"Look, we don't handle any military traffic here, buddy," said the controller, a young man and ill at ease. "They've got their own port over on Minor. But I can tell you, there was a ship landed there last week, not the usual supply run, and everybody here figures it must've been full of reinforcements."
A man in the colorful one-piece rainsuit that marked those who had to live on this rain-sodden world nodded solemnly. "Stands to reason Earth's going to build up the fort on Minor when hell's a-popping right across settled space," he said. "Not much that happens anywhere that we don't hear about it on Dittersdorf!"
Mark opened his mouth to sneer, "Dittersdorf, hub of the universe." He held his tongue because he realized that all he'd be doing was trying to hurt the locals in revenge for the way they'd hurt him-by saying something that they thought was the truth, and that he didn't want to hear.
"We got all the transport we could find, Yerby," Dagmar volunteered. "That ain't much-two aircars and a surface-effect truck the guy says'll still run, but I dunno. They don't have flyers nor blimps here, it's mostly wheels on the ground. Which don't help us a lot getting across the water to this fort."
"Let's go inside," Mark said. "I want to check something in the dead storage room."
"Say, you know they got showers here?" a Woodsrunner said. He probably lived in a tent or lean-to on Greenwood and the luxury awed him. "And they run all the time!"
"Water goes at a discount on Dittersdorf," Amy muttered grimly. "But we're not going to be here long. One way or the other."
The party strode toward the caravansary entrance. "Now, I guess we can go scout out this fort, Yerby," Zeb Randifer said, "but that's likely to warn them, don't you think? Besides, I figure they'll just shoot first and ask questions later. From what these boys been telling us-"
His thumb hooked to the locals and the off-planet travelers with them. They nodded gloomy agreement. Mark was quite sure that nobody in the whole port except him and Yerby had ever visited Minor, but there's never a shortage of people to swear to a rumor of disaster.
Though if an unscheduled starship had landed at the port, then the rumor really did have some substance.
"Don't worry yourself," Yerby said as they entered the caravansary. The building felt wet, though the humidity inside couldn't possibly have been higher than that of the open air. "I been in the place before and I'll go again. You can't tell what's happening in a place like that from the outside."
He stretched mightily and added, "So long as I'm around, Zeb, I don't guess anybody'll need you to go stick your nose where somebody might nip it off."
"Hey, you've got no call to say that!" Randifer protested. "I volunteered for this just the same as you did!"
"We're going to take a look through the abandoned property," Mark said to the watchman. The storage room's door was closed, but the padlock wasn't in place.
The watchman shrugged. He wasn't a man Mark remembered from previous trips though Dittersdorf. Sight of Amy had made his eyes widen, though he'd probably seen his share of women like Dagmar Wately here on the men's side. Mark didn't know Dagmar well, but he was quite certain that she didn't worry about sexual harassment any more than Yerby did.
"What sort of communication with the fort do you have, sir?" Amy asked the controller. Her voice sounded strong, though her face was still pinched.
Mark found that having to think cleared his mind faster than he otherwise recovered from transit. Maybe that was true for Amy as well.
"No communication at all, miss," the controller said. "We don't need to talk to them, and they don't want to talk to us."
Mark began lifting boxes of ragged clothing out of the storage room and setting them carefully on the floor of the common area. It isn't there. He wanted to hurl the trash out of the way, but he was irrationally convinced that if he let Fate know he was desperate, Fate would punish him.
"Look, I'm not going to tell you fellows what to do," another local said, "but what I say is, you're going to get yourselves killed if you so much as fly over Minor the way things are."
"Well, I'm glad you're not trying to tell me what to do," Yerby said, "because I am going to head over to Minor myself and see what's going on in the fort."
Something rattled in the box Mark lifted. He reached into a jumble of boots-individuals, not pairs-and came out with the hologram reader he'd noticed on his first visit to the caravansary. He switched the sealed unit on. The seed catalog's opening images appeared, a profusion of flowers and succulent vegetables.
"Bingo!" Mark called. He turned, holding up the reader. Everybody was staring at him.
"You're not going to go, Yerby," he said. "You'd be recognized even by somebody as dotty as Captain Easton. But I won't have any trouble passing for a seed salesman like the poor guy who brought this here however many years ago!"
"And I," said Amy calmly, "will go along to make sure they won't connect Mark with their visitors six months past."
Dagmar Wately looked from Amy to Mark. "You know," she said, "it might work. If they don't just blow you to vapor the first time they see a speck on their sensor screens."
"Well, if they do that," Zeb Randifer said judiciously, "then we know what we're up against."
34. Back to the Funny Farm
Amy circled the fortress slowly, a hundred feet in the air. She was carefully avoiding the appearance of being sneaky or threatening. "I didn't really think they'd just shoot us out of the air without warning," she said in a small voice.
"Me neither," Mark agreed heartily. Of course, the car's radio might not work, leaving the fort with no way to warn intruders that they were about to shoot.
"Though I wasn't sure they could warn us," she added. "I don't trust the radio." Great minds running in the same direction, Mark thought. Nervous minds, at any rate.
Amy was driving to provide an excuse for her presence. It might have strained the credulity of even Captain Easton to believe that a Terran seed company had sent a pair of salespeople over so many light-years. This car was a twin-fan design, inherently unstable despite stub wings that worked only in forward flight. It was in better shape than the vehicle Yerby'd rented six months before, though, and Amy was a better driver. Less ham-fisted, at any rate.
"There he is," Mark said, pointing to the figure hoeing energetically in the garden to the west of the fort's outer wall. "It must be Easton, I mean."
Amy brought them in fast. Hovering in a two-fan aircar was like riding a bicycle along a tightrope-and just as likely to be fatal if you screwed up.
"Don't crush his plants!" Mark warned. He remembered the kids' nickname for Easton and added, "Especially his cabbages."
Amy sniffed. She turned the car ninety degrees just before touching down, aligning the undercarriage perfectly with the outer furrow and a foot beyond it. Easton looked up with a puzzled expression.
"Good evening, Captain!" Mark called as he hopped out of the vehicle. "I'm with Sunrise Seeds of Vermont, and you're clearly just the sort of discerning customer we're looking for. Have we got a deal for you!"
"Seeds?" repeated Easton on a note of rising hope. "No, let me come to you, young man. You might…"
Easton hopped spryly to Mark's side, the tools in his belt jingling. His red waterproof boots didn't so much as brush a leaf of his carefully tended plants.