Shaker nodded. “Go ahead, then. I’ve got other things to do. I’ll be at the cargo beetle if you need me. I expect your report in four or five hours.”
Without another word he turned and headed into the tall plants, moving along a faint line of disturbance that showed the way to the cargo beetle that we had arrived in. The vegetation sprang into position as soon as he had pushed through. I was starting right after him when Sean Wilgus moved to block my path.
“Not you,” he said softly. “You stay with us.” He lifted a hand to his belt.
“Now then. First things first.” Patrick O’Rourke stepped in front of Wilgus. “You’re too hasty, Sean, as usual. Don’t forget what we came for.” He turned toward Walter Hamilton. “You there. You’ve been here for a while. Are there any breaks in all this mess of plants?”
Not “Dr. Hamilton,” you see, but “You there.” Danny Shaker wouldn’t have allowed such rudeness, only he wasn’t around to stop it.
Hamilton glared at O’Rourke, but he answered quickly enough, and in a tone not designed to please. “If you’d bothered to use the eyes in your head on the way down, you’d know there are no totally cleared areas. But there are certain regions, like the one where we are presently standing, at which the natural climax species attain a reduced height. They seem to be associated with deep, narrow fissures in the surface. We found a dozen or more of those, up to ten meters deep and with more vegetation at the bottom of them. And then there are the trails.”
“Aha!” That was Sean Wilgus. He came around to face O’Rourke. “I told you they’d been holding out on us. Trails! For people!” He swung to face Hamilton. “Right?”
The scientist stared down his nose at him, if you can do that to somebody taller than you are. “Don’t sound like a bigger fool than you are. There are no people on this world. The trails are made by the frequent passage of small animals.”
“How do you know?”
“There couldn’t be people here. This world isn’t big enough to support them.”
“Just like it couldn’t possibly have an atmosphere, according to all you big experts. But it has one.” Wilgus was stepping closer to Hamilton. Patrick O’Rourke pushed in between them.
“Either there are or there aren’t,” he growled. “People, I mean. I told you, Sean Wilgus, calm down. That’s what we’re here for, to stay cool and see for ourselves. Make one of your wild moves, and the chief will skin you when we get back to him—aye, and me, too, for letting you do it. This isn’t a big planetoid. Let’s get down to finding our own answers.”
O’Rourke was so big and broad that Walter Hamilton and Sean Wilgus could hardly see each other around him. For the moment it put an end to their argument. The four crewmen from the Cuchulain ignored Hamilton and me and started to organize their own search effort.
What they decided was simple-minded, but it ought to work. They would line up thirty or so paces apart, close enough to be in easy earshot, and walk around Paddy’s Fortune in the direction of the setting sun. A “day” on the planetoid was a couple of hours, but on the other hand its circumference was only five or six kilometers. The walkers would catch up with the sun. By the time they had walked until Maveen was twice overhead, they would have performed more than one full circuit of the world. At that point they would either have found something interesting, or they would have found nothing. They could perform another sweep, farther north or south, or they might try something completely different.
No one suggested a role for me or Walter Hamilton. We trailed along after them, the two of us walking one behind the other in the path of flattened vegetation left by Sean Wilgus. I was in front, and I gradually slowed our pace so that we lagged farther and farther behind the crewman. I wanted to tell Walter Hamilton what Doctor Eileen had refused to hear: the full details of everything that I had heard when I was hidden on the Cuchulain.
I ought to have known better. If Doctor Eileen, who knew me so well, found it impossible to believe me, what chance did I have with a near-stranger?
I talked for maybe five minutes. Finally Hamilton caught up with me and pushed past, saying as he went, “Would you for God’s sake shut up! It’s hard enough to think without your blathering. And I’ve got plenty to think about.”
He hadn’t even been listening! But then he started, about the observed ecology of the planetoid, and how it all had to balance, and how anybody with half a brain and a first course in population dynamics would realize that the biggest animal you could find on Paddy’s Fortune would mass no more than a mouse, or at absolute maximum a small miniver, and Sean Wilgus and anyone else who talked of people on this worldlet had to be morons.
Then all of a sudden he stopped dead, and said, “For the love of Kevin! A natural world’s balance. But of course it can’t possess any such thing.” He went down to one knee on the muddy ground, and pulled a little calculator and an electronic book from his pocket.
“What is it?” I said. “What have you found?”
“I told you, shut up,” he muttered. “I’ve got to think.” He ignored me as he did a whole bunch of calculations, then started to key new entries into his book.
I wanted to tell him that nobody could tell me to shut up, and I had plenty to think about, too. But I didn’t want to make him angrier than he already seemed to be. Although he wasn’t my choice of company, whatever he did he wouldn’t kill me. I couldn’t say that of any of the others. And Hamilton had a gun at his belt, a white-handled pistol that he could use if anyone tried violence.
Meanwhile he was back on his feet again, and moving fast. We were closing on the line of four crewmen. I knew that was the case, because although we were again in the middle of tall, scrubby bushes and I couldn’t see anything but leaves and twigs and soggy black earth—how did it stay so damp, without rain?—I heard voices ahead.
Angry voices. Everyone was cursing. The crew had arrived on Paddy’s Fortune looking for women, but what they had found so far was mostly mud. They had stopped for a rest, calling to each other to compare loud and angry notes.
Walter Hamilton went up to Sean Wilgus and waved the electronic book in his face. “Listen to me,” he said.
Wilgus had his right thumb in his mouth. He was squatting down, peering along a low archway that ran through the tight-leaved plants, and he took no notice of Hamilton.
With loud complaints coming in from all sides, that was not too surprising. The only person who wasn’t shouting was Robert Doonan, and that was probably because he was in such bad physical shape that he needed all his energy just to walk and breathe. But Patrick O’Rourke, off to the left, had encountered a patch of thornbush, with spines hard and sharp enough to draw blood. Joseph Munroe, next in the line, had not been looking where he set his feet. He had stepped into one of the little pools. It turned out that it was not so much a pool as a deep pothole, only a few feet across but as deep as it was wide, and Munroe had plunged into cold water up to his crotch.
Sean Wilgus himself had just crossed a little trail and seen a brown thing like a small kangaroo rat jumping along it. He had tried to grab it as it passed, but it had bitten him on the thumb and got away.
If he had been in a bad mood before the search began, he was in a worse one now. He had taken his gun from his belt, and he was aiming it along the dark tunnel.
Walter Hamilton stopped waving his book and crouched down at Wilgus’s side. “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”
Wilgus did not even look up. “I’m waiting. Next time I see some damned jumping thing, I shoot. I’ll teach that son of a bitch.”