Carp stepped into midstream and waded north. The turbulent flow pushed against him, rising past his knees. At one point the stream became narrower and deeper, and he was in almost to his waist. After standing at that deepest point for a few moments, he turned and allowed the liquid flow to push him back downstream. He waded past his point of entry, on to where the flow was slower. There were calm, deep pools here, and the whole stream was much wider.
“But what is he doing?” Milton said.
Drake did not reply. Although the actions were mysterious, the Snark-human synthesis carried a sense of definite purpose in every movement.
Carp emerged from the stream and headed back to the flier. Once more he entered, and once more there was a long and frustrating wait. When he came out he carried a big bundle of soft material.
“He has been stripping the front cabin,” Drake said quietly. “Those are seat materials and seat covers from the control chair. Are you sure there is no way that he can control the flier itself?”
“Quite sure.” Milton displayed a confidence that Drake did not share. “He would need to change microchip settings from remote to manual, and that requires microtools and a knowledge of circuit designs. He has neither. But he has made sure that we cannot do anything with the flier, either. The cables he is carrying are the ones that control attitude and power levels. Do you think he merely seeks to hold the car as a place where he can hide?”
“No. He could do that without stripping the seats.”
But Drake did not have a better suggestion. He watched as Carp, in near darkness now, retraced his steps toward the stream. The synthesis chose his site carefully, and on the stream bank formed a rough cylinder from the material that he was carrying. A long loop of cable went around it and back to his hands. Carp ran another noose on the soft
ground, a full meter away from the cylinder in each direction, and held on to the free end of that line also. In the last glimmer of light he paid out both wire cables and stepped down into the water. Heading upstream, he came to the deepest point of the fast-running rapids. There he crouched down until only his head was visible.
“I think I get it,” Drake said. “He saw the soundbug tracks, and he must have an idea what made them. He tried digging as a way to become invisible, but only the first few inches of ground are soft. So instead he’s trying to use water to hide him.”
“Water?”
“Sorry. I mean liquid hydrocarbons.” Yet to Drake, in his present body, they seemed like water. What else should you call a clear, cold liquid that ran in pure streams, that evaporated from surface pools, that you could drink whenever you felt thirsty? He and Carp had a lot in common, even if Drake could not follow the other’s thought processes. But it was the difference in thought patterns that provided the whole reason for Carp’s existence.
That existence was now threatened. Milton grunted, and drew Drake’s attention to another display. It was dark enough for the soundbug to waken from its daytime torpor, and it was on the move. It had emerged from its den and was making its way downhill. No sound signal accompanied the display, but the easy liquid movement across the uneven surface gave an impression of silent, ghostly progress.
That was confirmed when the soundbug came on its first prey of the night. The animal was a short, fat version of a polar Snark. It was scrabbling busily in the dirt, tail high in the air. The soundbug seized it before it realized it was in danger. The soundbug’s leathery legs moved the victim to the front constricting rings and compression began. Blood spurted from the blind head end into the waiting maw of the soundbug, but the fat Snark did not die at once. It went on struggling, until the last wriggling tip of the tail was swallowed.
Drake did not look at Milton. He had no trouble imagining the Servitor’s reaction, because he shared it. The original idea had sounded clean and simple: combine Snark ferocity with human cunning, to produce an organism more effective than either in combatting the Shiva. What had been left unmentioned was the question of testing the result.
In retrospect it was obvious: he and Milton would have to expose Carp to more and more dangerous situations, until one of them proved fatal. It was a particularly vicious form of torture, with no escape but death.
Drake made his decision. He might be willing to sacrifice himself to save the Galaxy from the Shiva, but he could not bear to create thinking beings merely in order to kill them. If Carp somehow survived through the night, that would be the end of the experiment. The Snark-human synthesis would live out his days in peace on Graybill. That sounded like a cruel enough punishment, forcing a sentient being to exist without others of its kind, but Drake could change that. It would be easy to develop a dozen copies of Carp in the off-world lab and transport them down for release on the surface of the planet.
More than likely, however, that would not be necessary. Every action of the soundbug seemed to emphasize its invulnerability. Nothing in the flier could penetrate that massive armor. Nothing could sever those tough limbs. Unless Drake flew to the distant site at once and rescued Carp, the chance of the synthesis being alive at dawn seemed close to zero.
Drake glanced from one screen to the other. The fat Snark had apparently been no more than an appetizer for the soundbug’s main meal. It was on the move again, quartering the ground. Long antennas had unfurled above the armored back, to receive returning sound signals and interpret them as images.
The soundbug was closing on the stream. Very soon the pictures on the two display screens would merge and show the same scene. To Drake, who knew exactly where to look, Carp’s head was easy to pick out. It was a lighter gray against the darker turbulent flow. The question was, would the soundbug recognize that feature of the stream as new and different, when natural rocks both upstream and downstream rose above the surface to interrupt the flow?
Very soon, they would know. Thirty meters more, and the soundbug was at the far bank. It had come to the narrowest point of the stream, and it hesitated there. The flier was over in the middle of the clearing. That would be new to the soundbug; but also new, and much closer, a fat cylinder lay on the other bank. As the soundbug paused, the cylinder twitched and jerked a couple of feet along the ground.
The soundbug crossed the stream and pounced in a single movement. As it grabbed the stuffed roll of seat covers, Carp stood upright in the middle of the stream. He pulled hard on the second wire, drawing a noose around the soundbug’s legs and carapace.
The predator felt the pressure at once and reached its head down to grip the cable. The maw snapped shut on the
closed loop.
The wire had an outer insulating layer, but its core had been designed to resist both shear and stretching. It would not break, nor could it be cut through. While the soundbug had all its attention on the confining cable, Carp hauled backward and dragged the struggling creature over the edge of the bank into the fast-flowing stream. Weighed down by its dense carapace, the soundbug plunged to the streambed, where it stood with the current swirling about its broad back.
Drake expected that Carp would now try to pull the soundbug upstream, and would fail. The drag of the current in the other direction was too great. But instead, the Snark-human synthesis began to wade forward and allowed the cable to slacken. With the noose still tight around its legs and hindering its movements, the soundbug scrabbled and splashed and was swept farther downstream.
Carp followed. Still holding the wire, he came dangerously close to the predator. Except that it was no longer quite so dangerous. The antennas, thoroughly soaked, lay flat along the back. When Carp pushed at the edge of the carapace, adding his weight for a moment to the force of the current, and then rapidly jumped away, Drake realized that the soundbug was blind. Its sound-emitting equipment was below the surface, and its wet receiving equipment had no signal to receive.