The Ship Who Searched b-3

by Anne McCaffrey

  As they moved into main room, Doctor Aspen turned toward her column. "I am told that you have some interest and education in archeology, my lady Tia," he said, as he settled into a seat near one of the side screens. "And you, too, Alex. Please, since you'll be on-site with us, feel free to participate. And if you know something we should, or notice something we miss, feel free to contribute."

  Alex was obviously surprised; Tia wasn't She had gleaned some of this from the records. Aspen's students stayed with him, went to enormous lengths to go on-site with him, went on to careers of their own full of warm praise for their mentor. Aspen was evidently that rarest of birds, the exceptional, inspirational teacher who was also a solid researcher and scientist

  Within moments, Aspen had drawn them all into his charmed circle, calling up the first team's records, drawing his students, and even Alex, into making observations. Tia kept a sharp eye out for the missing member of the party, however, for she had the feeling that Haakon-Fritz had deliberately timed his entrance to coincide with the gathering of Aspen's students. Tia figured that he wanted an excuse to feel slighted. She wasn't going to give it to him.

  She could, and did, hook herself into the spaceport surveillance system, and she spotted Haakon-Fritz coming long before he was in range of her own sensors. Plenty of time to interrupt the animated discussion with a subtle, "Gentlebeings, Doctar Haakon-Fritz is crossing the tarmac."

  Treel and Les exchanged a wordless look, but said nothing. Aspen simply smiled, and rose from his chair, as Tia froze the recording they had been watching. Alex hurried down the stairs to intercept Haakon-Fritz at the lift.

  So instead of being greeted by the backs of those deep in discussion, the man found himself greeted by the Courier Service brawn, met at the top of the lift by the rest of his party, and given an especially hearty greeting by his superior.

  His expression did not change so much as a hair, but Tia had the distinct feeling that he was disgruntled. "Welcome aboard, Doctor Haakon-Fritz," Tia said, as he shook hands briefly with the other members of his party. "We have a choice of five cabins for you, if you'd..."

  "If you have more than one cabin available," Haakon-Fritz interrupted rudely, speaking not to Tia, who he ignored, but to Alex, "I would like to see them all before I make a choice."

  Tia knew Alex well enough by now to know that he was angry, but he covered it beautifully. "Certainty; Professor," he said, giving Haakon-Fritz the lesser of his titles. "If you'll follow me." He led the way back into the cabin section, leaving Haakon-Fritz to carry his own bags.

  Treel made a little growl that sounded like disgust; Fred rolled his eyes, which was the closest he could come to a facial expression. "My word," Fred said, his voice ripe with surprise. "That was certainly rude!"

  "He ees a Practical Darweeneest," Treel replied, with a curl to her lip. "Your pardon, seer," she said to Aspen. I know that you feel he ees a good scienteest, but I am glad he ees not the one in charge."

  Fred was still baffled. "Practical Darwinist?" he said. "Does someone want to explain to a baffled young veggie just what that might be and why he was so rude to Lady Tia?"

  Les took up the gauntlet with a sigh. "A Practical Darwinist is one who believes that Darwin's Law applies to everything. If someone is in an accident, they shouldn't be helped, if an earthquake levels a city, no aid should be sent, if a plague breaks out, only the currently healthy should be inoculated; the victims should be isolated and live or die as the case may be."

  Fred's uneasy glance toward her column made Tia decide to spare Les the embarrassment of stating the obvious. "And as you have doubtless surmised, the fanatical Practical Darwinists find the existence of shell-persons to be horribly offensive. They won't even acknowledge that we exist, given the option."

  Professor Aspen shook his head sadly. "A brilliant scientist, but tragically flawed by fanaticism," he said, as he took his seat again. "Which is why he has gotten as far as he will ever go. He had a chance, was given a solo Exploration dig, and refused to consider any evidence that did not support his own peculiar partyline. Now he is left to be the chief clerk of digs like ours." He looked soberly into the faces of his four students. "Let this be a lesson to you, gentlebeings. Never let fanatic devotion blind you to truth."

  "Or, in other words," Tia put in blithely, "the problem with a fanatic is that their brains turn to tofu and they accept nothing as truth except what conforms to their ideas. What makes them dangerous is not that they'll die to prove their truth, but that they'll let you die, or take you with them, to prove it"

  "Well put, my lady." Doctor Aspen turned his attention back to the screen. "Now since I know from past experience that Haakon-Fritz will spend the time until takeoff sulking in his cabin, shall we continue with our discussion?"

  The Exploration team had left the site in good shape; equipment stowed, domes inflated but sealed, open trenches covered to protect them. The Evaluation team erected two new living domes and a second laboratory dome in short order, and settled down to their work.

  Everything seemed to be under control; now that the team was on-site, even the sulky Haakon-Fritz fell to and took on his share of the duties. There would seem to have been no need for AH One-Oh-Three-Three to remain on-planet when they could have been making the rounds of 'their' established digs.

  But that was not what regulations called for, and both Tia and Alex knew why, even if the members of the team didn't. Regulations for a CS ship attached to Institute duty hid a carefully concealed second agenda, when the ship placed a new Exploration or Evaluation team.

  Archeological teams were put together with great care; not only because of the limited number of personnel, but because of their isolation. They were going to be in danger from any number of things, all of the hazards that Tia had listed to Alex on their first mission. There was no point in exposing them to danger from within.

  So the prospective members of a given team were probed, tested, and Psyched to a fair-thee-well, both for individual stability and for interactive stability with the rest of the team. Still, mistakes could be made, and had been in the past. Sometimes those mistakes had led to a murder, or at least, an attempted murder.

  When a psychological problem surfaced, it was usually right at the beginning of the stint, after the initial settling in period was over, and once a routine had been established and the stresses of the dig started to take their toll. About that time, if something was going to go wrong, it did. The team had several weeks in cramped quarters in transit to establish interpersonal relations; ideal conditions for cabin fever. Ideal conditions for stress to surface, and that stress could lead to severe interpersonal problems.

  So regulations were that the courier, whether BB or fully-manned, was to manufacture some excuse to stay for several days, with the ship personnel staying inside and out of sight, but with the site being fully monitored from inside the ship. The things they were to look for were obvious personality conflicts, new behavioral quirks, or old ones going from 'quirk' to 'psychosis'. Making sure there was nothing that might give rise to a midnight axe murder. It would not have been the first time that someone snapped under stress.

  Alex was most worried about Les, muttering things about post-trauma syndrome and the fragility of combat veterans. Tia had her own picks for trouble, if trouble came. Either Fred or Aldon, for neither one of them had ever been on-site in a small dig before, and until he went to the Institute, Aldon had never even been off-planet. Despite his unpleasantness to her, Haakon-Fritz was brilliant and capable, and he had been on several digs before without any trouble surfacing. And now that they were all on-site, while he was distant, he was also completely cooperative, and his behavior in no way differed from his behavior on previous digs. There was no indication that he was likely to take his fanatic beliefs into his professional life. Fred and Aldon had only been part of a crew of hundreds with an Excavation team, where there were more people to interact with, fewer chances for personality stress, and no real trials to
face but the day to day boredom of repetitive work.

  For the first couple of days, everything seemed to be just fine, not only as far as the personnel were concerned, but as far as the conditions. Both Tia and Alex breathed a sigh of relief. Too soon by half.

  For that night, the winter rains began. Tia had been sifting through some of the records she'd copied at the base, looking for another potential investment prospect like Largo Draconis. It was late; very late, the site was quiet and dark, and Alex had called it a night. He was in his cabin, just about at the dreaming stage, and Tia was considering shutting down for her mandated three hours of DeepSleep, when the storm struck.

  'Struck' was the operative word, for a wall of wind and rain hit her skin hard enough to rattle her for a moment, and that was followed by a blast of lightning and thunder that shook Alex out of bed.

  "What?" he yelped, coming up out of sleep with a shout "How? Who?" He shook his head to clear it, as another peal of thunder made Tia's walls vibrate. "What's going on?" he asked, as Tia sank landing-spikes from her feet into the ground beneath her, to stabilize her position. "Are we under attack or something?"

  "No, it's a storm, Alex," she replied absently, making certain that everything was locked down and all her servos were inside. "One incredible thunderstorm, I've never experienced anything like it!"

  She turned on her external cameras and fed them to her screens so he could watch, while she made certain that she was well-insulated against lightning strikes and that all was still well at the site. Alex wandered out into the main cabin and sat in his chair, awestruck by the display of raw power going on around them,

  Multiple lightning strikes were going on all around them; not only was the area as bright as day, it was often brighter. Thunder boomed continuously, the wind howled, and sheets, no, entire linen closets of rain pounded the ground, not only baffling any attempt at a visual scan of the site, but destroying any hope of any other kind of check. With this much lightning in the air, there was no point even in trying a radio call.

  "What's happening down at the site?" Alex asked anxiously.

  "No way of telling," she said reluctantly. "The Exploration team went through these rains once already, so I guess we can assume that the site itself isn't going to wash away, or float away. For the rest, the domes are insulated against lightning, but who knows what's likely to happen to the equipment? Especially in all this lightning."

  Her words proved only too prophetic; for although the rain lasted less than an hour, the deluge marked a forty-degree drop in temperature, and the effects of the lightning were permanent.

  When the storm cleared, the news from the site was bad. Lightning had not only struck the ward-off field generator, it had slagged it There was nothing left but a melted pile of plasteel and duraloy. Tia didn't see how one strike could have done that much damage; the generator must have been hit over and over. The backup was corroded beyond any repair, though Haakon-Fritz and Les labored over it for most of the night Too many parts had been ruined, probably while it sat in its crate through who-knew-how-many transfers. Never once uncrated and checked, and now Doctor Aspen's team paid the price for that neglect.

  Tia consulted with Doctor Aspen in person the next morning. There was little sign of the damage from where they sat, but the results were undeniable. No ward-off generator. No protection from native fauna, from insectoids to the big canids. And if the huge grazers, the size of moose, were to become aggressive, there would be no way to keep them out of the camp. Ordinary fences would not hold against a herd of determined grazers; the last team had proved that.

  "I don't have a spare in the holds," Tia told the team leader. "I don't have even half the parts you need for the corroded generator. There were no storms like the one last night mentioned in the records of the previous team, but we should assume there are going to be more. How many of them can you handle? Winter is coming on, and I can't predict what the native animals are going to do. Do you want to pull the team out?"

  Doctor Aspen pursed his lips thoughtfully. "I can't think of any reason why we should, my lady," he replied. "The only exterior equipment that had no protection was the ward-off generator. The first team stayed here without incident all winter, there's nothing large enough to be a real threat to us, so far as I can tell. We'll have a few insects, perhaps, until first hard frost. I imagine those jackal-like beasts will lurk about and make a nuisance of themselves. But they're hardly a threat."

  Alex, feet up on the console as usual, agreed with the archeologist. "I don't see any big threat here, either. Unless lightning takes out something a lot more vital."

  Tia didn't like it, but she didn't challenge them, either. "If that's the way you want it," she agreed. "But we'll stay until the rains are over, just in case."

  Stay they did; but that was the first and the last of the major storms. After the single, spectacular downpour, the rains came gently, between midnight and dawn, with hardly a peal of thunder to wake Alex. She had to conclude that the first storm had been a freak occurrence, something no one could have predicted, and lost a little of her ire over the lack of warning from the previous team. But that still didn't excuse the corroded generator.

  Still, the weather stayed cold, and the rain left coatings of ice on everything. It would be gone by midmorning, but the difficulty in walking around the site meant that the team changed their working hours, beginning around ten-hundred and finishing about twenty-two-hundred. Despite his recorded disclaimer, Doctor Aspen insisted on working alongside his students, and no one, not even Haakon-Fritz, wanted him to risk a fell on the ice.

  Meanwhile, Tia made note of a disturbing development. The sudden cold had sent most of the small game and pest animals into hiding or hibernation. That left the normally solitary jackal-dogs without their usual prey, and in what appeared to be seasonal behavior, they began to pack up for the winter, so that they could take down the larger grazers.

  The disturbing part was that a very large pack began lurking around the camp. Now Tia regretted her choice of landing areas. The site was between her and the camp; that was all very well, especially for observing the team at work, but the dogs were lurking in the hills around the camp. And with no ward-off generator to keep them out of it.

  She mentioned her worry to Alex, who pointed out that the beasts always scattered at any sign of aggression on the part of a human. She mentioned it again to Doctor Aspen, who said the animals were probably just looking for something to scavenge and would leave them alone once they realized there was nothing to eat there.

  She never had a chance to mention it again.

  With two moons, both in different phases, the nights were never dark unless it was raining. But the floodlights at the site made certain that the darkness was driven away. And lately, the nights were never silent either; the pack of jackal-dogs wailed from the moment the sun went down to the moment the rains began. Tia quickly became an expert on what those howls meant; the yipping social-howl, the long, drawn-out rally-cry, and most ominous, the deep-chested hunting call. She was able to tell, just by the sounds, where they were, whether they were in pursuit, and when the quarry had won the chase, or lost it.

  Tia wasn't too happy about them; the pack numbered about sixty now, and they weren't looking too prosperous. Evidently the activity at the site had driven away the larger grazers they normally preyed on; that had the effect of making all the smaller packs join up into one mega-pack, so there was always some food, but none of them got very much of it They weren't at the bony stage yet, but there was a certain desperate gauntness about them. The grazers they did chase were escaping five times out of six, and they weren't getting in more than two hunts in a night

  Should I suggest that the team feed them? Perhaps take a grav-sled and go shoot something and drag it in once every couple of days? But would that cause problems later? That would be giving the pack the habit of dependence on humans, and that wouldn't be good. Could they lure the pack into another territory that way, thou
gh? Or would feeding them make them lose their fear of humans? She couldn't quite make up her mind about that, but the few glimpses she'd had of the pack before sunset had put her in mind of certain Russian folktales, troikas in the snow, horses foaming with panic, and wolves snapping at the runners. Meanwhile, the pack got a little closer each night before they faded into the darkness.

  At least it was just about time for the team to break off for the night Once they were in their domes, they'd be safe.

  As if in answer to her thought, the huge lights pivoted up and away from the site, as they were programmed to do, lighting a clear path for the team from the site to the camp. When everyone was safely in the domes, Les would turn them off remotely. So far, the lights alone had kept the jackal-dogs at bay. They lurked just outside the path carved by the lights, but would not venture inside.

  As if to answer that thought, the pack howled just as the First of the team members emerged from the covered excavation area. It sounded awfully close. Tia ran a quick infrared scan. The pack was awfully close, right on the top of the hill to the right of the site!