—yes, I know him, he’s from GHQ, works with Ted, kind of nice but homely as hell—
—uh-huh, ugliness like that is nature’s contraceptive, I figure. Forget it. You got anybody else in mind, though, the night is young even if I’m not—
—She came over to me and positively whispered all of it to me in one gush which was a kind of tribute when you think about it, coming from a woman who obviously hasn’t found much in the world it was necessary to whisper about—
—Evolution goes all sorts of ways, that’s why I don’t think we’ll puzzle out the radio sources just by peeking at the basic biochem, not when we got such lousy resolution through all that damned dust. I mean, all kinds of things are selected for, right? You and me are myopic because the nearsighted males couldn’t hunt so good, so they stayed home while the bruisers went out running down meat. Just hanging around the caves and painting the walls and gettin’ a little on the side in the heat of the day. Never mind all that strong pair-bonding stuff they always tell you; fact is, you never know who the father is and that’s why a male strategy of spreading it around as much as you can pays off. So it gets selected for. Hell, it feels good—that’s the sure sign; evolution doesn’t read our rule books, she’s got her own—
—think you’ve had enough? That rum isn’t rum, it’s spidmeer and you’re starting to look like a lobster—
—we need more recon down there skip this biochem piffle—
—yeah, right, way I see it is, we got a surplus a genius an a shortage of guts aroun’ ’ere—
—an oxidation-reduction cycle,’s what it is, down there in that dust they’re playin’ the same ol’ game we are, only not so profitable. Higher up the chain from those dust eaters there’s gotta be starch production using that crummy low-cal sunlight. Leaves oxy as leftovers, an’ that’s what the EMs gotta breathe, but damned if I know how anything could live off that—
—I don’t see why she has to bite my head off just over a spilled
sample
container—
—You get us contaminated with those Isis spores I’ll vac you so fast—
—well I
didn’t
why should I look I don’t. think you can say that just like
that
—
—Could be wrong but
some
body left off the seals.
—then don’t look at me when you—
—call this a multifass well, this may shape you up for a vote but nobody’s talking about what I want
—part of it’s to find out what the goddamn issue is if you’d just listen fer once—
—I was saying, when the smaller animals breathe they have this little sac, kind of an air trap, and it filters the dust out of the air before they hit the inward stroke to suck in a lungful—
—Real slow, about two breaths a minute, I’ve seen it
—No bigger’n your finger, intricate li’l things, damn fine design for eatin’ up those dust-huggin’ fellas. Then the ones fat as your hand, they’re lunchin’ off the finger-sized guys
—Him? Just a passing thing, yer ol’ hump ‘n’ hustle is all—
—Come on Elinor no civilized woman ever regrets a pleasure and this is going to be—
—so while you guys are grandstanding it with the survey, somebody’s taking out the garbage, getting meals, agronomists and skiffers, all scutwork, so at least we’d like to be in on what’s comin’ out instead of flashin’ on it in the weeklies you squirt Earthside—
—I still say you stack up your shipcred, you can get your tail upholstered the way he did, just give the usual squeeze to Dexter in medmon, they’ll slip you in, won’t be more than a hairline scar nobody’ll notice in the dark
He eased over into the group around Ted Landon and waited until a break came. It still all came through to him as overlapping voices, so even his own sounded involuntary, part of a stream.
—Ted, we’ve got to go down there and have a look.
—Hold your horses, gosh, this isn’t the best place to go over the technical details, Nigel; if you came to the briefings you’d be more up to speed—
—They take too long, never understood why you call them briefings, but I do run through the tapes.
—Glad to hear that, and of course we are doing a study of all the ramifications, looking for a safe way to do it.
—Seems a trifle obvious, actually.
—Well, some are advocating an active recon mode— you know, where we use remote radar sensing to interrogate the internal biochem of the EMs for—
—Sounds bloody awful.
—Ah, there’s the alternative, a passive mode which I incidentally favor, which is to station servo’d eyes in well-sheltered spots, and watch the EMs if they pass nearby. We’ve had good staff review of that proposal.
—Mere eyes? Use walkers. We’ll need mobility.
