To Save a World by Marion Zimmer Bradley Page B

from its protective coating of impervious plastic. It looked like a grayish dust with black flecks. It too is alive, she thought: Well, that is the way of life. New times—and new predators.
    Which will survive? Can I load the dice strongly enough? This —she fingered the living soil of Darkover— or this .
    She emptied the grayish black, evil-smelling dust into the soil; covered it; fastidiously brushed the dust from her long fingers. She walked back toward the camp.
    A picture rose in her mind; the crystal black virus working under the ground, against all the creeping things, worms, nematodes, all the things that make a soil live; spreading, growing, reseeding itself to make a dying soil even more barren.
    What would I have done to those who poisoned my forests?
    Why should I have done anything? We no longer had need of our forests. But on the other hand I need shed no tears for those who came after us. If it is their turn to be swept away—well, they will go as we went.
    She checked off a mental list.
    Telepaths.
    Forests.
    Soil.
    Ocean? No. The population which remains must be fed somehow. Leave the ocean alone. In any case it is not much used now, and as food supplies decline, the movement of men from the forests to the oceans will cause enough social disruption in itself. So the very existence of an untapped ocean resource will work for me; it's only necessary to make the people demand the technology which will open up the ocean to exploring and mining."
    She moved slowly back toward the camp. A whiff of sweet-smelling familiar smoke from the campfire came to her, with a smell of cooking food. She saw Menella moving around the fire with her companion, her own assistants watching the girls; but oddly without desire, she realized. The Free Amazons puzzled her a little. They seemed to have the trick of coexisting with men without arousing either desire or resentment, as if at will they could become men . . . .
    — Dangerous ground. Don't think along those lines!
    The effort to turn off a recurrent, dangerous train of thought blanked her face almost to automatism. She reached up, not thinking, and brought down a handful of leaves and buds which, in the springtime rains, were expanding into down-filled pods. Her hands moving slowly, by old habit, she stripped the pods to their soft fibers and her long fingers twisted, gently, relentlessly, them into a soft thread.
    Still spinning the soft fiber between her hands she walked into the camp; suddenly, realizing what she was doing, she crumpled the thread and threw it away, and walked to the fire.
    She asked, deliberately jolly, "Whatever's cooking smells good. When do we eat?"

 
     
CHAPTER SIX
     
     
    THEY HAD issued a hospital uniform—the white synthetic smock with the red and blue caduceus of Terran Medic and two small stars on the sleeve, indicating service on two planets—to David Hamilton, and he was surprised at how much better it made him feel. Among other things, it meant that he melted into nearly complete anonymity anywhere on the spaceport or in the HQ or hospital buildings; just another Medic on the staff. It also gave him unquestioned access to any testing equipment he might want, without the need to route his requisition through Jason Allison.
    He hadn't yet been outside the hospital building, even though Regis Hastur had offered, most cordially, to show them the city and he knew that Missy and Conner and Rondo had all taken advantage of the invitation.
    Because of this, he had not seen any of his fellow members of the project that day, and had spent the day going over the data from the physical examinations, with the final startling revelation that Missy was a chieri. Was she too a functional hermaphrodite? He realized that without being aware of it he had from the beginning thought of Missy as "she," although his early confusion about Keral's gender had been only partially resolved. Now, at a table apart in the cafeteria, he still held the comparison