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they were geophones, and they had to be set in a receiving array kilometers in
length. Moreover, they had to drop from at least twenty meters to be sure to
penetrate the surface and stand upright so that their readings would be
trustworthy, and each one bad to be placed within a circular error of two
meters. It did Walthers no good to point out that these requirements were
mutually contradictory, so it was no surprise to him that when the
truck-mounted vibrators did their thing the petrological data were no use at
all. Do it over, said Mr. Luqman, and so Walthers had to retrace his steps on
foot, pulling out the geophones and hammering them in by hand.
What he had signed on to do was pilot, but Mr. Luqman took a broader view. Not
just trudging around with the geophone spikes. One day they had him digging
for the ticklike creatures that were the Peggys equivalent of earthworms,
aerating the soil. The next they gave him a thing like a Roto-
Rooter, which dug itself down into the soil a few dozen meters and pulled out
core samples. They would have had him peeling potatoes if they had eaten
potatoes, and did in fact try to lumber him with all the dishwashing-backing
off only to the extent that it was finally agreed to do it in strict rotation.
(But Walthers noticed that Mr.
Luqman's turn never seemed to come.) Not that the chores weren't interesting.
The ticklike bugs went into a jar of solvent and the soup that resulted became
a smear on an electrophoresis sheet of filter paper. The cores went into
little incubators with sterile water, sterile air, and sterile hydrocarbon
vapors. They were both tests for oil. The bugs, like termites, were deep
diggers. Some of what they dug through came back to the surface with them, and
electrophoresis would sort out what it was that they carried back. The
incubators tested for the same thing in a different way. Peggys, like Earth,
had in its soil microorganisms that could live on a diet of pure hydrocarbons.
So if anything grew on the pure hydrocarbons in the incubators, that sort of
bug had to be what was growing there, and it would not have existed without a
source of free hydrocarbons in the soil.
In either case, there would be oil.
But for Waithers the tests were mostly stoop-labor drudgery, and the only
surcease from them was to be ordered back into the aircraft to tow the
magnetometer again or to drop more spikes. After the first three days he
retired to his tent to pull out his contract printout and make sure he was
required to do all these things. He was. He decided to have a word with his
agent when he got back to Port Hegramet; after the fifth day he was
reconsidering. It seemed more attractive to kill the agent . . . But all the
flying had one beneficial effect. Eight days into the three-week expedition,
Walthers reported gladly to Mr. Luqman that he was running low on fuel and
would have to make a ifight back to base for more hydrogen.
When he got to the little apartment it was dark; but the apartment was neat,
which was a pleasant surprise; Dolly was home, which was even better; best of
all, she was sweetly, obviously delighted to see him.
The evening was perfect. They made love; Dolly fixed some dinner; they made
love again, and at midnight they sat on the opened-out bed, backs propped
against the cushioning, legs outstretched before them, holding hands and
sharing a bottle of Peggys wine. "I wish you could take me back with you,"
Dolly said when he finished telling her about the New Delaware charter. Dolly
wasn't looking at him; she was idly fitting puppet heads on her free hand, her
expression easy.
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"No chance of that, darling." He laughed. "You're too good-looking to take out
in the bush with four horny Arabs. Listen, I don't feel all that safe myself."
She raised her hand, her expression still relaxed. The puppet she wore this
time was a kitten face with bright red, luminous whiskers. The pink mouth
opened and her kitten voice lisped, "Wan says they're really rough. He says
they could've killed him, just for talking about religion with them. He says
he thought they were going to."
"Oh?" Walthers shifted position, as the back of the daybed no longer seemed
quite so comfortable. He didn't ask the question on his mind, which was
Oh, have you been seeing Wan? because that would suggest that he was jealous.
He only said, "How is Wan?" But the other question was contained in that one,
and was answered. Wan was much better. Wan's eye was hardly black at all now.
Wan had a really neat ship in orbit, a Heechee Five, but it was his personal
property and it had been fixed up special-so he said; she hadn't seen it. Of
course. Wan had sort of hinted that some of the equipment was old Heechee [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]