Red-haired Flinter Cole sipped his black coffee and looked around the chrome and white tile galley of Space Freighter Gorbals, in which he was riding down the last joint of a dogleg journey to the hermit planet of New Cornwall. "Nothing's been published about the planet for the last five hundred years," he said in a nervous, jerky voice. "You people on Gorbals at least see the place, and I understand you're the only ship that does."
"That's right, twice every standard year," said the cook. He was a placid, squinting man, pink in his crisp whites. "But like I said, no girls, no drinks, nothing down there but hard looks and a punch in the nose for being curious. We mostly stay aboard, up in orbit. Them New Cornish are the biggest, meanest men I ever did see, Doc."
"I'm not a real doctor yet," Cole said, glancing down at the scholar grays he was wearing. "If I don't do a good job on New Cornwall I may never be. This is my Ph. D. trial field assignment. I should be stuffing myself with data on the ecosystem so I can ask the right questions when I get there. But there's nothing!"
"What's a pee aitch dee?"
"That's being a doctor. I'm an ecologist—that means I deal with everything alive, and the way it all works in with climate and geography. I can use any kind of data. I have only six months until Gorbals comes again to make my survey and report. If I fumble away my doctorate, and I'm twenty-three already...." Cole knitted shaggy red eyebrows in worry.
"Well hell, Doc, I can tell you things like, it's got four moons and only one whopper of a continent and it's low grav, and the forest there you won't believe even when you see it—"
"I need to know about stompers. Bidgrass Company wants Belconti U. to save them from extinction, but they didn't say what the threat is. They sent travel directions, a visa and passage scrip for just one man. And I only had two days for packing and library research, before I had to jump to Tristan in order to catch this ship. I've been running in the dark ever since. You'd think the Bidgrass people didn't really care."
"Price of stomper egg what it is, I doubt that," the cook said, scratching his fat jaw. "But for a fact, they're shipping less these days. Must be some kind of trouble. I never saw a stomper, but they say they're big birds that live in the forest."
"You see? The few old journal articles I did find, said they were flightless bird-homologs that lived on the plains and preyed on the great herds of something called darv cattle."
"Nothing but forest and sea for thousands of miles around Bidgrass Station, Doc. Stompers are pure hell on big long legs, they say."
"There again! I read they were harmless to man."
"Tell you what, you talk to Daley. He's cargo officer and has to go down with each tender trip. He'll maybe know something can help you."
The cook turned away to inspect his ovens. Cole put down his cup and clamped a freckled hand over his chin, thinking. He thought about stomper eggs, New Cornwall's sole export and apparently, for five hundred years, its one link with the other planets of Carina sector. Their reputedly indescribable flavor had endeared them to gourmets on a hundred planets. They were symbols of conspicuous consumption for the ostentatious wealthy. No wonder most of the literature under the New Cornwall reference had turned out to be cookbooks.
Orphaned and impecunious, a self-made scholar, Cole had never tasted stomper egg.
The cook slammed an oven door on the fresh bread smell.
"Just thought, Doc. I keep a can or two of stomper egg, squeeze it from cargo for when I got a passenger to feed. How'd you like a mess for chow tonight?"
"Why not?" Cole said, grinning suddenly. "Anything may be data for an ecologist, especially if it's good to eat."
The stomper egg came to the officers' mess table as a heaped platter of bite-sized golden spheres, deep-fried in bittra oil. Their delicate, porous texture hardly required chewing. Their flavor was like—cinnamon? Peppery sandalwood? Yes, yes, and yet unique....
Cole realized in confusion that he had eaten half the platterful and the other six men had not had any. He groped for a lost feeling—was it that he and the others formed a connected biomass and that he could eat for all of them? Ridiculous!
"I'm a pig," he laughed weakly. "Here, Mr. Daley, have some."
Daley, a gingery, spry little man, said "By me" and slid the platter along. It rounded the table and returned to Cole untouched.
"Fall to, Doc," Daley said, grinning.
Cole was already reaching ... lying in his stateroom and he was the bunk cradling a taut, messianic body flaming with imageless dreams. He dreamed himself asleep and slept himself into shamed wakefulness needing coffee.
It was ship-night. Cole walked through dimmed lights to the galley and carried his cup of hot black coffee to main control, where he found Daley on watch, lounging against the gray enamel computer.
"I feel like a fool," Cole said.
"You're a martyr to science, Doc. Which reminds me, Cookie told me you got questions about Bidgrass Station."
"Well yes, about stompers. What's wiping them out, what's their habitat and life pattern, oh anything."
"I learned quick not to ask about stompers. I gather they're twenty feet high or so and they're penned up behind a stockade. I never saw one."
"Well dammit! I read they couldn't be domesticated."
"They're not. Bidgrass Station is in a clearing the New Cornish cut from sea to sea across a narrow neck of land. On the west is this stockade and beyond it is Lundy Peninsula, a good half-million square miles of the damndest forest ever grew on any planet. That's where the stompers are."
"How thickly settled is this Lundy Peninsula?"
"Not a soul there, Doc. The settlement is around Car Truro on the east coast, twelve thousand miles east of Bidgrass. I never been there, but you can see from the air it isn't much."
"How big a city is Bidgrass? Does it have a university?"
Daley smiled again and shook his head. "They got fields and pastures, but it's more like a military camp than a town. I see barracks for the workers and egg hunters, hangars and shops, a big egg-processing plant and warehouses around the landing field. I never get away from the field, but I'd guess four, five thousand people at Bidgrass."
Cole sighed and put down his cup on the log desk.
"What is it they import, one half so precious as the stuff they sell?"
Daley chuckled and rocked on his toes. "Drugs, chemicals, machinery parts, hundreds of tons of Warburton energy capsules. Pistols, blasters, cases of flame charge, tanks of fire mist—you'd think they had a war on."
"That's no help. I'll make up for lost time when I get there. I'll beat their ears off with questions."
Daley's gnomish face grew serious. "Watch what you ask and who you ask, Doc. They're suspicious as hell and they hate strangers."
"They need my help. Besides, I'll deal only with scientists."
"Bidgrass isn't much like a campus. I don't know, Doc, something's wrong on that planet and I'm always glad to lift out."
"Why didn't you and the others eat any of that stomper egg?" Cole asked abruptly.
"Because the people at Bidgrass turn sick and want to slug you if you mention eating it. That's reason enough for me."
Well, that was data too, Cole thought, heading back to his stateroom.
Two days later Daley piloted the cargo tender down in a three-lap braking spiral around New Cornwall. Cole sat beside him in the cramped control room, eyes fixed on the view panel. Once he had the bright and barren moon Cairdween at upper left, above a vastly curving sweep of sun-glinting ocean, and he caught his breath in wonder.
"I know the feeling, Doc," Daley said softly. "Like being a giant and jumping from world to world."
Clouds obscured much of the sprawling, multi-lobed single continent. The sharpening of outline and hint of regularity Cole remembered noting on Tristan and his own planet of Belconti, the mark of man, was absent here. Yet New Cornwall, as a human settlement, was two hundred years older than Belconti.
The forests stretched across the south and west, broken by uplands and rain shadows, as the old books said. He saw between cloud patches the glint of lakes and the crumpled leaf drainage pattern of the great northeastern plain but, oddly, the plain was darker in color than the pinkish-yellow forest. He mentioned it to Daley.
"It's flowers and vines and moss makes it that color," the little man said, busy with controls. "Whole world in that forest top—snakes, birds, jumping things big as horses. Doc, them trees are big."
"Of course! I read about the epiphytal biota. And low gravity always conduces to gigantism."
"There's Lundy," Daley grunted, pointing.
It looked like a grinning ovoid monster-head straining into the western ocean at the end of a threadlike neck. Across the neck Bidgrass Station slashed between parallel lines of forest edge like a collar. Cole watched it again on the landing approach, noting the half-mile of clearing between the great wall and the forest edge, the buildings and fields rectilinear in ordered clumps east of the wall, and then the light aberration of the tender's lift field blotted it out.
"Likely I won't see you till next trip," Daley said, taking leave. "Good luck, Doc."
............