Upon a Sea of Stars (37 page)

A red marker buoy indicated the location of the pearl beds. Quietly, without any fuss, the ship submerged, dropping down below the surface as her ballast tanks were filled. Grimes went back to the control room; always keenly interested in ships—the ships of the sea as well as the ships of space—he wanted to see how this submersible was handled. He was alarmed when, as he completed his cautious descent down the ladder, the coxswain snatched that nasty looking knife from the rack on the bulkhead. But the Mellisan ignored him, slashed swiftly and expertly at one of the seaweed bladders. It deflated with a loud hiss. Behind Grimes, Wunnaara hooted with laughter. When he had the Commodore’s attention he pointed to the absurd potted plant hanging almost over the compass. Its fronds had turned scarlet, but were already slowly changing back to blue. Grimes chuckled as he realized what was being done. This was air regeneration at its most primitive, but still effective. These submarines, when built, had been fitted with excellent air regeneration plants but, no doubt, the Mellisans preferred their own. The oxygen released from the bladder brought with it a strong smell of wet seaweed which, to them, would be preferable to the odorless gas produced by the original apparatus.

Grimes watched the coxswain until Wunnaara called him back to the conning tower. He was impressed by the Mellisan’s competence. He was doing things that in a human operated submarine would have required at least four men. Could it be, he wondered, that a real sea man must, of necessity, be also a first-class seaman? He toyed, half humorously, with the idea of recruiting a force of Mellisan mercenaries, to be hired out to those few nations—on those few worlds where there was still a multiplicity of nations—which still relied upon sea power for the maintenance of their sovereignty.

Back in the conning tower he forgot his not-quite-serious money-making schemes. The submarine—as he already knew from his inspection of the depth gauges—was not running deep, but neither was she far from the sandy bottom. Ahead, astern and on either side were the pearl beds, the orderly rows of the giant bivalves. Among them worked Mellisans—who, like similar beings on other planets, including Earth, were able to stay under water for a very long time on one lungful of air. Some of them, explained Wunnaara, were planting the irritant in the mantle of the shellfish. Others were harvesting the pearls from mollusks that had been treated months previously. These were taken to the underwater depot for cleaning and sorting and, eventually, would be loaded into the submarine for carriage to the spaceport. But, said the Chief, this would be a poor harvest. . . .

From his vantage point he conned the ship, yelping orders down to the coxswain. Finally they were drifting over a long row of opened bivalves. Considerable force had been employed in this opening, the not typical Mellisan care. They could extract the pearl without inflicting permanent injury upon the creature inside the paired shells; in many cases here the upper valve had been completely shattered. In most cases no more than a few shreds of tattered flesh remained. And in all cases what had been a pearl was now only a scattering of opalescent dust.

Now the submarine was approaching the high wire net fence that had been erected to protect the pearl farm. It looked stout enough to stop a ship of this class—but
something
had come through it.
Something
had uprooted metal posts embedded in concrete;
something
had snapped wire rope like so much sewing thread. It was not something that Grimes was at all keen to meet, not even in the comparative safety of this well-designed and -built submersible.

“You see?” mewed the Chief. “You see, Grimes
Wannarbo
?”

“Yes. I see.”

“Then what do, Grimes
Wannarbo
? What do?” Under stress, the old Mellisan’s English tended to deteriorate.

“I . . . I don’t know. I shall have to see some of the starfish. Have you any in captivity, or any dead ones?”

“No. No can catch. No can kill.”

There was a steady thumping sound, transmitted through the water, amplified by the hull plating.

“Alarm!” Wunnaara cried. “Alarm! Alarm!” He shouted something in his own language to the coxswain. The submarine changed course, her motors screaming shrilly as speed was increased to full—or a little over. She skimmed over the flat sandy bottom, raising a great cloud of disturbed particles astern of her.

Ahead there was a commotion of some kind—a flurry of dark, almost human figures, an occasional explosion of silvery air bubbles, a flashing of metallic-seeming tentacles, a spreading stain in the water that looked like a frightened horse as she came full astern—and then she hung there, almost motionless, on the outskirts.

There were half a dozen of the . . .
things
, the starfish, and a dozen Mellisans. Through the now murky water could be seen the wreckage of practically an entire row of the bivalves—shattered shells, crushed pearls, torn, darkly oozing flesh. The odd thing about it all was the gentleness of the marauders. They seemed to be trying to escape—and they were succeeding—but at the same time were avoiding the infliction of serious injury upon the guardians of the beds.

And they were such flimsy things. Or they looked flimsy, as though they had been woven from fragile metallic lace. They looked flimsy, but they were not. One of them was trapped in a net of heavy wire handled by three Mellisans. Momentarily it was bunched up, and then it . . . expanded, and the wires snapped in a dozen places. One of them received a direct hit from a harpoon—and the weapon, its point blunted and broken, fell harmlessly to the bottom.

They were free and clear now, all of them, looking more like gigantic silvery snowflakes than living beings. They were free and clear, swimming toward the breached barrier, their quintuple, feathery arms flailing the water. They were free and clear, and although the Mellisans gave chase there was nothing that anybody could do about them.

“You see?” said the Chief.

“I see,” said Grimes.

He saw, too, what he would have to do. He would make his own report, of course, to Rim Runners’ head office, recommending that something be done on a government level to maintain the flow of commerce between Mellise and the Confederacy. And he would have to try to persuade that pitiful nong of an ambassador to recommend to
his
bosses that a team qualified to handle the problem—say marine biologists and professional fishermen from Thule—be sent at once to Mellise. But it would not be at once, of course. Nobody knew better than Grimes how slowly the tide runs through official channels.

But. . . .

What could he, Grimes do? Personally, with his own two hands, with his own brain?

There had been something oddly familiar about the appearance of those giant Astersidea, about their actions. There had been something that evoked memories of the distant past, and something much more recent. What was it? Lynn Davis’ gaudy pets in the brightly lit aquarium? They swam, of course, and these giant mutants (if mutants they were) were swimmers, but there the similarity ceased.

“What do, Grimes
Wannarbo
?” Wunnaara was insistent. “What do?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” replied the Commodore. “But I’ll do something,” he promised.

But what?

That night, back in his room in the port captain’s residence, he did his homework. He had managed to persuade Captain Stacey to let him have the files on all Rim Runners’ personnel employed on Mellise, and also had borrowed from the Ambassador’s library all six volumes of Trantor’s very comprehensive
Mellisan Marine Life
. (Trantor should have been here now, but Trantor was dead, drowned two years ago in a quite stupid and unnecessary accident in the Ultimate Sea, on Ultimo, a body of water little larger than a lake.) Grimes skimmed through Trantor’s work first, paying particular attention to the excellent illustrations. Nothing, nothing at all, resembled the creatures that he had seen, although most of the smaller starfish, like the ones he had seen in Lynn Davis’ tank, subsisted by making forcible entry into the homes of unfortunate bivalves.

Then he turned to the files.

About half the spaceport employees were true Rim Worlders—born out on the Rim. The other half—like Grimes himself—were not, although all of them were naturalized citizens. Judging from the educational qualifications and service records of all of them, none of them would be capable of inducing a mutation. Grimes had hoped to turn up a biological engineer, but he was disappointed. And biological engineering is not the sort of thing that anybody takes up as a hobby; in addition to the years of study and training there is the quite expensive license to practice to obtain, and the qualifications for that are moral rather than academic or practical. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a permanent fixture in Man’s mythology.

Feeling like a Peeping Tom, another permanent fixture, he leafed through Lynn Davis’ service record. She was Terran-born, of course. Her real education had been at M.I.T., where she had graduated as a Bachelor of General Physics. After that she seemed to have specialized in meteorology. There had been a spell with Weather Control, North American Continent, and another spell with Weather Prediction, satellite-based. After that she had entered the service of Trans-Galactic Clippers as Spaceport Meteorological Officer. She had seen duty on Austral, Waverly, and Caribbea, all of them planets upon which T-G maintained its own spaceports. From Waverly she had gone to Caribbea—and on Caribbea she had blotted her copybook.

So, thought Grimes,
she’s a compulsive gambler. She doesn’t look like one. But they never do.
It was on Caribbea that she had become a regular habitué of the New Port of Spain Casino. She had, of course, worked out a system to beat the wheel—but the system hadn’t worked out for her. There had been the unhappy business of the cracking of the T-G cashier’s safe, allegedly thiefproof, but (luckily) very few thieves held a degree in Physics. There had been the new banknotes, the serial numbers of which were on record, that had turned up in the safe of the casino’s cashier.

After that—the Rim Worlds.

A
pity
, said Grimes to himself.
A pity. But it could have been worse. If she’d gone to Elsinore, in the Shakespearian Sector, where they’re notorious for their gambling, she’d really be in a mess by now.

He turned up the file on Peterson. The absentee meteorologist was another ex-Terran, and also had been employed with Trans-Galactic Clippers. Grimes noted with interest that Petersen had spent a few weeks on El Dorado, popularly known as “the planet of the filthy rich.” (Grimes had been there himself as a young man, as a junior officer in the Federation’s Survey Service.) It seemed that a T-G ship had called there on a millionaires’ cruise, and T-G had insisted on sending its own spaceport personnel there in advance.

Women, not money, had been Petersen’s trouble. Twice he had been named as correspondent in an unsavory divorce case. If the ladies had not been the wives of prominent T-G executives it wouldn’t have mattered so much—but they had been.

There could be a connection,
thought Grimes.
There could be. Both of them from Earth, both of them T-G. . . .
He shrugged away the idea. After all, it had been said that if you threw a brick at random aboard any Rim Runners’ ship, the odds are that you will hit an ex-officer of the Interstellar Transport Federation’s vessels.

So it went on—case histories, one after the other, that made depressing reading and, insofar as the quite serious crisis on Mellise was concerned, a shortage of both motive and opportunity. But money could be a motive. Suppose, tomorrow, a foreign ship dropped in, and suppose that somebody aboard her said to old Wunnaara, “
We’ll
fix your starfish for you—in return for full trading rights. . . .”

And whatever else I am,
thought Grimes tiredly,
I’m not a starfish fixer.

He poured himself a stiff drink and went to bed.

She said, “I hear that you’ve been looking through the personnel files, John. That wasn’t very gentlemanly of you.”

“How did you hear?” asked Grimes. “My doing so was supposed to be as secret as the files themselves.”

“There aren’t any secrets on this bloody planet, in this tiny community.” Her face, as she stared at him over her candlelit dining table, was hard and hostile, canceling out the effects of an excellent meal. “And did you find what you were looking for?”

“No.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Somebody who’s capable of doing a spot of biological engineering.”

“Did you find anybody?”

“No, Lynn.”

“What about the spaceport quack?”

“Frankly,” said Grimes, “I wouldn’t go to him with a slight head cold.”

“Frankly, my dear, neither would I.” She laughed, and her manner softened. “So you’re still no closer to solving the Mystery of the Mutated Starfish.”

“No.”

“Then I’ll solve it for you. There was a bad solar flare about a year ago, and our atmospheric radiation count went up no end in consequence. There’s the answer. But I’m glad that you stayed on Mellise, John. You’ve no idea how hungry a girl gets for intelligent company.”

“I’m glad that I stayed, Lynn. For personal reasons. But I really wish that I could help old Wunnaara. . . .”

She said, “I don’t like His Too Precious Excellency any more than you do, John, but I often feel that he’s on the right tack as far as the natives are concerned. Let them help themselves.”

He said, “I discovered this world. I feel, somehow, that it’s my direct responsibility.”

She replied a little bitterly, “I wish that you’d start shedding some of your feelings of responsibility,
Commodore
. Don’t worry so much. Start having a good time, while you can.”

And I could, too,
he thought.
With a quite beautiful, available woman. But. . . .

She said, “It’s a wild night. Hurricane Lynn—I named it after me. You aren’t walking back to old Stacey’s place in this, surely?”

He said, “It’s time I was going.”

“You’ll be drenched,” she told him.