Green Grow The Rashes And Other Stories

by William Meikle

  ~-o0O0o-~

  And here I must take more care over my words. There are no histories that mention what I must tell, no pictures I can show you. Only what I have seen with my own eyes, and if I am to impress you with urgency, I must be clear in my intent.

  The flyer told me I was somewhere in the South Pacific. It looked little different to the spot where I had come upside, but as we descended I saw that the ice here was less compacted. Several darker patches showed. As I got closer, I could see there were stretches of broken ice and slush. I started to think there might even be open water available. The probe beeped a proximity alert warning as the flyer hovered ten feet above an island of rock, black against the ice all around.

  There was ore here, and a lot of it. The scan showed a seam, some one hundred feet deep in the rock. I quickly spotted that I would have to land and drill to get proof, for if the deposit was as large as it seemed to be, then more flyers would be needed to carry it back below to where it was needed.

  I put the flyer down on the flattest spot I could find. I did not need to get out to supervise the drilling; the on-board bot handled that. But I could not come all this way to merely sit in a bubble. Even despite the glowering stars overhead, my curiosity won over my fear. I put on a helmet and ventured outside, aware even as I did so that I was probably the first human to walk above ground for three centuries.

  I had to turn up the suit heater after just two steps. The helmet told me I had two hours power left, but I wasn’t worried. I just wanted a short walk, just enough to be able to brag about it back in the warren.

  The only sound was the steady grinding of drill on rock. My heads-up told me that the strata being drilled was sedimentary on top of schist, the drill currently penetrating rock that was over two hundred million years old, and going through a million years of sediment a second.

  All of which was secondary to the fact that I had just found a cave.