“That would have been most unlikely, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose so. But you must understand that a man could hunt ten lifetimes and never come in smelling distance of a planet half as good. When something like that happens you fall victim to all sorts of fantasies. You wake up sweating at night at the imaginings that build up in your mind. You know you’ll never hit again. You know this is your one and only chance to make it really big. You can’t bear the thought that something might come along and snatch it all away.”
“I think I understand. You were in a hurry.”
“You’re damned right I was,” I said. “And the surveyors were in a hurry, too, so they could earn the bonus. I don’t say they were sloppy, but they might have been. But let’s be fair with them. The intelligent life forms lived in a rather restricted stretch of jungle and they weren’t very bright. A million years ago Earth might have been surveyed and not a single human have turned up. These life forms were on about the same level, let us say, as Pithecanthropus. And Pithecanthropus would not have made a splash in any survey of the Earth at the time he lived. There weren’t many of him and, for good reason, he would have stayed out of sight, and he wasn’t building anything that you could notice.”
“Then it was just a big mistake.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just a big mistake.”
“Well, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, sure. But try to tell that to a million settlers who had moved in almost overnight and had laid out their farms and surveyed their little towns and been given time enough to really appreciate this new world of theirs. Try to tell it to a realty firm with those million settlers howling for their money back and filing damage claims. And there was, of course, the matter of the bonus.”
“You mean it was taken for a bribe.”
“Miss Foster,” I said, “you have hit it exactly on the head.”
“But was it? Was it a bribe, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t think so. I’m fairly sure that when I offered it and, later, paid it, I didn’t think of it as a bribe. It was simply a bonus to do a good job fast. Although I suppose, unconsciously, that the company might have been disposed to do a little better for me than they would have done for someone else who didn’t pay a bonus, that they might even be inclined to shut their eyes to a thing or two.”
“But you banked your money on Earth. In a numbered account. You’d been doing that for years. That doesn’t sound too honest.”
“That’s nothing,” I said, “that a man can be hanged for. With a lot of operators out in space it’s just standard operating procedure. It’s the only planet that allows numbered accounts and Earth’s banking setup is the safest one there is. A draft on Earth is honored anywhere, which is more than you can say for many of the other planets.”
She smiled at me across the fire. “I don’t know,” she said. “There are so many things I like about you, so many things I hate. What are you going to do with George when we’re able to leave?”
“If he continues the way he is,” I said, “we may bury him. He can’t go on living too long without food or water. And I’m not an expert on force feeding. Perhaps you are.”
She shook her head a little angrily. “What about the ship?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Well, what about it?”
“Maybe, instead of leaving the city, we should have gone back to the field.”
“To do what? To bang a little on the hull? Try to bust it open with a sledge? And who has got a sledge?”
“We’ll need it later on.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. We may know more then. Pick up an angle, maybe. Don’t you think that if a ship, once covered by that goo, could be cracked open by main force and awkwardness someone else would have done it long ago?”
“Maybe they have. Maybe someone cracked their ship and took off. How can you know they haven’t?”
“I can’t, of course. But if this vibration business is true, the city is no place to hang around.”
“So we’re going off without even trying to get into the ship?”
“Miss Foster,” I said, “we’re finally on the trail of Lawrence Arlen Knight. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, of course. But the ship. . .
“Make up your mind,” I said. “Just what in hell do you want to do?”
She looked at me levelly. “Find Knight,” she said.
SEVEN
Just before dawn she shook me awake.
“George is gone!” she shouted at me. “He was there just a minute ago. Then when I looked again, he wasn’t there.”
I came to my feet. I was still half asleep, but there was an alarming urgency in her voice and I forced myself into something like alertness.
The place was dark. She had let the fire burn low and the light from it extended out for only a little distance. George was gone. The place where he had been propped against the wall was empty. The shell of Roscoe still leaned grotesquely and a heap of supplies were piled to one side.
