James Blish - Surface Tension

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Book 3

Surface Tension

Prologue

Dr. Chatvieux took a long time over the microscope, leaving

la Ventura with nothing to do but look at the dead landscape

of Hydrot. Waterscape, he thought, would be a better word.

From space, the new world had shown only one small, trian-

gular continent, set amid endless ocean; and even the con-

tinent was mostly swamp.

The wreck of the seed-ship lay broken squarely across the

one real spur of rock which.Hydrot seemed to possess, which

reared a magnificent twenty-one feet above sea-level. From

this eminence, la Ventura could see forty miles to the horizon

across a flat bed of mud. The red light of the star Tau Ceti,

glinting upon thousands of small lakes, pools, ponds and

puddles, made the watery plain look like a mosaic of onyx

and ruby.

"If I were a religious man," the pilot said suddenly, "I'd

call this a plain case of divine vengeance."

Chatvieiix said: "Hmn?"

"It's as if we'd been struck down foris it hubris? Pride,

arrogance?"

"Hybris," Chatvieux said, looking up at last. "Well, is it?

I don't feel swollen with pride at the moment. Do you?"

."I'm not exactly proud of my piloting," la Ventura ad-

mitted. "But that isn't quite what I mean. I was thinking about

why we came here in the first place. It takes a lot of 'arro-

gance to think that you can scatter men, or at least things

very much like men, all over the face of the galaxy. It takes

even more pride to do the jobto pack up all the equipment

and move from planet to planet and actually make men, make

them suitable for every place you touch."

"I suppose it does," Chatvieux said. "But we're only one of

several hundred seed-ships in this limb of the galaxy, so I

doubt that the gods picked us out as special sinners." He

smiled. "If they had, maybe they'd have left us our ultra-

phone, so the Colonization Council could hear about our

cropper. Besides, Paul, we don't make men. We adapt them

adapt them to Earthlike planets, nothing more than that.

We've sense enoughor humility enough, if you-tike-tfest"

betterto know that we can't adapt men to a planet like Ju-

piter, or to the surface of a sun, like Tau Ceti."

"Anyhow, we're here," la Ventura said grimly. "And we

aren't going to get off. Phil tells me that we don't even have

our germ-cell bank any more, so we can't seed this place in

the usual way. We've been thrown onto a dead world and

dared to adapt to it. What are the pantropes going to do with

our recalcitrant carcassesprovide built-in waterwings?"

"No," Chatvieux said calmly. "You and I and all the rest

of us are going to die, Paul. Pantropic techniques don't work

on the body; that was fixed for you for life when you were

conceived. To attempt to rebuild it for you would only maim

you. The pantropes affect only the genes, the inheritance-

carrying factors. We can't give you built-in waterwings, any

more than we can give you a new set of brains. I think we'll

be able to populate this world with men, but we won't live to

see it."

The pilot thought about it, a lump of cold blubber collect-

, ing gradually in his stomach. "How long do you give us?" he

said at last.

"Who knows? A month, perhaps."

The bulkhead leading to the wrecked section of the ship

was pushed back, admitting salt, muggy air, heavy with carbon

dioxide. Philip Strasvogel, the communications officer, came

in, tracking mud. Like la Ventura, he was now a man without

a function, and it appeared to bother him. He was not well

equipped for introspection, and with his ultraphone totally

smashed, unresponsive to his perpetually darting hands, he

had been thrown back into his own mind, whose resources

were few. Only the tasks Chatvieux had set him to had pre-

vented him from setting like a gelling colloid into a perma-

nent state of the sulks.

He 'unbuckled from around his waist a canvas belt, into

the loops of which plastic vials were stuffed like cartridges.

"More samples. Doc," he said. "All alikewater, very wet.

I have some quicksand in one boot, too. Find anything?"

"A good deal, Phil. Thanks. Are the others around?"

Strasvogel poked his head out and hallooed. Other voices

rang out over the mudflats. Minutes later, the rest of the sur-

vivors of the crash were crowding into the pantrope deck:

Saltonstall, Chatvieux' senior assistant, a perpetually sanguine,

perpetually youthful technician willing to try anything once,

including dying; Eunice Wagner, behind whose placid face

rested the brains of the expedition's only remaining ecologist;

Eleftherios Venezuelos, the always-silent delegate from the

Colonization Council; and Joan Heath, a midshipman whose

duties, like la Ventura's and Phil's, were now without mean-

ing, but whose bright head and tall, deceptively indolent

body shone to the pilot's eyes brighter than Tau Ceti

brighter, since the crash, even than the home sun.

Five men and two womento colonize a planet on which

"standing room" meant treading water.

They came in quietly and found seats or resting places on

the deck, on the edges of tables, in corners. Joan Heath went

to stand beside la Ventura. They did not look at each other,

but the warmth of her shoulder beside his was all that he

needed. Nothing was as bad as it seemed.

Venezuelos said: "What's the verdict, Dr. Chatvieux?"

"This place isn't dead," Chatvieux said. "There's life in the

sea and in the fresh water, both. On the animal side of the

ledger, evolution seems to have stopped with the Crustacea;

the most advanced form I've found is a tiny crayfish, from

one of the local rivulets, and it doesn't seem to be well dis-

tributed. The ponds and puddles are well-stocked with small

metazoans of lower orders, right up to the rotifersincluding

a castle-building genus like Earth's Floscularidae. In addi-

tion, there's a wonderfully variegated protozoan population,

with a dominant ciliate type much like Pammoecium, plus

various Sarcodines, the usual spread of phyto-flagellates, and

even a phosphorescent species I wouldn't have expected to see

anywhere but in salt water. As for the plants, they run from

simple blue-green algae to quite advanced thallus-producing

typesthough none of them, of course, can live out of the

water."

"The sea is about the same," Eunice said. "I've found some

of the larger simple metazoansjellyfish and so onand

some crayfish almost as big as lobsters. But it's normal to find

salt-water species running larger than fresh-water. Ana there's

the usual plankton and nannoplankton population."

"In short," Chatvieux said, "we'll survive hereif we

fight."

"Wait a minute," la Ventura said. "You've just finished tell-

ing me that we wouldn't survive. And you were talking about

us, the seven of us here, not about the genus man, because we

don't have our germ-cells banks any more. What's"

"We don't have the banks. But we ourselves can contribute

germ-cells, Paul. I'll get to that in a moment." Chatvieux

turned to Saltonstall, "Martin, what would you think of our

taking to the sea? We came out of it once, long ago; maybe

we could come out of it again on Hydrot."

"No good," Saltonstall said immediately. "I like the idea, but

I don't think this planet ever heard of Swinburne, or Homer,

either. Looking at it as a colonization problem alone, as if we

weren't involved in it ourselves, I wouldn't give you an Oc

dollar for epi oinopa ponton. The evolutionary pressure there

is too high, the competition from other species is prohibitive;

seeding the sea should be the last thing we attempt, not the

first. The colonists wouldn't have a chance to learn a thing

before they'd be gobbled up."

"Why?" la Ventura said. Once more, the death in his

stomach was becoming hard to placate.

"Eunice, do your sea-going Coelenterates include anything

like the Portuguese man-of-war?"

The ecologist nodded.

"There's your answer, Paul," Saltonstall said. "The sea is

out. It's got to be fresh water, where the competing creatures

are less formidable and there are more places to hide."

"We can't compete with a jellyfish?" la Ventura asked, swal-

lowing.

"No, Paul," Chatvieux said. "Not with one that dangerous.

The pantropes make adaptations, not gods. They take human

germ-cellsin this case, our own, since our bank was wiped

out in the crashand modify them genetically toward those

of creatures who can live in any reasonable environment. The

result will be manlike, and intelligent. It usually shows the

donors' personality patterns, too, since the modifications are

usually made mostly in the morphology, not so much in the

mind, of the resulting individual.

"But we can't transmit memory. The adapted man is worse

than a child in the new environment. He has no history, no

techniques, no precedents, not even a language. In the usual

colonization project, like the Tellura affair, the seeding teams

more or less take him through elementary school before they

leave the planet to him, but we won't survive long enough to

give such instruction. We'll have to design our colonists with

plenty of built-in protections and locate them in the most fa-

vorable environment possible, so that at least some of them

will survive learning by experience alone."

The pilot thought about it, but nothing occurred to him

which did not make the disaster seem realer and more inti-

mate with each passing second. Joan Heath moved slightly

closer to him. "One of the new creatures can have my per-

sonality pattern, but it won't be able to remember being me.

Is that right?"

"That's right. In the present situation we'll probably make

our colonists haploid, so that some of them, perhaps many,

will have a heredity traceable to you alone. There may be

just the faintest of residuums of identitypantropy's given

us some data to support the old Jungian notion of ancestral

memory. But we're all going to die on Hydrot, Paul, as self-

conscious persons. There's no avoiding that. Somewhere we'll

leave behind people who behave as we would, think and feel

as we would, but who won't remember la Ventura, or Dr.

Chatvieux, or Joan Heathor the Earth."

The pilot said nothing more. There was a gray taste in his

mouth.

"Saltonstall, what would you recommend as a form?"

The pantropist pulled reflectively at his nose. "Webbed ex-

tremities, of course, with thumbs and big toes heavy and

thorn-like for defense until the creature has had a chance

to learn. Smaller external ears, and the eardrum larger and

closer to the outer end of the ear-canal. We're going to have

to reorganize the water-conservation system, I think; the glo-

merular kidney is perfectly suitable for living in fresh water,

but the business of living immersed, inside and out, for a

creature with a salty inside means that the osmotic pressure

inside is going to be higher than outside, so that the kidneys

are going to have to be pumping virtually all the time. Under

the circumstances we'd best step up production of urine, and

that means the antidiuretic function of the pituitary gland is

going to have to be abrogated, for all practical purposes."

"What about respiration?"

"Hm," Saltonstall said. "I suppose book-lungs, like some of

the arachnids have. They can be supplied by intercostal

spiracles. They're gradually adaptable to atmosphere-breath-

ing, if our colonist ever decides to come out of the water. Just

to provide for that possibility. I'd suggest that the nose be re-

tamed, maintaining the nasal cavity as a part of the otologi-

cal system, but cutting off the cavity from the larynx with a

membrane of cells that are supplied with oxygen by direct

irrigation, rather than by the circulatory system. Such a mem-

brane wouldn't survive for many generations, once the crea-

ture took to living out of the water even for part of its life-

time; it'd go through two or three generations as an amphib-

ian, and''then one day it'd suddenly find itself breathing

through its larynx again."

"Ingenious," Chatvieux said.'

"Also, Dr. Chatvieux, I'd suggest that we have it adopt

spOTulation. As an aquatic animal, our colonist is going to

have an indefinite life-span, but we'll have to give it a breed-

ing cycle of about six weeks to keep up its numbers during

the learning period; so there'll have to be a definite oreak of

some duration in its active year. Otherwise it'll hit the popu-

lation problem before it's learned enough to cope with it."

"And it'd be better if our colonists could winter over in-

side a good, hard shell," Eunice Wagner added in agreement.

"So sporulation's the obvious answer. Many other microscopic

creatures have it."

"Microscopic?" Phil said incredulously.

"Certainly," Chatvieux said, amused. "We can't very well

crowd a six-foot man into a two-foot puddle. But that raises

a question. We'll have tough competition from the rotifers,

and some of them aren't strictly microscopic; for that matter

even some of the protozoa can be seen with the naked eye,

just barely, with dark-field illumination. I don't think your

average colonist should run much under 250 microns, Sal-

tonstall. Give them a chance to slug it out."

"I was thinking of making them twice that big."

"Then they'd be the biggest animals in their environment,"

Eunice Wagner pointed out, "and won't ever develop any

skills. Besides, if you make them about rotifer size, it will

give them an incentive for pushing out the castle-building

rotifers, and occupying the castles themselves, as dwellings."

Chatvieux nodded. "All right, let's get started. While the

pantropes are being calibrated, the rest of us can put our

heads together on leaving a record for these people. We'll

micro-engrave the record on a set of corrosion-proof metal

leaves, of a size our colonists can handle conveniently. We can

tell them, very simply, what happened, and plant a few sug-

gestions that there's more to the universe than what they find

in their puddles. Some day they may puzzle it out."

"Question," Eunice Wagner said. "Are we going to tell them

they're microscopic? I'm opposed to it. It may saddle their

entire early history with a gods-and-demons mythology that

they'd be better off without."

94"Yes, we are," Chatvieux said; and la Ventura could tell by

the change in the tone of his voice that he was speaking now

as their senior on the expedition. "These people will be of the

race of men, Eunice. We want them to win their way back into

the community of men. They are not toys, to be protected

from the truth forever in a fresh-water womb."

"Besides," Saltonstall observed, "they won't get the record

translated at any time in their early history. They'll have 'to

develop a written language of their own, and it will be im-

possible for us to leave them any sort of Rosetta Stone or

other key. By the time they can decipher the truth, they

should be ready for it."

"I'll make that official," Venezuelos said unexpectedly. And

that was that.

And then, essentially, it was all over. They contributed

the cells that the pantropes would need. Privately, la Ventura

and Joan Heath went to Chatvieux and asked to contribute

jointly; but the scientist said that the microscopic men were to

be haploid, in order to give them a minute cellular structure,

with nuclei as small as Earthly rickettsiae, and therefore

each person had to give germ-cells individuallythere would

be no use for zygotes. So even that consolation was denied

them; in death they would have no children, but be in-

stead as alone as ever.

They helped, as far as they could, with the text of the

message which was to go on the metal leaves. They had their

personality patterns recorded. They went through the mo-

tions. Already they were beginning to be hungry; the sea-

crayfish, the only things on Hydrot big enough to eat, lived

in water too deep and cold for subsistence fishing.

After la Ventura had Set his control board to rightsa

useless gesture, but a habit he had been taught to respect, and

which in an obscure way made things a little easier to bear

he was out of it. He sat by himself at the far end of the rock

ledge, watching Tau Ceti go redly down, chucking pebbles

into the nearest pond.

After a while Joan Heath came silently up behind him, and

sat down too. He took her hand. The glare of the red sun

was almost extinguished now, and together they watched it

go, with la Ventura, at least, wondering somberly which

nameless puddle was to be his Lethe.

He never found out, of course. None of them did.

Cycle One

In a forgotten comer of the galaxy, the watery world of Hy-

drot hurtles endlessly around the red star, Tau Ceti. For

many months its single small continent has been snowbound,

and the many pools and lakes which dot the continent have

been locked in the grip of the ice. Now, however, the red sun

swings closer and closer to the zenith in Hydrot's sky; the

snow rushes in torrents toward the eternal ocean, and the ice

recedes toward the shores of the lakes and ponds . . .

The first thing to reach the consciousness of the sleeping

Lavon was a small, Intermittent scratching sound. This was

followed by a disquieting sensation in his body, as if the

worldand Lavon with itwere being rocked back and forth.

He stirred uneasily, without opening his eyes. His vastly

slowed metabolism made him feel inert and queasy, and the

rocking did not help. At his slight motion, however, both the

sound and the motion became more insistent.

It seemed to take days for the fog over his brain to clear,

but whatever was causing the disturbance would not let him

rest. With a groan he forced his eyelids open and made an

abrupt gesture with one webbed hand. By the waves of phos-

phorescence which echoed away from his fingers at the motion,

he could see that the smooth amber walls of his spherical

shell were unbroken. He tried to peer through them, but he

could see nothing but darkness outside. Well, that was nat-

ural; the amnionic fluid inside the spore would generate

light, but ordinary water did not, no matter how vigorously

it was stirred.

Whatever was outside the sphere was rocking it again, with

the same whispering friction against its shell. Probably some

nosey diatom, Lavon thought sleepily, trying to butt its way

through an object it Was too stupid to go around. Or some

early hunter, yearning for a taste of the morsel inside the

spore. Well, let it worry itself; Lavon had no intention of

breaking the shell just yet. The fluid in which he had slept

for so many months had held his body processes static, and

had slowed his mind. Once out into the water, he would have

to start breathing and looking for food again, and he could

tell by the unrelieved darkness outside that it was too early

in the spring to begin thinking about that.

He flexed his fingers reflectively, in the disharmonic motion

from little finger to thumb that no animal but man can copy,

and watched the widening wavefronts of greenish light re-

bound in larger arcs from the curved spore walls. Here he was,

curled up quite comfortably in a little amber ball, where he

could stay until even the depths were warm and light. At this

moment there was probably still some ice on the sky, and

certainly there would not be much to eat as yet. Not that

there was ever much, what with the voracious rotifers coming

awake too with the first gust of warm water

The rotifers I That was it. "There was a plan afoot to drive

them out. Memory returned in an unwelcome rush. As if to

help it, the spore rocked again. That was probably one of the

Protos, trying to awaken him; nothing man-eating ever came

to the Bottom this early. He had left an early call with the

Paras, and now the time had come, as cold and early and

dark as he had thought he wanted it.

Reluctantly, Lavon uncurled, planting his webbed toes

and arching his backbone as hard as he could, pressing with

his whole body against his amber prison. With small, sharp,

crepitating sounds, a network of cracks raced through the

translucent shell.

Then the spore wall dissolved into a thousand brittle shards,

and he was shivering violently with the onslaught of the icy

water. The warmer fluid of his winter cell dissipated silently,

a faint glowing fog. In the brief light he saw, not far from

him, a familiar shape: a transparent, bubble-filled cylinder, a

colorless slipper of jelly, spirally grooved, almost as long as

he was tall. Its surface was furred with gently vibrating fine

hairs, thickened at the base.

The light went out. The Proto said nothing; it waited while

Lavon choked and coughed, expelling the last remnants of the

spore fluid from his book-lungs and sucking in the pure, ice-

cold water.

"Para?" Lavon said at last. "Already?"

"Already," the invisible cilia vibrated in even, emotionless

tones. Each separate hair-like process buzzed at an independ-

ent, changing rate; the resulting sound waves spread through

the water, intermodulating, reinforcing or cancelling each

other. The aggregate wave-front, by the time it reached human

ears, was rather eerie, but nevertheless recognizable human

speech. "This is the time, Lavon."

'Time and more than time," another voice said from the

returned darkness. "If we are to. drive Flosc from his castles."

"Who's that?" Lavon said, turning futilely toward 'the new

voice.

"I am Para also, Lavon. We are sixteen since the awaten-

ing. If you could reproduce as rapidly as we"

"Brains are better than numbers," Lavon said. "As the Eat-

ers will find out soon enough."

"What shall we do, Lavon?"

The man drew up his knees and sank to the cold mud of

the .Bottom to think. Something wriggled tinder his buttocks

and a tiny spirillum corkscrewed away, identifiable only by

feel. He let it go; he was not hungry yet, and he had the Eat-

ersthe rotifersto think about. Before long they would be

swarming in the upper reaches of the sky, devouring every-

thing, even men when they could catch them, even their nat-

ural enemies the Protos now and then. And whether or not

the Protos could be organized to battle them was a question

still to be tested.

Brains are better than numbers; even that, as a proposition,

was still to be tested. "The Protos, after all, were intelligent

after their fashion; and they knew their world, as the men did

not. Lavon could still remember how hard it had been for

him to get straight in his head the various clans of beings in

this world, and to make sense of their confused names; his

tutor Shar had drilled him unmercifully until it had begun to

penetrate.

When you said "Man," you meant creatures that, generally

speaking, looked alike. The bacteria were of three kinds, the

rods and the globes and the spirals, but they were all tiny

and edible, so he had learned to differentiate them quickly.

When it came to the Protos, identification became a real prob-

lem. Para here was a Proto, but he certainly looked very dif-

ferent from Stent and his family, and the family of Didin

was unlike both. Anything, as it turned out, that was not green

and had a visible nucleus was a Proto, no matter how strange

its shape might be. The Eaters were all different, too, and some

of them were as beautiful as the fruiting crowns of water-

plants; but all of them were deadly, and all had the whirling

crown of cilia which could suck you into the incessantly

grinding mastex in a moment. Everything which was green

and had an engraved shell of glass, Shar had called a diatom,

dredging the strange word as he dredged them all from some

Bottom in his skull which none of the rest of them could

reach, and even Shar could not explain.

Lavon arose quickly. "We need Shar," he said. "Where is

his spore?"

"On a plant frond, far up near the sky."

Idiot! The old man would never think of safety. To sleep

near the sky, where he might be snatched up and borne off by

any Eater to chance by when he emerged, sluggish with win-

ter's long sleep! How could a wise man be so foolish?

"We'll have to hurry. Show me the way."

"Soon; wait," one of the Paras said. "You cannot see. Noc

is foraging nearby." There was a small stir in the texture of

the 'darkness as the swift cylinder shot away.

"Why do we need Shar?" the other Para said.

"For his brains, Para. He is a thinker."

"But his thoughts are water. Since he taught the Protos

man's language, he has forgotten to think of the Eaters. He

thinks forever of the mystery of how man came here. It is a

mysteryeven the Eaters are not like maa. But understand-

ing it will not help us to live."

Lavon turned blindly toward the creature. "Para, tell me

something. Why do the Protos side with us? With man, I

mean? Why do you need us? The Eaters fear you."

There was a short silence. When the Para spoke again, the

vibrations of its voice were more blurred than before, more

even, more devoid of any understandable feeling.

"We live in this world," the Para said. "We are of it. We

rule it. We came to that state long before the coming of men,

in long warfare with the Eaters. But we think as the Eaters

do, we do not plan, we share our knowledge and we exist

Men plan; men lead; men are different from each other; men

want to remake the world. And they hate the Eaters, as we

do. We will help."

"And give up your rule?"

"And give it up, if the rule of men is better. That is reason.

Now we can go; Noc is coming back with light."

Lavon looked up. Sure enough, there was a brief flash of

cold light far overhead, and then another. In a moment the

spherical Proto had dropped into view, its body flaring reg-

ularly with blue-green pulses. Beside it darted the second

Para.

"Noc brings news," the second Para said. "Para is twenty-

four. The Syn are awake by thousands along the sky. Noc

spoke to a Syn colony, but they will not help us; they all ex-

pect to be dead before the Eaters awake."

"Of course," said the first Para. "That always happens. And

the Syn are plants; why should they help the Protos?"

"Ask Noc if he'll guide us to Shar," Lavon said impatiently.

The Noc gestured with its single short, thick tentacle. One

of the Paras said, "That is what he is here for."

"Then let's go. We've waited long enough."

The mixed quartet soared away from the Bottom' through

the liquid darkness.

"No," Lavon snapped. "Not a second longer. The Syn are

awake, and Nothoica of the Eaters is due right after that.

You know that as well as I do, Shar. Wake upl"

"Yes, yes," the old man said fretfully. He stretched and

yawned. "You're always in such a hurry, Lavon. Where's Phil?

He made his spore near mine." He pointed to a still-unbroken

amber sphere sealed to a leaf of the water-plant one tier

below. "Better push him off; he'll be safer on the Bottom."

"He would never reach the Bottom," Para said. "The ther-

mocline has formed."

Shar looked surprised. "It has? Is it as late as all that? Wait

while I get my records together." He began to search along

the leaf in the debris and the piled shards of his spore. Lavon

looked impatiently about, found a splinter of stonewort, and

threw it heavy end first at the bubble of Phil's cell just below.

The spore shattered promptly, and the husky young man tum-

bled out, blue with shock as the cold water hit him.

"Woughl" he said. "Take it easy, Lavon." He looked up.

"The old man's awake? Good. He insisted on staying up here

for the winter, so of course I had to stay too."

"Aha," Shar said, and lifted a thick metal plate about the

length of his forearm and half as wide. "Here is one of them.

Now if only I haven't misplaced the other"

Phil kicked away a mass of bacteria. "Here it is. Better give

them both to a Para, so they won't burden you. Where do we

go from here, Lavon? It's dangerous up this high. I'm just

glad a Dicran hasn't already shown up."

"I here," something droned just above them.

Instantly, without looking up, Lavon flung himself out and

down into the open water, turning his head to look back over

his shoulder only when he was already diving as fast as he

could go. Shar and Phil had evidently sprung at the same

instant. On the next frond above where Shar had spent his

winter was the armored, trumpet-shaped body of the rotifer

Dicran, contracted to leap after them.

The two Protos came curving back out of nowhere. At the

same moment, the bent, shortened body of Dicran flexed in

its armor plate, straightened, came plunging toward them.

There was a soft plop and Lavon found himself struggling in

a fine net, as tangled and impassible as the matte of a lichen.

A second such sound was followed by a muttered imprecation

from Phil. Lavon struck out fiercely, but he was barely able

to wriggle in the web of wiry, transparent stuff.

"Be still," a voice which he recognized as Para's throbbed

behind him. He managed to screw his head around, and then

kicked himself mentally for not having realized at once what

had happened. The Paras had exploded the trichocysts which

lay like tiny cartridges beneath their pellicles; each one cast

forth a liquid which solidified upon contact with the water in

a long slender thread. It was their standard method of

defense.

Farther down, Sharand Phil drifted with the second Para

in the heart of a white haze, like creatures far gone in mold.

Dicran swerved to avoid it, but she was evidently unable to

give up; she twisted and darted around them, her corona

buzzing harshly, her few scraps of the human language for-

gotten. Seen from this distance, the rotation of the corona

was revealed as an illusion, created by the rhythm of pulsa-

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摘要：

Book3SurfaceTensionPrologueDr.Chatvieuxtookalongtimeoverthemicroscope,leavinglaVenturawithnothingtodobutlookatthedeadlandscapeofHydrot.Waterscape,hethought,wouldbeabetterword.Fromspace,thenewworldhadshownonlyonesmall,trian-gularcontinent,setamidendlessocean;andeventhecon-tinentwasmostlyswamp.Thewrec...

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James Blish - Surface Tension

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