John Brunner Read Online Free PDF Page A

like
this: a seed or spore would settle on the float, feed there until it was heavier
than a certain critical load, at which point the collapse of the bladders
dropped it underwater and it became food for the larger plant, entwined among
root-tendrils and squeezed of its sap.
    A
man's weight speeded the process so that it cycled to completion in three to
eight minutes. Nothing on Zygra was solid and stable.
    "They're
pelts, all right," Victor muttered, adding in a tone of weak triumph, "Didn't I say
so?"
    Scrawny, skin yellow and bagging, his large
head wobbling on his thin neck, he chuckled his self-approbation.
    "Shut up," Coberly told him. Insofar as there could be a leader in this situation, Coberley was theirs. He was neither cleverer than
Victor—whose IQ, in his normal phase, would have run close to genius level—nor
more skillful than Horst, who was anyway fifteen years younger. But he fed on
some invisible source of energy, probably hatred, and he was always the one
who found the willpower to continue when the natural impulse was to weary
surrender. He was a former fat man; now he was puffy, his skin loose without
substance beneath to round it and firm it.
    "I
don't see a monitor," Coberley went on.
"What do we do if we've picked up a stray herd? There are some, you know.
In a good year a few escape the monitors and wander about on their own."
    "Kill
them!" Victor shrilled. "Rip them up and ruin them! Cost the company
a million for every one we kill!"
    "Shut up!" Coberley repeated, this time with malice, and Victor
complied. They waited. And at last, at last, the monitor came in sight: awash
in the water, barely protruding above the herd of pelts, but hiding beneath its
flush narrow deck a store of miracles.
    They
sighed in unison. "Solomon!" Coberley snapped, and the fourth member of the party acknowledged with a cautious pace
towards the edge of the channel.
    Solomon Weit was going to make their bid simply because,
having been here a shorter time than any of his companions, he was stronger and
quicker. Even so, he was a shadow of what he had once been. He was an immensely
tall man, three-quarters of African extraction, and Horst had always found
something oddly comforting in his very darkness. It brought to mind solid
things: blocks of ebony, ingots of bronze. He seemed to resist the leeching soddenness of Zygra while all the
others grew wan and feeble.
    Yet he had lately begun to cough on cool
nights, and his eyes were rimmed with red. "Now?" he said.
    "Now," confirmed Coberley , and they threw themselves flat on their bellies,
distributing their weight over a wide enough area of the bladderwrack to delay its collapse a few precious extra minutes.
    Plunging
their hands into the water as the pelts surged by, they struggled to get a grip
on their clammy edges.
    If
the people who pay a million could get them in the raw state, they wouldn't be
so eager, Hoist
thought for the hundredth time, or the hundred thousandth.
    "Got one!" Solomon exclaimed, and the others rolled closer, helping him to haul it
from the water. Patches of white and navy-blue shimmered over its upper end;
they didn't stop to admire the play of color, but laid it flat and held it down
so that Solomon could slide onto it and get it wrapped securely around him. In
response to the contact, it subsided and began to conform to him.
    "Damnation,
it's too advanced!" Coberley muttered.
"Look, it's clinging already, and we needed an unripe one which would take
on a random shape—"
    "Too
late to worry about that," Horst countered. "Just have to hope it
fools the monitor anyway. Unless you feel it's not safe, Solomon?"
    The
dark man looked at the monitor from the shadow of a kind of hood into which he had prodded and teased the pelt. "I
don't think there's time to get it off and catch another," he grunted.
"And we don't dare miss this chance! It may take weeks to get within reach
of another monitor. . . . Give me the hammer, quickly!"
    Hoist
detached the