Leaving me on my lonesome, Marc thought with an inward smile. Very neat depiction of our little social unit, eh?
He prodded at the dirt with a stick, not exactly drawing, but as an aid to thought.
"Weh, we've got more gear than we can possibly carry ourselves," he went on. "But we're going to need every scrap of it to get six thousand miles east of here. I'd hate to be left standing with an empty rifle while a dire bear ate me only a week's travel from home."
Blair sat with his legs crossed and his fists on his knees; the firelight gilded the sparse hairs on the backs of his hands, turning them to little copper-gold wires.
"We could make for the coast and try to build a boat," he said. "That would solve our transport problem."
Cynthia looked at him. "Chris, have you seen the stuff that lives in the ocean here? I wouldn't try a long voyage on anything that doesn't outweigh the pleiosaurs—and that means a hundred tons displacement. With one big mo'fo' of a catapult on the foredeck and the stern."
Marc nodded. "Yeah, but granting that, a ship is a possibility. But we'd need a lot of native help, and we'd have to show them how to make the tools to make anything I'd feel comfy sailing in."
"A good point," Blair admitted. "And there are the storms to consider."
"Yeah," Marc said. "So, we could catch and break a bunch of churr for riding and pack-beasts, or some tharg and make an oxcart, or both."
Blair's eyebrows went up. "That would be a great deal of work for four people," he said.
"We could get some native help on that, too," Cynthia said. "If there's a friendly tribe nearby."
Marc shrugged. "Possible, but it'd mean months learning the language. Or we could Ice a couple of 'saurs. I've done it with Doc Feldman and we've got a kit along."
"Oh, great, the four of us are going to capture a six-ton ceratopsian!" Cynthia said, but she smiled as she did.
"Not impossible, I should think," Blair said thoughtfully. "A pit trap, perhaps?"
"Well, the first thing we've got to do is build a secure camp," Marc said. His smile became impish. "We'll call it Fort Dinosaur? Blair surprised him by being the only other one to laugh.
Tahyo gave Marc a look of profound disgust as he swung the axe beneath the warm spring sun. The young greatwolf had a thoroughly canine attitude towards pointless effort; he was against it. And if it wasn't concerned with hunting food or playing, it was pointless.
"You'll enjoy sleeping safe from the saber-tooths and 'saurs, too, you," Marc said cheerfully. Then: "Timbeeerrr!"
There wasn't anyone within twenty yards, but he said it anyway, for the sake of the thing. The slender young tree was only three or four times his own height, anyway; they weren't set up to handle real tree trunks. It came down with a crash and a flashing of pale green leaves, a sort of poplar, the wood creamy pale at the stump and the scattering of chips. It was easy to cut, but heavy and strong. The axe took the branches off with a steady tick. . . tick sound. When the sapling had been turned into a long tapering pole, he dropped a loop of rope around the butt and hitched it over his shoulder, leaning into it as he hauled.
Blair was doing likewise not far away. As they pulled their loads up the hill the Englishman began humming—the chorus from The Volga Boatmen, which Marc had watched, twice, on his own transit from Earth. Three months of mild queasiness in zero-G could make you receptive to about anything; he'd even read War and Peace, and then right after it Jude the Obscure, cover to cover. There were limits to how many times you could do At the Earths Core or A Princess of Mars.
"He's getting a lot less tight-assed," Marc muttered to himself. "Mais, life is like that. Odd. I was convinced he was a son of a bitch until after that piece of sabotage. He was different after that."
The campsite was a semicircle fifty paces around, backed against the sheer basalt crag that topped the hill. They didn't have time or labor for a stockade; instead they were using an abatis of sharpened stakes, supported by Y-forked poles driven deep into the soil and the whole lashed together with tough braided rawhide.
Shamboo would have been perfect for the whole thing, but there didn't seem to be any growing within convenient reach.
Cynthia crouched by a low, hot fire, charring the ends of the stakes, turning the pale creamy wood to iron-hard blackness.
"Ah, the life of a research scientist on the cutting edge of Earth's technology," Blair said sardonically as he dropped his pole with the others.
The woman snorted. "Hey, lover boy, you noticed, didya?" she said with sardonic amusement; Marc also noticed the look she gave the Englishman's sweat-slick muscular torso. "We come here by nuclear-powered spaceship. Then we travel by bamboo… well, shamboo… blimp. Now we're down on our feet. Pretty soon it'll be chipping flint, you mark my words. And walking on our knuckles."
Jadviga laughed, which was unusual; she was braiding strips of hide not far away, her fingers moving with quick, strong flicks.
"Already you are making the wooden spears with fire-hardening," she said. "Was there not a discovery of such in Germany not long ago?"
Marc searched his memory. "Weh. Preserved in waterlogged caves—four hundred thousand years old. Proving that we were top predators even before we were human. Though here, with the raptors and allosaurs and Quetzas, the title's still open."
Jadviga finished a strand and dusted her hands. "There. I have enough for a fleet—hundreds of meters!"
"Dozens of meters, at least," Blair joked.
I wonder why he said meters? Marc thought idly.
The Commonwealth countries had talked about switching to metric, but they'd never really gotten around to it, probably because the chances of the U.S. doing so were somewhere between zero and nothing, and the links of the Anglosphere had gotten steadily stronger over the past generation.
Mais, anyone in the sciences is used to using metric, too. Only polite to Jadviga, since she's not likely to know our system well.
Marc drank a dipper of water and asked, "Jadviga, podna, something I've always wanted to ask. This isn't far from where you people put down your first probe, when I was just a little bebette. Why didn't you plant your base here?"
Jadviga's face grew even less expressive than usual. "That was a policy decision," she said.
Marc shrugged; he could tell a silence that meant Bug off, Yanki, when he heard it. He switched the rope yoke and loop to the butt ends of half a dozen finished poles. That was a real load, but he only had to keep them moving fifteen yards or so. He stood bent over and panting with his hands on his knees for a moment, then got to work. The first rings of six- and eight-foot shafts already bristled outward. Marc trimmed rough points on the butt ends of the longer ones with his machete, and then rammed them as deep as he could before letting them drop into the forks. Getting through the tough sod was a bit of a struggle, but the earth beneath was dark and soft, and a few minutes of grunting effort sufficed for each. Jadviga had coils of the hide rope soaking in a bucket of water; Marc took a length and tied the shafts to their supports, bracing his foot and hauling with all his strength to get the knots tight. The leather would dry hard as iron in a day or two of this warm, dry weather. If they were here more than a couple of weeks, they could pour melted horn over it for waterproofing.
When he'd finished the set, Marc paused to haul up a bucket of water from the shallow well they'd dug, pouring it over his shirtless torso before drinking a couple of pints. The taste was clean, but with an earthy, mineral undertang. Then he checked on lunch: soup cooking in a leather trough suspended over a low, hot fire. If you made sure the heat only reached the portions with liquid inside, that worked well enough for a prolonged simmer. This was bird-meat with wild greens. He tasted a spoonful: ready in about another hour.
"I'm going up to have another look," Marc said. "Can't hurt, and it's my turn."
Jadviga cast him a glance as he slung rifle and binocular-case over his back. He suspected it was a sympathetic one, and winced a little. Was my tongue hanging out that mu
ch? he thought. And here I thought I was being subtle.
The ladder was made the same way as their abatis, two long saplings or youngish trees with stout branches tied across them for rungs. It bent with the springy resilience of nearly living wood as he went up it quickly, and he rubbed his hands on the seat of his cargo pocket pants to clear them of sap before he unlimbered the binoculars. The top of the column was ten paces on a side, an irregular tabletop with a few pockets where soil had accumulated and tough grass and low bushes taken root.
It gave a magnificent view over the countryside around. That was about half-and-half grassland and forest, with the woodland like an irregular-meshed fishing net thrown over the green-tawny of the open country. Southward, higher hills rose, dense with tall trees; there was more forest and broken country to the east as well. As he remembered the map, that was the crash site for the Riga, a long lake about ten miles away.
"Those are real woods, there," he said to himself.
It was pleasant up here, sitting amid the quiet sough of the wind as it dried his skin and hair. The Vepaja had crashed about a mile and a half to the northwest; he could see the black stretch where it had set woods and grass afire, but a quick scout had shown nothing worth salvaging except pieces of twisted metal, and that could wait.
Turning in a slow circle, he saw plenty of game. A flock of black eagles came down a long vale, big birds with ten-foot wingspans and talons like tigers. A herd of small antelope panicked and sprang out in all directions as the birds went overhead, and they dove, tag-teaming the little herbivores and settling down to eat pack-style, and incidentally guard the carcass. In the next clearing over was a herd of tharg, about two hundred of the big bovinoids… or bovines, if Doc Feldman was right. They were scattered when Marc first turned the focusing screw of the binoculars with his thumb, but they stampeded to the other end of the open space and formed a defensive ring.
A minute later he saw the reason: three spotted saber-tooths cruising around the edges looking for a chance to cut one out, their stumpy tails twitching in excitement.
"Just another day on Venus," Marc said to himself, grinning.
Then the binoculars tracked back. A pack of raptors exploded out of cover, a dozen man-sized feathered sauroid predators. One of them turned back to raise its crest and prance at whatever had spooked them, leaping high to make a threat display with the long sickle-claw that folded out from against its hock.
Crack.
Marc shot upright with an amazed curse, and refocused just in timed to see the raptor collapse limply, its long head and snaky neck flexing as it fell with what he could have sworn was a surprised expression. Looking down, he saw the others hadn't heard it; Jadviga would be jumping for joy if she had, because the only people besides them in this part of Venus who could possibly have guns were the crew of the Riga.
Marc kicked a rock off the cliff. The others looked up at that, all right. He made a broad gesture to the east, then a finger-waggle: company.
"Why are we acting as if this might be an enemy?" Jadviga complained. "It is Franziskus!"
Mais, it might be someone else from the crew, Marc thought. But she's got a right to be hopeful while she can.
All of them were outside the abatis, armed but looking friendly. Or all of them but Tahyo. The greatwolf was restless, slinking about in front of Marc's feet, whining and wulfing occasionally. The gentle slope of the hillside fanned out ahead of them, the waist-high grass billowing in the warm scented wind. It offered no cover within a thousand yards except for the grass and the odd scrubby bush, which of course was why they'd picked the spot.
Or, just possibly, might some local have gotten the ship's gun?
Not likely; even less likely that they'd be able to maintain it or hit anything they shot at, but why take risks?
"Call me an old lady," Marc said easily. "But this is the way we'll do it."
"I must call you sir, now," Jadviga said.
That's an actual joke, Marc thought, surprised. From Mrs. Stoneface herself.
Then he chided himself for an uncharitable thought; after all, she was probably going to see her husband again, which had been a major point of the whole expedition. And right now, Marc hoped so, too. Another three Terran personnel would make it much more likely that they'd get back to Jamestown uneaten.
The slope ended abruptly with a line of scrub along the edge of a tongue of high forest. Marc leveled his binoculars. The trees were draped with lianas and creepers, strings of hand-sized crimson flowers rising a hundred feet and more into the air as they spiraled upward around trunks; insects and hummingbirds buzzed around them, and around the white and rose and purple blooms on the bushes that made a wall along the feet of the big oaks and beeches and mahoganies. A fringe of dwarf palms only ten or twelve feet high was scattered out into the meadow, along with the odd live oak. Only insects swarmed around the corpse of the dead raptor, but those included dragonflies two feet from wingtip to wingtip.
Then a figure pushed through the brush, hacking left and right with a machete. Marc blinked in surprise; it was a tall man with unkempt ash-blond hair and a scraggly new beard, dressed in a hide loincloth, but with an AK-47 over his back, ammunition pouches and knife and pistol and scabbard at his waist.
"It's Binkis," Marc said. "Looks a bit gaunt, but otherwise healthy."
Jadviga made an involuntary sound of relief and checked her impulse to run forward with a visible effort. Her man strode out into the open and waved his machete overhead before sheathing it. Then he turned and made a curious beckoning gesture towards the scrub.
Marc whistled and handed the binoculars to Blair. "That look like what I think it looks like?" he said.
The Englishman slung his own rifle and took them. "Bloody hell!" he said after a moment.
"You Great White Hunters going to enlighten my humble Harlem self?" Cynthia asked sharply. "I can see there's some natives with him."
"Not just natives," Marc said, remembering what he'd seen.
Squat figures, built like barrels on thick, muscular legs, with arms like oak roots and hands like spades. Hair like a sparse pelt, say halfway between what a human had and what a chimp did—though perhaps not quite so much if you used an Ainu as your Homo sap reference. Big blobs of nose, little eyes under shelves of bone, beards half-hiding the fact that they had no chins.
"Neanderthals," Marc said, as more and more came into view: twenty at least… no, more like thirty now.
"And over a dozen of them have assault rifles to go with their spears and stone hatchets," Blair added dryly.
"You are shitting me!" the young woman said sharply, grabbing for the glasses.
When she lowered them again, they all turned and looked at Jadviga, who'd gone white under her tan.
"Mais," Marc said slowly. "Could you start by telling us, Mrs. Binkis, what the Riga was doing with better than a dozen military rifles on board? And please don't tell me it carried them all up to orbit and back."
Jadviga flushed, but her voice was steady. "Like you we keep a number of firearms for protective purposes," she said. "The Riga was bringing replacements from Earth."
Cynthia cut in, "And what Captain Binkis was doing handing them out to locals? The Treaty dearly forbids giving Venusians firearms! Under any circumstances!"
The Baltic-born woman licked her lips. "I'm sure there an explanation is. Perhaps Franziskus was coerced…"
Blair had been using the binoculars again. "He's armed, and he appears to be in charge. At least, he's waving and they're spreading out in response."
Tahyo added his bit to the exchange, a bristling growl. His master went on:
"Those are very like the specimens I remember from the first EastBloc probe's pictures. Is there something you're not telling us, Mrs. Binkis?"
She shook her head. "I… I am as surprised as you are, sir."
"Don't bullshit me! You're surprised all right, but not as surprised."
Marc thought quickly. It didn't take a man long t
o walk a thousand yards, and half that would put the strangers within effective range. A quick glance behind him showed the half-completed abatis, but that had been built with wild animals or possibly spear-armed natives in mind. It was no protection against modern weapons at all. Running was out of the question; they'd be hunted down if the newcomers were hostile. Which left only one, very bad, alternative.
"All right, everyone, up the ladder. Now!" he snapped.
As he'd expected, Jadviga showed no sign of obeying. Cynthia and Blair did, snatching up a few things and then doing their best squirrel imitation. Marc waited an instant and then did a little snatching himself: a belt of ammunition, his quiver and bow, a couple of full canteens.
"Up, boy!" he barked. Then as the animal whined and hesitated: "Now!"
Climbing near-vertical ladders wasn't easy for a canid to begin with; their bodies weren't put together that way. Tahyo was at the awkward age, anyway, and each rung required a sort of lunging shuffle. With no fingers to grip and a ladder only slightly inclined in that meant he had to keep his paws from slipping by sheer pressure, and soon the beast's long legs were quivering. Halfway up, the young greatwolf began to topple backward with a yelping howl, plate-sized forepaws flailing at the air as he twisted sideways. Marc lunged.
"Jesus!" he shouted, as his hand closed on the falling great-wolf's ruff.
Tahyo weighed over fifty pounds these days, and the angle was awkward; the wiggling and thrashing didn't help, either. Marc jammed a knee around the rung he was on and felt his back crackle as he bent back, farther, farther, the gear slung across his shoulders pulling at him, the greatwolf's paws scratching bloody tracks down the right side of his torso.
"Huhhh!"
When he slammed forward again he clung for a moment, almost sobbing as he panted with relief. Tahyo clung as well, his jaws clenching so hard on the rung that the tough green wood splintered.
"Use this!" someone called from above—Blair, he thought.
A loop of rope dropped down beside him. After wrestling moments and one heart-stopping instant when he thought they were going to fall again he managed to get the noose up under Tahyo's forelimbs and snugged tight.
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