to see what they do, eh?”
Conway began, “This is all theory …
He broke off as the ship’s radio hummed, cleared its throat and said
briskly, “Scout ship Nine. Mother here. I have an urgent signal for Doctor
Conway. The being Camsaug has gone on vacation wearing the tracer the
Doctor gave it. It is heading for the active stretch of shore in area
H-Twelve. Harrison, have you anything to report?”
“Yes, indeed,” replied the Lieutenant, glancing at Conway. “But first I think the Doctor wants to speak to you.”
Conway spoke briefly and a few minutes later the scout ship leaped ahead under emergency thrust, ripping through the sky too fast for even the leaves to react to its shadow and trailing an unending shock wave which would have deafened anything on the surface with ears to hear. But the great carpet slipping past them might well number deafness among its many other infirmities which now, Conway thought angrily, included a number of well-developed and extensive skin cancers and God alone knew what else.
He wondered if a great, slow-moving creature like this could feel pain, and if so, how much? Was the condition he could see confined to hundreds of acres of “skin” or did it go much deeper? What would happen to the beings living in or under it if too many of the carpets died, decomposed? Even the rollers with their offshore culture would be affected-the ecology of the whole planet would be wrecked! Somebody was going to have to talk to the rollers, politely but very, very firmly, if it wasn’t already too late.
All at once the horse-trading aspect of his assignment, the swapping of tools for medical assistance, was no longer important. Conway was beginning to think like a doctor again, a doctor with a desperately ill patient.
At Descartes the copter he had requested was waiting. Conway changed into a lightweight suit with a propulsion motor strapped onto his back and extra air tanks on his chest. Camsaug had too great a lead for him to follow on foot, so Conway would fly out to the being’s present position by helicopter. Harrison was at the controls.
“You again,” said Edwards.
The Lieutenant smiled. “This is where the action is. Hold tight.”
After the mad dash to the mother ship the helicopter trip seemed incredibly slow. Conway felt that he would fall flat on his face if it did not speed up and Edwards assured him that the feeling was mutual and that they would have made better time swimming. They watched Camsaug’s trace grow larger in the search screen while Harrison cursed the birds and flying lizards diving for fish and suiciding on his rotor blades.
They flew low over the settled stretch of coast where the shallows were protected from the large predators of the sea by a string of offshore islands and reefs. To this natural protection the rollers had added a landward barrier of dead land-beast by detonating a series of low-power nuclear devices inside the vast creature’s body. The area was now so settled that doughnuts could roll with very little danger far inside the beast’s cavernous mouths and prestomachs and out again.
But Camsaug was ignoring the safe area. It was rolling steadily toward the gap in the reef leading to the active stretch of coast where predators large, medium and small ate and eroded the living shore.
“Put me down on the other side of the gap,” said Conway. “I’ll wait until Camsaug comes through, then follow it.”
Harrison brought the copter down to a gentle landing on the spot indicated and Conway lowered himself onto a float. With his visor open and his head and shoulders projecting through the floor hatch he could see both the search screen and the half-mile distant shore. Something which looked like a flatfish grown to the dimensions of a whale hurled itself out of the water and flopped back again with a sound like an explosion. The wave reached them a few seconds later and tossed the copter about like a cork.
“Frankly, Doctor,” said Edwards, “I don’t understand why you’re doing this. Is it scientific curiosity regarding roller mating habits? A yen to look into the gaping gullet of a land beast? We have remote-controlled instruments which will let you do both without danger once we get a chance to set them up …
Conway said, “I’m not a peeping Tom, scientific or otherwise, and your gadgetry might not tell me what I want to know. You see, I don’t know what exactly I’m looking for, but I’m pretty sure that this is where I can contact them—”
“The tool users? But we can contact them visually, through the plants.”
“That may be more difficult than we expect,” Conway said. “I hate to attack my own lovely theory, but let’s say that because of their vegetable vision they have difficulty in grasping concepts like astronomy and space travel or, as beings who live in or under their enormous host, of visualizing it from an outside viewpoint …
This was just another theory, Conway went onto explain, but the way he saw it the tool users had gained a large measure of control over their environment. On a normal world environmental control included such items as reforestation, protection against soil erosion, efficient utilization of natural resources and so on. Perhaps on this world these things were not the concern of geologists and farmers but of people who, because their environment was a living organism, were specialists in keeping it healthy.
He was fairly sure that these beings would be found in peripheral areas where the giant organism was under constant attack and in need of their assistance. He was also sure that they would do the work themselves rather than use their tools because these thought-controlled devices had the disadvantage of obeying and shaping themselves to the nearest thought source-this had been proved many times at the Hospital as well as earlier today. Probably the tools were valuable, too much so to risk them being swallowed and/or rendered useless by the savage and disorganized thinking of predators.
Conway did not know what these people called themselves-the rollers called them Protectors or Healers or an almost certain method of committing suicide because they killed more often than they cured. But then the most famous Tralthan surgeon in the Federation would probably kill an Earth-human patient if it had no medical knowledge of the species and no physiology tape available. The tool users worked under a similar handicap when they tried to treat rollers.
“But the important thing is they do try,” Conway went on. “All their efforts go toward keeping one big patient alive instead of many. They are the medical profession on Meatball and they are the people we must contact first!”
There was silence then except for the gargantuan splashing and smacking sounds coming from the shoreline. Suddenly Harrison spoke.
“Camsaug is directly below, Doctor.”
Conway nodded, closed his visor and fell awkwardly into the water. The weight of his suit’s propulsor and extra air tanks made him sink quickly and in a few minutes he spotted Camsaug rolling along the sea bottom. Conway followed, matching the roller’s speed and keeping just barely in sight. He had no intention of invading anyone’s privacy. He was a doctor rather than an anthropologist and he was interested in seeing what Camsaug did only if it ran into trouble of a medical nature.
The copter had taken to the air again, keeping pace with him and maintaining constant radio contact.
Camsaug was angling gradually toward the shore, wobbling past clumps of sea vines and porcupine carpets which grew more thickly as the bottom shelved, sometimes circling for several minutes while one of the big predators drifted across its path. The vines and prickly carpets had poisonous thorns and quills and they lashed out or shot spines at anything which came too close. Conway’s problem now was how to drift past them at a safe altitude but remain low enough so as not to be scooped up by a giant flatfish.
The water was becoming so crowded with life and animal and vegetable activity that he could no longer see the surface disturbance caused by the helicopter. Like a dark-red precipice the edge of the land beast loomed closer, almost obscured by its mass of underwater attackers, parasites and, possibly, defenders-the situation was too chaotic for Conway to tell which was which. He began to encounter new forms of life aglistening black and seemingly endless mass which undulated across his path and tried to wrap itself around his legs and a great, iridescent jellyfish so transparent that only its internal organs were visible.
One of the creatures had spread itself over about twenty square yards of seabed while another drifted just above it. They did not carry spines or stings so far as he could see, but everything else seemed to avoid them and so did Conway.
Suddenly Camsaug was in trouble.
Conway had not seen it happen, only that the roller had been wobbling more than usual and when he jetted
