He knew enough, though, to keep them from going near the central chamber where the tokamak held its fusing plasma in an unbreakable magnetic grip. They saw the pumps that sucked cool water in from Ocean, to make steam and then to condense it when spent; they saw the gratings that kept the creatures of Ocean from being sucked in along with it; they saw the remarkably slim cables, wrapped in the chilling jackets that made them superconducting, that carried the power plant’s output down under the strait to the community that used it. They even peeped into the control room, every wall a mosaic of screens and signals, where they saw Dr. Patroosh furiously arguing with a pair of uninterested Delt controllers. They would have seen more, probably, but Detslider was watching the time. He was due for his lunch break, he informed them, and they were welcome to come along if they wanted to.
Lunch was machine-served in a large room filled with tables, couches, and Kalkaboo tree-rests, sparsely occupied by beings who paid no attention to the human visitors. To Giyt’s displeasure the human lunch menu turned out to be creamed chipped beef on toast. “It’s always something the machines can dispense. Real crap,” Detslider told him. “Come on. Take your plate and we’ll go someplace that smells better to eat it.” A Delt, sipping some thick yellow liquid from a shallow bowl by the door, turned one eye to glare at Detslider as they left, but the man ignored him. Five meters down the corridor there was a smaller room, with two human women and a man playing pinochle at one table and space for the visitors at another. While Giyt doggedly ate his lunch Rina made polite conversation with all of them. Detslider came from Pasadena, he said, but left it for Tupelo because there was too much crime in California. Like his job? Well, it was all right, but boring. The others, respectively from Tucson, Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and Boston, agreed, the woman from Pottsville adding, “The damn Delts push you around here, like they owned the place.” But it wasn’t just the Earth humans that suffered, she conceded; the Delts acted superior to everybody.
When they went back to the control room Dr. Patroosh spied them, snapped some final argument at the Delt controllers, and swept past them at the door. Over her shoulder she called, “Come on, we’ll go home. I’m not doing any good here.” And crossing the strait in the skimmer she was silent and morose. When Rina asked her sociably how her mission had gone. Dr. Patroosh snapped, “Lousy. They’ve got this whole fusion section locked up, nobody but Delts allowed in—because of radiation danger, they say, but for Christ’s sake we know all about radiation danger.” She glanced at the Delt pilot, who seemed to be paying them no attention, but lowered her voice. “I’m going home to report. We’ll see what happens . . . but I’ll bet we’ll cave in again and dig their damn foundation for them.” Then she was silent. So were Giyt and Rina until their pilot, sweeping the surface of Ocean with his glass, cried out joyfully and began pulling something heavy and harsh-looking out of a locker. With one hand he steered the skimmer toward dimples of disturbed water; with the other he was locking the object from the locker to a mount on the skimmer’s rail.
“Now what?” Dr. Patroosh demanded irritably.
Giyt had no answer for her, but Rina piped up. “Do you know what that looks like. Shammy? That long gold thing with the barbs on the head?” And then of course he did. It was a harpoon, and the Delt proved it a moment later by firing it at the little whirlpools—no, at something under the whirlpools, something red and many-eyed that gasped and snorted as the shaft struck home and it rose briefly to the surface.
The pilot shrieked in exultation, something that the translator did not even try to put into English. The creature sounded, pulling a hundred meters of supple, braided cable out of the harpoon’s reel. The pilot made an adjustment on the reel, darted to the controls, and started the skimmer at high speed toward the coast. Then he turned to his passengers, grinning. “Good eating, you bet! But maybe too far out for any good.”
“Too far out for what good?” Rina asked, but the Delt had already turned away. He was talking rapidly on the communicator to someone ashore, keeping one eye on the skimmer’s wake, where the cable was stretched out almost horizontally. At the end of it Giyt could see the quarry flailing about for a moment, then it disappeared below the surface. Ominous whirls appeared all around it, and then something else was in the water. Blood?
It was blood, all right.
By the time the skimmer reached the river’s mouth a Delt vehicle built like an armored car was waiting for them, but it was too late. When the pilot hauled his catch in to retrieve his harpoon most of the creature was gone, slashed away by the horde of predators.
The pilot laughed and spoke into the communicator; the tanklike thing lumbered away as he turned the skimmer upstream toward the town. He said philosophically, “Too far out, you understand? Too bad. Wonderful to eat, only not just for Delts.” Then he pursed his everted lips, as though trying to remember something, then brightened. “Hey, I know Earth thing! You know Earth-human liar Kepigay?”
“Who?” Giyt asked, and the Delt tried the name several times more before Rina said, “Oh, do you mean Ernest Hemingway?”
“Yes. Excellent liar, Kepigay. Greatly enjoy Earth-human lies; Earth humans such excelling liars. You know Kepigay old Earth romance lie, Man Approaching Death in Relationship to Ocean?”
“I think he means The Old Man and the Sea,” Rina offered. “We had it in American lit in Wichita.”
The pilot nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, I had volume also in aboriginal folk lie study. Damn good lie, that one. You see? Same thing here; catch fish too far, sharks eat. Aboriginals have much native lore which persons can learn from, I say always—though not,” he added, with one eye wandering over to fix on Dr. Patroosh, “on subject nuclear fusion.”
And all the way back to the town their pilot entertained them with stories of his fishing exploits while Dr. Patroosh glowered silently into space. When the pilot let them out on the shore of Crystal Lake, he said cheerfully, “Survive well until dark.”
Rina giggled. “I think he means have a nice day.”
“Yes, exactly. Do not shoot brain fragments all over house like famous Earth-human liar Kepigay.”
They dropped Dr. Patroosh off at the Hagbarth home. Then, in the cart going to their own house, Rina said thoughtfully, “You know what’s funny, hon?”
“What?”
“Well, Colly’s from California, right? We’re from Kansas. Matya comes from a little town on the Jersey shore, Lupe from just outside of Albuquerque, those other guys—”
“What’s funny about that? Everybody has to come from someplace.”
“Well, sure, Shammy, but they’re all from America. Wouldn’t you think there’d be some people from South America or Asia or somewhere?”
He thought for a moment, then brightened. “What about Dr. Patroosh? She said she was from some island in the Indian Ocean.”
“No, not exactly. She said her grandparents were. She’s an American, all right. So I just think it’s funny that there isn’t anybody from the rest of the world, that’s all.”
X
The celebrated inventor of the faster-than-light transmission portal, Dr. Fitzhugh Sommermen, remains in a coma after suffering a major stroke. The attack occurred while the scientist was being interviewed on European network television. His physicians have declined to offer any prognosis for his recovery, saying only that he is resting comfortably and that all possible measures are being taken. In a related story, U.S. President Walter P. Garsh interrupted a news conference this morning to deliver a typically outspoken attack on the European reporters who were questioning Dr. Sommermen at the time. “When will they stop badgering this, poor man?” the president demanded. “No one can pretend that it is only scientific curiosity that continues to impel them. They want secrets, and they want them for their own use. Well, they won’t get them. These secrets belong to America, and we aren’t giving them away.”