Starliner(26)

"Yes," said Dewhurst, admitting defeat. "Yes, I can see that."

"So we chatted—"

"Sitting on your air mattress, I suppose," Reed said.

"Sitting on my air mattress," Wade agreed with an appreciative nod. "She said she was local but from another island. A fisherman's daughter, I assumed. Not professional, I was sure of that now, but not disinterested either. I put a hand on her shoulder, and she slid open the front closure of my shirt."

Wade leaned back in his chair, savoring perhaps the memory and certainly the focused interest of the others in the lounge. Belgeddes smiled like a father watching his youngest perform in a church pageant.

"Well," the storyteller continued, "I thought I knew where matters were proceeding. Now, of course, I think they were intended to proceed in a very different fashion. But her fingers touched the garnet locket that my mother had given me on her deathbed. I always carry it, you know. Mother said it would protect me from harm. Silly superstition, I suppose, but there you are."

"And I suppose you're wearing it now?" Da Silva asked, more precise than hostile in his tone. "The locket?"

"At this very moment?" Wade replied. He patted the breast of his tailored gray-and-black shirt "I believe it's in my cabin. I can go get it, of course."

"Shouldn't say he was in much risk at the moment, would you?" Belgeddes said. He chuckled. "Unless you fellows are a syndicate of starship gamblers preying on poor innocents like Dickie and me?"

"Huh! Catch me playing cards with you two!" Dewhurst muttered.

"Well, she touched the locket and she pulled back like she'd been burned. 'Why, that's nothing!' I said, pretty hasty as you can imagine. Not wanting anything to spoil the moment, so to speak. So I flipped the locket out, and I turned my light—I mentioned having a light, didn't I?"

"A miniflood," Belgeddes agreed approvingly.

"I switched on the light—aimed at the locket, mind, but there was scatter from it and through it, though the garnets. And when that red light flickered across the girl, as I thought she was, she simply melted."

"Melted to nothing?" Da Silva demanded.

"Not at all," said Wade. "Into a pool of what I suppose was protoplasm, but it seeped at once down into the soil."

He nodded toward Reed. "The coarse gravel, as Mr. Reed noted."

"I suppose the clothes melted with her?" Dewhurst said.

"No," Wade answered equably, "they were there when I came back the next morning. As was my mattress. I didn't stand on the order of my going, as you can imagine."

"Cast offs," Belgeddes said. "Saw them myself when I came back with him. Sort of trash you could pick from the town midden in Tarek Bay back then."

"What I believe," Wade said, "is that the beach walkers are—or were—"he nodded toward Reed again "—if Mr. Reed is correct in believing them extinct—"

Reed opened his mouth to protest at being misquoted, but he swallowed the words before speaking.

"At any rate, the beach walkers were a life form indigenous to Ain al-Mahdi that mimicked other species," Wade continued. "When men colonized the planet, they mimicked men—or women, at any rate, for the same purposes."

"Which we can guess, easily enough," Belgeddes interjected. "Dinner, not to put too fine a point on it."

"Food or reproduction," Wade said. "Survival of the individual or survival of the species. The basic drives of all forms of life. But its mimicry broke down under intense red light."

He looked at Reed and raised his eyebrow for confirmation. "You've heard that only a ruby laser can kill a beach walker, I suppose? Well, that's not true. It's the angstrom range, not simply destructive energy. And it's not fatal, only—disconcerting to the creature."

Dewhurst's mind riffled the guidebook through whose images he'd browsed in his cabin's bathroom. "There aren't any large animals on Ain," he said. "Except men. There never were."

"Not in the seas, old boy?" Belgeddes responded. "That's not what I recall. I seem to remember some of those arthrodires weighing tonnes, with jawplates spreading wide enough to swallow a catcher boat on a bad day."

"Well, yes, I suppose. . . ." Dewhurst mumbled. "But a—a sea creature doesn't just come up on land!"

Wade got to his feet and smiled at Dewhurst. "Fish don't, that's true," he said in gentle mockery. "At least they usually didn't on Earth."

Belgeddes stood up also. "Time we got back to the cabin, Dickie," he said. "We've still got some unpacking to do before we lift off."