The screen lit, filled with print. The Grad read, "Moby is a whalesized creature with a vast mouth and vertical cheek slots that are porous, used as filters. It feeds by flying through clouds of insects. Length:

seventy meters. Mass: approx eight hundred metric tons. One major eye. Two smaller eyes, better protected and probably near-sighted for close work, on either side of a single arm. It stays near ponds or cottoncandy jungles. It prefers to be spinning, for stability and to watch for predators, since there is no safe direction in the free-fall environment.

Moby avoids large creatures and also shies from our CARMs. When attacked it fights like Captain Ahab: its single arm is tipped with four fingers, and the fingers are tipped with harpoons grown like finger

~

dave glanced over his shoulder. They had a side view of the flying mouth. Despite the swarm of insects near the raft, it was going around them. "That?"

"I'd think so."

"Carms? Captain Ahab? Whale-sized?"

"I don't know what any of that means."

"Doesn't matter, I guess. So. It's timid, and it eats bugs, not citizens.

Doesn't sound like a threat."

"And that is why you need a Scientist. Without the cassettes you wouldn't know anything about it."

"Maybe," said Gavving, "we don't want it to go around us."

He explained, stumbling a little. Nobody laughed. Maybe they were too thirsty. dave studied the massive bug-eater, pursed his lips, nodded.

Clave stood as Minya posed him, gripping the steel bow in his left hand, drawing the bowstring halfway back toward his cheek. It felt awkward. Instead of one of Minya's mini-harpoons, a meter and a half of his own harpoon protruded before him.

The moby was watching him. He waited until the creature's spin put the major eye on its far side. "Throw the line," he said.

Gavving hurled the coiled line toward the moby. Clave let it unroll for a moment, then sent the harpoon after it.

The harpoon wobbled in flight, until the trailing line dragged it straight again. With the steel bow and Clave's muscles to propel it, the massive harpoon might have flown as far as the moby. It didn't. It didn't even come close.

"Reel it in and coil the line," he told Alfin. To the others he said,

"Arrows. Put some arrows in the beast. Get it mad. Get its attention." The Grad's arrow went wide, and dave stopped him from wasting

another. Gavving's and Minya's were flying true, and each had fired another when Clave said, "Stop. We want it mad, not scared, not injured. Grad, how timid is that thing likely to be?"

"I read you everything I know."

Class4fiedl The first chance he got, Clave was going through all of the

information on all of those "cassettes." He'd make the Grad read them to him.