Sheffield said, “Not adequate, Cimon. He should be on the spot. He may see things our precious specialists will not.”
Cimon said freezingly, “Very likely. The answer, Sheffield, is no. There is no argument that can possibly persuade me.” The astrophysist’s nose was pinched and white.
“Because I made a fool of you?”
“Because you violated the most fundamental obligation of a professional man. No respectable professional would ever use his specialty to prey on the innocence of a non-associate professional.”
“So I made a fool of you.”
Cimon turned away. “Please leave. There will be no further communication between us, outside the most necessary business, for the duration of the trip.”
“If I go,” said Sheffield, “the rest of the boys may get to hear about this.”
Cimon started. “You’re going to repeat our little affair?” A cold smile rested on his lips, then went its transient and contemptuous way. ”You’ll broadcast the dastard you were.”
“Oh, I doubt they’ll take it seriously. Everyone know psychologists will have their little jokes. Besides, they’ll be so busy laughing at you. You know-the every impressive Dr. Cimon scared into a sore throat and howling for mercy after a few mystic words of gibberish.”
“Who’d believe you?” cried Cimon.
Sheffield lifted his right hand. Between thumb and forefinger was a small rectangular object, studded with a line of control toggles.
“Pocket recorder,” he said. He touched one of the toggles and Cimon’s voice was suddenly saying, “Well, now, Dr. Sheffield, what is it?”
It sounded pompous, peremptory, and even a little smug.
“Give me that!” Cimon hurled himself at the lanky psychologist.
Sheffield held him off. “Don’t try force, Cimon. I was in amateur wrestling not too long ago. Look, I”ll make a deal with you.”
Cimon was still writhing toward him, dignity forgotten, panting his fury. Sheffield kept him at arm’s length, backing slowly.
Sheffield said, “Let Mark and myself come along and no one will ever see or hear this.”
Slowly Cimon simmered down. He gasped, “Will you let me have it, then?”
“After Mark and I are out at the settlement site.”
“I’m to trust you.” He seemed to take pains to make that as offensive as possible.
“Why not? You can certainly trust me to broadcast this if you don’t agree. I’ll play it off for Vernadsky first. He’ll love it. You know his corny sense of humor.”
Cimon said in a voice so low it could hardly be heard, “You and the boy can come along.” Then vigorously, ”But remember this, Sheffield. When we get back to Earth, I”ll have you before the Central Committee of the G.A.A.S. That’s a promise. You’ll be de-professionalized.”
Sheffield said, “I’m not afraid of the Galactic Association for the Advancement of Science.” He let the syllables resound. ”After all, what will you accuse me of? Are you going to play this recording before the Central Committee as evidence? Come, come, let’s be friendly about this. You don’t want to broadcast your own-uh-mistake before the primest stuffed shirts in eighty-three thousand worlds.”
Smiling gently, he backed out the door.
But when he closed the door between himself and Cimon, his smile vanished. He hadn’t liked to do this. Now that he had done it, he wondered if it were worth the enemy he had made.
Nineteen
Seven tents had sprung up near the site of the original settlement on Junior. Nevile Pawkes could see them all from the low ridge on which he stood. They had been there seven days now.
He looked up at the sky. The clouds were thick overhead and pregnant with rain. That pleased him. With both suns behind those clouds, the diffused light was gray white. It made things seem almost normal.
The wind was damp and a little raw, as though it were April in Vermont. Fawkes was a New Englander and he appreciated the resemblance. In four or five hours, Lagrange I would set and the clouds would turn ruddy while the landscape would become angrily dim. But Fawkes intended to be back in the tents by then.
So near the equator, yet so cool! Well, that would change with the millennia. As the glaciers retreated, the air would warm up and the soil would dry out. Jungles and deserts would make their appearance. The water level in the oceans would slowly creep higher, wiping out numberless islands. The two large rivers would become an inland sea, changing the configuration of Junior’s one large continent; perhaps making several smaller ones out of it.
He wondered if settlement site would be drowned. Probably, he decided. Maybe that would take the curse off it.
He could understand why the Confederation were so damned anxious to solve the mytsery of that first settlement. Even if it were a simple matter of disease, there would have to be proof. Otherwise, who would settle the world? The “sucker bait” superstition held for more than merely spacemen.
He, himself-Well, his first visit to the settlement site hadn’t been so bad, though he had been glad to leave the rain and the gloom. Returning was worse. It was difficult to sleep with the thought that a thousand mysterious deaths lay all about, separated from him only by that insubstantial thing time.
With medical coolness, Novee had dug up the moldering graves of a dozen of the ancient settlers. (Fawkes could not and did not look at the remains.) There had been only crumbling bones, Novee had said, out of which nothing could be made.
“There seem to be abnormalities of bone deposition,” he said.
Then on questioning, he admitted that the effects might be entirely owing to a hundred years’ exposure to damp soil.
Fawkes had constructed a fantasy that followed him even into his waking hours. It concerned an elusive race of intelligent beings dwelling underground, never being seen but haunting that first settlement a century back with a deadly perseverance.
He pictured a silent bacteriological warfare. He could see them in laboratories beneath the tree roots, culturing their molds and spores, waiting for one that could live on human beings. Perhaps they captured children to experiment upon.
And when they found what they were looking for, spores drifted silently out over the settlement in venomous clouds-
Fawkes knew all this to be fantasy. He had made it up in the wakeful nights out of no evidence but that of his quivering stomach. Yet alone in the forest, he whirled more than once in a sudden horror-filled conviction that bright eyes were staring out of the duskiness of a tree’s Lagrange I shadow.
Fawkes’ botanist’s eye did not miss the vegetation he passed, absorbed as he was. He had deliberately struck out from camp in a new direction, but what he saw was what he had already seen. Junior’s forests were neither thick nor tangled. They were scarcely a barrier to travel. The small trees (few were higher than ten feet, although their trunks were nearly as thick as the average Terrestrial tree) grew with considerable room between them.
Fawkes had constructed a rough scheme for arranging the plant life of Junior into some sort of taxonomic order. He was not unaware of the fact that he might be arranging for his own immortality.
There was the scarlet “bayonet tree,” for instance. Its huge scarlet flowers attracted insect-like creatures that built small nests within it. Then (at what signal or what impulse Fawkes had not divined) all the flowers on some one given tree would grow a glistening white pistil over night. Each pistil stood two feet high, as though every bloom had been suddenly equipped with a bayonet.
By the next day, the flower had been fertilized and the petals closed shut-about pistil, insects, and all. The explorer, Mako-yama, had named it the “bayonet tree,” but Fawkes had made so bold as to rename it Migrania Fawkesü…