“That’s not going to help anything, you know,” she said.

“Maybe not, little girl, but it does wonders for my primitive, ignorant mind!” He booted it again.

“Oh, act your age, Captain! I . . .” She paused, looked past him.

“Well, don’t stop now. What . . .?”

He turned and stared in the same direction.

A considerable distance off, a small figure standing in a boat was flailing its arms frantically at the air. Towering on two sides of the figure, like the walls of a canyon, were two night-black nightmare shapes not quite as big as a pair of good-sized shuttlecraft. Their descent was graceful, almost ballet-like. Unconsciously, Mal had slipped an arm around Kitten’s waist. This time she didn’t move it.

“Was that a scream, there?” Her voice was even, but there was the slightest tremor to it. She was remembering an earlier time on another island.

“I think so. There! An explosion?”

“Maybe. Maybe . . .”

They waited anxiously. The halcyon sea recovered. The small boat was gone.

Needless to say, the small figure was too.

Kitten let out a long breath. “Well, I guess it wasn’t a very good idea after all.” She slipped gently out of his grasp and peered over the twisted railing of the skimmer.

“I think we ought to try and wade off the reef to the island proper. We can come back for blankets and supplies. It’s bound to be warmer inland than out on these wrecks. Besides, they’re liable to be pulled off the reef when the tide comes in. I don’t fancy being dumped into the surf at 2 a.m.” She slipped easily over the edge, hung by her fingers for a moment and dropped lightly into the shallow water. Her knees bent as she took the impact.

A tiny portion of the entity that was the Vom reacted to a foreign ingestion. A minute portion of the food did something odd to a few cells. The strangeness was communicated to the Vom-mind. The reaction extended. A group of cells were suddenly disoriented. At their center, neural deracination took place. Idly, then more attentively, finally in a state of real concern, the Vom sought to isolate the farrago. Some cells were by-passed and not affected. Others were . . . not harmed, but disoriented on an increasingly massive scale. They became incapable of performing their proper functions.

Synaptic connections were deliberately broken in an attempt to seal off the infection. The attempt failed. Had the difficulty been enzootic, the Vom might have controlled it. But it seemed to strike at random points, unpredictably. The difficulties this caused were not irreparable, but at the height of battle they were a disaster. A small portion of the Vom-mind was forced to shut down. The creature’s power was noticeably weakened. The Guardian-Machine and the Other sensed it, pressed harder.

A whole quadrant of projection cells died before they could be shuttered down. The Vom quivered in pain, sending huge waves crashing across nearby islands, smashing through the brush and sweeping away small lives.