When Cadmann got there, a fifteen-by-thirty-meter block of ground had been marked off with rope to protect the footprints. A score of colonists were still huddled around the periphery. Joe Sikes's wife, Evvie, held her baby tightly against her breast, the child's reddish scalp shining through thin, limp blond hair. The baby gurgled, unconcerned, but the woman looked stricken. Their baby was the colony's second. The first, April Clifton, was still in intensive care.
Carlos stood with Mitsuo Kokubun and Harry Siep, and they were grinning. Harry preened his heavy growth of beard, hiding his mouth behind his fingers as he whispered something to Mits. All three choked on repressed laughter.
Zack ran his fingers through black hair that had been noticeably thicker only months before. When Cadmann broke through the ring of spectators and squatted to take a close look at the tracks, Zack punched him lightly on the shoulder, relief and gratitude tattooed across his face in bold strokes.
"Glad you're here," Zack said. "What do you make of this?"
Cadmann hitched his trousers and bent, peering closely at the depressed ridges of the footprint. It was just broader than his hand, with four distinct, roughly triangular toes. He ran his finger along it lightly.
He asked, "Have we taken a cast of this?"
"Marnie did. We're reinforcing the fences, and we can put the power back through them if we have to."
There were eight of the prints, some faint, some clear and sharp. One in front of the chicken coop was smeared. He stood and looked back along the path the tracks had taken-they led in the direction of the mountains, but disappeared long before they reached the plowed ground. Suspicion niggled at the back of his mind.
"You know," Cadmann said finally, "I could have sworn there weren't any tracks here when I left this morning."
Zack shook his head. "Beats me. There was someone here all the time, Cad. The overcast was pretty bad. Maybe the sun had to be just so high before we could spot them."
The crowd had thinned a bit.
"Hola, amigo. Any ideas?"
Cadmann studied the ground, then Carlos's overeager smile. Little Rick
Erin, standing next to Carlos, was having trouble managing his face.
Cadmann walked slowly up to the historian-carpenter. "Yes. I do have an idea. I think it was made by something that was highly skilled, bipedal, not overly intelligent, and weighed about-" he looked Carlos over carefully. "About seventy kilos. I'd guess. We'll call it illegitimus estupido for the time being. I'm mixing languages there, but I think you get my drift."
He turned on his heel.
"Cadmann-"
"Yeah?"
"Nothing."
As he walked away Cadmann heard sniggers and the sound of backslapping, idiots. He doused the flare of anger as he came back to the mined coop.
"What do you think. Cad?" Zack looked puzzled.
"This was a hoax. This was." Cadmann's face was still burning. "I like the idea of checking the fences. Get them ready." He looked out over the flat ground, past the fluffy cultivated rows, past the ring of thorn trees to the mountains and jungle beyond. "Listen, Zack, maybe the footprints were a hoax, but these chickens are still dead. I don't think we've got anyone dumb enough to murder a bunch of our chickens for a joke. I don't much care who laughs at me-let's be ridiculously cautious for a while, eh?"
Cadmann stepped on the nearest print. If he had strapped, say, a rubber cutout to the bottom of his shoe, he could walk carefully back and forth, making those goddamn prints right in front of everyone's nose, and then stand back and watch the fun...
Behind him someone made a doglike yipping sound. He didn't turn to look.
Chapter 4
RAINY NIGHT
Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.
WILLIAM BLAKE, Appendix to the "Songs of Innocence and Experience: A Divine Image"
Six weeks after the incident at the coops, a mild eruption on the northwest side of the island shook the ground. Three days later threadlike wisps of ash still drifted from the air. The mists that enshrouded the mountain peaks had dropped in a gray blanket, diffusing the light of Tau Ceti.
Streamers of light flashed within the cloud banks, and thunder echoed distantly onto the plain. Cadmann slipped his tractor into neutral and watched the clouds cautiously. The engine's hum strummed his spine.
"Don't worry," Mary Ann called to him. "That's just a little mountain storm. It doesn't care about us." She moved between knee-high rows of plants, checking the slender soil-meter rods for moisture and pH.
The alfalfa replanting was being cautiously hailed as a success. Failure of the first crop was attributed to the thorn trees which had once dominated the plain. When the trees were burned away their taproots remained alive underground, leaching moisture from the soil. Alfalfa, with a potential yield of ten tons per acre, requires tremendous amounts of water. Omar Isfahan and Jon van Don, two of the Colony's engineers, had planned and installed a more extensive irrigation system.
"We could use the water, either way. But if it's going to rain, I'm wasting my time up here."
"Practice. Practice. We all take rotation in the fields." Mary Ann's smile was as brilliant as her hair, and it warmed him. They had grown closer in the weeks since his talk with Sylvia aboard Geographic.
Hibernation Instability. He saw her differently now. She wasn't bright... and yet she had been. Wounded in the war to capture Avalon; wounded in his war.
The electrified fences had been expanded and strengthened. When there was no additional trouble, the animals were turned out into the northern pasture. Some of the older lambs and calves were already grazing contentedly.
No additional trouble...
Cadmann liked the sound of that, even if there was a part of him that didn't quite believe it. (Didn't want to believe it?)
He had returned twice to Geographic. He liked that. Checking the embryos was sheer routine; but one side of the crew lounge was a wide window. Cadmann could sit and look up at Avalon, and feel peace.
So beautiful. Spirals of white storm, blazing white of polar caps, the spine of jagged white-capped mountain range along the single continent.... white against the rich blue of a water-and-oxygen atmosphere, a world that men could take and tame.
Zack had been right. Their grandchildren would conquer this world, and the first hundred and sixty colonists would be remembered for all time.
Immortality.
At what price? A century of sleep? Brain damage for a few; Ernst and
Mary Ann and Carolyn and, yes, Terry, were paying the price for all. But for the rest: bruises and sprains, and maybe a few bad dreams? He had to laugh. The pilgrims who had founded the American continent had paid far more dearly to accomplish less.
Tau Ceti Four's colonials had it easy.
The air was suddenly cold. Raindrops spattered against his hands and the hood of the tractor.
"Shit-oh-dear," Mary Ann said, gazing up at the clouds. They coiled angrily in the sky like a vast heap of coals: black around the edges, fire flickering in the core. The lightning flashes were brighter and closer, and the thunder was no longer a distant rolling explosion.
"So much for the weather report, Mary Ann." The wind was whipping the rain into sheets, and he turned up his collar. "Come on, hop aboard-I'll give you a ride back to the shed."
She clipped a handful of green sprouts and stuffed them into her blouse pocket. She hunched her shoulders and clopped through the broken ground, climbed up behind him on the tractor and wrapped her arms around him. He felt her shiver as her breasts pressed into his back.