Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition (199 page)

"That's
conjecture, but I've studied this very carefully."

They all agreed
with the logic of that. TR soon went into orbit, then to take the
spores and the biological research crew to a world where there was
no higher animal life while Tab and Kit headed back for Koosd.

"Our hardest
part will be to inform these people it'll be pointless to haul off
all the wood because the fungus will eventually take over anyhow,"
Kit said bitterly. "The one good thing I can say is the thing
wasn't deliberately cruel or belligerent to the Klaft so there's a
fairly good chance it won't randomly attack the Grandish."

"If it
perceives them to be a threat it will," Tab replied. "We won't stop
them from getting rid of the rotting wood. If there's a big enough
area cleared there's a small chance the influence will be
resistible in it. It may be our only chance."

"It could
influence the Klaft as far away as A Port," Kit reasoned. "A little
patch here and there won't much matter – particularly since
there'll be millions of the things around here."

"We're going to
be attacking them as fast as we find them," Tab said. "We can hope
it won't retaliate against the Grandish. I'll try to make it clear
the attacks are from us, not from the natives."

"It'll use the
natives as tools to get to us," Kit warned. "Remember – it very
quickly learned it could control me to an extent by threatening
Givzoo and his fellow researchers. It even told me such a thing was
a weakness in me it wouldn't hesitate to exploit."

"We WILL find a
way out of this," Tab replied confidently. "We've had problems as
bad as this before!"

"You have," Kit
replied. "But you were with Maita at the time. Zule and certain of
the Immins' sordid little exploits that could have destroyed a
people – I guess you did handle some of them alone, but those were
against animal life. We can understand animals fairly well because
of the probe, but how would we use a probe on a plant?"

"THAT is one of
the kinds of things we come up with that make us winners!" Tab
cried. "One part of the research Givzoo MUST do is to try to find a
way to use a probe on these things. Maybe Maita can develop some
kind of machine for them alone."

"Surely Maita
will be finished with whatever they're doing in plenty of time,"
Kit agreed. "For the first time I have a glimmering of hope we can
come out of this one ahead. I like the Grandish and damned well
don't want to see this world under the control of those
things!"

Lope was
waiting for them when they returned a few hours past dawn the
following morning. He had piled up all the wood that was down and
was digging out all the old stumps in his nearby pasture. There
were several adolescent boys and girls helping.

"We done
decided the kids can start right here, then go to Liek's place,
then to Map's and so on. Clean 'em all up right up to Milk Lake.
They's doin the same b'low the main road to the ocean. Got more
kids down that side so's it'll go faster," Lope reported. "You'uns
is got good ideas fer citybreds!"

"Misd is a town
just a little bigger than Koosd," Tab said. "Veen's been there.
It's mostly farms. There're far too many in our families to stay
with farming so some of us've got to get into business. We know
glass and this area has some of the best raw materials on the
planet. We've decided where we want to build the glass plant. That
point south of where Flint Creek goes into Keystone Bay. Lots of
good sand and the slag can be dumped in that old sink below the old
castle where it won't ever hurt anything. I think we can buy the
castle to use for a home while we're here."

They talked
awhile longer, then Kit and Tab headed for Koosd. They were
unusually silent along the way, each wondering what would happen to
these people if they couldn't stop that fungus from spreading.
There had to be some way. They both were hopeful the fact the thing
was in many small pieces for practical purposes would allow some
form of attack. If some didn't have the necessary memories
programmed in to protect themselves there was always a chance
something vital could be eliminated.

Possible, but
unlikely. With millions of spores the combination of a certain few
with hundreds of thousands of copies appeared to be inevitable.

They took up
permanent residence at Veen's, leasing the adjoining rooms for a
year at the time, then concentrated on buying the land at Flint
Creek and Keystone Bay. That meant a good deal of travel, which
covered the continuing search for the fungal growths and the
research updates they were getting from Givzoo. They were finally
able to purchase the land with its large sink and its old abandoned
castle, then to hire labor crews to renovate the castle and to
build the processing plant for the glass. The sand they had on the
bay would supply their needs for centuries as it was mostly in
another sink that had filled in over the millennia. It was more
than a hundred meters deep and a quarter kilometer in diameter. It
had some of the rarer qualities that they had noticed in the native
glass that made them decide on the plant as a business base.

The ovens
weren't hard to construct from excellent quality firebrick that was
already a standard item being manufactured up the coast a few
kilometers so could be brought in by barge.

Kaer Peld began
getting a bit too serious about Tab so he contrived to begin doing
little things that irritated her. They were seemingly habits he
couldn't – or that he wouldn't (which added to the irritation) –
break. Finally she quit trying to change him and began looking
around at others. They had long serious talks and decided things
weren't working out between them and that they'd better break it
off while they could still remain good friends. Kit learned from it
enough that he would do little things to make the girls consider
him a great one for a good time, but not the kind who would make a
good lifemate so they'd better not allow themselves to get too
emotionally involved.

The fungus
still dominated their thoughts. Nothing would change that. It was
why they were on this world. It was still the one threat to a good,
sound, developing culture and a good, sound, honest people.

Tab's penchant
for getting far too involved with his female "friends" on a world
where he would have to stay for any time was working overtime here
so he had to stay on his guard, but Kit's established "playboy"
mentality kept him from those involvements.

"Wouldn't it
have been better for Maita to have made one of us female?" Kit had
asked at one time. "I really don't see the disadvantage if we kept
our involvement only with each other."

"No. We're too
much alike," Tab replied. "I would know I couldn't hurt you so I
couldn't return any tenderness. That's also true about you.
Besides, we've been in any number of situations on worlds where
homosexuality was a culturally accepted practice. You've never
appealed to me at all!"

"That's
something I've been able to avoid," Kit said. "I don't think I
could respond to it. Maita didn't program me for it."

"Your reptilian
and amphibian models don't have so much of it as do mammals and
some of the unclassifiable types," TR put in. "Maita and us ships
will program it in where it's needed."

Tab grinned,
but Kit wasn't at all sure he could be programmed into that.

"Besides which
you two can't work efficiently if you're supposed to be emotionally
involved," TR had continued. "Regardless of the basis of the
involvement, an emotional attachment of that type would always be a
danger to both of you. Maita doesn't really understand emotions of
those kinds anymore than I do, but it knows anger, which isn't so
strong. It knows what that can do. You've seen Maita lose its
temper. We'll stay away from strong emotional attachments with
those possessive overtones, thank you. You're hard enough to live
with just being such close friends!"

There was a
true and very deep love among all the members of Maita's crew, but
it was based on respect and affection. Maita decided long ago that
sexual attachments would probably cause more problems than they
would resolve. Besides, Maita didn't really have any understanding
of the sexual urge.

The glass plant
was finished before the castle, which wasn't a problem as Tab and
Kit were comfortable staying at Veen's. They had to hire permanent
help for the plant and to train them for the job. This would be the
first plant to use the particular molding process on the continent,
though it was true the process was used on Klormedt. The process
for making the tempered glass and ovenproof glass was also imported
from Klormedt. The empire's operatives never brought new technology
onto these worlds as they could be strongly disrupting influences
to a culture. They did sometimes combine things already invented to
make something new, but not until it was fairly determined the item
would soon be invented in any case. There would be need of this
facility on the continent of Sendedt for the foreseeable future so
it wasn't only a make-work place to be used for cover for the two
robots. It would be owned and run by the people of Grandish when
they left. The great advantage to the world was that while
pollution was not yet of any great concern to the Grandish it
likely would be some day. This facility would be a striking example
of a plant that didn't produce anything detrimental while it did
produce something useful. It would be a thing for the people of the
area to point to with pride in another fifty to one hundred years,
solid proof that business and the ecology could coexist comfortably
with a little more planning and a little less greed. Fuel for it
was natural gas, which was free for the taking in the area and was
already in use in some coastal areas.

It took most of
a year to finish the plant and it also took most of a year for the
first reports of the fungus's effects to begin to filter in. The
plant was finished nine days after the first reports were received,
which TR and T6 immediately sent floaters to investigate. The
growths were located near a small village in the mountains toward
the southern tip of the continent. The spores had fallen into a
wooded area devastated by fire, then by insects which killed the
trees by boring into the wood where the bark was burned off. There
were more than a hundred fungal growths for the floaters to burn
off.

"There were
reports that the people in the town were acting like they were
sleepwalking most of the time," TR reported to the two robots after
all the growths were destroyed. "I think we've learned another
little thing that should be of great value to us in this. The
thing, when it's young at least, can't reach a mind to control it
very quickly. The things had to learn control over a period of
twenty days or more. That let several people who were visiting the
town to sell kitchen supplies see something was very wrong and to
get out to tell others. In at least the fungi that were there the
ability to immediately control wasn't YET programmed in. I believe
that means there will be serious lacks in all the spores. If enough
RNA was grown into the spores to store much of it they would've
been too heavy to drift far. There's a good chance those closer to
Koosd will have a more complete program grown in."

"We can hope,"
Kit answered. "Our problem being that a more likely scenario is
there'll be large groups of the things, each with its own memories
to trade with the others. That's the basic idea, isn't it?"

"I personally
think there are a few of the types of spores we were afraid of –
big ones with everything," Tab said. "If so we're really going to
have a problem sooner or later."

"I would think
such a spore would still consider us to be its main enemies," Kit
suggested. "Me in particular. It will have the encounters in its
memory and will have identifications, whatever they are to that
thing, along with them. It should direct its attacks at us
personally.

"Remember: that
original fungus didn't consider any other there or the people on
this planet to be a part of the challenge."

"It would
actually BE the original in a sense," TR agreed. "I wonder how it
would sort out what memories to save and which ones to exclude. Our
logic would come up with very different answers than the fungus
would. You can be sure of that."

"It might
be...." Kit began, then was thoughtful for a few minutes. "TR, send
a floater back to that facility," he said after awhile. "I want to
know exactly how far a spore of a certain size and weight would be
thrown by that pressure. We know the specific gravity of the thing
so we can figure ... do you think it could grow spores of any shape
it chooses?"

"No, but I
think it will eventually learn how to do so," T6 said. "I can see
how even the logic of the plant would decide a gliding shape would
take a heavier spore much farther than a globe. It will then occur
to it that it can direct the flight of the spore. Givzoo said he
didn't determine if the thing is actually intelligent or if it's
programmed by evolution. I think it's shown that intelligence is
the answer to that one! It was able to figure how to get those
spores all over this planet using the few artificial means at its
disposal. The research of those people on those spores on that
world is becoming more important by the minute. That thing is going
to be very hard to effectively attack, much less to get rid of
permanently."

"We have to
find some way to probe the fungus," Kit insisted. "That's the only
way we'll know what is and isn't programmed into the individual
spores. It doesn't seem possible to do anything! We can't burn the
whole surface of the planet to get those spores. We don't have
enough floaters in the empire to find them all. We can't poison
them, we can't use a bacteria or virus. This is unbelievable!"