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approximately seventy-five per cent of the vanished animals to be accounted
for; and reports of new disappearances were still coming in from farther down
the coast.
Parrol called the Giard Pharmaceuticals Station next. Nile Etland had been in
and out during the day; at the moment she was out. She had left no message for
him, given no information about where she might be reached. Freasie, at the
laboratory, told him the checks Nile had them running on the sea beef
specimens had been consistently negative.
He switched off as fresh gusts of heavy wind started the Hunter bucking again,
gave his full attention for a time to the business of getting home alive. He d
already buzzed Nile s PanElemental twice and received no response. She could
have called the Hunter if she d felt like it. The fact that she hadn t
suggested she had made no progress and was in one of her irritable moods.
By the time the Hunter had butted through the last of the typhoon belt, Parrol
was becoming somewhat irritable himself.
He reached for one of the sandwiches he d brought along for the trip, realized
he d long ago finished the lot and settled back, stomach growling emptily, to
do some more thinking, while the car sped along on its course. Except for
scattered thunderheads, the sky was clear over the mainland to the west. He
rode into the gathering night. Zetman, the inner moon, already had ducked
below the horizon, while Duse rode, round, pale and placid, overhead.
An annoyingly vague feeling remained that there should be a logical connection
between the two sets of events which had occupied him during the day. The
disappearing herds of beef. The Tuskason Sleds mysteriously stricken fraya
pack . . .
Details of what the sledmen had told him kept drifting through Parrol s mind.
He gave his visualization of the events they had reported free rein. Sometimes
in that way
The scowl cleared suddenly from his face. He sat still, reflective, then
leaned forward, tapped the listings button on the communicator.
 ComWeb Service, said an operator s voice.
 Give me Central Library Information.
A few moments later, Parrol was saying,  I d like to see charts of the ocean
currents along the east coast, to a thousand miles out.
He switched on the viewscreen, waited for the requested material to be shown.
Another hunch! This one looked hot!
The location indicator showed a hundred and three miles to the Giard Station.
Parrol was pushing the Hunter along. He was reasonably certain he had part of
the problem boxed now, but he wanted to discuss it with Nile, and that
annoying young woman still had not made herself available. The PanElemental
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did not respond to its call number, and it had been three hours since she last
checked in at the station.
Mingled with his irritation was a growing concern he was somewhat reluctant to
recognize. Nile was very good at taking care of herself, and the thing he had
discovered with the help of Central Library made it seem less probable now
that
human criminality was directly responsible for what had happened to the herds.
But still . . .
The communicator buzzed. Parrol turned it on, said,  Parrol speaking. Who is
it?
A man s voice told him pleasantly,  My mistake, sir! Wrong call number.
Parrol s eyes narrowed. He didn t reply the voice was a recording, and a
signal from Nile. He snapped a decoder into the communicator s outlet, slipped
on its earphones and waited. The decoder was set to a system they had
developed to employ in emergencies when there was a chance that unfriendly
ears were tuned to the communicators they were using.
After some seconds the decoder s flat, toneless whisper began:
 Alert. Alert. Guns. Air. Water. Land. Nile. Water. East. Fifty-eight. North.
Forty-six. Come. Caution. Caution. Call.
Not.
After an instant the message was repeated. Then the decoder remained silent.
Parrol removed the earphones, glanced at the speed indicator which showed the
Hunter already moving along at its best clip, chewed his lip speculatively.
That meant, rather definitely, that a human agency was involved in the sea
beef problem! Which didn t in itself disprove his latest conclusions but added
another angle to them. Nile liked to dramatize matters on occasion but wasn t
given to sending out false alarms. Guns . . . the possibility of an attack by
air, water, or land. By whom? She didn t know or she would have told him.
She d called from the surface of the sea, fifty-eight miles east of the Giard
Station, forty-six miles to the north. That would put her due east of the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]