Part 5 (1/2)

The other wall showed the sticklike people cultivating a field, working in a row with what looked like a primitive hoe.

”Stoner, it's getting late,” Betsy said, made uneasy by being high up in a building that had been built only G.o.d knew when.

Stoner reluctantly led the way back toward the crawler. ”There was no violence here,” he decided.

”They left peacefully. Every building we've checked was systematically emptied. If the end had come by war, disease, or some violent natural occurrence, there'd be artifacts everywhere. My guess is that the climate changed. That river used to run with water. When the rains stopped they simply moved on.”

”To where?” Betsy asked.

”Good question.”

Jumper, who had been made quite unhappy when he was left on the ground floor as his friends and master disappeared through a hole in the ceiling, was feeling better, scouting the way. He halted suddenly, froze into an att.i.tude of discovery, then began to bark. Clay went over next to the wall of a building and saw that Jumper had discovered a small burrow.

”There may be something in there with teeth, boy,” he told the dog. ”Come on.”

Jumper whined and began to dig. Clay reached down to pick Jumper up just as the dog's frantic digging unearthed an object with an ancient, green patina. Clay pulled Jumper away and yelled, ”Hey, Stoner!”

The object was an axhead of hammered bronze. Stoner whooped and showed the metal to Betsy. None of the rock samples he'd taken that day had been encouraging so far as traces of metal were concerned, but he had the proof in his hands now. ”There's copper and tin,” he said. ”And where there's copper and tin, there have got to be other metals.”

The Americans on Omega were an elite group. Each had been selected for achievement in his or her individual field, and even in an era when robots and computers had produced a twenty-hour workweek for the majority of people in the United States, high achievers still followed the ancient rules of success.

One simply did not make it to the top of his or her field by working a twenty-hour week, or even an old-fas.h.i.+oned forty-hour week. Everyone chosen for theSpirit of America expedition was aware of the basic time management rule, that there are only so many hours in a day, and the important thing is how one uses those hours.

It seemed a blessing, therefore, to have an extra ten minutes in each hour on Omega, adding up to an extra four hours daily. And since the s.h.i.+p had landed just as Omega's summer season was starting, thelong days gave almost eighteen standard hours of good daylight. The problem was that the human body was used to a day of twenty-four sixty-minute hours, not a day of twenty-four seventy-minute hours.

Of course, each specialist wanted to spend time working exclusively in his or her specialty field. But everyone had work a.s.signments outside the specialty field. There were times, such as during the construction of the smelter on the Dinah River, when there was a need for ordinary physical labor, and at such times research and exploration had to be interrupted. To make up for the time taken away from their own work, scientists and technicians often burned lights in the laboratories into the early hours of the morning, and then got up after inadequate sleep to continue construction, or woke in the predawn hours to do extra work.

Amando Kwait, for example, always got an early start on the day, whether he had special extradisciplinary responsibilities or not. Today he had his own staff busy, working in the s.h.i.+p's gardens or testing botanical samples and gathering others, so he linked up with Paul Warden, who was taking a cartographic crew across Jumper's Run to the north. Amando wanted to cover as much territory as possible, gather samples at random to get an overall picture of Eden before planting food crops.

Paul was in a good mood, in spite of the fact that once again, just last night, he had been brushed off in a cold, almost crude way by Sage Bryson. He'd then had a talk with a friend of his, Grace Monroe, who knew as much about the human brain as anyone living and, being a woman herself, a lot about women in general.

”Yes, I know Sage,” Grace had told him. ”Isn't she a lovely woman?”

Paul, his face going red, confessed that he did, indeed, think that Sage was lovely, more than lovely, leading Grace to smile and say, ”Why, Paul, I think you've made your choice.”

Almost everyone knew everyone else. The s.h.i.+p had been a small world for the long voyage, and there had been no little speculation regarding the unmarried members of the company. When an unmarried couple paired off and stayed that way for any length of time, it was said that so-and-so had made his or her choice.

Warden flushed deeply, and his half grin became an east-west smile. ”I have. She hasn't.”

”Well, she couldn't do any better,” Grace a.s.sured him.

”I can't figure out whether she dislikes just me or men in general,” Paul said.

Grace didn't tell Paul, but she suspected that there might be something in what he'd just said, for Sage had been given plenty of opportunity by the s.h.i.+p's bachelors to socialize as a pair, and she had always refused.

”She'll come around, Paul,” Grace said, not at all sure, but wanting Paul to feel better. He was, in Grace's opinion, one very sweet man.

As Warden drove the crawler through Jumper's Run, stirring up silt from the creek's rocky bed, he remembered Grace's words and prayed that she was right. He had Sage Bryson so deep under his skin that he was beginning to itch.

It was a beautiful day for exploring. Climatologists, who had begun their study of the planet's weather patterns while the s.h.i.+p was still in orbit, had concluded that the coastal area of Eden would receivebetween twenty-five and forty inches of rainfall annually, mostly during the winter months. Summers-the s.h.i.+p had landed in what proved to be the area s late spring-would be dry, with temperatures not more than ninety degrees Fahrenheit at midday, with cooling ocean breezes coming from the great western sea.

Winters, the climatologists predicted, would be mild, snowless, and relatively brief, considering that Omega's year was four hundred twenty-five Earth-days long, making for thirty-five-day months.

As Paul Warden steered the crawler up the slope from Jumper's Run in the early morning, the temperature was seventy degrees, the sun pleasantly warm, the almost purple sky cloudless. No one aboard was in much of a hurry. Paul would stop the crawler when Amando wanted to taljp a closer look at a plant or when the mapmaking team wanted to apply the sensors of their automated, computerized instruments to the surrounding terrain.

They moved quickly into a wide plain of undulating tall gra.s.s, studded with the beautifully symmetrical umbrella trees. Paul aimed at a small grouping of three trees in the near distance. A herd of silver-horned antelope moved casually aside, splitting to let the crawler move past them on its almost silent hydrogen power.

Lynn Roberts, not yet thirty years old, short, bronzed from her time spent under sunlamps aboard s.h.i.+p, was in charge of the mapmaking team. She had not seen the silver-horns before. ”They're so beautiful,”

she breathed.

Paul obligingly stopped the crawler, and the silver-horns, after checking them out, grazed on, some within a distance of less than a hundred feet.

”They're not afraid of us at all,” Lynn said.

”That's because we haven't started eating them,” said her partner, George Evans, a Minnesota man, still in his twenties but acknowledged to be among the best surveyors on Earth.

”No one would eat anything so beautiful,” Lynn said.

”There were beautiful animals in Africa, too, ” Amando commented. ”There are few left, if any.” He let his thoughts wander sadly, remembering when the communists took over and began to use hunger as a weapon to force the tribes to their will and as a way of reducing the troublesome population surplus.

Those who were hungry ignored the conservation laws, and beautiful animals had been eaten.

”We've got a fresh chance here,” Lynn Roberts said. ”We ate synthetic protein at home and on the trip out. We can't start killing just to stuff our stomachs with natural protein.”

A herd bull decided that the gra.s.s was more desirable a hundred feet away. He lifted his head and pranced gracefully toward a new spot, moving in a determined straight line until he approached a spot of gra.s.s that was of a slightly lighter color than the rest. He made a wide, careful circle around the browner gra.s.s, and as his harem followed dutifully, each of the silver-horns circled the lighter gra.s.s. Amando did not take particular notice; it was not unusual, in a gra.s.sy plain, to see spots of different color. He could see several of the small, lighter-colored spots from the crawler.

They sat in silence, watching the silver-horns. Warden moved the crawler toward the trees, where a family of the as-yet-unnamed meat eaters lolled in the shade, the bones of the night's kill attracting a dozen of the leathery scavenger birds not a hundred yards away.

There had been a lot of discussion about the catlike carnivores. The young one that had been brought tothe s.h.i.+p for study had no patience for men and was quite belligerent when approached. Paul Warden had been asked to determine the reaction of the carnivores to man in their own habitat. He stopped the crawler again and, his stun gun set on full charge, walked purposefully toward the trees. The greenish-tan animals looked at him until he was within fifty feet, and then they rose one by one and faced him. He was ready to stun the entire family, adult male and female and two yearling cubs, with the beam of his gun.

”Scram!” he said, waving his arms. The male's ears jerked forward inquisitively, and then, with a yawn, he turned and started to walk slowly away, the others following. Warden kept walking, moving faster than the animals. The male, the size of a healthy c.o.c.ker spaniel, stopped and pointed his short ears at Paul and opened his heavily toothed mouth to make a mewling, purring sound. The female and the cubs kept moving, but the male held his ground, managing to look quite bored with it all, until Paul was only ten feet away.

”Well, boy, what's your decision?” Paul asked the animal, stun gun at the ready. ”We're going to be here for a while, you know, and we don't mind you staying around as long as you don't decide that we look good to eat.”

While the scientists in the crawler watched tensely, the animal yawned again, made that mewling, purring sound, and took padded, feline steps toward Paul, long tail pointing straight up into the air. Paul, quite nervous, started to use the stun gun to put the cat to sleep for a few minutes, but on a hunch he held his fire. The cat wasn't all that big, but its teeth were big enough, and there were smooth, powerful muscles rippling under that greenish-tan hide. But Paul still didn't fire, and the cat came to within four feet of him, sat down, and looked up with big, yellow, cat's eyes.

”Want to be friends?” Paul asked, wondering if the animal was sizing him up for dinner. The cat made a purring sound and fell heavily, with a soulful grunt, to his side and lay there looking up fetchingly.

”I'll be d.a.m.ned,” Paul said. He swallowed hard, stepped forward, knelt. ”Easy old boy,” he whispered, and put out his hand to touch the animals head.

The cat purred, and Paul ran his hand down the smooth hide to the lighter-colored belly fur and rubbed.

A tongue like sandpaper rasped across his arm, and the purring increased. He looked back toward the others on the crawler and shrugged, and the cat, deprived of rubbing, reached up and licked his hand.