Part 30 (2/2)
”What's the significance?”
”I've been through the lists of what the first search teams found when they arrived here to hunt for evi- dence. There are fragments of everything you can imagine, but no Teallin. Yet the town was just getting ready to move, according to its fisher survivors. After three months of anchoring here.”
”It's a luxury item,” Mataroreva said interestedly.
”Like most of the foodstuffs that are exported from Cachalot. You can extract about a kilo of meat from one mollusk. That may not sound like much, but the
stuff has a strong, smoky flavor. It's combined with other foods, mixed to give them spice. And they'd been gathering it for three months?”
Merced tapped the viewer screen. ”Two s.h.i.+ploads packed for transfer at Mou'anui. Several thousand kilos. Just a footnote in the regular records, mixed in with all their other work and their own food imports, medicines, power packs, and other general inventory.
Just another statistic.”
”So that's it,” Mataroreva muttered.
”So what's it?” Rachael wondered. ”Somebody put it together for me, please.” She looked apologetic.
I'm afraid I wasn't listening too closely.” She tried to hide her neurophon behind her.
”Teallin is perishable. It's packed in polymultiene containers, vacuum-sealed until it can be transported to its eventual processing destination.”
”Oh-oft/ Vacuum-packed?”
”Not only that,” Mataroreva continued, ”but poly- multiene is a chemical relative of the polymeric ma- terial that the towns themselves were built upon.
When the search skimmers out from Mou'anui arrived here, they found thousands of fragments of the stuff, from finger-sized all the way up to square meters of town-raft. And a lot of other related, unsinkable ma- terial.”
”I see,” Rachael said.
”I've got to check this.” He tamed, hurried up- ward. Moments later they could hear him mumbling into the s.h.i.+p's communicator. The signal would go out instantly via satellite relay to the Administration Cen- ter on Mou'anui.
”If this proves out,” Cora said, ”is it sufficient basis for us to declare that a human agency was responsible for all the destruction? Any local life thorough enough to devour every human inhabitant would only natur- ally consume all the available food it could get its teeth into.”
130 CACHALOT.
”But we found packaged foodstuffs ourselves,” Ra- chael countered. ”Some were exposed to the water and decomposing.”
”I know. And the Teallin was vacuum-sealed, too.
I don't see any attacking creature or creatures being able to detect the food inside such containers. Yet it's all gone. You'd expect that the previous searchers would have found some of it.”
”We're forgetting one thing,” Rachael reminded her. ”All the attacks took place during a storm. Even a mild storm could have dispersed any floating debris quite rapidly.”
”Yes, but every single container?”
Mataroreva rejoined them, glanced at each in turn.
”They didn't find anything?” Cora asked.
”On the contrary, they did. Polymultiene vacuum containers, each about a meter square.”
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