“With the other polyps,” Mater corrected him primly. She detested slang.
Pater was eyeing Junior with ominous calm. “And where,” he asked, “did you get that stone?”
Junior contracted guiltily. The surfstone slipped from his tentacles and plumped to the sea-floor in a flurry of sand. He edged away, stammering, “Well, I guess maybe… I might have gone a little ways toward the beach…”
“You guess! When I was a polyp,” said Pater, “the small fry obeyed their elders, and no guess about it!”
“Now, dear—” said Mater.
“And no spawn of mine,” Pater warmed to his lecture, “is going to flout my words! Junior… COME HERE.”
Junior paddled cautiously round the homesite just out of tentacle-reach. He said in a small voice, “I won’t.”
“DID YOU HEAR ME?”
“Yes,” admitted Junior.
The neighbors stared. The three maiden aunts clutched one another with muted shrieks, savoring beforehand the language Pater would now use.
But Pater said “Ulp!”—no more.
“Now, dear,” put in Mater quickly. “We must be patient. You know all children go through larval stages.”
“When I was a polyp…” Pater began nastily. He coughed out an accidentally inhaled crustacean, and started over: “No spawn of mine…” Trailing off, he only glared, then roared abruptly, “SPRAT!”
“I won’t!” said Junior reflexively, and backpaddled into the coral shadows of the reef.
“That wallop,” seethed Pater, “wants a good polyping. I mean—” He glowered suspiciously at Mater and the neighbors.
“Dear,” soothed Mater, “didn’t you notice…?”
“OF COURSE I— Notice what?”
“What Junior was doing. Carrying a stone. I don’t suppose he understands why, just yet, but…”
“A stone? Ah, uh, to be sure, a stone. Why… Why, my dear, do you realize what this MEANS?”
Pater was once more occupied with improving Mater’s mind. It was a long job, without foreseeable end—especially since he and his helpmeet were both firmly rooted for life to the same tastefully decorated homesite (garnished by Pater himself with colored pebbles, shells, urchins, and bits of coral in the rather rococo style which had prevailed during Pater’s courting days as a free-swimming polyp).
“Intelligence, my dear,” pronounced Pater, “is quite incompatible with motility. Just think—how could ideas congeal in a brain shuttled hither and yon, bombarded with ever-changing sense-impressions? Look at the lower species, which swim about all their lives, incapable of taking root or thought! True Intelligence, my dear—as distinguished from Instinct, of course—presupposes the fixed viewpoint!”
He paused. Mater murmured, “Yes, dear,” as she always did at this point.
Junior undulated past, swimming toward the abyss. He moved a bit heavily now; it was growing hard for him to keep his maturely thickening afterbody in a horizontal posture.
“Just look at the young of our own kind,” said Pater, “Scatterbrained larvae, wandering greedily about in search of new stimuli. But, praise be, they mature at last into sensible, sessile adults. While yet the unformed intellect rebels against the ending of carefree polyphood, instinct, the wisdom of Nature, instructs them to prepare for the great change!”
He nodded wisely as Junior came gliding back out of the gloom of deep water. Junior’s tentacles clutched an irregular basalt fragment which he must have picked up down the rubble-strewn slope. As he paddled slowly along the rim of the reef, the adult anthozoans located directly below looked up and hissed irritable warnings. He was swimming a bit more easily now, and, if Pater had not been a firm believer in Instinct, he might have been reminded of the grossly materialistic theory, propounded by some iconoclast, according to which a maturing polyp’s tendency to grapple objects was merely a matter of taking on ballast.
“See!” declared Pater triumphantly. “I don’t suppose he understands why, just yet… but Instinct urges him infallibly to assemblei the materials for his future homesite.”
Junior let the rock fragment fall, and began plucking restlessly at a coral outcropping.
“Dear,” said Mater, “don’t you think you ought to tell him…?”
“Ahem!” said Pater. “The wisdom of Instinct—”
“As you’ve always said, a polyp needs a parent’s guidance,” remarked Mater.
“Ahem!” repeated Pater. He straightened his stalk and bellowed authoritatively, “JUNIOR! Come here!”
The prodigal polyp swam warily close. “Yes, Pater?”
“Junior,” said his parent solemnly, “now that you are growing up, it behooves you to know certain facts.”
Mater blushed a delicate lavender and turned away on her side of the rock.
“Very soon now,” said Pater, “you will begin feeling an irresistible urge… to sink to the bottom, to take root there in some sheltered location which will be your lifetime site. Perhaps you even have an understanding already with some—ah—charming young polyp of the opposite gender, whom you would invite to share your home-site. Or, if not, you should take all the more pains to make that site as attractive as possible, in order that such a one may decide to grace it with—”
“Uh-huh,” said Junior understandingly. “That’s what the fellows mean when they say any of ‘em’ll fall for a few high-class rocks.”
Pater marshaled his thoughts again. “Well, quite apart from such material considerations as selecting the right rocks, there are certain—ah—matters we do not ordinarily discuss.”
Mater blushed a more pronounced lavender. The three maiden aunts, rooted to their boulder within easy earshot of Pater’s carrying voice, put up a respectable pretense of searching one another for water-fleas.
“No doubt,” said Pater, “in the course of your harum-scarum adventurings as a normal polyp among polyps, you’ve noticed the ways in which the lower orders reproduce themselves—the activities of the fishes, thexrustacea, the marine worms will not have escaped your attention.”
“Uh-huh,” said Junior, treading water.
“You will have observed that among these there takes place a good deal of—ah—maneuvering for position. But among intelligent, firmly rooted beings like ourselves, matters are of course on a less crude and direct plane. What among lesser creatures is a question of tactics belongs, for us, to the realm of strategy.” Pater’s tone grew confiding. “Now, Junior, once you’re settled, you’ll realize the importance of being easy in your mind about your offspring’s parentage. Remember, a niche in brine saves trying. Nothing like choosing your location well in the first place. Study the currents around your prospective site—particularly their direction and force at such crucial times as flood-tide. Try to make sure you and your future mate won’t be too close down-current from anybody else’s site, since in a case like that accidents can happen. You understand, Junior?”
“Uh-huh,” acknowledged Junior. “That’s what the fellows mean when they say don’t let anybody get the drop on you.”
“Well,” said Pater flatly.
“But it all seems sort of silly,” said Junior stubbornly. “I’d rather just keep moving around and not have to do all that figuring. And the ocean’s full of things I haven’t seen yet. I don’t want to grow down!”
Mater paled with shock. Pater gave his spawn a scalding, scandalized look. “You’ll learn! You can’t beat Biology,” he said thickly, creditably keeping his voice down. “Junior, you may go!”
Junior bobbled off, and Pater admonished Mater sternly: “We must have patience, my dear! All children pass through these larval stages…”