Aliens

consuming and very expensive.

But how much is a world worth? And Acheron was not as bad as some that the Company had invested in. At least it possessed an existing atmosphere capable of modification Much easier to fine-tune the composition of a world's air than to provide it from scratch. Acheron had weather and near normal gravity. A veritable paradise.

The fiery glow that emanated from the crown of the volcanolike atmosphere processor suggested another realm entirely. None of the symbolism was lost on the colonists. It inspired only additional humour. They hadn't agreed to come to Acheron because of the weather.

There were no soft bodies or pallid, weak faces visible within the colony corridors. Even the children looked tough. Not tough as in mean or bullying, but strong within as well as without. There was no room here for bullies. Cooperation was a lesson learned early. Children grew up faster than their Earthbound counterparts and those who lived on fatter gentler worlds. They and their parents were a breed unto themselves, self-reliant yet interdependent. They were not unique. Their predecessors had ridden in wagons instead of starships.

It helped to think of oneself as a pioneer. It sounded much better than a numerical job description.

At the centre of this ganglion of men and machines was the tall building known as the control block. It towered above every other artificial structure on Acheron with the exception of the atmosphere processing stations themselves. From the outside it looked spacious. Within, there wasn't a spare square metre to be found. Instrumentation was crowded into corners and sequestered in the crawl spaces beneath the floors and the serviceways above the suspended ceilings. And still there was never enough room. People squeezed a little closer to one another so that the computers and their attendant machines could have more room. Paper piled up in corners despite unceasing efforts to reduce every scrap of necessary information to electronic bytes. Equipment shipped out new from the factory quickly acquired a plethora of homey scratches, dents, and coffee-cup rings.

Two men ran the control block and therefore the colony One was the operations manager, the other his assistant. They called one another by their first names. Formality was not in vogue on frontier worlds. Insistence on titles and last names and too much supercilious pulling of rank could find a man lost outside without a survival suit or communicator.

Their names were Simpson and Lydecker, and it was a toss-up as to which looked more harried than the other. Both wore the expression of men for whom sleep is a teasing mistress rarely visited. Lydecker looked like an accountant haunted by a major tax deduction misplaced ten years earlier Simpson was a big, burly type who would have been more comfortable running a truck than a colony. Unfortunately he'd been stuck with brains as well as brawn and hadn't managed to hide it from his employers. The front of his shirt was perpetually sweat- stained. Lydecker confronted him before he could retreat.

'See the weather report for next week?' Simpson was chewing on something fragrant, which stained the inside of his mouth. Probably illegal, Lydecker knew. He said nothing about it. It was Simpson's business, and Simpson was his boss Besides, he'd been considering borrowing a chew. Small vices were not encouraged on Acheron, but as long as they didn't interfere with a person's work, neither were they held up to ridicule. It was tough enough to keep one's sanity, hard enough to get by.

'What about it?' the operations manager said.

'We're going to have a real Indian summer. Winds should be all the way down to forty knots.'

'Oh, good. I'll break out the inner tubes and the suntan lotion. Heck, I'd settle for just one honest glimpse of the local sun.'

Lydecker shook his head, affecting an air of mock disapproval. 'Never satisfied, are you? Isn't it enough to know it's still up there?'

'I can't help it; I'm greedy. I should shut up and count my blessings, right? You got something else on your mind Lydecker, or are you just on one of your hour-long coffee breaks?'

'That's me. Goof off every chance I get. I figure my next chance will be in about two years.' He checked a printed readout. 'You remember you sent some wildcatters out to that high plateau out past the Ilium Range a couple days ago?'

'Yeah. Some of our dreamers back home thought there might be some radioactives out that way. So I asked for volunteers, and some guy named Jorden stuck up his mitt. I told 'em to go look if they wanted to. Some others might've taken off in that direction also. What about it?'

'There's a guy on the horn right now. Mom-and-pop survey team. Says he's homing something and wants to know if his claim will be honoured.'

'Everybody's a lawyer these days. Sometimes I think I should've gone in for it myself.'

'What, and ruin your sophisticated image? Besides, there's not much call for lawyers out here. And you make better money.'

'Keep telling me that. It helps.' Simpson shook his head and turned to gaze at a green screen. 'Some honch in a cushy office on Earth says go look at a grid reference in the middle of nowhere, we look. They don't say why, and I don't ask. I don't ask because it takes two weeks to get an answer from back there, and the answer's always 'Don't ask.' Sometimes I wonder why we bother.'

'I just told you why. For the money.' The assistant operations officer leaned back against a console. 'So what do I tell this guy?'

Simpson turned to stare at a videoscreen that covered most of one wall. It displayed a computer-generated topographical map of the explored portion of Acheron. The map was not very extensive, and the features it illustrated made the worst section of the Kalahari Desert look like Polynesia. Simpson rarely got to see any of Acheron's surface in person. His duties required him to remain close to Operations at all times, and he liked that just fine.

'Tell him,' he informed Lydecker, 'that as far as I'm concerned, if he finds something, it's his. Anybody with the guts to go crawling around out there deserves to keep what he finds.'

The tractor had six wheels, armoured sides, oversize tyres and a corrosion-proof underbody. It was not completely Acheron-proof, but then, very little of the colony's equipment was. Repeated patching and welding had transformed the once-sleek exterior of the tractor into a collage composed of off-colour metal blotches held together with solder and epoxy sealant. But it kept the wind and sand at bay and climbed steadily forward. That was enough for the people it sheltered.

At the moment it was chugging its way up a gentle slope, the fat tyres kicking up sprays of volcanic dust that the wind was quick to carry away. Eroded sandstone and shale crumbled beneath its weight. A steady westerly gale howled outside its armoured flanks, blasting the pitted windows and light ports in its emotionless, unceasing attempt to blind the vehicle and those within. The determination of those who drove combined with the reliable engine to keep it moving uphill. The engine hummed reassuringly, while the air filters cycled ceaselessly as they fought to keep dust and grit out of the sacrosanct interior The machine needed clean air to breathe just as much as did its occupants.

He was not quite as weather-beaten as his vehicle, but Russ Jorden still wore the unmistakable look of someone who'd spent more than his share of time on Acheron. Weathered and wind-blasted. To a lesser degree the same description applied to his wife, Anne, though not to the two children who bounced about in the rear of the big central cabin. Somehow they managed to dart in and around portable sampling equipment and packing cases without getting themselves smashed against the walls. Their ancestors had learned at an early age how to ride something called a horse. The action of the tractor was not very different from the motion one has to cope with atop the spine of that empathetic quadruped, and the children had mastered it almost as soon as they learned how to walk.

Their clothing and faces were smeared with dust despite the nominally inviolable interior of the vehicle. That was a fact of life on Acheron. No matter how tight you tried to seal yoursel in, the dust always managed to penetrate vehicles, offices homes. One of the first colonists had coined a name for this phenomenon that was more descriptive than scientific. 'Paniculate osmosis,' he'd called it. Acheronian science. The more imaginative colonists insisted that the dust was sentient, that it hid and waited for doors and windows to open a crack before deliberately rushing inside. Homemakers argued facetiously whether it was faster to wash clothes or scrape them clean.

Russ Jorden wrestled the massive tractor around boulders too big to climb and negotiated a path through narrow crevices in the plateau they were ascending. He was sustained in his efforts by the music of the Locater's