Welladay was indeed a watery world, Shahanna thought as the day side of the planet turned under her ship. Good thing that explorers were obstinate creatures; otherwise the hidden riches of this stormy world would have gone unnoticed.

She checked her location visually as the ship's computer began to print landing instructions.

"I'm not that stupid," she murmured, noticing the turbulence of several storm centers that blossomed in the northern hemisphere of Welladay. She tapped out Locate for the Rib Reefs, the rocky spine of the planet that stretched from north to south and broadened into the Blade, the one permanent installation on the watery world. "At sunrise, hmmm? Wouldn't you know. And right in the path of one storm. Well, let's beat it in." She began to punch out landing coordinates.

At that moment, the proximity alarm rang. She hit the Enlarge toggle of the screen control just in time to see two telltale blips—the small satellite that ought to be in orbit near her, and the larger one that certainly ought not to be in Welladan skies. Suddenly her ship rocked with the violence of a direct hit. Shahanna remained conscious just long enough to hit the survival button on the armrest.

Odis planted his flippered foot on the young whale's blunt snout and shoved.

"This is no time for nuzzling, nuisance," he roared, as the force of his thrust sent the baby backfinning. Whales liked to be talked to—roared at—though there was little chance they understood more than the tone of voice. Some fishmen denied even that much comprehension. "Almost finished now, Mother," Odis bellowed reassuringly at the massive creature whose thyroid glands he was tapping.

The indicator dial of the long-beaked suction pump reached the red area, whereupon, with more deftness than others gave him credit for, Odis broke the connection and sealed the beaker. He closed the tap mouth and noted the date of this tap in paint-pen above the metal insert. Old tap-dates had faded but the new paint would glow for the three months necessary for a mature whale to generate more vital radioactive iodine in its thyroid gland.

Odis touched the zoom button on the drone's remote control, then scrawled the whale's registry number beside the luminous date on the beaker before holding it for the drone to record. That formality observed, he scratched the female's rubbery upper lip where the scales had been torn. What kind of a fight had she been in? Well, at least the wound had healed.

Once again her child tried to nose Odis' fishboat out of the way. Chuckling over the creature's antics, Odis climbed up the boat's ventral fin and over the back to the hatch. Ducking below, he stored the precious beaker of radioactive iodine in the chemfoam-protected carrier.

Back on the fishboat's snub-nosed brow, Odis frowned at the sight of the school of whales beginning to melt away from the neighborhood. He had been out since early morning, tracking them down, and spent a good hour easing into the herd before he had tried to tap one. First, he'd pounded affectionately on the snouts of the mammals he knew as well by scar marks as by registration code. Two had shied away from him so wildly that he began to worry that this group had already been milked by that fardling pirate. When he was finally able to draw alongside the old blue-scarred cow and do a light tap, he had decided that their weather-sense was all that was making them skittish.

Between the freakish storms of Welladay and the fardling pirates, Odis growled to himself as he squinted toward the darkening horizon, they might as well pull the plug on operations here. He frowned. Where else would he find a world more to his liking? A task more suited to him, a man born and bred on a high-gravity planet? Or creatures big enough not to suffer from his inordinate strength?

Pleased with himself, he stepped on the release for the outboard panel and began to beam toward Shoulder Blade for a weather report.

The instrumentation was on a pole that looked like a colorful Christmas tree when it was lit up—which was now. It was recording various local indications of the weather. But when he tried to reach Okker in his harbormaster's lookout at the Eye of the lagoon, the beam crackled with interference. So the easterly storm had hit them. Even with a band of weather satellites, one couldn't always be sure of weather on Welladay.

Odis tagged the playback in case Okker had broadcast while he was tapping the whale. He whistled as he listened to Okker's sour report of mach-storm warnings, the advice that all vessels return to Shoulder at cruising depth and hold at shelf-level until recall– the local storm over Shoulder seemed to be only a squall. The warning was repeated twice with additional ominous details on the mach-storm's wind velocity, estimated drift, and duration.

Odis grunted. He could just imagine Okker's disgust at relaying such a message. Tallav, the maggoty Planetary Administrator, had probably been at Okker's elbow. With the exercise of tolerance, Odis could understand the reasons for Tallav's ineffectualness. A meek man, he was not suited to a blustery, stormy world like Welladay, even if affairs proceeded normally. But Tallav was caught in a fladding bind. Someone was pirating the main source of Welladan wealth so that no substantial revenue had been garnered from the whales in months. Result: Supplies could not be paid for, and credit had been suspended. What with the depredations caused by pirates and various natural catastrophes, only three fishboats were operable. Requests from legitimate sources for the priceless radioactive iodine had become demands: Urgent! Top Priority. Gray phage was endemic and periodically epidemic. The only specific vaccine was a dilute suspension of the radioactive iodine. In addition to the risk of tapping to death the few whales they could now find, Welladan fishmen were constricted by lack of operable craft.

The two best fishmen, Odis and Murv—a newcomer on a Debt-Contract—had been sent out in an attempt to find and tap enough of the valuable substance to make up at least one critically needed shipment. Whatever Odis and Murv could get today, therefore, was crucial. Fleetingly, Odis wished they could charge a hardship premium, but the price of the iodine had been fixed by Federation officials who evidently were too concerned with other crises to pay attention to repeated Welladan requests to investigate piracy.

So here was timid Tallav, calling the fishmen back because there was a mach-storm brewing in the west. Odis ran a quick check of the instrumentation on the approaching storm, now boiling black and ochre on the horizon.

As he evaluated the readings, he maneuvered his ship toward the nearest adult whale. He could get one more tap completed before he would have to duck and run home. Fishboats were sturdily designed for Welladan waters, to race on hydrofoils with the scaly spawn of her seas, to plunge trenchward with the whales, to endure the savagery of a sudden squall, to wallow, whalelike, within the school itself without being attacked by a nervous male.

He coasted along the port side of the mammal, rather pleased that the creature was not shying off as did its schoolmates. The painted code above the tapvent had faded completely, so Odis toyed with the idea of getting at least a beaker and a half, as he made his preparations to tap.

It was then that he noticed the strange color of the scales. At first, he thought it was caused by the light —the sky had already changed with the approach of the storm. As he looked around, there wasn't another whale in sight; they'd all raced away, north and south, deep from the storm center. This whale wasn't moving because it was close to death.

Cursing with pent-up anger, Odis stomped below, retrieved the beaker he had just drawn, and prepared to pump the contents into the sick mammal. Would it be enough? Was the gesture merely a waste of fluid now—fluid as precious to the life of Welladay as to this mammal? Odis refused to consider this a waste. In an angry scrawl he painted the date and the circumstances on the whale, adding a crude skull and crossbones.