"They"re deserted," said Jonnie. "I"ve been to some of them. No population but rats. Mining ghost towns."
""Tis a sad thing" said Robert the Fox. "All this s.p.a.ce and all kinds of food and no people. And over in Scotland there"s little s.p.a.ce that will grow anything and hardly any food at all. It "s a dark chapter in history we"ve been through."
"We"ll change it," said a young Scot behind him.
"Aye," said Robert the Fox. "If we have any luck. All this great broad world full of food and no people! What are the names of those grand peaks down there?"
"I don"t know," said Jonnie. "If you look on the mine map you"ll see they just give them numbers. I think they had names once but people forgot. That one over there we just call "Highpeak." "
"Hey!" said a young Scot. "There"s sheep down on that mountainside!" He was using a hand telescope.
"They"re called bighorns," said Jonnie. "It"s quite a feat to hunt one down. They can stand on a ledge not bigger than your hand and sail off and land on another one not wider than two fingers."
"And there"s a bear!" said the Scot. "What a big one!"
"The bears will go into hibernation soon," said Jonnie. "I"m surprised one is out at this alt.i.tude."
"Some wolves are following him," said the Scot.
"Laddies," said Robert the Fox, "we are hunting bigger game! Keep your eye out for the canyon."
Jonnie spotted it shortly before one o"clock.
Chapter 7.
It was a startling sight. The grandeur of the scene in this thin, cold air made one feel small.
Out of a river, a thin, silver thread in the depths far below, reared a reddish, ma.s.sive wall of rock rising sheer and raw. Narrowly across from it was its echoing face. Down through the eons the river, finding a softer strata between the two faces, had gnawed its turbulent way to make at last this gigantic knife slice in the all but impregnable stone. A thousand feet deep, a hundred yards wide, the enormous wound gaped.
All around it rose majestic peaks, hiding it from the world.
The sparkling white line of quartz, many feet thick, marked it with a brief, diagonal line. And in that quartz, imbedded and pure, gold shone and beckoned.
It had in its reality a much greater impact than any photograph. It was like a jewel band set upon the wrinkled skin of a hag.
One could see far below where a portion of the cliff face had fallen; the fragments lay like crashed pebbles in the depths. The river had eaten too deep under the cliff and an earthquake had shaken a slice of the face loose.
Snow had not fallen yet, for the year was dry, and there was nothing to impede the view. Jonnie dropped the plane lower.
And then the wind hit them.
Funneled up the long gorge, compressed and screaming to get free, the turbulent currents tore at the cliff.
With fingers racing across the overlarge keys of the console, Jonnie fought to keep the light personnel plane in position.
It was not a dazzling lode at that moment. It was a brutal, elemental wall that could crush them if they touched it.
Jonnie leaped the plane a thousand feet up, clear of the updrafts, and steadied it. He turned to one of the Scots, the one who looked like him and who had spoken of Burns. His name was Dunneldeen MacSwanson. "Can you handle this plane?"
Dunneldeen came forward. Robert the Fox went to a rear seat and strapped himself into the copilot seat.
In these teleportation drives, there were a number of corrections that had to be constantly watched. Some were built in to the computers; some were preprogrammed for any flight. s.p.a.ce itself was absolute and motionless, having no time, energy, or ma.s.s of its own. But to stay in one place relative to the ma.s.s around one, it was necessary to parallel the track of such ma.s.s. The world turned daily, and that was a near thousand-mile-an-hour correction. The earth orbited the sun and that required second-to-second correction. The solar system was precessing, and even if the correction was minute, it had to be compensated for. The whole solar system was en route to somewhere else at a blinding speed. The universe itself was twisting in relation to other universes. These factors and others made control of the ship a dicey business in normal times. Down there in that canyon it was a nightmare.
The irregular external buffetings of the wind upset the inertia of the motor housing and made instant shifts of coordination continual.
Dunneldeen had been schooled and trained in all this. But he had seen Jonnie"s fingers flying over that console and knew it was no routine flight. In the first place the Psychlo keys allowed for wide talons and wider paws, and it required a snapping tension in the wrists to compensate for these s.p.a.cings with human hands.
Dunneldeen looked down at the canyon top. "It is no "roam in the gloamin"," he said. "But I can try!" He started down.
Jonnie unwrapped his seat belt and had them pa.s.s a small contrivance called a core gun to him. By firing a small rotating borer, the gun would take a one-inch diameter chunk out of a rock face, the length of the core varying by how long one let the borer stay there before hauling it back on a line. With it one obtained a cylindrical sample of a vein or rock.
"Start taking pictures," he yelled at the rest of them. They had three picto-recorders aboard, an instrument that measured depth below surfaces, and one that measured densities while drawing a pattern. The instruments were "light" Psychlo prospecting tools, but being Psychlo, they required a lot of muscle.
The Scots took the equipment and began individually operating through the slots in the side of the fuselage.
Jonnie lowered his own port and readied the core gun. "Take us in as close to the vein as you can get without risking us."
"Aye!" said Dunneldeen. "There"s the rub. Ready? Down we go!"
They shot back into the chasm. Jonnie could hear Dunneldeen"s fingers on the console keys: they sounded like a miniature of that Thompson. Then the sound was blotted out by the shrieking howl of the canyon wind.
They swerved. The wall came within inches and swept back to yards. It danced up and down. The scream of the motors began to match the wind as they raced to correct positions.
Jonnie forced himself to concentrate. He wanted a core on the first shot, for it took time to rewind. The sparkling lode danced and leaped in his sights. He pressed the trigger. With a bark and sizzle of paying out line, the corer hit the lode.
Dead on!
He triggered the rotator. The line whipped up and down in the wind.
The plane suddenly slid sideways in a sickening swoop and almost hit the opposite wall. The core came out and dangled below the ship. Jonnie reeled the looping, twisting line in.
"Take her up!" he shouted.
Dunneldeen vaulted the ship up two thousand feet to quieter air. He sat there, limp, his arms and wrists aching, sweat heavy on his forehead. "Ooo, mon! "Tis like danc"n" wi" the devil"s wife!" he panted, relapsing to dialect.
"Did you get your readings and pictures?" Jonnie called over his shoulder.
The instrument men had gotten their depths and densities. But those operating the picto-recorders, struck by the awesome scene and seeing much more of it to take, said no, they wanted another crack at it.
"I"ll take her," said Jonnie.
"The devil"s wife?" said Dunneldeen. "Na, MacTyler. I have a feeling I"ll be dancing this dance again some other day. I"ll keep her, thank you." He yelled back over his shoulder: "What do you want?"
They wanted the slide debris at the canyon bottom.
"I hope you all made your peace with the parson before we left," said Dunneldeen. "Here we go!"
They plummeted to the bottom of the gorge and made a pa.s.s. The boiling white froth of the river fanged at the fallen fragments. They were mainly under water.
The plane fought back up the narrow gorge slowly so the picture takers could track it on both sides. Dunneldeen"s hands were a blur on the controls. The bucking ship screamed as its motors over-revved.
"Something is getting hot," called Robert the Fox. And it had become warm in the cabin despite the alt.i.tude.
It was the motor housings, overworked in compensating for the lunging and changing inertia of the ship.
They drew opposite the top of the cliff. Jonnie looked at it while the picto-recorders were busy.
There was no flat surface there where one could set down a ship. There was no s.p.a.ce where one could operate a lowered drilling platform. It was all pinnacles and clefts.
Jonnie saw something else and called for vertical shots down the cliff face. The cliff was not vertical. It fell away inward. Anything lowered from above would hang fifteen to twenty feet away from the face of the cliff. How could one hope to rig ore nets?
They went directly above it and Jonnie saw something else. "Shoot more verticals of that top!" he called.
Yes, he saw it plainly now. There was a crack inset about thirty feet from the top edge of the cliff, parallel to it. Another such crack had caused the fall of rock that bared the lode. But here was a second one. Just waiting for another earthquake. The whole lode would pitch into the gorge.
They went up two thousand feet and the picto-recorder operators had to be content with general scenery. It was impressive enough in its gigantic beauty.
"By your leave, MacTyler," said Dunneldeen, "if it"s home we"re going now, I"ll exchange with Thor."
Jonnie nodded, and a near-duplicate of him, who was nicknamed Thor due to his Swedish background slid over the seat top, matched his motions to Dunneldeen"s, and took over.
Dunneldeen dragged himself back to the rear. "It"s a reel a bit fast for the piper," he said. "Are we going to have to operate in that? that?"
The core in Jonnie"s hand was part white quartz and part gold. It was a very pretty thing. This was a lure that had wooed Terl, that had given them their chance. He wondered how many lives it would take.
"Head for home," he told Thor.
They were very quiet on the way back.
Chapter 8.
Jonnie was very edgy as he walked Windsplitter around the minesite as casually as he could. What he was doing was dangerous, but one could not have told it from the easy way he sat his horse. It was a semiannual firing day and the personnel at the minesite were hurried, snappish, and preoccupied.
Jonnie had a picto-recorder hidden in a tree that overlooked the site and he had a remote control hidden in his pouch. He had gotten a long-play disc into the recorder, but that would not permit it to run for hours untended. He had to get all the data he could. Robert the Fox would not have approved, for this was a scout pure and simple. And if Terl spotted the picto-recorder or detected the remote, there could be repercussions.
Jonnie had delayed reporting to Terl, taking advantage of the "week or so" order. He had heard by accident of this semiannual firing from Ker the chatterer.
Ker had come over at Jonnie"s request to inspect the personnel carrier motor. Jonnie needed the data. If it was faulty that was one thing, but if it was only underpowered for the job at the lode that was another.
So Ker had come to the base, growling a bit about it: he was an operations officer, not a mechanic. But Terl had sent him.
The midget Psychlo"s temper was sweetened, however, by Jonnie"s handing him a small gold ring a scout had found on the "finger" of a corpse long gone to dust.
"Why give me this?" said Ker, suspiciously.
"Souvenir," said Jonnie. "Not very valuable."
It was valuable. It was a month"s pay.
Ker dented it slightly with a fang. Pure gold.
"You want something, don"t you," Ker decided.
"No," said Jonnie. "I"ve got two so I gave you one. We"ve been shaftmates quite a while now." This was a Psychlo mining term for a pal who pulled one out of a cave-in or a fight.
"We have, haven"t we," said Ker.
"Besides, I might want somebody killed," Jonnie added.
This sent Ker off into a gale of laughter. He appreciated a good joke. He put the ring in his pocket and got busy on the motor.
Half an hour later he came over to where Jonnie lolled in the shade. "Nothing wrong with that motor. If it got hot, it was just being overdriven. You want to watch it, though. You keep running one that hard and it will go up in smoke."
Jonnie thanked him. Ker hunkered down in the building"s shade. They talked, mostly Ker chattering. Ker got on the subject of being pushed by schedules and Jonnie eased in casually with his question. "What happens on Day 91 of the new year?"
"Where"d you get that?" "Saw it posted at the minesite."
Ker scratched his greasy neck fur. "You must have read wrong. It would be Day 92. That"s a semiannual firing date. One"s happening in just seven days, you know. What a lot of bother."
"Something different about it?"
"Aw, you must have seen a couple when you were in the cage down there. You know, semiannual firing."
Jonnie may have seen it, but at that time he didn"t know what he was looking at. He put on a stupid look.
"It"s a slow firing," said Ker. "No ore. Personnel incoming and outgoing, including the dead ones."
"Dead ones?"
"Yeah, we"re shipping dead Psychlos home. They want them accounted for because of pay and they don"t want them looked into by aliens, I guess. Nutty company rules. Lot of trouble. They put them in coffins and hold them down in the morgue and then...c.r.a.p, Jonnie. You"ve seen the morgue. Why am I telling you?"
"Better than working," said Jonnie.