by Jerry Oltion
"Not if you have the right password."
The inside of the building was divided into four rooms. Greg led him into the one in back on the left. It looked like a control room at NASA or something; there was a big desk with at least a dozen computer monitors surrounding the command chair, and there was a stack of short-wave radio transceivers off to the side. There were half a dozen conversations going on at once, turned down low, but still audible. One of the monitors showed the steady circling of the radar dish, and several specks of light flared as the refresh line swept over them.
Trent whistled softly. "I had no idea you were this hightech."
Greg laughed. "The computers and radios were bought used in Korea, and the radar is made from a microwave oven."
"An oven?"
"A magnetron's a magnetron. As long as it broadcasts microwaves, that's all you need. And a dish to pick up the reflections." He sat in the chair and pointed at the screen. "We've got nine incoming commuters this morning. There's usually ten, but Sergei's out with the flu."
"That's pretty good radar if it can tell you that."
Greg grinned. "We subversives have our ways. So would you take a bag of mail to a French colony?"
There was an extra chair beside the desk. Trent spun it around and sat on it backwards. "What happened to your regular courier?"
"He's out with the flu."
"Ah. And what makes you so sure you can trust me? I am an American, after all."
"So was I, until I moved here. We're not all a bunch of warmongering imperialists. You went to a lot of trouble to help somebody yesterday, and you're going to a lot more trouble to help them again today. Plus you're out here looking for work, despite your government trying to keep you locked away at home. Not your typical party-line American."
"I could be a spy, settin' you up to trust me."
"You could. In which case, you'll get to read a lot of letters to friends and family. Just make sure you put them back in the right envelopes before you deliver them."
Trent took a deep breath. A French colony. All his life, he'd been told that the French were stuck-up, hateful, anti-American bastards who opposed anything the U.S. did just out of spite. He didn't believe that any more than he believed that all Arabs were terrorists, but a lifetime of indoctrination hadn't exactly left him a Frog-lover, either. And he suspected the feeling was mutual.
"So we just pop into orbit, give them the password, and they welcome us with open arms?" he asked.
"Your contact does. You probably won't see anyone else."
"And if we do?"
"Say 'bonjour.'"
"Yeah, right." He could imagine how that would play out. "Are we supposed to bring a mail sack back here?"
"Normally, yes, but I doubt if they'll trust you that far."
Trent ran his fingers through his beard. "But you think they'll let us go once we know where the colony is?"
"The U.S. already knows where it is. Unfortunately. They've got no secrets anymore."
"Hmm." So they said. Trent watched the little blips descend through the radar screen for a minute, imagining him and Donna as a blip on a French radar screen. What else besides an old microwave oven would be pointed at them?
"How much does this pay?" he asked.
"A hundred bucks Australian. That's about two-forty American. Paid up front, because I trust you." Two hundred and forty bucks. A day's pay at a decent job. It would be good money for a simple jump and drop, but not nearly enough if anything went wrong. And Trent couldn't legally bring Australian money into the U.S., not since the Australians wound up on the uncooperative nation list. On the other hand, it might be good to have some non-U.S. money while he and Donna were in space. By the sounds of things, being a U.S. citizen outside the U.S. was even less of a good idea than he'd originally thought. And if they still had any cash left when they decided to go home, he supposed they could exchange it in Canada before they crossed the border.
"We just drop off the mail sack and we're free to go," he said. "No questions asked, no shots fired." Greg nodded. "That's right."
Trent drummed his fingers on the back of the chair. He should go ask Donna what she thought, but he already knew what she would say. A couple of hundred bucks and a chance to see a French colony and live to tell about it; of course she would want to go.
"All right," he said. "We'll do it. Where is it, and what's the password?" Greg wrote down a name and a set of coordinates on a piece of note paper. "The planet is called Mirabelle, and it's probably already in your preset destination list if you've got a recent update of your navigation software, but here's the coordinates in case it's not. Those are relative to here, so don't forget you're already 4.2 light-years from Sol if you use the coordinate system to go anywhere else from there." Trent made a mental note to tell Donna, even though she would probably already know that.
"When you get there, you'll see a continent shaped like this." Greg drew an elongated bird shape, and made a little circle on the upper back. "Right about here is a big crater, easy to spot from orbit. It's flooded, so it'll look like a perfectly circular lake. You want to land about ninety kilometers to the south of it, at the junction of two major rivers. Land on the east bank. It's a big, grassy plain, so you've got lots of room for error." He drew the rivers, and a squiggly circle for the plain.
"When does the password come in?" asked Trent.
"You'll use two of them, actually. The first one, on channel 8, just before you enter the atmosphere, you say 'Le facteur va attérir,' which means 'the mailman is landing,' and they'll say, 'Quel est le mot de passe,' and you say—"
"Hold on, hold on. You've got to write all that down."
"Sure." Greg jotted the words below the drawing of the continent. They didn't look much like they sounded. "Okay," he said. "Today's password for entry is 'poisson.'" Trent laughed nervously. "Poison? This is getting more cloak-and-daggerish by the second."
"Actually, poisson means fish."
"As in 'something's fishy here.'"
Greg looked hurt. "It's just a mail drop, I swear. But if you don't want to do it . . ."
"I said we'd do it." Trent took the note and read aloud, "Lee factor va a terrier."
"Spoken like a native."
"Yeah, right." He folded the note and went to stick it in his pocket, but then he remembered that Greg said he'd need two passwords. "I assume the other password is for when we turn over the mailbag to whoever's on the ground?"
"That's right. But this time it's you asking them for the word, so you know you're giving the mail to the right person."
"Makes sense." Trent supposed there were just as many French thieves who would steal a mail shipment as there were any other nationality. "So we say . . ." He opened the note. "We say 'Quel est le mot de passe,' and after they're done laughin' their asses off at our pronunciation, they say what?"
"Chapeau."
"Which means . . . ?"
"Hat."
"So we say 'fish,' and they say 'hat.' Got it. What else do we need to know?" Greg glanced at his radio rack. "Don't be too talky on the radio. You'll be safe enough while you're still in space, but it'll put them on the spot. They don't like transmitting too much from one point on the ground."
"Why not?"
"It gives the bombs a signal to home in on."
They looked at one another for a few long seconds before Trent said, "Bombs."
"Actually, just rocks coming in at high velocity, but they have about the same effect. The U.S. hits anything that looks like a military installation."
Trent looked around the dispatch office, and felt the hair standing up on the back of his neck. "Like a radar base?"
Greg nodded. "Yeah, like that. This'll be one of the first targets if Nick's right about the future of Alpha Centauri."
"But you don't think he is."
"Not for a while yet. Maybe never, if public opinion back home changes fast enough. But there's a reason the guy with the American voice is running the radios."
Trent supposed there was some sense in that. It was probably a lot easier to bomb somebody who didn't speak your language.
He looked at the map again. "That crater to the north, there. How new is it?"
"About two months."
"And you can see it from orbit?"
Greg nodded. "They were setting up a smelter. Big no-no."
"I guess." Trent stuck the paper in his wallet, and the five orange $20 bills that Greg gave him, wondering what he'd just gotten himself and Donna into. It looked like they'd find out soon enough. The mailbag was just a big canvas sack about the size of an army duffel, and weighed maybe fifty pounds. Trent laid it on the floor of the camper where it couldn't roll around too much, then he went to the front and unplugged the charger. Donna had already shut off the compressor when the air tanks were full, so they were ready to roll.
The drive back to the aliens' landing site was much more fun in daylight. It was a lot easier to see where they were going, for one thing, and this time they had a chance to look at the scenery, too. The sun was coming in low to their left, lighting up the mountains full on and making them seem like they were towering over the town, even following the pickup out onto the plain. Trees to their right glowed silver in the morning light, and the ones to their left made dark silhouettes with silver halos around their edges. Houses peeked out between them, and little white columns of smoke rose from chimneys as people got up and started their day.
Nobody seemed inclined to try a pantomime conversation with so much to look at, so Donna slotted a disk into the player and everyone bopped and sang along to the music while Trent drove. They angled away from the Firehose, but the river was easy to spot even from a couple miles away. It was a solid wall of vegetation meandering from Bigtown all the way to the horizon. Off in the distance, where the trees blended into a single color, it looked like a piece of Christmas ribbon standing on edge. Every now and then another piece of ribbon would join it, and the Firehose would get wider and taller. The ground between streams was much more open. People had plowed and planted crops for miles around town, which made Trent glad they had found the road on their way in last night. He could have ripped a long swath through a couple of dozen farms if he had just driven in cross-country. The only open water was in the irrigation ditches that led from the Firehose to the fields. Trent wondered if the ditches would soon be choked with vegetation, too. It looked like plants here really huddled around water, which meant it must get good and dry in the summertime. It already felt like summertime, but Trent had no idea what season it really was. Donna could probably figure it out from space just by looking at the way the sunlight hit the planet, and Nick's sweetie, Glory, could probably calculate it from the angle of the Milky Way in the night sky or something, but Trent didn't have a clue. He wondered if Nick had known when he'd landed here. It was hard to believe those two were really going to play Adam and Eve somewhere. Trent didn't even like camping out for more than a week or so; he couldn't imagine someone living off the land for the rest of their lives. If he were Nick—hell, if he were Glory—he would make damn sure their hyperdrive still worked and their ship still held air for years to come, but they didn't seem concerned about that at all. Different strokes for different folks, he guessed. A lot of people thought he and Donna were nuts for sticking around Rock Springs, for mostly the same reasons he thought Nick and Glory were nuts. Too rural, nothing to do, no shopping, no culture, no whatever else people who didn't like the place thought was important. They didn't see what it did have, the rugged beauty of the rock outcrops, the wide open feel of the high desert, the sense of community you felt when you knew not only the people on both sides of your house but the people on both sides of you in the phone book.
It got pretty dry there in the summer, too. Rock Springs didn't even have as much vegetation in its riverbeds as they had around here on the flats. Of course the rivers were dry most of the year, and it was pretty generous to call Bitter Creek or Killpecker Creek rivers in the first place. And the altitude was enough to make the air seem twice as dry as it actually was, and make your blood as thick as soup to boot. When he thought about it in those terms, nobody in their right mind would pick Rock Springs to settle in, not with so many more hospitable places right there on Earth, but somebody had started a town there a hundred years or so ago, and a lot more somebodies had moved in.
He looked at Onnescu rolling past under his wheels. Little bulb-shaped blue flowers dotted the ground where it hadn't been plowed, and bushes with red branches and purplish-green leaves covered the hillsides. There were even rock outcrops. It was pretty enough, and there were certainly enough wide open spaces to suit just about anybody, but it didn't call to him the way the countryside back home did. It wasn't just the threat of war with the U.S., either, though that certainly put a damper on his enthusiasm. He just wasn't sure if anything would measure up to the place he'd spent his entire life. He owed it to Donna to give it a shot. She had always wanted to get out of that two-bit mining town and see the world. He laughed quietly to himself when he thought of the next world she would see. A French colony. Who'd have thought?
They found the Greenwall easily enough, and by daylight they could see that it was just the next drainage coming down out of the mountains south of the Firehose. The road led them directly to the ford, but from there they were on their own. Tire tracks led off in several directions, but none of them were clearly from Trent's pickup, and the tracks petered out in just a few hundred yards anyway. Trent drove up to the top of a hill and pulled to a stop. From up there they could see for miles in every direction, but they couldn't see Katata's landing site, not even when Trent got out the binoculars and scanned the terrain ahead of them.
"Well," he said, "I guess we'll have to do this by dead reckoning. We were camped closer to the mountains by a mile or two, and we headed pretty much south from there, so I think we need to angle that way." He pointed at about a thirty-degree angle toward the mountain from south. "Does that seem right to you?"
"As right as anything," Donna said. "Katata, what do you think?" She pointed out toward the south. Katata looked out over the rolling hills and writhed her tentacles left and right over the dashboard, like a pair of snakes thinking about striking the windshield. At last she settled on roughly the same direction that Trent had pointed, and said. "Baktataka."
Talana said. "Ti, ti!" and pointed farther to the left. Then of course Dixit spoke up with a squeal and pointed to the right, waving both of his tentacles out the passenger window. Trent laughed. "Well, if we average everybody out, we're in pretty good agreement." He picked out as much of a route as he could see from the hilltop, then drove down onto flatter ground and tried to follow it from memory.
He climbed another hill every quarter mile or so to keep his bearings. From the fourth one, they could see something glinting in the sun quite a ways to the left of where he thought the landing site should be, but when he checked with the binoculars he could see the silvery parachute hanging from a tree, flapping softly in the morning breeze.
"That's it," he said.
Katata spoke excitedly with her kids, and they squealed in delight.
"Next stop, your new home," Trent said.
That turned out to be overly optimistic. It took a couple more hilltop reconnoiters to correct their path, because Trent kept steering too far to the left. It was all the hills and gulleys in the way; he had to pick a direction around them, and he was always a little off in his guess when he tried to head the same direction on the other side. It had actually been easier navigating by Orion last night. Katata and her family were a long ways out of town. Twenty miles didn't seem like much on a civilized planet, but out here, without a vehicle, they might as well be doing the Adam and Eve thing. He hoped they could grow and hunt all the food they needed, because there wasn't going to be much grocery shopping in town for them.
At last they topped a rise and saw the parachute and the water-tank spaceship in the grassy meadow below. And now that they had day
light, they could see the stream that ran along the edge of the meadow just a couple hundred yards away.
"You know," Trent said, "You guys picked a decent spot. You just might do okay here." When they drew closer, they could see that the father and the child who had stayed behind had been busy. A bright yellow tent stood beside the water tank, and the animals had been released from their cages and tethered outside. A corral made of branches from the brush along the stream was about half finished.
The youngster ran out to greet them as they drove up, the yappy mop pet right at his heels. Big, ungainly birds flew up into the air ahead of them, squawking indignantly as they flapped off to the sides and landed again. The father, Magalak, came out from around the side of the tank to see what all the commotion was about, and when he realized who it was he dropped his axe and ran after his son, scaring the birds all over again.
Katata and the kids bounded out of the truck the moment it came to a stop, and everyone leaped together in a big family hug. Tentacles snaked over and around their bodies like ropes, and Katata and Magalak nuzzled their noses into each other's necks like vampires going for the jugular. Magalak lifted Dixit into the air and swung him around, and Talana proudly showed off her cast for all to see. Katata made Magalak hold still while she inspected his head wound, but it must have looked all right to her, because she didn't linger on it. Instead she gave him another squeeze and went for his neck again.
"Well," Trent said, a little embarrassed at watching them smooch it up, "it certainly looks like they're happy to see one another."
He and Donna got out of the truck, and Katata rushed over to them and babbled something full of k's and t's and a's, gripping their hands in her tentacles and tugging them from side to side.
"You're welcome," Trent said, and Donna said, "You'd have done the same for us, I'm sure." Magalak came over and spoke more solemnly, but just as unintelligibly, and Trent and Donna said
"You're welcome," half a dozen more times; then Katata said something to Talana and Talana came over and they repeated the whole exchange.
