Part 14 (1/2)

Paul made one last check on the monitoring system. The miner obliged by giving him a little blip, one more turn of that drill of a snout down below. The thing was still twenty feet down, and it would take a long time for him to reach the surface with that slow, careful, and almost silent digging. Paul activated his perimeter guard, and invisible beams surrounded his campsite. He turned on the red light of the alarm to warn the admiral when he returned that the guard beams were on. Omega's pure, ocean-scented air and his tiredness made for instant sleep.

He awoke sitting up in one swift movement with his laser in his hands and the monitor alarm going crazy.

The miner in the tunnel was moving at top speed, sc.r.a.pe-sc.r.a.ping frantically. Paul flipped a switch to illuminate the area with the crawler's lights and crouched in a ready position, weapon aimed at a circular mound of fresh earth. He was ready to blast away if the miner did anything more than poke his head up out of the hole. But the sounds of the monitor told him that the miner was retreating.

What the h.e.l.l? He checked the monitor to be sure he wasn't hearing things. The miner was reaching a point near the limit of the range, and then the sounds stopped. Paul edged closer to the fresh earth. He didn't quite understand how the thing had come up through almost twenty feet of subsoil so quickly, but it had, and there'd been an explosion of fresh dirt, which made a little mound around the hole through which the miner had emerged. The hole was not neatly dug, and the amount of fresh earth indicated that the powerful miner had simply pushed his way violently through the last few feet.

Warden got on the communicator. Emi Zuki was on duty. He reported the odd events but told Emi that it wouldn't be necessary to wake the captain or to send any reinforcements. The admiral, monitoring, broke in to tell Warden that he was on his way. Warden edged in closer to the fresh mound of soil, because there was something reflecting the beams of light. The monitor told him there was nothing down there but an empty tunnel, but he approached warily, ready to fire and flee at the same time.

There was only one object on the mound of fresh soil that was glittering, glowing in the bright lights. Paul held his breath and leaned forward and picked it up. It was rather heavy. It reminded him of a sea fan, that delicate underwater plant that extends leafless, feathery arms outward from a central stem. He moved out of the direct glare of the spots and examined the thing. When he tried to hold it by one of the irregularly shaped arms, the arm bent. There was a heavy, metallic feel, and the color was a rich red-gold.

He knew that Stoner McRae had returned that evening from an expedition into the inland badlands. He got Emi back on the communicator, and very shortly Stoner was answering in a sleepy voice. Stoner came awake quickly as he listened to Paul. He was standing beside Warden's crawler within ten minutes, holding metal, heavy metal, in his hands.

”Is it what I think it is?” Paul asked.

”It's gold, all right,” Stoner said, holding the multiarmed, feathery formation carefully. He'd seen natural veins of gold removed intact from the matrix rock before; it made for a certain natural beauty. But he'd never seen so complex a vein, so large a vein, with the tiniest veins so fragile that they would bend at a touch.

”This is the way the molten gold formed as it ran into faults in the forming rock,” Stoner explained.

What he couldn't explain was how such a c.u.mbersome thing as a miner could so delicately remove matrix rock without disturbing or distorting the delicate gold formation. And neither of them could explain why the miner had, for days, dug so carefully, obviously trying to avoid detection by the monitors, to burst up into the night air violently and leave such a precious gift.

”But it's more significant than just this gold, Paul,” Stoner said. ”If there's gold, there'll be other heavy metals.”

”Rhenium,” Paul said.

”Rhenium,” Stoner agreed.

TWELVE.

Theresita had slept fitfully through a long night that cooled only slightly. She awoke to the first dim light filtering down from high above to find herself still soaked, sticky, and dehydrated. The pain she had expected from the cut on her thigh had not materialized. She climbed down from the bole of the fallen tree, drank from the water puddled in the cavity left when the tree's roots had been ripped from the earth, and then began to push her way through the dense undergrowth.

She had no definite goal; it was just that she'd spent enough time perched atop the fallen tree. She had, during wakeful periods, accepted her situation: She would die; the untreated cut on her thigh would become infected, and that, combined with starvation, would kill her.

If she had been dumped alone into an African jungle, she would have thought about survival. She had been given two weeks of an excellent survival course when her African service had begun, and she'd learned to eat some very odd things. But this was a jungle on an alien planet, and there was no survival manual to tell her which plant roots were edible and which were deadly poison, which fruits would give her body the fuel it needed to function and which would, with some deadly alien substance, stop all functions altogether.

The heat increased rapidly as the sun rose higher in the eastern sky, and the filtered light made visibility better far down under the treetops. Things were moving in the trees high above her. She saw a variety of birds and once, with a rustle of sound, something larger than a bird pa.s.sed overhead, masked by thedense foliage.

She had no destination. She tried to keep moving in a straight line, in the southerly direction of the flow of the river, by keeping the glow of the sun to her left. She had to push her way through a great tangle of vines and low-growing, huge-leafed things that retained water on their surface, so that she was constantly wet with that and her own sweat.

She heard a great chattering ahead, the sound quite like that of the African jungles, and then she could see the source of the noise. Birds. Mauve, they stood about a foot high, and they were congregated in and around a type of tree she had never seen before. It had ladderlike branches growing perpendicular to its trunk, and the birds were eating its fruit. Half-eaten fruit lay atop the undergrowth. She picked up one.

About the size of a large grapefruit, the exposed flesh had a deep-green color and smelled slightly acidic.

She tore away that part of the fruit that had been pecked and pitted by the birds and touched her tongue gingerly to taste. It wasn't bad.

She looked at the fruit, held it out in front of her, and laughed, for she was suddenly reminded of a scene from an ancient English drama by Shakespeare, in which Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, was holding a skull and saying, ”Alas.”

”Alas,” she said.

Her mouth was watering. She had not realized how hungry she was until she'd touched her tongue to the fruit. She had a simple choice: If she didn't eat, she would die; if she ate, she might die faster. She ate.

Tangy juice ran down her chin. The fruit had a seed core at the center, but the flesh was edible from the thin skin to the core. The consistency was figlike, the taste totally unfamiliar, but tart like a citrus fruit. It was very good, so good that she found herself stuffing huge bites into her mouth and then, thinking that the fruit on the lowest branches, which were probably twenty feet off the ground, had not been pecked by the birds, she hitched up her skirt, leaped to seize a low branch, and clambered up until she could reach a large fruit. Surprisingly, there was no pain from the wound in her thigh. But as she ate the fruit, she waited for the pains to start in her stomach. When there were no stomach pains, Theresita began to pluck other fruit and drop it down onto the cus.h.i.+oning carpet of undergrowth.

The birds had quieted when she began to climb the tree, but now they were squabbling and eating again, one of them walking sideways on a limb level with her head to c.o.c.k his eye at her from a distance of five feet.

”Watch it,” she warned. ”You might be edible, too.”

A quick shower swept over as she was perched in the tree, and she waited it out there, hearing the roar of heavy drops on the canopy above her and then the drip, drip as it began to soak through. When the rain stopped, she had decided that she might just live for a while after all. Her leg wound had formed a good scab. Because the cut had been deep, she'd expected very slow healing, if any. Perhaps, she thought, there was something in the river mud that aided healing. It didn't really matter. It would either heal or it wouldn't.

It was very hot. She had torn her skirt in several places moving the short distance she'd covered. Her hose were nothing much more than runs but would still be useful. She removed them, stuffed both legs full of the fruit, and slung the makes.h.i.+ft bag around her neck, letting the filled legs dangle down in front. That way she had both hands free for making her way through the undergrowth. Water was no problem. The rain had left clear, good-tasting little pools in the hollow cups of the big-leafed plants. They grew about as high as her head, so that to drink she had only to tilt a leaf and let the water run into her mouth.

She could tell when she was getting close to the river, for the jungle floor, piled deep in detritus, became soggy. She would sink down into the rotted vegetation, and water would spring up in her tracks. Now and then she'd come across a tree so recently fallen that it had not begun to rot into the jungle floor and she'd rest. She made her lunch on one of the fruit and pushed on toward the south, but the river was apparently making a westward bend, so in the late afternoon the sun was in her face when she found another fallen tree and spent the night atop it.

She had a few bad moments when the light awakened her. There just didn't seem to be much point in going on. She doubted if she'd covered a mile the day before, pus.h.i.+ng, crawling, struggling through the denseness. And she'd seen the jungle extending in all directions to the horizon as the scout s.h.i.+p fell toward the river. For all she knew, the whole planet could be jungle. She might spend years not seeing anything but omnipresent green and just a hint of the glow of the sun through the jungle curtain.

She added to her menu a large, thin-sh.e.l.led nut when she saw it being eaten by a long-limbed tree creature, which had a long tail, a body like a cat, and a short snout with crocodile teeth. The nut meat was oily and substantial.

When she was still alive the next morning without ill effects from the things she'd eaten, Theresita experienced a change in her att.i.tude. Living beat the alternative. She would have done just about anything for a bath and then just five minutes of being dry. These would be possible only if she found her way out of the jungle.

She stumbled onto a wide path beaten down into a residue of dead vegetation. A quick examination of the path sent a chill up her spine. On her first day in the jungle she had heard great cras.h.i.+ng noises. This path had been pushed through the jungle by something of great weight, big enough to flatten and crush small trees four inches in diameter. Along the perimeter of the path were deep, regularly s.p.a.ced gouges, which had torn down through the vegetation to the gray soil.

She didn't like the idea of meeting whatever it was that had made the path, but it made for easy walking.

It was a relief to be able to walk without pus.h.i.+ng her way; it gave her a feeling of accomplishment, for she had covered, she estimated, at least two miles before the path turned directly away from the river.

She selected her place for the night more carefully.

She had no desire to be awakened by something as big as the creature that had crushed its way through the tangled jungle. She climbed the horizontal limbs of a fruit tree and broke off small branches to make a sort of nest, which she found to be quite comfortable.

She crossed another path at midmorning, and she found her first tool. She saw what she thought was a stone half-covered by crushed leaves. Since a stone can be a weapon or a tool, she bent to pick it up. It was rounded on three sides, quite flat, not more than a half-inch thick at the thickest part, and narrowed to a dull edge. It was grayish-white, smooth on the underside, and sandpaper textured on the top. The edge was not sharp enough to be used as a cutting tool but could be made so if she could find something to use as a grindstone.

Now the going was very hard again as she stayed just outside the limits of the river swamplands. Her bare legs were scratched and bleeding. Her sodden tunic protected her arms somewhat, at the expenseof many pulls and rips. She was exhausted before the afternoon had been used up. She found a fruit tree and repeated her nest-building activities from the night before and was asleep, her stomach full of fruit and nuts, before the total darkness came to that world under the jungle's knitted canopy. She came awake with a grunt of pure panic, dreaming that she was falling. She hugged a limb with both arms just as the tree shook violently. She heard the sound of falling fruit, then a dry, grinding sound and the crackings of breaking limbs and twigs.

The darkness was so total that she could see nothing, but she could hear and sense the presence of something very large there twenty feet below her on the ground.

”Stop that, you crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d!” she screamed as the tree shook again. She had to hang onto the limb to keep from being dislodged.

Her voice brought a response, a terrific roar that seemed to fill all available s.p.a.ce and echo off the surrounding trees. In quick fear she climbed higher, b.u.mping her head painfully on a branch. She wrapped her arms around a large limb and clung to it as the tree began to shake with a renewed and more frenzied a.s.sault. She feared that the tree would fall and that she would fall with it down into that terrible blackness and into the reach of the huge, roaring thing.

When dawn came, her fear increased. She could make out the outline of something as large as a front-line battle tank, and as the light grew slowly she saw a ma.s.sive, scarab-shaped body with, apparently, no head. Six short, powerful legs, a thick trunk, which ended in a single pointed horn, churned the jungle floor as the thing flung itself at the bole of the tree and collided with a resounding thud and a jar that shook the entire tree. The six legs scrambled, digging, pulling the ma.s.sive body backward.