America 2040 - Golden World Part 5

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-fashioned 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 ship 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 ship'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 ship 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 ship'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 ship 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 ship 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 ship, 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 ship 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.

The rest of the family came drifting back, and Paul was soon surrounded by four big cats, the two young ones b.u.t.ting him with their heads to get their share of rubbing.

Lynn Roberts got off the crawler and came forward. The four animals looked at her, yawned, mewled, and one of the young ones frisked toward her, spooking her a bit, until the cat started rubbing against her leg. Soon all of them, including Amando, were squatting on the ground, scratching feline ears and rubbing smooth bellies.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned," Paul said. "The bees don't sting, there are no snakes, and the wild animals like to have their tummies scratched."

The male carnivore decided that playtime was over. He stood, shook himself, growled a growl that got everyone's attention, licked Paul's hand, and led the family away, past the carca.s.s of the night's kill, where the scavenger birds hissed, and then led a parade around a lighter spot of gra.s.s, which was in his line of march.

"They acted almost as if they'd seen men before," George Evans commented. Warden had been puzzled. It just wasn't natural for wild beasts to be so tame. But Evans's suggestion had not occurred to him. He stood, looked around, and shivered in spite of himself. It was all too idyllic to be real.

They loaded up and moved on, making two stops for the mapmaking crew, one for Amando, who saw a magenta-colored flower not in his collection, and then they climbed a long, gentle slope to another flatland of gra.s.s and stopped once again for the mapmakers. The three mapmakers' instruments were set up on tripods at a precise separation, a b.u.t.ton was pushed, and the instruments did the rest. Then Lynn and George went to swivel the two end instruments. Lynn was walking directly toward an area of lighter gra.s.s.

Paul was still contemplating George Evans's remark about there being other men, and his own reaction to it, a reaction that had him wanting to look quickly over his shoulder. He was looking toward the south when he heard Lynn's one agonized scream. He turned, his hand going for his laser weapon, just in time to see Lynn in the jaws of a nightmare from his youth, a thing with white flesh and sawteeth in a pointed snout. Lynns arms flailed for a moment, and then the muscular, snakelike neck of the nightmare creature flexed, and Lynn's blood spewed forth. With a quickness that was almost as frightening as the appearance of the beast, the pointed, toothed head disappeared, taking Lynn down with it. Dust flew, and there was a concave hole from which the dust arose for a moment, and then there was nothing.

Amando Kwait, not more than twenty feet away, had seen it all. "She walked into the circle of lighter-colored gra.s.s," he cried out to George. "The ground seemed to explode under her, and then the thing seized her."

"We've got to get her out!" George Evans called frantically.

"It's no use," Warden said. "It's no use." He'd heard the snap of bones, had seen the gush of blood, had seen the jaws of the beast close, driving the huge teeth through Lynn's body.

Now they knew. Even the biblical Eden had had its serpent. This, their Eden's serpent, had teeth, teeth that exploded upward from the ground itself.

Paul immediately got on the radio. He knew that there were many teams working in the field, and the areas of lighter gra.s.s were common sights. He gave warning. Jackie Garvey, on duty aboard ship as communicator, pa.s.sed the warning along to all field units. "Look for areas of gra.s.s lighter than the surrounding gra.s.s and avoid them."

The McRaes and Clay left the abandoned city in a mood of celebration. There were almost four hours of daylight left. "We'll check out the area under the north rim," Stoner said. "My guess is that there's water there. Should make it a nice place to camp."

There was water, and a quick check on the crawler's a.n.a.lyzer showed that the water was safe for swimming. Cindy and Betsy changed into their swimsuits behind the crawler, and then Clay and Stoner joined them in the water, which, after the pleasant, warm day, was deliriously refreshing.

Even as they splashed around and Cindy and Clay played chase with Jumper, a pair of the handsome little carnivorous p.u.s.s.ycats came down to drink at the far side of the pool, seemingly not very curious about the noisy humans. They all dried in the sun, changed, and started making camp. Clay helped set up two tents on the gra.s.sy margin of the pond, and then he and Cindy gathered dead, fallen limbs from the umbrella trees nearby.

Clay got the fire going and soon there was a smell of synthasteak grilling.

With nothing to do but wait, Clay suggested a walk. Cindy was the only taker. They started off down the dry riverbed, with Clay, at Stoner's suggestion, checking along the bank for artifacts. They were even with the crawler when Stoner called out, "Hey, Clay, how about turning on the beacon just in case anyone is looking for us."

The beacon, separate from the malfunctioning radio, sent out a homing signal coded to identify that particular crawler. It had a limited range, and that was reduced even further by the high cliffs surrounding the valley.

Clay walked along the riverbed, which was only twenty-five to thirty feet wide, and Cindy followed him.

Two hundred yards down the river a small herd of silver-horns grazed. Clay started walking idly toward them, past a roughly circular area of gra.s.s that was lighter in color, and glanced at it, seeing nothing of interest there. There were several of the lighter areas of gra.s.s ahead.

"Let's see how close we can get to the silver-horns before they spook," he suggested. Cindy was walking to his right, watching the silver-horns.

The herd buck lifted his head and gazed at them, and then went back to his grazing.

"Brave little beggar, aren't you?" Clay said.

Jumper had just seen, or smelled, the silver-horns. He showed indications of going after them, and Clay told him to heel.

"They don't seem to be afraid of us at all," Cindy commented.

"I'll bet if we could catch a young one, we could tame him," Clay said.

The lighter circle of gra.s.s was twenty feet in front of them, directly in their path. It was wide enough so that all three of them, boy, girl, .and dog, could walk across it abreast.

SIX.

Lieutenant Jackie Garvey lifted her coffee mug, took a sip, then frowned. The coffee had gone cold and stale. She shoved it away, rose, stretched. The ship's clocks were still set on Mountain Standard Time, but her body wasn't. She, like most, was having a bit of trouble adjusting to Omega's longer day.

Outside, Hamilton was beginning to settle down for the evening. Jackie had the ship's ears on and had used powerful visual equipment to try to spot the different varieties of birds that had begun to sing from the trees around the town at dusk. Unlike the seabirds, the land birds were drab in color, and their songs, although quite birdlike, were just different enough to give the early evening an alien feel. She swung the visuals toward the distant, inland mountains. On the tallest peaks, the champion of which was five thousand feet taller than Earth's Mount Everest, iced rocks protruded harshly from the eternal snows. The thirty-four-thousand-foot peaks would be almost as hostile to humans as was s.p.a.ce itself.

And yet, she felt, someday some young men and women would climb them and look down on this new world from its top and claim it as their own.

She closed off the optics and ran a systems check. The ship was humming along nicely. Power-plant monitors showed blank, with the rockets and the Shaw Drive put nicely to bed by Max Rosen, to await an awakening that would not come until plants had been built to manufacture rocket fuel and the exploration teams found metals.

It had been a long watch. Omega's seventy-minute hours had crawled. When the signal bong sounded and the access hatch to the control bridge opened, she looked up quickly, pleased with the thought of having company, and was doubly pleased when she saw that it was Duncan Rodrick.

"Good evening," she said. "I was just about to put on some coffee."

"Sounds good," Rodrick said, walking to stand beside her to check the ship's log quickly.

"Busy day," she said. "Poor Lynn."

"Yes."

She looked at him. His eyes were still on the log. The rigors of command and the times of tension had not changed Duncan Rodrick. To Jackie, he looked the same as he'd looked the first time she met him, during those days when theSpirit of America was still diagrams and figures on Harry Shaw's plans. For a mature man, he looked amazingly youthful. There was about him at all times an air of laid-back alertness, like a panther at rest, or like an athlete at ease, prepared at a second's notice to spring into all-out action.

His blond hair, cut full, showed no sign of thinning. At first glance, a stranger might take him to be just a very relaxed fellow, a man always ready to smile and say something pleasant, a likable, all-American boy-man who, given the chance, might look good in a full-color ad for shave lotion or a particular brand of brandy. But when Jackie had made the contact with Rodrick more personal and stood close enough to look into his eyes, she'd seen unwavering confidence. There was more than the handsome, youthful, pleasant outward appearance. Behind those hawk's eyes was someone very intelligent.

"I haven't seen much of you lately, Dunc."

He caught her eyes, looked away quickly, and that glance, his avoidance of her smile, aroused her puzzlement yet again.

"Things have been pretty hectic," he said. "And they're not going to get better for a while."

He had given her the right to be informal with him when they were alone, not by words, but by actions, during the first months of the outward trip. Now he was almost indifferent to her, it seemed. But in that a.s.sumption she was mistaken.

Rodrick's primary reaction to Jackie was guilt, with a bit of regret. He regretted that he'd moved so swiftly in courting her during those first few months of the journey. There was a limited number of choices for any single person aboard, and in the first warm flush of their relationship, he had given Jackie reason to think that their alliance might become permanent. In the group of people aboard the ship, for every man there was a woman. He felt guilty because now Jackie's choices were extremely limited; manysingles had paired off while he'd taken up her time.

There were moments when Duncan Rodrick frowned at himself in the mirror and wondered if his mother had had any children that lived. Here he was, a young man, just forty-six years old, not having reached half his life expectancy-a one-time loser at marriage and practicing to be a tragic figure in love with another man's wife.

Things would have been more simple back on Earth: Stealing a fellow-officer's wife would, at worst, have merely moved him from near the top of the always clogged promotion list to the bottom, a price he would have paid gladly to have Mandy Miller as his wife.