Wild Country

did, Ba'al charging up first, tail erect. She was squatting on the stream bank, just above the falls, and patted the fearsome muzzle of the boar to calm him. She pointed into the water several paces from the base of the falls as Ted hurried to her side. 'Is that a robin's egg? A button?'

He saw the image wavering in the water, a smooth oval object of a deeper hue than bluebonnets. 'We'll soon — know,' he grunted, hauling his boots and socks off, then rolling up his trousers. The bottom was limestone and it was too early in the season for algae that made it slick. He waded over, pleased that the water was not all that chill. This creeklet, like so many others in Wild Country, probably ran aboveground for only a brief distance before plunging back to where it belonged: the measureless caverns of Edwards Plateau. Its temperature would remain fairly constant throughout the year.

He scrabbled for the thing, stood up, displayed it between thumb and forefinger, and then flipped it to Sandy. She was turning it over as he waded back. 'It's one of those Mormon fifties,' he said.

Briefly, after the war, the Young administration had done the best it could to make up for the loss of U. S. mints in Denver, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. The so-called 'Mormon fifty' was a coin the size of an old silver dollar, minted in Ogden. Like the Susan B. Anthony dollar before it, the coin had not been a success. For one thing, its alloy was of little value — but Amerinds in the west found a partial solution. Navajo silversmiths embedded softly rounded turquoise ovals in the centers of the coins. Some were irregular, and none would have fitted a coin slot. They had been accepted at face value and were now worth twice that as rarities.

Sandy held it up. 'How do you suppose…' she began, pushing aside a broad fig leaf that was teasing at her hair.

A gritted phrase by a dying man caromed through his mind: '. .faithful, under a ledge at the fig tree.' He hurried back into the water, waded up to the base of the sluggish little waterfall, then plunged his hand through the sheet of water. Sandy was gaping at him as though he had gone mad, but her mouth fell open as he pulled his hand back. Several coins plunked into the water at his feet. He held a score more in his hand: Krugerrands. gold Mexican thousand-peso pieces, more of the reworked Mormon fifties. 'I can feel hundreds of 'em in here,' he said.

Sitting on their blanket, he told her of the message Cam Concannon bade him give to the old rancher. And of Mul Garner's insistence that the money belonged to no one. In any case, one Ted Quantrill now held mineral rights to that property. 'And if gold isn't a mineral, what is?' he crowed. 'The name of this creek is 'Faithful,' then. Must run the year 'round, honey.'

They kept that solitary coin and returned the rest to the deep slot beneath the ledge, inside the falls. They didn't need the money now. Sandy pointed out, but one day they might. If Ted continued to refuse money for advertising endorsements, his name might soon be forgotten.

'God, I hope so,' he said. 'But even if nobody pays a dime to go up against that android this summer' — he would never call the game by its name because it was his name—'now we have something to fall back on.'

'Maybe there is such a thing as security,' she said.

'Nope. Just varying degrees of insecurity,' he quoted.

'All the same, I like the idea of hearing that water from my kitchen window, and knowing what it means.'

'You're pretty set on this location, I take it,' he said.

'Well, not unless you are.'

'I'm set, sold, and incidentally your slave. Sandy.' He kissed her beneath her ear, the kind of gentle caress that implied a belly too full for stronger stuff, and then moved over to the edge of the blanket where Ba'al lay basking in the April sun. 'Call me only if you find more treasure.'

What if she told him, here and now, about Lufo's return of the Ember of Venus? No, she'd already decided how she was going to present that to him as soon as she found a set for it. A phrase from an old song popped into focus: 'I can't cook, but you won't care,' and she decided that her options were rape or active diversion.

She wiggled her fingers at him, stood up, then began to pace around the level region above the fig tree. She found stones to place at likely corners, laid a few dead oak branches down to further sketch out her imaginary foundation lines. It took her a half hour to decide where the kitchen would go. The individual rooms, modem reinforced plastic modules, could be brought in by chopper. But could they pour foundations without bringing in complete strangers? She wanted that very much.

She turned to ask him and saw that he lay with his head against the belly of Ba'al. They were both snoring. 'And the lion shall lie down with the other lion,' she told herself.

Which naturally directed her to think of herself lying down with her lion, with all his parts still intact after a world war and his fight to survive its aftermath. She said to her distant man, knowing he could not have heard thunder over the rumble of those snores, 'You're only a man for all that, with a little edge in your reflexes. You weren't my first, and there are smarter men around, and you may not be any whiz as a sheep rancher. But you suit me right down to the ground. I don't care what they do with that silly android; turn it out to stud for the ladies, for all of me. I've got the original Ted Quantrill. And I want it now.'

She tiptoed to him, shook his toe until he was blinking at her, and beckoned with a slowly curling forefinger. He rose without waking Ba'al and followed. She traced the foundations of the house with gestures, then moved to speak in his ear. 'You may not know it, but I am now taking you down the hall to the master bedroom. Take off your jacket,' she added, insinuating her hip against him, moving it suggestively. 'Come with me.'

He came with her. More than once. If the boar waked, he was too wise to show it.

After Games

Lufo's alliance with Marianne Placidas. The New Israeli hit man who finds her smudged prints in Oregon Territory.

Quantrill pitted against his android copy; the nature of the android's terrible malfunction, which programmers might have foreseen.

Billy Ray's escape from prison. His search and eventual romance of Mul Garner's dim-witted sister. Garner's south spread.

The worldwide economic panic after synthesizer theft by Brazil, and devaluation of gold as a common metal.

Childe's teenaged jealousy and ruse: separation and reconciliations.

Mating of Ba'al.

Death of Ba'al.

Assassination of Jim Street, and Quantrill's choice.

About the Author

Dean Ing has worked as a USAF interceptor crew chief, a senior research engineer in the aerospace industry, a builder and driver of sports-racing cars, and a university professor. He has a doctorate in communications theory.

Dean Ing is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Ransom of Black Stealth One, The Nemesis Mission, and The Skins of Dead Men. He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

Surfer

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