“The globe itself is keeping perfect time, and Darius is all right. Xerxes is a few seconds of longitude ahead of true position.”
“That’s dreadful, Mr. Grego!” Stenson was deeply shocked. “I must adjust that the first thing tomorrow. I should have called to check on it long ago, but you know how it is. So many things to do, and so little time.”
“I find the same trouble myself, Mr. Stenson.”
They chatted for a while, and then Stenson apologized for taking up so much of Mr. Grego’s valuable time. What he meant was that his own time, just as valuable to him, was wasting. After the screen blanked, Grego sat looking at it for a moment, wishing he had a hundred men like Henry Stenson in his own organization. Just men with Stenson’s brains and character; wishing for a hundred instrument makers with Stenson’s skills would have been unreasonable, even for wishing. There was only one Henry Stenson, just as there had been only one Antonio Stradivari. Why a man like that worked in a little shop on a frontier planet like Zarathustra…
Then he looked, pridefully, at the globe. Alpha Continent had moved slowly to the right, with the little speck that represented Mallorysport twinkling in the orange light. Darius, the inner moon, where the Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines had their leased terminal, was almost directly over it, and the outer moon, Xerxes, was edging into sight. Xerxes was the one thing about Zarathustra that the Company didn’t own; the Terran Federation had retained that as a naval base. It was the one reminder that there was something bigger and more powerful than the Company.
GERD VAN RIEBEEK saw Ruth Ortheris leave the escalator, step aside and stand looking around the cocktail lounge. He set his glass, with its inch of tepid highball, on the bar; when her eyes shifted in his direction, he waved to her, saw her brighten and wave back and then went to meet her. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, dodged when he reached for her and took his arm.
“Drink before we eat?” he asked.
“Oh, Lord, yes! I’ve just about had it for today.”
He guided her toward one of the bartending machines, inserted his credit key, and put a four-portion jug under the spout, dialing the cocktail they always had when they drank together. As he did, he noticed what she was wearing: short black jacket, lavender neckerchief, light gray skirt. Not her usual vacation get-up.
“School department drag you back?” he asked as the jug filled.
“Juvenile court.” She got a couple of glasses from the shelf under the machine as he picked up the jug. “A fifteen-year-old burglar.”
They found a table at the rear of the room, out of the worst of the cocktail-hour uproar. As soon as he filled her glass, she drank half of it, then lit a cigarette.
“Junktown?” he asked.
She nodded. “Only twenty-five years since this planet was discovered, and we have slums already. I was over there most of the afternoon, with a pair of city police.” She didn’t seem to want to talk about it. “What were you doing today?”
“Ruth, you ought to ask Doc Mallin to drop in on Leonard Kellogg sometime, and give him an unobstrusive going over.”
“You haven’t been having trouble with him again?” she asked anxiously.
He made a face, and then tasted his drink. “It’s trouble just being around that character. Ruth, to use one of those expressions your profession deplores, Len Kellogg is just plain nuts!” He drank some more of his cocktail and helped himself to one of her cigarettes. “Here,” he continued, after lighting it. “A couple of days ago, he told me he’d been getting inquiries about this plague of land-prawns they’re having over on Beta. He wanted me to set up a research project to find out why and what to do about it.”
“Well?”
“I did. I made two screens calls, and then I wrote a report and sent it up to him. That was where I jerked my trigger; I ought to have taken a couple of weeks and made a real production out of it.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The facts. The limiting factor on land-prawn increase is the weather. The eggs hatch underground and the immature prawns dig their way out in the spring. If there’s been a lot of rain, most of them drown in their holes or as soon as they emerge. According to growth rings on trees, last spring was the driest in the Beta Piedmont in centuries, so most of them survived, and as they’re parthenogenetic females, they all laid eggs. This spring, it was even drier, so now they have land-prawns all over central Beta. And I don’t know that anything can be done about them.”
“Well, did he think you were just guessing?”
He shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know what he thinks. You’re the psychologist, you try to figure it. I sent him that report yesterday morning. He seemed quite satisfied with it at the time. Today, just after noon, he sent for me and told me it wouldn’t do at all. Tried to insist that the rainfall on Beta had been normal. That was silly; I referred him to his meteorologists and climatologists, where I’d gotten my information. He complained that the news services were after him for an explanation. I told him I’d given him the only explanation there was. He said he simply couldn’t use it. There had to be some other explanation.”
“If you don’t like the facts, you ignore them, and if you need facts, dream up some you do like,” she said. “That’s typical rejection of reality. Not psychotic, not even psychoneurotic. But certainly not sane.” She had finished her first drink and was sipping slowly at her second. “You know, this is interesting. Does he have some theory that would disqualify yours?”
“Not that I know of. I got the impression that he just didn’t want the subject of rainfall on Beta discussed at all.”
“That is odd. Has anything else peculiar been happening over on Beta lately?”
“No. Not that I know of,” he repeated. “Of course, that swamp-drainage project over there was what caused the dry weather, last year and this year, but I don’t see…” His own glass was empty, and when he tilted the jug over it, a few drops trickled out. He looked at his watch. “Think we could have another cocktail before dinner?” he asked.
CHAPTER TWO
JACK HOLLOWAY LANDED the manipulator in front of the cluster of prefab huts. For a moment he sat still, realizing that he was tired, and then he climbed down from the control cabin and crossed the open grass to the door of the main living hut, opening it and reaching in to turn on the lights. Then he hesitated, looking up at Darius.
There was a wide ring around it, and he remembered noticing the wisps of cirrus clouds gathering overhead through the afternoon. Maybe it would rain tonight. This dry weather couldn’t last forever. He’d been letting the manipulator stand out overnight lately. He decided to put it in the hangar. He went and opened the door of the vehicle shed, got back onto the machine and floated it inside. When he came back to the living hut, he saw that he had left the door wide open.
“Damn fool!” he rebuked himself. “Place could be crawling with prawns by now.”
He looked quickly around the living room — under the big combination desk and library table, under the gunrack, under the chairs, back of the communication screen and the viewscreen, beyond the metal cabinet of the microfilm library — and saw nothing. Then he hung up his hat, took off his pistol and laid it on the table, and went back to the bathroom to wash his hands.
As soon as he put on the light, something inside the shower stall said, “Yeeeek!” in a startled voice.
He turned quickly, to see two wide eyes staring up at him out of a ball of golden fur. Whatever it was, it had a round head and big ears and a vaguely humanoid face with a little snub nose. It was sitting on its haunches, and in that position it was about a foot high. It had two tiny hands with opposing thumbs. He squatted to have a better look at it.