Wildcatter

Day 413, Continued

The pond was washing into the cave with every wave. That water must be fresh, although it was certainly not sterile. There was no sign of a break in the torrential rain.

“Prospector to Golden Hind.”

“Go ahead, Seth.” It was JC himself on watch.

“There’s no chance of rescue for at least three hours, and eight or ten is more likely. I’m dehydrated. I’m going to open my vizor and drink some of the rainwater that’s slopping around outside. Plan to quarantine both of us when you get us back.”

“Seth, that’s suicide!”

“It’s sensible. Meredith’s alive and well, and it sounds as if Mariko survived until after the second crash, so whatever infection they caught wasn’t fatal. Once that storm surge arrives, there won’t be any fresh water anywhere. Prospector out.”

“No!” JC was not easily dismissed. “Listen. Collect some water by all means, but don’t drink it until you’re truly desperate.”

“Good idea,” Seth said, although he knew he couldn’t last another five or six hours without the dehydration affecting his physical and mental state. Dehydration brought on cramps, dizziness, delirium and a lot of other things he could not afford if he was going to get out of this mess alive.

“And Reese wants a word with you.”

“Seth? This is Reese.”

“Hi, Reese.”

“Those samples you sent up… No signs of reversed chirality. The proteins are terrestrial-normal.”

“So it was just the sort of stupid idea only a Neanderthal like me would think of. Thanks. Prospector out.”

“Come and sit down, Neanderthal,” Meredith said.

He obeyed. “So tell me the rest of your story.” Anything to take his mind off his thirst.

“Nothing to tell. By the next day I was feeling much better, thinking more clearly, but I knew I was doomed to die here. I could get water from the taps in the decon room but no food. I thought I heard Mariko tapping sometimes. I tried tapping back, but her response never seemed to make any sense, so perhaps I was just hearing a loose piece of the hull blown around by the wind. It stopped after a couple of days.

“When I was strong enough, I crawled out here, to the lab. I renamed it the lanai. I had no way of calling De Soto or the other ships. I tried to mark out a signal on the sand, because by then I’d decided that the infection wasn’t always fatal. It probably killed Dylan, I wasn’t sure about Mariko, and I seemed to be recovering.”

“De Soto was still there, then?”

“They all were. They were in very low orbit, and sometimes, when the sun was behind a cloud, I could see sunlight reflected off them as they went by overhead. Always there would be at least one of the three. Then they closed up into a group, close together, and I knew they were about to leave. Then I saw their jump flash. And knew I was alone.”

“Did you write your message in the sand?”

“It was very faint. I did drag a chair outside to show that there was still someone alive. They either didn’t see it, or they ignored it. The centaurs took it away later.”

Seth tried to imagine what the media would do with this story, but it made his mind reel. Duddridge was a dead man walking. He would be torn to shreds.

“That must have been almost three weeks ago.”

“Feels like three years. Now you turn up. I may start weeping soon.”

“Weep away. Trauma and stim shorts can do that to anyone. You’ll be an international celebrity, you know. Sell your memoirs for a fortune.”

She leaned against him. It was a romantic gesture, except that she weighed a ton. “You really think this damned world will let us go?”

He put an arm around her. “I think the wind’s dropping already. As soon as the storm lets up, Niagara will come for us. We’ll walk over, load the samples, and be on our way.”

“You’re sweet,” she said dreamily.

She must be more confused than he’d realized. No one had called Seth Broderick sweet in the last twenty years.

He took Meredith’s cup and went over to the mouth of the cave. After one last breath of pure air, he removed his helmet, ignoring Control’s squawks of protest. The roar of the storm grew louder. Cacafuego smelled of steam, and sea, and something that he thought might be mulch. Despite the rain, the air was hotter than a sauna, provoking instant beads of perspiration on his face. He filled the cup where a steady trickle of water was running down the side of the shuttle. He drank.

“This hemlock tastes like champagne.”

Meredith smiled. “Champagne is iced. If it’s warm, it’s hemlock.” She stared at his face until he wondered what she was thinking. Then she said, “I didn’t know Neanderthals were so good looking.”

She was probably joking, but stim shots could have strange effects on people, especially if they were seriously traumatized, as she was. He drank another cupful.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You’d have been happy to see Quasimodo or one of his gargoyles.”

“Come and sit by me, Quasimodo. Why not take off your bell-ringing costume first?”

She must know what men wore inside an EVA suit, but she was right. The suit’s temperature control wouldn’t work without the helmet, so in this heat he must either remove the suit or put his helmet back on.

“I think I may as well die in comfort. But I’ll undress in the bedroom, if you don’t mind. My gear will be safer there.” The larger waves were coming well inside now, lapping close to the table. The castaways might soon have to abandon the lab and retreat to the dorm.

“Right. You go and slip into something comfortable,” she said.

Not knowing her, he wasn’t sure how much she was playacting or what he would do if she started making serious advances. Under normal circumstances he wouldn’t hesitate, for she was an attractive woman, but in their current predicament there was something grotesque about the idea. He had given her drugs, which would make it feel like date rape.

“Here,” he said, detaching the communicator and camera from his helmet. He handed to them on their strap, which could be worn as a headband. “You talk to the nice people upstairs.”

He clambered back into the decon room and crawled across the unsteady shower doors to the dorm. There, far from the raging storm, the air stank of rotting fish and human sweat. He removed his suit by the light of his helmet, stripping down to shorts and shoes. He was glad to be rid of the heavy suit, but now perspiration was pouring off him and he would need to drink much more water.

He had just begun to retrace his path when he heard a strange yittering noise ahead. He crawled forward across the shower doors as quietly as he could.

A herd of centaurs had arrived. Meredith had shed her bra and sarong. She was kneeling in the water that now sloshed to and fro in the former laboratory, moving her hands in a feed-me gesture, and the visitors were milling around her, as noisy as excited parakeets. Those closest to her kept fondling her hair.

They were about the size of middling dogs, black on top and white below, in the manner of penguins or fish, but their skin was as smooth as dolphins’. Like the lizard Seth had caught hours ago, they had six limbs, which must be the standard for Cacafuego’s vertebrate equivalents. They walked on the rear four limbs, but their front torsos bent upward, so that the first set of limbs looked like arms and their head faced forward, in human fashion. It was easy to see why Meredith and her team had named them centaurs.

Their hands had no fingers, being shaped like giant tongues, able to roll up to grip things. He saw three or four centaurs with spears and others carrying gourds, which must be used for storage or transport. The way they waved their hands about in gestures seemed typically human, but their faces were quite alien. The closest model he could think of would be giant pandas with muzzles full of sharp teeth. Fangs would not penetrate an EVA suit, and they were not being used to attack or even threaten Meredith. Sentient or not, centaurs were cute. They might make popular pets, except that ISLA would never allow an advanced species to be imported. ISLA wouldn’t hesitate to call them sentient.

Did he? Maybe. He didn’t want them to be intelligent! Although these hexapods would certainly qualify as intelligent by ISLA’s muddled rules, they were not building nuclear power plants yet, and their descendants never would. By terrestrial standards they were obviously marine mammals. The first step to technology was fire, and their chances of encountering that, let alone taming it, must be very close to zero.

As a first guess, this harsh sideways world would force them to migrate north and south with the sun. If permanent sea ice at the equator made that impossible, most likely they hibernated. The chimneys might serve as their winter lairs.

Well aware that Meredith would accuse him of terrestrializing again, Seth decided that Centaurus cacafuegensis was closer to marsupial than placental. Their white chests showed no nipples. Several bore humps on their backs with tiny centaur heads protruded from them, like baby kangaroos in their mothers’ pouches. But centaurs also had a resemblance to flying squirrels, because a web of skin joined all three limbs on each side. The general effect was that of a blanket draped over their backs, and very long sleeves in front. Their walk was an awkward roll, but they would be powerful swimmers, flying through water as bats flew through air. They had quadrupeds’ stability on land, plus bipeds’ dexterity. They had sharp teeth and claws to catch fish. Their overall design seemed more efficient than anything on Earth or any other planet Seth could recall offhand. Exobiologists would go into raptures over them.

His doubts about their intelligence faded when a centaur outside the cave started yittering louder than the others, and the crowd parted to let it enter. Unsteady under the load of a meter-long fish held in its hand flaps, the newcomer advanced to Meredith and presented her with its still-twitching gift. The rest of them yittered in loud approval and applauded by slapping their flippers, like seals. That was language Seth was hearing, and the speakers were a wild species, not trained or domesticated. Their behavior was closer to a demonstration of sentience than anything witnessed in a century of human stellar exploration. Centaurs met at least three of the five criteria in GenRegs 001.196 [C]. Golden Hind’s report would kill any hope of a development license.

So now JC’s suspicion about Duddridge made a lot of sense. There was more than enough evidence here to post a purple beacon on Cacafuego, and that would have sent Golden Hind away with its tail between its legs. Instead he had posted the quarantine flag, which might have seemed equally justified but which would not by itself have barred Galactic from sending a second expedition in future. He had passed up a chance at eternal fame in favor of a chance to return. Why? What opportunity for profit had he seen on this brutal world that Seth was missing?

While Meredith was thanking the centaurs for their kindness, Seth realized that she was not wearing the communicator headband he had given her, their only link to Golden Hind. Furthermore, a couple of youngish-looking centaurs were playing tug-of-war with his precious sample bag. Any moment they would pull it open and all his hard work would be lost forever.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Stop that!” He swung his feet over the door. On Earth he would have jumped. On Cacafuego, he had to clamber down as carefully as some fragile old lady.

The cave erupted in a tumult of yittering, a centaur panic. They had not known there was another of the monsters up there watching them, a larger version of the one they knew. A human crowd would have fled out the door in terror. The centaurs swarmed, but they headed for Seth himself, and their cries seemed to be more alarm calls than threats. The claws on their middle and rear paws enable them to climb, after a fashion. Some scrambled up the makeshift workbench-ladder beside him. Flippers wrapped around his ankles, arms clasped his waist, and he was dragged loose. Only the knee-deep water and a layer of centaurs saved him from serious injury.

He emerged spluttering but unharmed except for bruises, and none of his would-be rescuers seemed to have been damaged either. They must have rubber bones. They had not done with him yet. A dozen flippers grabbed his shorts and ripped them away in shreds. Other centaurs boiled around his legs to get those dangerous shoes off him. He was tipped back in the water again. Only when he was safely mother-naked was he allowed to sit up. Conscious of Meredith’s stare, he preferred not to stand.

“All right?” she said, having to shout.

“Where is the communicator?” he yelled, but couldn’t make out her answer over the storm outside and the excitement inside. The centaurs were fascinated by hair. And this new one had it on his chest, too! Then they discovered the stubble on his chin and every one of them wanted to stroke that, so that he could hardly breathe for flippers. He arranged his thighs to protect other places.

The waves were growing larger, threatening to float him, and already floating the centaurs. He wanted to move both himself and Meredith to the watertight compartments, but now that he knew that the centaurs could climb, he did not want to give them the idea of exploring in there. They were as curious as monkeys, another sign of intelligence.

A glimpse of orange through the forest of flippers and bright-eyed panda-like faces reminded him of the sample bag he had come to rescue. He heaved himself to his feet. The juvenile gang had given up their tug-of-war and taken to tossing the bag around in a game of catch. Seth struggled in their direction through water and massed centaurs. The excitement had begun to die a little, but revelation of more of him raised the noise level again. The alien had hairy legs!

“Mine!” he roared and tried to grab the sample bag. That made the game even better. The bag hurtled past him several times, but his terrestrial reflexes couldn’t judge the higher speeds involved and he floundered, making a fool of himself and starting to lose his temper. He could recognize laughter, even in Centaur, and he thought he heard some human mirth in there also. At last, more by luck than skill, he intercepted a pass and retrieved the precious bag.

He raised it over his head. “Mine!” he repeated. They had gourds and spears; they must understand the concept of property. Yes, but that might not be the point in this case.

The teenager-equivalents thought this was another game and tried to jump high enough to reach the prize. He staggered as they collided with him and fell back, but he kept possession of the bag. Their yittering changed, growing even shriller. Seth couldn’t understand their chatter or their facial expressions, but when one of them slapped him on the chest he understood. Those flippers stung like a hard leather strap. Then another struck his back. He was rescued from a mobbing by one of the spear-carriers, who shouted and scolded, and drove the gang away from the monster.

Seth thanked him and bowed.

He, or she, yittered and clapped flappers.

The dialogue might have progressed further, had it not been interrupted by shrill cries from centaurs outside the cave. Those near the door took it up, and in moments the entire tribe had disappeared.

“That’s the surge coming,” Meredith said. “Hear the rumble?”

Mostly Seth could still hear the roar of the wind and rain, but at least he no longer had to shout over the centaurs as well. “What happened to the communicator?”

“I was kneeling on it.” She struggled to her feet, clutching the headband. She put it on. “Can you hear me? Yes, we’re both all right. Sorry to scare you. I had to hide the com from the centaurs. They’ll grab anything; worse than jackdaws or keas. Seth’s here, see? Yes, I agree. A bit on the hairy side, but that impressed the centaurs.”

“Mine!” Seth said firmly, dropping the sample bag so he could relieve Meredith of the com and camera. “Prospector to Golden Hind.”

“Welcome back, Mr. Universe,” said Hanna. Oh, Lord, why did it have to be Hanna? “That storm surge is almost upon you. If you can take cover, do so right now.”

“Yes, ma’am. Prospector out.”

Seth hurled the sample bag at the doorway to the decon room. He aimed very high and scored at the first attempt. By then he had decided that Meredith would need help and he would be better able to provide it if he went first, however ungallant that seemed. He scrambled up the improvised ladder as fast as he could and reached down for her.

She handed him the fish the centaurs had brought her, rescued her bra just before it floated out the door, and started to climb. The help he could give her was very limited, and they might not have made it had the rapidly rising water not lifted her. He hauled her in beside him.

Meredith scrambled across the shower doors. He followed. By the time he reached the far side, the water was spilling into the decon chamber. He slid open a panel to let the big shower cubicle take the first of the flood while he made his escape through the second doorway and found a safe foothold on the foldaway bunk that served as a ladder. He let the door latch itself. Then he scrambled down, landing hard on his bare feet. The dormitory was blessedly quiet, the roar of the storm barely detectable through the hull.

He wished he’d saved a reserve of rainwater.

In the gloom, lit only by his helmet lamp, Meredith sat on the tumbled bedding, making herself more decent with another sheet. Seth looked around for another, absurdly conscious of the vivid red welts where the centaur had slapped him. Fortunately the camera had not recorded that foolish brawl.

“That door is a devil to open,” Meredith remarked. Her calmness would have been incredible if he did not suspect she was slipping into some sort of shock.

“Not if the room beyond it is full of water, it won’t be.” He straightened out another mattress for himself.

“You don’t happen to have a blazer on you?”

“Didn’t bring one.”

“Then I’ll eat sushi. Lend me your knife.”

Seth wasn’t tempted to join her for dinner. He was too parched to eat anything, but he did accept a fragment of Cacafuegian salmon for his sample bag.

“Why bother?” Meredith said with her mouth full. “‘Indigenous materials from a world inhabited by sentients must be surrendered to an authorized representative of ISLA.’”

True. “I promised JC I’d collect samples for him. If he wants to deep-space them, that’s his privilege.”

He left the light on, because his battery had at least ten hours’ power remaining, longer than the air in the cabin would last. The shuttle shuddered again as another wave struck it, even bounced slightly. Neither of them commented.

“How does it taste?”

“Excellent,” she said with her mouth full. “Needs some Tartar sauce.” She ate two slices of raw fish, wrapped the rest in a pillowcase and tucked it away, out of sight or scent. It might be stinking up the dormitory, but the dormitory already reeked of too many things for one more to matter.

By then Seth had noted that the noise of the storm had stopped altogether and the cabin was starting to shift uneasily, both observations suggesting that the shuttle must be almost submerged.

He said, “Since no one can overhear us here and you trust me like you would your own mother, tell me about Commodore Duddridge.”

“Of course I trust you, Mom, but you’re recording everything we say.”

“Then pretend I’m Grandma.”

“That’s worse. What about Commodore Duddridge?”

“Do you trust him?”

“As much as I trust any bottom-line, bottom-feeding low-life. I told him so, the last time we spoke, just before the shuttle rolled. I told him things I’d been wanting to say for a long time.”

“What sort of things?”

“Well he asked me a lot of personal questions, about my experience with various guys in the crew. Really personal details about their technique and performance. So I felt at liberty to tell him how much better in bed they all were than he was and how most anyone aboard would make a better commodore. I told him I expected he would blame the disaster on me. I wanted to get that into the record. He assured me that he would see that no blame attached to me for what happened to the landing party.”

“And you didn’t believe him?”

“Never!” Meredith moved as if seeking a more comfortable position. No position was comfortable for long in 1.62 gees. “Old Doddery is old for deep-space work and angling for a management slot. He sucks up to the top brass, puts Galactic’s balance sheet ahead of anything else, and still wants the crew to think of him as a brother. He’s always sincere, no matter how little he means it.”

That had been Seth’s impression of the man in the one recorded glimpse he had obtained, but could he be so mean-spirited that he would leave two women to die out of personal dislike?

“When he pulled out, he posted a yellow flag, meaning plague. His beacon message dwelt on the hurricane-force winds and a virus that could penetrate all barriers. He never mentioned the centaurs at all.”

“What? But I told him they were sentient! And I was right. Every time it rains or floods, they come visiting and leave fish offerings. That’s GenRegs’ 196 [E] behavior exactly. He should have posted a purple flag. Why yellow?”

“Perhaps to cover his ass for forbidding Tony Violaceus to try a rescue effort after you lost contact.”

“Tony offered to do that? Jeez! He really is a great guy.”

Seth thought he caught a faint afterthought of, “in bed, too,” but that might be his own Old Adam grumbling. “Tony could have staked the planet for Galactic while he was at it. So perhaps Duddridge didn’t want you rescued, babbling about talking otters? Your remarks from the shuttle can be dismissed as fevered delirium. He hoped to scare Mighty Mite out of sending down a shuttle, but he did not want to close the world to a later visit by Galactic. If this is the case, then he must think that there’s some value in staking this planet. And you must have found it.”

Meredith still worked for Galactic, not Mighty Mite. If she had found something valuable she might have told Duddridge and still want to keep it from Seth.

For a moment she said nothing. Then, “All we found was the centaurs, and they close down the whole planet. There’s another thing, though. Doddery might have refused Tony’s offer because he didn’t want another death on his record. He lost people on both his previous missions, and now three more. Looks bad. You agree that the centaurs are sentient?”

Seth sighed. “After watching them bring you that fish just now because they understood that you were hungry and couldn’t catch your own? You, a member of a species they had never met before? Of course I do. I think ISLA should put Cacafuego off-limits to development.”

Scientific expeditions observing from space would be all. No explorers and no missionaries. What would missionaries preach to six-limbed natives anyway?

The shuttle’s moves were becoming violent−erratic rises followed by sudden descents.

“Will Mighty Mite survive if it cannot stake the planet?”

“No. It will take ISLA years to decide whether to grant Mite a development permit or interdict Cacafuego and release the reward money. The reward won’t even cover the interest on Mite’s debts.” The publicity would help, of course, but not nearly enough. Seth’s plog would be a bestseller, as would Meredith’s, if she managed to pry the records out of Galactic. “We’ll all be celebrities for a week or two.” Especially JR. He’d love it. “And you can sue Galactic.”

“Sue but never win.”

“Oh, don’t think that. They’ll pay up millions to avoid the bad—look out!”

The shuttle shuddered as if it had been kicked. Then again. After a long tremor and a distant grating, tearing noise, it began to tilt.

Seth said, “Let’s move to this side, just in…”

Too late. The cabin twisted violently and arranged the move for them. He slid, stopped with a jolt, and had all his breath knocked out by ninety kilos of Meredith running into him. Then they were buried under loose bedding. They had arrived on the original floor, although it still had a steep slope. Murky green daylight poured in through a window that had been hidden until now.

The movement didn’t stop; it became a wild rocking. Clearly the front part of the shuttle had separated from the rest and was floating, basically right way up, but nose high. All that showed through the window was greenish water, with no surface or bottom in sight. He remembered that Galactic’s second shuttle had disappeared, presumed washed out to sea—not a comforting thought.

“We must do this again in cozier surroundings,” Meredith murmured.

“I guarantee full cooperation.”

They disentangled as well as they could. Was their next trial to be seasickness? Roll, yaw, rock…

Seth said, “I’m sure Golden Hind is tracking us. The bow should be above water. I expect the tilt comes from all that sand in the lab. I don’t think we’ll go very far, and we’re probably being swept inland. When the flood subsides, we’ll run aground.”

“A total lack of imagination is a good thing in a prospector.”

“What are you imagining?”

“Don’t ask.”

Unfortunately, he didn’t have to.

Their impromptu submarine continued its erratic motion, starting to spin as well as rock. It would meet no floating tree trunks, but it was moving so fast that any large rock could burst it open and sink it.

When humans couldn’t play sex games or power games, they normally just chattered. So he chattered.

“Female prospectors are rare.”

“Yes.”

He waited.

“And most people called Meredith are herms? That what you’re wondering?”

“But too polite to ask.”

“I was named after my Uncle Auntie. My father was junior prospector on JKV’s Harmonious Chariot. My mother was senior astrobiologist. They hit it off tops. They both wanted to make me a herm, but deep-space ships don’t carry prenatal herm drugs. So here I am, permanently overwhelmed in the action.”

“I don’t mind underwhelming if you want a change. Born where?”

“On Earth. In Sweden.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“Mother’s still around, teaching at UNU. Father made the second descent to Blue Lantern.”

“Um, quicksand, right?” It was a classic deep-space horror story. Twenty-odd years ago, so she could have no memory of him.

She nodded. “The first team landed on what looked like a beach beside a small lake and the shuttle sank in up its wings. With the jets plugged, it would have blown up if they had tried to take off. Then it started to move toward the pond. Nobody thought badly about that—quicksand is caused by underground artesian springs, so a slow flow down to the water seemed reasonable.

“Prospector Tsukuba brought the second shuttle down. He landed on the lake itself, as instructed. The plan was that he would throw ropes to the first crew, haul them off the beach, then fish them out of the water. He was standing on the wing of his shuttle, preparing to throw the first rope, when the shuttle was dragged under, and him with it. The whole thing, pond and beach, turned out to be a feeding orifice.”

“I’ve seen the plog, what there was of it. All four people died.”

“Blue Lantern was one of the bad ones, but we may match it. Ask me tomorrow.”

“My immediate worry is getting seasick,” Seth said.

They lay in silence for a while. He was physically exhausted, and had been running on his nerves for hours. Even so, he could not sleep in this blender.

Yet he must have dozed for a few minutes, because he was suddenly aware of Meredith tugging at her sheet.

“Right, Quasimodo.” Her voice was slurred. “Pull out your rope and bells and start humping.”

“Never met anyone as romantic as you, Juliet.”

“I mean it, Stud.” This was the stim shot speaking. “May be the last chance we’ll ever have and I am hot to trot, ripe to rape, frantic to—”

“Not now! Wait until we’re safely on Golden Hind, fed and clean and comfortable. Then I’ll be at your service. All you can eat. These little piggies can go ‘Oo! Oo! Oo!’ all the way home.”

She muttered something inaudible. Her eyes stayed closed.

More light was coming in the window. Their submarine was rocking, pitching, and spinning even more violently in waves near the surface. Weeds were streaming past the glass. They looked like that ferny ground cover, so it was the shuttle that was moving at such an alarming rate, and the water wasn’t very deep.

Then thump! The stern had grounded. Crunching noises. More violent thumps, felt in every bone he possessed. The light brightened.

“That’s good,” he said. “We’re surfacing.”

No answer.

Four smaller bumps and a big one and all motion stopped.

The water level sank steadily down the glass.

Seth swallowed his heart back where it belonged. “Please remain seated with your safety web fastened until the shuttle has come to a complete stop at the terminal building.”

The cabin was resting on its belly, almost level. The door that had been in the ceiling was now at the far side of the room, easily accessible.

He waited to make sure that there were no more surprises coming but his eyelids started drooping, so he sat up. Having made sure Meredith was comfortable and not likely to choke, he rose to peer out the window. All he could see was rain and an extremely rough wall, reminiscent of a coral reef, decorated with “moss” and “barnacles”. He could guess what that was.

He might be going to survive this crazy adventure after all.

He dug through the litter to find his headband, then walked up the slant of the deck to the corridor door. And hesitated. The corridor might be full of water. There had been two dead bodies in the shuttle before it broke apart. He did not know their present whereabouts, and they would be in loathsome condition after three weeks of unrelenting heat. The door opened easily to his touch. He detected no foul stench of death.

The window on that side showed another chimney about two meters away, half hidden in driving rain. He could hear nothing except the noise of the storm, although that seemed to be slackening. If the centaurs had any sense, they were staying indoors. The corridor, like Niagara’s, was divided by airtight doors. The first one aft was warped and immovable, but there was probably nothing left beyond it anyway. If he couldn’t get out, centaurs could not get in.

Forward the corridor brought him to the starboard exit door. He decided not to try it, because if he couldn’t open it, he probably couldn’t get out at all. He would cross that bridge when he got to it.

Now the passage ended at a door that he guessed would lead to the prospectors’ quarters. Normally only Control could open bulkhead doors, but with the power off all he need do was tug on the emergency lever. Inside, he found no bodies, just a dormitory for two, a toilet, and the door to the cab. The heat was terrible, the air stale and nasty. Rummaging in cupboards, he found the most welcome sight of his life, a crate of water bottles. He gulped a quarter of a bottle without drawing breath.

His search found no bodies and ended in the cab itself. In the absence of power, the view screens had all reverted to windows, and he was able to look out at the chimney colony. There were still no centaurs in sight, but visibility was restricted by rain. Aft, past where the shuttle’s wing had been, he could glimpse a spread of flat sand, broad enough for Niagara to land on, and that was a very welcome sight.

Armed with a second water bottle, he settled into the master’s chair. The glass should not block transmission as the metal hull had.

“Prospector to Golden Hind.”

At least three voices yelled, “Seth!” simultaneously. The ship must be passing almost directly overhead, for he detected no delay.

“Meredith and I are both alive, in the forward end of the shuttle, jammed in the chimney forest.”

Jordan: “Yes, we can see it. The other half didn’t go far, but if you’d been a hundred meters farther north, you’d have gone straight past and out to sea.”

“Must be the gods’ reward for virtuous living. How’s the weather look?” He was resigned to hearing that another week ought to do it.

“It looks good for about four hours from now, but our orbit isn’t properly lined up. We can jump if it’s urgent, but there’s a big tropical high due in about eight hours. That should give you some relatively calm weather. And you must need some sleep.”

He’d believe in calm on this violent planet when he saw it. “Is my plog uploading?”

“Control says it’s all done.”

“Good. There is a problem. Meredith is unconscious. I haven’t tried to waken her, but I think she’s in coma. It’s probably a reaction to the stim shot, on top of narcosis, dehydration, and a diet of raw fish. Emotional trauma too, I expect. Dare I give her another stim shot before the shuttle lands? I can’t carry her in this gravity.”

Pause for murmured consultation…

“Seth? Jordan again. Control and Reese both say no, don’t risk it. We’ll try to concoct something safer for her and send it down with the shuttle. How close can it land?”

“The closer the better as far as I’m concerned. It seems flat enough behind the cab, but it’s raining too hard to be sure. Don’t argue with the chimneys, they’re natural formations, solid rock.”

“We won’t.”

“Come down on sand if you can. Both of us will need depressurizing, especially Meredith, and we should both be quarantined, because I had to break asepsis.”

“We’re working on that assumption.”

Seth drew a deep breath. “I want to go on record as agreeing with Meredith Tsukuba’s opinion that the centaurs are sentient.” He heard JC utter his favorite oath in the background. “They were bringing offerings of fish to her. They carry weapons and gourds. They don’t harm us as long as we aren’t wearing clothes. They have complex calls that seem to be language.”

He had wanted fortune and must settle for fame.

“Control has analyzed your earlier plog,” Jordan’s voice said, “and agrees with you on the language.”

“They don’t build the chimneys, but they nest in them, so they’re around here somewhere. Toss some clothes into the shuttle for both of us, please. We’ll have to strip naked to get to it.”

“Your plog ought to be Top of the Pops.”

“Only if it has a happy ending. I must sign off now and get some rest. I haven’t slept in years.”

He checked on Meredith. She was still asleep, her pulse worrisomely faint. He went back to the prospectors’ dormitory and, with a huge sigh of relief, sank down on the lower bunk, which was probably hers. He was asleep before his eyes closed.