Poems are Made by Fools Like Me

1.

Very few planet-testing assignments are worth reporting on— except, of course, for the tech reports I do have to make. Those are what the Comity pays me very poorly for, and they are still worth writing. With any luck, they will not only make me a pittance I couldn’t possibly learn to live on, but they will actually save lives, anywhere from one to an entire shipload, or even more if the place reports out as uninhabitable—uninhabitable despite, of course, the wonderful descriptions everybody was so pleased with when the drone ships checked in.

Let me explain how planet-testing works. If you already know this, skip ahead to the double-space, or the beep, or the sunburst, depending on how you’re getting this. If you don’t, though—and a lot of people don’t, because they have the idea that it’s like the stuff on 3V with the heroic Survivor and his twin blasters and his laconic swagger, or whatever the hell that is:

The drones come first. Drones are big awkward ships that go out to where a new planet is supposed to be. They go out by, or through, or during, space-four, which means that every once in a while we lose one. God alone knows where a lost drone might show up, and one of these days we’re going to find one crossing the (space-four) path of a ship with something alive in it, and some poor bastard at Colonization, who may not have been anywhere close to having been born when the damned drone set out, is going to be fired.

The ones we don’t lose end up where they are supposed to end up, and usually, to my continuing surprise, the planet is really there, and the drone takes a lot of readings from an orbit around the place that is not supposed to be detectable from planet-level. For all I know, it really isn’t; I have never tested for it.

The readings tell Colonization what the atmosphere is like (in magnificent detail), whether there is noticeable EM radiation of any sort (and what sort, and does it have patterns we can distinguish, and does it localize for specific points on the planet, and does it vary unusually with local night and day for any point on the surface—and much, much more), whether there is detectable animal—or vegetable—or mineral, I suppose—life down there on the ground, in the water or in the atmosphere, what the local sun’s spectrum is like in very close and agonizing detail, what planetary temperatures and visibilities are likely to be at a staggering variety of latitudes and longitudes during the planetary year… and so on, and so on, and so on. As all this is squirted in a single beam back by space-four (well, a triple beam, because beams get lost even more often than drones), a magnificent array of informative data comes back to Colonization very, very quickly, and Colonization can then make up its mind what to do next.

It always makes up its mind the same way: it calls me. Or if not me, one of the other people in my trade (and there are not many people in my trade, because there is plenty of room at the bottom, but a good deal of it is room in rather small boxes, under headstones).

It wants to know whether the new planet is habitable.

Didn’t the drones tell it that? you may ask, and the answer is no, they can’t tell it that, and I’m sorry to have to advise you that you have asked a stupid question.

The drones tell us only what the bare scientific facts are, even though there are a hell of a lot of bare scientific facts. These facts enable me (or some other poor bastard of a Survivor) to request, and usually obtain, a great deal of equipment when I set out, some of it actually right for the parts of the planet I’m going to be on: sunshades for worlds that are brilliantly, hotly lit, lots of ointments and small-field generators for worlds that are rich in muck and spongy growths of one sort or another, large-sized weaponry for worlds that appear to have large-sized, oppressive (and unintelligent) animal life, and so on.

What I do with whatever stuff I have brought, of course, is set up housekeeping. My job is to live on the planet for a standard year (not a planetary year; this would in theory be a good idea, but some planetary years are fifteen standard years long, and we would all be bored by then. Or, of course, dead). When that year is up, a drone ship comes looking for me, and I climb aboard, and report back to Colonization—which at that point can have a fairly good idea not whether the place is theoretically and scientifically livable, but whether human beings can live on it. If you think these two things are the same thing, you have a positively awesome faith in the practical value of theory.

I am also equipped, at the end of my year, to tell Colonization what a colonist actually does have to bring along. It is seldom what the scientific data assured me I had to bring, and the difference is that the new list works.

Sometimes, in brief fact, the planet does get inhabited by human beings, and gets quickly stitched into History, which means that a lot of other human beings hear a lot of inaccurate, if stirring, stories about it. But the story of my standard year wandering around the place looking for trouble is, as I’ve said, seldom worth telling except to Colonization. Once in a while—Rasmussen will serve as a fine example, if you know the place, with its biting saurians and its very odd multiple society—the story is simply not printable, not even today.

But just once…

I was living in Florida at the time. Florida is on Earth, and it isn’t called Florida anymore (most of it is now called Under Water) but, against challenging odds, a little chunk of island is still around to be lived on. It was once called Key West, though whether it was shaped like a key or whether it had once been thought of as the Key to West Something-or-other I cannot tell you, and I was living there for a very sentimental reason. I had fallen in love again.

What I had fallen in love with, for the fifteenth or twentieth time, wasn’t human, or even animal: it was a sort of dessert concoction called Key Lime pie. Pies haven’t been fashionable for forty or fifty years, and it’s a shame, because a good pie—apple, mince, or even custard—is a work of art, possibly a little too Primitive for fashionable folk, but of course that leaves all the more pie for thee and me, if thou art a sensible soul, and if thou artn’t, go hunt up a Key Lime pie recipe and learn better.

Ordinary limes can be picked up anywhere, really, and so can the rest of the ingredients, but Key limes (limes from this Key of an island) arc specifically called for, and there are still some nicely flourishing lime trees on the place. As far as I know, I have been the only human inhabitant of Key West for at least the last thirteen years, and I go there—there’s a wood-and-metal house, parts of it still standing, that serves as my Key West Cabin—when I need Key lime pie again. It is lovely stuff, and it deserves an authentic setting if one can be provided.

I had planned a fairly good dinner one quiet evening, and my Totum and a couple of Robbies were doing the dull preparatory work (I allow them that, but the cooking, not to mention dishwashing and the like, is all mine; dishwashing, by the way, like solitaire or crossword puzzles, is a fine way of busying the mind a little without actually occupying it, and I have done some of my best thinking near hot, soapy water) while I watched the sunset. I have heard somewhere or other that sunsets in and around Key West were spectacular even before the Clean Slate War. For a brief while after that they must have been unbelievable, and they are still pretty good today, or tonight, or, in fact, whenever it is you’re reading—or hearing—or otherwise assimilating—this rambling report.

The dinner involved seafood, of course—what else, on a very small island?—and was to be topped off by Key Lime pie and coffee. Kona beans are usually a little too sweet to be used alone, but they work awfully well with that pie, and I had some good Kona along to grind just a bit later in the proceedings. I felt wholly at peace with myself, the Universe, and the cheerful prospect of nourishment, and when I heard the beep I thought for one second that it was my Totum telling me things were ready for the Master’s hand.

Unfortunately—

I do try never to turn down an assignment; that sort of behavior can give one a bad name, for some damned reason. And I did manage to sell the Colonization sahib who had managed to reach me on the idea that it would make no real difference if I reported to him some time the following morning, rather than in four hours, which would be, after all, fairly late in the evening even for Grand Forks, Idaho, where for some damned reason most of Colonization lives.

I told the fellow that I had to do a little research on the drone reports. God knows I did have to look them up. But I could have them beamed to me aboard my ship, en route, in the morning, and so I did.

I made an extra pie, to take with me and eat on the way to Tree.

I hereby swear and attest: the planet was officially named Tree. I have run into as many funny-sounding planetary names as anybody, I suppose, short of a galactic surveyor (one of my favorites is Copious, which seems to have been named by mistake; some bom damn fool thought it was an ancient-language word for Body—his name was Hubert Boddy, and he thought he’d back into History that way), but Tree hit a new sort of low. Its basic difficulty is that it is the fourth planet in the system, counting from either end (there are seven, and it’s in the middle), so you can’t get away from: Is that Four? No, dat’s Tree. There must be something better for Colonization to do than think up bad straight lines.

The place does have trees, though; I’ll give it that. The course bumps beamed onto my card gave me a trip time, through space-four, of nearly four days (though of course that doesn’t mean anything in terms of normal three-dimensional distance; it’s two days and a bit Earth-Mars, if you ever want to do that jump the hard way, and a couple of hours under two days to Alphacent, which is noticeably further away), and I spent my four days (once the pie was gone) reading drone reports, looking at drone pictures, and generally Droning. If the planet had one thing, it was certainly trees.

Not that they were Earth trees, of course—but they looked a lot closer to that model than anybody could have expected. They were tall things (four feet for teenies, fifty feet for big bastards, and everything in between added in, for sixty or seventy slightly different breeds of foliage) with branches and leaves—though the branches weren’t individual things but a sort of hard flattened twining material that thinned out toward the ends but never quite became fully unified. The leaves weren’t soft green chlorophyll contraptions, either; they were a sort of yellow-tan, very light in color for the most part, and much harder, it turns out, than leaves on Earth trees. They occurred in the thousands on every tree; the leaves were not only collection-plates for nourishment from solar energy (they were the point men for a sort of calcium bond system that worked instead of chlorophyll, but the details are thoroughly hairy, if you don’t mind), but collection-plates for small animals, of which there were millions upon millions.

The trees, or the leaves, emitted something—at that stage nobody had any idea what, since there are limits to the information even a drone ship can collect from orbit—that attracted small animals. Almost bonded to the actual leaves was a sort of translucent surface that rolled up quickly and digested the animals. Every tree its own king-sized, slightly odd, Venus flytrap.

But they looked a lot like Earth-normal trees from any reasonable distance—the color was something my eyes adjusted to easily enough—and they occurred in groves and stands and forests and jungles all over what seemed to be the main continent. The oddity, if you collect oddities, was that no single breed of tree dominated a grove, stand, forest, or jungle, for the most part—statistical flukes occurred, but they were obviously flukes; all the breeds existed happily, and in brotherly calm, everywhere on the planet. Brotherly calm, you understand, is something any Survivor is willing to cheer about.

The planet had six land masses for its trees, four of them a bit bigger, apiece, than Key West. The fifth was about the size of Macallan on Pupil III, if you know it—a little bigger than North America.

The sixth was the size of a really large continent. Tree had decided to go out of its way to show the visitor that it could grow continents in style, and shouldn’t be judged by pinched and early efforts. The big one was where most of the vegetable and animal life seemed to thrive—except for water creatures, of course, though the liquid that washed about three-fifths of the world wasn’t quite water any more than the air was quite Earth-normal air; it was breathable, it did not cause fits or dizziness or nausea, but its figures were just that little bit different, as expected; planets can be siblings, but not, as of right now, identical twins. Though you might not want to take any large bets on that for the next five or six worlds; who knows what the next one is going to be like?

And though there were predators and predatees in the water, as usual exchanging places with each bite, they could safely be left for a little later in my inquiries. My first job was figuring out how to live on land.

I had a portable house. Not a tent, not a jump back into the ship, but a jiffy-building that ran itself up in a hurry—and a good thing, too, because I don’t take my Totum and Robbies planet-testing with me, and I am just too damned lazy to build a log-cabin type of dwelling all by myself. It isn’t at all like dishwashing, and even less like fine cookery.

I had some weapons, too. The planet didn’t look as if it was about to toss up anything wildly dangerous—just the usual animals, more or less, most small and a few surprisingly large, with claws, teeth, serrated beaks, the occasional horn, and other expectable equipment.

Now, most animals, on any world, won’t eat totally unfamiliar things. The stuff might be poisonous. It might taste terrible. It might eat you right back.

But in amassing enough data to come to a decision that some one particular thing is really, totally unfamiliar, most animals will cause death, and great agony. Rather than give them the trouble of trying me out and deciding that I was not edible—a sheer waste of the animal’s time—I carried a variety of weaponry.

And some other things… No sense in running through a full inventory here and now.

So I set up my light housekeeping with heavy weapons, and began making the first, and most important check list: Things to Eat.

It really doesn’t matter if you’re perfectly safe—armed against all intruders, nicely supplied with oxygen and so forth—if there is nothing on the planet you can eat, and eat regularly and often. If that’s the fact, you’re not a colonist, you’re a tourist.

The drones had made some spot analyses not only of atmospheric components but of chemical properties of local animal and vegetable life. There were a few poisonous things, mostly among the plants (though there was one wondrous animal that looked a little like a giraffe with very, very long ears, which killed its prey by spitting a sort of chlorinated goo at it through a tubed tongue; Mother Nature gets exceptionally weird now and then, doesn’t she?), and as usual on almost any world there were a) trace elements missing, which colonists would have to supply either by growing things from elsewhere or by keeping factories of some sort busy, and b) trace elements added, which colonists would have to watch out for by diet regimens and by providing some sort of chelating process if needed to remove the stuff.

But those were minor difficulties, solvable on other worlds and therefore solvable on Tree. I had a good list of stuff it would be safe to eat, or stuff I could fairly easily make safe to eat, and I began considering cooking solutions.

These are seldom obvious. Some quite usual Earth foods are foods only if cooked, stored, buried, salted, scraped, or otherwise treated for lengths of time ranging from ten seconds to ten years. We’ve had millennia to figure out how to eat shark, or Jerusalem artichoke, and the human race could manage perfectly well, as far as health and even basic pleasure are concerned, if shark steaks and Jerusalem artichokes were both suddenly canceled from the Universe.

I had a year—a year that was going to be interrupted any number of times by urgencies I couldn’t predict—in which to figure out an entire Joy of Cooking for a new planet, with new animals and brand-new plants. It didn’t seem like enough time, but it never does. (And though it surprises 3V viewers no end, unless there are obvious danger flags up on a world, any Survivor’s first assignment is that same Joy of Cooking—obvious when you think about it, but lots and lots of people don’t think about it.)

But of course I hadn’t even dreamed of the interruptions yet. The first one took seventeen hours out of my life.

I was in my (jiffy-built) house. This was a single-room log-cabin arrangement, with a working kitchen using local fluid treated so as to become H₂0 with fewer trace elements, a working bathroom, same specs, and windows here and there made of nice unbreakable Glassex, and impervious, I had been told, to anything short of the end of the world. I was staring at a bunch of roots that looked a little like bulbous carrots and a little like deep-orange, helium-inflated corn, and wondering whether boiling or baking would be a good place to start. Late-afternoon sunlight, in what was this area’s fall, was coming through the windows, and I was surrounded by the small-animal, and occasionally large-animal, noises of the local forest.

I didn’t actually take notes on all this at the time, though I made plenty later on, but noticing details I’m not really noticing is one of the things I do best.

I had about decided on boiling, to start with-it takes less time, so if it doesn’t work I haven’t spent hours on it—and I stood up to find the pot I was going to put the damned things in.

Then I got up off the floor and watched the sunrise through my nice impervious Glassex windows.

I felt nothing. I mean, nothing that seemed connected to what had happened. In the first seconds I wasn’t sure just what had happened, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out: late afternoon, sunrise; standing up, lying down. The only difficulty was whether I’d been out for seventeen hours (the planet had a twenty-six hour day minus about a minute and a half) or for seventeen hours plus some multiple of twenty-six (less a minute and a half per twenty-six), and a quick check told me it had been seventeen.

There is such a thing as a body clock, very roughly: How hungry am I? and How stiff am I? and most of all How much do I need to take in some liquid, or to emit some liquid? Will give you a fair time check, at least in terms of multiples of twenty-six hours.

The noises outside were not noticeably different.

That bothered the hell out of me.

What got to me even more was that I had no idea why it bothered the hell out of me. I had no fixed notions about what Tree noises were like during an early morning, a late afternoon, or smack at noon on Christmas Day. I hadn’t been on the damned world long enough for that. But the back of my head had filed something that appeared to mean: noises should not be the same at these two points in time.

I could not figure out what it had filed, but I was not about to ignore it.

Did the noises have something to do with the seventeen hours I hadn’t been around for? Had they somehow caused the blackout? Were they in some way a response to the blackout?

I could go on for seventeen hours here and now, listing questions that might, or might not, have had useful answers. There is seldom any shortage of questions.

The one answer I did feel fairly sure of was the answer to the question: “Why am I still alive?” I was still alive because I had been nicely shut inside my jiffy-house log cabin when what-ever-it-was had come and got me. If unconsciousness was usually the prelude to being eaten (or at least taste-tested), some damned animal was in a very frustrated state, because he’d been unable to take off my large, unwieldy shell and get at me. Whatever had got me, it was something the jiffy-built house wasn’t impervious to, which was sad but in no way a complete surprise.

I spent some time sitting and staring out the window at the nice, peaceful-looking forest. Then I looked around, found the bulbous carrots (or helium-packed corn) on the floor near where I’d been, picked up the bunch, and found a pot to boil it in.

Boiled, the stuff tasted almost exactly like sawdust mixed with black pepper, not one of the tastes people eagerly seek. But fried, perhaps…

I sighed, and went to the door of the cabin. Outside, there were a lot of bunches of this particular root. I could pick one up easily and try frying it.

I could also walk right into some patient animal, wondering if the Possible Food Thing was ever going to come out of its big shell.

Well, that was also what I got paid for, silly as it sounded. I put the bunch of boiled stuff in my left hand, a slug gun in my right—slug guns make lots of noise, and frighten away animals you weren’t even aiming at— and opened the door with my deep-orange, bulbous left hand.

And nothing attacked me. Nothing even stood around looking disappointed.

Even the fairly ubiquitous small animals didn’t seem to be around; perhaps they were being properly small-animal cautious about the big construction that hadn’t been there the day before. It was, in fact, a thoroughly peaceful day in the forest. Any minute now and I would see Red Riding Hood starting off on her errand to Grandma Fricker’s House, or Handel and Grizzle looking for an edible witch. The place felt like that, sort of fairy-tale, and though I couldn’t have said why, it was, again, something I didn’t ignore.

Feelings are not facts. Once in a while they’re better; they show you where the facts are hiding.

Not just then, though.

I walked slowly away from my cabin—having remembered to shut the door, which self-locked and was keyed both to the palm of my hand and to the pore pattern of the tip of my tongue. (My suggestion—just in case I had to get in quickly, and had my hands occupied or missing.)

I tossed the boiled bunch of stuff away to my right, and I took seven steps. A patch of the same stuff was another three or four steps ahead of me.

Before I could take step eight I heard a very odd sound indeed; it almost wasn’t a sound. It was the faint echo of bacon sizzling somewhere on another planet.

The back of my head said, instantly: Beamer. I dropped flat on the ground, which at that point was covered with a sort of grass which looked, and felt, as if it had been made of pale yellow plastic buttons, several hundred of which dug the hell into me.

My head replayed the sound, and checked for direction. I had the impression it had been off to my left, and some distance away, whatever it had been; certainly the damned planet hadn’t evolved beamers to shoot at strangers with, so there must be some animal or plant which made a noise like a…

I was looking off to my left from my prone position, and there it was, a patch of button-grass burned nicely black, just as if by a beamer. About ten feet in front of my nose.

OK, I remember thinking with some irritation: who’s not playing fair out here? Who has come to this brand-new world with an old beamer?

And why, for God’s sake?

That was a question that had any number of possible answers. The least plausible was that some competing person or persons was trying to be a Survivor and underbid me for the job. There was no way I could make real sense out of that one; but ideas that began with: “Someone wanted a planet that wasn’t yet inhabited, and that wouldn’t kill him on the spot—for some purpose or other,” sounded a little more as if they could be heading for plausibility.

But a) Why was this someone shooting at me? and b) Where the hell was he, so I could shoot at him?

The answer to the first question isn’t: “Because he wants me dead.” The right answer has to tell me why, on a continent the size of some small planets, this fellow is within shooting range of me. Why is he not five thousand miles away doing whatever it is he’s planned on doing?

The answer to the second question sounded as if it might be simpler to find.

Off to my left. Within range of the burned button-grass. I tried looking without moving, getting a view out of the comer of my eye. There was a little wind blowing, and button-grass was moving slowly and unwillingly. I looked for any motion against the wind, and in a minute or so I saw some. I fired the slug gun without taking the time to notice that I was aiming it.

About seventeen animals screamed and panicked, all of them out of my line of sight and well into the trees. There was a lot of trampling, trumpeting, and pushing and shoving out there as everything tried to get out of the way of whatever had just made all that noise.

A slug gun will frighten animals you weren’t even aiming at. It will also cover a retreat by a human being— and just by the way, why was I assuming the being with the beamer was human?—who had missed with his first shot, but, all in all, not by very much.

Question three: Is he going to stop, turn, aim, and try for me again?

Answer: Those seventeen fleeing animals are still fleeing, and making the hell of a racket in the process. A calm, cool, collected fellow might just manage to stop, turn and aim in the face of a small stampede of unfamiliar animals, but he’d have to be a good bit better than I am to do it well.

If there are hand-weapon users a good bit better than I am, they belong to a club I have never heard of. I stood up, and I didn’t get shot at.

Slowly the screaming, trumpeting, trampling and so on faded into the distance. The normal sounds of the forest resumed, hesitatingly at first. I walked the remaining four steps, picked up a new fistful of bulbous orange whatevers, and took them back to my log cabin for frying.

Or possibly roasting.

Much later that day, it turned out that if you mashed the stuff into a pulp, and then removed the bits of husk or skin or whatever it was that held the globs of orange stuff together, you had something that would fry up pretty well, with an interesting taste of peppered cod. If you left the husk in the mix you had a sort of highly spiced glue, but with a little work a strainer would separate the bits out fairly well.

Recipe #1 for the joy of Tree’s cooking. I had spent a profitable day.

And I had spent a good deal of it— while working away in my kitchen area—wondering about my invisible assassin. There wasn’t much I could do about him actively (and “him” is of course a term of pure convenience; the term I actually used is not printable, so “him” will have to do for now), but maybe I could figure out a) what he thought he was doing, b) why he thought he was doing it, and c) where I could make an appointment with him to discuss a) and b).

His having arrived near me might, after all, have been pure coincidence. If that were the case, maybe he’d just shot at me out of panic—not expecting another drop-in anywhere near his own site. It’s easy to kick coincidence out of your thinking, but it isn’t bright; coincidences happen.

All the same, this seemed a coincidence the size of the damned continent, possibly the size of Tree itself. I filed it as a small possibility, and went on to wondering about other possibilities.

First: let’s suppose he wanted the planet to himself, and had to get rid of any intruders as rapidly as possible-had to cancel me out as soon as I turned up.

This seemed to require, at first, that he know about my arrival and landing, hurry to my landing area, and wait for me to emerge from my cabin.

Possible, again, but very, very unlikely; to know about my landing and to arrive that fast through quite a lot of Tree jungle, he’d have to have tracked my ship down somehow—in which case he’d have been able to arrive when I did, and he’d have shot at me before the jiffy-built cabin got jiffy-built. Why wait till the last minute?

But maybe, instead, he had detected the cabin being built, or some other sign of my arrival, just that little bit later. For all I knew the behavior of animals or trees gave him a due; it was perfectly possible that he knew the place better than I did then and there.

So he arrived as rapidly as he could, set up, and fired at me as soon as I came out.

Because he wanted the planet to himself. Because he needed the planet to himself. Because he hated me, Gerald Knave, Survivor, from some little adventure somewhere else, or from some previous lifetime. Because he enjoyed hunting, and hunting people was better sport than hunting orange bulbous vegetables, or even strange Tree animals, even if you limited yourself to the somewhat rare large types.

Because…

It was becoming obvious that I did not have the materials I was going to need to think with, and I was going to have to get some more materials somewhere.

It was going to interfere with my Joy of Cooking, but that was something I’d expected. Interrupted by urgencies I couldn’t predict… hadn’t I said that?

Well, I certainly hadn’t predicted an anonymous damned fool with a beamer. Who the hell would have?

The way to collect more facts, of course, was to make myself a target. But this is a job that really ought to be done with great care; I planned to be a target with a safe, well-protected bull’s-eye.

So.

I dug into my bag of tricks, feeling lucky that large animals usually call for a bit more in the way of equipment, all in all, than simply large guns. By the next morning I was about as ready as I was going to get.

I walked out into the little clearing around my log cabin—still no small animals, which seemed normal by then—and looked for food. Joy of Cooking still had to be put together, and it only made sense to start with the easy foods to get at—vegetables. Meat, which has to be run after and caught, could come a little later.

The bulbous orange things were, if not a solved problem, at least one recipe ahead of the rest. I looked around me, and found some large, tan buttons scattered among the pale-yellow ones that seemed to serve as a sort of grass, or ground cover, or icing on the planet’s dirt. These, I had been assured, were edible (in the largest sense: they would not quickly poison anybody), and though they looked somewhat tough, it might be that they were even edible raw. I grabbed up several handfuls, not moving quickly and not trying to move slowly, just ambling along in a thoughtful manner, as if I were doing my job while trying to remember the name of the Comity Vice-Assistant’s Assistant in Charge of Overcharging.

I wasn’t whistling, or humming, but I tried hard to look as if that was my basic mood. Given that I had been shot at the previous day, it would have been an insane mood for me to be in, but it’s interesting, in a way, to realize just how many people will cheerfully accept anybody’s insanity except their own.

I’d collected about as many Tender Buttons (copyright Gtde Stein, back before the Clean Slate War, though as far as I know she’d never been off-planet) as I could comfortably carry, and I ambled slowly back to my log cabin with the load, trying not to look either disappointed or expectant.

Six or seven steps from my door, I heard that teeny sizzle again, and dropped flat on another damned patch of pale yellow button grass. The stuff dug into me just as uncomfortably as before—this was a continent, or at least an area, where rolling around on the greensward, or yellowsward, was never going to be wildly popular—and this time he was shooting low and to his left. He was also, judging from the sound, shooting a different size and make of beamer, God alone knew why.

A sizable patch of buttons had turned dead-black, over there to my right; much larger beamer, check. I stayed flat, tracking back as well as I could out of the comer of my eye.

Much less wind today. No button movement.

Ten seconds of dead silence.

Buttons moving over there, just to my left. Some sort of bird, animal or waterfall gave a scream like a duchess whose feet were being stepped on by several unruly commoners. The buttons stopped moving, and then resumed, a little more slowly.

I had my own beamer in my left hand—frightening animals was not what I was after; stampedes were contraindicated—and I shot at the moving buttons before I could spend any time on aiming or shifting position. There was a small, rather odd-sounding thunk, and the whole damned area went up in flames.

Not a forest fire. Not even a button-grass fire.

I watched a rocket—a very small rocket—take off from the patch of button-grass, head for the sky, arc over toward the forest and away from my log cabin, and sizzle right on out of sight.

A rocket?

A rocket?

All right. He’d been hiding in a hollow, the button-grass giving the hollow sufficient cover; there’d been more of him than flat ground-level would have allowed. I would check on the hollow in a few seconds. I would check very damned carefully on the hollow. Later on I would scream and curse and otherwise blow off some steam, while trying to fit together some of the goddamnedest pieces, claiming to be one puzzle, I had ever seen.

First, I was going to spend several lengthy seconds in adjusting.

Yes, I know: this is not supposed to be necessary. We Survivors adjust instantly to anything, with our beamers at the ready and our laconic swaggers unholstered and to hand.

In real life, however…

A rocket?

Whatever I had thought up to that point became instantly subject to massive revision. While revising, I got up and walked over to where the hollow had to be, and found out that it was there.

It had been dug, very carefully and very smoothly, by some sort of machine; human beings dig raggedly, and this was as smooth a post-hole as I have ever seen. It was about seven feet deep, and about three feet in diameter, and the dirt of Tree, at the bottom of the hole, was burnt to a sort of slag that looked like a fifty-fifty combination of glass and glue. The sides were glass-smooth, with two little indentations running at opposite sides of the cylindrical hole, top to bottom.

The rocket, obviously, had dug the damned hole during the night, and waited partway inside it, its beamer itching with readiness, until I’d come out in the morning. The thing seemed too small to have a human pilot, and I hadn’t really offended any teeny races over the years. Obviously, I’d run into a rocket that hated me.

That conclusion didn’t make a great deal of sense, but then, at the moment, I wasn’t making a great deal of sense. Inside, where it didn’t show (so the flora and fauna of Tree could go on appreciating my laconic swagger, I suppose), I was jumping up and down and screaming.

I’d marked the direction the rocket had taken, and I realized that I was going to have to go on being a target for a while. A fully generated protective field is an uncomfortable sort of thing to have to walk around in—sweat collects; despite the manufacturers’ claims about blowers and cycling temperatures, sweat collects—but I was going to have to walk around in it for at least some of this new day. Inside the field, little could damage me except poison gas, and so far I had no evidence of poison gas anywhere in the picture.

That, like damned near everything else, was of course subject to change at any second.

Being a target cheerfully collecting vegetables wasn’t going to work twice; there is a limit to just how insane people (let alone vengeful rockets) will believe you are likely to be. But a vengeful target would be almost plausible, I thought, and as I went back to my log cabin to collect some heavier weaponry I was screwing my face up to look vengeful, just for practice.

Once inside the log cabin, though, I relaxed the muscles. I got ready and collected some fairly heavy armament, suitable for carrying, together with some fancy instrumentation, and piled all of it near the door; then I went for the detail maps.

The forests got in the way a little, but not nearly as much as you’d think; drones can collect large piles of bare scientific facts, even when the area involved is not as bare as would be really helpful. The map showed me very few places where a miniature rocket might land without instantly setting a forest, or at least a large glade, on fire, and I translated those into the ground I’d seen, worked out the directions and came up, to my complete surprise, with only a single really hopeful-looking candidate.

All this was assuming, of course, that the damned thing had landed somewhere nearby, somewhere I could get to on foot. For all I really knew, it had traveled five thousand miles to its home base, which was somewhere under the ice of the polar ocean with Captain Nemo and the crew of Old Ironsides.

But the rocket did seem to be marked Local; why jump across continents yesterday if you were planning on coming right back today and doing more shooting? Commuting is definitely the hard way to arrange to murder somebody.

I mused about remote control for a minute. That seemed even more unlikely; the controls necessary would be complicated, leaving little time for actual aiming and shooting. All the same, if there had been someone inside the rocket he’d been a very small someone, and—it occurred to me— perfectly relaxed about getting his feet heated. Of course, there were protective fields… in fact, I was still wearing one.

Which showed me how completely I had been upset. I took the damned thing off, wiped myself down, thought about a fast shower in the almost-water my shower was geared to provide, and sighed. Then I put the field back on, grabbed up my weaponry and instruments, and started out on foot for Rocket Central.

I kept my eyes open for vegetables most of the trip, in an abstracted sort of way; the fact that I was doing that, more or less on automatic, cheered me when I noticed it, because it meant that the back of my head had figured there was a fair chance of my returning. Why waste time on a census of vegetables you were never going to get to cook?

It was a nice, normal sort of trek, in fact, barely two miles. Fall was rather hot in this particular area of Tree, or else the manufacturers were lying even more than usual about the protective field, but what’s a little sweat between friends? I slogged through a glade or two, and the yellow-tan trees rustled gently in the wind, waving a little stiffly and being nourished by all the small furry animals that happened by. Flyers, a very few of the animals were—I had no idea how flyers made fur do for feathers on Tree, though I admit it’s an interesting question; in fact, it might have been the most interesting question for me to answer while I was on the planet. At the time, of course, I was silly enough to believe that I was otherwise involved.

Rocket Central—a clearing among several glades—was a quarter of a mile ahead when I stopped, sat down with a carefully inaudible sigh of relief, and began to put some of the weaponry in order. There is a great deal to be said for weapons not marked Some Assembly Required, but if you have to carry the damned things before use, you may not have many options. I owned a medium-range beamer assembly, complete with sights so complicated they were almost useless, and a bomb-thrower our ancestors would have called a Bazooka, though why a bomb-thrower would be named for a chewing-gum I have never really figured out.

The beamer sights were good for one thing without being hooked up; they could tell me if there was a rocket in residence a quarter of a mile away. The damned thing had to be hot, even after the hour or so it had been waiting, and it certainly wasn’t made of the same things as the trees, animals or dirt of the planet. Not unless Tree was much, much stranger than the drones had been telling me.

I set the sights up (a five-minute job, and I wonder whether anybody, at any time, has needed to use a medium-range beamer assembly, and has actually had the five minutes to set up its sights properly) and took one peek, and there it was, sitting in its clearing as if it had never even thought of flying over and trying to pot me. It had an innocent look hung on its nose, and I wanted very badly to rush out and paste it one.

Instead, I set up the Bazooka, aimed it very carefully, and fired. There was a hell of a noise, the Bazooka went backward about four inches in hard ground, and a smoking arc went through the edge of my glade and landed at the far edge of Rocket Central, maybe fifteen feet from the rocket.

I worried for a second that I’d cut it too fine, and damaged the damned thing, but it was a strong, spirited little rocket. It swayed a little on the ground, and then, when the explosion had come and gone, it started moving.

It didn’t rise up in the air. It just started turning, fairly rapidly, as if it were trying to screw itself into the dirt. What it was doing, I saw, was hunting for the vengeful fellow who had tried to shoot it.

I wasn’t, of course, hard to find. The rocket homed in on me, stopped its turning slowly, came round about eight more degrees, and opened a port up near the nose. The barrel of something or other poked a little way through the port, and wavered up and down for a second or two.

Then it fired. It missed the Bazooka by about two feet, because I had been crouched just about two feet from it.

By the time the shot arrived, I was three feet the other side of my weapon. I watched the ammunition expend itself against a yellow-tan tree, one of the bigger ones, and the tree didn’t explode; it just sighed and disappeared. Apparently it had become impalpable dust, carried away by the air.

An extremely nasty rocket. I could have crouched where I’d been and let the beam or whatever it was bounce off me, but there’s such a thing as boasting. Better, anyhow, to have the damned thing miss me; that way it would keep on trying, and I would find out a bit more.

I had most of my instrumentation trained on the rocket by then, and it was reading out heat changes, attitude changes, composition of rocket, a variety of interior scans of the thing, and so on. The rocket, having missed with its first shot, took a second, and this time it hit the Bazooka, which collapsed almost as fast as the tree had disappeared. It had been shredded.

The Bazooka had not been made out of Tree-wood. The rocket was shooting large bundles of very small circular saws, as I could tell from the tinkly clatter of their landing, and a few slow-motion bounces here and there—and the teeth on those blades were something very powerful indeed.

My readouts, meanwhile, were telling me something I did not want to believe. There really was some sort of being inside that rocket.

Second by second, the interior readout refined itself. The being inside of it looked human: two arms, two legs, head, torso, all in what seemed normal proportion. I began to wonder just how detailed the scan could get, and as the figure in the rocket—a figure small enough to move around a little in there, despite all the machinery!—got more and more human I switched the readout a bit to focus in on the head and shoulders.

Maybe I would recognize the fellow.

Maybe, on the other hand, it would turn out to be Little Red Riding Hood. Or Captain Nemo.

The rocket fired once more, missing everything except the air above the shredded Bazooka. Then it cleared its throat, the gun disappeared and the port closed, and another port, further down on the rocket, opened. This time what came out was a puff of black smoke.

Poison gas?

The smoke rolled slowly toward me just at the level of the button-grass, which turned an instant deep brown and seemed to go limp.

I did not hesitate. I got up, abandoning my heavy weaponry and some of the instruments, and ran like a frightened deer. I didn’t think I had much of a chance, but I wasn’t stopping to assess odds, I was running, and running took all my attention.

Pretty soon I was in a forest instead of a glade, puffing and blowing—and covered with sweat—and the black smoke was nowhere to be seen. Apparently, I told myself, it had a nice short lifetime, dissipating or somehow mixing with Tree’s air pretty quickly. Or else it had just used itself up on button-grass, small animals, and anything else available.

I was, apparently, safe once more, and on my way back to the comforts of my log cabin.

I was also on my way to do some very hard thinking, because I had seen the face of the rocket’s operator, if that’s what he was, very plainly in those final two or three seconds.

I’d recognized him, all right. He was Gerald Knave, Survivor—but (if you remember the old, old joke) quite a bit smaller.