And they'd ail have something to talk about when they were Old Settlers in the Coronis Colony, fifty or sixty years from now.
But if the ship never did get off the ground again... .
Impossible. This wasn't a charted planet, okayed for colonizing, and already opened up. The Coronis Colony--Phi Coronis Delta--was already the site of a flourishing mining settlement. There was a functioning spaceport and a crew of engineers and technicians had been working there for ten years preparing the planet for settlement and studying its ecology. You couldn't set down, raw and unhelped by technology, on a completely unknown world.
It couldn't be done.
Anyway, that was somebody else's job and he'd better do his own now. He made all the observations he could, noted them in his pocket notebook, and packed up the tripod starting down the hill again. He moved easily across the rock-strewn slope through the tough underbrush and trees carrying his pack effortlessly in the light gravity. It was cleaner and easier than a hike on Earth, and he cast a longing eye at the distant mountains. Maybe if their stay stretched out more than a few days, he could be spared to take a brief climb into them. Rock samples and some geological notations should be worth something to Earth Expeditionary and it would be a lot better than a climbing trip on Earth, where every National Park from Yellowstone to Himalaya was choked with jet-brought tourists three hundred days of the year.
He supposed it was only fair to give everyone a chance at the mountains, and certainly the slidewalks and lifts installed to the top of Mount Rainier and Everest and Mount Whitney had made it easier for old women and children to get up there and have a chance to see the scenery. But still, MacAran thought longingly, to climb an actual wild mountain--one with no slidewalks and not even a single chairlift! He'd climbed on Earth, but you felt silly struggling up a rock cliff when teen-agers were soaring past you in chairlifts on their effortless way to the top and giggling at the anachronist who wanted to do it the hard way!
Some of the nearer slopes were blackened with the scars of old forest fires, and he estimated that the clearing where the ship lay was second-growth from some such fire a few years before. Lucky the ship's fire-prevention systems had prevented any fire on impact-otherwise if anyone had escaped alive, it might have been quite literally from a frying pan into a raging forest fire. They'd have to be careful in the woods. Earth people had lost their old woodcraft habits and might not be aware any more of what forest fires could do. He made a mental note of it for his report.
As he re-entered the area of the crash, his brief euphoria vanished. Inside the field hospital, through the semi-transparent plastic of the shelter material, he could see rows and rows of unconscious or semiconscious bodies. A group of men were trimming breaches from tree trunks and another small group was raising a dymaxion dome--the kind, based on triangular bracings, which could be built in half a day. He began to wonder what the report of the Engineering crew had been. He could see a crew of machinists crawling around on the crumpled bracings of the starship but it didn't look as if much had been accomplished. In fact, it didn't look hopeful for getting away very soon.
As he passed the hospital, a young man in a stained and crumpled Medic uniform came out and called.
"Rafe! The Mate said report to the First Dome as soon as you get back--there's a meeting there and they want you. I'm going over there myself for a Medic report --I'm the most senior man they can spare." He moved slowly beside MacAran. He was slight and small, with light-brown hair and a small curly brown beard, and he looked weary, as if he had had no sleep. MacAran asked, hesitatingly, "How are things going in the hospital?"
"Well, no more deaths since midnight, and we've taken
four more people off critical. There evidently wasn't a leak in the atomics after all--that girl from Comm checked out with no radiation burns; the vomiting was evidently just a bad blow in the solar plexus. Thank God for small favors--if the atomics had sprung a leak, we'd probably all be dead, and another planet contaminated."
Yeah, the M-AM drives have saved a lot of lives," MacAran said. "You look awfully tired, Ewen--have you had any sleep at all?"
Ewen Ross shook his head. "No, but the Old Maws been generous with wakers, and I'm still racing my motors. About midafternoon I'm probably going to crash and I won't wake up for three days, but until then I'm holding on." He hesitated, looked shyly at his friend and said, "I heard about Jenny, Rafe. Tough luck. So many of the girls back in that area made it out, I was sure she was okay."
"So was I.' MacAran drew a deep breath and felt the clean air like a great weight on his chest. "I haven't seen Heather--is she--"
"Heather's okay; they drafted her for nursing duty. Not a scratch on her. I understand after this meeting they're going to post completed lists of the dead, the wounded and the survivors. What were you doing, anyway? Del Rey told me you'd been sent out, but I didn't know what for."
"Preliminary surveying," MacAran said. "We have no idea of our latitude, no idea of the planet's size or mass, no idea about climate or seasons or what have you. But I've established that we can't be too far off the equator, and--well I'll be making the report inside. Do we go right in?"
"Yeah, in the First Dome." Half unconsciously, Ewen had spoken the words with capital letters, and MacAran thought how human a trait it was to establish location and orientation at once. Three days they had been here and already this first shelter was the First Dome, and the field shelter for the wounded was the Hospital.
There were no seats inside the plastic dome, but some canvas groundsheets and empty supply boxes had been set around and someone had brought a folding chair down for Captain Leicester. Next to him, Camilla Del Rey sat on a box with a lapboard and notebook on her knees; a tall, slender, dark-haired girl with a long, jagged cut across her cheek, mended with plastic clips. She was wrapped in the warm fatigue uniform of a crewmember, but she had shucked the heavy parka-like top and wore only a thin, clinging cotton shirt beneath it. MacAran shifted his eyes from her, quickly--damn it, what was she up to, sitting around in what amounted to her underwear in front of half the crew! At a time like this it wasn't decent... then, looking at the girl's drawn and wounded face, he absolved her. She was hot--it was hot is here now--and she was, after all, on duty, and had a right to be comfortable.
If anyone's out of line it's me, eyeing a girl like this at a time like this... .
Stress. That's all it is. There are too damn many things it's not safe to remember or think about... .
Captain Leicester raised his gray head. He looks like death, MacAran thought, probably he hasn't slept since the crash either. He asked the Del Rey girl, "Is that everyone?"
"I think so" the Captain said, "Ladies, gentlemen. We won't waste time on formalities, and for the duration of this emergency the protocols of etiquette are suspended. Since my recording officer is in the hospital, Officer Del Rey has kindly agreed to act as communications recorder for this meeting. First of all; I have called you together, a representative from every group, so that each of you can speak to your crews with authority about what is happening and we can minimize the growth of rumors and uninformed gossip about our position. And anywhere that more than twenty-five people are gathered, as I remember from my Pensacola days, rumors and gossip start up. So let's get your information here, and not rely on what somebody told someone else's best friend a few hours ago and what somebody else heard in the mess room--all right? Engineering; let's begin with you. What's the situation with the drives?"