“How does Casagra feel about this idea?” O’Bannon asked.
“He concurs,” Helton replied.
“Then why isn’t he here to say so?” O’Bannon asked.
Helton grimaced. “He’s redeploying some of the guard detachment. Asks that you excuse him, and says he’ll talk to you about it after Officers Call.”
“I see,” O’Bannon said. “How would you go about boring this tunnel?”
Helton shrugged. “The best way available. I mean, when I have a readout on what equipment of that nature is available on Xerxes, then I can pick the best method from what we have at hand.”
O’Bannon got to his feet. “Okay, Gunnie. Get your shopping list and pick out what you think is the best shovel. I’ll talk to Casagra and get back to you.”
The airboat bobbed slightly as it eased slowly down the canyon, close to the ground, taking advantage of whatever cover there was.
“Take it easy, Alex,” Jimmy said.
Alex looked pained. “This is very delicate,” he said. “It makes me nervous.”
“Not as nervous as you’ll be if you scratch up Ingermann’s airboat,” chimed in a third man.
Alex half-turned from the controls. “Oh, be quiet, Morrie,” he said to the third man. “It just makes me more nervous.”
A large beefy man in the rear of the boat suddenly jumped to his feet. “Look out!” he shouted.
Alex jerked around in time to see that he was heading straight for a rock outcropping. He swerved to miss it and barely regained control after the evasion.
The beefy man came forward toward the pilot’s station. “Listen, Alex,” he said, “if you can’t handle this thing maybe I ought to take over.”
“You can have it, Squint,” Alex said. “I don’t know what I’m doing driving this thing, anyway. I don’t have any experience working this close. I’m scared to death.”
“All right, then,” Squint said. “Why didn’t you say so to begin with?”
The fifth man was topside, sitting in a stowage sling, with about half his body sticking out of the open top hatch. His job was to watch the sky for Marine patrols. His name was Dave. “Listen, you guys,” he said. “Not so fast. Look up there to the left, just above that bench.”
Jimmy stooped down and looked out the front of the boat, while everyone else scrambled for a look.
“What do you make of it?” Dave asked.
“Looks like fresh blasting in the rock to me,” Morrie said.
“Either that,” Dave said, “or a big crack opened up by an earthquake.” He jumped down to the deck, swinging his weight on the cargo straps. “Take it on up to the ledge, Alex. Let’s see what’s what.”
Above the sandstone ledge, layers of flint and conglomerate were laying vertically at an angle. Apparently an earthquake had cracked these apart, making a fissured passage-way without disturbing the sandstone bench.
Dave stroked his chin. “Ledge ain’t wide enough to set down the boat. I sure would like to see what’s in there.”
“You think somebody’s been diggin’ for sunstones in there?” Squint asked.
“That’s what we’re supposed to be lookin’ for,” Jimmy said.
“But we can’t set the boat down,” Alex whined. “Let’s just forget it.”
“No,” Dave said. “No, I want to see what’s in there.”
Morrie had been peering at the ledge, which couldn’t be more than several meters wide. “Look,” he said, “Alex can ease the boat over so the side hatch is above the ledge and let down the hatch while he keeps it locked on hover. The four of us will jump out and go in for a look.”
Alex looked anguished. “I can’t hold it on hover that close all the time you’re in there.”
Squint glared at him. “You don’t have to, stupid,” he said. “After we’re out, shut the hatch and hide this thing someplace on the canyon floor—but someplace where you can see the ledge. When we come out, we’ll give you the high sign and you can bring her back up and get us.”
Dave and Jimmy were already gathering up some light-packs and a couple of vibrohammers.
Once inside, the four found themselves in a long, fissured chamber that came together at the top in an acute angle.
As he shined his light around, Jimmy whistled in amazement. “Wow,” he said. “You don’t think this thing could fall in on us, do you?”
“Of course not,” Squint snapped. “Can’t you see the rocks is leanin’ together at the top? They’re holding each other up.”
“Come on,” Dave said. “Let’s see what’s up ahead.”
About a hundred meters into the mountain, the slowly narrowing fissure had pinched down to the point that a man could go no farther. Frustrated, they began to shine their lights around.
“Boy it sure is hot in here,” Morrie said. “It’s hard to breathe.”
“Great Ghu!” Jimmy said, suddenly alarmed. “You don’t think we’re inside a volcano, do you?”
Everyone looked uncomfortable for a moment.
“Naw,” Squint said. Proud of his deductive powers, he added, “We didn’t see no volcanoes from up above did we?”
“It could be dormant,” Jimmy said. “What if—”
Before the argument could start, Morrie let out a shout of surprise. “Hey! Hey, you guys—lookit this.”
Squint turned his light to the same spot on the sandy floor as Morrie’s was. “So what,” he said. “You found some shiny pebbles.”
Morrie bent down and snatched up two of the shiny bean-shaped pebbles. He rubbed them between his palms, then slowly opened his hands. There was a slight glow coming from within his cupped palms.
“Jeez,” Dave said. “They are sunstones!”
“Aw, come on,” Jimmy said. “You don’t find sunstones just laying around. They have to be cracked out of solid flint. Everybody knows that.”
Dave frowned. “Well, then, somebody had been digging sunstones in here.”
“No, no.” Morrie shook his head. “It’s too hard to get them out of the flint. When a guy finally gets one, he puts it in a little bag. Nobody would be careless enough to drop a half-dozen of them on the floor, unless—” He shined his light down the fissure. “—Unless somebody was stashing a whole bunch of them away, down there. Then some could get dropped without anybody noticing.”
“A man can’t get through there,” Dave announced with authority. “It isn’t wide enough.”
“A Fuzzy could have though—stupid,” Squint said. “A Fuzzy could be trained to do that.”
“Jeez,” Dave said. “There could be enough sunstones back there to make us all rich for life. What are we waiting for? Let’s take the vibrohammers and open up this narrow spot—see what we find.”
“What about Ingermann?” Jimmy asked.
“The hell with him,” Squint said. “We’ll take a handful back to him and keep the rest.”
“Just enough to get him excited,” Morrie said.
“Right,” Squint said, “and while he’s scheming how to get over here and steal, we all get the hell off the planet as fast as we can.”
Morrie picked up one vibrohammer. “That’s assuming we find anything.”
“Only one way to find out,” Squint said, picking up the other one. “We’ll spell each other on these. You two guys go back to the opening and get some fresh air. We’ll call you when it’s your turn.”
The communications sergeant came hurrying toward Phil Helton and Captain Casagra, peering at a sheet of printout in his hand as he walked briskly along.
“What have they got on Xerxes that we can use?” Helton asked rhetorically as the sergeant gave him the sheet. Helton held it over to one side so Casagra could see the list.
The sergeant sidled around so he could look over Helton’s shoulder.
“Hmmmmm,” Helton said. “Collapsium cutter. That’s no good. Heading drill, 1.5 meter. Do the job, but we have to shore up behind it, and it could still get the whole slide moving—cover up the wreck all ove
r again.” He snorted derisively. “Power shovel, Mark X. Terrific. We have those, but I don’t think we want to make a life’s work out of taking the slide apart. Ahhhh. M-79 terrene. That gives us a two-meter head wall and it glasses up the tunnel behind itself. What do you think, Captain?”
Casagra cleared his throat. “Sounds good to me. They use it to bore passageways on Xerxes. It wouldn’t set up any stresses in the rockpile.”
“Good,” Helton said. “Check it off. Wait. I have to sign for it, too.”
After Helton had signed the inventory sheet for the piece of equipment, Captain Casagra did the same. “Okay,” Helton said as he handed the printout back to the communications sergeant. “Hop this over to Colonel O’Bannon, get his approval, and transmit it back to Xerxes. Don’t forget to tell them we want their own operations and maintenance people to come down with it. I sure don’t know how to run the thing; only seen one once before.”
The sergeant gulped. “Colonel O’Bannon? Himself?”
Helton smiled. “Sure. He won’t bite your head off. He just looks like he might.”
As Helton and Casagra walked away, their boots crunching in the dry soil of Fuzzy Valley, Casagra spoke. “Did the Fuzzy Institute people get everything they wanted?”
“Indeed,” Helton replied. “They’re all back at Holloway Station, now, with their Fuzzy bones—furiously analyzing everything, I imagine.”
“How soon do they think they’ll have something for us,” Casagra asked.
“They think a couple of days; either confirmation or denial of authenticity. Gerd van Riebeek is coming up sometime tomorrow. He’s going to interview the two Marine technicians who made the find, take some tapes of the wreck—that sort of thing.”
Casagra looked alarmed. “Tapes? Visual records? Does O’Bannon know about this?”
Helton nodded. “He wasn’t too thrilled about it at first, but when Gerd offered to let him review the tapes before they left the site and censor out anything he wanted, there wasn’t much he could object to.”
The stalwart five on the other side of the mountain were having their difficulties. They would chip away enough rock from the sides of the fissure to allow a man through, only to find the passage narrowed again less than a dozen meters further. They labored in shifts; one could only stand about a half-hour’s work in the close, oppressive heat of the passage.
But they kept at it, because every time they broke through a narrow place they would find a few more sunstones. All of them had the fever by now. Sunstone fever.
“Listen,” Dave said. “We better quit till morning. It’s almost dark outside.”
Squint leaned back, gasping for breath. “So what? It’s dark in here all the time. We can keep working with the lights.”
“That’s not what he means,” Morrie said. “The lights in here will show out through the mouth of the fissure.”
Dave nodded. “Marine patrol be on us within an hour unless we shut down.”
“Aw,” Squint said. “We’re a good hundred-fifty meters inside the mountain by now.”
Dave frowned. “Yeah,” he said, “and you can see a lighted match or a cigarette coal for two kilometers— especially out here where it’s really dark, with no city lights or anything.”
They made a dark camp in the airboat, squabbled endlessly over how to divide up the sunstones already found, and had an uninspiring dinner of Extee-Three.
As each man fell asleep, exhausted, he curled his hand around the pistol he had sneaked under his pillow.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was that indeterminate time when it is neither night nor dawn. There was only enough light to discern that light was coming. The dark, gray, humpbacked shapes of Marine vehicles and inflatable tentage were just visible in the paler gray light that was slowly brightening in the east. Lights were on in the kitchen scow, where the mess sergeant and his crew had already been working for about an hour. Lights were on in the communications center, where the duty NCO stood in the aft hatchway, watching the light grow, and scratching himself. Then he yawned and stretched, turned, and went back to his monitor screens.
O ‘Bannon was pulling on his left sock when his communication screen chimed softly, indicating a routine transmission.
It’s starting already, O’Bannon thought. He reached over and tapped the key. When the image cleared, he said, very simply, “O’Bannon.”
The face in the screen was that of an anxious young man. He was wearing field greens, a single bar, and a worried look. “Sir, “he said nervously. “Lieutenant Crocker reporting.”
There was a pause.
O’Bannon rubbed his hand across his forehead. “Well, then, Crocker,” he said. “Report.”
“Yes, sir,” Crocker said. “The intruder we logged yesterday morning still hasn’t turned up. I think they’ve gone to ground someplace inside the reservation.”
O’Bannon grimaced. “Well, then, they’d be sitting still, wouldn’t they? If you’re on the move and they’re sitting still, it shouldn’t be too hard to spot them, should it, Lieutenant?”
Lieutenant Crocker looked uncomfortable. “No, sir—no, sir; it shouldn’t. I’m certain we’ll turn them up. In any case, I’ve taken steps to make sure they don’t get out of the area.”
“I think that’s an excellent approach, Crocker,” O’Bannon said, with just the right tone of cynicism in his voice, “because if they do, I think we can find you a somewhat less sensitive job—on Nifflheim, or, perhaps, Yggsdrasil.”
The muscles around Crocker’s eyes were beginning to tighten. “I understand, Colonel,” he said.
“Have you run an inbound spiral search?” O’Bannon asked.
“Uh—no, sir,” Crocker said. “We’ve been doing standard grid.”
O ‘Bannon softened his expression. Already scared the kid to death, he thought. Time now to prop him up a bit. “Try running an inbound spiral. Five cars. Slideback formation. That should flush ‘em if they’re down in the brush someplace.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Crocker said.
“Okay, son,” O’Bannon replied. “Report back before evening chow.”
Jack Holloway and Gerd van Riebeek missed breakfast by a mile, but they arrived at Fuzzy Valley in time for the mid-morning coffee-break.
Sergeant Beltrán motioned them aside. “You guys don’t look like you ate yet today,” he said. “Huh?”
They both shook their heads.
Beltrán nodded in approval of his own sagacity. “Come on over to the kitchen scow. I’ll fix you something up. You can’t get by till lunch on coffee and pastry.”
When they emerged from the kitchen scow, well-fed and still marveling at the meal which Beltrán had whipped up on the spur of the moment—using odds and ends—an enormous closed cargo scow was just settling out of the sky. Its landing point was midway between the excavated wreck and the rockslide over the cave-mouth.
Phil Helton was on the ground, talking the lander chief down to the right spot. O’Bannon, Stagwell, and Casagra were off to one side, observing the operation.
“Come on, Gerd,” Jack said. “Let’s see what this is all about.”
By the time they had walked to the site the scow had settled to the ground and lurched off contragravity.
After greetings had been exchanged, the flight crew had already secured the scow, the equipment crew had grounded the hatch-ramp, and a man wearing field greens and an orange cap was crunching across the ground toward them.
As the man drew closer, Holloway could see a black stencil on his left shirt pocket; an engineer’s hammer, framed by the inverted “V” of a mason’s square at the bottom and a spread divider compass at the top. “TFN” was stenciled below the design.
The man stopped, saluted the officers, and said, “Master Chief Construction Mate Lyman Byers reporting, sir. The difficult we do immediately; the impossible may take a whole shift.”
O’Bannon returned the salute and looked slightly bilious. These guys from the co
nstruction battalion even have their own compliments on the load-list, he thought. He inclined his head toward Helton.
Chief Byers’ face brightened as he ambled his lanky frame over to where Helton was standing with Jack and Gerd. “Whatcha need, Gunnie? Gotta bore a big hole in something, huh?”
Gear was already coming out of the scow, to where the equipment crew was laying it out in precise rows on the ground.
Helton outlined his requirements as Byers listened attentively—with a concentration that was far different from his previous country-boy attitude.
“Take your own soundings,” Helton said. “I want the shortest, straightest tunnel you can manage, but I want you to pull out when the headwall is about six inches short of breaking into the cavern. Can you cut it that fine?”
“No problem, Gunnie,” Byers said seriously. “If the inside face of the rockfall was perfectly vertical, my operator could cut it fine enough to leave you a windowpane, if’n you wanted one.”
Helton smiled. “Okay, get to it, then.”
By now the terrene itself had come out of the scow, on its own contragravity skid. It had the look of a short, fat torpedo with a snubbed-off nose. Directly behind it came the control cabin, a collapsium-hulled affair of smaller diameter than the terrene head. It housed all the sensors, controls, and pickups, as well as the operator. To the rear of it, it carried a collapsium counterweight, so that when the entire affair was on contragravity and working, the weight of the terrene to the front was balanced to level by the counterweight at the rear.
As Byers loped off across the dry soil, his crew was already swarming over the equipment at the complicated task of mating the terrene with its control cabin.
“Your men are pretty flamboyant—with those blinding orange caps, aren’t they?” Gerd asked of no one in particular.
“Oh, there’s a reason for it,” Helton said. “That’s a damned dangerous piece of gear, especially when it’s hot. They wear those gaudy caps so they can tell the players from the spectators. Anyone not wearing a loud orange cap gets within a hundred meters of that thing, the crew chief goes out and runs him off, be he captain, corporal, or general.”
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