A terraforming crew was here seventy years back. They planted atmosphere-generators, and by now there’s a decent quantity of air, a little thin, but enough to support life. Unfortunately that causes a wind, which Higby V didn’t have previously, and the wind comes sweeping across those barren plains like a knife, scooping up the sand and swirling it around. Plant life is gradually taking hold and will keep the sand down, but not for a while. The current project here is to create a self-sustaining water supply by setting up a standard evaporation-condensation-precipitation cycle, and all along the horizon you can see the hydrolysis pylons turning gas into water day and night. The immediate effect of this is to produce one miserable downpour every five or six hours.
I shouldn’t crank too much however. If it weren’t for the erosion that all this rain and wind has caused lately, the High Ones site would never have been uncovered.
I can imagine a more congenial place to do archaeological field work, though. The temperature here hovers just above freezing all the time; the sky is never anything but gray; the sun is an old and tired one, and doesn’t break through the clouds very often; and there are no cities here, no settlements more elaborate than pioneer squatments, no recreation facilities, nothing. You have to be Dedicated to enjoy it out here.
“What use is this planet to anybody?” Jan Morten-son wanted to know. “Why did they bother terraforming’ it?”
Steen Steen suggested it might have radioactives. Mirrik squashed that stupid idea, pointing out that there were no metals heavier than tin here, and not much even of the lighter ones. Pilazinool believed the place had some strategic importance, maybe as a refueling stop or a monitoring station for the more valuable worlds in the next system over. But Leroy Chang, who has your true Harvard man’s knack for being anti-Earth wherever possible, blurted his own explanation for why we had converted this planet to a place fit for Earthmen: politics and greed. We grabbed it, he said, to keep anybody else from having it. Pure and simple imperialism. Dumb imperialism, too, since we’ve spent a couple billion credits a year since the turn of the century to maintain and develop a place that has no natural resources, no tourist potential, and no other intrinsic value.
Dr. Schein challenged this interpretation, and off everybody went on a political discussion. Except me. That’s one pocket I refuse to climb into.
While this was going on, Mirrik got bored and wandered away, and began digging up the turf just to have something to do. He tusked up a couple of tons of dirt in a restless way, stopped, peered into the hole he had made, and let out a booming yell. You’d have thought he accidentally had uncovered a cache of High Ones artifacts.
Well, he hadn’t. But he had found a burial ground of Higby V natives. Maybe eighty centimeters down, the extinct inhabitants of this planet had parked about a dozen specimens, complete with weapon points, bone necklaces, and long strings of what looked like teeth. The skeletons were short and squat, with huge hind legs and little grasping paws on top.
“Cover it up,” Dr. Schein ordered.
Mirrik protested. Since we were waiting around anyway for the military escort that was supposed to convoy us to our real work site, he wanted to amuse himself by digging this stuff. Saul Shahmoon was curious about it too. But Dr. Schein rightly pointed out that we had come here to excavate High Ones artifacts, not to fission around with the remains of minor local civilizations. We had no business disturbing this site; it would be a kind of vandalism if we did, since it rightfully belongs to archaeologists who are specialists in the Higby V native race. If there aren’t any such specialists now, there will be someday. Mirrik saw the logic of that and carefully backfilled what he had unearthed.
Score one for Dr. Schein. I admire professionalism.
At last our military escort arrived and transported us from the landing area to the collection of bubbleshacks that passes for Higby V’s greatest metropolis. There we had a vastness of triviations to take care of. Dr. Schein handled the job of making sure our funds had been transferred into a local account, so we’d be able to get food and supplies at the base PX. Such financial details are supposed to be handled automatically by Galaxy Central, but nobody with a proper reverence for stash ever assumes that Galaxy Central gets anything straight, which is why Dr. Schein checked. Checking involved plugging into the telepath hookup. The TP on duty was a surly vidj named Marge Hotchkiss, and if you ever hook horns with her in the course of your daily work, Lorie, give her a nasty overload for me, will you? This Hotchkiss person was plump and plain, with piggy little gray eyes and a very visible mustache. About thirty-five, I guess. Except for her TP powers she is probably an extraordinarily ordinary person, the kind normally destined for a life of quiet spinsterhood in some decayed rooming house; but out here she’s one of about fifty women on a planet populated by several thousand men, and that has made her arrogant beyond her station. When Dr. Schein asked her to make the hookup, she gave him a slicy smirk and insisted on his thumbprint first. He explained that he wasn’t drawing on his thumb account to make the call, that he was merely requisitioning credit information from Galaxy Central and didn’t have to pay. She wanted his thumb on record anyway. So he gave her the print, and then she took her sweet time about making the linkup. “Lots of interference on the line,” she told us.
Completely phony, that’s sure. The thing about telepathy that makes it the only practical means of interstellar communication, of course, is that there isn’t any interference, no static, no relativistic time-lag, none of the headaches and slowdowns you get in a normal communications channel. (Blot that “normal"! What I mean, of course, is “mechanical.") All that Marge Hotchkiss had to do was reach out, grab the next TP in the relay chain, and send our message heading at instantaneous propagation toward Galaxy Central. It was her pleasure to stall, though. Finally she put the message through, and confirmed that the credit balance transfer had been made.
Dr. Schein, Dr. Horkkk, and Pilazinool went off to register their thumbprints, or equivalent identifications, so they could draw against the account here. Saul Shahmoon was given the job of picking up our excavation permit from the base headquarters. The rest of us had nothing much to do for a while, and I started to make talk with the Hotchkiss creature.
“My sister’s in the TP network,” I said.
“Oh.”
“Her name’s Lorie Rice. She works out of Earth.”
“Oh.”
“I thought maybe you knew her. You TP people generally make contact with each other all over the place. Sooner or later you must come in touch with everyone else in the whole communications net.”
“I don’t know her.”
“Lorie Rice,” I said. “She’s very interesting; I have to say so. I mean, she has this wonderful curiosity about the whole universe, she wants to know everything about everything. That’s because she’s bedridden, she can’t get around anywhere much, and so the TP net sort of serves as eyes and ears for her. She gets to see the whole universe through other people’s eyes, via telepathy. And if you’d ever had any contact with her, you’d remember it, because—”
“Look, I’m busy. Go get sposhed.”
“Is that friendly? I’m just trying to make a little talk. You know, I miss my sister a whole lot, and it doesn’t cost you anything if I ask you if you’ve ever talked to her. I—”
She brushed me off by rolling her eyeballs up into her head so that only the whites showed. It was her cute way of announcing that she was going into another TP linkup.
“Cut yourself on your own slice,” I muttered, and turned away.