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personality conflicts having manifested themselves. Any arguments or differences of
opinion had been relegated to work. Hopefully it would stay like that for at least a year. It
would make his job so very much easier.
For his part Carnavon had been on too many such expeditions to be as sanguine, but he
was hopeful. And if relationships grew testy, there was always Simna to smooth things
over. He chuckled at how rapidly O'Sandringham and Stevens had paired off. On the
surface they seemed to have little in common. O'Sandringham was not only far more
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educated, but the mate teased her unmercifully. To this she responded with insults that
were carefully designed to do little real damage.
At first there was a certain amount of competition to see who could describe and name the
most new creatures. Only Cedric Carnavon and Simna didn't participate. They didn't seem
to need that kind of immortality. As long as accepted taxonomical procedure was followed
there was nothing to stop Ramirez or Noosa or anyone else from naming various
discoveries after themselves. Given the seemingly infinite variety of the Xican forest, the
game soon grew old and was abandoned, personal nomenclature giving way to that which
was properly descriptive.
Prentice had carefully live-trapped several small black creatures as they'd tried to return to
the silicon-barred hole he'd encountered on that first day. As he conveyed them back to the
camp he hoped he wasn't breaking up a family. The little creatures had green stripes on
their underbellies that he suspected might be a form of sex-determinant and three bright
green eyes apiece. Instead of teeth, their little round O-shaped mouths were lined with
inward-facing grinding surfaces. They might eat anything from arthropods to rock, he
mused. They made no effort to escape from the lightless collection box, the interior of
which he hoped would approximate the conditions to be found naturally within their hole
or tunnel.
He added them to the growing collection of boxes and holding cages in Dome Three, which
was rapidly turning from a laboratory into a zoo. There were a couple of the cow-pig
things, several fliers that had been trapped in nets and quickly tranquilized, a whole
phylum of burrowers and crawlers, another of worm-relatives, and something utterly alien
that looked like a loaf of wheat bread on wheels. Its method of locomotion consisted of
gadding about on rotating, ballooning spheres. Noosa had found it and spent half a day
trying to get it into a cage without traumatizing the creature.
There was also an immobile predator. The size and shape of an overstuffed footstool, it
was squamous and lumpy, devoid of external organs or prominent epidermal features. In
place of limbs were a cluster of long, whiplike tentacles near the top that Simna theorized
served as sensory organs as well as grasping devices.
They'd observed pairs and trios of the Bellies, as Ramirez had ignominiously dubbed them,
traveling at an agonizingly slow pace over the ground, feeding on whatever they
encountered that was too slow or stupid to get out of their way. Indiscriminate as to diet,
they readily plucked crawlers out of branches, burrowers from the earth, or tiny fliers from
the air. Although too thin to threaten a human, the tentacle-whips were lightning-fast. It
was as if all a man's energy and reflexes had been concentrated in his hands and fingers.
They'd collected their Belly by slipping a broad shovel beneath its slow-moving form and
placing it gently in a large wheeled collection box. As much as out of customary concern,
they took care because agitating a potential specimen could result in its doing involuntary
damage to itself. It made no effort to escape, though as Halstead pointed out it could easily
double its speed without drawing attention.
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It occurred simultaneously to Simna and Carnavon that except for the fliers, they'd thus
far seen nothing that traveled in what could be called rapid fashion. Noosa had found
several sets of parallel grooves in the ground that hinted at a fast-moving animal, but it
remained unobserved.
"There it goes!" Halstead shouted one morning.
"Where?" exclaimed Prentice.
Halstead shook his head dolefully. "Missed it."
Prentice blinked, then grinned. And so it went.
Ramirez wanted to track the groove-makers, but Prentice squashed the idea. They had far
more than enough to keep them busy within an hour's walk of Base Camp. Bashing
through the forest for days on end in search of Xica's more elusive inhabitants could wait a
month or two. Ramirez protested, as usual, and acquiesced, as usual, before returning to
the study of specimens already gathered.
Xica's bounty soon forced Prentice to send Stevens back to the lander for another load of
assorted cages and holding containers. To everyone's joyful consternation, their biological
larder was filling up fast. But it wasn't enough to gather specimens: you had to make some
sense of them as well. Exploration without explication was not science. Gradually the first
outlines of a crude schematic of Xican taxonomy began to emerge from their collective
studies. Within that diagram animals and plants found their respective positions shifted
repeatedly. Each dawn brought forth new discoveries and new precedents, all of them
clamoring for accommodation.
It was at lunch on the first day of their third week on Xica that Halstead entered the mess
with a peculiar expression on his face. Unusually, it did not reflect its owner's standard
preoccupation.
He halted behind an empty chair. Most of his colleagues were halfway or more through
their meals. Off to one side, Simna was trying to help Stevens adjust the beverage
dispenser.
"You're late, Ted," said O'Sandringham. "Better hurry, or there'll only be four or five
portions left." Halstead's ap-petite reflected his outsized frame and served as the
foundation for a running series of good-natured jokes among his companions.
"I'm not hungry," he told her evenly.
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