But no attack came. The dragons seemed to regard the ship as a curiosity, nothing more. They had come here to feed. When they reached the first clumps of seaweed they opened their immense mouths and began to gulp the stuff down by the bale, sucking in along with it the squid-things and the crab-things and all the rest. For several hours they grazed noisily amid the seaweed; and then, as if by common agreement, they slipped below the surface and within minutes were gone.
A great ring of open sea now surrounded the Spurifon.
'They must have eaten tons of it," Lavon murmured. "Tons!"
"And now our way is clear," said Galimoin.
Vormecht shook his head. "No. See, captain? The dragon-grass, farther out. Thicker and thicker and thicker!"
Lavon stared into the distance. Wherever he looked there was a thin dark line along the horizon.
"Land," Galimoin suggested. "Islands — atolls—"
"On every side of us?" Vormecht said scornfully. "No, Galimoin. We've sailed into the middle of a continent of this dragon-grass stuff. The opening that the dragons ate for us is just a delusion. We're trapped!"
"It's only seaweed," Galimoin said. "If we have to, we'll cut our way through it."
Lavon eyed the horizon uneasily. He was beginning to share Vormecht's discomfort. A few hours ago the dragongrass had amounted to mere isolated strands, then scattered patches and clumps; but now, although the ship was for the moment in clear water, it did indeed look as if an unbroken ring of the seaweed had come to enclose them fore and aft. And yet could it possibly become thick enough to block their passage?
Twilight was descending. The warm heavy air grew pink, then quickly gray. Darkness rushed down upon the voyagers out of the eastern sky.
"We'll send out boats in the morning and see what there is to see," Lavon announced.
That evening after dinner Joachil Noor reported on the dragon-grass: a giant alga, she said, with an intricate biochemistry, well worth detailed investigation. She spoke at length about its complex system of color-nodes, its powerful contractile capacity. Everyone on board, even some who had been lost in fogs of hopeless depresion for weeks, crowded around to peer at the specimens in the tub, to touch them, to speculate and comment. Sinnabor Lavon rejoiced to see such liveliness aboard the Spurifon once again after these weeks of doldrums.
He dreamed that night that he was dancing on the water, performing a vigorous solo in some high-spirited ballet. The dragon-grass was firm and resilient beneath his flashing feet.
An hour before dawn he was awakened by urgent knocking at his cabin door. A Skandar was there — -Skeen, standing third watch. "Come quickly — the dragon-grass, captain—"
The extent of the disaster was evident even by the faint pearly gleams of the new day. All night the Spurifon had been on the, move and the dragon-grass had been on the move, and now the ship lay in the heart of a tight-woven fabric of seaweed that seemed to stretch to the ends of the universe. The landscape that presented itself as the first green streaks of morning tinted the sky was like something out of a dream: a single unbroken carpet of a trillion trillion knotted strands, its surface pulsing, twitching, throbbing, trembling, and its colors shifting everywhere through a restless spectrum of deep assertive tones. Here and there in this infinitely entangled webwork its inhabitants could be seen variously scuttling, creeping, slithering, crawling, clambering, and scampering. From the densely entwined masses of seaweed rose an odor so piercing it seemed to go straight past the nostrils to the back of the skull. No clear water was in sight. The Spurifon was becalmed, stalled, as motionless as if in the eight she had sailed a thousand miles overland into the heart of the Suvrae! desert.
Lavon looked toward Vormecht — the first mate, so querulous and edgy all yesterday, now bore a calm look of vindication — and toward Chief Navigator Galimoin, whose boisterous confidence had given way to a tense and volatile frame of mind, obvious from his fixed, rigid stare and the grim clamping of his lips.
"I've shut the engines down," Vormecht said. "We were sucking in dragon-grass by the barrel. The rotors were completely clogged almost at once."
"Can they be cleared?" Lavon asked.
"We're clearing them," said Vormecht. "But the moment we start up again, we'll be eating seaweed through every intake."
Scowling, Lavon looked to Galimoin and said, "Have you been able to measure the area of the seaweed mass?"
"We can't see beyond it, captain."
"And have you sounded its depth?"
"It's like a lawn. We can't push our plumbs through it."
Lavon let his breath out slowly. "Get boats out right away. We need to survey what we're up against. Vormecht, send two divers down to find out how deep the seaweed goes, and whether there's some way we can screen our intakes against it. And ask Joachil Noor to come up here."
The little biologist appeared promptly, looking weary but perversely cheerful. Before Lavon could speak she said, "I've been up all night studying the algae. They're metal-fixers, with a heavy concentration of rhenium and vanadium in their—"
"Have you noticed that we're stopped?"
She seemed indifferent to that. "So I see."
"We find ourselves living out an ancient fable, in which ships are caught by impenetrable weeds and become derelicts. We may be here a long while."
"It will give us a chance to study this unique ecological province, captain."
"The rest of our lives, perhaps."
"Do you think so?" asked Joachil Noor, startled at last.
"I have no idea. But I want you to shift the aim of your studies, for the time being. Find out what kills these weeds, aside from exposure to the air. We may have to wage biological warfare against them if we're ever going to get out of here. I want some chemical, some method, some scheme, that'll clear them away from our rotors."
"Trap a pair of sea-dragons," Joachil Noor said at once, "and chain one to each side of the bow, and let them eat us free."
Sinnabor Lavon did not smile. "Think about it more seriously," he said, "and report to me later."
He watched as two boats were lowered, each bearing a crew of four. Lavon hoped that the outboard motors would be able to keep clear of the dragon-grass, but there was no chance of that: almost immediately the blades were snarled, and it became necessary for the boatmen to unship the oars and beat a slow, grueling course through the weeds, while pausing occasionally to drive off with clubs the fearless giant crustaceans that wandered over the face of the choked sea. In fifteen minutes the boats were no more than a hundred yards from the ship. Meanwhile a pair of divers clad in breathing-masks had gone down, one Hjort, one human, hacking openings in the dragon-grass alongside the ship and vanishing into the clotted depths. When they failed to return after half an hour Lavon said to the first mate, "Vormecht, how long can men stay underwater wearing those masks?"
"About this long, captain. Perhaps a little longer for a Hjort, but not much."
"So I thought."
"We can hardly send more divers after them, can we?"
"Hardly," said Lavon bleakly. "Do you imagine the submersible would be able to penetrate the weeds?"
"Probably not."
"I doubt it too. But we'll have to try it. Call for volunteers."
The Spurifon carried a small underwater vessel that it employed in its scientific research. It had not been used in months, and by the time it could be readied for descent more than an hour had passed; the fate of the two divers was certain; and Lavon felt the awareness of their deaths settling about his spirit like a skin of cold metal. He had never known anyone to die except from extreme old age, and the strangeness of accidental mortality was a hard thing for him to comprehend, nearly as hard as the knowledge that he was responsible for what had happened.