Wildcatter

by Dave Duncan

  Niagara tilted to the vertical, jets flashed fire, and … and hovered, drifting.

  “It looks like I’m not going to be able to…”

  What? Why? The wind gauge had dropped to twenty klicks, just a gentle breeze hereabouts, but the shuttle was floating over the greenery, moving steadily farther away from the wreck.

  —Looking for level ground, Prospector.

  It all looked level to him, but Control had radar. The vegetation was thrashing in the wash from the jets, as well as in the wind. This hovering ate fuel at a murderous rate. His chatter dried up as he stared in horror at the fuel gauge. Forty-six … forty-five … Forty-one was the point of no return. When the numbers showed that, Control would blast back into orbit… Forty-three…

  The shuttle gently settled down in a roiling mass of smoke.

  Then came silence—and sheer panic as the shuttle began to tilt. He added some comments that would certainly have to be cut. If the undercarriage could not find a level footing, the engines would fire again and the landing would be aborted.

  That almost happened but didn’t. He started breathing again when Niagara came to rest at a Tower of Pisa slant. Even that could be a fatal problem. The ground might be rocky and uneven, but soft goo was far more likely in a flat area with high rainfall. Mud had been known to trap shuttles permanently. Blackadder’s Law: Every world is different, except they’re all out to get you. Which way was the wind blowing? Even a middling gust from the wrong direction would tip him over. Move!

  He unbuckled his harness. “Niagara has landed—a little off vertical, but it seems to be stable. I see the wind is clocked at a bracing twenty-five klicks, probably the closest to dead calm we ever get around here. Temperature is forty-one Celsius, humidity ninety-two. My EVA suit will keep me comfortable. I am now starting down the shaft we call the Gut. You will see how Control closes the bulkhead hatches above me as I pass each one. That’s to prevent contamination of the ship when I open the outer hatch. I am really conscious of the high gravity. At my weight it makes me tote an extra sixty kilos or so and I notice it just holding the rungs of the ladder.

  “Now I’m at the door, but Control will not open it until the outer skin is cool enough to touch. I expect to find smoke outside there. The landing jets will have fired the vegetation, but my suit is fireproof and my helmet filters the air I breathe. Even the two packs at my feet are fireproof. Ah!”

  The clock in his helmet display tipped over to Day 413.

  The door fell open.

  Outside he saw the triangular shadow of the shuttle, like a giant arrow pointing the way to fortune for Seth Broderick. The nearby vegetation was charred, but it must be too wet to burn well. White smoke was streaming away in the wind, staying close to the ground. He kicked out his packs, noting how they fell as if shot out of a cannon; then he turned and gingerly clambered down the ladder on the inside of the door. Because of the shuttle’s tilt, the last rung was about a meter above the ground. Normally he would have jumped, but the packs made the landing tricky and a twisted ankle could kill him now. He lowered himself by his arms, which was not the easiest thing he had ever done.

  Golden Hind opened the circuit just long enough for him to hear them all cheering, but he was too busy looking around at the world to respond.

  Day 413

  The public and the wildcatters themselves glamorize the first-footers. They’re an all-right gang, of course, but I’ve always been more impressed by the second wave, the ones who go down to gather up the first ones’ bones.

  Fonatelles, op. cit.

  He had expected something like grassland—not a putting green, of course, but a tussocky meadow. He should have known better. What Cacafuego had laid out as a welcome mat was a boulder field, giant shingle on a chaotic scale, with everything from gravel up to rocks as big as bathtubs. For three meters out from the shuttle the rocks had been blackened by the landing jets, but beyond that the ground was hidden under a dense mat of ropy roots or vines, from which sprouted ferny green stuff about waist high.

  Of the shuttle’s five legs, one was contracted as far as it would go, two were fully extended, and one of those did not even reach the ground. The result looked highly unstable. If the wind veered about thirty degrees to the east, Control would very likely slam the door shut and lift off. It lacked enough fuel to hunt for a better site nearby. His EVA suit was fireproof but it could not save him from being boiled alive. He didn’t mention all that to his plog. It could be dubbed in later, if there was a later.

  He hoisted one of the packs and carried it out of range, then came back for the other. They were heavy but the footing was horrible, even when he could see where he was stepping. He tore off a couple of fronds, wound them into a wad, and rolled them in a sample wipe—which looked like an ordinary sheet of sandwich wrap, but at once sealed itself and evacuated the air. Loamy soil and scummy water were the two best sites to find potentially pharmaceutical materials, but neither was handy. He tried tearing up one of the creeper vines, but could not budge it.

  Then his eye was caught by a tiny movement. He was being watched. In shape it was most like a terrestrial lizard, about as long as his hand. In color it was trying to match the half-blackened rock on which it sat, but not succeeding very well. Fire would be rare on this rain-sodden island. Seth slowly drew his stun gun, set it to low, and froze the little critter. He picked it up.

  “Sorry, wee fellow. Hey, you’ve got six legs! Aren’t you lucky?”

  And so was he. Plants were just sunlight-eaters, sugar-makers, and much less diverse than fauna. There could be no argument with a new animal species. Chemists would drool over this evidence. He wrapped it in a wipe and dropped it in his collecting pocket.

  “Captain to Master. Your fifteen minute planned stay is almost up. Our view of your location is through a probe, not direct. We don’t see any major storms lurking, but don’t rely on that too much.”

  Especially when the shuttle was balanced on a hair.

  “Copied and out.” Seth trudged back to the open door and threw the two samples inside. “Control, close door.”

  Then he had to retrace his steps to the packs and squat to take out the flag. His knees were weary already. The flagpole was telescopic, but where could he plant it? It would be very unimpressive peeking over the shrubbery. He tried a patch of finer gravel, but the shaft went in only a few centimeters, not enough. He jammed it between two of the burned boulders, then turned to face Niagara.

  “Can you see me clearly?”

  “You’re beautiful!” That was JC, excited. “Wave for all your teeny plog fans. Now get farther back and send Niagara home.”

  Easier said than done. The vegetation completely hid the ground, and kept writhing in the wind. While the boulders underneath seemed fairly stable, being locked in place by the creeper, he had to feel for every foothold. If he tangled a foot and tripped, he would very likely twist or break something. After about ten meters he turned.

  “Control, return to mother ship for refueling.”

  —Crewmember still ashore. Confirm instructions.

  Does it think he was not aware of that? “Departure confirmed.”

  White flames and smoke burst out around the shuttle’s undercarriage. Niagara soared up on pillars of fire and turned to the east. No birds flew up in alarm. The sky was a clear blue, but uncluttered by circling vultures. Evolution did not favor wings on high-gee worlds.

  A stray buffet of wind blew the flag over.

  * * *

  Seth Broderick had a planet all to himself. He was as alone as a guy ever could be. Frustratingly, all he could see of his world was groundcover and a charred area like the scar of a large campfire. Control had avoided ridges when choosing a stable landing ground, so he was standing in a very slight hollow. He plodded up the gentle slope, arms spread to keep his balance, placing every step with care. Top speed was half a klick an hour now. He chattered to his plog.

  “If you’ve watched many plogs, then I’m sure
you’ve heard other prospectors say this, but I really wonder what this world smells like. The filter on my suit cuts out all the odors and dust…” He paused to catch his breath. “Another strange thing here is the silence. This is a very silent place. No birds singing, no dogs or traffic… Just the wind swishing this groundcover.”

  At the top of the slope he found the chaotic rocks and pebbles more exposed, as if this were a later dump from some great fleet of trucks. Here the vegetation had not been burned, but he found dead remains of the ropy vines under some of the boulders, and collected a few fragments.

  Although he was still standing on a plain, he had gained a slightly wider view. The sun was low in the sky, roughly north-north-east, but it would not set at this latitude yet, so he need not worry about darkness. The Tsukuba River lay somewhere to the north, heading eastward to the sea. Southeastward stood an ominous wall of cloud, not the storm he had flown over, another just as menacing. The chimneys must lie in that direction. To the south he ought to be able to discern the coastal ranges, but all he was sure of were some clouds that might be the sort that hung around above mountains.

  To the north he thought he could see a white triangular wing pointed skyward, the remains of the Galactic shuttle, perhaps half a kilometer away. He had planned on being set down much closer to it.

  “Golden Hind, can you place me?”

  Jordan: “Your landing site was about 1.2 kilometers west of the chimneys. The Galactic shuttle is 0.6 klicks northeast of you.”

  Right on! “And the river?”

  “The major channel is at least three klicks north of the shuttle, but remember there are many minor channels.”

  “Then I shall investigate the shuttle first and after that proceed to the colony. I doubt if I’ll get any farther over this terrain. What is Maria making of it? I was expecting alluvium—mud, not boulders. Is this crap glacial?”

  “Maybe originally glacial,” Maria said. “The nearest I’ve ever seen are debris flows that you get in major floods. But that’s in mountains; I’ve never heard of anything quite like it on a river plain. Some of the rocks look well-rounded and some are freshly broken. It’s very poorly sorted—big stuff jumbled in with much finer. I can’t be sure without a closer look, but I suspect you’re seeing the product of those storm surges Control predicted. The river probably floods, but I can’t believe any river could throw boulders of that size around on what is basically flat ground. Anything that can do so must be extremely violent.”

  “I can’t wait to meet it. Thanks. Prospector out.”

  He made his way back down to his packs and collected two spare water bottles. He could always locate the packs by their transponders, but he very much doubted that he would be coming back for them.

  * * *

  Wading over that rubble in that gravity felt much like climbing a mountain while carrying a horse. It took him well over an hour to reach the shuttle, a distance he could have run in two minutes on Earth. Several times he nearly fell. Level patches were bad enough; the gentlest slopes, up or down, were even harder, because terrestrial eyes and reflexes couldn’t judge what was needed.

  Still the only sound was the rush of the wind in the shrubbery. Every ten or fifteen minutes he heard that sound rising and lay down until it stopped howling and the wind dropped to a strong breeze again. Twice he thought he was going to be lifted bodily, and certainly would have been had he not had the vegetation to hang on to. He understood now how Dylan Guinizelli had let a gust of wind break his arm.

  He collected a thumb-sized, four-legged beetle, a few stray weeds unlike the ferns, some fibrous material that he guessed was decayed wood-like matter left there by the storm surges, three broken shells with traces of organic material clinging to them, some tiny animal bones, and a dozen fecal pellets. Those would probably excite Reese more than all the rest. A single gram of organic material would yield thousands of exotic chemicals, but he found it hard to believe his packet of grunge would ever make him rich, despite the legends of old Mathewson and his bucket of dirt. It was not an inspiring collection and he might have to return with his sample bag more empty than full—unless, of course, he found some of the Galactic samples he could purloin. There would be a certain justice in that.

  He had used up at least a third of his planned stay. He was tired. He was thirsty, and had emptied his first water bottle. Why couldn’t the damned planet have given him a nice flat meadow to run around on, as he had expected? A delta plain made of boulders was an absurdity.

  Long before he reached the Galactic shuttle, he saw that it was a KR745, which could carry a team of five and made Golden Hind’s Oryo 9 look like a child’s toy. It had probably cost twenty times as much. JC liked to badmouth the multinationals, but even he never accused them of skimping on equipment. Seth found where the KR745 had touched down, charring the vegetation. He found the scars where it had dragged and bounced as the wind took it away. And he came at last to the gully where it now rested.

  The KR745 had the standard delta wings for supersonic flight, but it was a “layflat” as opposed to a “standup” like Niagara. It landed level, not vertical. That might have been its undoing, if the crew had not appreciated the wind danger soon enough. Control should have done so, but with the two prospectors gone exploring, the biologist left aboard must have overruled Control’s advice to take off. Now what had once been a beautiful thing was an ugly corpse, lying like a dead bird in a shallow, sandy channel, resting on its port side against the far bank, with one wing pointing at the sky and the other crumpled underneath the fuselage. Its back had been broken, leaving the nose almost separated from the rest.

  The channel was sinuous, its bed sandy not rocky, the first fine-grained sediment Seth had seen. No water was flowing, but Maria had been right about open water near the wreck, a shiny pond, rippling in the wind. More pools marking the low points of the channel, even on the limited stretch he could see before it curved out of view. Would they be salt tidal pools, or seepages of fresh groundwater from the river? He had no intention of tasting them to find out, but he would certainly take samples.

  He was babbling about this to his plog when Jordan’s voice interrupted.

  “Prospector, the shuttle will dock in about ten minutes. We can begin refueling at once, but how does the weather look down there?”

  Weather? Seth glanced eastward and then used some words that would certainly have to be edited out before his plog could ever be made public. The storm was halfway up the sky, white on the crest, but black as death underneath, lurid with lightning flashes.

  “Not good,” he added for publication. “What’s the timing?”

  “Not good either. We think that brute is going to hit you in about two hours, and Niagara can’t get to you before then.”

  “Two hours should give me long enough to take a look at the chimneys. This wreck must have been lodged here for two or three weeks. I can shelter inside it until the wind drops.”

  “Keep in touch, Seth.”

  “Stick around, won’t you? Prospector out.”

  The rocky bank sloped gently, but gentle in that gravity felt like steep elsewhere. He slid and staggered down it without falling. Then, at last free to step out normally, he headed along the hollow to the wreck. His objective was the gaping hole just forward of the wings, which looked like an easy access. He hadn’t gone far when he saw the footprints, and those changed everything.

  * * *

  There were many prints, most of them old and faint, flattened by wind and rain until they were mere dimples in the sand. He might not have noticed them had they not been grouped into two distinct trails and highlighted by a few more recent tracks. Both trails began at the break in the shuttle. The wind had not yet had time to blur the latest set, although they did not look very recent. They were human footprints and their maker had been barefoot—reasonable in this climate, dangerous in this environment. One set ran eastward to the pond and the other west to a place where someone had been digging in the san
d. Even your average Ph.D. could work out that the pond was for either drinking water or washing, while the digging site was a makeshift latrine. Animals dug pits, but not with a shovel.

  Seth babbled to his plog about Man Friday and Robinson Crusoe while the rest of his brain raged against the extent of Commodore Duddridge’s treachery. Some of his shuttle crew had survived until very recently. They might even be still alive. The commodore had not merely given up too easily, he had deliberately flown away and marooned people to die on a planet one step up from Hell. Then the bastard had tried to cover up his crime by posting a quarantine beacon in the hope that Mighty Mite’s expedition would not come looking at the evidence. There was a charge of willful murder in Comrade Duddridge’s future.

  Seth’s second thought—followed instantly by a surge of shame that he would think of such a thing at a time like this, when he had just discovered a fellow human being callously left to die—was that his financial future was now secure. If he returned alive to the real world, his plog was going to be a bestseller. It had all the syrupy drama and pathos of afternoon space opera, the sort of dreck churned out by teams of worn-out hacks to enliven the existence of Earth’s hopeless millions. He would be famous.

  Jordan’s voice: “Are those prints human, Seth?”

  “Yes, sir. Wait a minute, though…”

  Seth laboriously lowered himself to his knees, and then crouched to view the sand at a low angle. The oblique sunlight helped. “The topmost set, yes,” he said. “And some of the older ones. But there are other tracks mixed in, bigger feet. Can you see this one?” He traced it out for the camera’s benefit: four toes in front, probably two behind. Or the other way around, of course. Every toe ended in a wicked claw. “Whatever it is, I don’t think it eats grass.”