"That cold? How cold is 'that' cold?" Her gaze was fixed on the stars that weren't.

"That all depends, doesn't it?" he murmured. He nodded toward the large cylinder. It lay on a flat area several meters wide that was just above the waterlme.

A smooth gla.s.s beach.

Cora had never before made love under the stars.

The fact that the stars were alive and that she and Sam were thirty meters beneath the surface of an alien sea did not matter. Nor did the fact that they were watched by a thousand dispa.s.sionate green eyes.

"Find anything?" Rachael extended a hand, helped her mother back onto the deck.

"Not really." The bright sunlight burned Cora's face.

Mataroreva was right behind her, slid up his mask.

"We did a lot of looking. Found many beautiful things, but nothing that would help the investigation, I'm afraid."

"You looked long enough." Rachael studied Cora's back for a moment more, then added, "Pucara thinks he's found something significant."

"That's more than any of the rest of us have been able to do. Where is he?" Cora was grateful, no mat- ter what the little researcher might have discovered.

128.

CACHALOT.

CACHALOT.

129.

"He's still down below, using the ship's duplicator to make a copy of what he's found. Just in case."

"It must be significant." They all moved below.

Merced was working in the one large, below-decks room, surrounded by familiar apparatus. He glanced up briefly as they entered. "Any luck?"

"Not a thing." Cora shook her head. "You've had

some?"

"Maybe. I think it could be." He moved aside,

switched on the duplicator's viewer. They crowded around the tiny screen. Cora felt Sam pressing close behind her, shifted her stance ever so slightly. Appar- ently he understood, because he moved back a step.

"Figures," Mataroreva muttered as he examined the screen. "Another list. So what?"

"The figures line up economically with some mani- fests I found. Here." Merced adjusted the instrument.

Words and quant.i.ties were superimposed alongside the lists of numbers. "I found out what the town was working, here on this reef." He looked up at their guide. "Do you know something called Teallin?"

"Sure," Mataroreva said. "It's a mollusk, looks like a perverted abalone. That's what the town was har- vesting?" He nodded thoughtfully. "It would explain why we've come across so few of them in our search.

The mature ones were all harvested, then?"

"That's what the records indicate."

"What's the significance?"

"I've been through the lists of what the first search teams found when they arrived here to hunt for evi- dence. There are fragments of everything you can imagine, but no Teallin. Yet the town was just getting ready to move, according to its fisher survivors. After three months of anchoring here."

"It's a luxury item," Mataroreva said interestedly.

"Like most of the foodstuffs that are exported from Cachalot. You can extract about a kilo of meat from one mollusk. That may not sound like much, but the

stuff has a strong, smoky flavor. It's combined with other foods, mixed to give them spice. And they'd been gathering it for three months?"

Merced tapped the viewer screen. "Two shiploads packed for transfer at Mou'anui. Several thousand kilos. Just a footnote in the regular records, mixed in with all their other work and their own food imports, medicines, power packs, and other general inventory.

Just another statistic."

"So that's it," Mataroreva muttered.

"So what's it?" Rachael wondered. "Somebody put it together for me, please." She looked apologetic.

I'm afraid I wasn't listening too closely." She tried to hide her neurophon behind her.

"Teallin is perishable. It's packed in polymultiene containers, vacuum-sealed until it can be transported to its eventual processing destination."

"Oh-oft/ Vacuum-packed?"

"Not only that," Mataroreva continued, "but poly- multiene is a chemical relative of the polymeric ma- terial that the towns themselves were built upon.

When the search skimmers out from Mou'anui arrived here, they found thousands of fragments of the stuff, from finger-sized all the way up to square meters of town-raft. And a lot of other related, unsinkable ma- terial."

"I see," Rachael said.

"I've got to check this." He tamed, hurried up- ward. Moments later they could hear him mumbling into the ship's communicator. The signal would go out instantly via satellite relay to the Administration Cen- ter on Mou'anui.

"If this proves out," Cora said, "is it sufficient basis for us to declare that a human agency was responsible for all the destruction? Any local life thorough enough to devour every human inhabitant would only natur- ally consume all the available food it could get its teeth into."

130 CACHALOT.

"But we found packaged foodstuffs ourselves," Ra- chael countered. "Some were exposed to the water and decomposing."

"I know. And the Teallin was vacuum-sealed, too.

I don't see any attacking creature or creatures being able to detect the food inside such containers. Yet it's all gone. You'd expect that the previous searchers would have found some of it."

"We're forgetting one thing," Rachael reminded her. "All the attacks took place during a storm. Even a mild storm could have dispersed any floating debris quite rapidly."

"Yes, but every single container?"

Mataroreva rejoined them, glanced at each in turn.

"They didn't find anything?" Cora asked.

"On the contrary, they did. Polymultiene vacuum containers, each about a meter square."