The scouts of Selan's Independent Fleet, who had first looked this
planet over and decided to call it Luscious, had selected a name,
Trigger thought, which probably would stick. Because that was what it
was, at least in the area where they were camping.
She rolled over from her side to her face and gave herself a push away
from the rock she'd been regarding contemplatively for the past few
minutes. Feet first, she went drifting out into a somewhat deeper
section of Plasmoid Creek.
None of it was very deep. There were pools here and there, in the
stretch of the creek she usually came to, where she could stand on her
toes in the warm clear water and, arms stretched straight up, barely
tickle the surface with her finger tips. But along most of the stretch
the bigger rocks weren't even submerged.
She came sliding over the sand to another rock, turned on her back and
leaned up against the rock, blinking at sun reflections along the water.
Camp was a couple of hundred yards down the valley, its sounds cut off
by a rise of the ground. The Commissioner's ship was there, plus a half
dozen tents, plus a sizable I-Fleet unit with lab facilities which
Selan's outfit had loaned Mantelish for the duration. There were some
fifteen, twenty people in all about the camp at the moment. They knew
she was loafing around in the water up here and wouldn't disturb her.
Strictly speaking, of course, she wasn't loafing. She was learning how
to listen to herself think. She didn't feel she was getting the knack of
it too quickly; but it was coming. The best way seemed to be to let go
mentally as much as possible; to wait without impatience, really to
more-or-less listen quietly within yourself, as if you were looking
around in some strange forest, letting whatever wanted to come to view
come, and fade again, as something else rose to view instead. The main
difficulty was with the business of relaxing mentally, which wasn't at
all her natural method of approaching a problem.
But when she could do it, information of a kind that was beginning to
look very interesting was likely to come filtering into her awareness.
Whatever was at work deep in her mind--and she could give a pretty fair
guess at what it was now--seemed as weak and slow as the Psychology
Service people had indicated. The traces of its work were usually faint
and vague. But gradually the traces were forming into some very definite
pictures.
Lazing around in the waters of Plasmoid Creek for an hour or so every
morning had turned out to be a helpful part of the process. On the
flashing, all-out run to Luscious, subspace all the way, with the
Commissioner and Quillan spelling each other around the clock at the
controls, the transmitters clattering for attention every half hour, the
ship's housekeeping had to be handled, and somebody besides Mantelish
needed to keep a moderately beady eye on the Ermetyne, she hadn't even
thought of acting on Pilch's suggestion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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