Case of Conscience by James Blish Read Free Book Online Page B

by a short time-our whole people goes to the seashores. There, with the men to protect them from predators, the women wade out to swimming depth, and the children are born."
    "In the sea?" Ruiz-Sanchez said faintly.
    "Yes, in the sea. Then we all return, and resume our other affairs until the next mating season."
    "But-but what happens to the children?"
    "Why, they take care of themselves, if they can. Of course many perish, particularly to our voracious brother the great fish-lizard, whom for that reason we kill when we can. But a majority return home when the time comes."
    "Return? Chtexa, I don't understand. Why don't they drown when they are born? And if they return, why have we never seen one?"
    "But you have," Chtexa said. "And you have heard them often. Can it be that you yourselves do not—ah, of course, you are mammals; that is doubtless the difficulty. You keep your children in the nest with you; you know who they are, and they know their parents."
    "Yes," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "We know who they are, and they know us."
    "That is not possible with us," Chtexa said. "Here, come with me; I will show you."
    He arose and led the way out into the foyer. Ruiz-Sanchez followed, his head whirling with surmises.
    Chtexa opened the door. The night, the priest saw with a subdued shock, was on the wane; there was the faintest of pearly glimmers in the cloudy sky to the east. The multifarious humming and singing of the jungle continued unabated. There was a high, hissing whistle, and the shadow of a pterodon drifted over the city toward the sea. Out on the water, an indistinct blob that could only be one of Lithia's sailplaning squid broke the surface and glided low over the oily swell for nearly sixty yards before it hit the waves again. From the mud flats came a hoarse barking.
    "There," Chtexa said softly. "Did you hear it?"
    The stranded creature, or another of its kind—it was impossible to tell which—croaked protestingly again.
    "It is hard for them at first," Chtexa said. "But actually the worst of their dangers are over. They have come ashore."
    "Chtexa," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Your children—the lung-fish?"
    "Yes," Chtexa said. "Those are our children."

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V
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    In the last analysis it was the incessant barking of the lung-fish which caused Ruiz-Sanchez to stumble when Agronski opened the door for him. The late hour, and the dual strains of Cleaver's illness and the subsequent discovery of Cleaver's direct lying, contributed. So did the increasing sense of guilt toward Cleaver which the priest had felt while walking home under the gradually brightening, weeping sky; and so, of course, did the shock of discovering that Agronski and Michelis had arrived some time during the night while he had been neglecting his charge to satisfy his curiosity.
    But primarily it was the diminishing, gasping clamor of the children of Lithia, battering at his every mental citadel, all the way from Chtexa's house to his own.
    The sudden fugue lasted only a few moments. He fought his way back to self-control to find that Agronski and Michelis had propped him up on a stool in the lab and were trying to remove his mackintosh without unbalancing him or awakening him—as difficult a problem in topology as removing a man's vest without taking off his jacket. Wearily, the priest pulled his own arm out of a mackintosh sleeve and looked up at Michelis.
    "Good morning, Mike. Please excuse my bad manners."
    "Don't be an idiot," Michelis said evenly. "You don't have to talk now, anyhow. I've already spent much of tonight trying to keep Cleaver quiet until he's better. Don't put me through it again, please, Ramon."
    "I won't. I'm not ill; I'm just tired and a little overwrought."
    "What's the matter with Cleaver?" Agronski demanded. Michelis made as if to shoo him off.
    "No, no, Mike, it's a fair question. I'm all right, I assure you. As for Paul, he got a dose of glucoside poisoning when a plant spine stabbed him this afternoon. No, it's yesterday