shattered. He tried again, with the same result. No matter how delicate his touch, the shafts fell in two. As they broke he heard a faint chime like a crystal bell, and the bright line faded within seconds.
If he wished to know what lay farther up the side of the drowned valley, he had to cross the field of spears. Feeling like a ruffian, too ham-handed to touch anything on this planet, Bony pushed his way through. He left behind him an avenue of destruction. If everything on Limbo was like this, the planet should be off limits to humans. It was far too delicate to withstand human contact.
At the edge of the field of spears, Bony halted and turned to look back at the
He waved, wondering if Liddy would be able to see him from so far away. He fixed in his mind the contours of the underwater valley, so that even when the ship was out of sight he would have no trouble returning to it. Finally, he turned and began the slow, buoyant walk that would take him up the slope and onto the undersea ridge that marked the end of the valley.
He was almost floating, but in order to make forward progress up the steep incline he still had to put his feet down and exert pressure on the seabed. A carpet of spheres of dull orange-red had replaced the standing pikes, and he could not avoid treading on some of them. They flattened, even under his sea-supported weight of what could not be more than a few pounds; but at least they did not shatter and crumble to dust. Instead they produced an odd wheezing sound, like a chesty old man’s sigh of complaint. When he had passed by, they slowly and silently resumed their original shapes.
Life-forms? Bony was not sure, but his guess was yes. Experience throughout the Stellar Group showed that life popped up everywhere you thought it possibly could, and in a lot of places where you felt sure that it couldn’t possibly. There was life in the sulfur volcanoes of Io, life in the ammonia clouds of Uranus, life on fifty-kilometer fragments of radioactive ice in the far reaches of the Oort Cloud, even viral life of a sort coating arid rock shards of the Dry Tortugas. And this was all within the limits of the extended solar system. When you included the domain of the whole Stellar Group, the variety of life-forms, life-tolerances, and life-locations seemed endless. The idea of life on Limbo seemed very reasonable.
And then there were dangerous life-forms. To be dangerous, life did not have to be smart. It merely had to be hungry, poisonous, bad-tempered, territorial, frightened, or accidentally lethal. Bony, as an Earth form, was almost certainly useless as food for any indigenous form on Limbo or any other alien planet. Unfortunately, that was the sort of discovery a creature made only after an attempt at eating had begun.
Occupied by such disturbing thoughts, Bony came to the top of the ridge. He guessed that he had walked maybe two or three hundred meters and risen twenty meters above the ship’s location at the bottom of the valley. Everything was noticeably brighter. He raised his head and stared straight up, wondering how far he was from the surface. When they first arrived, he had guessed at maybe a sixty-meter depth for the
The far side of the ridge descended in a shallower slope that seemed to lead to another valley. The seabed structures changed again. Now they formed clumps of long green strands with thick purple fingers at the end of each. Bony decided that he had come far enough for one day. He would, if the ship was still here tomorrow, take a closer look then. He was all ready to turn and head back when he noticed something about the green clumps. Although their height and degree of growth varied so that they covered almost the whole seabed apparently at random, the positions of their centers were not at all haphazard. They lay along a precise triangular grid, each one about half a meter from its three nearest neighbors.
It could happen naturally. For all that Bony knew, the separation was governed by some precise biological demand for light or nutrients. If, on the other hand, it was
Bony sank down on his haunches to examine the nearest clump of plants. He reached out and tugged at one of the purple fingers. It came away easily and split open like a ripe pod, revealing a group of pea-sized objects within. A puff of gas came at the same time, bubbling up into the water. He lifted the pod to the visor of his suit helmet for a closer view of the dimpled seeds. They looked like a food crop, ripely edible — though probably not to humans. One of those might be enough to kill Bony. As he peered at the cluster his peripheral vision caught a movement far away.
They were on the floor of the valley, close to the limit of visibility. Three of them. At that distance, in the diffuse watery gloom, he had no way of judging size. Each one was rounded and iridescent, like an object blown from a collection of different-sized soap bubbles or a figure made by children from balloons, come to life and in its movements oddly ominous. Bony saw — or imagined — a round bubble head supporting bubble eyes that nodded on long thin stalks; a spherical multicolored body; string-of-bubble limbs or tentacles, that carried the creatures across the seabed as though they were floating ghosts.
Carried them
Only one thing preserved the dignity of Bony’s retreat: it was physically impossible to run underwater.
As soon as the ship came into sight he turned to look back. He was glad to find that he left no telltale track of suspended seabed mud, nor could he see any sign of the bubble creatures.
Even so, the relief when he reached the protective bulk of the
He removed his helmet as the outer hatch closed. By the time that Liddy matched air pressures and opened the inner hatch he had his suit halfway off. She interfered with that by coming up behind and giving him a hug.
“I wondered where you’d gone. You disappeared completely.”
“I thought that since I was outside and the suit worked fine, I’d take a little look around.” Bony tried to be casual. “Where is Friday Indigo?”
“Sleeping, I guess. I haven’t heard a sound from up there.”
“Still? But he’s been asleep for—” Bony saw the clock. “That can’t be right. I was gone for hours.”
“Thirty-seven minutes, from the time you dropped out of the hatch to the time I saw you coming back. What did you find?”