[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
And meanwhile Dolly had got up long enough to make him coffee and leave it on
the table. She herself went back to bed, where she was, or pretended to be,
sound asleep while he drank it, and dressed, and went out the door.
When I look at Audee, from this very great distance that separates us now, I
am saddened to see that he looks so much like a wimp. He wasn't, really. He
was quite an admirable person. He was a first-rate pilot, physi cally brave,
rough-and-tumble tough when he had to be, kind when he had a chance. I suppose
everybody looks wimpy from inside, and of course from inside is how I see him
now-from a very great distance inside, or outside, depending on what analog of
geometry you choose to apply for this metaphor. (I can hear old Sigfrid
sighing, "Oh Robin! Such digressions!" But then Sigfrid was never vastened.)
We all have some areas of wimpiness, is what I am trying to say. It would be
kinder to call them areas of vulnerability, and Audee simply happened to be
extremely vulnerable where Dolly was concerned.
But wimpiness was not Audee's natural state. For the next little bit of time
he was all the good things a person needed to be-resourceful, succoring the
needy, tireless. He needed to be. Peggys Planet had some traps concealed
beneath its gentle facade.
As non-Terran worlds go, Peggys was a jewel. You could breathe the air. You
could survive the climate. The flora did not usually give you hives, and the
fauna was astonishingly tame. Well-not exactly tame. More like stupid.
Walthers wondered sometimes what the Heechee had seen in Peggys Planet. The.
thing was, the Heechee were supposed to be interested in intelligent life-not
Page 20
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
that they seemed to have found much- and there was certainly not much of that
on Peggys. The smartest anims~1 was a predator, fox-sized, mole-slow. It had
the IQ of a turkey, and proved it by being its own worst enemy. Its prey was
dumber and slower than it was-so it always had plenty to eat-and its biggest
single cause of death was strangulation on food particles when it threw up
what it had eaten too much of. Human beings could eat that predator if they
wanted to, and most of its prey, and a lot of the biota in general . . . as
long as they were careful.
The ragged-ass uranium prospectors hadn't been careful. By the time the
violent tropical sunrise exploded over the jungle, and Waithers set his
aircraft down in the nearest clearing, one of them had died of it.
The medical team had no time for a DOA, so they flocked around the barely
living ones and sent Walthers off to dig a grave. For a time he had hopes to
pass the chore on to the sheepherders, but their flocks were scattered all
over. As soon as Waithers's back was turned, so were the shepherds.
The DOA looked at least ninety and smelled like a hundred and ten, but the tag
on his wrist described him as Selini Yasmeneh, twenty-three, born in a
shantytown south of Cairo. The rest of his life story was easy to read. So he
had scrabbled for an adolescence in the Egyptian slums, hit the miracle odds-
against chance of a passage for a new life on Peggys, sweltered in the ten-
tiered bunks of the transport, agonized through the
Of course, you realize the "wimpiness" Robin is excusing here isn't that of
Audee Waithers. Robin was never a wimp, except in the need to reassure himself
from time to time that he wasn't. Humans are so strange!
landing in the deorbiting capsule-fifty colonists strapped into a pilotless
pod, deorbited by a thrust from outside, shaken into terror on entry, the
excrement jolted out of them as the parachutes popped open. Nearly all the
capsules did in fact land safely. Only about three hundred colonists, so far,
had been crushed or drowned. Yasmeneh was that lucky, at least, but when he
tried to change careers from farming barley to prospecting heavy metals, his
luck ran out because his party forgot to be careful. The tubers they'd fed
themselves on when their store-bought food ran out contained, like almost
every obvious food source on Peggys, a vitamin C antagonist that had to be
experienced to be believed. They hadn't believed even then. They knew about
the risk. Everybody did. They just wanted one more day, and then another day,
and another, while their teeth loosened and their breath grew foul, and by the
time the sheepherders stumbled across their camp, it was too late for
Yasmeneh, and pretty close to the same for the others.
Walthers had to fly the whole party, survivors and rescuers together, to the
camp where someday the loop would be built, and already there were at least a
dozen permanent habitations. By the time he got back at last to the Libyans,
Mr. Luqman was furious. He hung on the door of Waithers's plane and shouted at
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]