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“True. Let’s try a little farther along.” Molly approached the verge more carefully this time, but was able to wade ankle deep before encountering the same difficulty. She bent over and groped with a gloved hand, again finding no trace of the glitter before she reached the adhesive. “You’d better stay out of this, Carol,” she advised. “I can pull free, but you’d find it harder. We should go back to the line I followed across here, as nearly as I can remember, and ... no, the crystals didn’t grow this close to the wall. We’d have to get well out in the lake to make sure they really aren’t there any more. Let’s go along the rope and check your line.”

Carol agreed, and started the robots again. Twice they had to ride them, where the lake came to the very wall; one of these places, to Carol’s annoyance, was where she had slipped on something. There was no way to check if it were still there; the liquid was too deep. She mentioned this to her companion.

The Human shrugged. “You got a sample before. If it had been ice, it would have dissolved in the ammonia anyway.”

Then another problem claimed their attention. A little farther on, the rope turned and led toward the middle of the great cavern, as they had expected. Carol set the robot directions as precisely as she could from the lie of the rope. They mounted their machines, and Molly took the cord in one hand, allowing it to slip through her fingers as they floated slowly across the lake a few centimeters above the surface.

“You should have taken this thing,” the Human remarked after a minute or two. “There’s a lot of your slimy stuff stuck to it, and I don’t have any collecting cans left.”

“Let’s see,” said Carol from some two meters away. She turned her light on Molly as the latter held the line up for inspection. “Just a moment—I’ll steer closer and get some.”

Molly agreed, and as the other robot drew alongside, she held the slippery length of material out so that her friend could scrape the lip of a can along it.

“Of course, we could have waited and done this more easily where it lifts out of the lake,” the Shervah remarked, “but…”

“But that part wouldn’t have been under the surface,” Molly pointed out. “How fast are we going now? Can you judge when we should get back to that place?”

“Not too well. Even if I’d seen the lake before, it really hasn’t any features to stick in memory.”

“Are you sure?” asked Molly. “What’s this stuff ahead of us?” Carol indicated the direction with her light but said nothing until they had drawn level with what looked like a patch of tall grass blades sticking through the surface of the liquid. Still silent, she took hold of one of them and tried to break it off.

“Tough and slippery,” she reported. “Can you get a grip on it, Mol?” The Human tried, and after some effort managed to pull one of the stalks loose from whatever was holding it below. By this time, several voices were wanting to know what was going on, Charley’s by no means the loudest. Molly explained briefly; she had handed her specimen to the Shervah, who was far too busy pulling it up the rest of the way and examining its base to talk to anyone.

“Something like swamp grass”—she had to be more explicit in description—“growing from the bottom of the lake. It’s getting thicker as we go along. It must have started since Carol and I passed, probably since the lake filled. Something has changed the flow pattern down here, and the biology. I wish I could guess which was cause and which effect. Like it or not, Joe, there is complex life here, and I’d guess it’s tied in with Enigma’s seasons in some way.”

“Is it interfering with your guide rope?” asked Joe, with his usual grasp of essentials.

“It seems to be dragging more, as though something were holding it to the bottom,” replied Molly. “If I did lose my hold on it, it would be rather a nuisance; maybe you should take it, too, Carol, and just back me up. Put three or four meters between us; then I can warn you if something takes me by surprise and I lose it.”

“Good idea.” The smaller student, without really taking her attention from the grass blade she held in one hand and examined with one eye, worked her robot behind the other close enough to let her take hold of the cord trailing from her friend’s glove; then she fell back a little, as suggested. Molly, of course, was still getting whatever tension was on the line.

“Any worse?” asked the Shervah after a minute or two. “I think so, but the change is very gradual.”

“Troubles?” came Charley’s voice.

“Oh, no,” the Human reassured him. “The rope’s sticking to the bottom of this puddle, or maybe to the grass, a little, but we’re in no danger of losing it. We’ll be under the drop point soon.”

“No, we won’t,” said Carol suddenly.

“What?”

“We’ve passed it. Look ahead.” Molly sent the beam of her light into the region that the red-sun native could already see clearly enough.

The cave wall was a dozen meters ahead of them.

Chapter Thirteen

Datum Three: Jenny

It seemed a pity to have to be so quick. Hours or days would have been better, to look over the caves, decide something of the life pattern, and form some idea of a logical basis for selecting specimens. Still, she’d be back, of course. Jenny slipped out of her mapper. It was tempting to try to walk on only the back three or four pairs of legs in this trivial gravity, and one could almost balance erect, Human or Shervah style, but it really took too much attention. It must be convenient to have eyes so far from the ground and be able to see so far without making a climbing or erecting project out of it; but on the other hand, it must be a nuisance to have to bend over or fold those long, rigid legs in order to give a close examination to something on the ground. Use what you have.

And there was work to do; one could philosophize later, though at least this was a time and place where one’s theorizing could hardly result in embarrassment. She remembered with sympathetic amusement the degree holder who had stressed, during a lecture on, if she recalled correctly, Fire’s inner planet Diamond, the universal tendency for the eyes of animals to be located close to their mouths. The unfortunate speaker had then noticed Joe in his audience. The Nethneen’s environmental armor hid the fact that his mouth was at the lower pole of his nearly spherical body, but memory had been enough.

But this wasn’t work.

There were lots of things growing here, but nothing moving. That did not mean, of course, that the things were all plants; it was already obvious that something radically different from the respiration-photosynthesis cycle of a typical sun-circling planet must be going on here. Jenny, like any imaginative being, was hypothesizing well ahead of data.

The growths in the patch which had caught her eye, only a meter or two from the mapper, were pulpy things which Molly would have compared to multiple links of sausage, some growing upward and some extending in segments along the cave floor. Jenny carefully sliced off end segments from a low and a high branch and stowed them in separate specimen cans. Colorless—to her eyes—ichor flowed copiously from the cut ends; she hoped she had not done excessive damage to the creature, and watched for half a minute, worried. If there were no animals, there might be no evolutionary provision for dealing with mechanical damage.

Then the penultimate segment shrank in on itself, the open end was pulled out of sight, and the flow ceased. The Rimmore went on, satisfied.

She could not budget much time; she was back at the mapper in ten minutes, specimen cans full. There was a puddle of material, presumably the spilled ichor, between the spot where she had made her first collection and the robot itself. Protected by her armor, she gave little thought to stepping in it; of course it might not be a good idea to contaminate the outside of her protective suit—but she would be cleaning it off when she got back to the tent, anyway.