century, and since there was little work to be done until spring in any case, the Authority voted to risk the Lazy Eight II in exploring Jinx's oceanic regions. Accordingly six of us red-hot explorers, namely-' Herkimer named names, 'took the ship up and went west. A circular flying wing isn't exactly a goddam airplane, but the ship was lighter than during first landing, and we had enough power to stay up forever or to make a straight-up landing anywhere we could find flat land.
'One problem was that the goddam visibility kept dropping-'
Garner whispered, 'Their slang seems to have changed somewhat since they moved to Jinx.'
'Oh, you noticed that?'
Kzanol/Greenberg twitched in annoyance at the interruption. That would have marked him for an alien anywhere! In 2106 you learned not to hear extraneous noises before you went insane.
'— Couldn't see at all. The light from the fusion drive didn't show us the ground until we were two hundred feet up. We landed on the solid jets, near the shoreline, and started the cameras. Right away we were surrounded by these.'
Mayor Herkimer had a sense of drama. As he stopped talking, the scene jumped to a sandy, sloping beach. The sand in the foreground was blackened and blown into a curving wall. Beyond, the ocean. There were no waves on that ocean. The water seemed thick. Thick and gray and living.
Something moved into view. Something white; something like an enormously magnified slug, but with a smooth, slick skin. From the front of the beast reared a brontosaur neck with no head at all. At its base the neck was as wide as the animal's shoulders. It rose in a conical slope. The tip was thick and rounded, featureless but for two tufts of black bristles.
The camera watched as the beast approached; saw it stop at the scorched sand. Others of its kind came out of the mist. The camera swept a full circle, and everywhere there were enormous white bulks like albino sperm whales swimming through sand.
Their rounded tips swung back and forth; the tufted bristles blew without wind. Of course the bristles were sense organs; and of course the mouths were invisible because the mouths were all closed. Unusual in a whitefood. But they were whitefoods, and no mistake.
Mayor Herkimer spoke. 'These pictures were taken in visible light, but with a long exposure, which accounts for the damn blurring. To us it was like night. Winston Doheny, our biologist, took one look at these monsters and dubbed them
Films showed the action. Tracer bullets stitching six lines from off-camera through the bulky front of a bandersnatch. The silent death, evidenced only by a suddenly drooping tip. White shapes fading ghostlike into the mist. Herkimer continued, 'They run on a rippling belly foot, and as you can see, they move goddam fast.
'According to Doheny this animal is one big cell. Nerves are similar to human nerves in structure, but have no cell body, no nuclei, nothing to separate them from other specialized protoplasm. The brain is long and narrow, and is packed into a bone shell at the elevated tapering tip. This skull is one end of a jointless, flexible, very strong internal cage of bone. Apparently God never intended the beast to shift position.' Garner winced at the unconscious blasphemy. 'The mouth, which was closed in the film, is just ahead of the belly foot, and is good for nothing but scooping up yeast from the ocean.'
The film showed details from the dissection of the bandersnatch. Evidently the two cops at the door had decided not to look; but Masney and Garner watched in keen interest. Autopsies were nothing new to them. The beast was turned on its side to expose the belly foot, and its jaws were opened with a pulley. Slides were shown of tissue sections. There was a circulatory system, with six hearts weighing eleven pounds apiece; there were strange organs in the left side, which only Kzanol/Greenberg recognized as budding apparatus. He watched with manic concentration as the brain case was opened to show the long, narrow brain, gray and deeply convoluted, in its canoe of a skull. The form was familiar in detail, though he'd never seen one raw. Then it was over, and Mayor Herkimer was back.
'The ocean is a uniform foot thick in some unknown breed of yeast. Herds of bandersnatchi move along the shoreline, feeding continuously. The shore is no goddam tourist trap. It's always dark, the waves are smothered by the yeast and the gravity, and the banderanatchi wander along the shore like the lost souls of worn-away mountains. We'd have liked to leave right then, but Doheny couldn't find the sex organs, and he wanted to make a few more dissections.
'So we sent out the copters to find another specimen. But no bandersnatch ever came close enough to be shot from a copter. The banderanatchi had been curious and unafraid. Now they ran whenever a copter got close. All of them. They couldn't possibly have all known about us, unless they were either telepathic or had a language.
'Yet at least one goddam bandersnatch was always within sight of each copter. They seemed to know the range of our guns.
'On the third day of the hunt Doheny got impatient. He assumed that It was the copters that the bandersnatchi were afraid of, and he landed his goddam copter and went hunting on foot. The moment he was out of shooting range of the copter, a bandersnatch charged in and flattened it like a goddam freight truck running down a pedestrian. Doheny had to walk back.
'Several hundred miles east of the shore, we found other forms of native-'
Mayor Herkimer was cut off in mideentence. The slender brunette's voice came from a blank screen: 'Mr. Garner, there is another section of the report listed under 'bandersnatchi. Do you want it?'
'Yes, but just a minute.' Garner turned to face Kzanol/Greenberg. 'Greenberg, were those whitefoods?'
'Yes.'
'Are they telepathic?'
'No. And I've never heard of them avoiding a meat packer's ship. They just go on eating until they're dead.'
'Okay, miss, we're ready.'
Again there was the square, bearded face of the mayor. 'We returned to Sirius Mater five Jinx days after our departure. We found that
'The colonists let it alone, which was goddam sensible of them, and the bandersnatch didn't come too close. By this time its skin, or its cell wall, was light blue, possibly for protection from sunlight. It went straight to Northwest Cultivation Area, spent two hours running tracks across it in what Vicemayor Tays claims was the damnedest dance he ever saw, then moved off toward the ocean.
'Since we. had both copters, we were the first to see the tracks from above. These are films of the tracks. I am convinced that this is a form of writing. Doheny says it can't be. He believes that a bandersnatch could have no use for intelligence, hence would not develop it. I have to admit the sonofabitch has a good argument. The bandersnatch makes a beached dolphin look like a miracle of dexterity. Would you please analyze this and let us know whether we share this world with an intelligent species?'
'The machines couldn't make anything out of this,' Garner put in. 'Concepts were too alien, maybe.'
From the phone screen came kaleidoscopic color static, then a fuzzy picture. Curved lines, like snail tracks, on brown earth. The earth was piowed in mathematically straight furrows, but the lines were broader and deeper. Hillocks and tree stumps distorted them. A helicopter had landed among the wavy tracks; it looked like a fly on a printed page.
Kzanol/Greenberg choked, gurgled, and said, ''Leave our planet at once or be obliterated, in accordance with the treaty of- I can't read the rest. But it's tnuctip science language. Could I have some water?'
'Sure,' Masney said kindly. He jerked a thumb at the cooler. After a moment Kzanol/Greenberg got up and poured his own water.
Lloyd went over to Garner's chair and began talking in a low voice. 'Luke, what was that all about? What are you doing?'
'Just satisfying curiosity. Relax, Lloyd. Dr. Snyder will be here in an hour, then he can take over. Meanwhile there are a lot of things Greenberg can tell us. This isn't just a man with hallucinations, Lloyd.
