“Coming, coming!” shrieked the Bandicoot, rising and jigging like a sandhopper on its spindly legs. Its cry was answered by another from the sky, and a moment later, with the usual blur and buzz of wings, Bird settled at the edge of the ring of darkness. The second Bandicoot dropped from her back and jigged across to join the first.
“Bandy said to skim home,” said Bird in the metallic voice produced by moving one wing-case to make a flow of air and then modifying the flow with the sensitive leading edge of the wing itself.
“What’s up, Man?” she added. “The Bandy told you about the wreck?”
“No. And I didn’t say anything about bringing you home. The last my Bandy told me was about a seam of Sperrylite you thought you’d spotted. What kind of wreck? How old?”
Bird raised a wing-case and let it fall back, producing a sharp explosion like a mining blast. This was her form of swearing.
“I’ll chop him up and feed him to my husband,” she rasped.
She had met her “husband” in the larval stage, when they were both about three inches long, and after a brief, blind courtship had incorporated him in her body, where he now lay, like an extra gland, somewhere near the back of her four-foot thorax. Doc had once paid him a visit, out of curiosity, and said that there was still an intelligence there, of a sort, but that it spent all its time dreaming. He guessed that the dreams were nonrepresentational, but had never been able to interest Skunk or the Bandicoots in finding out. Bird was not merely a flying scout. She had evolved from a migratory species whose guidance system depended on their ability to sense the magnetic field of their planet with great accuracy; so now she was able, skimming on her gauzy wings above the surface of a strange planet, to map the irregularities where different metallic ores showed up. And in deep space she was like an old sailor with a weather eye, able to sense long before it registered on the instruments the coming of one of the particle-storms that could rush like a cyclone out of the apparently blank spaces between the stars.
“Yup, space wreck,” she said. “More than a month old, less than a year. Real mess. Didn’t go in, but my Bandy said he couldn’t feel anybody thinking down there. I was just going to skim in close when he told me to hurry home. I was coming, anyway, but what made him do that?”
“Nothing, except Cat’s dead.”
“Somebody killed him,” said Hippo.
“With a blunt instrument,” said David.
Bird made a contemptuous rustle with her wing-cases, and before the sound had ended Mole came snouting out of the earth beyond the fire, shaking soil from his pelt like a dog shaking off water. As the flurry of pellets pattered down, the third Bandicoot scrambled out of the capsule which Mole trailed behind him on his subterranean journeys and skittered off to join the other two. Now all three were hopping like hailstones on paving, and shrilling at each other in and out of the limits of David’s hearing range.
“What’s up?” growled Mole.
“Cat’s dead and I’m pregnant,” said Hippo.
“I don’t know why I bother,” said Mole. “Soon as this trip’s over I’m paying off and going home.”
He would have trouble finding it, thought David. Home for Mole was somewhere in the Ophiucus area, a planet—or rather an ex-planet—which had become detached from its sun and all of whose life-forms had evolved in a belt between the surface permafrost and the central fires.
“Home?” said Bird. “Yup. Good thinking. Count me in on payday.”
She clicked and tocked in a thoughtful way. Doc put his hooter up, sighed “Ho-o-o-o-ome,” and plopped back under.
Home. Why not? Earth. Clothed, soft-skinned bipeds. David was a rich man, in theory, by now. He could afford to retire, buy four or five young wives and a mother-in-law, and a nice little island . . .
The Whizzers cut the reverie short by slithering into the camp, bringing the last of the Bandicoots. At once all thought and talk were impossible in the frenzy of jigging and shrilling, until Bird turned on the four of them and drove them, with a series of fierce explosions, round to the far side of the ship. Meanwhile Skunk crawled down from the Whizzer he had been riding. The Whizzers were legless reptiles from a planet of crushing gravity. They were about seven feet long and three feet wide, but less than a foot high, and on planets less massive than their own they could carry reasonable weights over almost any surface at speeds of up to sixty miles an hour. They flowed. David seldom got the chance to ride one, because his function was to stay at base and coordinate information with his own stored knowledge; but sometimes, when he needed to see something with his own eyes, a Whizzer had taken him and he had found the ride as much fun as surf boarding. Despite being hermaphrodites, Whizzers paired for life. They were deeply religious.
Skunk was also a hermaphrodite and legless, but otherwise nothing like a Whizzer—slow, sightless, a nude blob, corrugated with scent glands. He could synthesize and aim a jet of any odour he wished. He could stun even Hippo with a stink, provided her nostril was unsealed. On the anniversary of David’s first joining the crew Skunk had presented him with a smell which was all the pleasures of his life, remembered and forgotten, linked into ten minutes of ecstasy. Skunk knew what odours to produce because he was a telepath, not in the style of the Bandicoots, but able to sense the minutest variations of emotion: thus he could attract or repel, numb or excite, at will. David had seen him organize the slaves of a fully functioning mine in Altair to load the ship with jade while their trance-held guards watched impotent. That had been a rich trip, if risky. Pity they’d had to trade the loot for fuel at a way station . . . Skunk had almost total power except over creatures such as Cats, which had no sense of smell. He could be any colour he chose. He could feel danger long before David could analyse it. Surface-scouting on a new planet was always done by a team of two Whizzers, one Bandicoot, and Skunk.
“The Bandicoot said we were to return,” hissed one of the Whizzers. “What new providence has the Lord effected?”
“I don’t know,” said David. “I think that the Bandicoots just wanted to get together.”
“Listen to them,” said Mole.
“Disgusting,” said the Whizzers.
“A very untidy relationship,” said Bird, smugly.
“Dear little things,” said Hippo.
“Hippo, get away from that strut,” said David.
“Sorry,” said Hippo. “You know, I really am pregnant.”
“You and who else?” said Bird. “You aren’t the only female in these parts, remember. There’s me, too, and several halves and quarters.”
“But it’s important,” said Hippo.
“It’s hysterical,” snapped Bird. “Get Doc to check. He’ll tell you.”
“Doc’s drunk,” said David. “He’s found some substance in Cat’s body . . . But if Hippo does give birth it means she’ll produce a cloud of seeds which float about until they stick to a living body—then they burrow in and eat it out from the inside.”
“Charming,” said Bird. “What happens if they land on another Hippo?”
“Why do you think they’ve evolved that hide, and the ability to seal off?” said David.
“Well, we’ll just have to copy her,” said Bird. “Get inside the ship, seal off, and wait till the happy event is over.”
“But you can’t do that,” said Hippo. “What about my babies? What will they eat?”
“Oh, they’ll find something,” said Bird.
“But was it not revealed to Brother/Sister Skunk that the Lord has not yet seen fit to bring forth warm-blooded creatures upon this planet?” said one Whizzer.
“Infinite is His mercy. Strange are His ways,” said the other.
David started trying to work out whether Hippo could bust her way into the ship. His analysis wouldn’t cohere. He didn’t know how much extra strength to allow for the desperation of maternal feelings, and all the other constants seemed to be slithering around. Then, in the middle of this mess, a wholly irrelevant point struck him. He ought to have seen it before.