The atmosphere in the tent was certainly tense. But no one was worrying about Chan — they hardly seemed to notice his arrival! He grabbed S’greela by one of her forelimbs. She turned and gave him a little nod of acknowledgement.
“It is good that you have returned. We are not sure what to do next. There has been a bad — a bad misunderstanding — ”
“Misunderstanding!” growled Angel’s communications box.
“—a misunderstanding with the Coromar.” S’greela motioned toward the side of the tent, where the great caterpillar creature was stretching its length along the flexible wall. “That seems to be the group name that these beings give to themselves.”
The animal did not react to its name, but it seemed quite at home in the tent. It was free to move, but making no attempt to escape. Instead, the long mouth was chomping contentedly on a great bale of vegetation.
Chan was totally confused. The scene was so peaceful, the very opposite of what he had imagined. “A misunderstanding?”
“I am afraid so. The animal is not very smart. As soon as Angel was able to speak with it, it agreed to come along with us provided that we would feed it when we got here.” The Pipe-Rilla shook her head testily. “Really, food seems to be the only thing it cares about at all. Naturally we agreed, since we have ample provisions with us.”
“So what’s the problem?” Chan took a closer look at the Coromar, contentedly browsing. “You gave it plenty of food, didn’t you?”
“Well, now it has all it wants. But when we first arrived here, Vayvay — that is the name of this Coromar — did not seem to understand that we would have to bring food to it from storage. It did not want to wait.”
“It tried to leave?’
“No. It tried to eat Angel.”
Chan stared at Angel, sitting motionless at the other side of the tent, as far away as possible from the Coromar. The side fronds were all lying limp against the barrel body, and the head fronds were tightly closed. Angel was sulking.
“Surely the rest of you tried to stop it?”
“We did stop it. All that happened was that Vayvay took a bite at Angel’s middle section — one little bite.”
“It was quite understandable,” added Shikari. The Tinker, its parts reunited, sounded in excellent spirits. It came rustling across to Chan’s side. “After all, even Angel will not deny that the Chassel-Rose is a vegetable. And the real confusion was the fault of the communicator that Angel wears. As S’greela says, Vayvay is not very smart. It apparently assumed that the communicator was the intelligent being, since that was the part that did all the talking. Vayvay thought that the rest of Angel must be some sort of mobile food supply.”
“A perfectly natural assumption, actually,” said S’greela. “To put it as Angel might have put it,” concluded Shikari, “one man’s meat is another man’s mid-section.”
There was an outraged crackle from Angel’s communicator. “We are not amused. This is no matter for joking. If we had not moved quickly, it would have been far more than one bite.”
“All right, that’s enough.” Chan went across to sit down wearily next to Angel. “Cut out the bickering. We have far more important things to worry about.” Chan ignored the cry of protest. “We are supposed to be a pursuit team. Remember? We are tackling the most dangerous creature in the universe. When you looked around the tunnel and found that I was gone, didn’t it occur to you that I might be in trouble? Didn’t one of you think, wait a minute, now, maybe we ought to take a look and see what has happened to Chan. No. Instead, you just headed back here without giving me a thought.’
There was an embarrassed silence. “We were preoccupied with the Coromar,” said Shikari at last. “The tunnel was quite safe, and the part of me that had remained here was reporting no trouble anywhere on the surface. There was no cause for worry about you.”
“And you did return unharmed,” added S’greela. “Why are you so upset? Were you afraid?”
“Not as much as I ought to have been.” Chan was beginning to have second thoughts about what he was going to tell the others. Suppose everything was part of his own mental instability? Suppose that he had imagined the whole thing? “I encountered Nimrod down there. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.
Now I’m not so sure. But I’m amazed that I’m here to tell you about it.”
He summarized his experiences in the horizontal tunnel, keeping his account as matter-of-fact as possible. When he finished there was a strange and non-committal silence. It ended when Angel exchanged a long sequence of shrill squeaks with the Coromar.
“Leah Rainbow was your friend, and she is dead,” said Angel at last. The topmost fronds waved towards Chan. “But Vayvay has never heard of Nimrod. Of course, although the Coromar exist planet-wide, they are not very intelligent. Perhaps they do not travel far from their usual haunts, and perhaps they do not speak much one to another.”
“Don’t spare my feelings. If you don’t believe me, you might as well say so.”
The human mind has processes that we cannot begin to emulate.” Angel turned to Vayvay, as the Coromar produced another series of squeaks. “Ah, and not before time! Vayvay says that it is most sorry that it tried to eat us. But it points out that we look delicious.”
Chan glanced at Shikari and S’greela. It was not just Angel. They were all too diplomatic to say so, but not one of them believed his story. The worst thing was that Chan now doubted it himself.
“Can you ask the Coromar general questions?” he said to Angel.
“That depends on the subject. It is not a complex language, but over half the words seem to concern only eating, or looking for food.”
“Can you ask what Vayvay knows about the other species — say, the agile ones that live in the deep forest? See if they, or any others, sometimes generate a sort of dark mist. Also, see if we are likely to be able to get any help from them when we go deeper towards the forest floor.”
Chan waited impatiently, through an exchange that went on and on. Angel seemed less sure of the replies this time, and many strings of sounds had to be repeated. At last Angel turned again to Chan.
“According to Vayvay, we will obtain no help from the agile creatures. They are named the Maricore. I am sorry that we spoke for so long, but Vayvay was very confused by my questions. You see, both the Coromar and the Maricore are the same species. The Coromar are the feeding, intelligent — just — stage of the life cycle. They live for twelve to fifteen earth years, after which they encyst and undergo a complete metamorphosis. Before the change a Coromar is asexual, and therefore naturally has no sex drives. After metamorphosis a Coromar becomes a Maricore and thinks of little else. In this stage they live only one year. They mate, eat very little, and during this part of life they actually shrink in size. According to Vayvay they never exhibit the least sign of intelligence. They also have poor survival skills. For safety they dwell in the deep forest, and never approach the surface layers. It is one duty of the young Coromar to descend, guard the mature Maricore, and assure their survival until they can give birth to another litter of Coromar. Without that aid, most Maricore would not live long enough to breed.” Angel paused. “An inversion of the familiar theme. The child is father to the man — but in this case the expression proves to be literally true.”
“What about the mist?” Chan didn’t want to hear philosophy. He was suddenly absolutely exhausted, with a return of the dizziness that he had felt in the tunnels. He wanted Shikari warm about him, and then sleep. “Do the Coromar know anything about that?”