[THE SPACEMAN WITH PLUTONIUM CYLINDERS part 8] by A.Appleyard

  <To those who have read parts 1 to 7 I apologize for repetitions hereinafter;
but I felt that some explanation is due to those who have not read them.>
  `RD' = `recycler-destructor and materials separator': it sorts and separates
the component chemical elements of whatever is put in it.
  `actinides' = elements 89 to 103, including uranium (92) and plutonium (94).

  "How many are in this new party from Earth that's coming? What sort?" said
Plutey-pots to Jet Jack as the Jetters asteroid miner group helped to get Aulien
landing field ready, "I still can't really get used to the rate those two moons
Arda's got move against the stars; the one that's up now's moved its width past
those three stars since we started this job. Not much light from them, after
Earth's moon. Lucky there's plenty of light otherwise right now. Some people'll
miss sun eclipses here: our moons aren't big enough to cover our sun.".
  "17, they say they're all biologists and geologists." said a local man who
lived in Aulien. He had a propulsor spacesuit (they had seen him in it before),
but now he was in ordinary overalls. He was one of the sort who only flew in
atmosphere or space when he had to, and sometimes needed prodding to get him to
keep in practise of space flying.
  "There's sure plenty light to work by, from that Altaloke!" said Laser Larry,
"Look at its tails spreading up over nearly half the sky! If someone told me
before that we'd see a comet that big, so often, I'd never've believed him.".
  "The sun heats its head and boils the gas and dust out of it, and the sunlight
blows it out into tails." Rattler explained, "Some say that a few thousand years
ago the Solar System had a big comet a bit like that, but it broke up. Some of
those old stories ...".
  A loud intruder alarm interrupted him. They went into defensive position, but
a stand-down came over Jet Jack's radio. "It's animals." a computer voice said
as a man wearing a backpack helicopter motor and rotor set over a spacesuit
undersuit flew out of an airfield workshop to chase them off. One of the light
running two-legged dinosaurlike animals was tangled spectacularly in the
perimeter fencing; the others ran towards a mound near the fence and jumped back
out over the fence from it. The animals, each about as heavy as a man but taller
and thinner, ran into the bush, picking at leaves and fruit as they went, and
after a mile swerved both sides away from something. As the helirig man flew
down to see what it was, he saw something that back on Earth would have merely
been pretty, but after several years on Arda made the back of his neck creep:
white butterflylike flowers; but the leaf shape was slightly but comfortingly
different. It was thankfully <Pseudokeraunus imitans>, a species of `false
landmine bush', evolved to look like the real thing without using up energy and
growth material making landmines, but very poisonous to Ardan animals. As the
animals moved on, one of them put its head into a dense bush and with a quick
scooping gulp emptied a bird nest that had been built too low. "Sitting bird and
all. Another week and they'd've fledged." he thought angrily, for he shared many
men's affection for songbirds; but nature in the wild is like that. After the
various attacks and alarms that had been he wondered briefly if Aulien, or the
Anor system, was itself a `nest built too near Earth' for ISAB (an Earth body,
International Space Administration Board) to scoop empty and take over with
sudden massive force; then he shook off such thoughts and unfolded his helirig's
counter-rotating coaxial rotors and took off and returned to his workshop.
  By then Altaloke's huge head had risen above the northeastern horizon. Against
the streaky whiteness of its tails spreading upwards, a dark dot appeared and
grew and descended. The plane's styling was directly functional with a tail like
an outsized missile's. He had left Earth business life too soon to have heard of
the alarm which an Arda-made plane's missile-like styling had caused as it
approached Manchester airport in England carrying some men from WAIA (West
African Industrial Area). Its lower tail fin folded sideways as it landed.
  On the ground it was nearer and smaller than he had thought it was. Without
room for an aisle, how would the passengers get to doors? Its sides hinged down,
revealing the passengers, who were all in spacesuits in an unpressurized volume
little bigger than themselves. In airless space all their suit propulsors had
been remote controlled by the pilot to help to manoeuvre it, for there had not
been time before the journey for them to learn well enough how to suit propulsor
fly. Sometimes such a craft would be used in space without its body casing, the
passengers strapped into open seats with their suit tethers tied in along the
craft's backbone. The passengers got out onto the world beyond space, many of
them in a shock of alienness suddenly realizing the abyss of black void that
separated them from all that their parents could ever have reached or known of.
  "Well, <that> wasn't quite what I expected." said a passenger pulling his
spacesuit hood and breathing mask off, "Like once when I was promised a lift to
inspect a building site and it turned out to be the back of an open lorry along
with a load of building site workmen. He didn't even come straight here, he
poked about asteroids first, thought we might like to see the sights. That base
Ilmenost on that asteroid looks quite a place. I come in my best [office] suit
to give a good impression, and I'm told to undress and stuffed into a spacesuit
like I was only expecting as an emergency if the cabin leaked. And they haven't
heard of baggage handlers round here, so we'll have to do the unloading. And I
hate to think what being spaced has done to some of the things in my luggage.
That man in the spacesuit with the jet fighter fight painted all over his
cylinders and helmet, I suppose he's that Jet Jack that I was told would meet
us. Typical asteroid miner type rough, by the look of him. Lucky I'd heard
before about conditions here.". He remembered an interview a year before when no
amount of best business manners could cancel out a badly scraped shoe and muddy
trouser knees after a stumble cutting in a hurry across long grass, and only
saliva and a handkerchief available to try to patch up the damage in time. He
wondered how long it would be before a local boss in respectable clothes came
out and said "Thankyou, that'll be enough." to the assortment of dirty overalls
and spacesuits and spacesuit undersuits that had come out to meet them.
  "Not the first time." said another as he thankfully rid himself of his bulky
spacesuit, "In the 1920's before airliners were pressurized, airliner passengers
often had to wear oxygen masks as routine. Lets hope that out here there's some
such weird masterpiece of alien technology as a powerpoint that my shaver and
computer can run off. Well, we're here, `Arda, the place of 'ard work', as they
say, like that management expert who came to their main asteroid base called
Ilmenost hoping to set up a new government department or the like and ended up
here in Aulien as a foundryman. I'm John Delaville, a geologist. I suppose that
if we get on a field trip while we're here, whenever I need to get to bedrock
I'll have to dig down myself. On Earth there's excavation exposures all over the
place. Here there'll only be natural outcrops, and no roads to most places to
get powered plant to site. Oh well, we knew before we came what it'll be like,
no city comforts and all that. I've got a set of CD-ROM's about what's known
about Arda geology, but it's 6 months old.".
  "Here's an update." said Jet Jack handing him a CD-ROM. "And here's something
to help you dig down: hold onto that tree while I put it on you, it's heavy." he
said, fastening a heavy metal-cased backpack to Mr.Delaville's back. It'll run
for months without refuelling, no exhaust gas, and you can run quite a powerful
rockdrill off it. The drills we've got here can either rotate or jab, and they
can take a shovel bit for cutting earth.".
  "Looks like the sort of thing I'd like also." said visitor with several
environmental action group stickers and badges on his clothes, a Mr.Newton, "I
came from Earth to get away from pollution and everything spoilt. Back home we
say to use natural means only, but -".
  "It's too much like 'ard work, 'ere on Arda where everything's not been done
already for you." said Plutey-pots, taking another of the backpacks out of a
ground vehicle and strapping it to Mr.Newton's back.
  "Ye spirits, that's a load, ruining my good [office] suit strapping that thing
on me over it. At least it's too small to be a -" said Newton, staggering under
its weight, but he gradually got used to it. Plutey-pots was in his undersuit
only, and the usual asteroid miner smell; the visitors would have to put up with
it. So far none of the visitors had seen him in his spacesuit or put two and two
together about what its oxygen cylinders were made of.
  Thus some of them treated the journey as routine; but others took longer to
get over the shock and lost feeling of being on land which was on no map or
globe of their known world and no compass direction and distance of land or sea
journey from anywhere known. Their only link with their homes was the alienness
of hyperspace, and men in strange equipment who had appeared from nowhere and
with them had vanished into nowhere, often as little accountable to Earth men as
was any alien of old space tales. From that old airfield in London they had gone
in none of the four directions, nor up or down, nor any combination of them, but
they had gone, and were now deposited far away having to shed spacesuits and get
back into ordinary clothes in the open to try to be presentable in time. Seeing
men, however clothed, and buildings made by men, was some sort of anchor for
their minds to hold on to as practicality gradually returned.
  "Where do we go?" one of them asked, "At least just here there's <some> sort
of civilization nearby.".
  "Not here, right around here's already well known." said Jet Jack, "People
keep on wanting to stay near the `bright lights'. Arda's a new world and it
needs field work to discover things, not cosy conferencing in posh hotels.".
  "Well, where then?" said Delaville, not hiding his disappointment at another
journey ahead of him taking him far from what town comforts were to be had among
the factories and reactor-domes and barrack-like housing of Aulien, as he looked
around at the rocky Orlando Hills southwards and the landmine-bush-ridden alien
scrub stretching into the distance. There were other towns on Arda, and perhaps
a long tiring flight away they would be taken to another place with a building
vaguely resembling something fit to hold a formal conference in. Native flies
and midges buzzed round but rejected their off-world body smell and did not bite
them. Something with brown and white barred pterodactyl-like wings and four legs
flew overhead and away over the airfield. Anor steadily climbed and grew hotter.
  "Oh, is it? After all we were told about a conference, we're going straight on
a rough field trip? I should have expected that with Ilmenostians! What's on
those crates?: `seismic blasting charges', now we'll have to learn explosives
handling on the job, and why the @#% stick a <picture of pretty flowers> on each
of the crates!?": thus another visitor, Mr.Jackson, complained as his trapped
alien lost feeling returned and his comfortable hoped-for business atmosphere
evaporated into a reality of manual work and heavy power tools far from his
home; but to anyone who has been on Arda for a while the leaf shape and white
butterflylike flowers depicted had an ominous relevant meaning, and a similar
design was often borne by Ardan explosive experts and their vehicles.
  "Everybody who comes here seems to want to look at that area in the Ered Kal'
where those ores are, that helped to make ISAB want so badly to take us over
that time. No harm letting you see it, I suppose, since all Earth seems to know
about it already. That leaked out a long time ago.".
  "Oh. `The Mountains of Light'. That Tolkien stuff that those [asteroid miners
called the] X-100's named such a lot of places in when they discovered [a star
that they named] Anor and [its planets including] Arda.". Thus many people
called those mountains near the eastern sea, but it was not the full name.
  "Same as Arda has only one continent, a huge one, and it's called Ilyarda,
which means `All the Earth'.".
  "That lot and their funny codenames, [after] poisonous snakes and all sorts,
like that one called Plutey-pots. I presume his [spacesuit] cylinders aren't
really made of element 94 like I read in one of the tabloid papers once.".
  "Now to see what you lot've brought with you." Jet Jack announced.
  "Oi! What's this?" one asked sharply, and others likewise. Dark rumours awoke
in their minds from scare tales, of men unwillingly brought there and undergoing
the first stages of being reprocessed into workmen for the local spacemen, some
calling despairingly beneath star constellations seen in no Earth sky for police
who 400 light years separated them from, while their luggage was shared as loot.
  "Just a kit inspection." said Jet Jack somewhat roughly, "There's a limit to
what we can carry about with us. I see a lot of you are being prompt to change
back into best office suits, out come handy little emergency packages to repair
such hideous damage as scuffed shoes or a day's beard: as they say `there's no
second chance to make a first impression'. Lets see what you've brought, I'll
start with you - infinity nicely starched white shirts that won't stand a bit o'
work wear - a bottle o' nancy-boy cologne that's all boiled off to @#% in space
- lab clothes, they'll be <some> use - that thin city plastic mac ain't enough
outdoor wear for 'ere, at least you next to 'im 'ad the sense to come in an
anorak - the usual flimsy city shoes, and a change of ditto carefully wrapped to
keep the shine on them - you're not running <that> off kit batteries draining
them, you'll just 'ave to grow a beard - there's no cash machines to put <that>
in this side o' the Pleiades - if that bulge is an 'ip flask, pour it out and
refill it with water <now> - never mind, measure 'em all and kit 'em out in
overalls and work boots like the last lot. Where's the other one of you?: I can
only count 16 of you here.".
  Realizing tiredly that space travel technology had not advanced to unlimited
luggage capacity travel everywhere any more than to real subspace radio or the
like, and surprised and annoyed at how severe the weight and volume restriction
was, they set to and weeded out their luggage. One of them, not pleased that his
name badge on his overall chest said merely `R.Taylor' with no `Mr.' and no room
to insert it, started apportioning his luggage among the others.
  "No you don't." Rattler (Jetters) ordered, "They need their luggage room for
themselves. That flashy office suit for a start'll 'ave to stay 'ere during.
And all that paperwork you've brought.".
  "Tell your man to keep his fingers off it. I'll have no outsized space thug
going through my confidential documents. And I'll thank you not to countermand
me." Taylor said to Jet Jack in a tone of managerial annoyance, "And about the
missing man, one of us, er, couldn't make it.".
  "I'll talk with them directly. Going through middlemen wastes time." said Jet
Jack irritatedly, "Yes, lets see what this stuff is that's so important that you
pinch people's luggage room for it: Holborn Holdings Ltd. annual report - some
investment company in Chicago - offer of a consultany to advise about an opening
in trading in futures for a new manganese discovery in Gabon, reams and reams of
RD'ings about likely market trends and zero about how the stuff's to be dug and
processed - etc etc: what ain't geology out o' that lot'll 'ave to stop 'ere
during, also. I know 'ow much there'll be time and cargo room for.".
  "I protest about this - routine hyperspace jump space travel to 400 light
years from Earth and we're back to ancient evils such as having to prove need
for the journey and tight limits on body plus luggage weight." said Mr.Taylor,
bristling with managerial self-assurance and importance, "My great-grandfather
told me of a man in the 1930's flying back from a business trip cum holiday and
out there he'd picked up 9 pounds of body fat and 11 pounds of business
reference matter, even had to have an emetic and an enema and a Turkish bath to
dump enough gut contents and sweat to get within the flight company's weight
limit rather than have to abandon valuable personal property and he'd run out of
money to pay through the nose for the extra because of that stupid limit on how
much money he could take out of his country, important business or not. And now
I'm told to dress and work like a navvy in my position. If I lose any business
because I couldn't catch up with relevant paperwork during spare moments here,
I'm suing for damages.".
  "If you were going to do other people's paperwork most of the time instead of
expedition work, you should've stayed on Earth to do it and not taken a place
that could've gone to someone else. It's just the `bazaar effect' again: in the
bazaar food and essential supplies are unnecessary rehandled and rerehandled so
much by people trading in time taken off work that they cost so much that to
afford to buy enough people have to take time off work to trade in stuff on the
side in the bazaar, and it takes a tight and strictly enforced street trading
licence system to put a stop to it. We don't waste fuel rod in the wilds just to
do in exotic surroundings what we could've done at home. This is a working field
trip, not conferences and deciding policy. It was all in the brochure we sent.
If it wasn't in what you received, query it with whoever at your end rehandled
the information that we sent them, or we will. Same as I am directly ordering
you to give them back NOW every penny of that fat registration fee that we never
said you could charge them and you haven't passed a penny of it onto us who made
the transport and kit that you are using. And your overall goes on instead of
your office suit, not over it, in the places we'll be going and the ways we'll
be travelling. If you're looking for a boss here to complain to, I'm him,
spacesuit and all. If you're in charge of this lot, where on Arda have you lot
decided to go?".
  "Now we've seen what facilities we've got here, we'd better decide now." said
Mr.Taylor to the rest of the visitors, "The meeting now starts to decide who of
us is best suited to be members of a committee to coordinate with the local men
and make recommendations what to do and to ask them why we can't do it here at
Aulien instead of having to fly again, me chairing as was agreed, Mr.Jackson to
record the minutes ...".
  "We can't wait while you go through all that 'ere. " Jet Jack interrupted
irritatedly, "I was told you'd've decided before you came. The meeting of who?,
anyway.".
  "Five of us who I chose, who I consider the most responsible.".
  "It's the south Ered Kal'." said Jet Jack, "Start loading the plane.".
  "I've got to maintain appearance and formality. It's too easy to get slack,
casual clothes get let past, meetings degenerate into random arguing instead of
proper motions and everything through the chair[man]. You spacemen go on about
your rights and the freedom to choose ...".
  "You lot 'ad plenty o' time to decide on the way 'ere or before, as I said.".
  "I came here to get on with geology, not to wait about while meetings pass
recommendations to other meetings and then review and re-review decisions in the
light of, etc, and it spends most of its time discussing arrangements." another
visitor interrupted, "Some of us tried to suggest where to go, and you said `not
yet, there's a proper procedure.'. Now we at last know where we're going.".
  Several of them agreed with him aloud, for the feel of Ardan soil safely there
under their boots and the empty void between them and home made them much more
ready to speak out. Taylor muttered but said nothing more aloud just then. An
asteroid miner group called the Typhoons came up to see what was happening and
talked with some of them; the tone became indignant, but the only words of it
that Plutey-pots caught were: "Oh did he indeed, just for that!? <I>'ll see
about that!, however far I've got to 'jump and back.".
  The flight on was in a craft that had proved practical and never mind oddness
of appearance: a reproduction Dakota with a hyperspace jumper in it. They loaded
their kit and supplies into its rear end, and got in it. It took off eastwards.
  Their expectations of several days flight across Ilyarda and furnace-like
refuelling stops in the endless dreaded interior Karnelitse desert, but at least
letting them catch up with paperwork and laptop computer work on the way, were
cut short when the Aulien plain scrub below them disappeared behind blank grey
which cleared to show a high snow-backed mountain range, and Anor much further
northwest behind `mare's tails' and thickening high cloud coming in from the
eastern sea. The plane flew south past the glaciers and three-spiked top of
Nelderasse, over a deep cold lake called Nen Argollug, over more mountains
covered in pine-like native trees, and down to an airstrip cut out of forest on
the only flat land anywhere near, where a small lake had filled with silt a few
centuries before.
  It landed. They were down, away from what passed for city life on Arda, among
alien metal ores in the heart of a high jagged alien mountain range, where a
long curved side range joined the long straight main range. Such were the Ered
Kalashnikov, named by the X-100's from their shape as seen from space. An unmade
lorry road went off up a valley below a forested hillside with patches of ground
cover including a trailing plant with big blousy dayglo orange flowers - a plant
as ominous as the name of the mountains for those who knew about it. They got
out. A cold wind from the southeast blew up the valley. In a tree by the road a
pack of six-legged baboon-sized hairy animals trumpeted at something. The sky
was covered in deepening cloud. Taylor complained when put into a chain of men
passing the hold luggage out of the back of the plane, and guessed that given a
suppply system for mining in the area there may be a reasonable conference room
and accommodation somewhere near after all.
  The open lorry waiting there was obviously the local passenger transport. They
climbed onto its back and loaded their kit on it. Thankfully its back was
covered in soft foam goods-packing.
  "I'll ride in the cab." said Mr.Jackson, one of the visitors, to the rest,
"I've got to coordinate matters with Mr.Jet Jack, since he seems to be the local
man in charge. Some of you find something for me to step up on; the rest load up
like he said.".
  "That's only the driver in front. I'm here." said Jet Jack getting on the back
with the rest, "And they can understand me directly.".
  "Er - no shotgun, on this sort of mountain road their driver likely needs to
see all he can on both sides." said another visitor.
  "Shotgun what? - I thought you lot had scanned clean of firearms." Jet Jack
said annoyedly, and reached for a metal detector.
  "How's shotgun come to mean the seat beside the driver, anyway? Confusing use.
With me a gun's a gun and what ain't a gun ain't." said Rattler.
  "It started with armed guards sitting beside horse stagecoach drivers.".
  The lorry started and set off up the valley. Multicoloured birds flew among
alien trees clinging to black crags of uraninite rock with a U-235 proportion
much higher than Earth's 0.7%, above a river tumbling over rocks further and
further below the road. Four miles further it came to a work area. A processing
plant and a reactor were tucked into a side stream gorge that had been widened
by quarrying; a high sunward cliff of unfamiliar multicoloured rock was covered
in solar panels. "Right around here's been quite well mapped," said Jet Jack,
"but south along from here there's an interesting unmapped area, part of the
collision zone where a small loose crust plate hit Ilyarda and stuck onto it and
raised these mountains. There's somewhere you can sleep tonight - hallo, that
building up there on that ledge is new. I and the Jetters 'aven't been 'ere for
a while. What's on that notice outside it?". He climbed to it up a steep stepped
path and started to read it. "All those placenames in `X-100-ese' are quite
enough to cope with, without having to decipher text written in it also.", he
growled, and tried to decipher it.
  Thus the inscribed block of local limestone read: "Hic Ardae ultra spatiam
vastitatem aedificata est haec ecclesia Sanctae Mariae et Sancti Johannis
Patmensis in Montibus Kalashnikovinis, ut aliquid Verbi Dei audietur in hac
terra actinidum et incultorum spatiensium.".
  "It's not X-100-ese." said a man in an overall coming out of the building,
"It's good Latin. Here on Arda beyond the vastness of space is built this church
of `St.Mary and St.John of Patmos in the Kalashnikov Mountains', so that some of
the Word of God can be heard in this land of actinides and wild spacemen. Thus
this stone says. I built this church as I could here with mining gear and local
stone. Come in and have some peace of mind for a while, if you wish, whether or
not you are of my faith.".
  Thus was piously carved by a Catholic priest who found his way there, enacting
solemn Earthly ceremonial once every seven Ardan days, altering his yearly and
weekly Church routine as much as he had to, using the old Latin forms among
spacemen two thousand million million miles from home below the high cliff of
alien plutonite rock, under a magnesium-white alien sun which had never `stood
still over Gibeon' or shone on any of the sacred events that he knew so well.
Galileo or not, some who live largely by the Bible still somewhat believe the
Bible's cosmology, and it had been a shock being reminded so drastically that
real space was otherwise as he first stepped on the soil of a world that
according to strict Papal doctrine had nowhere to exist except as part of some
demon-realm where living men had no right to go.
  "Man needs more than merely practical things." he said, "Yes, I know how the
`Faithful Brethren' closed religious order on that asteroid ended: a perfect
Company police type cleanout raid, except it was our own people the X-100's did
it. Oh well. The Faithful Brethren got too big, too commanding, left the ways of
humility and forgot that Our Lord moved among unclean people and didn't shut
Himself away in a sacred area or try to become a power like those He spoke out
against, and so on the Faithful Brethren came the inevitable retaliation. It is
said: `Thou shalt not steal.', and goodness or badness of the end purpose, or
calling the theft by some other word, makes no difference, when well-meaning
people think they need someone else's stuff, as has made many well-meaning
people unpopular down the ages.
  So here I am, among the mine traffic; most of them just go past, but some come
in sometimes needing somewhere quiet or a sympathetic ear. A week ago I saw a
miner at the altar praying about some family matter back on Earth that he had
heard of, kneeling in work overalls, with a reactor-pack still on his back -
that's a sort of portable generator to run power tools off, since you lot down
there look new here. I just have to put up with that sort of thing, same as when
The Arbiter, that man in Ilmenost who sorts out disputes and the like, landed
and came in here, complete with his fancy shiny showoff curium-247 spacesuit
oxygen cylinders. Practicalities keep intruding, same as that the Arbiter often
has more weighing on him than merely those cylinders of his: for example, a girl
called Dianthus in the Quasars jumped groups to the Actinides to be with a man
called Californium that she fancied, without asking her father or her group's
leader. The Actinides are 15 men from NASA who quit on office jobs and went to
space and codenamed themselves after the 15 actinide elements.
  Still, it was a sad sight, when I put a propulsor spacesuit on and ventured
out of atmosphere and into our asteroids to see the Faithful Brethren's base as
the 30% who hadn't deserted during the action tried to patch it up. It was a
long journey at spacesuit propulsor speed. All sacred books gone in case any of
them were accounts or records. Holes everywhere where those one-man torpedo
craft called MST's had cut in and in. Of the Brethren remaining, three deserted
while I was there, and the Quasars asteroid miner group came wanting supplies
and somewhere to suit-off and got threatening when the Brethren tried to order
them off. OK, I know all that about what the place's founder turned out to be,
and about the methods allegedly used to stop desertions before.
  Miners tell me that, needing bright stone to decorate things, I was over free
with stuff that on Earth belongs only in secure nuclear premises: plutonite, a
cherry red crystal called seaborgite, curite, and the rest, all the transuranic
element minerals that have been here since (they say) several supernovas in the
last hundred million years doused Arda with their fallout. They are around here
in the rocks, so I used them, to depict sacred events and ideas, before I found
what they were. I'd put too much into it to hack it all out and remake it with
ordinary minerals, like some say I should. It is sufficient to keep me in a
sense of service and knowing that I belong in the world and not shut away from
it, same as the name the X-100's gave these mountains reminds me that in the
real world there are wars and troubles whether or not I want things to be
otherwise.
  I get candle wax by scraping it off the stems of a shrub that grows round here
- no need on Arda to rob bees of their house and home to get wax, another thing
to thank God for, and wonder of wonders it doesn't smell of teargas when I burn
it. Some Ardan life smells like a chemical works. I suppose the shrub grows it
to keep insects off; whatever Man takes from nature, something loses out. I have
to get altar flowers from the forest about: there's a good variety of them, but
I don't care for people bringing pluteweed in, that stuff with the big dayglo
orange flowers that tells miners there's plutonium in the soil. Yes, that stuff,
natural in the rocks here. All isotope 244, won't fission as itself and far less
radioactive than plute-239 like they make from uranium back on Earth. Better
radiation shielding than lead, and strong enough to use structurally: lead's
soft and uranium's brittle. In a place like this I can't avoid picking up stuff
about isotopes and halflives and all that, same as my grandfather running a
church in a coalmining area soon learned a lot of mine jargon. I came from Earth
with the mail in a pressurized craft, one of those Dakotas, so I was spared
having to wear a spacesuit with a radioactive powerpack for the journey. I
survive and keep this place going. I've got a sound synthesizer for hymn music
and the like; I've too much else to do to try to get a pipe organ out here and
find somewhere to keep it and someone to service it.".
  Thus he said, and would have said more, but rain was starting in a quick dark
evening and they had to leave him and find beds before Anor above the clouds
finally set behind the high cliff of unearthly minerals. They unloaded, and 400
light years from home slept among their kit in a spare miners' lodging in a
blind black night without Earth's city lights as rain lashed the wild forest and
a few peals of thunder rolled. Night insects had to stay under cover; native
animals had a night thankfully free of their bites.
  About 3 am the rain stopped and the clouds finally tattered and cleared, and
as Altaloke's tails rising covered the northeast sky Anor's light reflected off
them lit the mountains. Beneath its alien jazzy-patterned glow and the strange
constellations the geological party woke, dressed, ate food synthesizer output,
and sleepily came out to their first morning on a new world.
  "Aagherh - waking us at this ungodly sort of hour -" said one of them, "in
that place Aulien there were fun spots that the workmen had set up for
themselves. Rough and ready, and the whole place was dead after 8pm; but it was
something. Why can't he have let us stay there a day or two?, instead of
straight in, transship, and straight out to site in the middle of nowhere and
the stars are all different so I can't find my way by them.".
  "Next to no roads yet, so it'll be fly or boat if possible, except in open
country flat enough for four-wheel-drive vehicles." said another, "In any case
we'll have to stay in reach of whatever airfields and ports and oilwells exist
yet. Or our own feet and carry everything.".
  "In some places there are plants that produce fuel oil, if we can find them."
a local man said, "Or we can RD vegetation to get it, but that means humping a
big enough RD about with us. I've RD'ed my back enough before man-hauling loads
to remote sites.".
  "Can't we hire a few horses or mules to carry the heavy stuff? - what are that
lot looking at me like that for? - have I said something silly? -".
  "What are they going to graze on around here!? the incompatible biochemistry,
and we haven't got far domesticating local animals. Most species that are big
and strong enough are too ornery or the wrong shape to saddle or fasten a load
on. They'll need several generations of selecting for manageability, same as
Earth wild cattle cows were as dangerous as bulls, or for size, same as Earth
wild horses were more like ponies and only good for a short fast light run.".
  "OK, OK, geology happens where the rocks are, not always near the fleshpots,
same as everybody wants to work the Swiss Alps where the fancy ski spots are.
Why can't we borrow some emergency breathing sets from that factory we passed
and try a day or so of scuba diving in that Lake Golliwog that we flew over?".
  "Nen Argollug, it's called," said Jet Jack, "and it's too cold without proper
diving suits. You may get a chance to scuba dive with proper kit at Magazine
Head, that big underwater wall, after we finish before you go back.".
  "Lets see what alien miracle of luxury transport we'll be flying in here
beyond the stars: nothing in here where that man Plutey-pots said, but a load of
spare helicopter motors with rotors on - not very big and they've all got
backpack straps on like rucksacks - oh no -".
  "Oh yes." said Plutey-pots, "We're all going helirig flying. Handy to get in
and out of forest and rocky corners. They've got good autopilots in to stop you
colliding and suchlike, so it won't take you long to get used to them. They're
powerful enough for you to carry heavy kit between you.".
  "Oh no." said Taylor, "Helirigs. Strap a vibrating heavy motor and rotor with
a gassy exhaust pipe on my back at my age as if I was some docker-type rough,
and my legs dangling over nothing. I came here expecting reasonable facilities,
I can accept flying <in> a helicopter, not being turned into one.".
  "You're going to have trouble with some of these." Plutey-pots said quietly to
Jet Jack, "I know the type, from what I was before I went into space. A lot of
these are head-of-geology-department types who pulled seniority to have first
pick at this unusual opportunity. They were expecting plenty of local students
and porters to do the routine stuff and running-around-after for them. Jackson
and Taylor on their forms left their jobs and academic qualifications
mind-your-own-business blank: that plus how they've acted so far likely means
they're just department administrators with no more geology than secondary
school, hoped to be important passing on our orders to the rest and speaking on
behalf of the rest and being waited on by the rest; well, they're unlucky, we're
quite capable of talking with this many Earth men directly."
  Jet Jack did know the type, and their atmosphere of business managerialism
made his hackles rise. "Who told them?" he said, "Not the brochure we sent them.
More likely people down there [on Earth] passing it on rewording it each time.
I've 'ad this afore, the amount of business-promotion-ese and waffle they put
in. $%@ silly trick, why can't people leave messages in their original words?
Well, they'll soon find out, and they'll look for someone to accuse, and so
it'll go on.".
  As they were packing for the flight, a man in a spacesuit appeared from hyper
near them. His suit badges said he was Tarpan, leader of the Typhoons asteroid
miner group; he was towing a small pressure bag containing a man in jeans and a
leather jacket, who on being let out addressed Taylor directly and not politely:
"And here I am!, after all my planning for this trip you tell me at the last
moment at the airport sorry but I can't go 'cos I'm not respectably dressed: I
@#% <thought> that rule was your invention and not in the original, from what I
know of this place, and him having to waste his time and the wear on his
spacesuit flying kit going 400 light years each way alone specially to fetch me;
and here you are in overalls and heavy boots anyway. Well, I'm ready.".
  Mr.Taylor looked angry, but, like the rest, had inevitably to strap the heavy
helicopter motor on his back and start it and nervously watch the lethal-looking
counter-rotating four-bladed rotors spinning two feet above his head. He had
never flown anything before. He had no taste at all for having equipment
fastened directly to his body instead of to a vehicle, or when he took off to
feel his weight dangling from a parachute-type backpack harness open to the
weather instead of resting in an comfortable enclosed seat. Why ever did he have
to rush off into a pioneering remote place at his age? Why ever had he believed
all that stuff promising all sorts of modern facilities above what he had heard
of Arda before one way and another? Some of the younger men tried aerobatics and
whooped wildly, revelling in the feeling of freedom; so often back on Earth did
city backstreet wild types who got hold of helirigs. The ground and the little
nest of work buildings in the narrow valley dropped horribly remote below his
dangling feet as he perforce followed the others. There was a small enclosed
aircraft to carry some of the heavy kit. Mountain slopes and gorges passed below
them as they flew southwards. After 46 miles they found a clearing made by a
landslide the previous year, and landed warily.
  "These new geological periods that we've got to learn: what's the matter with
the proper list that we learned back in school?" said one as they thankfully rid
themselves of their helirigs and found somewhere safe to stack them.
  "The life history developments and extinction crises and tectonic events that
mark their boundaries happened on a different list here." said another, "For
example, we can't talk of the Carboniferous period in the singular here, where
there were two main coal periods and many local coal beds laid down at different
other times. There's a few mollusc shells here: according to that CD-ROM they
might be Eridanian period. Some of them are new; is that enough different for it
to be likely that we're on the island side of the collision line? Yes: early
Eridanian shelly sea-sandstone dipping 62 degrees, west 10 degrees south. Looks
like some folds on that cliff up there - that great tree I'll have to squeeze
past with this load on to get there - ugly big spider webs sticky across the way
- looks like a basalt dike here - lets get there.".
  He scrambled up and sideways over fallen rocks, and had nearly reached the
tree and a promise of its trunk to lean on when he jumped back with an alarmed
yell as a hot laser beam hit a rock in front of him and someone ordered everyone
to stand still. He looked to his right to see three men in full space kit aiming
heavy lasers at him and those near him.
  They advanced towards him, aiming their guns. He had heard tales of rogue ISAB
space-commando squads left over from the big battle, or what were they? In
either case, he knew the likelihood him and the rest of being arrested and held
for interrogation or reprocessed under guard into space or on-ground workmen or
the like. One of them pushed past him holding a stick, and said one word.
  "Propanodendron." the spaceman said, and hit a short growth sticking out of
the tree's trunk. A two-foot-long sharp spike stabbed out of the growth with a
pistol-shot noise, and hissed from its hollow end; there was a sudden gas smell.
  "High-pressure propane and carbon dioxide mixture." the spaceman said, "I'll
spare you the biology lesson how the tree makes it. Meant to see off big native
animals rearing up it to eat its leaves.". He went round the tree, setting off
all the tree's natural gas-injectors that he could find and reach. "And keep on
keeping away from it." he ordered, "Over a week or so those spikes pull back in
and re-arm themselves. That natural hazards booklet that we sent you explained
about it, if you read it, if they bothered to copy it and pass it on. A group of
us called the Typhoons lost their only hyper jumper man from one of these once,
and that left them stranded down on planet till someone heard them radioing for
help: that was before we all had spacesuit propulsors strong enough to get us
off planets. If you think it's rough here and not much facilities, the X-100's
had it worse when they came here: there was nothing, and they had to set up on
that asteroid Ilmenost with only what they'd brought with them.".
  "What on earth's this here?" said one of them, "- someone's idea of a joke, a
fossil missile!?, making fun of us - oh, it's one of those torpedo creatures, I
saw some video of some once, `Presteroides' the program called them.", chipped
it away from the rock, recorded and packed it, started his helirig (which he was
still wearing), and with two others flew across a valley to look at another rock
exposure. There he found a rock called serpentine made from old ocean bed caught
in a continent collision. Where now were high cold mountains a long way inland a
deep sea once separated two warm coasts full of sea-life, until the island at a
runaway speed of 3 centimeters a year hit Ilyarda and stuck to it, crumpling and
half-melting their edges. The island was called `South Kalashnia'; that sort of
perpetration is common when geologists name reconstructed past land features.
Mr.Newton was less enthusiastic than some others at sorting out the remains of
this sort of geological high-speed traffic accident rather than working on easy
structures, and he said so. A movement in a tree overhead brought him back to
the present day and proved to be the disagreeable sight of a large snake holding
on by its tail while it bundled a flapping bird down its throat. They finished
mapping that area and flew on, along the collision line and the mountain land
each side, much more wary of the vegetation than before. For some of them it was
much more geology and much less administration than they had done for years.
  Taylor and Jackson finally accepted that Jet Jack, a typical asteroid miner
group leader not used to having a chain of command under him, was no office-type
`organization man' and had no intention of managing the visitors through the two
instead of directly. After all the time they had spent on polishing their formal
appearance and confident efficient managerial manner in letters of application
for the visiting party's managership and submanagership and at that interview in
that university's administration block, they had been pushed aside by a rough
smelly-undersuited spaceman leader. "That Jet Jack would have made a good
space-marine officer, if he was on the right side, and I know what Army types in
offices are like." Taylor said angrily, "All these workman-type roughs expecting
me to walk and helirig fly all over these mountains with scanners and heavy
power tools like them. I don't know about actinides in the rocks around here,
but there's a lot too much actinide in ornaments on their spacesuits. Not my
fault I'm not a geologist: if a science department's admin man is a scientist,
he's likely to favour his fellow scientists too often, and the job of enforcing
controls and cuts is pushed up to his superior who has enough else to do. And
it's quite clear the rest won't obey me or Mr.Jackson any more, two of them have
already called me a `slick-suited deskbound sorrybut', that insulting asteroid
miner expression for space metals Company management men.". There the two were,
far from home, deposed, found to have no scientific skill or action leadership
qualities too late to be dumped at Aulien with the left-luggage. To pay their
way they were found what assistant-type work they could do; Jackson picked up
the beginnings of a useful skill in identifying minerals while he was with them.
  "Aarh, this rock's hard." Mr.Newton said at the next site, twenty miles
further among high mountains with contorted patterns on their sides, "The
geology looks like it's been in a car crusher, and I'm expected to sort it out.
I need to cut some big samples here, it'll take forever with a hand hammer...".
  "Well, put this on." said a local man in a full propulsor spacesuit landing
behind him, holding a backpack power supply connected to a large rockdrill.
  "Oh it's you again." Mr.Newton said, seeing the name `Plutey-pots' on his
safety helmet and looking suspiciously at his shiny spacesuit oxygen cylinders,
"That heavy thing again. How does it work?".
  "Never mind. Just use it." said Plutey-pots, strapped it to Mr.Newton's back,
and went away to spacesuit propulsor fly about a cliff following and examining
contorted strata.
  "How <does> this thing work?" Mr.Newton wondered as he leaned under its weight
against the heavy vibrating rockdrill. "I came here to get away for a while from
industry and everything spoilt, and they're building nuclear reactors including
fast breeders here already. As long as they don't expect me to work in or near
one. Likely much of this geology information'll end up telling miners where to
devastate the land to get minerals, the sort of things that as a Greenpeace etc
member I'm against, as he should know from my badges. Now I'm starting to weed
the sheep from the goats, all these petty contortions making the pattern hard to
spot, this cliff here's starting to look like another nappe nose on top of Nappe
5. Why can't we go somewhere easier? The geology here looks like it's been in a
scrap metal chopper and baler. While I've got this thing on I better use it to
cut out a safe path here. How come this thing <is> so powerful for its size and
it hasn't needed refuelling yet??". He continued at his work.
  They mapped the rocks and examined the animals and plants, flew on again, and
so continued, and slept wherever night found them. Newton used the power pack
routinely, and soon got a good skill with the rockdrill that ran off it.
  Three of the biologists scuba dived in cold mountain-lakes by the way to see
what underwater life they could find, using light easily portable Arda-made kit
that the expedition had brought from Aulien. At one such site Jet Jack spotted
Jackson with a handful of papers looking for a quiet corner and ordered him to
dive in this kit to help a geologist to survey the rest of a rock pattern that
vanished below a cold glacier lake.
  "I've enough heavy manual work that I wasn't told I'd be getting, without
having to learn to scuba dive now, and not even in usual kit but in this stuff
that makes me look like some patrol boat's frogman looking for trouble." Jackson
complained, for he had been hoping to catch up on what of his business paperwork
he could remember the details of and handwrite on odd paper, but he had to obey.
He put the kit on. Tough kevlar-reinforced drysuit over his overall; 30 to 40
minutes duration Salvus oxygen rebreather with small absorbent canister and
oxygen cylinder on a metal plate strapped to the left side by a belt and a
diagonal shoulder strap leaving the back and chest free; no weights to cart
around between dive sites but a ballast bag filled on site with any stones or
sand found; safety helmet. A breathing tube like a gasmask's went from the
gasmask-like fullface mask to the canister, and another from the canister to the
breathing bag round his neck and upper chest. The absorbent absorbs the carbon
dioxide that the diver breathes out; he lets more oxygen in from the cylinder.
The Salvus is an old British design which Ardans revived, unattractive but
effective, made to the old tested plan but with its breathing bag reinforced
with kevlar. As this left the back free, sometimes they wore a backpack motor
and propeller: some watching did not care for the idea of `being turned into a
motorboat instead of riding in one'. A new medication prevented oxygen depth
poisoning to as deep as air aqualung divers can easily go; with only oxygen in
circuit, diver's bends risk was far less.
  After scrambling over slippery boulders to the water edge and filling his
ballast bag there, as he swam down and took two more stones on board for weight
he found it more enjoyable than he had expected - but next time in warmer water
please. The Salvus is incredibly light and compact, and with it he was far more
agile than with a bulky aqualung as he swam about and twisted and turned in the
clear cold water in an alien mountain range under a magnesium-white sun far from
Earth. The new experience drove away for a while his shock of loss of the
submanagerial importance that he had expected.
  Cold-adapted native fish whose heads opened into four jaws snapped at nearly
invisible water-fleas which filtered plankton out. The water was deep and clear
and he could see far. The lake bottom of unsorted sand and stones melted out of
the glacier sheltered assorted worms and eels. He pulled a stone up to examine
it, revealing a crab. Before the crab could find other hiding a bigger thickset
fish darted in and shovelled it up and with a loud demolishing crunch compacted
it for swallowing. On one side of the lake a submerged sandstone rock face
showed random cross sections of huge fossil tropical sea-shells. It was too cold
for Ardan freshwater octopuses like he had seen elsewhere climbing upstream over
stones and poking about among them. A water bird dived from flight to catch
fish. His small oxygen cylinder got nearly empty and he had to finish and come
out onto the stony shore. The water was clean and fresh, so they did not have to
wash their kit afterwards. They refilled their sets' cylinders and emptied and
refilled their canisters. The absorbent was a sort that could be regenerated in
a heating chamber run off Newton's powerpack (safety note: not all breathing set
absorbents are!); they had three big oxygen cylinders to refill breathing set
cylinders from. They finished their work there and packed their kit and flew on.
  Anor sank behind the western mountains. They had found a sheltered hollow to
camp in. The trees there were bonsai-ified by nibbling animals and their roots
having to scrabble among buried scree for food, but some were tall enough for
them to sling from their branches fluorescent lights run off two of the backpack
power supplies resting among angular boulders and scanty ground vegetation.
Newton again wondered how they worked. Fuel cell? If so, they seemed to give a
mighty lot of power for a very long time on one refuelling. By this light they
took notebooks and laptop computers out and noted the day's findings and work.
One of Anor's two moons was up but did not help much. Altaloke would not start
to rise until the small hours. Taylor was heard complaining that his computer's
hard disk was nearly full and wanting a plug-in hard disk pack to offload into.
  "Already?" Jet Jack queried.
  "Yes, this Anor system issue thing instead of my own that you made me leave at
Aulien.".
  "What's it full with?".
  "That's" Taylor said, and managed to clamp his tongue just in time against the
admission-of-guilt word "private.".
  "Lets see." said Jet Jack, sitting beside Taylor.
  "It's technical stuff, nothing you'd understand.".
  "Lets see.". Jet Jack reached across into Taylor's lap, switched the computer
on, and waited irritatedly while it went through its usual startup ritual. Its
BIOS ran. It said "bzonk" from its floppy drive finding there was no floppy in
there. It started DOS. He called the directory tree explorer.
  "c:\eredkal\this and that, c:\supplies\, etc, looks OK;" he said, "c:\gabon\,
c:\s&j\consult\, c:\holborn\annrep\, etc, look in a few files in them. What's
that directory?, that file looks like a readme, says it's a business statistics
trends analyser program. Oh. All that again, likely smuggled across from your
own computer. You're right, it <is> `nothing that I understand' the reason for
working on it 'ere instead of expedition work. Delete it. Other people need our
offload disk packs for proper work.".
  "I protest. I was assured the managership and that this trip was largely
consultancy, and we find it's a field trip under very rough conditions and I end
up as everybody's spare hand. At least let me catch up in spare moments with
what I was assured I'd have plenty opportunity for instead of dragging me about
in the back of beyond. I'm sick of overalls and heavy boots and helirigs and
helirig exhaust. I want my good office suit and a proper seat in an aircraft.".
  "Likely you do. All that sort of thing's made by someone's proper work. Now I
know why it took so long on Earth between us telling them we had an expedition
available and them finally replying, and all the rewording and rerewording and
organizational @#%'ing about in n different offices instead of leaving our
message alone as we wrote it. Comes from trusting an agent down there instead of
sending round ourselves.".
  "Likely they did," Taylor said, "if that brochure you showed us was what Arda
sent, that curt misspelt casual little thing like a boys' club notice announcing
a trip to the seaside and no decent business promotion style at all.".
  "And/or they didn't like it being yet another field trip and junior staff that
can take rough conditions go and get the glory, so they said it was something
seniors'd like to go on, hoping we'd change the trip into what they described
else it'd make us look bad. Well, we didn't change the trip. We couldn't anyway,
we haven't got very much to theorize a lot of details from, that's why it's all
field trips here now, to get facts for you posh suit types to discuss at
comfortable conferences later.".
  He saw no point saying any more about the matter there. Some people got sleepy
and some did not. Jet Jack gave ten minutes warning that the powerpacks would be
switched off; a few objected. Everybody got in their sleeping bags, and slept as
night flying animals sought their own food regardless of the human intrusion
into the remote places and roadless valleys of the Ered Kalashnikov 400 light
years from home. Next day they explored the area and flew on again.
  "You were complaining about reactors: I know where the biggest artificial
nuclear reactor on Arda is: it's at Aulien." Plutey-pots said a few days later
to Newton at a high cold site by a glacier near the south end of the mountains;
the ice-filled valley stretched away eastwards between steep bare cliffs.
  "Yes, I know you're already building those things here.". Newton said, "And
that place that you call Nunarien.".
  "And I know where the smallest is!".
  "Where?"
  "You're quite near it.".
  "Oh, am I? How near?"
  "Very near.".
  "I don't see it." he said, turning round and walking thirty feet.
  "It's still as far from you as it was.".
  "In that case. what <is> this thing on my back? I'm starting to have a
horrible idea - that priest talked about something called a `reactor-pack' - OH
NO!!" Newton said, and went rigid with fright and dismay. "You - space sewage -"
he said, "I'm in all the environmental groups and Greenpeace, and I swore I'd
totally boycott anything nuclear, and now I find you've tricked me into wearing
a mini nuclear power station on my back every day! And you'll likely show off
photos of me with it on using it looking like one of your workmen, caption about
me `sporting a reactor-pack' as if I was proud to wear such an abomination. I
used up good Greenpeace stickers on its casing made of I dare not guess what
metal. What sort of reactor is it, anyway?".
  "Yes, you've got a little fast breeder on your back. It runs on curium-245."
said Plutey-pots as the spacemen laughed roughly at Newton's expostulations,
"Yes, we <are> space sewage and proud of it, not polite city people, as you know
by the smell when we open our spacesuits. Reactor, liquid sodium cooling
circuit, generator, the lot, all nestling handily on your back in a handy
plutonium-244 casing to support it and absorb the radiation.".
  "And for neutrons to gradually turn it into more curium-245. OK, I know how
these things go on, the world's caught up with me again. I should have expected
something like this, instead of thinking that `beyond the world all is good and
clean and perfect'. I better start using it again." he said, feeling overloaded
and shocked and radioactive, "I'll cut out a big sample of that mineral vein.
And someone'll have to help clear a patch of level ground somewhere near for the
next fuel and supplies drop. And with all those thick trees around it means
someone with a portable power supply, i.e. me. Back on Earth I spent all that on
body-building to get some muscle to scare off troublemakers, and all I get from
it is to end up here among all those unnatural transuranic element minerals as
`the biggest carthorse gets the biggest load' carrying `Sizewell C' or wherever
it's called about.". He set to work again. He restarted his rockdrill, leaning
against it. On his back, little control rods lifted, and fission started, making
power to run the drill. Among the alien scenery he shivered at the idea of a hot
reactor core a few inches from his back, but he carried on. When he had cut his
rock sample free, he switched off and noted the sample's site and orientation.
  A week later they reached the south or `muzzle' end of the Ered Kalashnikov
and thankfully finally collated their notes and results. `South Kalashnia' also
ended there, and the sea was only 21 miles away. They loaded up for the last
time and flew northeastwards. The endless forest became red-leaved as the land
rose beneath them in the south tip of the Emyn Gaer (Red Hills). One of the
party landed on a hilltop and pick-and-shovelled down to rock; as expected from
native Ardan surveys it was andesitic lava, and he took a sample of it. At the
sea the tide was out. They landed on the edge of the beach.
  "Phew, that's over at last!" said Newton and others as they thankfully unslung
their helirigs and loads and lay on the sand.
  "'Ten-shun!" Jet Jack shouted, "Form a line down the beach and advance
northwards checking for soft patches as far as where that stream comes out!".
  "We're not at some fancy ready-made airport here!" Plutey-pots added. They
complained and obeyed; often a job appears to be finished when it is not. The
plane came in over the inland hills and landed on the beach, scaring sea birds.
  "What's all that gore on its left propeller and motor casing?" said someone.
  "Eridanus valley, as usual. Big blue-and-grey river pterodactyl tried to prove
it was boss. Prop'll need checking when I get back to Aulien." its pilot radioed
to them curtly.
  "I've got an ultrasound crack-detector, if I can get any help to cut wood to
make a stand for me to reach the prop." said Rattler, one of the Jetters.
  "OK, OK." said Newton, and sighed tiredly, "My back becomes a site for a
nuclear power station again, after I thought I'd seen the last of that thing.".
While others loaded the kit into the plane, he put his reactor-pack on again,
connected an electric chainsaw to it, cut down a tree in the salt-scrub by the
beach, and cut it up for others of the party to make it into scaffolding below
the suspect propeller. One blade proved to be slightly out of line but there
were no cracks.
  "You said we could scuba dive on the Magazine Head Wall and then hyper jump
straight home." said someone.
  "I said we might. I'm not going further than I need with this propeller if I
can avoid it, and I'm not going to 'jump out of radio reach of backup with it,
and Aulien's the nearest place there's a spare." said the pilot, "We can run an
instrument transect as we fly back to Aulien; if the prop gets too bad we can
'jump the rest of the way. I don't like using up hyper jumper time if I can
avoid it, they're valuable and wear out and use a lot of energy.".
  "OK, OK, I suppose it'll give us a chance to see more of this planet.".
  "And for me to offload things that Earth authorities might take fright at or
take a fancy to.".
  "Such as a great lot of stuff that they say you lot shouldn't have been making
for yourselves out here." said one of the visiting party, a Mr.Faulkner, who
couldn't or wouldn't hide his sympathy for the Companies' and then ISAB's side
in what had happened down the years.
  "We 'ad to, all too often. I'm not goin' into all that again." said Jet Jack,
"F'r instance, suit RD's, those little RD's built into suit life support kit to
RD the -er- body waste: I know they can't take everything a big RD can, but
Company ones often wore out so quick they jammed on the least thing: like one 'o
my men's suit RD jammed tight on a lump o' chewin' gum that had `passed through'
'im, caused our suit mechanic a lot o' dirty messin' about in #$% in a little
pressure bag an A.U. [= radius of Earth's orbit] and an 'alf from anywhere
proper to unsuit. About as much use as your computer's RD.".
  "Erh? I didn't know computers had RD's in?".
  "RD: Remove Directory: that MS-DOS computer command: it's supposed to get rid
of file directories, but it only takes empty directories, it refuses if these's
even one file in the directory, even an empty file.".
  "It's time someone slung that old pun in the RD." said Delaville, "That lot
getting here before anyone official could: it's happened before. When Europe was
discovering the rest of the world, often uncontrolled roughs got to places and
named and claimed them before proper armies or navies could. Rudyard Kipling
called such people `the legion that never was [en]listed' in a poem that he
wrote called `The Lost Legion'.".
  "Like those X-100's could have made very efficient space marines if they'd
been on our side." said Mr.Faulkner.
  "In Kipling's poem they call themselves `our wholly unauthorized horde'.".
  "Yeehaa!! That's us! Unauthorized and proud of it, and so's our kit!" Laser
Larry in the Jetters exclaimed, "No sorry-but'ing paper-shuffling clerk or
manager ever signed for my group's on-suit hyperspace jumper! We ain't got
permission from no Earth committee, and we don't need it!".
  "His poem `The Song of the Dead' says the same sort of thing but rather
depressing.".
  "Never mind. I hereby declare the poetry appreciation group suspended till the
work's been done." Jet Jack interrupted.
  They removed the stand and finished loading and got on board. During the delay
the tide had come in; as the plane taxied its wheels splashed through shallow
water and tried to bog down until Jet Jack worked the plane's hyperspace
jumper's controls in a way he knew, and the plane jerked upwards. It flew up
southwards and turned west inland over a wide strip of plain. On the right was
the end of the Ered Kalashnikov, now familiar to them. To the left the high
jagged ice-backed crest of the Har-Lossered (South Snow Mountains) stretched
alien and unknown away to the south along the coast of Ilyarda; far out of sight
the great inland river Eridanus looped round its south end to reach the sea.
  The plane flew across the wide Eridanus valley, and the huge inland desert of
Karnelitse (Red Sand) beyond, for day after day, landing each night to refuel
where a mineral or vegetation fuel source was to be found, running instruments
to add one to many previous low-level survey transects of gravity and magnetic
variations and suchlike, and collecting readings from automatic recording
seismographs. The left propeller began to sound indefinably different.
  They crossed the Eridanus where a big tributary from inland joined it. Higher
dry ground nearby offered easy crossing points and a flood-free site; mineral
and fuel deposits were nearby. Plutey-pots from his former life well knew the
city that on Earth men would have built at such a meeting of natural routes;
here would likely have been the downtown area, here the river docks, here the
factories and workmen's area, and all around the suburbs; here roads and
railways might have run. But all was empty and wild, and herds of huge animals
pushed through alien forest even where he had placed the financial area and the
most profit from property values and satisfying business discussions with others
of his former kind there. But he thought of the empty distance between there and
anywhere where such ideas were reality, and shivered; the returned ghost of his
own business suit which had vanished into Levitsky's asteroid base RD evaporated
into Ardan pioneering reality as the plane flew away from the place, and his
spacesuit undersuit's familiar asteroid miner smell evaporated such fantasies.
His spacesuit with its well-known oxygen cylinders waited for him at the back of
the plane, and he was once again not Mr.Blore but Plutey-pots.
  At night in the Eridanus grassland herds of animals grazed like by day, and
ran away from predators, and demolished bushes with a loud crunching of twigs
and branches, and many-coloured birds and insects were there in plenty; but in
the Karnelitse the ancient silence descended and the night wind blew the sand
ever on for a thousand miles and a few drought-hardy insects and small animals
looked for seeds left by plants that grew up after rain that might not come in
twenty years: in the night cool snakes and stinging creatures came out for prey,
and men realized why ancient Egyptians had believed that every night the snake
demon Aapep with his army of snakes and shadows tried to take over the world -
and some areas there was not even that much life. The alien constellations of
the Anor system sky slowly circled above them.
  Around the next night landing site at last a few tufts of native grass with
branched blades fought with the sand, and larger animals lived. The wind still
blew sand ever on, hissing over the land. In a hollow, ground water rose and an
oasis of woodland bound the sand. As they refuelled, a small herd of sheep-sized
antelopelike animals were grazing. One of the herd suddenly tried in vain to
jump away, as if caught in a leg trap; there was a heaving of brown coils as the
Sand Python took its prey. Biologists call it `Psammopython shaihulud', and it
burrows to reach its prey; but it lives and breeds like other snakes, and can
tolerate water. After dark, wondering what impression of them later visitors
would be given, they watched videos made on site of what they had been doing,
projected against the outside of the plane by a video-projector run off a
reactor-pack leaning against a tree trunk while night creatures called and
prowled in the dark wood around on a planet 400 light years from their home.
  They took off in the morning. The slightly off-balance left propeller began to
vibrate more and more. The grass became denser and after they crossed a range of
rocky hills became dry scrub which they droned monotonously over. Streams joined
into a river which drained westwards, passed Aulien, turned northwest, and was
great by the time it cut through the coast range and reached the sea near Iron
Bay; the X-100's, seeing that river from survey orbits, called it the Taipan
after one of them who had died in a gunfight with Company men. Half an hour
before sunset they landed on a dusty airstrip which someone had jocularly named
`Heathrow', and the name had stuck. There was a crude weather shelter, and a
local stone lockup for tools. An ominously heavy-duty armed tracked RD-truck was
steadily crunching up bush to make fuel-oil. It stopped, sounded a siren, and
fired one of its heavy mounted flamethrowers. A large landmine bush exploded in
the flames and set off others. The RD-truck advanced, swallowing the burning
remains. A small young landmine bush's dreaded root tubers exploded under its
left track to no effect. John Delaville shivered, for once near his home town
after a riotsquad stopped a big unauthorized pop concert he saw a similar
RD-truck consuming musical instruments and staging and tents and personal
property regardless as it cleaned up, unaffected by petrol explosions as its
mechanism sliced up swallowed fuel-cans; and he had heard dark rumours of their
traceless effectiveness cleaning out tramp dosses. A small fuel-tanker filled up
from it and drove up to their plane.
  Next day they flew over endless miles of more of the same. In the long flight
some of them had written much of their scientific reports and articles. Such is
a longhaul flight by Dakota. The left propeller still vibrated. Instruments
fastened to the plane's outside still read the air and the ground. Anor reached
the western rim of Arda and vanished, and the plane still droned on.
  "Mickey Mouse at last!" the pilot exclaimed suddenly. He meant a radar beacon
on one of the Orlando Hills, which were so named nostalgically by ex-NASA men
after a Disneyland in Florida where they had often gone on weekends and holidays
before they came to the Anor system. Aulien was near at last. The pilot saw at
last on his radar screen the welcome echo pattern of the Orlando Hills with
their odd-looking Disney names. As he got near them, runway lights came on north
of them. He descended, and at last landed at Aulien, a place that they now
thought of as a metropolis of civilized comfort and mains electricity after long
weary crossing of a continent far bigger than any that Earth now has.
  They unloaded beneath the alien stars. The left propeller had held out; they
helped the pilot to change it. They hosed the undercarriage out very well, for
there was a sort of local seed that they certainly did not want to take where
they were going. After that, they looked for what entertainment could be found.
There was better food to be had than the portable synthesizer's output that they
had been living off. A large misspelling-ridden notice mentioned a cafe and
tried to keep some sort of order in who went where on the airfield. They
followed a sign to a storehouse at the east end of the town. Inside it was a
typical workmen's den decorated with a random mixture of pin-ups and pictures of
machinery and equipment. Some local men hung up a large bedsheet at one end and
set up a video-projector. The film was `The Discovery of Anor', which some of
them had seen before - or thought they had, for this was not the Earth version
but the original Ilmenostian version with its totally uncensored opinions of the
space trading Companies and their methods and the free spacemen's image of the
old business and financial climate that had led to so many asteroid miners
cutting loose. Some of the matter was live-acted, some computer reconstructed.
  The businessman manners of the space metals Company directors notorious for
hard rule in Solar System space bases, had been portrayed with varying accuracy
and some overdoing by rough asteroid miner actors. Plutey-pots watched to see
how his former identity as Mr.Blore, London financier, had been handled. A
ground workman from Port Quasar on Ilyarda's west coast made a fair showing as
Mr.Fletcher, director of Fletcher Mining. Mr.Milford of Milford Metals Brokers
was acted by one of the Pallas-2 asteroid miner group: of them, Red Scorpion
would have been the best choice for height and limb length and eye colour, but
he was too muscular (but so were several of the actors for their roles), and he
had a strong Birmingham accent to lose; but there was another reason, and so the
role went to Long Tom. Many of the spacemen involved acted as themselves. It had
a noticeable air of having been made under another sky than Earth's, although
such things as the Ardan constellation of Denethor reflected in a hotel bedroom
mirror over a London skyline had by then been corrected. The film showed
everything of how Fletcher's set up `Project Sardaukar' to breed a squad of
identical multiplet cloned XYY hard trained Company enforcers, and how on their
first mission against disobedient asteroid miners they deserted and themselves
became a free asteroid miner group called the Sardies, and so the free spacemen
got a hyperspace jumper and copied it. The story was long and exciting, as on
the screen the X-100's fought free of the Companies, got a hyperspace jumper,
found Anor and Arda, and founded Ilmenost.
  The film ended. They went out, went to what passed for a hotel in Aulien, and
slept. They spent three days resting looking round Aulien and the land about,
and some of them including Jackson scuba dived in a nearby lake.
  They laid out the plans of a geology paper and biology papers about what they
had found; they had so much new source matter that the geology paper would have
to be book-sized and not a routine periodical article. As a change from food
synthesizer output they had a dinner of Earth-type food grown or raised in some
new large buildings that they had seen on the southwest edge of Aulien. More
than half of the visitors stayed in their overalls for it.
  Next morning they collected their left-luggage and loaded their luggage and
rock samples and biological samples into the plane. The Jetters sealed their
spacesuits and took off into orbit, glad to get back into space for a while. The
plane took off north over where the Taipan River looped round the end of a line
of low hills. Arda vanished behind blank grey and the plane's engines stopped as
it hyperspace jumped into the Solar System and then into Earth's atmosphere. Its
engines restarted and it landed on Northolt Airfield in northwest London. They
were home. Seeing their un-spaceshiplike plane sitting on English soil some
wondered if they indeed had been to such a place as Arda so far away; but they
had their samples and photos, and some had Ardan plant seeds which they planted.
And, as the plane came in to land, despite all precautions three other seeds
fell out of its undercarriage as it was lowered and fell onto Earth soil on
weed-grown waste ground.
  They in due course published their findings and results, and some became
celebrities within their immediate work circles; life went on as men gradually
built up the geological picture of a new world. And also the sociological
picture; many now accepted the independence of the Anor system settlers and
spacemen, but some in ISAB and the successors to the Companies did not, but
planned to rearm and retrain a space-navy and wait their time and collect what
useful information they could from what came back via the miscellaneous comings
and goings between Earth and the Anor system.
  Meanwhile in the Anor system life went on. Red Scorpion the electronics man,
who had never bothered with scuba diving on Earth, learned it at last in a lake
near Aulien and then in Arda's alien ocean, including many dives at Magazine
Head where the big sidespur of the Ered Kalashnikov mountains meets the eastern
sea, a spectacular dive site like Earth's Ras Muhammad Wall (at the south tip of
Sinai) but many miles of it. He seemed to pick up scuba diving very quickly -
"as if he had done it before somewhere", as his trainer said. - the Company
director Mr.Milford used to scuba dive, and was due to go on a diving holiday
when he and other important Company men vanished that time.
  "This lot here seem to have little idea of office organization." a visiting
Earth biologist who was diving with him said, "Like once I read of back on Earth
where the king of some small Asian nation brought in a man from Birmingham in
England as a `new broom to try to sweep clean' to set up a new Treasury after
the king sacked all the old one for corruption; the palace people hoped for a
really big new organization to live off and peculate, but he did all guarding
and metal-casting and coin-making and accounting etc himself and bought a
sleeping bag and a Kalashnikov and metalworking kit and a powerful backpack
propane flamethrower and slept among the treasure like a dragon. His idea of a
Treasury accounts computer department was to stack gold and silver blocks into a
crude seat which he sat in with a laptop computer across his knees connected to
a laser printer on the floor in a corner. He did the job honestly and well, and
had a nightmarish job sorting out a tangle of contradictory account books that
the previous people had left. But people who reckon organization man success by
how many men he has under him, didn't care for it much.".
  Red Scorpion said: "I've <very> little respect for paperwork. F'r instance I
started electronics when I was 9, but when I got to secondary school the beaks
[= schoolmasters, here] piled more and more homework and then holiday projects
on so I had no time of my own, nothing but write write write, then a blitz on
writing standards so everything had to be slowly carefully engrossed in the
neatest presentation hand taking ages else it'd come back, till one day. Two
days before I'd mended a radio for the science master, and so it got about that
I had a hobby that took time from their $%& precious homework and revision. Back
came some history that I'd left some dates out in 'cos I'd had enough else to
learn. Back like a boomerang for writing and a few grammar faults came an
English essay that I'd already had to rewrite once, this time twice and an
imposition, and the original not given back so I had to compose it again. OK, so
I'd left it till after all the other homework that evening. `Write out 100 times
`I must not leave any homework item till last'': one beak actually told a boy to
do that. Idiot bully. Of course with all that homework one job must be the last.
Every beak wanted his homework to be the first in the evening before the boy got
sleepy. Well everybody can't be first. And an order to give up the electronics
and the part-time jobs that I had to pay for stuff for it.
  I just refused, and my father backed me up, and he said so: "Your electronics
is your best way to a career, and it's been at a standstill for 4 months thanks
to all that @#$ toilet paper school work and school rules in case their #$%
precious homework suffers. Well, just defy it, and get back to your electronics.
If I'm pushed, I push back. If they keep you in, stay at home next day to get
the time back, if you need the time to do something. And I'm not going to
arrange the family's weekends around your #@% homework any more. We're going to
Wales for Whitsun, all of Whitsun; and from now on if I catch you doing school
work when there's proper work for you to do in the workshop the school work goes
on the fire.". That started a total war between parents and masters for their
children's time there. Once a father grabbed his son out of detention by force
to get him home to help with urgent proper work in his workshop and that started
a pitched battle in a corridor and in it three of the fathers grabbed and caned
a master who'd been too fond of keeping boys in and so on.
  Of course it ended up in the papers and the court; soon after that I chucked
school once and for all and that was good riddance to that. I got a job on
Swansea docks. After that I went into space, I thought there'd be all sorts of
jobs for electronics men in something like that, but the Companies had all that
sewn up and I ended up as just an asteroid miner. But I soon found more use for
electronics mending men's kit instead of them wasting time and money buying
another at some Company supplies, they say I'm about the best space electronics
man around. I've invented or improved a lot of things that the men here use.".
  "The men here say they were mighty glad to get you back after you vanished for
3 and a part years that time;" the biologist said, "but others also would like
particular important men back. <Someone>'s got to organize big matters, and all
those Company directors, Milford and Fletcher and Sir Engisham and the rest who
coordinated such a lot of big business, vanishing that time didn't help much.
There's not many people in a thousand that can properly keep track of that many
matters at once. They tied a <lot> of business and finance together, and a lot
went down crash and upset things and put people out of work when they went. You
lot out here'd be glad of that, for it badly delayed plans to restore Earth law
and order out in the asteroid belt. They were needed back. Badly. It took ages
to tie everything together into one organization again. Milford and his scuba
diving: a lot of firms have rules against important men having risky sports, as
well as the trouble getting hold of them when needed and then they're in holiday
casuals and nothing fit for an important meeting. Where <are> they? On the way
here I met an asteroid miner group called the F-15's, all kitted up heavy for
work and breathing-masked with only their eyes showing, and their leader called
Hot-pots - my Geiger counter told me just in time to keep right away from his
spacesuit oxy tanks - they didn't know any more than anyone else round here.".
  The F-15's coming, and him noticing them more than other Anor system spacemen
that he met, seemed mere chance; but something undefinable drew his eyes to
them. He had come with some Earth businessmen and favoured their side in
matters; knowing this had drawn the F-15's there like a shadowy tractor beam
pulling at some of their minds, a ghost of the past that gradually evaporated as
they got near leaving them wondering why they had left their asteroid mining and
space base construction work to stare at yet another lot of Earth visitors.
  But this was not on Plutey-pots's mind as the Jetters went to the coastal
mountains west-north-west of Aulien. They activated their spacesuit propulsors
to bring them out of an equatorial retrograde orbit, descending over Arda's
ocean to Port Quasar, a settlement on the continent's west coast named after the
first man to land there. They landed in a developing industrial area and scuba
dived a few times in warm coral sea to get clean and a change from spacesuits
and geology. On one dive they thought for a moment that the fishing voyage that
they had heard of was not the only one ever after all, for they saw such a net
again, and backed away from it, for sea and large lake patrol craft have been
known to keep a fishing trawl onboard as an easily stored way to catch unwelcome
scuba divers. But as their sense of distance returned they saw that it was much
nearer and smaller than thought. From otter boards somewhat bigger than a man's
hand and six feet apart thin warps converged to an ring on the breathing set
harness of a scuba diver with a backpack motor who had just passed above them.
They watched the odd sight for a while: it was a biologist after specimens.
  Next morning they resuited and took off towards the jagged-backed mountains to
the east. Many Ardan placenames were with a sometimes excessive persistence in
Tolkien's languages, the main literary taste of the X-100 asteroid miner group
who had discovered and first explored the Anor system, but some people chose
otherwise; after Port Quasar was founded the X-100 name `Ered Falas Dun' = "West
Coast Mountains" was overtaken by "Quasar Range", referring also to the amount
and explosiveness of the volcanoes along its ridge line.
  The first man to map this area in detail liked the book `Captains Courageous'
by Rudyard Kipling (a story about deepsea fishermen) and let all Arda know by
his choice of mountain names. In a land with no central place-naming authority
such things happened. The new railway from Port Quasar to Aulien scrambled over
the range by a scarily narrow high notch under the knife-crested peak of Penn,
whose western face was marked by a contorted pattern of limestone folded and
refolded in with dark rock. They looked briefly at a workmen's shelter at the
top of the pass; to Jet Jack's surprise it was built of well-squared marble. The
reason was all round them: the line was cut there through seven miles of it,
where heat and pressure had upheaved and melted old coral reef limestone deposit
as the mountains rose. On Earth builders would have paid a fortune for marble
that clear, for the metamorphism had digested all fossils, and native octopuses
and fish in the original reef had kept the deposit clear of dark-shelled
molluscs; but here it went unheeded.
  They flew south along the range. They detoured west round the blasting crater
and cone of Harvey, and the volleys of stones and ash, and the volcanic gases
like a hundred polluting chemical works at once, and the din, and the teargas
smell of Ardan jungle burning as the lava flowed. Forty miles further on Disko,
the highest mountain in the range, stood quiet, a perfect single cone, with only
a suspicious uniform youngness in the forest on its slopes and along two nearby
rivers to show that 50 years before it had awoken and summarily blown out the
contents of its crater lake and shed a massive lethal mud-flow and then twenty
feet thick of hot ash; thankfully there had been no men there then.
  Those mountains named after fictional fishermen looked down inappropriately on
a sea which such men sailed only once ever in reality, when some years before
some out-of-work shipbuilders who had gone to space settled at Iron Bay further
north on that coast and reverted to their old trade, and made boats, and then an
trawler, the first of an intended local fleet, and sailed it, and brought to
port a holdful of Ardan fish hard-won from storms and native sea monsters, and
only then someone told them about biochemical incompatibility. That trawler had
to be hyperspace jumped to Earth and sold there for what they could get, the
unlikeliest sort of ship ever to travel in space, and they built no more of
them, and hung up their sea-waterproofs and helmets with spray visors and the
port's badge as a regret and a longing for what might have been. Men computer
generated film of that fishing voyage, every detail of it, for it was the only
such voyage. But such local craft and their voyages were many in the inevitable
fiction which men write to work off their longings for impossible things.
  The Jetters flew along the mountains, seeking their destination. When past the
high two-pointed peak of Salters, they looked at their maps. It was a routine
ore deposit survey; Plutey-pots, scanning his area with various instruments,
propulsor flew over a narrow side valley and saw a cluster of buildings in it.
Human settlement was scarce on Arda, and he landed there to look. Some of them
were brick in a style surprisingly like English old inner city backstreet, and
seemed to have been artificially aged. He felt uneasy. Inside were assorted work
kit and many books and CD-ROM's about electronics. As he was looking at a
clutter of `alternate reality' equipment and unidentified kit, he felt colder
and colder although Anor was rising above the valley side in a clear sky. He
crossed a yard towards another room; some feathery two-legged dinosaurlike
animals about 3 feet tall eating weeds growing between flagstones kept several
yards away from him. Wondering who lived there, he went in and looked around.
Among unidentified medical-looking kit a man was sitting at a table going
through papers and reports, often looking at both the room's doors as if waiting
impatiently for a caller who was late; something about his eyes told that he was
on his last thin hope. He seemed vaguely familiar and wore a well-cut executive
business suit and city shoes, clothes rarely seen on Arda except on visitors,
and which Plutey-pots had never worn since Jet Jack's spacemen had reprocessed
and consumed his old identity as Mr.Blore, City of London financier. Plutey-pots
felt a sudden urge not to disturb, went out, and found that the room had been
cold although Anor was shining into it full through a large window.
  He walked round the outside of the base and examined holes where brick clay
had been dug. The vegetation on five acres of one side of the valley was a few
years old recovering from being slashed to the ground, as if to make room to lay
solar panels out; a flat dug-out slightly radioactive area told of a portable
reactor having been there. What had been done there? There were a few Ardan and
Karnilian geology maps on walls; but also a detailed map of part of south
Birmingham in England, a place 400 light years away and utterly irrelevant. To
the south the steaming craters and cone of Long Jack stood over the place.
  He heard another man coming, pushing through the alien red and blue leaved
jungle. The man appeared, clothed in a way much more usual for Arda, thick tough
overalls over an unwashed spacesuit undersuit. The emanating stale sewer smell,
which would have disgusted many, that badge of free-roaming spacemen who hardly
ever need to go to base or into pressure and unsuit, seemed welcoming after how
he had felt in those rooms. Plutey-pots excused himself and went ahead of the
spaceman into the medical kit room, and shivered, thinking that he knew the
businessman's face now, as someone he had traded with sometimes in what seemed
like a previous existence, when he had been Mr.Blore. The businessman looked at
the two for a moment, swept his papers into his briefcase with an annoyed look
that clearly meant "I'm sorry, but I can't attend to you, I have another urgent
engagement. I thought I wouldn't get distractions here.", and walked briskly off
- straight through a wall. Nothing appeared on the other wide of the wall. Anor
shining into the room seemed to regain its proper warmth. The place seemed clean
again, and Plutey-pots turned to what he had come for; he searched the area with
his geology instruments, and left, saying nothing about what had found in the
building. But he knew that all too likely it was there, so far from his office
that Earth's Sun's light took 400 years to reach there, that Mr.Milford, founder
and main director of the big space metals trading Company Milford Metals Brokers
and much else, who had controlled spacecraft, and guards, and space bases, and
the lives and fates of many asteroid miners, and offices on Earth and Mars and
many asteroids, and much non-space finance and business and directorships and
control, had had there his last brief distorted waking memory of being himself.
  After that they spacesuit propulsor flew back along the mountains to Aulien
with their survey results. They landed there after dark; night animals called in
the scrub outside the town's perimeter fence. Plutey-pots went into a building
of local stone roofed and furnished with alien-smelling local timber; it was a
library. In one room was a somewhat-sorted collection of Company documents which
asteroid miners had got hold of one way and another down the years; memories of
his old life, and a need to find about the enemy, led him to read some of them.
Some of them were very distressing to such as he now was who valued good hardy
far-travelling space kit above paper profits and business control and rules
about patents. He went to a shelf rack labelled with `Milfords' and an rough
copy of a Milford's Company logo out of place 400 light years from anywhere
Mr.Milford's businesses had ever wielded their power or traded, leafed through
papers and reports, and found one which he read carefully.
  Below an authorizing signature and an emblem of enforcement which years and
light-years had made totally irrelevant, he read: "The very harmful effect on
asteroid mining investment profitability of various spacesuit improvements made
unauthorizedly by asteroid miners in remote places ... they make the wearers too
independent of bases for too long and remove most of their need to mine metals
to sell to the Companies to pay for replacement parts.... Captured unauthorized
spacesuits and other kit must not be allowed to accumulate in store until
quantities of them are rescued in raids or sold by dishonest storemen. Salvaging
parts while dismantling them is forbidden as this depresses the market in new
parts and risks them being used to make more unauthorized space kit. A type of
propulsor (sometimes called a `PL-prop') that can fly the wearer on and off
Earth-sized planets without aid of spacecraft has been found recently on some
such spacesuits; this duplicate of a top-secret Company research project is a
kit item of obvious dangerous potential and is totally forbidden except under a
very strict licence which is only available to the armed forces; such propulsors
must be destroyed under tight security as soon as possible and there must be no
risk of any getting back into circulation. A general-purpose RD of grade at
least Industrial-3 or GR-4 with a grade at least 2 radioactive materials module
will safely and completely consume these and all sorts of unauthorized long-trip
spacesuit and man-portable space weapon met so far. Oxygen and other compressed
gas cylinders should be emptied first. Recovered radioisotopes from powerpacks
will need the usual handling precautions including preventing fissile critical
masses forming. Spacesuits should be fed in one at a time, unfolded, to prevent
jams; an Industrial-3 RD can consume 50 to 100 of them per day...".
  In his new mentality since he had stopped being the City of London financier
Mr.Blore, he felt an anger at people who for regulations would do such a deed -
and thought it strange that in a nearby building Aulien had recently designed
and made a heavy-duty automatic reactor-pack destructor. For men also come to
treat reactor-packs as companions, and give them personal names, and sometimes
call them `him' rather than `it'; but their life is limited. Sometimes an old
reactor-pack can be saved for further use, with some inside parts replaced; but
inside the thin-looking but effective shielding neutrons from the hot little
reactor transmute and distort mechanical parts and wiring and cooling sodium and
turn safe shielding plutonium-244 into dangerous fissile curium-245, until one
day its control system shuts it down and refuses to let it run again, the sooner
the longer it has been used without bringing it in for service to replace its
reactor's inner shielding. Then the machine must swallow it and inside itself
break it up like any other scrap metal object, and separate all metals from the
parts, likely to use what it can to make more reactor-packs. Some time some of
Sardie #4's `Jimmy''s Pu-244 casing will become some of the next generation's
Cm-245 fuel rods, much more Cm-245 than was used to make it, and the excess is
fuel for a big reactor whose excess neutrons are used to turn stable elements
into useful spacesuit powerpack radioactives; but some of his faithfully
circulating circuit sodium will find there no re-use, for stray neutrons will
have pushed it up to calcium, which as a metal was little use for them.
  In that same design building also lay in store a spent ISAB message-missile.
Its hold had contained something that had been worked on in a ship in space far
from the security leaks that plague ground labs among populous cities. To save
its hold's contents from capture or loss it had been fired during the battle at
another ISAB craft that seemed safely away from the action; but that craft was
attacked and had to dodge, and the missile fell onto Arda and lay in hot dry
soda deposit two miles below sea level in the feared hot hollow of Kumnearen,
the Empty Ocean. ISAB had deemed it safely lost in thousands of square miles
where men would never go, but yet men later went there and by chance found it.
Now Anor system free spacemen examined its contents as they prepared for another
official visiting party from Earth.
  The group came, in a pressurized craft, in late afternoon. Steady rain was
falling from a leaden sky, and they could not see the Orlando Hills. As the main
landing strip was under repair after being badly cut up by heavy planes landing
when it was soft from wet, they landed on a secondary strip without built-in
landing lights and marked by a double line of small liquid fires on the ground.
  It landed. They came out and unloaded their luggage, knowing by now not to
expect baggage handlers out there. A line of ground staff in identical overalls
presented-arms with the nozzles of their powerful-looking pressurized-liquid
flamethrowers. At one end of their line were two jeeps whose fresh tyre tracks
ran from the two edges of the runway.
  "Who's them? What's happening!?" one of the visitors asked in alarm at the
unusual and dangerous-looking choice of display weapon.
  "They made the flarepath. When it's this dull, we need a flarepath even by
day. We've got radar, but the pilot prefers to see something as well.".
  "Uhh." the visitor said flatly, needing time to get used to the idea of napalm
as an aircraft landing aid, and realizing that recent events had given the Anor
system men good reason for as much of their work kit as possible to be some use
in defence. In a time when some sorts of mobile refuse disposal kit were more
and more lethal-looking, such things were to be expected.
  Their first need was a meal and a night's sleep; after that a day to get over
jet-lag and the usual various feelings of alienness and shock at being so far
from Earth. The Jetters, who were there to meet them, were glad to go with them
to what passed for a night spot in that pioneering place on an alien planet,
thankful for the Anor system as a remote safe base where they could relax away
from Earth city downtown area bad characters and undesirables official and
otherwise. A film started; it had been made there and in space nearby, largely
computer-simulated, showing a typical part of what might all too likely have
happened if ISAB in the big attack had chosen other tactics and had not yielded
to pressure to get for the men and organizations and governments that financed
ISAB some sort of visible return quickly regardless. As often with work and
action types, the audience had chosen it for pace and action and powerful
participants rather than for emotions and polite relationships and the like.
  In it, an emergency plan meeting of about 200 men from many free spaceman
groups was well underway when with only two seconds warning from a small on-suit
hyperspace jump field detector three spacecraft appeared surrounding them about
half a kilometer away. The crafts' shape and markings told them that they were
seeing what very many Anor system men had met but few ever had got away to tell
of. ISAB PSC-5's, roaming the Anor system in radio and radar silence, knowing
from previous survey where all objects were where men are likely to be. A modern
interrogation drug, easily overcoming all loyalties and determinations, had got
all details of this meeting from someone they had caught before. The craft fired
from their missile guns volleys of the small fast one-man or by this time more
usually sentient-computer-controlled missile-shaped craft called MST's.
  The spacemen desperately bunched into a tight ball round their hyper jumpr man
and started to try to 'jump out. A laser beam from one of the craft accurately
destroyed Protak Pete's small on-suit hyper jumper: a heavy sensitive on-ship
hyper jump field detector had done its routine job. An unexpected sudden gravity
field threw them about, stopping attempts to fire warning radio beam signals at
other groups and bases. Another group leader tried to 'jump out with those he
could take with him. A powerful laser beam, controlled by PSC-5-84's sentient
onboard computer thinking a thousand times faster than a man ever could, burnt
through three men to reach him and knocked out his hyper jumper. The rest could
do nothing but untether and try to scatter. Their hand-held lasers achieved
nothing. They found themselves being pulled towards whichever they were nearest
to of the efficient-looking craft with the dreaded ISAB insignia on. Modern
spacesuit propulsors that had often got them on and off planets against strong
gravity were easily defeated by whatever was pulling them. Too late they
realized that again technology had put an end to an established assumption.
  "Tractor beam! Everybody says there's no such thing!".
  "Some fancy development of a lopsided wide-range ship-size hyper jump field, I
bet! Haven't you seen the way our 'jumpers sometimes pull things in when we're
using them!?".
  "Lot of work to perfect it, I bet. Big labs, big budget; big field generator
that we couldn't carry on a suit. Forget it, they've caught up with us again.".
  A whirl of MST's caught those who were out of range of the tractor beams. The
few that escaped all this were shot and scooped up later. The rest, running
their spacesuit propulsors at emergency overload in vain, were rapidly pulled in
towards the wide steel intakes of the ISAB spacecraft, and vanished inside, and
the intake doors closed behind them. The craft found and scooped up the few
scatterers and debris, and were gone. Puff Adder in the X-100's, the last one
uncaught, twisted and turned despite the racking pullings of his overpowered
suit propulsor, trying to evade MST PSC-5-84-15's rushing charges and shooting,
until MST PSC-5-92-17 shot his propulsor out and untelescoped as it scooped him
into itself and returned to PSC-5-92 and pumped him into the hard-hold as it
went back into its missile magazine. No message or memory of what had happened
was left on site. The big cleanup was continuing as planned.
  The captured men were quickly pumped in a tangle of their tethers into highly
armoured holds. Design had progressed far since Fletcher Mining's trick loader
craft and the Jetters' hyper jump escape from its hold into its cockpit and so
taking it over; in the wall of craft PSC-5-93's hold a hyper field detector
easily spotted an attempt at repeating that deed. Inward-pointing detectors and
lasers found and burnt out the mechanisms of all remaining on-suit hyper jumpers
and of all other unwelcome `stomach contents' including a 400-kiloton atom bomb
that one of the spacemen had: a desperate plan to `take one of them with me' had
come to nothing. The holds' armoured lining could withstand all conventional
explosives small enough to be concealed. Spacesuit outside pack contents and
propulsors and group-towed cargo were stowed into object holds. The prisoners,
when thoroughly searched and safe, were pushed into the crafts' large
collapsible prisoner-holds, leaving the hard-holds for intaking and cleaning the
next catch. They were left for the moment in their spacesuits as the readiest
means of life-support until interrogation and processing onboard or later in a
bulk prisoner carrier, when interrogation drugs quickly got from them much more
of their affairs and where in the endless distances of the Anor star system many
more of them were likely to be. The craft stored separated metals in containers
as their heavy-duty onboard RD's consumed whatever and whoever was no longer
needed as the craft went on their planned search routes.
  Meanwhile the Actinides hyper jumped to a base which had once housed an
isolationist group called `the Faithful Brethren', and was still sometimes
called `Brethren's'; now a small industrial area in a straggle of structures had
developed round it. But as the greyness and distortion of their hyper jump field
cleared they saw much new damage on the base and on three Anor system loader
craft tethered to it. Near it were two ISAB PSC-5's with their collapsible
prisoner-holds nearly full, and they knew what that meant. Their leader, whose
helmet forehead carried his codename `Actinium', at once reactivated his on-suit
hyper jumper, knowing that although certainly a bulky long-range sensitive hyper
jump field detector in one of the PSC-5's had detected them coming, they were
too far away for a missile to reach them before the jump field could separate
from normal space. But again the tight law and order and control that a big
power organization needs to run and spread and keep its manpower and means of
enforcement supplied, had overcome and consumed rogue self-declared freedom and
wildness. ISAB scientists, now with much more freedom to research (for ISAB had
learned the hard way the results of delaying development work while waiting for
permissions and committees' findings), with the resources of large planetary
nations behind them, had overtaken them again, when freed from officialdom
delays which had often kept them behind free spacemen in space technology.
  There now was something that accelerated away faster than a hyper jumper. That
was a special hyper jumper that could form and separate a jump field much faster
than the old type, but to do so needed a power source much bulkier than it could
jump out along with itself. Before the Actinides could get away, the stars near
them distorted and an MST-like small craft appeared. Its jump field coalesced
with theirs, which flattened back into normal space as the missile destroyed
Actinium's on-suit hyper jumper with a shot. In half a second, at what to it was
an easy pace, for its onboard sentient computer thought far faster than a man,
it did that and scooped them up in a net as it detected and snatched or shot out
all laser guns and the like. They ran their suit propulsors maximum power to get
away towing it, but it jumped, this time at ordinary rate on its own powerpack,
at once to in front of its parent craft's open scoop, where the tractor field
sucked them in, and the scoop shut behind them, and they were gone. Inside its
impersonally efficient-looking powerful bulk the PSC-5 routinely pushed its
scoop contents into its hard-hold where it removed their suit propulsors and
cargo and remaining weapons, and pumped them into a store compartment.
  The two PSC-5's stayed there a while, their holds gradually collapsing to
empty as they processed their contents and their heavy-duty onboard RD's ran
steadily. As an ISAB base mechanic opened PSC-5-92's onboard RD afterwards, the
smell of stale long-trip asteroid miner spacesuit told him what it had likely
been used for and why its grinder blades were so worn down and battered.
  This base-busting was largely an MST job, and this time the order "Enemy
technology investigation: capture the base and its staff and contents as intact
as possible." had gone according to plan; the PSC-5's had scientists and others
on board to help in the processing and sorting.
  Like many, the Actinides were found guilty of desertion, in their case from
NASA (whose successor was ISAB), and the sentence was summary. Into the crafts'
fuel stores went all separated actinide metals that their onboard RDs' output:
spacesuit and tool powerpack contents, group tow-crate cargo, flashy spacesuit
ornaments, the token piece of each member's name actinide metal which each one
up to Californium wore (shielded if necessary); one of ISAB's fleet of massive
specialized RD-and-foundry craft was on its way to consume the unwanted parts of
the captured free-spaceman base, and its powerful onboard fission reactors were
not choosy. So ended the men called `the Actinides', and again no news got away.
  As often in films showing an enemy triumphant, the free spacemen found a way
to fight back at the last, and the survivors regained the Anor system and over
many years bred back lost numbers and rebuilt. But fiction stories and dangers
and disasters depicted in them come to an end, and safe reality returned. In the
audience a visitor from Earth, from ISAB but not saying so, as well as finding
yet again that the Anor system men were being kept alert and aware of risks of
attack and needs for precautions, and regretting what might have been instead of
the `Bay of Pigs'-style actual disaster caused by hastiness, wondered whether a
particular device used in the story was merely a conventional fiction, or not.
  Some ISAB men from the battle were indeed loose in space; on the 3rd planet of
a single star which they called Itan, about halfway between Aldebaran and the
Hyades, they were gradually setting up a self-sustaining base in the hope that
when they chose to tell Earth where they were ISAB would keep them on its books
and not demobilize them to unemployment to save money. There time passed as they
repeated the X-100s' tasks setting up without support on a planet which unlike
Arda was in a Pre-Cambrian state with little free oxygen and no life out of
water. Their officers tried to keep tight naval discipline and drill and parades
against an endless tide of work and research and surveying taking up men's time,
and crying babies, and unauthorized personal and room ornaments, and workman
mentality, and unauthorized slang names for men and kit, and women leaving
ordered duty undone to look after their own children rather than leaving them to
the duty minder, and individualism in general. Needing some sort of armed action
to bring men back to their proper purpose as space law and order enforcers, they
armed and equipped a squad of 20 men, and ordered them to raid supplies from the
Anor system, as a tethered group with three on-suit hyperspace jumpers.
  In the morning the Earth party were shown the usual sights and given the usual
information handouts. By then they knew such things as that the nearest to best
clothes that they were likely to see on Ardans were freshly-washed work clothes.
The spacemen there had the usual exotic variety of ornaments; for example, a
Koh-i-Noor-sized diamond found in a carbonaceous asteroid was as likely to be
worn in its original uncut octahedron shape on a spacesuit among calcite and
seaborgite and the like as to be sold quickly to the Earth jewellery trade.
  They wanted to get on with their business at once, but knew that many of them
could not yet, and cursed the human body's procrastination when forced to change
step in its tight inborn programming to the Earth-type day and night cycle. They
went north out of Aulien to the Taipan River. Along its banks continuous forest
and swamp covered what on Earth would be valuable river-dock land with factories
behind. Once London's East End was like that, and natives in deer skins dragged
dugout canoes through wolf and bear infested alder forest to fish in water where
big ships now dock. In one place men had hacked the forest back and made the
timber into piles and planks and build wharves. Launches and small barges were
exploring and charting the river, and starting to pull out the flood-washed
driftwood logs that lay in wait everywhere for boats' hulls; but before they
could reach the distant salt water much heavy civil engineering would be needed
in the huge canyon where the Taipan River cuts through the coast range. They
went back to Aulien along the dusty bush track which one day might be a busy
Dock Road, saw what sights there were in the town, ate a dinner of locally-grown
natural Earth-type food, and slept. In the morning the meeting started.
  They asked why Ilmenostians had broken an undertaking not to sell or further
develop a particular spacesuit navigation kit device until negotiations among
Earth bodies about them were complete and a particular committee had given the
go-ahead. There followed a tedious argument which was in part:
  "We waited a reasonable time and we weren't going to wait forever for a piece
of paper while men need the device." said a man from Ilmenost who was there.
  "You still gave us a firm undertaking that you would await our reply.".
  "We did, but it never came. You kept on and on conferencing and committeeing
about different things, like that fortnight on the effect on the pound and the
dollar, whatever that had to do with it. And now you're going on forever about
the knock-on effects on costs, not the cost of anything in particular but just
costs.". A satisfyingly general topic that had promised at least two months of
expense accounts and speeches and feeling important. The words `deliberate
stalling' hovered unspoken in the background.
  "We were waiting for you to offer us terms much more favourable than you had
offered us so far. We have recourses." said the leader of the Earth delegation.
  "Meaning you thought you had us over a barrel for a piece of paper. If that
last bit was a veiled threat: whatever it threatens, ISAB tried it that time, in
great force, and we saw them off and they lost a lot of men and attack craft.".
  "Meaning that just like Anor system men usually do, you kept on developing on
the sly and in the end went ahead anyway. The regard Anor system men pay to
pieces of paper is minimal. Someone should tell them that we on Earth have more
officialdom to consult than a few asteroid miner group leaders and him with the
curium-247 oxy tanks. Well, that's the end of that, same as you invented
PL-props, that's planet-landing spacesuit propulsors, and simply started selling
them all over the place letting allsorts get on and off planets bypassing the
official space landing sites and routes and security checkpoints. Yes, official
Earth space bodies <were> developing them and had them nearly to a prototype,
but they were being properly tight careful about who were allowed to have one or
to know how to make them. Ditto on-spacesuit hyperspace jumpers. That's what
finally ruined proper Earth tight control of what was going on in space.".
  "And there's turning up on Earth from here a lot too many of that dangerous
old anti-aircraft missile the Dakota that we thought we'd at last seen the last
of." said one of the party, one of two from an American aircraft company.
  This caused very odd looks from the Anor men. One of the neo-Dakotas on the
ground outside indeed had a missile-tail, four equal square-ended fins round its
rear end (the lower one folded sideways when on the ground); but it was a
one-off, and the rest followed the old tried and tested design, except for such
necessary space adaptations as an airlock in the tail and a large hyper jumper.
  "OK, I'll be more explicit." he said, "I was speaking of aircraft being not
just shot down after flying a while, but prevented from existing in the first
place, because old Dakotas went on for ever. They stopped being made in 1946 I
think it was, but 50 years later there were plenty of them still around. Most of
them wore out at last, thank God, and people were buying new air freight planes;
but you lot here are making Dakotas all over again to keep going forever ruining
the market for new cargo planes. We can't stop you using them yourselves, but
Earth in-atmosphere air freight people have been getting hold of them. Now we
know why when after 1945 when the war ended, when some clever idiot came up with
a Dakota successor called the Accountant [and in reality; Author], someone made
sure and smartish to kill the project and get the prototype scrapped.".
  Thus an angry extreme metaphor in the old conflict between people who want kit
to last and people who want trade selling replacements, a conflict with no easy
resolution. There was no point trying anything more there, except for the usual
tourist-type looking around; the visiting party soon went back to Earth.
  In England on Earth a middle-sized mongrel dog wandered onto waste ground near
Northolt Airfield to get away from traffic and feet. That a Dakota made far
farther away than any earthly factory, and long after the last Dakota was made
on Earth, landed there sometimes, it neither knew nor cared: from planes came
only disturbance and shooing-off, no scavenge and no interesting smells, as the
men there were too tidy nowadays. Nor did it know anything about space or Arda.
As its scruffy dim canine mind turned to its favourite preoccupation of finding
the most unwantedly obvious place to deposit its dirty intestine's filthy waste,
it found in a thicket a bush with white flowers and an unusual chemical-type
smell, which it routinely overwrote with its own smell. Then, not on Ilyarda but
in northwest London, there was a blasting roar and a hail of hardwood shrapnel.
  The alarm and cordoning-off caused by the explosion upset plans for engineers
to fly from there to Leeds (England) spaceport. Relations between ISAB etc and
independent Mars had improved recently, and spaceliners travelled between them
routinely. Aided by Ilmenostian technology, spacecraft had got bigger, and could
carry heavy cargo in and out of planet gravity easily. And could also carry more
and more luxury equipment for rich travellers, which was far from the intentions
of the Ilmenostian space engineers involved, who only rode in any sort of craft
rather in a propulsor spacesuit when hurry or heavy load compelled it. The
engineers should have checked things on the spaceliner Alcyone which was due to
take off; the liner should have waited for them, but businessmen and government
men who were on it or had sent reps on it threatened consequences for resulting
missed meetings and the like and by the resulting chain reactions of delays to
things, and the liner took off without the engineers. Again the same attitude.
  Twenty men from Itan in armoured long-trip spacesuits came out of hyper in the
Anor system, and 'jumped again to the nearest base that they knew of. A hyper
jump field detector on the base activated. They decided to hide and observe for
a while first. After a while an armed spacecraft approached, a PSC-5. Momentary
hope faded into a flat realization as they saw on it stars arranged in a syringe
pattern, the usual Ilmenostian craft symbol which originated as a hurried choice
copied from a prominent Anor system sky constellation. It was named Tiger Shark:
still many Anor system men's minds felt back to the planet where their species
had arisen. "Yes, look what they can make!" one of them thought irritatedly.
They waited a while. They knew the interior layout of PSC-5's. A short hyper
jump, shoot a few scared local maintenance men, and they would have a great
prize to pilot back to Itan whose coordinates no Earth or Anor man knew.
  "If it isn't battle-ready by now, as is likely." their commander said, "We
could pretend to be a new local asteroid miner group and infiltrate the local
population for a while. But other ISAB commando squads tried that, and meanwhile
the Anor system was infiltrating them, and they went native. Even our Admiral
Lintzford went native and is living near Aulien on Arda. OK, in we go!".
  They got into the craft's main crew compartment and quickly overpowered two
engineers, but the pilot's compartment was locked and too small for enough of
them to jump into. The stars seen through a porthole disappeared behind blank
grey. The idea of trying to hyper jump out of a large hyper jump field in mid
jump gave their hyper jumper men such Hieronymus Bosch-like weird images of the
likely multidimensional result and destinations that they decided not to try it.
The craft reappeared off Ilmenost, covered by heavy fixed guns. They started to
'jump out; the craft went partway into hyper. They started to laser through to
the pilot to get at the controls; sparks flew and metal melted. Other spacemen
appeared from hyper in the craft, and there was a mutual-gunpoint confrontation.
Seen from close up, the un-Anor-like spacesuits and the ISAB badges could not be
missed or denied. They had intended in such a case to firing-squad any armed
opposion while enemy shot bounced in vain off their armoured spacesuits; but
those Anor men also wore armoured spacesuits. After a while of standoff the Itan
men had to retreat quietly. Such is the effect of the time since the big battle,
and the result of trying too late a plan of attack that at a previous time would
have won. And the PSC-5's pilot was alarmedly thankful that he secured his
compartment door routinely when often told that it was unnecessary.
  The Itan men waited for what might happen. Itan had much fewer men than Anor,
and they had been ordered to avoid risk of heavy casualties; they were too much
needed for work back at base to unnecessarily `fight there and fall in a far
country'. The radio chatter of an assortment of people told them that the Tiger
Shark was going to the Solar System, to Mars, on a courtesy visit, for Mars and
the Anor system both had had to fight for their freedom. Trying to evade the
pursuing Anor men, they tried the unexpected: they made a short jump at the
outside of the Tiger Shark as it jumped away. The jump fields coalesced, and
they were carried to the Solar System. Once away from pursuit they could 'jump
back from the Sun to Itan as easily as from Anor to Itan. Their commander on
Itan would be glad of current information about what was happening back home.
The Tiger Shark, too big to do much effective at the display except fly past,
settled on the ground for a thorough service while its magazineful of agile
little one-man MST craft eddied about in fancy patterns in the thin Mars air.
  The Alcyone, named after the brightest star in the Pleiades, sped on from
Earth to Ceres, where the old base had been repaired and partly reoccupied as
the asteroid metals trade picked up again. Onboard rich men feasted and gambled
and sought pleasure as in a hotel, and all was spotless and well-appointed; but
all was not well. Important people demanded quick turnrounds; maintenance was
rushed. They wanted every means to entertain and confer with important clients
in flight: extra rooms for this and that were packed closely against the hull.
Micrometeorite erosion built up as threats of consequences for causing delay
told pilots not to detour round micrometeorite swarm tracks. Crew members
complained to the captain, who passed to his ship's owners recommendations which
were filed and forgotten in a maze of considerations and other business arising.
  Around her in the outer darkness asteroid mining went on much as before:
groups of men in long-trip propulsor spacesuits explored and dug at asteroids,
or made weeks-long crossings of emptiness, or hyper jumped for speed if they had
a hyper jumper and thought that the wear on it was justified. They towed
processing equipment around, and traded metals for supplies at bases official
and unofficial, and sometimes did not unsuit for months on end. To them
spaceliners were as always irrelevant `moving star' images on radar displays,
unless one stopped at an asteroid base; then sometimes venturesome passengers
would come out in spacesuits and poke about tethered to a safety craft, and some
would try asteroid miners' tools, to the amusement of genuine asteroid miners.
  Captain Itzinger of the Alcyone did not thank independent asteroid miners for
much; each person who travelled cheaply in a spacesuit tethered in with asteroid
miners who were going that way was one less to pay much more for a liner seat;
thriller fiction raids by gangs of spacemen hyper jump raiding spacecraft and
bases and planets made him less trustful of the real thing; and free spacemen
making their own kit and supplies in space had wrecked the old space trading
Company system that had provided so many valuable first-class passengers. But
asteroid miners both Company and free had found many of the known meteor swarms
that never crossed Earth's orbit to show as annual meteor showers. Now as he was
passing near Mars he was approaching such a swarm, and it was so dense that he
avoided it despite important passengers' growls at the delay. In the vastness of
space such collision risk may seem unlikely; but after such incidents as the
1866 collision between the Leonid swarm and Earth causing hundreds of `shooting
stars' a second for ground astronomers, space pilots were wary of the densest
meteor swarms. So he avoided it, and then had to turn back onto course to Ceres.
  Something snapped, or a stray meteor hit it. Pressure strained, then blew out,
breaking control wires that ran past the place. The crew frantically suited up
and went out and tried to repair the leak from the outside, but the leak
continued. He told the passengers nothing and then that the trouble was minor
and would be rectified soon, but in the end radioed unscrambled for help.
  And on Mars the Jetters and the Sardies heard. They balled and 'jumped to the
place. The Tiger Shark and its MST's would have to drop out of the air and space
craft display this time, for its men had other things to do.
  The Jetters and the Sardies, who were going to display in it, hyper jumped to
near the Alcyone. The Sardies then jumped into a large public room forwards.
Sardie #1 pushed into the control room and found the captain.
  "What - asteroid miners!? - at least you look like you could do the job - if
you could get this done quietly - avoid panic -" the captain said. From aft,
metal creaked as partitions warped under pressure as the air loss spread.
Outside, the ship's crew backed off as the hull damage suddenly blew open wider.
  "Right, everybody on board listen." Sardie #1 ordered, grabbing and switching
on what was labelled as a public address system, "This ship's hull is leaking
air badly, aft roof. Get into the pressure refuges NOW! Get into the pressure
refuges NOW! Never mind luggage! That's an order!".
  "Get out!" the captain ordered, "I said prevent panic, not cause it! I've got
important people on board, you can't just march in everywhere. I said `get the
leak mended and keep it quiet'. Pressure refuges? Pressure refuges??". Shouting
and running about started on board; all intercom phones rang and their
indicators showed a big and fast growing number of queued calls.
  "Typical." Plutey-pots thought, "Told there's nothing much wrong, now they
know there is, the panic'll be worse with them scrabbling for `essentials' which
they could've packed before if they'd been warned.".
  "To the pressure refuges? Why not?" Sardie #1 demanded, switching his gun on.
  "Pressure refuges -" the neatly uniformed captain started helplessly, as
stumped as an airliner captain told by some total ignoramus in authority to
order all his passengers to parachute out.
  "At least shut all emergency internal pressure doors!! Where's the control?".
  "Here." the captain said, and operated it. There followed a series of bangs
and slammings from inside, but fewer than Sardie #1 had hoped.
  "OK. We're taking over. That damage is spreading. We've got to get everybody
out, or into pressure somehow, and depressurize the ship before anything else
blows out and damages any more controls. Then someone can mend its works.
Where's a plan of the ship and a copy of the passenger list and the crew list?".
  "That's confidential, both normally and as this is a security flight.".
  "The lists, or else. We'll need to know how many people are still missing.".
  The captain little liked the look of the Sardies, as identical as photocopies,
very tall and bulky, in their unattractively functional Ilmenostian long-trip
spacesuits. He radioed about frantically as his first officer handed over some
plans and maps and lists. A wind blew everything about as the Jetters, who had
given up trying to mend the spreading leak against the air blasting out of it,
'jumped in also and ran aft into a food-serving area.
  "Where's the firefighting kit?" Plutey-pots asked frantically.
  "Mr.Esh's stuff's down ..." said a steward.
  "I don't want some passenger's #%$ baggage, I want the firefighting kit! Are
there any breathing sets in it or anywhere!?".
  "I was just telling you, Mr.Esh's stuff's in room ...".
  "No #@% no, unless he's got any spacesuits or breathing sets of 'is own."
Plutey-pots shouted, unable to waste any more time, reaching for his laser and
turning its beam power down, "I - want - the - firemen's - stuff.".
  "OK, OK." the steward pleaded, "put your `interrogation aid' away, OK, OK, you
ignoramus work rough, the -firemen's kit-" he continued, gulping at the effort
of breaking years of hard conditioning to refer to fire, air leakage, radiation,
and such things that risk passenger panic if overheard, only by his company's
proper codewords when on duty in public, and said where it was.
  Plutey-pots cursed the steward for a thickhead and ran to the place directed,
reflecting that "re radiation it'd be him who'd panic if he knew what my
spacesuit oxy tanks are made of". He lasered the lock out and opened the door.
It was the firemen's room. In it he found seven breathing sets, and thankfully
they were