“For a bit, at least,” I said. “I’d like to know what happened to you up on the mountain. Rick told me what he saw, but that wasn’t much. I’m coming to the horse’s mouth. It was a plant that knocked you out?”

  “Well, I think so,” she said, swiveling her chair to face me though she didn’t get up. “A lichen, at least. Are lichens plants?”

  “Partly,” I said. “But partly fungus too.”

  We could have had a good time discussing the biota of Medlum…but that might have been jealousy talking. “But you touched it and it knocked you out?”

  “I never really touched it,” she said, frowning with concentration. “At least I don’t think I did. I was prying it off the rock because it was such a pretty mauve. Then I felt cold and very dizzy. I don’t remember standing up but I must have, because Rick says that when I shouted and he saw me, I was standing. And then I fell into the volcano.”

  “Could it have been a shock?” I said. “Static electricity? Or maybe just electricity from plant cells.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. She looked at the tip of her index finger and held it out to me. “There’s no burn and it didn’t feel like a spark. My whole body felt cold.”

  I bent closer to the finger. I didn’t see anything odd about it either.

  “Rick had picked a sample of the white kind,” Rachel said. “I wanted to get one of the purple ones too. Mostly they were deeper in the volcano, but I saw this one on the rim.”

  She smiled and said shyly, “I was getting it for you, Harry. I thought you might want to see it.”

  “Thank you,” I said, thinking again that she and I might have had a lot of fun together. “The white lichen Rick gave me seemed pretty normal, but we think the colored version may be a reproductive change. A fruiting body.”

  “The leaves looked fatter,” she said. “Besides the color. But they had the same shape.”

  “Well, thank you,” I said. There didn’t seem much more to learn from her. “Rick says he can take me to the spot where the lichen was, so I won’t ask you to guide me. He’s going to run me up on the Transportation Section vehicle, just like he did you. As soon as he gets off watch this afternoon.”

  I grinned. “He says we’ll be taking a proper rope, but I don’t guess we’ll have that problem again.”

  “I can’t believe that he climbed down into the volcano to bring me back,” Rachel said. Her voice had gotten dreamy. “He’s amazingly brave, isn’t he?”

  “I think the RCN selects for brave officers,” I said. After thinking about it for a moment, I said, “I guess brave people select themselves for the RCN. It comes to the same thing. But Rick is brave, yes; and very clearheaded in a crisis.”

  I cleared my throat and added, “Look, Rachel. Rick’s all those things and he’s my friend. He’s a good fellow, from everything I’ve seen or heard. But have you gotten serious about him for a romantic partner?”

  She stiffened and glared at me. “And what if I have? We’re both adults, aren’t we?”

  “You are indeed,” I said. “Then I wish you both the best of good fortune.”

  I nodded to her and walked away, feeling sad. She was a nice girl.

  I needed to get back to the Far Traveller so that Rick could run me up to the cone as soon as his shift finished. Any later and we wouldn’t have time to get back with the sample before dark.

  We wouldn’t have time to do it tomorrow, because the ship would be leaving Medlum forever just after dawn.

  ELKIN

  I’d been ready to go up to the bridge five minutes before but Doctor Veil had said, “Not yet. Wait till we go into Elkin orbit.”

  I’d fed another sample from Medlum into the sequencer. While I waited, I took another magnified look at the mauve variant of the lichen I’d scraped free on the cone lip. It was genetically identical to the white variant; the color was from the spores with which the scale-like leaves were swollen to the point of bursting.

  In fact several leaves had burst while we were on our way back to St. Martins, staining purple the inside of the clear container I was carrying them in. They contained bupivacaine and other compounds and were clearly psychotropic.

  I noted the data on the entry, along with imagery and the genetic data. I was hoping to find the mechanism by which the spores were expelled by comparing lobes which had vented with others which had not, but I hadn’t had a breakthrough before the High Drive went off and we went into freefall.

  “Time for us to go up to the bridge,” Doctor Veil said. She slid past me toward the door, and I scrambled to follow her.

  Doctor Veil had been in space much longer than I had. She was more comfortable in weightlessness than I probably would ever become. She entered the Up companionway without a wasted motion and was almost out of sight by the time I got in behind her.

  This was why we’d waited until now: Veil was going up the companionway without having to fight the 1-g acceleration which mimicked gravity.

  At bridge level, she headed toward the bow. When I tried to keep up by driving myself forward, I each time collided with the corridor walls and gave it up as a bad plan. I knew where she was going, after all.

  The watch out on the hull was coming out of the airlocks in the rotunda as I passed. They’d gotten the antennas and rigging in so that we could land. The rigging is fully automated, but it always needs to be tweaked by human beings. The buffeting as a starship drops through an atmosphere is severe enough without mast and spars tearing themselves loose in the airstream.

  To my surprise, Doctor Veil was waiting for me at the bridge hatch. I realized she must be afraid of being chased off with abuse by officers who felt she’d get in the way. My status with the captain was her protection against that happening.

  Before I could lead Veil in, Rick joined us from the rotunda where he’d just stripped off his hard suit. “You guys need help with something?”

  “We’d like to use the ship’s optics to check a ground feature mentioned in the Annotated Charts,” I said, raising my voice to be heard. Even coasting in freefall, the ship’s interior was a noisy, echoing box.

  “The gunner’s console is vacant,” Rick said, “and I’m off duty. Come on in and I’ll set you up.”

  The third console from the bow on the right—starboard—side was vacant. Most of the others had a ship’s officer at them. Instead of seating himself at the couch, Rick sailed past it and seated himself at the back side of the console, the striker’s seat. He gestured Doctor Veil to the couch.

  She maneuvered as smoothly in the air as he had. I wallowed along after her and managed to hook the couch with the toe of my boot. Otherwise I would have sailed through the holographic display.

  Rick engaged active sound cancellation around the console. In a normal voice, he said, “What is it you’re looking for?”

  I stood behind Doctor Veil as she keyed in an eight-digit coordinate from the Annotated Charts. She said, “Lieutenant Grenville, there are one hundred fifty-six artificial pools at the edge of a bay here. We would like to view the pools as highly magnified as possible.”

  “Rick,” I added, “that’ll be Alliance notation on the coordinates if it makes a difference.”

  “It makes a difference,” Rick muttered. The holographic display on our side of the console came live with a swatch of planetary surface which immediately dissolved and became a different portion of surface. “There. You can adjust it with the prompt on your side.”

  The image was a broad embayment at the edge of an arid landscape. There were round dots around most of the edge of the water. Veil used her joystick to center on one of the dots, then held down one end of the toggle in the top to magnify the image. According to the legend at the bottom of the display, the pond was circular to the limits of calculation and 23.6 feet in diameter.

  Veil moved the prompt to the next pool sunwise. The diameter was the same, 23.6 feet, but on the land side of the pool was a square building with the ruins of several additional buildings to the side of it. When Veil raised the magnification again, we could see that the roof of the square building had fallen in. It was a ruin like the sheds beside it.

  “These pools must be Archaic artifacts,” Doctor Veil said, looking up at me. “Look”—she expanded the view again—“see the way the bay has encroached, submerging twenty or thirty of them. They’re down there under the water. How long would that have taken to happen?”

  One bad east coast storm, I thought, remembering winters on Sheet Island. Aloud I said, “Ma’am, may I take a look at that with the prompt?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said, sliding off the couch. I took her place and moved the joystick to the far left end of the line of pools. I thought I’d seen something there.

  The sea’s incursion had flooded many of the pools, as Veil had said, but it had also cut off a few pools from the remainder of the line. Behind the end pool there was a square building and three sheds in better condition than those of the first installation we’d checked.

  Behind, inland, of the sheds were rocks arranged to block-print the word HELP.

  “We may learn that the Archaics were here,” I said. “Certainly there’s been a more recent visitor, though goodness knows how long ago those stones were placed.”

  “Lieutenant Grenville?” Veil said. “Will it be possible to land beside that pool?”

  “This bay looks like an ideal landing spot,” Rick said, “and I’ll point it out to Captain Bolton; but I suggest we set down on the other end? In this shallow water our exhaust will raise huge waves and if there is anybody living there we’d flood him out if we landed close.”

  “Yes, we have the aircar,” Veil muttered, but Rick was already speaking on what I supposed was a private channel to the captain.

  He paused and looked at me past the edge of the holographic display. “We’ll be landing pretty quick,” he said. “You may want to get onto couches.”

  Doctor Veil and I headed for the lab, though she could’ve stayed on the bridge if she’d wanted. Besides bracing for the landing, I wanted to tell Kent where we’d be going as soon as we were safely on the surface.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Vermijo was preparing to take the Far Traveller in to land in Pool Bay, as Captain Bolton had decided to name it. Rick, still off duty, was surprised when Bolton said over a two-way link, “Grenville, you’re slated to be in charge of the party setting up the temporary ground quarters, aren’t you? Over.”

  “Yessir,” Rick said. He’d remained on the vacant gunner’s station on the bridge after Harry and Doctor Veil had gone down to their quarters below. “I’ve just come off the hull and figured to go straight to the transportation bay rather than to my quarters on Level 4. Over.”

  “Do you think the watch can handle it without your presence?” Bolton asked. “Over.”

  “Yes,” Rick said. “Bosun’s Mate Veselka has done about a hundred setups between the Boxer and us. Over.”

  Besides which, he thought, I’ve managed not to get in her way yet, but she always worries that I will.

  “Doctor Veil asked if you could come along in the Bio Section truck while they check out some bloody thing they’ve discovered,” Bolton said. “They thought you might be helpful. Since they’re the ones you say found Pool Bay and I haven’t seen such a good anchorage since we lifted from Harbor Three on Cinnabar, I’m inclined to do them a favor if you’re interested in going. Over.”

  “I’m very interested, sir,” Rick said. “Shall I inform them I’ll meet them in the transport bay as soon as we’re down, over?”

  “I’ve done that,” said Bolton. “And I’ll also tell Veselka that she’ll be doing the setup alone. Bolton out.”

  The roar of the thrusters braking to allow gravity to shove the ship down into the atmosphere began to fill the world.

  * * *

  I was glad to be back in normal gravity. I knew that landing and lift-off were the most dangerous portions of star travel, but the sheer mental discomfort of insertion into and extraction from sponge space were the only aspects that I really disliked. I know that I’ll die some day; and I know that crashing into a planet’s surface would be quicker and less unpleasant than some of what has happened to relatives of mine over the years.

  Doctor Veil and I were waiting with Kent in the glazed office of the transport bay. We could watch the techs getting the ship’s four launches and our Bio Section aircar ready to haul crew and supplies for the ground site to shore. Rick entered the bay from a corridor and walked toward the car, then stopped when he realized we were all in the office.

  I went out to join him just as he turned around. “They opened the outer hatch while there was still a lot of steam and ozone in the air,” I explained. “We were just waiting under cover till it dispersed.”

  Rick laughed. “Well, you’re RCN now and the standards are less…delicate than you might’ve gotten used to in Academe,” he said.

  The tech working on the aircar got out of the cab and raised his thumb to us and walked over to the nearest launch. I glanced behind me and saw that Doctor Veil and Kent were coming out of the office also. The four of us walked together to the car.

  There was only room for three in the cab, but Rick hopped over the tailgate of the rear compartment. That left room for me beside Doctor Veil, but instead I got into the back also. I heaved myself over the gate with more effort and less grace, but I made it in.

  Kent opened the window in the back of the cab and shouted, “Ready?” I was about to shout back, but Rick gave the driver a thumbs-up. The car lifted as Kent checked the fan output and balance, then drove forward off the lowered ramp. We dropped abruptly to nearly the seething surface of the water, then swooped upward and swung left around the bay toward the far end of the line.

  I looked down through the back gate. Rick joined me and brought his head close to my ear to say, “Are those pools lined with concrete?”

  “Probably,” I said, “but we’ll need to check. Doctor Veil will want it to be moissanite because we know the Archaics worked with the stuff.”

  “And you?” Rick said.

  I shrugged. “I’m just after the truth. I don’t much care what it is.”

  Kent circled to kill his speed and dropped for a landing. During the turn Rick nudged me and gestured. I followed the line of his arm to see a man near the building. The fellow was wearing a loose garment that flared out as he changed direction: He was apparently trying to follow our maneuvers as we prepared to land.

  We grounded with a small spurt of sand from beneath each of our four drive fans. Rick and I were trying to get out as quickly as we could, but the castaway was scrabbling at the cab door before we could. Kent wasn’t opening for him.

  “Here, sir!” I said. “I’m Harry Harper. Who are you?”

  “You’ve got to take me off!” the castaway said. “You shouldn’t’ve left me here so long! I ran out of food! I have to eat fish!”

  “We’ll get you off,” I said. At least I thought we would. “We’re surveyors from Cinnabar. But who are you?”

  Kent still hadn’t opened his door but Veil came around from her side of the cab. She didn’t speak but the castaway turned to her and fell to his knees. “Ma’am!” he said. “You won’t leave me, will you? You’ll take me off surely, won’t you? I’ve been gathering the weed just like I was supposed to but I don’t care about the money! Just get me off!”

  “Yes, of course,” Doctor Veil said calmly. “We’re not a passenger ship but I’m sure Captain Bolton can find you a place in the crew. What’s your name, sir?”

  “Ma’am, I’m Terney,” the castaway said. “See all the weed I’ve gathered? When I filled the shed I covered it with brush.”

  Rick came with me when I walked to the shed Terney was gesturing toward. It was full of algae. It was so full now that the door must have been closed forcibly to compress it, though the algae had shrunk considerably in drying.

  “What the hell is this stuff?” Rick said, prodding the stored algae. “It looks orange.”

  “That’s algae from the pools,” I said, repeating what I’d learned from the Annotated Charts. “When it’s ripe it turns orange, yeah, but I think this has been stored for a long time and lost a lot of its color.”

  I walked over to the nearest of three mounds of brush behind the shed. The terrain inland of the beach was of crumbly soils. Cane-like plants grew in clumps linked by runners at about six inches off the ground. The soil under the clumps was held in place by a net of roots, but the winds gouged channels between the plants.

  Terney had created round fences by driving a line of canes into the ground and had then piled cut canes on to cover—I checked—a mound of ripe algae. The other two piles appeared to be the same, though the one farthest to the east was small in comparison to the other two.

  When we turned back Doctor Veil and Kent, with Terney hovering behind them, were bent over the pool. Kent was using a large screwdriver from the toolkit as a chisel and, striking it with an open-end wrench, knocked a chip from the liner.

  “There are three more piles of the algae here,” I called to Veil when she turned.

  “Then I think we’re ready to return,” Doctor Veil said. “I have samples of the algae at various growth stages and we’ve just taken some of the pool material for analysis.”

  We walked to the car. Terney would have gotten into the cab but Kent sent him to the back with us. Rick offered Terney his hand but the castaway grabbed the tailgate with both hands and hurled himself aboard. He may have been afraid of being abandoned again.

  When Kent ran up the engines, Terney relaxed noticeably: We were under way and he really was going to get off Elkin.

  “Where are you from, Master Terney?” I asked as we lifted.

  “From Hermogenes,” Terney said. “I signed on with Kalish, a contractor who was going to supply weed to cosmetics companies. I was supposed to gather weed for a year and dry it, then the ship would take us and the weed off. There was twenty of us, I guess, and we’d get a third of the price of what we’d gathered when the weed sold back on Hermogenes. It’s got to be ripe, you see, or it’s worthless—and they assay each batch.”