John Brunner (7 page)

VII

A
rms aching
, hands sore from gripping the crude paddle,
Horst
Lampeter
kept thinking of Solomon and how real,
how physical, this work made his loss seem. Their boat was difficult enough to
drive along anyway, consisting as it did of only a rough frame supporting them
on half a hundred pieces of
bladderwrack
, the cysts
inflated by lungpower and resealed with a gummy exudation from the stems of
dinglybells
. Every other day it was necessary to check the
whole caboodle and replace a dozen or so of the cysts which were starting to
rot.

But while Solomon had been with them paddling had been
disproportionately easier.
He'd driven his blade harder than Horst and
Coberley
put together—Victor could be ignored, since he was the weakest of any of them
and often fainted after a couple of hours in full sun. Also, Solomon had been
able to crack an occasional joke, tell a story, true or invented, or sing bawdy
songs in his resonant bass voice.

Now he rots among the
roots
....
He'd have made a joke of
that too—or a new verse for one of his songs.

"Take the right-hand side of that weed
ahead!" Victor called in his thin, piping imitation of a shout.

"Does
it matter?"
Coberley
snarled. "We don't even
know if we're on the same half of the damned planet as the main station!"

"But
we are," Victor insisted, sounding close to tears. Horst suspected that
both he and
Coberley
had been equally affected by
the death of Solomon, though none of them—including himself—had said how much
he was missed. They gave their feelings away all the time, nonetheless:
Coberley
had been more than ever irascible since the
disaster, while Victor had taken to whimpering aloud.

"Haven't we seen the monitors
nearby?" Victor went on.

"Haven't
we seen that the pelts they were driving were ripe ones? Haven't I taken
star-sightings, sitting up all night for breaks in the cloud while you two
snored
your heads off?"

"And
haven't you
snored
your head off while we sweat over
these damned paddles?"
Coberley
thundered back.

"Don't
argue," Horst pleaded wearily. "We can't be certain we're on the
right course—as you've pointed out,
Coberley
, they
may be withholding some of the pelts for next year because there seem to be so
many of them—but Victor is almost always right, and
I
don't know how he manages to keep track of so
many calculations in his head."

The
others were both mollified by that, and for a while they simply forged ahead,
turning a little to the right as directed when they approached the next mat of
weed.

Horst didn't look at it except
to make sure they were running clear of its fringe of roots; he was far more
concerned about the risk of it being grounded on a
mudbank
,
in which case they'd have to backtrack and go around the other side after all.
Getting around
Zygra
in a powerboat would have been a
slow job; the only sensible transport would be a hovercraft, and at that you
might run into a floating forest with trees of a sort rising fifty or sixty
feet from a base ten miles long-

"
Lookl
" Victor shrilled. "Look there, on the edge
of the mat!"

Their
heads jerked around to see what he was pointing at, and they gasped.

On
the very edge of the mat, half in the
water,
lay a
stocky man with one arm crudely bandaged.

"Can we get him off?" was Hoist's
first question, knowing that they had to. There was only one explanation for
his presence, which
Coberley
voiced by implication.

"Damn
the
Zygra
Company! May Shuster rot eternity
away!
"

"You think that's the latest of the
supervisors?" Victor muttered.

"How
else could the poor bastard have got here?" retorted
Coberley
savagely.

"Then we
are
in the right area of the planet!" Victor exclaimed. "What did
I tell you?"

"Oh,
shut up!"
Coberley
blazed. "He may have
been drifting for weeks! And in any case they wouldn't have trapped the poor
bastard until the last possible moment, the same way we were trapped, so we can
be damned sure the harvesting ship is due at any time now."

"I wonder if he's
still alive," Horst whispered.

He
was. The pain of having his arm touched while they wrestled him aboard the boat
made him stir and moan, and when they revived him by squeezing the sour but
nourishing juice of a
dinglybell
into his mouth he
cursed loudly in a language they didn't know, musical and full of open
vowel-ended syllables.

The
cursing ran dry. He licked his lips and rolled his eyes, surveying them in
mingled wonder and dismay, naked as he was himself, sick-looking, wild-haired.

"You too?" he
said.

"Us too," Horst
agreed.

And
at that instant of time they heard the beginning of what they had hoped not to
hear before sighting the main station: the faint drumming across the sky that
marked the arrival of a spaceship to take away the annual yield of pelts.

"Are
we far from the main station now?" Victor asked hopefully.

"How
should I know?" the man with the broken arm answered bitterly. "For
all I can tell, I've been unconscious for days on end."

Shuster was a man capable of harboring a
grudge, nurturing it, encouraging it until the time was ripe for getting even.
Kynance
realized the fact with a sinking heart and
set about trying to elude him long enough to garner clues to his likely deceits
from some sympathetic crewman.

Even
when the ship had set down at the main station on
Zygra
,
however, he prevented her from talking to people.

'The
business of harvesting is no concern of yours," he snapped at her.
"Your responsibility begins when this year's pelts are aboard, and ends
when we come back next time—if you're still validly contracted, of
course."

He
said that with a peculiar relish. It was a meager hint, but it was a hint.
Kynance
turned it over in her mind and decided that it
yielded only the same conclusion she had previously reached: whether it was
Shuster's private intention or the policy of the company, some effort was going
to be made to invalidate her contract by trickery.

Almost
certainly, then, the trick would come right at the end of her tour, when she
had lost the chance to apply for an extension. It would be less trouble simply
to leave her here in the grip of the prosthetics designed to ensure survival
after serious injury than to risk her doing something to revenge herself for
being tricked—but others tricked in the same way might have tried and failed,
and anyhow there was
Laban
Rex Chan versus
Gunther
Ranji
, 2108, to consider:
"The exercise of a contractual option is impossible if the party allegedly
exercising it is not fully conscious and in his right mind," this ruling
preventing an unconscious person supported by prosthetics from
"occupying"
Zygra
indefinitely
....

What
horrible byways her mind was being led down by this disgusting man! She wiped
her face wearily with the back of her hand. Now she was thinking in terms of
being mutilated deliberately and left here to uphold the company's claim on the
planet!

Mustn't.
Mustn't.
That path led to insanity. She rose and sneaked a
look out of her cabin. No one was in sight. If she very quietly stole out to
some lock-door not currently in use, and watched the loading of the pelts,
surely even Shuster wouldn't invoke that petty disobedience as grounds for invalidation.
Or if he tried, she'd fight.

She reached a lock unchallenged, and for some
time stood drinking in the scene. Close at hand, men and machines were bringing
up and crating treated pelts from the temporary store in which they were kept
prior to shipment; the colors flared dizzily and the scents made the air almost
unbreath
-ably sweet. Russet and tawny, green and
gold, white and scarlet and orange and black and other tints without names but
all possessing the same fantastic
beauty
....

Further
away, men conducted physical checks of the automatics: here on the main
station, they were restocking the life-support systems with vitamins and
proteins and fitting up the library with entertainment spools; out at the
coating-station she saw them testing the distillation columns and the
concentrators and the myriad other devices she had been taught about; others
were overhauling monitors—one had a bad crack in its casing through which water
had shorted out a handling unit—and installing newly devised programs for
breeding from sports
....
They'd said
something about the possibility of evolving a striped pelt, which would always
display its colors in regular parallel bands instead of randomly over the
surface
....

"Ah, there you
are."

The voice made her skin crawl. She turned and
saw Shuster behind her. But he wasn't going to complain about her being here.
He was simply saying, "The loading is almost complete, so it's about time
I showed you around the station and gave you your on-the-spot briefing."

He
sounded almost affable.
Kynance
followed him with a
sense of relief.

Mentally
she checked off all the ways in which she could be caught out in a breach of
her contract; she planned to write them down in a list when she had the chance,
and add to the fist as other points struck her later.
For example,
this alarm siren which might or might not indicate a genuine malfunction.
It would be easy to arrange a false alarm when she was in the shower. She'd
have to rig some sort of extension to the switch, so it could be inactivated
from a dozen points instead of one.

No,
just a second: that might be construed as tampering with the automatics, hence
sabotage
....
Cancel that: Horace Bellamy versus Guy and Guy
Starlines
,
2084, specified that "a switch designed for manual operation is not and
cannot be regarded as an automatic device."

Good. The prospect of being able to do
something to forestall Shuster's
skulduggery
cheered
her enormously. Only one cloud still hung over her apart from those to which
she had grown accustomed, and that became darker as they progressed further
with the tour of inspection.

Where
was her predecessor? Why wasn't he being called on to give her tips he'd picked
up during his own stay?

She ventured to ask Shuster that when there
was a lull in his flow of instructions. He didn't reply; he simply curled his
hp and showed his teeth.

Her stomach turned over with a lurch.

What
can they have done to him? Could they have thrown him over the side, drowned
him? Because—think, think— who's going to know?

Nobody ever came to
Zygra
except company employees. By law there had to be a record of the operation of
the automatics available for government inspection—Hughes and Le-
blanc
versus Mario
della
Casa, 2092—but in this case the government was that of Nefertiti, and she'd
already recognized the stake that government had in
Zygra
.

Panic
gripped her. For all she knew, the contract was irrelevant, empty, a scrap of
paper. No one from Earth would come hunting her if she failed to return; they
could safely leave her a year here, let her elude the obvious pitfalls, and
then invalidate the contract in the simplest way, by killing her.

The
world seemed to spin off its axis as she learned the reason behind Shuster's
temporary geniality. He was saying now, "And one final thing which may
interest you before
I
leave you and go aboard the ship for takeoff.
You were asking why your predecessor isn't here to show you around. Well, he
willfully infringed the terms of his contract. You're a great one for
legalisms, so if you want to see the proof which we'll be displaying to the
government when we get back
you're
welcome. He didn't
get to the alarm in the prescribed thirty seconds—"