H.M. Hoover - Lost Star by H. M. Hoover

blue feather pants hurried off with its booty, the other wortles giving chase.
    "It's not a very good sandwich," Lian called after them. "But compared to the taste of beetles, you may like it."
    She sat there to finish the fruit drink, and before long the wortles were straggling back. Liquids apparently held no charms for them. They stared at her
    awhile, then began to yawn great frog-mouth yawns. One by one they closed their eyes and dozed in the sun. Seeing them was very suggestive. On this revised time schedule an afternoon nap seemed an excellent idea and the lush grass an inviting bed. But remembering the beetles and Buford, she went to her room to sleep.
    When Dr. Farr woke her, the sun was low and her room glowed with diffused pink light. "Would you care to walk down to the river and watch the lumpies swim?" he said. "I admit it's not exciting, but we take our entertainment where we can on an expedition."
    She glanced at her watch. "Do we have time before dinner?" She was very hungry.
    "Dinner is fashionably late here. It fills up a long evening."
    They followed a switchback path down through the bushes on the hillside past a series of burrows where the wortle colony lived. Below, some of the staff was already sitting on the rocks. The sound of a miniature landslide from the sandy bluff caused Lian to look back to see a lone tolat coming down the hill. The tolat's eyes were erect to see over the bushes.
    "Shall we wait for it?" she asked Dr. Farr. "To be polite? It's all by itself, and it might like company."
    "Very well," he said agreeably. "But I doubt if the gesture will be appreciated. Tolats are very different from you and me."
    She interpreted the remark as fact. The tolat caught up to them as they stood waiting for it. It swerved past without speaking, without so much as a glance at them, and went on down the path as if they were not there. Seeing her puzzled expression, Dr. Farr said, "It was a kind thought, Lian. By human standards. But by tolat standards, our colleague was not rude."
    "It could at least say good evening."
    Dr. Farr smiled. "To a tolat that is an unessential remark and a foolish waste of time. I said good evening to one on a night when it was raining—it promptly went to its superior to question my mental fitness."
    The lumpies, some sixty of them, swam from a gravel sandbar a short distance away from the rocks. For the first time Lian saw they came in all ages. She was going to remark aloud on that and stopped herself; of course they had young. But it pleased her to see it nonetheless. The two of them sat down to watch.
    "How do you tell male from female?"
    "We can't," said Dr. Scott, who sat nearby. "They all look alike. Only another lumpie knows."
    Almost the entire expedition crew was watching the creatures, envying them the pleasure of the river. Swimming in untreated water was off limits to the staff. There was always the danger of foreign parasites that might cause exotic illnesses as yet undiagnosed and untreatable by preprogrammed medical computers.
    To see a lumpie swim was to see the creature in a different concept. The water turned them into creatures of grace. They looked like seals in the river, plump and sleek and fast. Heads out and up, rear legs tight together, arms paddling, forelegs balancing and guiding like flippers, they played tag and rolled and arabesqued over and over. And it was an entertaining performance.
    "Who named them lumpies?" Lian asked after watching their water acrobatics. "It's a very derogatory name. I think they're beautiful."
    Several staff members laughed.
    Dr. Scott spoke up. "I think they are, too, once you get used to them. Lumpie is an ancient provincialism from the mining areas of the North American Midwest. I believe it referred to the poor who scavenged lumps of coal in and around the mines, coal the machinery could not recover or wasted. Inadequate diet often made these people obese and rather dull-witted. The term has come down through the