"What's a pee aitch dee?"
"That's being a doctor. I'm an ecologist—that means I deal with everything alive, and the way it all works in with climate and geography. I can use any kind of data. I have only six months until Gorbals comes again to make my survey and report. If I fumble away my doctorate, and I'm twenty-three already...." Cole knitted shaggy red eyebrows in worry.
"Well hell, Doc, I can tell you things like, it's got four moons and only one whopper of a continent and it's low grav, and the forest there you won't believe even when you see it—"
"I need to know about stompers. Bidgrass Company wants Belconti U. to save them from extinction, but they didn't say what the threat is. They sent travel directions, a visa and passage scrip for just one man. And I only had two days for packing and library research, before I had to jump to Tristan in order to catch this ship. I've been running in the dark ever since. You'd think the Bidgrass people didn't really care."
"Price of stomper egg what it is, I doubt that," the cook said, scratching his fat jaw. "But for a fact, they're shipping less these days. Must be some kind of trouble. I never saw a stomper, but they say they're big birds that live in the forest."
"You see? The few old journal articles I did find, said they were flightless bird-homologs that lived on the plains and preyed on the great herds of something called darv cattle."
"Nothing but forest and sea for thousands of miles around Bidgrass Station, Doc. Stompers are pure hell on big long legs, they say."
"There again! I read they were harmless to man."
"Tell you what, you talk to Daley. He's cargo officer and has to go down with each tender trip. He'll maybe know something can help you."
The cook turned away to inspect his ovens. Cole put down his cup and clamped a freckled hand over his chin, thinking. He thought about stomper eggs, New Cornwall's sole export and apparently, for five hundred years, its one link with the other planets of Carina sector. Their reputedly indescribable flavor had endeared them to gourmets on a hundred planets. They were symbols of conspicuous consumption for the ostentatious wealthy. No wonder most of the literature under the New Cornwall reference had turned out to be cookbooks.