Cole was already reaching ... lying in his stateroom and he was the bunk cradling a taut, messianic body flaming with imageless dreams. He dreamed himself asleep and slept himself into shamed wakefulness needing coffee.
It was ship-night. Cole walked through dimmed lights to the galley and carried his cup of hot black coffee to main control, where he found Daley on watch, lounging against the gray enamel computer.
"I feel like a fool," Cole said.
"You're a martyr to science, Doc. Which reminds me, Cookie told me you got questions about Bidgrass Station."
"Well yes, about stompers. What's wiping them out, what's their habitat and life pattern, oh anything."
"I learned quick not to ask about stompers. I gather they're twenty feet high or so and they're penned up behind a stockade. I never saw one."
"Well dammit! I read they couldn't be domesticated."
"They're not. Bidgrass Station is in a clearing the New Cornish cut from sea to sea across a narrow neck of land. On the west is this stockade and beyond it is Lundy Peninsula, a good half-million square miles of the damndest forest ever grew on any planet. That's where the stompers are."
"How thickly settled is this Lundy Peninsula?"
"Not a soul there, Doc. The settlement is around Car Truro on the east coast, twelve thousand miles east of Bidgrass. I never been there, but you can see from the air it isn't much."