"I'm Pia—Pia Vignoli." The voice took on more assurance, but the plump body stayed poised for flight. "Well I'm Flinter Cole, and I have a job to do on this planet. It's terribly important that I get started. Will you help me?"
"How can I, Mr. Cole? I'm nobody. I don't know anything." She moved away, and he followed, awkwardly.
"Girls know all sorts of things that would interest an ecologist," he protested. "Tell me all you know about stompers."
"Oh no! I mustn't talk about stompers."
"Well talk about nothing then, like girls do," he said impatiently. "What's the name of that moon?" He pointed overhead.
Tension left her and she smiled a little. "Morwenna," she said. "That one just setting into Lundy Forest is Annis. You can tell Annis by her bluish shadows that are never the same."
"Good girl! How about the other two, the ones that aren't up?"
"One's Cairdween and the other, the red one—oh, I daren't talk about moons either."
"Not even moons? Really, Miss Vignoli—"
"Let's not talk at all. I'll show you how to walk, you do look so funny all spraddled and scraping your feet. I was born off-planet and I had to learn it myself."
She showed him the light down-flex of the foot that threw the body more forward than up, and he learned to wait out the strange micropause before his weight settled on the other foot. With a little practice he got it, walking up and down the moonlit path beside her in an effortless toe dance. Then he learned to turn corners and to jump.
"Pia," he said once. "Pia. I like the sound, but it doesn't suit this rough planet."
"I was born on Tristan," she murmured. "Please don't ask—"
"I won't. But no reason why I can't talk. May I call you Pia?"
He described Belconti and the university, and his doctorate, at stake in this field assignment. Suddenly she stopped short and pointed to where a red moon lifted above the dark cliff of the eastern forest.
"It's late," she said. "There comes Hoggy Darn. Good night, Mr. Cole."
She danced away faster than he could follow. He crawled back through his window in the reddish moonlight.
Next afternoon Cole faced Garth Bidgrass in the library. The old man sat with folded arms, craggy face impassive. Cole, standing, leaned his weight on his hands and thrust his sharp face across the table. His freckles stood out against his angry pallor, and sunlight from the end window blazed in his red hair.
"Let me sum up," he said, thin-lipped. "For obscure reasons I must be essentially a prisoner. All right. You have no education here, no biologists of any kind. All right. Now here is what they expect of me on Belconti: to rough out the planetary ecosystem, set up a functional profile series for the stomper and its interacting species, make energy flow charts and outline the problem. If my report is incorrect or incomplete, Belconti won't send the right task group of specialists. Then you spend your money for nothing and I lose my doctorate. I must have skilled helpers, a clerical staff, masses of data!"
"You've said all that before," Bidgrass said calmly. "I told you, I can provide none of that."
"Then it's hopeless! Why did you ever send for an ecologist?"
"I sent for help. Belconti sent the ecologist."
"Help me to help you, then. You must try to understand, Mr. Bidgrass, science can't operate in a vacuum. I can't work up a total planetary biology. I must start with that data."
"Do what you can for us," Bidgrass said. "They won't blame you on Belconti when they know and we won't blame you here if it doesn't help."
Cole sat down, shaking his head. "But Belconti won't count it as a field job, not in ecology. You will not understand my position. Let me put it this way: suppose someone gave you a hatchet and told you, only one man, to cut down Lundy Forest?"
"I could start," the old man said. His eyes blazed and he smiled grimly. "I'd leave my mark on one tree."
Colt felt suddenly foolish and humbled.
"All right," he said. "I'll do what I can. What do you think is wiping out the stompers?"
"I know what. A parasite bird that lays its eggs on stomper eggs. Its young hatch first and eat the big egg. The people call them piskies."
"I'll need to work out its life cycle, look for weak points and natural enemies. Who knows a lot about these piskies?"
"I know as much as anybody, and I've never seen a grown one. We believe they stay in the deep forest. But there are always three to each stomper egg and they're vicious. Go for a man's eyes or jugular. Egg hunters kill dozens every day."
"I'll want dozens, alive if possible, and a lab. Can you do that much?"
"Yes. You can use Dr. Rudall's lab at the hospital." Bidgrass stood up and looked at his watch. "The egg harvest should start coming in soon down at the plant and there may be a dead pisky. Come along and see."
As Hawkins guided the car past a group of the giant field workers, Cole felt Bidgrass' eyes on him. He turned, and the old man said slowly, "Stick to piskies, Mr. Cole. We'll all be happier."
"Anything may be data to an ecologist, especially if he overlooks it," Cole murmured stubbornly.
Hawkins cackled something about "Hoggy Darn itha hoose" and speeded up.
In the cavernous, machinery-lined plant Cole met the manager. He was the same powerful, long-haired man Cole had seen in the garden. "Morgan," Bidgrass introduced him with the one name, adding, "He doesn't use Galactic English."
Morgan bent his head slightly, unsmiling, ignoring Cole's offered hand. His wide-set eyes were so lustrously black that they seemed to have no pupils, and under the hostile stare Cole flushed angrily. They walked through the plant, Morgan talking to Bidgrass in the vernacular. His voice was deep and resonant, organ-like.
Bidgrass explained to Cole how stomper egg was vac-frozen under biostat and sealed in plastic for export. He pointed out a piece of shell, half an inch thick and highly translucent. From its radius of curvature Cole realized that stomper eggs were much larger than he had pictured them. Then someone shouted and Bidgrass said a flyer was coming in. They went out on the loading dock.
The flyer alongside carried six men forward of the cargo space and had four heavy blasters mounted almost like a warcraft. As the dock crew unloaded two eggs into dollies, other flyers were skittering in, further along the dock. Bidgrass pointed out to Cole on one huge four by three-foot egg the bases of broken parasite eggs cemented to its shell. Through a hole made by piskies, the ecologist noted that the substance of the large egg was a stiff gel. Morgan flashed a strong pocket lamp on the shell and growled something.
"There may be a pisky hiding inside," Bidgrass said. "You are lucky, Mr. Cole."
Morgan stepped inside and returned almost at once wearing goggles and heavy gloves, and carrying a small power saw. He used the light again, traced an eight-inch square with his finger, and sawed it out. The others, all but Cole, stood back. Morgan pulled away the piece and something black flew up, incredibly swift, with a shrill, keening sound.
Cole looked after it and Morgan struck him heavily in the face, knocking him to hands and knees. Feet stamped and scraped around him and Cole saw his own blood dripping on the clock. He stood up dazed and angry.
"Morgan saved your eye," Bidgrass told him, "but the pisky took a nasty gouge at your cheekbone. I'll have Hawkins drive you to the hospital—you wanted to meet Dr. Rudall anyway."
Cole examined the crushed pisky on the way to the hospital. Big as his fist, with a tripartite beak, it was no true bird. The wings were flaps of black skin that still wrinkled and folded flexibly with residual life. It had nine toes on each foot and seemed covered with fine scales.
Dr. Rudall treated Cole's cheek in a surprisingly large and well appointed dressing room. He was a gray, defeated-looking man and told Cole in an apologetic voice that he had taken medical training on Planet Tristan many years ago ... out of touch now. His small lab looked hopelessly archaic, but he promised to biostat the dead pisky until Cole could get back to it.
Hawkins was not with the ground car. Cole drove back to the plant without him. He wanted another look at the mode of adhesion of pisky egg on stomper egg. He drove to the further end of the plant and mounted the dock from outside, to freeze in surprise. Twenty feet away, the dock crew was unloading a giant.
He was naked, strapped limply to a plank, and his face was bloody. Half his reddish hair and beard was singed away. Then a hand hit Cole's shoulder and spun him around. It was Morgan.
"Clear out of here, you!" the big man said in fluent, if plain, Galactic English. "Don't you ever come here without Garth Bidgrass brings you!" He seemed hardly to move his lips, but the voice rumbled like thunder.
"Well," thought Cole, driving back after Hawkins, "datums are data, if they bite off your head."
"For your own safety, Mr. Cole, you must not again leave the company of either Hawkins or Dr. Rudall when you are away from the house," Bidgrass told Cole the next morning. "The people have strange beliefs that would seem sheer nonsense to you, but their impulsive acts, if you provoke them, will be unpleasantly real."
"If I knew their beliefs I might know how to behave."
"It is your very presence that is provoking. If you were made of salt you would have to stay out of the rain. Here you are an outworlder and you must stay within certain limits. It's like that."
"All right," Cole said glumly.
He worked all day at the hospital dissecting the pisky, but found no parasites. He noted interesting points of anatomy. The three-part beak of silicified horn was razor sharp and designed to exert a double shearing stress. The eye was triune and of fixed focus; the three eyeballs lay in a narrow isosceles triangle pattern, base down, behind a common triangular conjunctiva with incurved sides and narrow base. The wings were elastic and stiffened with a fan of nine multi-jointed bones that probably gave them grasping and manipulating power in the living organism. None of it suggested the limit factor he sought.
Dr. Rudall helped him make cultures in a sterile broth derived from the pisky's own tissues. In the evening a worker from the plant brought eleven dead piskies and Cole put them in biostat. He rode home with Hawkins to his solitary dinner feeling he had made a start.
Day followed day. Cole remained isolated in his wing, coming and going through his back door into the garden. He became used to the mute giant domestics who swept and cleaned. Now and then he exchanged a few words with the sad Mrs. Vignoli, Pia's mother, he learned, or with old Bidgrass, in chance meetings. He watched Pia through his windows sometimes and knew she fled when he came out. There was something incongruous in the timid wariness with which her plump figure and should-be-merry face confronted the world.
Once he caught her and held her wrist. "Why do you run away from me, Pia?"
She pulled away gently. "I'll get you in trouble, Mr. Cole. They don't trust me either. My father was a Tristanian."
"Who are they?"
"Just they. Morgan, all of them."
"If we're both outworld, we should stick together. I'm the loneliest man on this planet, Pia."
"I know the feeling," she said, looking down.
He patted her curls. "Let's be friends then, and you help me. Where do these giant people come from?"
Her head jerked up angrily. "That has nothing to do with your work! I'm inworld too, Mr. Cole. My mother is of the old stock."
Cole let her go in silence.
He began working evenings in the lab, losing himself in work. Few of the blue-clad men and women he encountered would look at him, but he sensed their hostile glances on the back of his neck. He felt islanded in a sea of dull hatred. Only Dr. Rudall was vaguely friendly.
Cole found no parasites in hundreds of dissected piskies, but his cultures were frequently contaminated by a fungus that formed dark red, globular fruiting bodies. When he turned to cytology he found that what he had supposed to be an incredibly complex autonomic nervous system was instead a fungal mycelium, so fine as to be visible only in phase contrast. He experimented with staining techniques and verified it in a dozen specimens, then danced the surprised Dr. Rudall around the lab.
"I've done it! One man against a planet!" he chortled. "We'll culture it, then work up mutant strains of increasing virulence—oh for a Belconti geno-mycologist now!"
"It's not pathogenic, I'm afraid," Dr. Rudall said. "I ... ah ... read once, that idea was tried centuries ago ... all the native fauna have fungal symbiotes ... protect them against all known pathogenic microbiota ... should have mentioned it, I suppose...."
"Yes, you should have told me! My God, there go half the weapons of applied ecology over the moon ... my time wasted ... why didn't you tell me?" The ecologist's sharp face flushed red as his hair with frustrated anger.
"You didn't ask ... hardly know what ecology means ... didn't realize it was important ..." the old doctor stammered.
"Everything is important to an ecologist, especially what people won't tell him!" Cole stormed.
He tried to stamp out of the lab, and progressed in a ludicrous bouncing that enraged him even more. He shouted for Hawkins and went home early.
In his rooms he brooded on his wrongs for an hour, then went downstairs and thundered on the locked door into the main house, shouting Garth Bidgrass' name. The sounds beyond hushed. Then Garth Bidgrass opened the door, looking stern and angry.
"Come into the library, Mr. Cole," he said. "Try to control yourself."
In the library Cole poured out his story while Bidgrass, standing with right elbow resting atop a bookcase, listened gravely.
"You must understand," Cole finished, "to save the stompers we must cut down the piskies. Crudely put, the most common method is to find a disease or a parasite that affects them, and breed more potent strains of it. But that won't work on piskies, and I could have and should have known that to begin with."
"Then you must give up?"
"No! Something must prey on them or their eggs in their native habitat, a macrobiotic limit factor I can use. I must learn the adult pisky's diet; if its range is narrow enough that can be made a limit factor."
The old man frowned. "How would you learn all this?"
"Field study. I want at least twenty intelligent men and a permanent camp somewhere in Lundy Forest."
Bidgrass folded his arms and shook his head. "Can't spare the men. And it's too dangerous—stompers would attack you day and night. I've had over two hundred egg hunters killed this year, and they're trained men in teams."
"Let me go out with a team then, use my own two eyes."
"Men wouldn't have you. I told you, they're superstitious about outworlders."
"Then it's failure! Your money and my doctorate go down the drain."
"You're young, you'll get your doctorate another place," the old man said. "You've tried hard, and I'll tell Belconti that." His voice was placating, but Cole thought he saw a wary glint in the hard gray eyes.
Cole shrugged. "I suppose I'll settle in and wait for Gorbals. But I've had pleasanter vacations."
He turned his back and scanned the shelves ostentatiously for a book. Bidgrass left the room quietly.
It was a boring evening. Pia was not in the garden. Cole looked at the barrier and the incredible cliff of Lundy Forest. He would like to get into that forest, just once. Hundred and fifty days before Gorbals ... why had they ever sent for him? They seemed to be conspiring to cheat him of his doctorate. They had, too.... Finally he slept.
He woke to a distant siren wail and doors slamming and feet scraping in the main house. Dressing in haste, he noted a red glow in the sky to southward and heard a booming noise. In the hall outside his room he met Pia, face white and eyes enormous.
"Stomper attack!" she cried. "Come quickly, you must hide in the basement with us!"
He followed her into the main house and downstairs to where Mrs. Vignoli was herding a crowd of the giant domestics down a doored staircase. The giant women were tossing their heads nervously. Several were naked and one was tearing off her dress. Cole drew back.
"I'm an ecologist, I want to see," he said. "Stompers are data."
He pushed her gently toward the women and walked out on the front veranda. From southward came an incredibly rich and powerful chord of organ music, booming and swelling, impossibly sustained. Old Hawkins danced in the driveway in grotesque pointed leaps, shrieking "Hoosa maida! Hoosa maida!" Overhead the moons Cairdween, Morwenna and Annis of the blue shadows were arranged in a perfect isosceles triangle, narrow base parallel to the horizon. It stirred something in Cole, but the swelling music unhinged his thought. With a twinge of panic he turned, to find Pia at his elbow.
"They're after me, after us," she cried against the music.
"I must see. You go find shelter, Pia."
"With you I feel less alone now," she said. "One can't really hide, anyway. Come to the watch tower and you'll see."
He followed her through the house and up two flights to the roof of the tower on the southeast corner. As they stepped into the night air, the great organ sound enwrapped them, and Cole saw the southern sky ablaze, with flyers swooping and black motes hurtling through the glare. Interwoven pencils of ion-flame flickered in the verging darkness and the ripping sound of heavy blasters came faintly through the music.
A hundred-yard section of the barrier was down in flames, and the great, bobbing, leggy shapes of stompers came bounding through it while others glided down from the top. Flyers swarmed like angry bees around the top of the break, firing mounted blasters and tearing away great masses of wood. The powerful chord of music swelled unendurably in volume and exultant richness until Cole cried out and shook the girl.
"It plucks at my backbone and I can't think! Pia, Pia, what is that music?"
"It's the stompers singing," she shouted back.
He shook his head. Bidgrass Station seethed, lights everywhere, roads crowded with trucks. Around the base of the breakthrough a defense perimeter flared with the blue-violet of blasters and the angry red of flame guns. As Cole watched it was overrun and darkened in place after place, only to reform further out as reserves came into action. Expanding jerkily, pushed this way and that, the flaming periphery looked like a fire-membrane stressed past endurance by some savage contained thing. With a surge of emotion Cole realized it was men down there, with their guns and their puny muscles and their fragile lives against two-legged, boat-shaped monsters twenty feet high.
"Sheer power of biomass," he thought. "Even their shot-down bodies are missiles, to crush and break." A sudden eddy in the flaming defense line brought it to within half a mile of the house. Cole could see men die against the glare, in the great music.
The girl pressed close to him and whimpered, "Oh, start the fire mist! Morwenna pity them!" Cole put his arm tightly around her.
A truck convoy pulled up by the manor house and soldiers were everywhere, moving quickly and surely. A group hauled a squat, vertical cylinder on wheels crashing through the ornamental shrubbery. Violet glowing metal vaning wound about it in a double helix.
"It's a Corbin powercaster," Pia shouted into Cole's ear. "It broadcasts power to the portable blasters so the men don't need to carry pack charges or lose time changing them."
Cole looked at the soldiers. The same big men he saw every day, the same closed and hostile faces, but now a wild and savage joy shone in them. This was their human meaning to themselves, their justification. The red boundary roared down on them, they would be dying in a few minutes, but they were braced and fiercely ready.
The music swelled impossibly loud and Cole knew that he too was going to die with them, despised outworlder that he was. He hugged the girl fiercely and tried to kiss her.
"Let me in your world, Pia!" he cried.
She pulled away. "Look! The fire mist! Oh thank you, good Morwenna!"
He saw it, a rose pink paled by nearer flame, washing lazily against the black cliff edge of Lundy Forest. It grew, boiling up over the barrier in places, spilling through the gap, and the great, agonizing chord of music muted and dwindled. The flame-perimeter began shrinking and still the fire mist grew, staining the night sky north and south beyond eye-reach. The song became a mournful wailing and the soldiers in the garden moved forward for the mopping up.
"Pia, I've got to go down there. I've got to see a stomper close up."
She was trembling and crying with reaction. "I think they'll be too busy to mind," she said. "But don't go too far in ... Flinter."
He ran down the stairs and through the unguarded gate toward the fought-over area. Wounded men were being helped or carried past him, but no one noticed him. He found a stomper, blaster-torn but not yet dead, and stopped to watch the four-foot tripart beak snap feebly and the dark wings writhe and clutch. The paired vertical eyelid folds rolled apart laterally to reveal three eyes under a single triangular conjunctiva, lambent in the flame-shot darkness. Soldiers passed unheeding while Cole stood and wondered. Then a hand jerked violently at his arm. It was Morgan.
Morgan wordlessly marched him off to a knot of men nearer the mopping up line and pushed him before Garth Bidgrass. Sweat dripped from flaring eyebrows down the grim old face, and over a blistered right cheek. A heavy blaster hung from the old man's body harness.
"Well, Mr. Cole, is this data?" he asked dourly. "Have you come out to save stompers?"
"I wish I could have saved men, Mr. Bidgrass. I wanted to help," Cole said.
"Another like this and you may have to," Bidgrass said, less sharply. "It was close work, lad."
"I can help Dr. Rudall. You must have many wounded."
"Good, good," the old man said approvingly. "The men will take that kindly and so will I."
"One favor," Cole said. "Will you have your men save half a dozen living stompers for me? I have another idea."
"Well, I don't know," Bidgrass said. "The men won't like it ... but a few days, maybe ... yes, I'll save you some."
"Thank you, sir." Cole turned away, catching a thick scowl from Morgan. Overhead the three moons were strung in a ragged line across the sky, and Hoggy Darn was rising.
Cole worked around the clock at the hospital, sterilizing instruments and helping Dr. Rudall with dressings. He was surprised to see other doctors, many nurses and numerous biofield projectors as modern as any on Belconti. Some of the wounded were women. All of them, wounded and unwounded, seemed in a shared mood of exaltation. He caught glimpses of Pia, working too. She seemed less poised for flight, tired but happy, and she smiled at him.
After three days Cole saw his stompers in a stone-floored pen at the slaughter house. Earth breed cattle lowed in adjacent pens. Four stompers still lived, their bodies blaster torn and their legs crudely hamstrung so they could not stand. They lay with heads together and the sun glinted on the blue-black, iridescent scales covering the domed heads and long necks.
 
Three shock-headed butchers stood by, assigned to help him. Their distaste for Cole and the job was so evident that he hurried through the gross dissection of the two dead stompers at one end of the same pen. After an hour he thought to ask, as best he could, whether the living stompers were being given food and water. When one man understood, black hatred crossed his face and he spat on Cole's shoe. The ecologist flushed, then shrugged and got on with the job.
It brought him jarring surprises culminating in a tentative conclusion late on the second day. Then the situation began to fall apart. Working alone for the moment, Cole opened the stomach of the second stomper and found in it half-digested parts of a human body. Skull and humerus size told him it was one of the giants.
First pulling a flap of mesentery over the stomach incision, Cole went into the office and phoned Dr. Rudall to come at once. Coming out, he heard angry shouts and saw two of his helpers running to join the third, who stood pointing into the carcass. Then all three seized axes, ran across the pen and began hacking at the necks of the living stompers.
The great creatures boomed and writhed, clacking their beaks and half rising on their wings, unable to defend themselves. The butchers howled curses, and the stompers broke into a mournful wailing harmonized with flesh-creeping subsonics. Cole shouted and pleaded, finally wrested an axe from one and mounted guard over the last living stomper. He stood embattled, facing a growing crowd of butchers from the plant, when Dr. Rudall arrived.
"Dr. Rudall, explain to these maniacs why I must keep this stomper alive!" he cried angrily.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Cole, they will kill it in spite of you."
"But Garth Bidgrass ordered—"
"In spite of him. There are factors you don't understand, Mr. Cole. You are yourself in great danger." The old doctor's hands trembled.
Cole thought rapidly. "All right will they wait a day? I want tissue explants for a reason I'll explain later. If you'll help me work up the nutrient tonight—"
"Our pisky nutrient will work. We can take your samples within the hour. Let me call the hospital."
He spoke rapidly to the glowering butchers in the vernacular, then hurried into the building. An hour later the stomper was dead, and Hawkins drove Cole and the doctor back to their lab with the explants.
"I've almost got it," Cole said happily. "Several weeks and two more bits of information and I'll tell you. In spite of all odds, one man against a planet—this will found my professional reputation back on Belconti."
Once again Cole faced Garth Bidgrass across the round table in the library. This time he felt vastly different.
"The piskies are really baby stompers," he said, watching the craggy old face for its reaction. It did not change.
"I suspected it when I saw how the smaller eggs fused with the large egg, with continuous laminae," Cole went on. "There was the morphological resemblance, too. But when I dissected two mature stompers I found immature eggs. Even before entry into the oviduct what you call pisky eggs are filamented to the main body of cytoplasm."
Disappointingly, Bidgrass did not marvel. He squinted and cocked his head. Finally he said, "Do you mean the piskies lay their eggs internally in the stompers?"
"Impossible! I made a karyotype analysis of pisky and stomper tissue and they are identical, I tell you. My working hypothesis for now is that pisky eggs are fertilized polar bodies. It's not unknown. But that the main body should be sterile and serve as an external food source—that's new, I'm sure. That will get my name in the journals all through Carina sector."
He could not help smiling happily. Bidgrass bit his lower lip and stared keenly, not speaking. Cole became nettled.
"I hope you see the logic," he said. "What threatens your stompers is harvest pressure from your own egg hunters. Stop it for a few decades, or set aside breeding areas, and you can have a whole planetful again."
The old man scowled and stood up. "We'll not stop," he said gruffly. "There are still plenty of stompers. Remember last month." He walked to the end window and back, then sat down again still looking grim.
"Don't be too sure," Cole objected. "I haven't finished my report. I made a Harvey analysis on the tissues of one stomper. It involves culturing clones, measuring growth rates and zones of migration and working out a complex set of ratios—I won't go into details. But when I fitted my figures into Harvey's formula it indicated unmistakably that the stompers have a critical biomass."
"What does that mean?"
"Think of a species as one great animal that never dies, of which each individual is only a part. Can you do that?"
"Yes!" the old man exploded, sitting bolt upright.
"Well, the weight of a cross-section of the greater animal at any moment in time is its biomass. Many species have a point or value of critical biomass such that, if it falls below that point, the greater animal dies. The species loses its will to live, decays, drills into extinction in spite of all efforts to save it. The stomper is such a species, no doubt whatever. Do you see how the slaughter a month ago may already have extinguished them as a species?"
Bidgrass nodded, smiling grimly. His eyes held a curious light.
"Tell me, Mr. Cole, your Harvey formula—do human beings have a critical biomass?"
"Yes, biologically," Cole said, surprised. "But in our case a varying part of the greater animal is carried in our culture, our symbol system, and is not directly dependent on biomass. A mathematical anthropologist could tell you more than I can."
Bidgrass placed his hands palm down on the table and leaned back in sudden resolution.
"Mr. Cole, you force me to tell you something I had been minded to hold back. I already know a good part of what you have just told me. I wish to exterminate the stompers and I will do so. But I meant for you to go back to Belconti thinking it was the piskies."
Cole propped his chin on folded hands and raised his eyebrows. "I half suspected that. But I fooled you, didn't I?"
"Yes, and I admire you for it. Now let me tell you more. Stomper egg brings a very high price and I have kept it higher by storing large reserves. When it is known the stomper is extinct, the rarity value of my reserve will be enormous. It will mean an end of this harsh life for me and for my grandniece after me."
Cole's lip curled, and red mounted in the old man's face as he talked, but he went on doggedly.
"I want the pisky theory and the news of stomper extinction to be released through Belconti University. The news will spread faster and be more readily believed and I will avoid a certain moral stigma—"
"And now I've crossed you up!"
"You can still do it. I can ease your conscience with a settlement of—say—five thousand solars a year for life."
Cole leaped up and leaned across the table.
"No!" he snapped. "Old man, you don't know how ecologists feel about the greed-murder of species. What I will do is work through Belconti on your government at Car Truro, warn it that you are about to destroy an important planetary resource."
Bidgrass stood up too, scowling darkly red.
"Not so fast, young fellow. I have copies of your early notes in which you call the piskies the critical limit factor in stomper extinction. Almost three hundred people were killed in that stomper attack, and you could easily have been one of them. If you had, I would naturally have reported it via the next Gorbals to Belconti and sent along your notes to date—do you follow me?"
"Yes. A threat."
"A counter-threat. Think it over for a few days, Mr. Cole."
Cole sat glumly in his room waiting for his dinner and wondering if it would be poisoned. When old Hawkins tapped, he pulled open the door, only to find Pia instead with a service for two. She was rosy and smiling in a low-cut, off-shoulder brown dress he had not seen before.
"May I eat dinner with you tonight, Flinter?" she asked.
"Please do," he said, startled. "Am I people now, or something?"
"Uncle Garth says now that you know—" She broke off, blushing still more.
"I don't like what I know," he said somberly, "but it's not you, Pia. Here, let me."
He pulled the cart into the room and helped her set the things on his table. Pia was lovely, he decided, wanting to caress the smooth roundness of her shoulders and dimpled arms. When she sat across the small table from him he could not help responding to the swell of her round breasts barely below the neckline. But her manner seemed forced and she looked more frightened than ever.
"You look like a little rabbit that knows it's strayed too far from the woods, Pia. What are you always afraid of?"
Her smile faded. "Not because I'm too far from the woods," she said. "What's a rabbit? But let's not talk about fear."
They talked of food and weather through a more than usually elaborate dinner. There was a bottle of Tristanian kresch to follow it. Cole splashed the blue wine into the two crystal goblets, gave her one and held up his own.
"Here's to the richest little girl on Tristan someday," he said, half mockingly.
Tears sprang to her eyes. "I don't want to be rich. I just want a home away from New Cornwall, just anywhere. I was born on Tristan. Oh Flinter, what you must think—" She began crying in earnest.
He patted her shoulder. "Forgive me for a fool, Pia. Tell me about Tristan. I had only one day there, waiting for Gorbals' tender."
She spoke of her childhood on Tristan, and the tension eased in both. Finally she proposed a picnic for the next day, the two of them to take a sports flyer into the forest top. He agreed with pleasure and squeezed her hand in saying good night.
She squeezed back a little. But she still looked frightened.
Next day Pia wore a brief yellow playsuit, and Cole could not keep his eyes off her. When he was loading the picnic hamper into the small flyer before the main hangar, she suddenly pressed close to him. He followed her wide-eyed gaze over his right shoulder and saw Morgan bulking darkly ten feet away.
"Hello there, Mr. Morgan," Cole said into the impassive face under the black bar of eyebrow.
Morgan rumbled in vernacular and walked on. His lips did not move.
"You're afraid of Morgan," Cole said when he had the flyer aloft and heading east.
"He's a bard. He has a power," she said. "Today, let's forget him."
Cole looked back at the bulk of Lundy Peninsula, swelling lost into blue-green distance from the narrow isthmus. The straight slash of Bidgrass Station from sea to sea looked puny beside the mighty forest towering on either side. Then Pia had his arm and wanted him to land.
He grounded on a pinkish-green mass of lichen several acres in area. Pia assured him it would support the flyer, reminding him of the planet's low gravity.
The resilient surface gave off a fragrance as they walked about on it. In a sea all around their island, branches of the great forest trees thrust up, leafy and flowering and bedecked with a profusion of epiphytal plants in many shapes and colors. Bright-hued true birds darted from shadow into sunlight and back again, twittering and crying.
"It's beautiful," he said. And so was Pia, he thought, watching her on tiptoe reaching to a great white flower. The attractive firmness of her skin, the roundness and dimpling, ripeness, that was the word he wanted. And her eyes.
"Pia, you're not frightened any more!"
It was true. The long-lashed brown eyes were merry as nature meant them to be.
"It's peaceful and safe," she said. "When I come to the forest top I never want to go back to Bidgrass Station."
"Too bad we must, and let's pretend we don't," he said, pointing to a cluster of red-gold fruits. "Are those good to eat?"
"Too good. That's the trouble with New Cornwall."
"What do you mean?"
"Race you back to the flyer," she cried, and danced away, bare limbs twinkling in the sunlight. He floundered after.
The lunch was good and she had brought along the rest of the bottle of kresch. They sipped it seated beside the flyer while she tried to teach him New Cornish folk songs. Her small, clear singing blended with that of the birds around them.
"I catch parts of it," he said. "As an undergraduate a few years ago I studied the pre-space poets. I can read Old English, but it is strange to my ear."
"I could teach you."
"I love one wry-witted ancient named Robert Graves. How does it go: If strange things happen where she is—no, I can't recall it now."
"I could write the songs out for you."
"The beauty is in you and your voice. Just sing."
She sang, something about a king with light streaming from his hair, coming naked out of the forest to bring love into his kingdom. Small white clouds drifted in the blue sky, and blue Annis slept just above the rustling branches that guarded the secret of their island. He listened and watched her.
She was softly rounded as the clouds, and her clustered brown curls made an island of the vivid face expressing the song she sang so bird-like and naturally. She was vital, compact, self closed, perfect—like one of the great flowers nodding in the breeze along the island shore—and his heart yearned across to her.
"Pia," he said, breaking into the song, "do you really want to get away from New Cornwall?"
She nodded, eyes suddenly wide, lips still parted.
"Come with me to Belconti then. Right now. We'll cross to Car Truro and wait there for Gorbals."
The light dimmed in her face. "Why Car Truro?"
"Pia, it's hard to tell you. I'm afraid of your great-uncle.... I want to contact the planetary government."
"It's no good at Car Truro, Flinter. Can't you just come back to Bidgrass Station and ... and ... do what Uncle Garth wants?"
He could barely hear the last. The fear was back in her eyes.
"Do you know what he wants?"
"Yes." The brown curls drooped.
Cole stood up. "So that's the reason—well, I'll not do it, do you hear? Garth Bidgrass is an evil, greedy old man and maybe it runs in the blood."
She jumped up, eyes more angry now than fearful. "He is not! He's trying to save you! He's good and noble and ... and great! If you only knew the truth—Morwenna forgive me!" She clapped her hand to her mouth.
"Tell me the truth then, since I'm still being made a Belconti fool of. What is the truth?"
"I've said too much. Now I'll have to tell Uncle Garth—" She began crying.
"Tell him what? That I know he's a liar? That you failed as a—" He could not quite say the word.
"It's true I was supposed to make you love me and I tried and I can't because ... because ..." she ended in incoherent sobbing.
Cole stroked her hair and comforted her. "I've been hasty again," he apologized. "I'm still running in the dark, and that makes for stumbles. Let's go back, and I'll talk to your great-uncle again."
In the morning Garth Bidgrass, looking tired and stern, invited Cole to breakfast with the family. Cole had never been in the large, wood-panelled room overlooking the south garden through broad windows. Pia was subdued, Mrs. Vignoli strangely cheerful. The meal, served by a giant maid, was the customary plain porridge and fried meat.
The women left when the maid cleared the table. Bidgrass poured more coffee, then leaned back and looked across at Cole.
"Mr. Cole, I did you a wrong in having you sent here. I kept you in the dark for your own protection. Can you believe that?"
"I can believe that you believe it."
"You came too soon. You were too curious, too smart. I have had to compound that wrong with others to Pia and my own good name."
Cole smiled. "I know I'm curious. But why can't I know—"
"You can, lad. You've nosed through to it and I'll tell you if you insist. But it will endanger you even more and I wish you would forego it."
Cole shook his head. "I'm an ecologist. If I have the big picture, maybe I can help."
"I thought you'd say that. Well, history first, and settle yourself because it is a big picture and not a pretty one. This planet was settled directly from Earth in the year 145 After Space, almost eight hundred years ago. It seemed ideal—native protein was actually superior to Earth protein in human metabolism. Easy climate, geophysically stable, no diseases—but planetology was not much of a science in those days.
"The colony won political independence in 202 A.S. It had a thriving trade in luxury foods, mostly stomper egg concentrates—freight was dear then. Settlements radiated out from Car Truro across the plains. Food was to be had for the taking in the mild climate and it was a kind of paradise. Paradise!"
The old man's voice rang hard on the last word and Cole stiffened. Bidgrass went on.
"Early in the third century our social scientists began to worry about the unnatural way the culture graded from the complexity of Car Truro to a simple pattern of mud huts and food gathering along the frontiers. Children of successive generations were taller than their parents and much less willing or able to use symbols. By the time a minority decided the trend should be reversed, the majority of the people could not be roused to see a danger."
"Earth life is normally resistant to low-grav gigantism," Cole said. "I wonder—"
"It was all the native foods they ate, but mainly stomper egg. There are more powerful and quicker-acting substances in the forest fungi, but then the population was all in the eastern grasslands, where the stompers ranged."
"I read they were a plains animal."
"Yes, and harmless too, except for their eggs. Well, the minority set up a dictatorship and began cultivating Earth plants and animals. They passed laws limiting the mechanical simplicity of households and regulating diets. They took children from subnormal parents and educated and fed them in camps. But the normals were too few and the trend continued.
"Shortly after mid-century the population reached the edge of the southern forest, and there many were completely wild. They drifted along the forest edge naked, without tools or fire or language or even family groupings. Their average stature was nearly eight feet. The normals knew they were losing. Can you imagine how they felt, lad?"
Cole relaxed a little. "Ah ... yes, I can ... I imagine the fight was inside them, too."
Bidgrass nodded. "Yes, they were all tainted. But they fought. They asked Earth for help and learned that Earth regarded them as tyrants oppressing a simple, natural folk. The economy broke down and more had to be imported. The only way to pay was in stomper egg exports. In spite of that, in about the year 300, they decided to restrict the stompers to the western part of the grasslands, thousands of miles beyond the human range.
"The egg hunters began killing piskies and grown stompers. They killed off the great, stupid herds of darv cattle on which the stompers fed. The stompers that survived became wary and hostile, good at hiding and fierce to attack. But killing off the eastern darv herds broke them and in a generation they vanished from the eastern plains. Things seemed to improve and they thought the tide was turned. Then, in t............