side by side they looked to be very nearly the same height, but dressed for different purposes and destinations. His short gray hair and official Expedition uniform of a conservatively cut brown jumpsuit, complete with military specification pen pocket and multipocketed black vest, was neatly starched and pressed; it made him look like a professor of SWAT Science. She, on the other hand, wore a low-cut purple silk blouse, faded patched jeans, and battered cowboy boots. She did wear the official vest, but hers was covered with a collection of buttons, pins, and gag medals.
She put on a look of mock chastisement. “Sorry pod-ner. I can’t cetacean cheap shots if they’re only going to make you blubber.”
He gave her a pained look, then shook his head ruefully. “Why did I ever let you marry us?” They started toward the front door of the house, which acted as an airlock.
“Tax purposes?” she suggested.
“
“I’m an orphan, remember?”
“Uh-huh. There are times I think you also want to be a divorcee.”
She slipped an arm around his waist and squeezed. “You’d miss me if I was gone, Mr. Science.”
“You’re darn lucky I’m not an experimentalist.”
Arthur and Claire had been married for four years. Their jobs had initially thrust them together, many of their colleagues wondered what kept them together, and their union could be regarded as just one more largely inexplicable Whugg artifact.
The institution they were part of was also based on a marriage of convenience, namely the odd partnership between Humans and Whuggs.
The two races were little alike. Whuggs were smart. So smart that expecting humans to gauge their intelligence was rather like asking squirrels to administer and interpret an IQ test for a Hawking or Einstein. Moreover, Whuggs were insatiably curious; their fundamental urge was to
The great Whugg character flaw was their absolute and unwavering refusal to travel—or even budge from the spot where they were acroama-triculated. Since they were one of the very few non-plant biologic entities with taproots, this was hardly surprising. The Whuggan fear of uprooting makes the human fear of death look like the mildest anxiety over a developing zit. Factor in the fact that adult Whuggs are the size of shopping malls—parking included—and you had a bunch of serious homebodies on your hands.
Whuggs were plenty smart enough to acknowledge their own shortcomings and seek a rational way around them—something many considered to be their most inhuman quality. A concerted effort of enough sheer brainpower to beat God at Scrabble allowed them to create a modest transient hitch in the space/time continuum’s gitalong which they used as a probe to seek out a race to act as the questing organs of their curiosity.
Humanity, whatever its other shortcomings, was not Hobson’s choice in this selection process. Life is three notches past ubiquitous in the Universe. Come to find out the trick was not creating life, but keeping the damn squirmy stuff from infesting and messing up every nice clean and tidy planet and moon capable of supporting it.
Several candidates were considered and rejected before the Whuggs snuck a cautious look at Earth. There they found a reasonably bright race that routinely produced creatures perfectly willing to pack their bags and go knocking about various star systems, sticking their noses into things for the pure hell of it. They even had a literature of sorts dedicated to that proposition, even though they hadn’t been back to their own Moon in almost fifty years. While it was true that they had several nasty habits and quite unpleasant tendencies, in their favor was the fact that humans were nearly as curious as the Whuggs themselves.
Contact was initiated, first through the hitch, then more widely and easily through the Whuggs’s organoform and omnipresent version of the computer. Negotiations went well, and the Whuggs soon found themselves experiencing the warm pleasure a dog owner feels when he gives his pet a new squeaky toy upon mentioning that their new space buddies would of course be shown how to build such primitive but useful devices as matter transmitters and transmuters, time-to-energy converters, zero-loss recyclers, reactionless and faster-than-light drives, stasis-field generators, and gravity twisters.
Of course there were adjustments to be made. Humans had to get over a few preconceptions before they embarked on this great adventure. For instance, no great gleaming Spaceships were to be constructed for the purpose of exploration; Whuggs found that idea utterly adorable but wholly impractical. They were into, as an old hot-rodders’ phrase put it,
Although those riding on it called the huge craft which had carried their expedition to this star system a mothership, it was actually the former Danforth Quayle Preparatory School, golf course and squash courts included, sfhered up and turned into an interstellar craft capable of running .35 light-year per hour flat out with no inconvenient time dilation to wreck everybody’s schedules. The over sixty smaller exploratory craft it carried along were a motley assortment of cheesy modular homes, house-trailers, RVs, and a decommissioned diesel submarine, all sfhere-shielded, gravity-fueled, and capable of about a quarter AU per hour.
The bureaucratic and diplomatic name for this venture was the Whugg/Humanity Noemic Traveling University. But the ten thousand-odd scientists and researchers from a hundred different disciplines and institutions who became part of it mostly used the nickname bestowed by one of its founders:
So, for that matter, did the Whuggs.
“Any major life forms nearby?” Claire asked, the moderately aggressive way she was carrying her stun rifle suggesting that she hoped the answer was yes.
“Not at the moment.” He glanced back over his shoulder, eyeing her weapon mistrustfully. “Is that thing on safety?”
She looked hurt. “Have I ever accidentally shot you before?”
“No, but there was that time you shot me on purpose. Once was plenty, thank you very much.”
“Shooting you saved your tenured buns, remember? That swamp-dwelling whatchamacallit—”
“Derosian bogmaster,” he supplied, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief. The Pitstop lowlands were every bit as hot and steamy as Earth’s tropics. He glanced up at the small hot sun, wondering if he should have worn a hat. Five minutes was all it took to turn his fair skin the color of a boiled lobster.
“Right. That ugly puppy would’ve had you for lunch if I hadn’t popped you to convince it you were dead. We were lucky it was a picky eater.”
“I
She quickened her pace to give him a fond pat on the fanny. “Coming back to life made you homy as hell, if I recall. That’s when we started fooling around. Remember? We had hot zombie nookie for two solid days.”
“And I needed a week to recover afterward. Careful, watch your step!” They detoured around a loveseat-sized heap of fresh dung that was a faded hue of the vivid lavender that was the predominant color of Pitstop’s vegetation, a scattering of what looked like glitter embedded in it.
“That’s one titanic turd,” Claire snickered.
“Indeed. It must have come from one of the big animals Maud called
“So Maud parked on the rim of a toilet bowl. Do you think she was studying them?”
“Maybe.” His handpad wheeped. He looked down at the screen, paled. “Uh oh, that’s one coming into sensor range now. We better hustle. They’re supposed to be vegetarians, but there’s no sense taking chances.”
Claire surveyed the surrounding growth with bright-eyed anticipation. “Don’t worry, old Betsy and me will take care of it.”
“It’s almost suppertime, not high noon.” He spoke into the pad. “Blind-ship Echo Seven, drop portal cloaking and open.”
Twenty meters in front of them and two off the ground a section of Pitstop’s lean-limbed, jelly-leafed jungle vanished, replaced by the welcoming arch of a blindship portal—which in this case was a fanlighted faux-wood front door complete with brass knocker and mail slot. The long metal tongue of its boarding ramp extruded down toward them.
Arthur started walking faster, one eye glued to the red dot which marked the leviathan. “Come on, lady! Let’s get inside and buttoned up in case it comes here.”
She increased her pace only slightly, her lower lip quivering in a theatrical pout. “You never let me have any fun!”
“I’m your husband,” he shot back, as if that explained everything.
Claire was, of course, more than just another gun nut.
Her official title was Expedition Fixer, a term the Whuggs found so splendidly evocative that they had insisted on its use. The supersentient aliens were not micromanagers. The human contingent of Why Not U chose who went on Expedition, and the Science Master decided what they did there.
The one exception to this tentacles-off policy was the office of Fixer. That person was always chosen by a Whugg or Whuggs. There was some confusion on this point; sometimes several spoke as one, other times one spoke as several, and the rest of the time were just in their everyday state of multiplex discrete consensual singularity.
Equal in rank to the captain of the huge mothership the Expedition had come in and was based from, as Fixer Claire was partly morale watchdog—acting as counselor, confessor, therapist and spat resolver; and partly head of security—functioning as cop, criminal investigator, judge and jailer. She could perform weddings, divorces, and autopsies with equal gusto. Part constable, part shrink, and part sacred clown, it was her job to act as the grease which kept all the odd human cogs from grinding each other toothless. She had more degrees than her husband, and acted as if they had all been gotten through mail order by sending in box tops.
Although there was nothing hurried, or even particularly coplike about the way she moved, it took her only a couple of minutes to ascertain that Maud Whalsitz was not on board and there were no immediate signs of foul play.
“Can you believe this pigsty?” Arthur called when she returned to the living room that served as main compartment. He stood in the middle of the floor, unhappily surveying the scattered food containers and wrappers, empty beer and liquor bottles, mounds of funky laundry and other uncategorizable detritus that covered every available surface. All in all it looked like a very large wild animal with an unrestrained fondness for junk food had been holed up in there.
“Yeah, I’ve seen her digs back at home base.” Claire picked up a box at her feet, sniffed it and frowned. “Hmmmmm.”
“What have you got there?” Arthur asked, hoping it was a clue. The sooner they wrapped this up the sooner they could go back to their own blindship, which was, thanks to him and no thanks to her, neat as a pin.
“Dried salted herrings.” She extracted one by the tail, held it out toward him. “Want one?”
“You’re joking,” he answered, revolted.
“Had to after I smelt it.” She dropped the small fish back into the box and put it aside. “Are the ship’s systems still monitoring and recording the area outside?”
“I’ll check.” He picked a path to the science station and, wishing he’d brought rubber gloves, fussily cleared the dreck off the console and chair. Wiping his hands on his pants he sat down and began a status check.
“It’s on. Is there something I should be looking for?”
Claire was holding a food-stained puce nightgown out in front of her, sizing it against herself. Although not a small woman, there was room enough for four of her to ballroom dance and even practice synchronized dipping inside it. “Hippo tracks?”
“What?”
She grinned at her husband, wadding up the garment and tossing it away. “All right, class, here’s today’s lesson in deduction. The missing Professor Whalsitz is not anywhere on her ship. Therefore she must be, stay with me now,
Arthur nodded. “Good thinking.”
A modest shrug. “Us law enforcement types know more than just our donuts. Though some cruller sorts refuse to admit it.”
He sighed. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.” He turned back toward the console. “System. Locate and replay last sighting of Professor Whalsitz in the area outside.”
“Entire recording?” the device replied. “It runs thirteen minutes and twelve seconds.”
Arthur turned back toward his wife to see what she wanted him to do.
“Why not?” she asked, sauntering toward him with a big plastic bag tucked under one arm. “I’ve got the cheese popcorn.”
Dr. Arthur Linstrom hated it when things went wrong. Had he been the sort given to tattoos—which he wasn’t—his might have read
Expeditions existed to collect information to be shared with the Whuggs. To his orderly mind that process had to be carried out as smoothly and efficiently as humanly possible. Humanly was the key word. Since the normal state of human affairs is the sort of milling muddled confusion you might expect from a flock of neurotic, tone-deaf sheep attempting to square dance, achieving such a lofty goal took no small amount of doing. There were nearly four hundred people on the Expedition working this star system, two-thirds of them scientists from several dozen disparate disciplines. The only surer recipe for conflict would have been to involve either religion or soccer.
He looked upon this group as an orchestra: one where each chair was playing a different instrument, interpreting the score on their own terms, quite often seeing themselves as soloists, and ignoring or trying to drown out the other players whenever possible.
His title was Science Master, but he saw himself as conductor, and his mission as coaxing a sweet symphony from what all too often lapsed into atonal noise. Assignments, equipment and resource disposition, scheduling, information exchange, data review, and acting as methodology watchdog were all within his purview.
Having one member of the Expedition come up missing was bad enough. That the missing member was one he would gladly have done without in the first place was enough to put his most recent round of ulcer treatments to the acid test.
Maud was not one of the best minds Earth had produced. She had managed to bully and backstab her way onto the periphery of the team of scientists who had worked with the Whuggs to create Why Not U, through vile force of personality mutated that into Full Tenure, and pretty much coasted since then. Her research was sloppy, her record-keeping haphazard, her conclusions ill-founded and generally wrongheaded. Although ostensibly an exothropologist, what little work she did produce fairly bristled with contempt for alien races. Anytime Arthur learned that she had finagled a berth on one of his Expeditions he immediately categorized her as Excess Baggage.
A hack like her would have been tolerable were she just another doddering, mossbacked chair-warmer dozing toward retirement. But the sewage ripple ice cream topping on the toxic waste cake was Maud being a Pyg.
Pygs—followers of the late and largely unlamented Alexi “The Human Landfill” Pyg—literally lived to throw their weight around, fanatically following a perverse self-help regimen constructed around a variation on a very old joke:
The answer was, of course,
The logic behind this flabulous form of body modification was to have more weight to throw around than anyone else, and keep what you had glommed by becoming an immovable object. But that was only one cracked facet of Pygism. They also cultivated a calculated slovenliness, and the sort of obnoxiousness of habit and personality guaranteed to make everyone around them adopt a hands-off policy.
The reason Maud got a seat—several seats, actually—on any Expedition she wanted to join was because nobody at University Central back on Earth wanted her around, and they kept hoping that one of these times she might not come back.
It was beginning to look like this time they might just get their wish.
“There she is,” Arthur said, as if there were any way Claire could miss her. On the screen before them what looked like an overinflated parade balloon with orange hair and green teeth waddled into view, her rolling jostling territories sheathed in enough lime green stretch fabric to Christo a minivan. Only the Whugg gravtwister bracelet on one hamlike wrist allowed her to move under her own power.
“When was this?” Claire asked from behind Arthur s shoulder.
He peered at the datatrack on the bottom of the screen. “Yesterday afternoon, around two.”
“Then she’s been gone for over twenty-four hours. Still, you wouldn’t think she could have gone too far away.”
“It’s doubtful. I’ve never seen her walk more than twenty steps without bitching about it.”
The big woman lumbered toward a tree-like growth with a triple helical trunk and blobby lavender leaves. A scowl appearing on the jowly porcine puddle of her face, she lowered herself to her knees.
“What do you think? Her daily exercise routine or prayer?” Claire asked with a chuckle.
“No, she’s—” He leaned closer to the screen. “She’s digging.”
“So she is. What kind of tree is that?”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t say. Maud had been sending me squat back at the mothership. Some stills and half-assed descriptions. That’s how I found out she was out of contact. I was trying to tell her to get the lead out.”
Whalsitz unearthed a breadloafsized black pod or nodule from the reddish ground. Tucking it under one arm she fiddled with her wristlet and levitated straight up, unfolded her legs and settled back onto her loafered feet like a spacecraft carved from moldy suet.
She went back to the center of the clearing, wrapped her sausage fingers around the bundle of fibers at one end of the pod and pulled. The pod opened lengthways, iridescent aqua bubbles foaming out of the opening. The bubbles swelled and popped, and the big woman wrinkled her flat nose in distaste. Her mouth began moving.
“Would you please dial up the sound?” Claire asked.
“Sure.” He leaned forward and tapped a pad.
“Any idea what she’s doing, Claire?”
She shook her head. “The experts are baffled.”
Several minutes passed, Maud clearly growing impatient with waiting. Then they heard a faint and far-off new sound which had been captured on the recording, a distant subterranean rumble. Whalsitz’s head turned and she peered off in that direction, her piggy eyes narrowing to slits.
“According to sensor readings that was a leviathan approaching the area,” Arthur murmured tightly. The rumble continued to grow louder, like an oncoming avalanche.
“Sounds bigger than a breadbox.”
“Bigger than an elephant. According to what little data Maud did send, at adult stage leviathans are about eleven meters long and eat over half a ton of vegetation a day.”
“Sounds like my old seafood diet. It sees food, it eats it. The thing’s still coming toward her.”
He nodded. “Two hundred meters and closing.”
“Whaletits isn’t running away.”
Arthur let out an uneasy laugh. “Do you think she even
Claire leaned over his shoulder and toggled a wider view.
“Well,” she chuckled as she straightened up, “If the old blob had any run in her, seeing that thing coming should have brought it out big time.”
The leviathan was big enough and ugly enough to unnerve even a Pyg. Roughly resembling a terrestrial catfish the size of a humpback whale with a truncated, unpiscene aft section, it had tiny brown eyes, an under-slung jaw, and big rubbery lips stir-rounding a maw large enough for a garage door. It was obviously a land animal; there were six muscular, splayfooted legs on each side. Warty leathery skin covered its broad back, and a long, absurdly fuzzy tail brought up the rear.
This less than lovely creature was powering toward Professor Whalsitz like a mutant locomotive at a good 30 kph. She faced the thing squarely, multiple chins momentarily quivering with consternation.
Then she shook herself, hawked and spat on the ground, grinned and called, “Come to mamma.”
There was a sort of grim inevitability to what followed. Claire and Arthur watched Maud stand her ground before the oncoming behemoth. It huffed and snorted and made a beeline for her, all twelve legs pumping furiously and throwing up a cloud of ruddy dust behind it.
A second or two before that vast mouth was about to close over her, a look which suggested a profound train of second thoughts crossed Maud’s face. She stumbled back a step, the pod slipping from her fingers as she reached behind her.
A fraction of a second later the leviathan’s ground-scraping lower lip bowled her off her feet, and in she went like a rancid cream puff down a garbage disposal.
Arthur shuddered and looked away, on the verge of tossing his cookies.
Claire noisily munched another mouthful of popcorn.
The leviathan let out a joyous
Claire spat an old maid past her husband’s ear, dinging the unpopped kernel off the image of the leviathan’s retreating backside. “I thought you said they were vegetarians.”
He swallowed hard, his face faintly green. “Maud must have been wrong.” He managed a queasy smile. “Done in by her own sloppy work.”
She let this paean to perfectionism pass. “Was it just me, or did she want—or at least expect—to be eaten? Up until the last moment, anyway.”
“Remember what she said?
Claire snorted. “Whaletits was too much of an egotist to kill herself.”
Arthur gazed up at his wife, an unspoken plea for some sort of logical explanation for what they had just witnessed in his eyes. Irrational behavior unnerved him, and although she provided him with a steady diet of it, he still counted on her to make the outlandish actions of others comprehensible. “Then why?”
“I don’t know,” she replied with uncharacteristic solemnity, reaching out to give his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “But don’t you worry. One way or another we’ll find out.”
Claire began that process by embarking on a slow, methodical search of Maud’s disheveled digs, efficiently tossing each room as she sought some small clue to what the woman had been up to. While she did that Arthur cleaned the place. She found nothing useful, but he netted $4.28 in lost change.
Three hours later they were back in their own blindship’s breakfast nook and finally sitting down to a late supper. As usual Arthur had done the cooking. Claire’s culinary skills were on the lethal side of nonexistent. He barely touched the meal he had prepared, still queasy from watching a colleague become a comestible. She ate with her usual gusto, wolfing down both her pork chops after drenching them in chunky red puddles of salsa. Her comments about the other white meat netted her one of his chops as well.
Over coffee and pie—Arthur had a slice of lemon and Claire had been in the mood for mincemeat—they got down to the business of deciding how to proceed. Arthur was holding out for calling it death by misadventure and pronouncing the case closed.
Claire overruled him. “We’re not done yet. There was some logical reason for what that old bat did, and I intend to find out what it was.”
“Pygs are wackos,” he argued. “Maybe she ate one cheesecake too many, her brain arteries clogged shut and she went completely off her rocker.”
“And decided that the leviathan was a pigeon and she was a nice tasty peanut?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Her actions were considered and purposeful.”
“You’re right,” he admitted with a glum sigh. “It’s just that thinking about it makes my brain hurt. We saw her dig up that pod and open it, an action which she seemed to know would call the leviathan right to her.”
“Whereupon it ate her. Which she also seemed to be expecting. But why would she—or anyone
“Beats me.” He scowled and sat up straighten “Wait a minute. Let’s back up a bit. How did she know that the pods were leviathan lures?”
Claire stared at him a moment, then gave him a truly stunning smile. “Excellent question, my brainy darling. The only answer that comes to mind is
“The indigenes?”
“Most likely.” She stood up and drained her mug. “I know it’s getting late, but I’d like you to start reviewing all the recordings Maud made. Somewhere in there she saw something that made her decide to become a leviathan’s lunch.”
He pushed back his chair. “Sure. What are you going to do?”
“Review her notes and logs. Look for clues there.”
He let out an evil chuckle. “Brace yourself, her work is always a mess. Even worse than your office. Anything else I should do?”
Claire yawned, then held out her empty mug hopefully. “Make more coffee?”
Claire found it of some note that there were next to no notes.
What few she did find were stored in the human-style computer on Maud’s craft. A linkup with their own equipment put several lines of gibberish on one of the piloting station’s screens. Claire studied it, recognizing an extremely heavy-duty military grade encryption.
“Sneaky bitch,” she muttered. “Both Arthur and I could whack you good for this.”
Maud’s secret notes had broken one of Why Not U’s most fundamental guidelines. The Whuggs wanted constant unfiltered feedback from the Expeditions, so all materials—observations, data, notes, and even wild guesses—were to be put into the Whugg computers which made Expeditions possible. Recordings could be stored in human machines, then the dull spots edited out for downloading on a day-to-day basis; although curious, they weren’t interested in staring at an unchanging view of the same rock or tree or solar body for hours on end. Since Whugg computers controlled the editing process, nothing useful got omitted.
The Whuggs’s semisentient organoform analogue of the computer was nothing like the glorified abaci humans had invented. It was a somewhat grainy, occasionally lumpy yellow mush that needed no power, input or output devices, software or twenty-four-hour tech support; its only basic requirement was a container capable of holding a material about the consistency of runny Cream of Wheat.
Humans had thought their computers and networks and cyberwhatevers were pretty dam cool until they were shown how to cook up what the Whuggs used, a process with some odd similarities to brewing beer. Apart from their awesome computational and seemingly infinite storage capabilities, anything entered into one was instantly accessible on all others in existence, no matter where they were. Not just locally, or globally, but
This allowed them to, among other things, communicate directly to any member of any Expedition at any time they wanted by way of the ship and lab computers. Having a Whugg take a personal interest in your work was a coveted, if quite often baffling-honor.
As a Fixer Claire had a gut-level understanding of something that went against the knotty grain of humans’ understanding of how things normally worked. Since all the Whugg computer-stuff was so uncannily linked, a dribble of it in a shot glass had the same awesome capabilities as enough to fill a swimming pool.
The reason she and the other Fixers knew this so well was because the Whuggs were just as intensely curious about the Expeditions themselves as their fruits, and each Fixer was in essence a mini-Expedition studying the Expedition of which he or she was a part. Each possessed special equipment for that task.
Claire knew that if Arthur ever found out about this hidden agenda he would be devastated by the seeming demotion from master of scientific research to just one more lab rat, and explaining that the endlessly curious Whuggs were studying
She turned her head to check on him. He was working away at the science station, completely absorbed and totally oblivious. Just the way she liked him.
She slipped her hand inside her blouse and closed her fingers around the locket hanging between her breasts, then subvocalized a command.
Working, the device whispered inside her head, then with no perceptible pause, Done.
She grinned as the screen redrew; the gibberish it had displayed turned into plain English. Whugg computers could translate anything. That code, which might have taken one of Earth’s biggest computers several months to break, had been chewed through by the pea-sized yellow lump inside her locket in less than a second flat.
Moments later she was frowning. There were only five entries, and not a one of them made any immediate sense. Cracking the encryption had only netted her:
HOLY SHIT!
GIZZARDS!
NO GENE POOL STAGNATION/DIVERGENCE.
CLEVER BASTARDS!
JACK.
“
“Claire?”
“Yeah?” she answered, shaking herself from her reverie. The last thirty minutes had been blown sitting there staring at those five enigmatic entries, and she’d gotten nothing but a headache for her troubles.
“I think I have something.”
“I’m glad someone does.” She got up, detoured to pour herself fresh coffee, then went to look over her husband’s shoulder. “What have you got?”
“Check it out.” On the screen before them one of the indigenes strolled nonchalantly into the clearing in front of the missing professor’s invisible blindship. The alien was bipedal, about 1.3 meters tall, and walked upright on flat scaly feet.
“The fellow looks rather like a turtle without its shell,” Arthur commented dryly.
“A turtle with bat ears, a furry tail and teeth like a politician.” Claire leaned closer for a better look. “It’s wearing a belt, a knife and carrying a… purse?”
“A carry sack of some sort,” Arthur agreed. “Once again the sketchy information I have indicates that they are hunter-gatherers, their development roughly equivalent with the later stages of our own Stone Age. I can’t tell you anything about their social habits. Studying that was supposed to have been Maud’s job.”
“Clever bastards,” Claire murmured.
He frowned back at her. “Why do you say that?”
“A notation Maud made sometime before she turned herself into a leviathan yummy.”
Arthur turned back toward the screen. “OK, here we go. This is what I saw that made me call you.”
The indigene ambled over to another of the helical-trunked trees, knelt down, and, using the long nails on its broad flat hands, unearthed a long black pod identical to the one Maud had dug.
“You found the monkey-see,” Claire muttered with a pleased nod. “Good spotting, love.”
The alien sauntered to the center of the clearing and deftly unzipped the pod, releasing an expanding mass of bubbles. Then it waited, its hairless head bobbing rhythmically.
“Stone age, you said?”
Arthur nodded. “There seem to be similarities.”
“Must be listening to rock music.”
He sighed, then pointed to the data track. “Here we go. There’s a leviathan coming.”
“And Elvis hears it.” The indigene turned its head and stared intently into the surrounding growth. Its eyes were large and round, like a lemur’s. Its ears swiveled to home in on the sound, but nothing in its posture suggested alarm.
They watched as the leviathan hove into view, thundering along on its twelve muscular legs. There followed a reenactment of Whalsitz s fate; the humongous life-form jonahed up the indigene, let out a joyful
“It
“Neither do I,” she admitted, then yawned and stretched. “We’re both whipped and hip deep in the bizarre. What say we call it a night and start fresh in the morning?”
“What about Maud?”
Claire chuckled and helped herself to a seat in his lap. “The damned fool turned herself into fast food. I still intend to get to the bottom of this mess, but guess we can write off rescue as an option. So there’s no need to pull an all-nighter at work.”
She squirmed around, batted her eyes and toyed with the buttons of her blouse. “Howzabout instead we pull one by you and me becoming the first humans to get lucky on this planet?”
Arthur blinked furiously, crimson creeping into his cheeks. Her sudden changes from dedicated investigator to sex maniac always caught him off guard. “But what about—I mean, with Maud dead and all, doesn’t that seem kind of, well…” He shrugged.
“Don’t worry, darling,” she cooed. “It’s OK.” She unbuttoned her blouse, pulled it open. “See? I’m wearing black!”
Arthur snored blissfully on as Claire kissed his forehead and then eased carefully out of bed. She grabbed her robe and slipped stealthily out of their bedroom, closing the door behind her.
She headed for the kitchen, blinking against the light and shrugging on the robe as she went. After nuking a cup of leftover coffee to reheat it, she returned to the blindship’s living room and settled herself into the chair at the science station.
Most times sex served as the old married folks’ sleeping potion, but every now and then it had the opposite effect, leaving her all revved up and ready for something. Arthur had just given her one hell of a jump-start. She figured she might as well put it to use.
It took her only a moment to call up those five decrypted but still cryptic entries. She took a swig of coffee and took another run at them.
HOLY SHIT. That usually denoted surprise and or amazement. Something here must have really grabbed the old bag’s attention. Something she was determined to hide. None of her recordings had been edited and passed over to the Whugg systems, either. Why was she playing so fast and loose with the rules?
GIZZARD. Whenever Arthur cooked chicken he always sauteed the gizzard in butter and garlic for himself. Canadian cuisine. Go figure. People didn’t have gizzards, but birds did. Was it that or the crop they used to macerate food, using swallowed stones as grinders? A perfectly bewildering and yet still boring lead for Arthur to follow in the morning.
NO GENETIC STAGNATION OR DIVERGENCE. Maud had to be talking about the indigenes, didn’t she? They were her field.
Claire frowned and took another sip of coffee. Pitstop’s peculiar topography kept the pockets of life on it isolated from each other. Each pocket should have been a separately evolving “island” with its own specialized biologic adaptations, like Earth s own Australia or Hawaii. Going on the assumption that they didn’t have some highly exotic reproductive mechanism to compensate, each indigene grouping should have been inbred and to some degree divergent from each other. Maud seemed to be saying that they weren’t. Why? How? And for that matter, how was it that there were indigenes in almost all of the habitable pits? They couldn’t have all appeared everywhere all at once, could they?
She shook her head. Arthur could probably give her answers to those questions, but she hated to wake him up. Let this one slide for now and on to the next entry.
CLEVER BASTARDS! Claire sat up straighter. Had Maud figured out the answer to the previous poser? And if so, why the note of admiration? If letting yourself get eaten was clever, then pastrami and Popsicles had more on the ball than people.
The last entry waited for her. JACK.
She leaned back in her chair and slurped some more coffee, letting associations flow.
Sprat. O’-lantern. Be nimble. Up the price, the front bumper. London, Kennedy, the Ripper. Jack Hire, that opera catawauller Arthur liked so much. Jack Toricelli, the gas giant specialist? No, he hated Maud’s gargantuan guts just like every other sane person who dealt with her. The woman had no friends, and her family had disowned her years before. What—or more likely who—the hell had that miserable Pyg been talking about?
Time to cheat a little bit. She put her mug aside, slipped her hand into her robe and closed her fingers around her locket. Since she was alone she didn’t have to subvocalize.
“Access.” she said quietly. “Jack.”
Parameters? the Whugg computer whispered inside her head.
“Be like that.” She rubbed her chin. “Try… try Pygs named Jack known to Professor Maud Whalsitz.”
The reply was immediate. ‘Monterey’ Jack Porklowski of Encino, California, USA, Earth.
“Give me a thumbnail bio.”
Caucasian male, aged fifty-two, single. Multimillionaire art dealer and owner of the Handy Hocks chain of pawnshops. Currently under investigation by several agencies for tax evasion and alleged dealings in items either known to be stolen or, at best, of questionable provenance.
Now she was getting somewhere. “What sort of items?”
Works of art. Antiquities. Alien artifacts.
“Friends with a fence. How interesting. Has Maud had illicit dealings with this man in the past?”
No direct evidence.
Claire was undeterred by this response. One thing Whugg computers had in common with their retarded silicon brethren was their annoying habit of never answering questions you didn’t ask. She considered her next query carefully before speaking.
“OK, correlate probability based on contested alien artifacts traced to Jack and believed to have originated in systems where Maud has been on Expedition.”
Probability approaches certainty.
There was a slight pause, then a new voice spoke inside her head. It was as deep and richly musical as the lowest notes from a pipe organ, and it shimmered with a vast oceanic amusement. Excellent question, little one!
Claire grinned happily. “Thanks, big guy! How are you doing, Boss?”
Intoxicatingly pleasured. I am aquiver. This situation is most deliciously intriguing. Its resolution shall indeed be a root-swelling feast of revelation.
“Intriguing to just you, or all of you?”
Shifting attentions and competing megamultiplex inputs to our linked solitaryseparateselfsame. We/I am busy busy busy sensing/thinking/learn-ing/sharing/wondering/marveling/in-tegrating/understanding what we ponder and pondering what we don’t understand and ever still wondering what might come; the growing circle of knowing casting wider horizons of unknowing. I/we percolate with tickled curiosity.
“Dumb question, huh?”
The Whugg laughed, its mirth tremendous and splendid, like having god bust a gut over a real knee-slap-per. No such thing, child, it chuckled fondly, then was gone.
Claire drew out her pendant and kissed it.
“Damn! But I love my job,” she whispered before putting the locket away and going back on the clock.
“Replay.”
On the screen before her Maud once again toppled inside the leviathan’s gaping maw like an orange-frosted lard-enhanced bonbon.
“Hold.” The image froze with the professor’s loafered feet protruding like a forked Florsheim tongue.
“Roll back.” The creature regurgitated its Pyg meatpie neat as a cat hacking up a hairball and backed away.
“Hold.” She scratched her chin thoughtfully. “Pan image 90 degrees clockwise.” Although she was viewing it on a flat screen, the recording was holographic. The viewpoint swuftg smoothly around to a point about ten meters behind Whalsitz. “Zoom to distance halved.” The big woman’s bulbous form expanded like an inflating weather balloon.
The new vantage point and close-up revealed that a flaccid army surplus knapsack was slung over one meaty shoulder and a sheath knife was clipped to her belt.
“Proceed in slo-mo, quarter speed.” Claire once more watched the leviathan bear down like a rubberlipped surrealist bus. This time she saw how at the last moment Maud had gone for her knife. She’d gotten it out, but it had tumbled from her fingers a fraction of a second before the leviathan got her. Not that Claire could see where it would have been much help.
So the question had been modified to:
Dammit, the answer had to be there somewhere. Had to be! Just as she was about to run the loop one more time before going on to review later recordings, a discreet signal sounded from the area monitor. She changed over to real-time display to check it out.
There was a leviathan approaching the clearing. She settled back to watch and see if another indigene came out to play midnight snack. Maybe it was a lemming thing…
Several minutes later she was shaking her head in wonder and muttering, “You clever, clever bastards!” over and over as she began hunting further clues on the recordings.
Now that she knew what to tell the system to look for, it didn’t take her long to find what she sought.
Arthur shuffled out of their bedroom in his underwear, yawning and rubbing his eyes. “Claire?” he called, “How long have you been up?”
No answer came.
Muzzily concluding that her wifely ESP had as usual sent her to take over the bathroom just before he needed it, he mooched on into the kitchen to get some caffeinated brain-starter in him while he waited for his turn to use the plumbing. She always did this to him, her preemptive precognition also extending to magazines and newspapers, the phone, the vid remote, and the last beer in the fridge. These morning waits were the worst. There were times he thought his marriage vows should have been
By the time he’d sucked down one cup of coffee she still hadn’t come out. Muttering dire threats in which the words mascara and maiming figured prominently under his breath, he went to hammer on the bathroom door.
“Claire? Hurry it up, will you?” he called, giving the door a smart rap. “Do your makeup—”
It swung open under his hand.
A tendril of unease curled through his innards when he saw that she wasn’t inside. After jittering anxiously from foot to foot while attending to urgent matters, he went looking for her in every one of the ship’s rooms.
“Don’t do this to me, Claire,” he begged, going to the pilot’s station by the bay window and signaling Maud’s ship to see if she had gone over there. The craft reported itself to be unoccupied.
He headed for the science station at close to a dead run. There he found a note posted on one of the screens. It read
“No,” he moaned, shaking his head from side to side in denial. “You wouldn’t. You
Fearing the worst, he instructed the system to backtrack through the most recent recordings made of the area outside to prove to himself she couldn’t possibly have done anything as crazy as what he suspected.
She had.
“Why, Claire,
Half the morning was gone. He had raged. He had cried. He had screamed and kicked things, quite possibly breaking a toe in the process. A combination of pain from his foot and the despair chewing at his heart had made him haul out the bottle and take that first drink. The ones that followed had just sort of happened. At about the fourth he’d half-decided to go looking for her, and even gotten as far as putting on an envirosuit, but in the end he had gone back to the fifth instead.
His bothersome beautiful beloved Claire grinned back at him from the screen in formerly living color, frozen in the act of blowing him a kiss in her final moments before the leviathan had gotten her. Her face wore that crazed look he knew—and secretly loved—so well, her dark eyes glowing with reckless pleasure. She’d known he would see this, and had waved good-bye before—
He took a shuddering glug and hugged the bottle to his chest, the hooded yellow Teflon fabric envirosuit and his tragic expression face making him look like a bereft banana on a bender. Every Canadian boy grew up knowing American women were trouble, and she was clearly and inarguably more trouble than any ten normal daughters of Uncle Sam. Why had he ever let himself get involved?
A sound that was half a sob and half a laugh escaped him. Like he could have stopped himself! Not two minutes after they had first met and begun working together she had begun driving him crazy. Before the month was out he’d known he was going to have to either kill her or admit that he loved her. That some deep, unsuspected, probably masochistic part of him liked it. Craved it. That when he was with her he was alive in a way he’d never been before. Life since then had been an adventure, and himself a reluctant adventurer.
He knew himself to be a dull man.
Cautious. A plodding
His rules and checklists were meaningless now, and in spite of all the times he had threatened divorce, he now knew that he was utterly, abysmally, and irrecoverably lost without her.
“Wha’ should I do now, darlin’?” he asked her image slurrily. She beamed back at him with the face of a peyote-eating Mona Lisa.
One part of him wanted to get drunker than he’d ever been in his whole life, drunk enough to die from. Another part wanted to go hunt down that miserable rubber-lipped wife-eating alien sonofabitch and make it
One of the fundamental guiding principles of Expeditions was that no major life-forms were to be harmed, and on that point the Whuggs were figuratively and literally immovable. The monster that ate his Claire had to be classified as a major life form just on size alone. Killing one on purpose would be effectively killing his career as a part of Why Not U at the same time.
“Big deal,” he sniffed, wiping away a tear and taking another numb swallow of whiskey. Going back to being a plain vanilla administrator mired in the hidebound life he’d led before she came along would be like dying anyway.
“T’ hell with it,” he growled, struggling to sit more or less upright. Enough maudlin muddling, mister!
“System. Exscrap—eggrap—uh, figure out th’ track of th’ leviathan on th’ screen. Use, uh, any an’ all ’vailable data from them orbiting whatchamacallits to locate it so I c’n—”
His longest drink of whiskey yet, tears running down his eyes and excess liquor dribbling down his chin.
“So I c’n
There. He’d said it. Breaking the rules still horrified him, but dam it, a man had to do what a man had to do! Speaking of which…
After three tries he managed to escape the chair’s clutches. He turned, oriented himself in the general direction of the bathroom, swung one leg out for that critical first step, missed the floor completely and proceeded to fall flat on his face, out cold even before his head hit the carpet.
What finally roused him was the bellowing.
The sfhere sheathing the blindship was completely soundproof, but the sensors monitoring the area were still active and keyed to respond to significant changes in ambient noise.
Bellowing was a rather pallid description of the unearthly sound which blew him from his stupor and set him to thrashing wildly around on the cheap shag carpet. It was a vast mournful baying
Arthur floundered around in blind panic, banging his head twice on the bottom of the chair before getting past that barrier, lurched to his feet, and when he slapped a hand onto the board to catch his balance he hit the mute button by sheer beneficent accident.
His ears still ringing, his head pounding, and his brain mired in that muddy no man’s land between roaring drunk and rawly hungover, he tried to flog his mind into action.
A dim recollection of instructing the system to track down the monster that had eaten Claire trickled back into his consciousness like a mixture of glue and broken glass. He squinted at the reads. The damned thing had been found, and it was presently located—
On the third try he got the system shifted over to displaying a real-time view of the clearing out front.
There it was, but strangely enough the gargantuan creature seemed to be in almost as much distress as Arthur himself. It was crouched on the hard-pan outside in a posture that rang corroded bells in his aching brain, its broad blunt head twisted to one side and its mouth open in a soundless howl of obvious anguish.
“Suffer, you bastard,” he growled thickly. “But stay where you are! I’m coming to put you out of your misery!”
The leviathan shook itself like a wet dog and swung its big body around as if trying to dislodge something clinging to its hindquarters, its fuzzy tail curled into quivering rigidity over its leathery back.
Arthur stared slackjawed as its rear end hove into view, his eyes nearly popping out of his head when he saw that sticking out from under the leviathan’s tail was a pair of legs.
Legs he knew quite well from being married to their owner.
And they were
The leviathan’s small, muddy brown eyes seemed to follow Arthur hopefully as he half ran, half edged around its heaving flanks. Claire’s stun-rifle banged into his spine with every step. He’d brought it along in case the colossus tried to eat him as well, but the thing seemed to be acting almost tame. When it had seen him coming it ceased its mournful baying, squatted down and lapsed into a shallow stentorian panting, like a monster mother in labor.
Arthur was not by nature a man to rush into things. He was the sort who, if he found his shoes on fire, would give considerable deliberation to whether water would be best poured over or into them.
But for once in his life he didn’t waste time debating methodology, pondering the merits of a modified Lamaze technique versus some other carefully researched approach. Instead he simply took a running leap up into the air, and with an atheist’s prayer for efficacy on his lips, seized hold of his wife’s ankles with both hands and let his full weight drop.
His technique, although crude, unconsidered and not particularly scientific, was sufficient unto the task. Claire came free like a cork from a champagne bottle, accompanied by a loud
They hit the ground in a tangle amongst the falling fragrant fecal confetti. The leviathan threw back its head and trumpeted a gobbling cry of pure unconstipated joy, swung around to give him a thankful lick with a mattress-sized pink tongue, then began galumphing gleefully away.
“Claire! Are you all right?” Arthur demanded, hauling her up from a sparkling lavender drift and shaking her. She wiped her face and spat, gave him a loopy grin, then grabbed him by the ears and fastened her mouth to his.
After she let go, and while Arthur was wiping his own mouth and spitting, she staggered to her feet. “Come on, my hero,” she panted. “We have to get back out of sight!”
He gaped up at her in confusion, wondering how she could make such an abrupt switch from chewing on his tonsils to ordering him around. “What—” he began, “I don’t—”
“No time,” she huffed, dragging him to his feet. “The indigenes aren’t supposed to know we’re here, remember?” She tightened her grip on his hand and began towing him back toward their ship.
Arthur let her, obscurely pleased that things had so quickly returned to normal.
As she had predicted, a dozen of the locals came running onto the scene less than a minute after they were back inside and recloaked. Arthur peeled off the envirosuit and wiped his face, and Claire scraped clods of dung off while watching the beings mill around the clearing, demonstrating the nearly universal humanoid signs for confusion by scratching their hairless heads and shrugging their thin shoulders. After a few minutes they gave up and headed back toward the way they had come, adding bemused head-shaking to the roster of gestures they shared with their clandestine observers. The Whugg system could have translated what they were saying, but it would have been redundant.
“OK Claire, I think you’d better tell me what the hell you thought you were doing!” Arthur said in the most commanding tone he could muster once the aliens were out of sight. He even flung down his towel for emphasis.
She responded by giving him the hairy eyeball, hands on her hips. “You’ve been drinking, haven’t you? You know you can’t hold hard liquor.”
“Well, maybe I did have one or—” He blinked, then scowled. “Don’t go changing the subject, dammit! Why the bloody hell did you go out there and let yourself get eaten? That was the dumbest, most—most—” Words failed him and he flung up his hands in baffled outrage.
“Oh, getting eaten was safe enough,” she answered mildly. “My only miscalculation was in my ability to get off the bus.”
The look he gave her suggested that he suspected brain damage. “Off the bus? What the hell are you babbling about, woman?”
Claire lifted an arm and sniffed, made a face. “Yuck! I smell like—well, you know. Tell you what. You wash your face and hands then make us something to eat while I take a shower. After we get some breakfast—” she glanced at her watch, “—better make that brunch, in us then we can talk. OK?”
“I guess,” he allowed. She was pretty rank, and his body throbbed with a need for coffee to replace spent adrenaline.
“Thanks. You’re a prince.” She leaned over to peer at the various readouts, then regarded him with one raised eyebrow. “You were tracking my leviathan. You weren’t plotting some sort of drunken macho revenge, were you?”
He couldn’t look her in the eye. “Well…” he began.
A knowing grin appeared. “Of course not. What was I thinking?” She raised her voice. “System. Use previously employed methods to extrapolate the probable position of the leviathan that swallowed Professor Whalsitz.”
Arthur’s eyes went wide with realization. “Wait a minute! You got eaten and you’re still alive! Do you think Maud might be?”
She shook her head, flakes of leviathan dung falling from her hair like lavender dandruff. “I doubt it. We’ll know for sure soon enough. Now get making some coffee and food, would you, love? I’ve had kind of a crappy morning.”
Arthur watched her head for the bathroom, tom between aggravation at being left in the dark and ordered around, and a tremendous sense of relief that he had her back again.
The sense of relief was greater. Probably almost as profound as that poor leviathan had felt to be rid of her.
Chuckling to himself he went to wash, and then whip up a brunch worthy of the occasion.
“OK,” Claire said after swallowing the last bite of her fifth Belgian waffle and putting down her fork. “Now I’m ready to be debriefed.” She lounged back in her chair and regarded him from under lowered lashes. “Or maybe you would rather I answered some of your questions instead.”
“Keep your briefs on,” he replied tartly, refilling their coffee cups. “And tell me how you could so blithely decide to let an alien monster eat you. Because if it’s something medication can fix, I’m getting you a prescription.”
“I knew it was safe, and I wanted to find out why Maud let one eat her.”
“Safe.” He shook his head. “We’ll hash that one out later. Did you figure out what Maud was up to?”
“I sure did. And it
“But
She beamed at him. “For the same reason the chicken crossed the road.”
Arthur could feel his headache coming back. “To get to the other side?” he grated, unamused by the punch line.
“Precisely. Maud had done some high-altitude survey work before touching down, and what she saw then indicated that the indigenes, though completely cut off from each other by the nearly airless ridges between their inhabitable pits, hadn’t stagnated or diverged genetically. That indicated the direct or indirect transfer of genetic material. How? Only one creature here was capable of crossing the barriers, and did so on a regular basis. That was the leviathans.”
“She never mentioned that,” Arthur put in.
“Maud withheld a lot of things—and had been doing so for some time now, releasing only those findings which wouldn’t point to whatever artifacts and information she’d been pilfering.”
Arthur paled and almost dropped his cup. “Maud was
“Every chance she got. Now let’s get back to the leviathans. Anatomically speaking, they’re a muscular, bone-reinforced tube surrounding a single huge combination stomach and lung.”
“You mean they’re, um, hollow?”
“Pretty much. After you go in one’s mouth you pass through a funnel-shaped ring of muscle and emerge in a big open space. The walls are lined with the feathery, fan-shaped, gill-like structures that keep the air circulating and extract the gases they need. The floor is lined with interconnected muscular pits where the vegetation it eats is macerated and digested. As long as you watch where you step it’s fairly comfortable inside. There’s air and heat, some sort of bioluminescent light, and even a salad bar if you’re not too fussy. I’ve had worse plane rides.”
Arthur rubbed his jaw, intrigued. “You’re saying there’s a habitable space inside each animal.”
“I am, and if you think diat’s something, wait’ll you hear the rest. That huge lung allows the leviathans to hold their breath the whole time they cross from pit to pit, which makes them in essence self-powered, pressurized transport. So if a local wants to get to the other side, it just whistles one up and rides in style.”
“But how do they know where they’ll end up?”
“There’s this small sort of pouch with a membrane you can see out, and an exposed knot of ganglia that can be manipulated to guide the thing. This clearing is like the local bus stop. The leviathans may be docile, but they’re just too big and too dumb to be allowed inside their villages. In fact, I think further study will show that the indigenes have definite overlapping routes set up. They are, as Maud said, clever bastards.”
“So you… drove that leviathan back here after it ate you?”
“Neat, huh?”
That wasn’t quite the word that sprang to his mind. “But if they are so docile, why didn’t you just climb back out its mouth instead of its, um, back door?”
She shook her head ruefully. “I couldn’t. That front funnel is strictly one-way. Oh, air can go back out when the ambient pressure is low enough and the leviathan wants it to, but the things have an incredible gag reflex. Believe me, I know. What it boils down to is their having one-way airlocks at either end, one in and one out. When a leviathan reaches its destination it takes a deeeep breath and then forcibly flushes out all the stale air, waste materials and any passengers it happens to be carrying. The indigenes seem to know some sort of trick for moderating that process. I figured out how they got back out when I saw an indigene, ah, unloaded.” She laughed. “Unfortunately I’m a bit larger than its usual passengers and got stuck in the exit.”
“Remarkable adaptation,” Arthur murmured thoughtfully, thinking of the stir this would cause in academic circles. Then he frowned. “That still leaves two questions unanswered. What do the leviathans get out of this arrangement, and why did Maud go inside one? She must have been after more than a simple joyride.”
“She was. Your two questions are connected. The pods used to call the leviathans are like candy to them, and may even alter their biochemistry to make crossings easier, like a carbo load before a workout. Then there’s a second benefit, and the solution to the riddle. Near as I can figure, during the crossings the indigenes make the leviathans stop in certain places, take a deep breath, slip out the back way to go outside for a minute or two so they can dig up digestive aids for their pets, then crawl back inside through that oral airlock, which opens just enough to let them back in without any serious loss of air. Then off they go again.”
Arthur didn’t get it. “Digestive aids?”
“Stones, like the gravel some birds swallow. Remember, the leviathans don’t have any teeth—” She laughed. “—And a good thing too! Stones in those muscular stomach pits help grind up the vegetation they eat. One certain kind can be dug up on the ridges between the pits. Once again, there may be some extra nutritional benefit, trace minerals maybe.”
Arthur nodded. “OK, that makes for a sensible symbiosis. But it still doesn’t explain why Maud wanted one to swallow her.”
Claire’s eyes gleamed with merriment. “Actually it does. Tell me, Mr. Science, what’s unusual about leviathan dung—besides its size, that is.”
He thought it over. “It glitters?” he said uncertainly.
“Excellent observation. Those sparkles are dust and chips from the grinding stones.” She reached into her pocket. “Here are a few half-worn-out stones I grabbed while I was inside.”
She opened her hand, and a dozen gleaming gemstones the size of robins’ eggs clattered onto the table between them.
“Almost there,” Arthur called from the science console. “You should be able to see it any time now.”
“Got it,” Claire replied, peering out the bay window as she piloted the ship on manual. The ungainly blind-ship turned slightly and began settling down toward the sun washed scarp.
“Poor thing,” she murmured as she put the craft down beside the dead leviathan. “It bit off more than it could poo.”
“No life signs at all,” Arthur reported tightly as he deployed the spytes. “Let’s get this over with.”
Claire went to stand behind her husband with her hands on his shoulders as the spytes flitted around the massive carcass like curious flies. They did not have to wait long for the answer they sought.
“Old Whaletits made a bad mistake by going into that poor creature to make her pile.” Arthur said mournfully.
Only the woman’s head had emerged into the killingly thin air, the rest of her corpulent body too large to pass. A breather mask dangled uselessly inches from her mouth.
“Yeah,” Claire agreed. “Thanks to being greedy she ended up looking like one—”
The Pyg’s face was the dark purple of a strangulation victim, her eyes wide and staring, her tongue black and protruding.
“—In the end.”
As Science Master, Arthur had final say in the collection and disposition of specimens. He was inclined to leave the unlucky leviathan and its fatal passenger for the exobiologists to separate and dissect. Claire agreed that there was no hurry in reclaiming Whalsitz’s body for an autopsy; cause of death was fairly obvious.
Their work on Pitstop done, they lifted off and headed back to where the Expedition’s mothership waited out by the system’s sixth planet so they could deal with the list of problems which had arisen while they were gone. Why Not U being a largely human enterprise, there were always problems, and quite often they were ones the two of them had to work together to solve.
Before they were even three kilometers up Arthur was bitching about her driving, and Claire was gleefully terrifying him with acrobatics and bludgeoning him with bad jokes.
Listening in, you might have thought that they didn’t get along, and divorce had to be just around the corner.
But really they couldn’t get along without each other.
Which made their marriage very convenient indeed.