America 2040 - Golden World Part 14

Paul made one last check on the monitoring system. The miner obliged by giving him a little blip, one more turn of that drill of a snout down below. The thing was still twenty feet down, and it would take a long time for him to reach the surface with that slow, careful, and almost silent digging. Paul activated his perimeter guard, and invisible beams surrounded his campsite. He turned on the red light of the alarm to warn the admiral when he returned that the guard beams were on. Omega's pure, ocean-scented air and his tiredness made for instant sleep.

He awoke sitting up in one swift movement with his laser in his hands and the monitor alarm going crazy.

The miner in the tunnel was moving at top speed, sc.r.a.pe-sc.r.a.ping frantically. Paul flipped a switch to illuminate the area with the crawler's lights and crouched in a ready position, weapon aimed at a circular mound of fresh earth. He was ready to blast away if the miner did anything more than poke his head up out of the hole. But the sounds of the monitor told him that the miner was retreating.

What the h.e.l.l? He checked the monitor to be sure he wasn't hearing things. The miner was reaching a point near the limit of the range, and then the sounds stopped. Paul edged closer to the fresh earth. He didn't quite understand how the thing had come up through almost twenty feet of subsoil so quickly, but it had, and there'd been an explosion of fresh dirt, which made a little mound around the hole through which the miner had emerged. The hole was not neatly dug, and the amount of fresh earth indicated that the powerful miner had simply pushed his way violently through the last few feet.

Warden got on the communicator. Emi Zuki was on duty. He reported the odd events but told Emi that it wouldn't be necessary to wake the captain or to send any reinforcements. The admiral, monitoring, broke in to tell Warden that he was on his way. Warden edged in closer to the fresh mound of soil, because there was something reflecting the beams of light. The monitor told him there was nothing down there but an empty tunnel, but he approached warily, ready to fire and flee at the same time.

There was only one object on the mound of fresh soil that was glittering, glowing in the bright lights. Paul held his breath and leaned forward and picked it up. It was rather heavy. It reminded him of a sea fan, that delicate underwater plant that extends leafless, feathery arms outward from a central stem. He moved out of the direct glare of the spots and examined the thing. When he tried to hold it by one of the irregularly shaped arms, the arm bent. There was a heavy, metallic feel, and the color was a rich red-gold.

He knew that Stoner McRae had returned that evening from an expedition into the inland badlands. He got Emi back on the communicator, and very shortly Stoner was answering in a sleepy voice. Stoner came awake quickly as he listened to Paul. He was standing beside Warden's crawler within ten minutes, holding metal, heavy metal, in his hands.

"Is it what I think it is?" Paul asked.

"It's gold, all right," Stoner said, holding the multiarmed, feathery formation carefully. He'd seen natural veins of gold removed intact from the matrix rock before; it made for a certain natural beauty. But he'd never seen so complex a vein, so large a vein, with the tiniest veins so fragile that they would bend at a touch.

"This is the way the molten gold formed as it ran into faults in the forming rock," Stoner explained.

What he couldn't explain was how such a c.u.mbersome thing as a miner could so delicately remove matrix rock without disturbing or distorting the delicate gold formation. And neither of them could explain why the miner had, for days, dug so carefully, obviously trying to avoid detection by the monitors, to burst up into the night air violently and leave such a precious gift.

"But it's more significant than just this gold, Paul," Stoner said. "If there's gold, there'll be other heavy metals."

"Rhenium," Paul said.

"Rhenium," Stoner agreed.

TWELVE.

Theresita had slept fitfully through a long night that cooled only slightly. She awoke to the first dim light filtering down from high above to find herself still soaked, sticky, and dehydrated. The pain she had expected from the cut on her thigh had not materialized. She climbed down from the bole of the fallen tree, drank from the water puddled in the cavity left when the tree's roots had been ripped from the earth, and then began to push her way through the dense undergrowth.

She had no definite goal; it was just that she'd spent enough time perched atop the fallen tree. She had, during wakeful periods, accepted her situation: She would die; the untreated cut on her thigh would become infected, and that, combined with starvation, would kill her.

If she had been dumped alone into an African jungle, she would have thought about survival. She had been given two weeks of an excellent survival course when her African service had begun, and she'd learned to eat some very odd things. But this was a jungle on an alien planet, and there was no survival manual to tell her which plant roots were edible and which were deadly poison, which fruits would give her body the fuel it needed to function and which would, with some deadly alien substance, stop all functions altogether.

The heat increased rapidly as the sun rose higher in the eastern sky, and the filtered light made visibility better far down under the treetops. Things were moving in the trees high above her. She saw a variety of birds and once, with a rustle of sound, something larger than a bird pa.s.sed overhead, masked by thedense foliage.

She had no destination. She tried to keep moving in a straight line, in the southerly direction of the flow of the river, by keeping the glow of the sun to her left. She had to push her way through a great tangle of vines and low-growing, huge-leafed things that retained water on their surface, so that she was constantly wet with that and her own sweat.

She heard a great chattering ahead, the sound quite like that of the African jungles, and then she could see the source of the noise. Birds. Mauve, they stood about a foot high, and they were congregated in and around a type of tree she had never seen before. It had ladderlike branches growing perpendicular to its trunk, and the birds were eating its fruit. Half-eaten fruit lay atop the undergrowth. She picked up one.

About the size of a large grapefruit, the exposed flesh had a deep-green color and smelled slightly acidic.

She tore away that part of the fruit that had been pecked and pitted by the birds and touched her tongue gingerly to taste. It wasn't bad.

She looked at the fruit, held it out in front of her, and laughed, for she was suddenly reminded of a scene from an ancient English drama by Shakespeare, in which Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, was holding a skull and saying, "Alas."

"Alas," she said.

Her mouth was watering. She had not realized how hungry she was until she'd touched her tongue to the fruit. She had a simple choice: If she didn't eat, she would die; if she ate, she might die faster. She ate.

Tangy juice ran down her chin. The fruit had a seed core at the center, but the flesh was edible from the thin skin to the core. The consistency was figlike, the taste totally unfamiliar, but tart like a citrus fruit. It was very good, so good that she found herself stuffing huge bites into her mouth and then, thinking that the fruit on the lowest branches, which were probably twenty feet off the ground, had not been pecked by the birds, she hitched up her skirt, leaped to seize a low branch, and clambered up until she could reach a large fruit. Surprisingly, there was no pain from the wound in her thigh. But as she ate the fruit, she waited for the pains to start in her stomach. When there were no stomach pains, Theresita began to pluck other fruit and drop it down onto the cus.h.i.+oning carpet of undergrowth.

The birds had quieted when she began to climb the tree, but now they were squabbling and eating again, one of them walking sideways on a limb level with her head to c.o.c.k his eye at her from a distance of five feet.

"Watch it," she warned. "You might be edible, too."

A quick shower swept over as she was perched in the tree, and she waited it out there, hearing the roar of heavy drops on the canopy above her and then the drip, drip as it began to soak through. When the rain stopped, she had decided that she might just live for a while after all. Her leg wound had formed a good scab. Because the cut had been deep, she'd expected very slow healing, if any. Perhaps, she thought, there was something in the river mud that aided healing. It didn't really matter. It would either heal or it wouldn't.

It was very hot. She had torn her skirt in several places moving the short distance she'd covered. Her hose were nothing much more than runs but would still be useful. She removed them, stuffed both legs full of the fruit, and slung the makes.h.i.+ft bag around her neck, letting the filled legs dangle down in front. That way she had both hands free for making her way through the undergrowth. Water was no problem. The rain had left clear, good-tasting little pools in the hollow cups of the big-leafed plants. They grew about as high as her head, so that to drink she had only to tilt a leaf and let the water run into her mouth.

She could tell when she was getting close to the river, for the jungle floor, piled deep in detritus, became soggy. She would sink down into the rotted vegetation, and water would spring up in her tracks. Now and then she'd come across a tree so recently fallen that it had not begun to rot into the jungle floor and she'd rest. She made her lunch on one of the fruit and pushed on toward the south, but the river was apparently making a westward bend, so in the late afternoon the sun was in her face when she found another fallen tree and spent the night atop it.

She had a few bad moments when the light awakened her. There just didn't seem to be much point in going on. She doubted if she'd covered a mile the day before, pus.h.i.+ng, crawling, struggling through the denseness. And she'd seen the jungle extending in all directions to the horizon as the scout s.h.i.+p fell toward the river. For all she knew, the whole planet could be jungle. She might spend years not seeing anything but omnipresent green and just a hint of the glow of the sun through the jungle curtain.

She added to her menu a large, thin-sh.e.l.led nut when she saw it being eaten by a long-limbed tree creature, which had a long tail, a body like a cat, and a short snout with crocodile teeth. The nut meat was oily and substantial.

When she was still alive the next morning without ill effects from the things she'd eaten, Theresita experienced a change in her att.i.tude. Living beat the alternative. She would have done just about anything for a bath and then just five minutes of being dry. These would be possible only if she found her way out of the jungle.

She stumbled onto a wide path beaten down into a residue of dead vegetation. A quick examination of the path sent a chill up her spine. On her first day in the jungle she had heard great cras.h.i.+ng noises. This path had been pushed through the jungle by something of great weight, big enough to flatten and crush small trees four inches in diameter. Along the perimeter of the path were deep, regularly s.p.a.ced gouges, which had torn down through the vegetation to the gray soil.

She didn't like the idea of meeting whatever it was that had made the path, but it made for easy walking.

It was a relief to be able to walk without pus.h.i.+ng her way; it gave her a feeling of accomplishment, for she had covered, she estimated, at least two miles before the path turned directly away from the river.

She selected her place for the night more carefully.

She had no desire to be awakened by something as big as the creature that had crushed its way through the tangled jungle. She climbed the horizontal limbs of a fruit tree and broke off small branches to make a sort of nest, which she found to be quite comfortable.

She crossed another path at midmorning, and she found her first tool. She saw what she thought was a stone half-covered by crushed leaves. Since a stone can be a weapon or a tool, she bent to pick it up. It was rounded on three sides, quite flat, not more than a half-inch thick at the thickest part, and narrowed to a dull edge. It was grayish-white, smooth on the underside, and sandpaper textured on the top. The edge was not sharp enough to be used as a cutting tool but could be made so if she could find something to use as a grindstone.

Now the going was very hard again as she stayed just outside the limits of the river swamplands. Her bare legs were scratched and bleeding. Her sodden tunic protected her arms somewhat, at the expenseof many pulls and rips. She was exhausted before the afternoon had been used up. She found a fruit tree and repeated her nest-building activities from the night before and was asleep, her stomach full of fruit and nuts, before the total darkness came to that world under the jungle's knitted canopy. She came awake with a grunt of pure panic, dreaming that she was falling. She hugged a limb with both arms just as the tree shook violently. She heard the sound of falling fruit, then a dry, grinding sound and the crackings of breaking limbs and twigs.

The darkness was so total that she could see nothing, but she could hear and sense the presence of something very large there twenty feet below her on the ground.

"Stop that, you crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" she screamed as the tree shook again. She had to hang onto the limb to keep from being dislodged.

Her voice brought a response, a terrific roar that seemed to fill all available s.p.a.ce and echo off the surrounding trees. In quick fear she climbed higher, b.u.mping her head painfully on a branch. She wrapped her arms around a large limb and clung to it as the tree began to shake with a renewed and more frenzied a.s.sault. She feared that the tree would fall and that she would fall with it down into that terrible blackness and into the reach of the huge, roaring thing.

When dawn came, her fear increased. She could make out the outline of something as large as a front-line battle tank, and as the light grew slowly she saw a ma.s.sive, scarab-shaped body with, apparently, no head. Six short, powerful legs, a thick trunk, which ended in a single pointed horn, churned the jungle floor as the thing flung itself at the bole of the tree and collided with a resounding thud and a jar that shook the entire tree. The six legs scrambled, digging, pulling the ma.s.sive body backward.

The body seemed to have scales. Theresita, as much in anger at herself because of her pounding heart and dry mouth as at the beast, plucked a fruit and threw it violently. It struck the scaled body near the front, and the churning legs stopped moving. The gray body extruded a bony roundness, which was followed by a scaly neck, and then the head lifted toward her to show her cold, gla.s.sy eyes and a beak that opened in a challenging roar to expose fields of needle-sharp teeth.

"Ugly b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" Theresita shouted, throwing another fruit, which struck the beast directly in its opened, roaring mouth. The roar ceased immediately, but the head jerked spasmodically and the fruit was expelled, followed by an even wilder roar. The head withdrew just in time for the front part of the body to smash into the bole. This time she heard the roots crack and saw the matted ground covering lift at the base of the tree. The d.a.m.ned thing was actually going to push the tree over with a few more charges.

Theresita looked around frantically. Far above her the fruit tree's upper branches joined the tangled canopy. She began to climb. She was hampered by her food supply, fruit and nuts in the legs of her hose dangling from her neck, so she stopped and threw them one by one at the armored monster and then resumed her climbing. She could find more fruit and nuts, but she wanted to hang onto the hose.

The tree's limbs got smaller and the swaying more p.r.o.nounced as the battering continued far below, but she would not look down. She was at least a hundred feet above the ground when she held her breath and reached out to grab a limb from another tree. She pulled herself onto it and crawled down its slope to the bole of a true giant and rested there, panting as the fruit tree she'd just left began to fall, its limbs breaking with sharp, shotlike sounds. It couldn't fall all the way, since it was held up by surrounding growth. The beast, all six legs churning, threw its tons of weight up onto the sloping tree trunk, and with a groaning, grinding crash the tree fell to crush the undergrowth. The beast toppled off with a thud and scrambled forward, long neck extended, mouth open, searching for her. Frustrated, it roared, dashed around, crus.h.i.+ng undergrowth, and after about a half hour, went cras.h.i.+ng off into the jungle, until shecould hear the cras.h.i.+ng no more.

Theresita was over a hundred feet high, and the limbs on her tree grew to an incredible size nearer the ground. There was no way down, so she went up. Crawling along limbs, clinging to smaller limbs and hand-walking, she progressed toward a section of tangled, climbing vines that obscured the huge trunks of several trees. She had to rest frequently. She made her way into the green tangle of the vines, found runners as thick as her wrist, and tested them to see if they would hold her weight. A half hour later she was on the jungle floor, picking up fallen fruit to restock her supply and finding another of the sandpaperlike rocks, which she knew now as scales from the battering-ram beast.

She tapped the two scales together and made a solid clink. She rubbed the dull, narrow edge of one against the sandpapery side of the other, and by exerting pressure, she could see results. The dulled edge began, after two hours' work, to take on a sharpness. She now had a cutting tool. It was sharp enough and strong enough to whittle through a two-inch sapling to give her another tool, a staff that could be used as a light club.

She pushed through the jungle until she found another fruit tree, checked to be sure that there was an avenue of escape from the upper branches, and built her nest high. It was still early, but she had work to do. The wood of the fruit tree was rather soft. She cut off a limb and laboriously whittled off a two-inch section about two feet long, split one end, drove one of the scales down into the split, and bound it there with one leg of her hose. Now she had not only a cutting-edged tool, but a weapon. She estimated that, at best, she could travel a mile a day through the jungle. She had no way of knowing which direction would offer the most immediate relief. For all she knew she might, by following the flow of the river, be heading into the heart of the jungle instead of out of it. At a mile a day it would take over three months to travel a hundred miles. And if she had two hundred miles, three hundred miles, or more to travel? She shuddered. She was already losing weight. A diet of fruit and nuts was exotic for one day, but she longed for something a bit more substantial.

The river seemed to be the only solution. The next morning she forced her way to the beginning of the river swamp and waded through. She didn't try to keep the mud off the healing wound on her thigh; indeed, the mud seemed to take the sting out of her many scratches.

The river was brown, muddy, and wider than it had been at the site of the crash of the scout s.h.i.+p. The mud flats were more exposed and difficult to cross. She'd have to find a better site. She began, slowly and laboriously, to make her way downstream, staying in the muddy swampland. She sank quite often up to her midthighs in the soft mud and had to struggle out. The going was slow and tiring. The river was making a slow swing toward the west; to her right the jungle seemed to encroach on the fringe of swampland. And then she was walking on matted jungle floor.

There was an almost imperceptible rise, and the higher ground extended to the river, so that for a few yards ahead there was a riverbank. This, then, would be her construction site. Here she would build a raft. She surveyed it and was pleased.

The jungle giants grew down to the water's edge, and among them was a tree laden with the figlike fruit, with the ladderlike horizontal limbs made for climbing. She saw a likely place for a nest site about twenty-five feet up. She was tired, but she made her way away from the river for a few yards, found a tree of six inches diameter, and began to use her "hatchet" to see just how difficult it was going to be to cut down the tree. It was d.a.m.ned difficult, she discovered, with the first lick, the wood so hard that she feared she'd broken her blade. She tried another type, being careful not to strike hard enough to ruin her tool, and the blade chipped away rough bark. She went to work eagerly and in two hours' time had the tree cut, branches trimmed, and the six-inch trunk cut to a ten-foot length. She dragged the pole back to the river. She had noticed that a certain type of vine often had long stringers going down into the water and that that portion of the vine in the water lost its bark. She cut a length of it to find it flexible and so strong that she couldn't break it. She notched one end of the pole, tied the vine to it, and secured the other end to a tree. She left the pole floating in the river all night. The wood was so soft and relatively easy to cut, she feared that it might absorb water too quickly. But the next morning, it was still floating as high in the water as it had the evening before.

She spent the next two days clearing a work area. The size of the raft she was going to construct was determined by the fact that her hatchet blade dulled quickly, and repeated grindings against the other scale would, she'd found, eventually wear it away. She would have to construct the raft in the water-one of the ten-foot lengths wasn't too heavy, but she wasn't sure she'd be able to move a raft constructed of a dozen of them lashed together side by side.

She had lost track of the days. It seemed that she'd been hot, wet, and sweaty for weeks, instead of merely days. A heat rash formed under her arms and inside her thighs and made life miserable until she began to coat the affected areas with swamp mud at night, to find them feeling much better each morning.

"What we have to do," she told herself, speaking aloud, "is get a few tons of this miracle mud back to Earth, and we'll be rich capitalists."

At first she had thought merely to lash the logs together side by side, but when she had four of them joined, she found that there was too much flexibility, that the logs moved up and down, rubbing against the vines used as las.h.i.+ngs. She'd have to cut more poles and lash them at right angles to the runners to give the raft stability. More work, but the raft was taking shape nicely. It was ten feet long and would be over six feet wide when she finished.

She was trimmed down to a weight she hadn't known since she was a teenage girl. She was hungry all the time in spite of plentiful fruit and nuts. One morning as she pushed her way through the undergrowth in search of the last two saplings, she found a small game trail and began to think in terms of meat. She'd have no way to cook it-trying to start a fire in that permanently wet jungle would be pure folly-but she followed the trail anyway. It led into the jungle, where she did not care to follow.

But at night, knowing where the trail was, she could hear some small animal moving down it to the river.

Theresita's desire for something substantial to eat was overwhelming. She overcame her reluctance to go deeper into the jungle and followed the trail for about two hundred yards to find that something had been digging around the roots of the same big-leafed plant that had furnished her with her drinking water for so many days. The roots of the plant were thick tubers, and there was clear evidence that something had been eating them.

She cut one, rubbed the dirt off as best she could, sliced off a piece and touched her tongue to it. It had a raw, starchy taste. For a long moment she was reluctant, then she remembered the fatalism she'd felt when she first ate the fruit. She took a small bite. It was chewy, like the meat of a coconut, and the taste was pleasing. She ate only a little bit, however, and carried three of the large tubers back to her camp. It wasn't meat, but when there were no ill effects, it was a welcome addition to her diet, and there was an unending supply of the tubers all around her.

She lashed the last pole into place that day. Then, knowing an excitement she hadn't felt in years, she put her weight on the raft and crawled to its center. It sank down into the water until water lapped over the logs, but held. "Oh, h.e.l.l," she said. It needed at least one more layer of poles to support her weight without her sitting in an inch of water all the time. "Well, what the h.e.l.l," she said aloud. "n.o.body's waiting for me." She went back to cutting down small trees. She almost caught one of the small animals on the game trail and spent the rest of the day being grateful that she hadn't. She was taking a long break, nibbling on a tuber, when she heard little feet on the trail, which was near the tree she was cutting. She froze and reached carefully for her ax and waited as the patter of little feet came closer. She saw movement in the leaves and launched herself full length, bringing the ax down at the point of movement with a force that would have decapitated a steer. There was a sharp cry from the hidden animal. She'd missed. She raised the ax again.

Before she could strike, a fearful odor a.s.saulted her nostrils, and she caught a glimpse of a small, bristly thing of k.n.o.bby welts and scurrying feet and an appearance so repulsive that all thoughts of eating left her. She scrambled away from the musk sprayed by the fleeing animal. None had hit her, but she had to abandon the tree she'd been cutting and she had it half cut down.

It took eighteen lengths of small tree trunks to lash a layer of flotation at right angles to the long runner on top of the raft.. When she stepped bravely onto the raft from the bank, it held her weight nicely and she was high and dry.

She had been giving a lot of thought to the problem of steering the raft. There was nothing to use as a rudder, so she cut a long, slender pole, which she could use to keep the raft pushed away from the bank.

She took one day for food gathering, then was ready to go.

She launched the raft just after first light, pushed away from the bank, and was caught in a slow current.

The raft tended to turn slowly round and round, but that was net a serious problem. She was moving.

The morning was clear, with only a white haze to limit the heat of the sun. Where her skin was exposed, below the ragged, short length of skirt and through the holes in her tunic, it began to turn pink. She had not been exposed to direct rays of the sun since her service in Africa, and she knew the power of those rays on tender skin.

The current had carried her to midstream. The pole was useless for steering because the water was so deep she could not touch bottom. The only way she could get to the bank was to swim, and she wasn't about to abandon so many days of hard work just to avoid a sunburn. She splashed water over her cooking skin until she saw that the raft was heading toward the east bank as the river entered a gentle curve. She kept testing the water for depth, and when she was very near the bank she felt the muddy bottom and began to lean on the pole until the raft moved out of the current and into an eddy alongside a muddy bank. She lashed the raft to trees and waded ash.o.r.e. The swamp mud began to cool her burning limbs almost immediately.

She slept in a nest in a tree and went to work the next morning building a lean-to on the rear of the raft.

The plants that provided water and tubers also provided their large leaves for her thatched roof. When the lean-to was finished it was too late to cast off, so she spent another night in the same tree and pushed the raft back out into the current just before sunrise.

She decided it wasn't all bad, during that lazy day. The raft revolved slowly, riding the center of the current. She decided to keep going, and darkness came without her reaching sh.o.r.e. She drifted downriver, trying to stay awake, but there was a slight breeze over the river, and for once she was almost dry. She dozed off, and when she awoke, there were two moons in the sky, both of them high. In their light she managed to tie up to two trees, and she spent the rest of the night on the raft, sleeping comfortably on a bed of leaves.

When morning came she decided to replenish her tuber supply and took about three steps into the brushbefore coming face to face with the cold eyes, gaping mouth, and huge bulk of a battering-ram beast. She screamed and turned, skin puckering, already feeling the tearing of those fearful teeth. But there was no movement from the beast. Then she smelled the ripe, sickening odor of decay and saw that the cold eyes were filmed.

Something had torn open that armored body and eaten away a chunk of white flesh large enough to fill a bathtub. The jungle, for yards around, had been torn, uprooted, and tramped down in the battle. She realized she would have a good supply of tools here. She approached the dead beast and tried to pry loose one of the larger scales. Finally, by using her staff as a lever, she broke it loose, bringing a portion of decaying flesh with it.

As she worked, she kept her eyes and ears open- she didn't want to be surprised by whatever was big enough and mean enough to kill a creature the size of a tank. She used the day to make three additions to her raft: First, she constructed two oars. Then she used the largest scale she could tear off the dead animal as a rudder for a sweep, which she mounted through a forked stick at the rear of the raft.

With a reserve supply of scales for toolmaking and lengths of green sapling for handles, she pushed off in the early evening. In her idleness, she carved a notch on a lean-to support pole and made it a habit, as the long, slow days went by, to keep track of them in that way. When, after twenty days of traveling, the jungle looked just as dense, the river just as wide and muddy, she began to wonder just what kind of a world she'd found.

She was bronzed now, and no longer had to protect her skin with mud, which she'd kept on the raft for medicinal purposes. Her hair was always damp, hanging in greasy straightness to her shoulders, so one afternoon after she'd sharpened one of her cutting blades to its narrowest edge, she chopped it off in handfuls, as close to her scalp as possible. Her skirt was nothing more than ribbons. Her lacy panties were torn. Her tunic was faded by the sun, and it, like the skirt, hung in tatters.

But she felt so good, she couldn't believe it. She couldn't do much in the way of movement aboard the raft, but she could do calisthenics. She had leaned down to a trimness that pleased her. "Lady," she told herself, holding a leg up in front of her, "keep this up and you can become a fas.h.i.+on model."

She estimated that the current was moving her along at the pace of a leisurely walker, perhaps three miles per hour. In a twenty-four hour day that would be seventy-two miles. When she marked up her thirtieth day on the river, allowing for the time she'd spent on the riverbanks, she guessed that she'd traveled over fifteen hundred miles. Just how big was this d.a.m.ned jungle?

II.

TROUBLE IN PARADISE.

THIRTEEN.

Duncan Rodrick was notified by Jackie Garvey of the odd presentation of the gold matrix by the miner.Jackie's call came just before his alarm went off, so it took him a few seconds to understand what she was saying. He had not planned to have a captain's breakfast, but he wanted to know more about the events of the night out there by Paul Warden's hot-dog roasting camp.

"Jackie," he said, "see if you can round up the following people for breakfast in my quarters: Chief Rosen and Dr. Monroe, Commander Warden, Dr. Miller, Dr. Kwait, Stoner McRae, and the animal man on Dr. Miller s staff- what's his name?"

"Dr. James Wilson."