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clared cheerfully. "Help us in exploring your world
and finding a few things you don't use yourselves,
and wonders will be granted gladly in return. It's
an old principle among my people. Among your own
ancestors." And just a touch illegal in this one instance,
that's all, she thought, but did not say to him.
"What sort of man is your hunting party leader?"
"That depends on where you're coming from,"
Logan told him enigmatically. She seemed ready to
explain further, but they had reached a door, and
Sal beckoned them to be silent. He held it open for
them and then remained behind while the other four
entered.
Hansen sat behind a narrow, curved desk which he
166
managed to give the appearance of wearing, like an
enormous plastic belt. The desk was piled high with
tape spools, cassettes, reams of paper, and dozens of
separate reports bound in simulated leather binders.
The walls were given over to shelves lined with books
and tape holders. The rear of the room was filled by
a floor-to-ceiling window which offered a panorama
of the Panta and the suffocating forest beyond.
As they entered, Hansen was staring at the screen
of a tape viewer mounted on a flexible arm. "Just
a moment, please. Jan, Kimi, good to find you alive."
He spoke without turning, his voice mellow, reassur-
ing.
His stature enhanced his middle-aged pudginess. He
was not much taller than Bom. Hair started halfway
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back on a forehead that seemed to be made from
dark putty and fell to his shoulders in long waves. Save
for the thick brush mustache which clung to his up-
per lip like a hibernating insect, his hair had turned
completely gray.
He was sweating despite the air-conditioning. In-
deed, that was the first thing Bom had noticed upon
entering the stationan apparently deliberate, abnor-
mal chill. Even on cool nights in the world, it rarely
got this cold.
Neither hun ter minded the extended wait. They
were fully occupied with studying the room and its
contents. Bom did not miss, however, the respectful
silence with which the tired, impatient Logan and
Cohoma waited.
Hansen touched a switch on the side of the viewer,
then pushed it back and away on its arm. It locked
into place out of his way as he turned to eye his
visitors. His right arm rested on an arm of the chair
and he rubbed at his perspiring forehead with the
other. He looked tired, and he was. Running this
station had prematurely aged as experienced and
toughened an old hand as Hansen. If it was not
something breaking down that he could not get re-
placements for because of the risk of a supply ship
running afoul of a Church or Commonwealth warship,
it was some nonmechanical crisis. It seemed like ev-
ery time one of his people put a foot on this world
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they were promptly stung, bitten, punctured, nibbled
at, or otherwise set upon by the local flora and
fauna.
Nor had he recovered from the loss of the life-
prolonging burl extracts, the burl itself, and Tsing-
ahn, the man who knew most about them. If only
that poor madman had not been so thorough in the
destruction of his notes and records! The news of
the biochemist's suicide and concurrent destruction of
everything relating to what had come to be called
the immortality extract had not gone over well with
Hansen's superiorsnot gone over well at all.
He did manage a slight grin as he examined the
two returned members of the skimmer team. The
mental lift provided by their miraculous survival had
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come at a badly needed time.
"We'd given you up for sure, for sure," he told
them. "Couldn't believe my ears when Security re-
ported four people standing at the edge of the forest."
A comer of his mouth twitched at the remem-
brance. "You two've caused me no end of trouble,
you know. Now I've got to re-call all the paperwork
detailing your deaths, the requests for replacements,
everything. Somebody in Budgeting's not going to like
you two."
"Sorry, Chief," Logan said, smiling back.
"Now," Hansen puffed expansively, leaning back
slightly in the chair and folding his hands over his
slight paunch, "tell me about your aboriginal acquaint-
ances, here." '
"They saved our lives," she replied, matter-of-factly,
"and I doubt they're aborigines, sir. Near as we can
figure, they're the descendants of the populace of a
colony ship that lost its way and wound up here.
They've lost the memory of that origin, all Common-
wealth and pre-Commonwealth knowledge, and nearly
all their technology. They have developed a rudimen-
tary tribal social structure. As a result, our friends
Born and Losting are convinced that they are in truth
natives of this world."
"And you're pretty certain they're not."
"That's right, sir," Cohoma chipped in. "Too many
similarities, an axe made of ship alloy, other things.
Same language, although they've developed a dialect
all their own, family structure is"
"Yes, yes," Hansen cut him off with a casual wave.
"Saved your lives too, did they? And brought you all
the way back through that rooted Hades out there-
how far did you say you'd come?" He cocked a quer-
ulous eye at Logan. She named a figure and the chief
of station whistled. "Just the four of you then, that
many kilometers through that?" He gestured over his
shoulder toward the window.
"Yes, sirand a couple of very domesticated ani-
mals." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]