Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02
man who was strapping a spare air tank on one of his charges.
“He took it,” the ostler said. “Your friend. Said he was getting a head start, that you’d catch up with him.”
“Jorv?”
“Short chubby fellow, sort of a restless way with him? I told him that I wasn’t finished packing it up, but he said as long as it had enough air and power on the meter to get him there, it was good enough. He almost wouldn’t wait long enough for me to put in a reserve air tank. I said to him, you don’t want to go out there without one— never mind that you’re only one person in a life-support system that’s supposed to handle three.”
“How long ago?”
“About two hours.”
Bram turned to the others. “I don’t know what he’s up to, but we’d better run him down before he gets there.”
“We’ll have to triple up,” Jao said. He looked at the mound of gear they had brought with them, then his eye lit on the red-haired sociobiologist. “Why don’t you and Ame and Shira ride together, and Heln and I can squeeze in with all this equipment.”
The walkers loped side by side across the dim plain, stretching their legs of plastic and synthetic protein. Their yellow headlamps bored into the endless ribbon of rubblescape ahead of them. They had traveled far enough so that the tethered moon was at their backs, showing its shape like a child’s top. To their right was the bloated face of a disk, casting a rusty light. To their left were the deeps of space with a hoarfrost of stars.
“Not a sign of him,” Bram said.
“Don’t forget, he’s running lighter,” Ame pointed out.
She was squeezed against him on the narrow bench. On her other side, Shira’s bony hip dug into her. The lanky paleobiologist said, “He’s had a two-hour head start. But Jorv’s not a good driver. He’ll try to hurry his walker too much, and that’ll mean that its legs will just be churning around in midair a good deal of the time.”
“Could we have passed him somehow?”
“We can see clear to the edge on either side. We’d have noticed his lights.”
“ If he remembered to turn them on,” Shira said, and fell silent.
“We’ve been running for three hours,” Bram said. “We’ll be there soon. If we were going to catch up to him, we’d have done it by now.”
“Don’t worry, Bram -tsu.” Ame said. “Jorv is a very intelligent man. He won’t do anything too rash. All he wants to do is study them.”
“They may be studying him by now,” Bram said, and urged the walker on.
An hour later, the great pearly dome of the alien bubble grew out of the dimness ahead. There was no question of it appearing over the horizon—not on the diskworld. It simply became visible as a dot and grew larger.
Bram slowed the walker and approached at a trot. Jao, driving the other walker, fell in beside him.
The aliens were deploying around their bubble, queer sticklike creatures who hurried back and forth, carrying huge cone-shaped containers that they peeled open to reveal equipment and housing materials. Wheeled vehicles, whose barrel-shaped tires seemed to be clustered at one end leaving a tubular chassis projecting with an upward cant were being readied. All the activity was taking place under the glare of work lamps set up on tall stands around the perimeter of the camp.
“They like things bright,” Ame said, looking at the pool of light around the tremendous ball.
“Look, there’s Jorv’s walker,” Bram said.
The spindly vehicle, its bubble deflated, stood a short distance from the equipment-littered area of activity. There was no sign of Jorv himself.
“Collapsed bubble,” Bram said. “It should have rein-flated itself by now. I hope Jorv’s not—”
Shira tossed her head. “If I know Jorv, he was careless about getting out, that’s all. Walked away and left it unsealed.”
“Bram-tsu ,” Ame said. “Do you notice something strange?”
It struck Bram after a moment. “Yes, why aren’t there swarms of those creatures around the walker for a closer look at it? It’s just sitting there. Don’t they have any curiosity?”
“Maybe Jorv’s getting all the attention.”
“No, he isn’t.” Jao’s voice came through the suit radio. “There he is, wandering around in the middle of their camp, and they’re ignoring him.”
Bram spotted the human figure after a moment. Jorv was dawdling about in bemused fashion, pausing here and there to look at things that interested him. He
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