He stomped off, raging. His followers left with him.
“It won’t matter what they do, Paul,” Mar Dook said, restraining Paul Benden from going after Ted. “The beast is moribund now. Give them the corpse to vent their feelings on. We’ve about finished what examinations we can make anyhow.” He shrugged wearily. “For all the good it does us.”
“And that is?” Paul inquired encouragingly. Mar Dook and Phas gestured to him and Emily to reenter the containment until where Pol, Bay, and the two geneticists were still writing up their notes.
Wearily, Mar Dook scrubbed at his face, his sallow skin nearly gray as he slumped onto a table that was littered with tapes and slide containers. “We now know that it is carbon based, has complex, very large proteins which flick from state to state and produce movement, and others which attack and digest an incredible range of organic substances. It is almost as if the creature was designed specifically to be inimical to our kind of life.”
“I’m glad you kept that to yourself,” Emily said wryly, looking over her shoulder at the door swinging shut on a view of the angry group heading away.
“Mar Dook, you can’t mean what you just said,” Paul began, resting both hands on the shoulders of the weary biologist. “It may be dangerous, yes—but designed to kill us?”
“That is just a thought,” Mar Dook replied, looking a bit sheepish. “Phas here has a more bizarre suggestion.”
Phas cleared his throat nervously. “Well, it’s come out of the blue so unexpectedly, I wondered if it could possibly be a weapon, preparing the ground for an invasion?” Dumbfounded, Paul and Emily stared at him, aware of Bay’s sniff of disagreement and the amused expression on Kitti Ping’s face. “That is not an illogical interpretation, you know. I like it better than Bay’s suggestion, that this might be only the beginning of a life cycle. I dread what could follow.”
Paul and Emily glanced around them, stunned by such a dreadful possibility. But Pol Nietro rose from his chair and cleared his throat, a tolerant expression on his round face.
“That is also a suggestion from the fiction of the Age of Religions, Mar,” Pol said with a wry smile. He glanced apologetically at his wife and then noticed Kitti Ping’s reassuring smile. He felt heartened. “And, in my opinion, highly improbable. If the life cycle produced inimical forms, where are the descendants of subsequent metamorphoses? The EEC team may have erred in considering the polka dots nondangerous, but they also discovered no other incongruous life-forms.
“As for an invasion from outer space, every other planet in this sector of space was found to be inimical to carbon-based life-forms.” Pol began to warm to his own theory and saw Emily recovering from the shock of the other revelations. “And we have determined that that—” He jerked his thumb at the discolored cube. “—is carbon based. So that would seem to more or less limit it to this system. And we will find out how.” Pol’s burst of explanation seemed to have drained the last of his energy, and he leaned wearily against the high laboratory stand. “I believe I’m right, though. Airing the worst possible interpretations of the data we have gleaned has cleared the air, so to speak.” He gave a little, almost apologetic shrug and smiled hopefully at Phas and Bay.
“I still feel we have missed something in our investigations,” Phas said, shaking his head. “Something obvious, and important.”
“No one thinks straight after forty hours on the trot,” Paul said, clasping Phas by the shoulder to give him a reassuring shake. “Let’s look at your notes again when you’ve had some rest and something to eat, away from the stench in here. Jim, Emily, and I will wait and deal with Ted’s delegation. They’re overreacting.” He sighed. “Not that I blame them. Sudden grief is always a shock. However, I personally would rather plan for the worst that can happen. As you’ve suggested several dire options, we won’t be surprised by anything that happens. And we should plan to reduce its effects on the settlements.”
Paul had a quiet word with one of the psychologists, whose opinion was that the thwarted tensions of the bereaved might be eased by what he termed “a ritual incineration.” So they stepped aside when Ted Tubberman and his adherents demanded the cube and destroyed it in a blazing fire. The resultant stench gagged many, which helped to speed the dispersal of the onlookers. Only Ted and a few others remained to watch the embers cool.
The psychologist shook his head slowly. “I think I’ll keep an eye on Ted Tubberman for a while,” he told Paul and Emily. “That was apparently not enough to assuage his grief.”
Telescopes were trained on the eccentric planet early the next morning. Its reddish appearance was due, Ezra Keroon suggested, to the aggregated dust swirls it had brought in from the edge of the system. Despite the lack of any proof, the feeling among the observers was that the planet was somehow responsible for the disaster.
During the day, Kenjo’s group discovered traces of an earlier fall on Ierne Island, which a witness remembered as more of a rainstorm littered with black motes than a fall of Thread. A scout sent to the northern continent reported traces of recent destruction across the eastern peninsula there. That discovery dispersed the vain hope that the Fall was unique or confined to a specific area. A review of the probe pics from the EEC did nothing to alleviate tension, for the fax incontrovertibly showed the Fall two hundred years before to have been widespread. They figured that the event must have happened just prior to the team’s arrival. The demand to know the extent and frequency of the falls increased ominously.
To assuage mounting fears and tension, Betty Musgrave-Blake and Bill Duff undertook to review the survey’s original botanical data. Ted Tubberman was the only trained botanist who had survived, but he spent his days tracking down every Thread shell and his evenings burning the piles. The psychologists continued to monitor his aberrant behavior.
Based on the original data, Betty and Bill deduced a two-hundred-year gap between incursions, allowing a span of ten to fifteen years for the vegetation to regenerate on the damaged circles after taking into account the age of some of the largest trees in and near the previous occurrence. Betty delivered their conclusion as a positive statement, meant to engender optimism, but she could provide no answer to the vital question of how long the deadly rain would continue to fall.
In an attempt to disprove Mar’s theory of purposeful design or Phas’s equally disturbing suggestion of invasion, Ezra Keroon spent that day on the link with the Yokohama’s mainframe. His calculations confirmed beyond question that the eccentric planet had an orbit of 250 years. But it only stayed in the inner system for a little while, the way Halley’s comet periodically visited Sol. It was too much to suppose there was no connection, and, after consulting Paul and Emily, Ezra programmed one of the Yokohama’s few remaining probes to circumnavigate the planet and discover its composition and, especially, the components of its apparently gaseous envelope.
Though all reports were honestly and fully presented to the community as soon they came in, by evening speculation had produced alarming interpretations. Grimly the more responsible members tried to calm those who gave way to panic.