Walter shrugged.
“Don’t know, but that’s Security’s problem—not HC.”
Val was not satisfied. Too many of the citizens he had come to admire had gone buckeye. Something was wrong.
4
Kaia the Male
High on his frozen mountain, Kaia stirred in his nest. Hibernation time still remained on his metabolic clock, but hunger called. The hunters’ constant pursuit had made his feedings scanty during the previous warm season. Now his winter sleep was being interrupted by protein starvation—acute amino acid deficiency. Enzyme systems faltered, screamed and tried alternate pathways. Reluctantly he left the dark warmth of his nest and crawled toward the pale glow of the cave mouth. Icy stones numbed hands and knees. He fingered the translucent white crust that sealed him in. It was still thick and hard. The snow line had not yet receded up the mountain. Outside he could only expect the white death. Shivering, he returned to his nest and wrapped a tattered cetacean hide around his old bony shoulders. His metabolic furnace sputtered without fuel. Coldness of death crept into fingers and toes. Desperate, he sorted through the debris at the bottom of the nest: sucking on long bones for the rusty grit in the tubular-shaped cancellous marrow cavities; chewing dry fruit pits for a few coarse bland lignen fibers; and licking cold mussel shells for stringy tags. Nothing. The cold continued to creep in. He didn’t need the ferrous ions in the marrow dust, and his efforts had produced little else.
Kaia’s grinding molars cracked open a fruit pit, releasing a meaty seed so bitter that it puckered his parotid. He spat out the lignen shells and chewed the meat. The plant’s hoarded starch granules promised to rekindle his furnace. Gathering a handful of the pits, he crawled back to the light of the cave mouth and cracked them open with a stone—munching the bitter seeds with swallows of melted snow. With the resinous starchy mulch coating his rugal folds and quieting his hunger pangs, Kaia burrowed back under the musty hides and returned to his cool torpid state.
Earth’s axis tilted. Longer, warmer days melted back the snowcap and thawed Kaia’s niche. The translucent crust dripped and sagged for a time. Then it fell into the cave, exposing his nest to the welcome glare of sunlight. He sat up stretching and squinting. After wrapping on strips of hide as leggings and loincloth, he crawled cautiously outside and stood in a wet cool breeze. The mountainside was a bright mosaic of gray stone and stubborn drifts of white snow. The sun warmed his hairy neck and shoulders. Hunger gnawed. He studied the horizon. Only an occasional Agromeck moved, bug-like, on Filly’s cultivated skin. Calories beckoned from below—a twinkling green filigree of plankton towers clinging to bare rock faces. He started down. A richer warmer atmosphere greeted him.
He climbed into the forest of plankton towers. The trunklike conduits pulsed and glowed with an inner coherent light of 570 nanometers. The carotenoids and phycobilins of the chloroplasts captured most of the light energy, but enough filtered through to produce a soft green glow. The trunks rose, arborizing freely, to form a tubule canopy which captured additional energy from the sun.
The noisy approach of a cumbersome Agromeck sent Kaia scurrying deeper into the syntheforest. After it passed, he emerged and started for the herb gardens. Filly, the cybercity, felt his clandestine movements on her skin. Footsteps itched. Filly moaned when he snapped open a tubule and began to suck plankton. Before she could sphincter down the leak, rich amino acids of zooplankton were fueling his starving enzyme systems. Refreshed, he munched his way across chickpea, soybean and thyme. Filly screamed when he pulled off a stalk of fennel. Her sorrow traveled along inorganic nerve fibers to Hunter Control.
“Sucker in my garden. Varmint on my skin,” she cried.
Val glanced up at the wall panel.
“Looks like a sighting over by Filly’s Mountain again. Haven’t been any buckeyes around there since the one we got last fall. Filly sure has sensitive skin. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got this one too. Foxhound is on the way.”
A small light moved across the wall map.
“Val!” exclaimed old Walter, glancing up from a folder of dusty papers. “Have you seen these reports on Tinker’s body?”
Val shrugged and turned his seat around.
“No—why?”
“It isn’t Tinker.”
Val jumped up and strode purposefully to Walter’s desk.
“What do you mean?”
“Look here. Both adults were male—had been dead about nine months. Hunters, I’d guess. And the infant was a female nearly five years old. It had enough skin pigment to be a jungle bunny. Probably killed by a hunter’s arrow.”
Val picked up first one report, then another. His face tightened.
“They must have been deliberately planted on Tinker’s trail to delay us. Look at the grass under the bodies—hardly stained at all,” he mumbled. Stepping back, he sat down weakly—the reports held limply in his hand.
“Who—?”
“Tinker,” suggested Walter, “perhaps Tinker put them there. He was a clever one.”
Val shook his head. “No. Where could he find just the right bodies. This is garden country. These corpses must have come from high country—the mountains.”
They were interrupted by a report from the Hunt at Filly’s Mountain. The hunter’s hypnoconditioning was reinforced, and his neck titrator gave a priming dose of Speed. The molecular courage brought a sinister grin to his face before the helmet snapped on.
Kaia, the aborigine, sat hidden in the tall grain while he savored the aromatic juices of fennel. Rich sharp flavors jolted pristine taste buds and stirred violent parasympathetic storms. Copious gastric juice flowed. Peristalsis gurgled. Soon his abdomen protruded comfortably, and he became more selective—choosing only the most succulent morsels.
Val watched the remote screen at HC. He recognized the sinewy form and took some stills for higher magnification.
“The scar is right there on the neck,” he said. “This is the same buckeye we watched die on Filly’s Mountain last fall.”
Walter asked the HC meck, Scanner, to dig up the old optics. Stills overlayed perfectly. Same bone structure. Walter nodded.
“Looks like we have our second resurrection,” said old Walter. “What do you make of it?”
“Second?” said Val puzzled.
“The coweye you saw while tracking Tinker.”
Val wrung his hands together. He had actually touched that coweye—felt the still, cold flesh. Death. The memory of her rewarming and swimming off was still with him. He shuddered.
“I get the feeling that we’re dealing with the occult,” mumbled Val. “But there must be a logical explanation. Can the HC meck get this data to the Class One for a work up—see how it computes?”
Scanner said: “Done. We’ll hear in a minute.”
The passing Huntercraft sent Kaia scurrying off in a zigzag course. Foxhound had difficulty tracking. The bugeyed, white-suited hunter swung down-harness with his bow. Kaia saw the skull-like Pelger-Huet helmet and the deadly arrows. Fear tightened his chest. He curled up and went cold.
The sensors searched, but the viewscreen indicated ambient. No warm-blooded body showed.
“There he goes again,” said Walter, pointing to the screen.
“Vanished?” said Val.
“If I didn’t believe in the Kjolen-Milo experiments, I’d say we had a case of teleportation here,” said Walter.
Val shook his head. “No, they came up with some pretty convincing equations. That buckeye is still out there. He just isn’t showing up on the sensors.”
“Foxhound,” called Val, “let the hunter keep searching. He may stumble on the buckeye’s hiding place.”
The craft returned to Garage to suck energy.