Forty Thousand in Gehenna (10 page)

“I think we could justify bothering this one,” Gutierrez said, without joy in the prospect.

“It’s not guaranteed to be as deep a burrow as they can get,” Jenks said. “After all, it’s new. I don’t think it would mean anything much if you dug into it. And the other mounds are all in protectorate.”

“Well, the bio department made the protectorate,” Norris said.

“The bio department won’t budge on that,” Gutierrez said. “Sorry.”

A silence. “Then what we have to do,” said Ogden, “is put it back across the river.”

“Look,” Norris said, “we could just put one of the building barriers up against it and if it tunnels under, then we’ll know, won’t we? A test. It’s on the riverside. It won’t be digging below the watertable, not without getting wet.”

“They’re gilled, aren’t they?”

“They may be gilled, but I don’t think any tunnels would hold up.” Norris squinted into the morning sun and considered a moment. “By the amount of dirt and the dryness of it—What’s the function of the mounds? You figure that out?”

“I think,” Gutierrez said, “it rather likely has something to do with the eggs. They do lay eggs. Probably an elaborate ventilation system, like some of the colony insects; or an incubation device, using the sun. I think when we get to examining the whole system, the orientation might have to do with the prevailing winds.”

“Let’s have a look,” said Jenks.

“All right.” Gutierrez stood up, brushed off his trousers and waited on Norris and Ogden, walked down the face of the last hill the earth-movers had stripped. They headed toward the mound, down across the grassy interval.

As they reached the trough, a stone’s cast from the mound of disturbed grass and dark earth, a darkish movement topped the crest of the mound and whipped up into full view, three meters long and muddy gray.

Everyone stopped. It was a simultaneous reaction. The safety went off Ogden’s rifle.

“Don’t shoot,” Gutierrez said. “Don’t even think of shooting. Just stand still. We don’t know what their eyesight is like. Just stand still and let it think; it’s likely to be curious as the ariels.”

“Ugly bastard,” Norris said. There was no dispute about that. The ariels prepared them for beauty, moved lively and lightly, fluttering their collar fronds and preening like birds. But the caliban squatted heavily on its ridge and swelled its throat, puffing out a knobbed and plated back collar, all one dull gray and smeared with black mud.

“That’s a little aggression,” Jenks said. “Threat display. But it’s not making any move on us.”

“Lord,” Ogden said, “if
those
start waddling through the base they’re going to need room, aren’t they?”

“It eats fish,” Gutierrez reminded them. “It’s more interested in the river than in anything else.”

“He means,” Jenks said, “that if you stand between that fellow and the river you’re a lot more likely to get run down by accident. It might run for its mound access; or for the river. If it runs.”

“Stay put,” Gutierrez said, and took a cautious step forward.

“Sir,” Ogden said, “we’re not supposed to lose you.”

“Well, I don’t plan to get lost. Just stay put. You too, Eva.” He started forward, moving carefully, watching all the small reactions, the timing of the raising and lowering of the knobbed collar, the breathing that swelled and diminished its pebbly sides. The jaws had teeth. A lot of them. He knew that. A thick black serpent of a tongue flicked out and retreated, flicked again. That was investigation. Gutierrez stopped and let it smell the air.

The caliban sat a moment more. Turned its head with reptilian deliberation and regarded him with one vertically slit jade eye the size of a saucer. The collar lifted and lowered. Gutierrez took another step and another, right to the base of the mound now, which rose up three times his height.

Of a sudden the caliban stood up, lashed its tail and dislodged clods of earth as it stiffened its four bowed legs and got its belly off the ground. It dipped its head to keep him in view, a sidelong view of that same golden, vertical-slitted eye.

That was close enough, then. Gutierrez felt backward for a step, began a careful retreat, pace by pace.

The caliban came down toward him the same way, one planting of a thick-clawed foot and a similar planting of the opposing hind foot, one two three four, that covered an amazing amount of ground too quickly. “Don’t shoot,” he heard Eva Jenks’ voice, and was not sure at the moment that he agreed. He stopped, afraid to run. The caliban stopped likewise and looked at him a body length distant.

“Get out of there,” Jenks yelled at him.

The tongue went out and the head lifted in Jenks’ direction. It was over knee high when it was squatting and waist high when it stood up; and it could move much faster than anticipated. The tail moved restlessly, and Gutierrez took that into account too, because it was a weapon that could snap a human spine if the caliban traded ends.

The collar went flat again, the head dipped and then angled the same slitted eye toward him. It leaned forward slowly, turning the head to regard his foot; and that leaning began to lessen the distance between them.

“Move!” Jenks shouted.

The tongue darted out, thick as his wrist, and flicked lightly about his booted, dusty foot; the caliban retracted it, serpentined aside with a scraping of sod, regarded him again with a chill amber eye. The tail swept close and whipped back short of hitting him. Then in remote grandeur the caliban waddled back and climbed its mound. Gutierrez finally felt the pounding of his own heart. He turned and walked back to his own party, but Jenks was already running toward him and Ogden was close behind, with Morris following.

Gutierrez looked at Jenks in embarrassment, thinking first that he had done something stupid and secondly that the caliban had not done what they expected: it had not gone through the several days of Highland-approach the probe team reported.

“So much for the book,” he said, still shaking. “Might be pushing on the mating season.”

“Or hunting.”

“I think we’d better try to establish a concrete barrier here, right on that hill back there.”

“Right,” Morris said. “And draw the line all around this area.”

Gutierrez looked back at the caliban, which had regained its perch on the mound. When animals violated the rules on a familiar world it indicated a phase of behavior not yet observed: nesting, for instance.

But curiosity in a species so formidably large—

“It didn’t follow the book,” he muttered. “And that makes me wonder about the rest of the script.”

Jenks said nothing. There was a limit to what bio ought to speculate on publicly. He had already said more than he felt politic; but there were people out walking the fields still relying on Mercury probe’s advice.

“I’d just suggest everyone be a bit more careful,” he said.

He walked back up the hill with the others following. The first front had sprinkled them with rain, quickly dried. There was weather moving in again that looked more serious—on the gray sea, out among the few islands which lay off the coast, a bank of cloud. There was that matter to factor in with the environment.

Might the weather make a difference in caliban moods?

And as for construction, if the weather turned in earnest—

“The foam’s not going to set too easy if we get that rain,” he said. “Neither will concrete. I think we may have to wait…but we’d better get to the maps and figure where we’re going to set that concrete barrier.”

“Two criteria,” the engineer said. “Protection from flood and our own access to areas we need.”

“One more,” Jenks said. “The calibans. Where they decide to go.”

“We can’t be warping all our plans around those lizards,” Morris said. “What I’d like to do instead, by your leave—is put a charged fence out here and see if we can’t make it unpleasant enough it’ll want to leave.”

Gutierrez considered the matter, nodded after a moment. “You can try it. Nothing that’s going to disturb the colony across the river. But if we can encourage this fellow to swim back to his side, I’d say it might be better for him and for us.”

Gutierrez looked at the clouds, and over his shoulder at the mounds, still trying to fit the behavior into patterns.

Day 58 CR

The fog retreated in a general grayness of the heavens, and the wind blew cold at the window, snapping at the plastic. The heat seemed hardly adequate. Conn sat wrapped in his blanket and thinking that it might be more pleasant, privacy notwithstanding, to move into the main dome with the others. Or he could complain. Maybe someone could do something with the heater. With all that expertise out there, gathered to build a world—surely someone could do something with the space heater.

Two weeks of this kind of thing, with the waves beating at the shore and driving up the river from a monster storm somewhere at sea: water, and water everywhere. The newly cleared fields were bogs and the machinery was sinking, even sitting still. And the chill got into bones and the damp air soaked clothes so that none of them had had warm dry clothing for as long as the fog had lain over them. Clothes stank of warmth and mildew. Azi lines huddled in the drizzle and collected their food at distribution points and went back again into the soggy isolation of the tents. How they fared there Conn had no true idea, but if they had been suffering worse than the rest of the camp, then Education would have notified the staff at large.

A patter began at the window, a spatter of drops carried by a gust. When the wind blew the fog out they had rain and when the wind stopped the fog settled in. He listened to the malevolent spat of wind-driven water, watched a thin trickle start from the corner that leaked; but he had moved the chest from beneath it, and put his laundry on the floor to soak up the leak that pooled on the foamset floor. There was no sound but that for a while, the wind and the beat of the drops; and solitude, in the thin, gray daylight that came through the rain-spattered plastic.

It was too much. He got up and put his coat on, waited for a lull in the rain and opened the door and splashed his way around to the front door of the main dome onto which his smaller one abutted, a drenching, squelching passage through puddles on what had been a pebbled walk.

He met warmth inside, electric light and cheerfulness, the heat of the electronics and the lights which were always on here; and the bodies and the conversation and the business. “Tea, sir?” an azi asked, on duty to serve and clean in the dome; “Yes,” he murmured, sat down at the long table that was the center of all society and a great deal of the work in the staff dome. Maps cluttered its far end; the engineers were in conference, a tight cluster of heads and worried looks.

The tea arrived, and Conn took it, blinked absently at the azi and muttered a Thanks, that’s all, which took the azi out of his way and out of his thoughts. A lizard scuttled near the wall that separated off the com room: that was Ruffles. Ruffles went anywhere she/he liked, a meter long and prone to curl around the table legs or to lurk under the feet of anyone sitting still, probably because she had been spoiled with table tidbits. Clean: at least she was that. The creature had come in so persistently she had acquired a name and a grudging place in the dome. Now everyone fed the thing, and from a scant meter long, she had gotten fatter, passed a meter easily, and gone through one skin change in recent weeks.

A scrabbling climb put Ruffles onto a stack of boxes. Conn drank his tea and stared back at her golden slit eyes. Her head turned to angle one at him directly. She flared her collar and preened a bit.

“Help you, sir?” That was Bilas, making a bench creak as he sat down close by, arms on the table. Non-com and special op colonel—they had no distinctions left. Protocols were down, everywhere.

“Just easing the aches in my bones. Any progress on that drainage?”

“We got the pipe in, but we have a silting problem. Meteorology says they’re not surprised by this one. So we hear.”

“No. It’s no surprise. We got off lightly with the last front.”

Another staffer arrived, carrying her cup—Regan Chiles dropped onto a bench opposite, scavenger-wise spotting a body in authority and descending with every indication of problems. “Got a little difficulty,” she said. “Tape machines are down. It’s this salt air and the humidity. We pulled the most delicate parts and put them into seal; but we’re going to have to take the machines apart and clean them; and we’re really not set up for that.”

“You’ll do the best you can.” He really did not want to hear this. He looked about him desperately, found fewer people in the dome than he had expected, which distracted him with wondering why. Chiles went on talking, handing him her problems, and he nodded and tried to take them in, the overload Education was putting on Computer Maintenance, because inexpert personnel had exposed some of the portable units to the conditions outside. Because Education had programs behind schedule…and shifted blame.

“Look,” he said finally, “your chain of command runs through Maj. Gallin. All this ought to go to him.”

A pursed lip, a nod, an inwardness of the eyes. Something was amiss.

“What answer did Gallin give you?”

“Gallin just told us to fix it and to cooperate.”

“Well, you don’t go over Gallin’s head, lieutenant. You hear me.”

“Sir,” Chiles muttered, clenched her square jaw and took another breath. “But begging the colonel’s pardon, sir—my people are going shift and shift and others are idle.”

“That’s because your department has something wrong, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll talk to the other departments.” He was conscious of Bilas at his elbow, witness to it all. “I stand by Gallin, you hear. I won’t have this bypassing channels.—Drink the tea, lieutenant; both of you. If we have any problems like that, then you keep to chain of command.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir,” Bilas murmured.

He stayed there, sipping the tea, himself and Chiles and Bilas; and soon others came up the table to intimate their troubles to him, so that his stomach knotted up again in all the discomfort he had left his quarters to avoid.