by Chris Bunch
The ship’s lock extended out over the dock, and the portal irised open. The half a hundred men waiting inside tasted the world’s air. It was humid, sticky, threatening.
“Lumberpigs first, old lags second, virgins last,” someone shouted. Men picked up their duffels and made their way up the lighter’s ramp to the dock and into an elevator.
Joshua slung his carryall over one shoulder, then bent to pick up the square leather-bound case beside him. A dark man who’d been in the same compartment with Wolfe in the short jump from Lectat IV to Montana Keep grabbed the case’s handles and lifted.
“Jesu, buddy, what the hell you got in there? Rocks?”
“Books,” Joshua said.
“A reader, eh? Be interestin’ to see if you can stay awake long enough offshift t’ turn a page. I never can.” The man shouldered his own gear, and the two joined the line snaking off the craft.
A man wearing a protective helmet and an officious expression waited on the dock. He held a notebook and checked names as the men went past.
“Virgins, over here. All new hires, let’s go. Come on, virgins,” he said monotonously. Wolfe stepped out of line, nodding good-bye to his acquaintance.
“See you up the Centipede,” the man said, and disappeared into an elevator.
“Name,” the helmeted man said.
“Hunt,” Joshua said. “Ed Hunt.”
The man keyed sensors. “Right. You’re unassigned, right?”
“Right.”
“Go topside, second companionway to the right, down two levels. Personnel will plug you in.”
Joshua started away.
“Hang on.” The man took a sensor from his back pocket. “I’m assumin’ you followed orders and didn’t bring any hooch or high, right?”
“I don’t get cooked on the job.”
“Yen,” the man said, disbelieving. “Nobody does. That’s why we don’t gotta shake all you lice down to keep you from gettin’ fried and fallin’ in the sealer.” He ran the sensor up and down Joshua’s body. “You’re clean. Open the bags.”
Joshua opened the carryall. The man probed through it, found nothing. He opened the leather-bound case, then hesitated. He looked up and met Joshua’s steady gaze. The man looked puzzled for an instant, then shook his head and closed the case without examining it.
“ ‘Kay. You ain’t carryin’ nothing. Go on or you’ll be late for noon meal.”
Joshua went into an elevator, rode it to the top, and stepped out onto the structure’s flat deck.
It curled from the shore two miles into the jungle, more than four hundred feet above the jungle floor, and was made of a series of cylindrically legged segments. The deck under him hummed from hidden machinery. Each segment’s top deck had a wide, toothed centerline belt with rough-trimmed logs on it. When the belt reached the structure Joshua stood on, it disappeared into the depths of the building, and Wolfe heard the screaming rasp of high-speed saws and smelled sawdust.
He found the second companionway and clattered down the crosshatched steel stairs.
There were three bored clerks in the office. Joshua recognized a few of the men he’d come out with in lines in front of them. He waited until one was free, then went to him and gave the man his name. The clerk touched sensors on a pad.
“You never contracted with us before,” the clerk said. “Correct.” It wasn’t a question.
“Correct.”
“Have you ever done any logging?”
“No.”
“Any idea where we could plug you in?”
Joshua shrugged.
The clerk looked at a screen. “I got half a dozen slots. Four of them are in the mill here at base. Two outside. You rather work inside or out?”
“Outside.”
“One’s oiler on the treadway. You get bored easy?”
“Yeah.”
“Then that isn’t for you. You done construction?”
“Some.”
“Ever drive a crane?”
“Once. Four… five years ago. For six months.”
“You kill anybody?”
“Nobody worth mentioning.”
“Pat your head and rub your gut, mister. I’m not joking.”
Joshua blinked, grinned, obeyed.
“Okay,” the clerk said. “You got separation there. Maybe you’ll work out. One of the drivers is going below next rotation, so we need a replacement. They’ll show you what you need to know up at the head. If you don’t work out, report back here and we’ll reassign you. That’s assuming you aren’t dumped for cause, in which case you go below and become their headache. Here.”
He handed Joshua a blue metal disk and a red bar. He said in a bored litany: “The red one’s your debit card. Buy what you want—we got a thorough company store. It’ll come out of your wages before you leave or take any rotation leave below. If you lose it, you’ll be responsible for any purchases made by whoever found it until you report it. The blue disk has your bunk and mess hall assignment on it. You’ll sleep—” The clerk looked at his screen. “—three legs back from the head. There’ll be a set of company regs on the shelf above your headboard.”
“Thanks.” Joshua picked up his bags.
“One other thing, Hunt. You ambitious?”
“In what way?”
“You said you like being outside. You got any interest in being a lumberpig?”
“I don’t even know what he is.”
“The cutter. The man down on the ground in the suit. The guy who lasers the trees that you’re going to be lifting up to the Centipede.”
Joshua shook his head. “Not me. Looks like a good way to get dead.”
“It is. That’s why we keep looking for new blood.” The clerk smiled. “Sorry. Bad choice of words.”
There were two smaller beltways on either side of the lumber drag. Joshua stepped on the one churning toward the end of the “Centipede” and set his bags down.
The smell of cut wood grew stronger and the clang of machinery louder as he rode.
He looked over the railing, down at the treetops. He spotted movement and saw a great leather-winged reptile with a drill-like beak hanging from a branch. Wolfe heard crashing in the jungle and looked away but could see nothing. But the tops of the trees waved frantically. He wondered what beast was passing under the shelter of the canopy.
* * * *
Sitka GMBH practices the most ecologically sound lumbering possible. The use of the MaCallum-Chambers Logtrain enables you, our most important employee, to work in a relatively safe environment.
The Logtrain, sometimes humorously called the “Centipede,” is built, segment by segment, from an area accessible to transports, either sea- or air-based, deep into uncut forest. It is therefore possible, from overhead, for your foremen to choose exactly the desired trees and communicate their instructions to the men on the ground, the cutters.
Once the log has been cut, it is secured by cranes at the cutting head of the Logtrain, lifted to the conveyor belt, and passed to the rear for processing.
After an area has been logged of all lumber of the type contracted for, an additional segment will be added to extend the Logtrain by you and your comrades, and once again logging will commence.
We welcome you to this, the most exciting and productive form of logging the fertile Human Mind has yet produced.
It is entirely due to the foresight and genius of Sitka GMBH Founder Harold…
Wolfe tossed the pamphlet aside, opened the leather-bound case, and took out a battered volume.
“…I thought it was a place Where life was substantial and simplified—But the simplification took place in my memory, I think. It seems I shall get rid of nothing, Of none of the shadows—”
“Hey! You. Cherry boy!”
Wolfe looked up.
“You want in?” The beefy man held up the game counter. He had more bills in front of him than did the other three at the small, stained table.
“No thanks,” Joshua sa
id. “I’m not lucky.”
The beefy man laughed as if Wolfe had said something funny. “You’re gonna learn, out here, up near the head, we all gang together. Ain’t no place for solo artists. Except maybe jackin’ off. Best do what’s sensible and get on over here.” Two of the others laughed too loudly.
Joshua grimaced, set the book down, and got up.
“That’s better,” the beefy man said. “Time to learn—”
Joshua booted the chair out from under him. The man sprawled, rolled to his feet, and charged forward, roaring like a bull. Joshua knelt, sweep kicked, and the man crashed to the deck. He scrabbled up and came in again, fists milling.
Joshua’s left shot out in a palm-up fist. The strike hit the man in his upper chest, the blow masking the darting motion Joshua’s right hand made, two fingers tapping the beefy man’s forehead.
The man’s arms flew wide, and he pitched backward as if he’d run into a wall.
Joshua didn’t watch him land but turned to the table. None of the other three had moved, although one man’s hand was slipping toward his coverall pocket. The man’s hand stopped.
Joshua waited, then went back to his book:
“…that I wanted to escape;
And, at the same time, other memories,
Earlier, forgotten, begin to return…”
One of the gamblers went to the beefy man and began slapping his face. After a time the man groaned, sat up, then vomited explosively.
Joshua turned the page.
* * * *
A violet laser blast cut through the green below and sliced sideways into the tree trunk.
“Awright,” the crane driver who’d introduced himself as Lesser Eagle said. “Now, I’ve already got my grabs on the upper part of the log. Watch close. The pig’ll cut it through on both sides… see? It’s just hanging on the stub, ready for me. Now, I’m moving in a second set of grabs just above the cut. Got it. Now, there isn’t any way that goddamned log is gonna go anywhere, unless I want it to.”
The suited man four hundred feet below moved hastily back as black machinery moved in on the tottering tree, a move echoed in various scales and angles by the screens around the crane cab.
There were three other cranes around the head and the same number of cutting teams down on the ground.
“I’m clear,” the radio bleated.
“And I’ve got it,” Lesser Eagle said into his mike. “Okay, I’m going to want to fell the tree to the left.”
“Why left?” Joshua asked.
Lesser Eagle looked puzzled. “I can’t tell you that. It’s just… the right way to do it. Maybe after you’ve been making lifts for six months or so, you’ll get it.”
“Maybe not. So when you don’t know, always drop it where there’s the least amount of crap. Liable to foul your lift or maybe kick up a widowmaker and take out the pig.”
His hands swept across the booth’s controls as if he were conducting an orchestra.
Far below the tree trunk broke from the stump to the left. The cable to the upper grab went taut, then the lower one, and the tree came up, swinging to the horizontal as it lifted toward the cutting head. Lesser Eagle swung the boom and neatly set the hundred-foot-long tree into the “basket,” which in turn brought the log lumber up onto the lumber drag over Joshua’s head.
“How about that, my friend? A little different than heaving iron, isn’t it?”
“Not much,” Joshua said. “A little hotter, a little noisier.”
“Hey, Prairie Flower.”
Lesser Eagle keyed his throat mike. “I’m listening, McNelly.”
“I’ve been down for two hours. Coming up.”
“Man, you ain’t got no stamina,” the Amerind said. “You ought to be good for a double, triple shift, the way you go on about what a great pig you are. Paul the goddamned Bunyan or whoever it was.”
“Stamina my left nut. You get in this stinkin’ suit one time and see how many minutes it takes you to start sweatin’ off the pounds. Friggin’ Sitka oughta put less money in bullshit and more into air-conditioning.”
“Not a chance, McNelly. I’m one of the privileged classes. Plus you could stand to lose a few ounces. Make you sexier next time you go below. Who’s replacing you?”
“Hsui-Lee. So get ready for amateur night.”
Another voice came up on the com:
“Your ass sucks buttermilk, piglet. I’ll spend most of my shift cleaning up your shit. I’ll be lucky if I send up more’n a few hundred feet of wood. Might as well have a brush hook as a cutter.”
Wolfe heard machinery grind, and cables lifted the cutter, awkward in his bulky sealed suit, out of the jungle up toward the head of the Logtrain. Another suit came down into Wolfe’s view, close enough so he could almost see through the faceplate. The pinchered arms waved or, more likely, tried to make an obscene gesture, and Hsui-Lee went down for his shift on the ground.
The monster came out of the jungle fast, a gray-green blur that hit the cutter and sent him spinning, life-support and lift cables tangling.
The radio screamed something, then cut off, then:
“Emergency! We’ve got a man down… and some goddamned critter’s about to take him! Where’s the sonofabitchin’ shooter?”
There was a gabble of chatter on the circuit that Wolfe couldn’t distinguish. He was the only one in the booth—Lesser Eagle had gone to help another driver reprogram his crane, telling Wolfe to keep his goddamned hands off the controls. “Let Hsui-Lee take the wood down. We’ll get it on the ground. If you want to be doing something, boom over to a clear area and practice tearing saplings out or something.”
Now Wolfe could make out the horror below. It stood about thirty feet tall, on four legs, with a body jutting up from the first two. He thought of some kind of lizardlike centaur, but the beast’s upper body was a dark cylinder, its head not much more than an enormous maw of dagger fangs. Four arms scrabbled at the downed cutter.
The man’s laser sliced toward the creature, cutting away one arm. Wolfe heard the nightmare roar, then his hands were busy on the controls, and the boom swung slowly, far too slowly, back from where he’d been practicing.
The cutter managed to roll away behind a tree trunk, and Wolfe had his boom over the scene. He slapped the cutaway, and his lower grab dropped, smashing down on the horror, missing the sprawled cutter by two yards.
He heard the howl through the sealed glass of the booth. His hands found another bank of controls, pulled, twisted.
The jaws of the upper grab yawned, lowered, took the monstrosity around the middle, and Wolfe lifted it clear of the ground, the cable reeling it toward him.
The grab bit deeply into the beast’s side, and a greenish fluid poured out.
Joshua snapped one control up; the grab’s jaws snapped open, and the horror fell, tumbling, down through the treetops into the jungle.
Wolfe saw the cables for the downed cutter’s suit lift him clear of the jungle. At that moment an explosive round slammed down into the area he’d dropped the beast into, and he heard the dim blast of the gunshot from the deck above.
The booth door slid open, and Lesser Eagle burst in.
“Get the hell out of there and let me—” He stopped, realizing everything was over, and saw the limp body of Hsui-Lee moving past the booth, out of sight to the deck above. Sirens were still shrilling, and the radio was still going on about shooter failure and how in the hell and such.
“Guess you did run a crane before, eh?”
“Once or twice.”
* * * *
“You figure you pulled the muscle yanking that man out,” the medical orderly said.
“I don’t know. All I know is it’s giving me grief.”
“Hell. I can’t see anything’s wrong.” The man hesitated. “But maybe I better send you back to the mill. Let a real doc make sure. I’m just the local specialist in blisters, burns, and whatever genital rots you lice managed to hide when you took your physical.”
/> “As long as you’re back there, you might want to look up Hsui-Lee. I’m pretty sure he wants to give you his firstborn or something.”
“Just a sprain, Hunt,” the doctor said. “You wasted your time coming back here. Get on back up to the head and tell them to put you on light duty for a day or so.”
“Thanks, Doctor.”
“None needed. If I hadn’t heard of what you did pulling that man away from that chironosaur, I’d say you were malingering like the rest of those lice outside.”
Wolfe stood, left the small clinic, and went down the corridor toward a companionway. In one hand he carried a large, heavy book. He paused outside an open door and looked in at the sleeping, bandaged man he’d last seen being dragged out of the jungle. He went on toward the deck without waking him.
The two men walked past, the first telling a most elaborate story, the second listening closely. Wolfe slipped out from his hiding place and crept to the high stack of supplies on the structure’s deck. He climbed onto its top and lay flat so no one could see him.
The world was dark except for the glare of the searchlights that made a finger of light along the Centipede out into the jungle and the glare of the overhead stars.
He opened the book with the cut-out midsection, took out the small bonemike and transponder, and checked his watch. It was still a few minutes short of the hour.
He turned the set on, checked its controls, and dropped the bonemike’s harness over his neck.
“Am I being listened to?” he said in Al’ar.
Nothing came for a long moment, then:
“You are being listened to,” the Grayle said.
Joshua sagged in relief. “It would’ve been a real pisser,” he muttered, “if this buildup hadn’t paid off.” Then: “Give location.”
“Just entering atmosphere. I have your location. Instructions?”
“As ordered, you’ll land two miles from my location, offshore, homing on this signal. Return underwater until you reach a point no more than a thousand yards distant from me, unless the water is less than a hundred feet deep. In that event, go to the nearest hundred-foot depth and remain on the bottom until summoned.”
“Understood.”