Something on my Mind

Illustration by Nicholas Jainschigg

Mid-morning, early summer. A stiff, dry breeze blew across the exposed face of the hill. The movement of the air neatly counterbalanced the rising heat.

Behind me was a broad, round-bottomed, glacial valley, filled with the local equivalent of trees—almost exactly like trees, except for an internal skeleton of something about the consistency of cartilage. Before me, written in the naked rock, was a tale of unimaginable power and violence. The country rock had been rent by the salt-and-pepper glitter of intrusive dikes of a fine-grained pegmatite. Long, forking lines reached across the barren side of the hill like lightning etched on a gray stony sky.

Ascendance was the ninth habitable planet discovered by humans. I and my co-workers were an advance team, here to explore prospective sites for settlements and to get some rudimentary infrastructure in place before the colonists arrived.

My contribution consisted of identifying the gross geologic features and trying to find any obvious, easily accessible deposits of minerals. So far, I had found traces of iron, no more. Pegmatites often yield other riches, such as radioactives, so I was still hopeful.

The wind backed, shifted, and whipped dust into my eyes and mouth. The pain was sudden and intense. I stumbled backwards, simultaneously pawing at my eyes and spitting grit.

Naturally, my radio picked that moment to announce a call. Just as inevitably, I had left it on my pack a good ten meters away.

Cursing in a steady stream, I fumbled blindly, as much by sound as sight. It took an eternity to find the idiot thing. I sat heavily next to my pack, picked the radio up and said, “Stills here.”

It was Susan Blankenship, back at the camp. “Have you seen Mike?”

“Nobody out here but me and the dust devils.”

“Cut it out. I’m serious.”

“Cut what out? He’s not here.”

Susan sighed heavily, as though having to talk to me was the worst kind of imposition. “Listen, smartass, I asked you if Mike was out there.”

“Mike’s not here. What could be simpler?”

There was a lengthy pause during which I imagined her counting to ten. Judging from the tone in her voice, I had managed to irritate her again. This seemed to be a special talent I alone possessed. As far as I knew, I was the only person, man or woman, who could anger her just by the way I held my fork.

Her voice, when it came back, was clipped and curt. “Where are you?”

“I’m on the far side of Bareback Ridge, about even with the fork in the stream.”

“And you haven’t seen Mike?”

“No, Susan, I haven’t seen Mike. Not since breakfast.”

“Not at all?”

My turn to count to ten. “What’s wrong, dearie, did he-man leave his loincloth behind again?”

There was an abrupt click.

“Susan?”

No reply.

I shrugged. I wouldn’t miss talking to her, but now my curiosity was stirring. Obviously, Susan had misplaced Mike Gaston. Since they were an item, she would be quick to worry. On the other hand, Mike was quite capable of taking care of himself.

Still, complacency can kill you, and no place more easily than on a new world. I blinked sore eyes experimentally a couple of times, then stood and made my way to the top of the ridge, the better to see. Five minutes of fruitless scanning through my binoculars reinforced my impression that I was alone.

I keyed my radio and said, “Susan, this is Heath, I’m on top of Bareback now, and I still don’t see Mike. Is this an emergency? Should I drop what I’m doing and look for him?”

The sun beat down on my shoulders as I waited for a reply. Minutes passed. I heard a wallah calling down in the valley below me. Wall-ah, wall-ah, wall-ahh! I shrugged again and gave up, slipping my radio into my shirt pocket to free my hands for the descent back to where I had left my pack.

The radio beeped. I pulled it back out and keyed it. “Stills here.”

“Did I say it was an emergency?” Susan demanded querulously. “No! So go on back to whatever you were doing. I’m sure your rocks are waiting on you.”

“That they are, my dear. Millions of years, they’ve waited, and I’d hate to keep them waiting another minute. Stills out.”

As I slipped and skidded back down to my pack, I saw the wallah at the edge of the trees below me. Partly arboreal, they were nimble climbers, but not much else. In size and shape, they resembled a cross between some of the smaller Earthly primates and a koala, but appeared to be scavengers, eating the remains of kills made by other animals.

By the time I got to my pack I was mildly winded. I squatted on my heels and took a sip from my canteen, swirled it through my mouth, then spat. That took care of the remaining grit in my mouth, but my eyes still smarted. Not much I could do there.

Why hadn’t Susan simply queried Mike’s radio? There was a communications satellite in synchronous orbit that would report back to her in seconds. Presumablv, Mike s radio would be somewhere near Mike, and her question would be answered.

That left two possibilities. One, hopefully the most likely, was that Mike had simply turned his radio off. It wasn’t unlikely. If your radio was queried, it beeped so you would know that someone was looking for you. Mike, in his role as biologist, could easily be trying to stalk an animal. The beep would ruin his approach. The other, more ominous, possibility was that the radio had been destroyed, but if Susan didn’t think there was any reason to worry, then I wasn’t going to pursue that train of thought.

Mike turned up safe and sound. I saw him that evening at supper with Susan almost literally hanging on his arm. I wouldn’t have thought anything more about it had I not seen him trade a significant glance with Gilda Orr.

That raised a third possibility—that Susan simply hadn’t liked what Mike’s radio had been telling her.

The next day, I did something I didn’t normally do. I took my rifle with me when I went out into the field. Even if it had been prompted by jealousy, Susan’s call the previous day had spooked me a bit. No one had ever been attacked by the local fauna, but I had gotten complacent. Not good.

I resented the weight of the gun, and I resented the bulk, or at least the length of it. It snagged on branches and tangled in every vine. I was all but ready to sling the damned thing into the brush by the time I got back to the far side of Bareback Ridge. I just hadn’t quite come up with a plausible story about how I had managed to lose it, especially as I was known to be almost neurotically careful with my equipment.

I had no ideological quarrel with carrying a weapon. It’s the futility of it that galled me; I’m a terrible shot. The inborn ease with which Mike Gaston could swing a rifle to his shoulder and effortlessly place small holes in a tight pattern on a target I could barely see was forever beyond me. Should the need to defend myself arise, I would be more likely to shoot myself and save a predator the effort of pulling me down.

I carefully placed the gun on the ground, half-afraid it would fire if I looked at it wrong. I then shrugged out of my pack and placed it next to the gun. After a few minutes of rest to get my breathing back in line, I started working my way up one of the dikes.

Small black crystals of magnetite, but not in sufficient quantity to be useful as iron ore. Pale blue hexagonal prisms of apatite. Pretty, but not really useful. Then a stretch where I saw nothing but the mica, quartz, and feldspar that made up the pegmatite. Each useful enough in its own way, but not worth getting excited about.

Wall-ah, wall-ah, wall-ahhh!

I turned and looked. Sure enough, there he was, just at the edge of the trees down below me. The wallah looked directly at me, then sprang across to another tree, then to another, then turned and went deeper into the forest before I lost sight of him.

I went back to my work. More of the tiny octahedrons of magnetite, not much more than grains, really. A nice, perfectly formed crystal of mica. Worthless, in and of itself, but a museum on Earth would pay a small fortune for it, just because it came from Ascendance. Only problem was, there was no practical way for me to get it back to Earth.

The crashing of an animal—a large animal—at a full run. Getting closer. I spun and stared down at the tree line below me. Nothing, but now I could hear the animal snorting and heaving for breath as it ran.

Was it running from something… or towards me? And if it was running from something, what the hell was it running from?

I glanced at the rifle, then back… there… a flashing glimpse of reddish brown between the trees, and then it was hurtling straight up the hillside towards me. Large, powerful shoulders and bared teeth. Head lowered, hooves sounding a staccato beat on the bare rock.

I broke and ran, in the long-legged lope that people use running down shallow slopes. In the back of my mind a little voice awoke, chastising me for not having practiced more with the gun. Too late now.

I skidded to a stop just below my pack, made a long reach for the rifle, swung the ungainly thing around, pointed the barrel towards the oncoming beast, and groped for the trigger.

Being a laser, there was no sound or recoil, but the creature’s legs buckled and its chin plowed into the stone face of the hill. I watched the animal collapse in on itself, seemingly in slow motion. It rolled over once, more due to the slope of the hill than volition, and was still.

I looked in amazement at the rifle, then at the dead beast, then back at the rifle. Then allowed myself to breathe again.

Ha! The secret. In my fear, I had done the very tiling I had been told to do when shown how to operate the rifle: Hold your breath, it will make your aim steadier.

I placed the gun across my knees and sat looking at the mound of fur. It wasn’t something I recognized, but that didn’t mean anything. The entire planet was populated with things I wouldn’t recognize if they walked up and introduced themselves.

Was it dead, or merely wounded? It lay absolutely motionless. I groped behind me until I found the radio, unwilling to let my eyes leave the creature until I was certain that it wouldn’t drag itself to its feet and resume its charge.

“Base?” I started, trying to keep my voice steady.

It took a few seconds, but the reply came back. “Heath? You OK? You never call in this early.”

“Gilda? Yeah, I’m all right. At least I think I am, but there’s a big critter here I think someone ought to come take a look at. It charged me.”

“Charged you?” Everybody’s nightmare—something aggressive and big. She didn’t like what she was hearing. I could sympathize.

“Ran. Hard. Towards me. Scared the ever-living hell out of me.”

“What is it? Where is it now?” she asked.

“I don’t know what it is, but it’s right here in front of me… uh, Bare-back Ridge. Other side.”

“In front of you? It stopped? Are you up a tree, or what?”

“I killed it.”

“You what?”

Honestly, I didn’t blame her for being startled. My lack of prowess with a gun was widely known.

“I shot it. It’s dead. Well, it looks dead, anyway. I’m going to keep an eye on it, just to be sure.”

There was stunned silence for a few moments. “I’ll get somebody up there right away.”

“I’d appreciate that. Oh… Gilda?”

“Yes?”

“Tell them to hurry if they want a good look at this thing. I’ve got a wallah up here who seems to think it’s dinner time.”

Mike Gaston was, perhaps inevitably, first on the scene, followed shortly by George Evanston and Mia Sands. Mike landed his skitter at the top of the ridge and hopped out, immediately taking possession of the area for God and king just by planting his feet at shoulder width. He danced down the ridge as lightly as though he had done it thousands of times. In tact, I don’t think he had ever been there before—bare rock just didn’t interest him.

George and Mia were a little more cautious, circling the area once before landing their skitter next to Mike’s. They were slower to approach, too, stepping warily down the hillside. Like me, they acted as though the beast might spring back to life.

Mike squinted at the carcass as though interested, not in the animal itself, but in the details of its demise. “It charged you?”

I nodded.

“I hope you didn’t pay too much.”

It took me a moment to get it. I gave him a shaky grin.

“You shot it?”

I nodded.

“It’s still intact.”

“I think so. I only fired once.”

“Not continuous beam?” he asked, as though probing for a confession. Like Gilda, he didn’t have much confidence in my marksmanship. A continuous beam would have allowed me to slash, slicing the thing in half—requiring little in the way of aim.

I gestured. “Have a look.”

He walked confidently towards the body as though it was no more hazardous than a leaf. I safetied the rifle just as George and Mia walked up. They asked almost the same questions as Mike, so I repeated the same answers. They, like Mike, seemed politely skeptical that I could have brought the animal down with a single shot. Well, so was I.

Mike stopped about three meters away from the animal. The wallah eyed him warily, then resumed worrying a strip of hide off of the body. Without warning, Mike suddenly stomped his foot and waved his arms, shouting.

“Wah—!” the wallah shrieked, scampering towards the trees, dragging the strip of flesh with it.

Mike circled the body, then squatted near the head. He looked up at me, frowning, then back at the head, then back at me. “One shot, between the eyes,” he called.

As if his words were a signal, George and Mia started towards the body. Mia surveyed the animal, then, like Mike, she glanced back towards me, an appraising look.

After ten minutes and much discussion of dentition, jaw structure, musculature, and eye placement, they came to a consensus. It was omnivorous. As such it could conceivably have been a threat. Mike took pictures and a tissue sample, then left the carcass where it lay and came back to stand before me. George and Mia took up flanking positions behind him.

“That was a lucky shot, Heath. I’ll log it in and let the sequencer rebuild it from the DNA; Once we’ve got a model, we can take a closer look at the morphology and see what we’ve got.”

I sat quite still for a long time after their skitters left, just looking at the fallen creature. A strange mixture of feelings was running through me. Regret and shame for having killed a living being, no matter how alien. Pride in my hitherto unsuspected marksmanship. Residual fear, left over from having a wild animal, possibly a dangerous one, come charging at me. A primitive urge to beat my breast and yodel at the silent forest that I was a man, able to take care of myself.

After a while, I pushed myself to my feet. Below me, the wallah was edging its way back up the slope, staring hungrily at the carcass.

I quit early that afternoon and hiked back to our base camp. I was hungry and tired when I walked out of the trees and saw the neat rows of temporary shelters. It was a welcome sight. Gilda came rushing out of the one that served as our command post and slammed into me, wrapping me tightly in her arms. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

Although by my standards Gilda was a very attractive woman, not once had she ever shown me the slightest bit of warmth, so I didn’t know how to react to this. “I’m all right. Honest.”

“I was worried,” she said, leaning back to look up at me.

“So was I,” I admitted truthfully.

She seemed to think it was a joke. She dimpled. “Oh, sure you were. I heard about how you nailed that guy right between the eyes.”

“I got lucky.”

She squeezed me, hard, then released me just as Adam Anderson, the leader of our team, walked up.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Sure, I’m fine. The worst part was having to work that part of Bareback Ridge with a dead animal twenty meters away.”

He grinned. “Look, if you’re not too tired, I’d like for you to give us a report on what you’ve found out there so far… other than the creature, I mean.”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

We were on rotation. About once every three or four weeks, we would give a report on what we had discovered. In theory, it was to promote some kind of cross-fertilization of ideas among the various disciplines. In reality it was a subtly disguised popularity contest. Few, if any, people attended the talks by those who were “out,” whereas those who were “in” could count on a lively crowd to discuss their findings. I never counted on more than two or three people when it was my turn. Sometimes I simply waited ten minutes to see if anyone showed up, then went about my business.

After talking to Adam, I turned to go back to the small hut I lived in, but stopped when I heard Gilda’s voice behind me. “Care for some company?”

That froze me in my tracks. Facing down a wild animal is nothing. True courage is not panicking when an attractive woman seeks you out.

I swallowed hard in a suddenly dry throat. “Um… sure.”

She fell into step beside me. We walked slowly. After standing outside the door of my hut talking for twenty minutes, I ducked inside and retrieved two chairs. We sat watching everyone else straggle in from their various researches out in the field until time to eat.

For all the sugar in orbit, I couldn’t tell you what we talked about, but I had more fun talking about it than I had had in ages.

What was even better was the quick peck on the cheek she gave me later on that evening. Maybe it was less than Mike Gaston would have gotten, but it was enough to make me grin like a fool.

Eighteen people showed up for my report that night, a personal record, but I was not surprised when it dwindled to seven the next time, then four. Nor was it surprising that they peppered me with questions, not about the magnetite, but about the beast I had shot.

Still, it stung that I was forgotten so quickly.

Two more lasting things did come of the incident. The first was that I started carrying the rifle with me every time I went out into the field. The other was that Gilda began to speak to me. Mike Gaston was still very much in the picture, yet she began saying hello, asking me how my day had gone. Not wanting to run afoul of Mike, I did nothing to encourage her, but I certainly didn’t go out of my way to dissuade her, either.

Honestly? Aside from the possibility of conflict with Mike, I was afraid of rejection, but I wouldn’t admit that, even to myself.

Perhaps strange things happen to a man who works alone all day. I began to think of the wallah at Bareback Ridge as a pet. I’d never owned a pet in my life. Never felt the urge. But if I didn’t see the silly little thing at least once during the course of the day. I’d fret a bit.

The barren flank of Bareback Ridge stretched for quite some ways. I worked that rock to death, dallying much longer in the area than I had originally planned, just so I could have company—even if it was an alien scavenger.

Mike had begun to be peripherally aware of me after I killed the creature. Before, I had been safely anonymous. Now, I was a player, albeit a very weak one. Whenever he happened to see Gilda talking to me, he’d always make a point of coming over, pumping my hand and asking me how I was doing. He’d talk animatedly for a few minutes, then somehow Gilda would end up leaving with him, often without bothering to say good-bye. The clincher? If Gilda wasn’t talking to me, Mike didn’t even glance my way. I’d have given a shiny penny to know what Susan thought of his behavior. Not that I ever wasted my time asking.

But the wallah was mine. At least until Mike found out. He’d probably do something obnoxious like stand on the edge of the woods and imitate its call… Wall-ah! Within ten minutes, it’d be eating out of his hand and riding his shoulder, nuzzling his ear. And that would be the end of my pet wallah. From then on, it would be Mike Gaston’s pet wallah, and all the women would coo and vie for a chance to rub its fuzzy little ears. So I kept my pet a secret.

My rifle began seeing regular use. I used it to feed the wallah. Not only was I feeding my pet, but it was good target practice. Game was always plentiful—frequently right at the edge of the trees, almost on display. Something or other would pop up within shooting range within five or ten minutes of my arrival at the ridge. I’d shoot it, and generally, if it wasn’t already watching from the safety of a nearby tree, the wallah was there within a few minutes.

It couldn’t last forever, of course. I had other places I needed to be. But I kept prolonging my inspection of Bareback Ridge. The wallah moved down the ridge with me, a matter of nearly four kilometers before all was said and done. Whether the critter was commuting to and from a fixed nest or migrating along with me, I couldn’t say.

On the last day, I shot a Wilson’s squirrel-cat, then went and sat about three meters from the carcass. I had already seen the wallah, bouncing from tree to tree, and I knew that it had seen me. It clung to the side of a tree not far away, eyeing breakfast. After about ten minutes, it came down and started padding towards me, walking upright with a bowlegged gait—almost a swagger—that I had never seen it use before.

It kept an eye on me, but I’d be hard pressed to say that it was being wary. It didn’t act the least bit skittish. It fell to eating and gave up watching me entirely. After a bit, it sat up on its haunches, staring me in the eye, then turned and walked into the forest.

The next day, I shifted to the south face of Tea Kettle Dome, over five klicks away.

If Bareback Ridge had been a waste of time, Tea Kettle Dome was not. A small trickle of water that bounced and slid down off the side had a tendency to leave green stains on the rock. I started up the side of the hill, hacking my way through the dense undergrowth with a machete, following the water up the slope, adding my dripping sweat to the rivulet. About two-thirds of the way up, my foot snagged in a vine and I tried to drill a hole in the hillside with my nose. I managed to get my arm up in time and my elbow took the brunt of the impact. Better than my nose, perhaps, but the pain was excruciating. I lay just as I had fallen, cursing in a monotonous monotone which did nothing to lessen the agony.

When the worst of it had subsided, I rolled onto my side, still breathing heavily. Before my face was a roughly triangular area where I had scuffed the thin dirt when I fell. I could see the ribs of the mountain. Translucent quartz, stained deep blue-green.

Oh, boy.

Within an hour, I had found enough malachite and azurite, both secondary weathering products of copper ores, to convince me that Tea Kettle Dome was going to figure prominently in the colonists’ future.

I spent the rest of the afternoon collecting specimens, ranging up and down the slopes, more excited than I’d been since I’d visited my first mine dump as a boy of ten. My pack grew heavy, pregnant with samples. I left it and the gun and clambered across the side of the hill, determined to find a crystalline specimen; all I’d found so far were masses. Finally, just at dusk, I cracked open a pitted mass of quartz the size of my head and found the tiny radiating hair-like crystals I’d been seeking all day.

It was long after dark when I got back to camp.

As I trudged up to the gate, I could see a solitary figure pacing just inside the fence.

Gilda.

I forgot myself. I ran towards her, gun and pack banging against my back, and caught her in my arms.

“Heath?” she gasped, startled.

“I’m the man of the hour, my dear!” I exulted. “At long last, I have earned my keep on this damned expedition!”

“God, you terrified me! I didn’t know what had happened to you. I thought—” She broke off in mid-sentence, seized me by the ears, and pulled my face down into the kiss that I had been fantasizing about for the last three months. “Don’t you ever do that again! I don’t care if you’re the man of the year! When I call you on that radio, you answer me, understand?”

“Radio?”

She gave me a look that seemed to indicate that she thought that I had been born with substandard mental powers. “Yes, radio, Heath. A small electronic device intended for communications. Something I was glued to throughout the afternoon. Something I have here in my hand, hoping that you would call in so I would know where you were—so I could come rescue your broken body, if need be. In case you don’t get the message, idiot, I was worried sick about you! I don’t know whether to hit you or kiss you.”

“Actually, if you’re offering me a choice, I—”

This time we didn’t come up for air for quite some time. Just as I was beginning to fear anoxia, she pulled back and said, “All right. So you’re alive and well after all. I’ll get around to forgiving you next Friday. Put it in your appointment book. Now, what is it that’s made you so smug?”

I started telling her about the copper on Tea Kettle Dome.

“Tea Kettle? Tea Ketffe? You didn’t tell anyone you were going to Tea Kettle! We all thought you were out on Bareback!”

She called me more names and threatened me with dire consequences. “Oooh, I’m so mad at you!” she said finally, stamping her foot.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you cared.”

“Didn’t know…” she began, then subsided, shaking her head. “Men! It’s a wonder the species has survived this long! If it weren’t for women throwing themselves at men, we wouldn’t be here.”

Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a single instance where Gilda had thrown anything, much less herself, at me. But the implications of what she had said…

“So why didn’t you answer your radio?” she demanded. “Are you too important to talk to us normal people now that you’ve found green rocks?”

I was saved from having to compose a reply by the arrival of Adam Anderson. He went through the same sequence of fussing at me for not answering my radio, demanding to know if I was still in one piece, fussing at me for not answering my radio, wanting to know where I’d been, fussing at me for not answering my radio, listening to the first ten words of my description of the copper, fussing… after the tenth time, it finally sunk in.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” I yelled, in order to override the increasing noise level—others had begun to gather, drawn by the commotion. I reached into my pack, drawing out my radio. In the wash of light from the floodlight at the command hut I could see that the switch was in the off position. “Mystery solved!” I said, holding the radio aloft. “It’s turned off.”

“Jeez, smarty, couldn’t you figure out how to turn it on?” came a voice from the back of the small crowd.

Gilda chimed in. “You knew you were late coming back. Couldn’t you have called to let me know you were all right?”

“OK, OK. I was bad. I didn’t tell anyone I was going to Tea Kettle, my radio was off—why, I don’t know, unless it got switched off when I fell, and I didn’t call home when I knew I was running late. Go ahead, make me eat worms. But! Don’t do it until you see how much copper there is out there. Surface indications are that there’s quite a bit. If the formation is as big as I’m hoping, the colonists will have a useful product as soon as they arrive.”

Adam congratulated me. “What will you need to check this out?”

I thought for a second, then told him I’d like a skitter to haul the coring drill and some other odds and ends out into the field. Without thinking, I also added that it would be nice to have a little help. Although I could do it myself, it would go much faster if I had someone along.

Illustration by Bob Eggleton

Almost before the words were out of my mouth, Gilda piped up. “I’ll go,” she volunteered. “I’m caught up on my lab work.”

He looked from her to me. “Well?”

I wasn’t sure I trusted myself to speak. “Uh… sure. I d love to have her along.”

After that, the crowd dissipated. Mike Gaston had apparently been among those listening in on the exchange, although I hadn’t seen him walk up. Gilda saw him at the same instant I did. She made a show of slipping her arm through mine. A look passed between them that has no name, but there was an element of defiance about Gilda as she walked off with me, chattering gaily, leaving Mike staring after us.

The expression on his face was not pleasant.

The ride out to Tea Kettle the next morning was pure bliss. Gilda and I had started early, and the sun had just cleared the horizon as we skimmed above the tree tops.

A skitter is like an oversized pickup truck with wings and a retractable roof. It being summer, I had the top down. The wind of our passage whipped Gilda’s hair as I slalomed between the hills, following the stream bed rather than flying higher and taking the direct route.

“This time, I’ll know where you are,” Gilda told me. “Even if you do come back late.”

I grinned in response. “I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell you that I packed a picnic.”

“Lunch?”

“Well, that too. But what I had in mind was dinner, actually.” I glanced at her. “I even brought a candle.”

Her eyebrow raised. “Why, Heath, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you just revealed a romantic streak. Perhaps I’d better do a little prospecting to see how deep the vein goes. It might be worth mining.”

I banked the skitter into a tight circle, whooping at the top of my lungs, just to let off steam and let the world know that I was happy.

Gilda turned out to be an excellent partner. Her lab work had made her a stickler for detail—a useful trait to have when working with a laser capable of punching a hole the size of your fist into solid rock.

Basically the laser moved in a five centimeter track on top of a tripod, round and round, burning a circular hole into the ground. When it was done, the laser head swung aside and an electric winch lifted the heavy core out. By lunch, we had three short but decent ones from holes spaced across the base of the hill.

I spent lunch wiping the sweat out of my eyes, but I didn’t care. Gilda was laughing at everything I said and I felt like a claustrophobic genie who’d just popped out of a thousand year confinement in a lamp two sizes too small.

Late that afternoon, we carefully laid the last section of the last core on the ground. “Now… about that candle-lit dinner…” Gilda prompted.

“Did I mention a beautiful sunset?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the oranges and reds condensing on the horizon, then turned back to me, smiling. “No, I don’t believe you did.”

I shrugged. “Just figured I’d toss that in for good measure. I only wish I’d thought to bring a portable shower.”

“What’s wrong with the stream?”

“I—”

“Shy?”

So what do you do in the face of a challenge like that?

It took a while for us to finally get around to eating. First I scrubbed her back, then she scrubbed mine. Then for a while we forgot all about scrubbing, although there was a great deal of motion involved. Then we got back to washing, but in a more leisurely manner. We even rinsed out our clothing and left it on a rock to dry.

Feeling self-conscious, I called in. “Um, this is Heath. We got caught up in our drilling and we ll be a bit late getting in.”

“Got any idea how much longer you’ll be?” Adam asked.

“Oh, I’d say we’ll be along in an hour or two.”

He snorted good-naturedly. “You might as well spend the night.”

“Nah, didn’t bring a sleeping bag.”

“Well, all right. Just let us know if you get in trouble.”

After I put the radio back in the skitter, Gilda said, “Caught up in our drilling? A bit risque, don’t you think?”

Honestly, I hadn’t meant anything by it, but if she thought I was being clever, I wasn’t going to say otherwise. “Woman, you have a dirty mind.”

She looked down at her nude body. “Better than a dirty body.”

“Much better,” I agreed emphatically.

Although the food was simple, I enjoyed myself immensely. After we finished we walked down to the stream, hand in hand, to retrieve our still-damp clothing. We left the corer and puttered back to camp.

Although he wasn’t waiting by the gate, Mike Gaston was standing in the open door of the command hut, watching us. His face was in shadow, but I got the impression that he was scowling.

At the moment, I couldn’t summon up anything but a smug grin. I’m sure that didn’t help matters any.

The next day was a near replay of the first. I hadn’t had the wit to think of it, but Gilda brought along towels, shampoo, and a fresh change of clothing. Seeing her standing there in the middle of a forest on an alien planet did strange things to me. I started thinking about the fact that the colonists would need a geologist. That it would be nice to settle down. That…

OK, OK—but it made a pleasant fantasy.

As I was cooking our dinner, I heard a distant Wall-ah, Wall-ah, Wallahhh. I straightened up. Wall-ah. It sounded fainter.

I cupped my hands to my mouth. “Wall-ah!” I cried.

Gilda, startled, looked at me. “Should I call you Tarzan or Doctor Doolittle?”

I looked down at my clean though unclad body. “I’m a little underdressed for Doolittle, don’t you think?”

She gave me a head to toe appraisal. “Somewhat less than the usual Tarzan garb, for that matter.”

Wall-ah!

“Wall-ah!” I answered.

“Seriously, why are you talking to a wallah?” she asked.

I told her about my secret pet over at Bareback Ridge.

“Did you ever talk to it?”

I shook my head. “No. But if there’s another one around here, it wouldn’t hurt to be sociable.”

Her gaze drifted out into the trees. “Maybe it’s the same one. It sounds as though it’s coming from the general direction of Bareback Ridge. Did you tell it where you were going?”

I chuckled. “Guess it slipped my mind, the same way I forgot to tell you.” In the distance, I heard the wallah call again. “Besides, there’s no way that one would know where to find me. It’s probably a different one.”

I called once more for good luck, then went back to fixing dinner.

The next day I was alone. Gilda had lab work to do. I hadn’t bothered to pack more than a token lunch, and no dinner at all, as we’d made plans to eat together that evening at camp.

As soon as my feet touched the ground, I heard a loud Wall-ah! from right over my head. I craned my neck, scanning the silhouettes of the trees against the early morning sky, and sure enough, there was a wallah peering down at me.

“Wall-ah,” I called softly, then went about my business.

A low, snuffling grunt came from somewhere off on the other side of the skitter. I peered into the gloom, barely able to make out a large body ambling through the trees. It didn’t act threatening, so I busied myself unloading gear from the back of the skitter.

Whiff-crash! A small sapling whipped down to the ground as though felled by an ax. I made a standing jump from the ground, clear over the side of the skitter, into the cargo bay. Adrenaline reached flood stage in my bloodstream in less time than it takes to gasp. I stared out at the beast just as its head snapped around towards me. I had a curious momentary feeling of vulnerability, as though this amiable looking creature was about to…

And it bolted straight for me.

When it reached the wing of the skitter, it barely paused. It jumped up on top. But the smoothness of the aluminum skin caught it by surprise, and its paws slipped. It went down in an ungainly heap and slid off the rear edge of the wing, to land on the ground with an undignified whump!

What I gained in seconds, I lost in attitude. Now the beast was mad. It clambered back up on the wing, claws extended—ripping gouges in the sheet metal.

My gun was in the copilot’s seat, leaning against the back, just out of reach. A move for the gun would bring me within reach of the thing’s claws.

Something made me glance up at the wallah. Its eyes were riveted on mine. Save me, it seemed to be saying.

What the wallah had to worry about, I didn’t know. It was safe up in the tree. I was the one who was face to face with an animal whose claws could puncture aluminum. But, pet or not, there was something about that look that I could not deny.

My eyes dropped to the beast, now testing the edge of the cargo bay with a forepaw before committing its weight. I gauged the distance to the seat, then crouched and sprang just as the creature heaved itself in. My feet grazed its snout as I went over, throwing me off balance. I slammed face first into the dash, then fell into the floorboard, feet sticking up into the air over the back of the seat.

Stunned, I could hardly see. Blood dripped from my face onto the floorboard of the skitter. Twisting from the hips, I reached back and upwards for the gun just as a vise closed on my left foot and started trying to wrench it off. I lined up the barrel of the gun with the beady eyes, then froze. The laser bolt would slice neatly through the skull and possibly my foot as well if my aim wasn’t perfect. I jerked on my foot, trying to get it back.

Wrong move.

The animal growled deep in its throat and clamped down harder, claiming its prize. Pain lanced up my leg. It started backing up, dragging me with it, over the seat back, into the cargo bay where I d be easier to gnaw on. I managed to hang onto the gun as I went up and over, but nearly lost it when I dropped onto the flat metal floor.

Even prepared for it, I lost my breath. I was dimly aware that the pressure on my foot had eased, but I couldn’t see the beast—my vision refused to clear.

I needn’t have worried about trying to locate the damned animal. Two full sets of silverware fastened onto my shin. Steak knives, dinner knives, forks, the works. He was busily trying to make the opposing sets meet in the middle. Dignity be damned—I screamed.

I brought the gun around to aim roughly where the animal should be, over somewhere to my right, fumbled for the trigger, and fired. Nothing happened. I shook my head to clear my eyes. I’d fired in the wrong direction entirely. There was a large dark blur off to my left. I aimed the muzzle at the middle of the mass and fired.

The beast howled. I fired again and it let go of my leg. I fired again just as it swatted the barrel, but as the gun left my hand, the beam swept upwards in an arc, from the thing’s gut through the upper part of its back—where its spine would be if it were an Earthly vertebrate.

Its back legs spasmed and it fell back on its haunches. It looked in confusion at its rear, as though willing it to work. Then it looked up, and, I swear, made eye contact with me. There seemed to me to be some fleeting instant of intimate contact—the vanquished acknowledging the victor. Then it collapsed heavily, rolling over onto its side, its panting breath hot on my ankle.

Ever so slowly, I pulled my leg away from the thing’s snout. It made no move to stop me. The gun had gone over the side of the skitter and I didn’t think my leg would support my weight if I went after it. I finally pulled myself into a sitting position, reached over the back of the seat, and retrieved my radio.

“This is Heath,” I gasped. “Anybody there?”

I was just about to call again when Susan answered. “What do you want, Heath?”

“I need someone to come get me.”

“What’s wrong, lover-boy? Get lonely?”

I made a mental note to kill her if I lived long enough. “Susan, I’ve been attacked. I’m hurt. Send someone out here.”

“What?”

“I’ve been bitten by something the size of a bear. My left leg is chewed up.

“Are you under attack now?”

I had to stop to catch my breath, “It’s… here next to me. It’s still breathing.”

“Next to you? Get away from it, you idiot!”

“Susan, I can’t move.”

“Then shoot it!”

“I can’t get to the gun.”

“Then how did you—”

I snapped. “Goddammit, Susan, are you going to sit there and argue with me, or are you going to get someone out here?”

“I’ll find someone. Stand by.”

I collapsed back against the seat. Idly, I noted that the pool of blood under my leg was getting larger. Have to do something about that. I made a mental note to get around to doing so real soon, but just at the moment I was tired and had to rest.

That damned bear-thing was mauling my leg again. I could feel it. And it hurt like hell.

I could hear voices. Human voices.

Gilda’s voice. I had to tell Gilda to stay back. Dangerous animal here.

Cranking my eyelids open took more strength than I had expected. I’d need a full night’s sleep just to recover.

It wasn’t the animal chewing on my leg, it was Nathan Chandler, our doctor. Given a choice between him and the creature, I’d be hard pressed to say which one was worse. Nathan was cutting my pants leg away just above my knee. When he slit the fabric lengthwise, exposing the lower half of my leg, I heard a sharp intake of breath next to my right ear.

I turned my head. It was Gilda, staring in horror at the fresh hamburger. I managed to locate my voice. “Gilda? What are you doing here?”

She looked at me. “You called in. Then you didn’t answer your radio. Did you think I’d sit at camp and wait?”

“There’s a… a thing. Like a bear. It’s—”

“It’s dead. It’s on the ground so Nathan would have room to work.”

Adam Anderson’s head popped up over the side of the skitter. “It’s possible these things are telepathic,” he said conversationally.

“Telepathic? What makes you think—”

“Tony saw one of these things yesterday. A blueheart walked right up to it and got eaten. Tony thought it sufficiently strange that he kept the critter in sight for the rest of the day.”

I gave him a skeptical grunt. “Maybe it uses scent as a lure. Maybe it makes some kind of subsonic call. Hell, it probably—”

He eyed me. “Then it tried to eat Tony. It turned and walked right past him. As soon as he figured out that it might be looking for him, he got scared. Bingo!” He clapped his hands together sharply. “The critter turned and looked straight at him. He said that it was an almost out-of-body experience. He could see himself through the creature’s eyes, almost as though he was outlined in neon. That’s in spite of the fact that he was hidden behind heavy brush.”

“It could see him through brush?” I asked.

Anderson nodded. “Clear as day. It was his fear that it was reading. Until then he was invisible.”

Nathan was tying off my leg with gauze. He gave a particularly vicious jerk that made my head swim. “But this thing evolved here. How the hell could it read our minds if we came from an entirely different evolutionary environment?”

Anderson shrugged. “Maybe fear is universal.”

That gave me something to digest. Whether I liked it or not, it did match my experience. “I’ve got just one more question.”

Anderson looked up from where Nathan was finishing with my leg. “And what’s that?”

“How many more of these things are there?” Maybe I didn’t want to be a colonist here, after all.

Nathan checked my other leg, but it was only bruised. Likewise, my boots had protected my feet from serious damage. He then attended to the cut on my forehead. He cleaned and bandaged it, then pronounced me good as new.

“If this is the condition I was in when I was new, I’d rather be used again, if you don’t mind,” I told him.

“Well,” he allowed, “barring some minor discomfort.”

“Minor,” I said to Gilda. I gestured at my leg. “He calls this minor. Notice that he didn’t offer to trade legs with me while mine heals.”

“I’ll get out a crutch for you when we get back to camp,” he offered.

I thanked him, then struggled to my feet, distributing my weight between my better leg and Gilda’s shoulder. “I want to take another look at this critter. If it’s telepathic, then we’re going to need a better idea of what we’re up against.”

I peg-legged my way to the rear corner of the cargo bin and sat heavily on the edge, looking down at my fallen adversary. Anderson and Mia Sands were crouched on the ground next to it. They were prodding its head like phrenologists.

“So what’s the verdict?” I asked.

“Looking for soft spots,” Mia said.

“I assure you it didn’t have a noticeable soft spot for me.”

She had the grace to chuckle. “We were curious as to whether the skull was continuous or whether there was soft tissue. Telepaths might have made some interesting cranial adaptations.”

Anderson looked up. “We’ll be taking your friend back to camp to dissect. Tony was foolish enough to let his get away.”

“Oh, I meant to ask… how did Tony keep from getting eaten?”

“He climbed a tree.”

I looked up, expecting to see the wallah, but it was nowhere to be found. But the rump of the animal I’d killed had been chewed. The wallah had eaten breakfast before leaving. I felt lucky. It could just as easily have been me.

Obviously, having my leg out of commission was a nuisance, but the corollary was that I got to see more of Gilda. Clouds with silver linings, and all that.

I spent the day catching up on busy work, mostly writing reports, then stumped ungracefully over to eat supper—for some reason, walking on crutches was not coming easily to me. I put my tray on the table, leaned my crutches against the edge and slumped into a seat. It wasn’t long before Gilda showed up.

“Say, fella, is that an empty spot next to you?” she asked, head cocked.

“Sit. I need someone to complain to—doctor’s orders. Supposed to speed the healing process if I act pitiful.”

She gave me a skeptical look, but slid in. “I spent the morning doing lab work, and the afternoon on a stint at the radio.”

I shook my head. “I understand that we’re short-handed and all that, but it seems rather haphazard to have to depend on you and Susan to handle the radio while you’re not doing lab work. As long as we have people out in the field, we ought—”

“So, how’s the leg?” Mike Gaston boomed from right behind me.

I twisted around to look up at him. “Nathan has me on accelerators, so it should be better by the end of the week.”

He inspected Gilda as though he expected to find my fingerprints on his property. He nodded to her. “Hello.”

She gave him a polite smile, but said nothing in return.

He looked back at me, gesturing at my leg. “You wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for your little buddy.”

I frowned, not sure what he meant.

“What little buddy?”

“Your wallah.”

I shrugged. “I couldn’t just let that thing eat the wallah.”

“The wallah was safe.”

I had the uncomfortable feeling that Mike and I were having separate conversations on diverging paths. “Maybe it could climb.”

“Fast enough to catch a wallah? I doubt it. All the wallah had to do was bounce over to the next tree to get away. Besides, the thing’s foot structure was wrong for a climber.”

“I was a little too busy to notice,” I replied testily. “I was more interested in its teeth.”

He snorted. “Just be more careful the next time a wallah wants you to shoot something.” Then he left, leaving me wondering exactly what the hell he’d been getting at.

After sitting around for a few days, the inactivity was getting to me. I’d done enough paperwork to keep a small army of bureaucrats busy for a month, and was beginning to annoy even myself. I hadn’t realized how much I valued my time out in the field until it was taken away from me. So when Adam dropped by my hut to say that they were organizing a picnic, I jumped at the chance to come along. Figuratively speaking, of course.

Six hours later, I was sitting propped against the bole of a tree, my belly full and the late afternoon sunshine warm on my face. Off to one side, I heard a small noise, then a muted wall-ah. I looked up and, sure enough, there was a wallah on a branch looking down at me.

Gilda looked up at him and said, “Your pet’s come to check on you.”

“It’s probably not mine.”

She shrugged. “Might be. It sure is looking at you hard. Do you think it wants something?”

“Dinner probably. Remember that old thing about not feeding stray cats unless you want a pet? This guy never shows up unless it’s dinnertime.”

She gestured at the remains of our picnic. “Will he eat leftovers?”

“I don’t think so. I tried it a couple of times over at Bareback. He wouldn’t come near the stuff. I guess he likes his meat fresh.”

About that time I saw a Wilson’s squirrel-cat just inside the edge of the trees on the opposite side of the clearing, headed more or less our way. I made a long reach and snagged my rifle by the stock where it lay on the ground near me. Pulling it to me, I lifted, aimed…

And died.

Hot pain lanced through my body, seemingly into the tree trunk behind me. My vision swam. I saw double: I saw the barrel of my rifle, yet superimposed over it, I saw the ground coming up. The ground hit me, even as I sat still with my back against the tree. Then the double vision faded, and all I could see was my rifle barrel drooping. I could hear myself gasping tor breath.

“Heath? Heath, are you all right?” Gilda cried.

I could hardly breathe. “God, that hurt,” I whispered hoarsely.

“What happened?” she asked.

“My—”

“His wallah had him,” came Mike Gaston’s voice. “It was controlling him—using him to get something to eat.”

“Mike, stop it. Something happened, and—”

“What happened was that the wallah was hungry. They’re telepathic, just like the animal that bit his leg. The wallah was telling him to shoot it some dinner.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“I shot the wallah. When it died, it released Heath.”

“But—”

“Wallahs aren’t like anything on Earth. They’re a new type of animal, halfway between a predator and a scavenger. They eat freshly killed meat, but they can’t do the killing themselves—they’re too small, too weak. So they’ve adapted to use larger, stronger animals to bring down their prey for them. It’s a symbiosis. The animal which does the killing benefits because the wallah brings the prey right to them. Then the wallah gets the leftovers. Since they’re small, they don’t need much, so the predator that kills the animal gets to eat its fill. The wallah simply orchestrates the kill. And Heath here was the best thing it had ever seen. Fresh meat daily. No wonder the wallah tracked after him so faithfully.”

“So you killed it? Why? To prove a point?”

Mike shrugged, unconcerned. “It’s just a wallah.”

“It was his wallah.”

He shook his head. “No… he was its human.”

I gently floated the skitter down onto the crest of Bareback Ridge. It was early morning and the sun was still struggling to clear the horizon. For a long time, I just sat, watching the morning come.

I had brought the wallah with me, wrapped in an old rag. I felt that the least I could do was bring him home to bury him. Not that anyone would know or care, but I felt I owed the poor thing that much.

After a bit I climbed out, went around to the other side of the skitter and got the shovel and the wallah. Stepping carefully—my legs were still none too steady—I made my way down the slope to the place where I’d first seen him.

Digging a hole was harder than I’d anticipated. The pain from my leg slowed me down. After a bit, I had an uneven oval large enough to hold the small body. I knelt down and placed the limp bundle in the ground then began to shovel the dirt back in.

“Aren’t you going to say something?”

I looked up to find Gilda watching from a few feet away. Back up the hill, there was another skitter next to mine.

I shrugged. “There’s nothing much to say, I guess. I just thought I’d lay the little guy to rest.”

She stepped closer and used the cuff of her sleeve to dab at my eyes. “I’d never realized you were such a sentimental fellow.”

“I’m not, really. Those are just dew-drops.”

“Oh.” She nodded. “I see.”

I looked down at the wallah. “I’ll be done here in a minute.”

“Take your time. I just got worried when I saw that you’d left early and alone.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to come.”

She smiled gently. “If it’s important to you, then it’s important to me.”

“I just…” I began, then stopped, unsure how to express myself.

She cut right to the heart of the matter. “You’re angry with Mike, aren’t you? There’s more to this than just him killing your pet wallah.”

It took me a moment to formulate my thoughts. “He humiliated me, publicly. He proved to all and sundry that I was under the control of an animal not much larger than a cat. I imagine that he thought it was great fun watching me twitch while the wallah was dying.”

She sighed. “Mike only did it because he was jealous. If he wanted to show me how smart and in control he was, it backfired. What he did was cowardly, low, and cruel. I don’t think there’s any more convincing way that he could have shown just how shallow he is.”

That meant… what? I still wasn’t sure where I stood with her. Was there even a chance? “Does that mean you and he—”

She snorted. “No more Mike Gaston for me. Count on it. I’m yours, if you’ll have me.”

My smile was slow to build. “Have you ever given any thought to settling down?”