There was a discrepancy between the number of eggs on his list and the number of organisms he had been able to catch. It didn’t seem to bother him. He could hardly expect to catch every animal just by fishing blindly with a strainer. After he had caught the same fish three times he shrugged good-naturedly and abandoned his efforts. It showed an unusual tolerance for frustration on Desperandum’s part, and it surprised me. I had expected him to empty the whole tub through a net. Apparently he thought that might endanger the health of the specimens.
All in all he had caught sixteen specimens from twenty-eight eggs. On the next day he tried again. There were more nuggets of plankton now; their spores had been present when the dust was first added. Besides that, the other plankton, sensing the presence of water, had spawned. There were dozens of tiny nuggets, no larger than chips of glass. Some of the larger nuggets were missing. They had been eaten.
Desperandum added a little more water to promote the growth of the major food source, then began fishing again.” He had more success this time; he caught twenty specimens. Oddly, he was unable to catch some of the earlier specimens, including the fish he had caught three times yesterday. It didn’t seem to bother him. After all, every creature there was entirely under his control.
I stopped my speculation. It was past my ability to fathom Desperandum’s mental states; like all old people, he had passed into a different orientation, as different from my own as childhood is from adulthood.
We killed a whale that day and dumped three eggs overboard.
On the next day Desperandum caught only fifteen specimens. One of them was a small predatory octopus, which accounted for the disappearance of a few of the fish. Desperandum pulled it out of the tank and dissected it.
Twelve specimens on the next day. Desperandum rid himself of three omnivorous fish, assuming that they were the culprits. On his checklist he had correlated twenty-seven of the twenty-eight eggs. The shiny, spiny, black one remained unidentified.
When he found only four specimens on the day after that Desperandum grew annoyed. He emptied out the jar. Dust rustled sluggishly across the deck and flowed under the rail into the sea. Desperandum quickly rescued the specimens that lay struggling or scuttling on the deck; three crabs, a small vegetarian octopus, and the larva of a dust strider. He frowned. All of his captives ate nothing but plankton or, when they could get it, the long linked ropes of kelp common in this part of the crater.
Then he turned to the jar. There, stuck to the side of the glass with a dust-colored suction disk, was a small Nullaquan anemone.
“Astonishing!” Desperandum said aloud. “An anemone. What a stroke of luck.”
The anemone looked quite healthy, as might be expected when it need only reach out one of its thorny arms for prey. It had eight arms, long, supple, pale brown tentacles studded with nastily sharp black thorns, like the branches of a rosebush. Each thorn was. hollow, as were the arms; each thorn was a sacking, vampirish beak. Hie arms sprouted from a short, thick trunk; at the bottom of the trunk was a snaillike suction foot At the junction of the arms was a complicated pink arrangement of layers, not unlike the petals of a flower. Like a flower, it was a genital organ. The anemone was quite strong for a creature of its size. It’s foot-long tentacles waved freely even without the support of the dust. It breathed through the siphonlike tips of its arms; they were thin, so it was not surprising that they had never been noticed.
The anemone seemed disturbed by the loss of its dust. It waved its tentacles indecisively, and finally hooked one over the rim of the jar. Then it released its suction hold on the glass with a faint pop and began to pull itself slowly and laboriously up the side of the glass.
“Dust! Quickly!” Desperandum snapped, watching the anemone with all the concern of a devoted parent for a sick child. Soon a crewman arrived with a bucket and Desperandum poured it slowly into the tub. “More, more,” Desperandum demanded impatiently. Soon the level of the dust swirled up to one of the anemone’s slowly threshing tentacles. The plantlike animal released its hold and slipped into the dust almost gratefully, it seemed to me.
Desperandum noticed my attention. “They’re extremely rare,” he told me. “I’d heard that there was a last colony of them living in the bay northwest of here, but I’d never seen one. No wonder I couldn’t account for that last egg.” Desperandum laughed jovially. He was enjoying himself.
I hoped that his new pet wouldn’t bite him. The way it had tried to climb out of its jar struck me as ominous. I would hate to wake up some night and pry its barbs away from my throat.
Next day I climbed up on deck after leaving the breakfast dishes for Dalusa. I found Desperandum standing beside the glass urn, holding a wiggling spratling over the . dust. Hesitantly, a brown, barbed arm lifted from the opacity and wrapped itself around the fish. The fish flapped weakly a few times and then stiffened. Testing the anemone’s strength, Desperandum kept a firm grip on the fish’s dry gray tail. Soon another tentacle snaked upward out of the dust; Desperandum snatched his fingers back just before the second tentacle lashed out at his hand. The fish disappeared under the surface.
“Strong little monster!” Desperandum said admiringly. “They were all over the crater before it was settled, you know. They kept attacking ships, innocently enough, and poisoned themselves. One sip of human blood through one “of those thorn-beaks killed them almost instantly. I’d even heard that they were extinct. No one would visit their last stronghold up north for fear of mutual destruction. Perhaps they’re making a comeback.”
Wonderful, I thought. A few hundred camouflaged killers would add spice to the Nullaquan existence. I wondered how large the creatures grew. Ten feet? Perhaps as much as twenty? There appeared the image of a venomous monster as big as a sequoia, biding its time in the dry black darkness beneath the ship. One massive barbed tentacle wrapped around the Lunglance, a negligent tug, and there would be another quick addition to the mysteries of the sea. Hunger would be too strong a motive; why, mere curiosity would be abundantly fatal.
Dalusa spotted a pod of dustwhales that day, but by the time the Lunglance reached the spot they had vanished.
The anemone continued to grow. Desperandum prudently put a weighted iron grating on top of the urn. Hie crewman gave the jar a wide berth whenever possible, especially when the creature would stick its barbed appendages out into the open air and wiggle them energetically. As it grew, the anemone was growing darker; now its arms were the color of dried blood.
When young Meggle came in for the officers’ lunch at noon, he told me sullenly that the captain wanted to see me. I reported to the cabin after a suitable lapse of time. Desperandum was just finishing his meal.
We went to the cabin; Desperandum ostentatiously shut the door. “I suppose you must have heard the rumor that I’m thinking of heading the ship for Glimmer Bay.”
That was the reputed home of the last anemones. “Yes, I’ve heard it,” I lied decisively.
“What do you think of it?” he said.
I felt that his frankness called for an evasion on my part.
“I’d like to hear your reasons for going first.”
“Very well. It concerns the specimen, of course. I’d like to keep it on board and study its habits, perhaps donate it later to the Church Zoo in the Highisle. On the other hand, it would be unethical to deprive an endangered species of a potential member of its gene pool. I’d have to see the situation for myself, take a census of the anemone population. Of course, that could be inconvenient.”