"I didn't hear anything silly," Mark said quietly. He squatted and rubbed bare dirt between his thumb and forefinger. "You know," he added, "it could be that more people need the chance to sit with a few friends and a lot of nature than know they do."
The pooter stuck its head out of the hole again. Mark winked at it. After a moment, the creature snipped off a clump of grass and began to ingest it, bite by bite.
As they watched the creature eat, Yerby Bannock said, "Where d'ye suppose a man would find one of them recycling plants you talked about, Mark lad?"
9. Another Country Heard From
As the flyers rose above the ridgeline, their motors running strongly in the midafternoon sunlight, the tiny radio attached to the hub of Amy's control yoke crackled, "-need help soonest. I got a gang of Zenith surveyors and their ship parked in my soybeans. Anybody who can hear me, come lend a hand. This is Dagmar Wately and I need help! Over."
"This is Yerby Bannock, Dagmar," the speaker resumed instantly. Mark could hear Yerby's voice faintly from the flyer ahead of them a beat or two after the same words had arrived over the radio. "I'm about ten minutes out. Anybody who can hear my signal, grab a persuader and come help Dagmar Wately talk to some Zeniths in her soybean field. That's southwest of her compound. Out!"
Yerby banked his flyer, swinging west by northwest from the south heading he'd set to go home. He bellowed over his shoulder, "You kids get back to the compound. Send George and Elmont out to Dagmar's soybeans if they haven't already gotten the message."
Amy continued to pull her craft around to follow her brother. She looked at Mark in an unspoken question.
"I don't know what I can do to help him," Mark said, "but I wouldn't feel right not to try."
Amy smiled. "Thanks," she said. "For not telling me I'm a girl."
"You are a girl," Mark said. "But I don't see that you can be much more useless than I am."
Amy's laugh trilled merrily across the sky. She held station a little above and behind her brother's flyer, just as she had on the way north. Yerby looked back at them and glared, but he didn't waste his breath shouting further orders.
Nearly a thousand acres of soybeans filled a valley similar to the one from which Mark and his friends had just come. The Terran crop was a green with less gray in it than the native vegetation growing near rock outcrops that hadn't been plowed. The starship sat like a troll in the midst of the rolling field on four great outrigger pontoons.
Frequent heating and cooling by magnetic eddy currents colored the upper surfaces of the ship's spherical hull. The lower curves were blackened by carbon not from the rocket fuel-that was surely hydrogen and oxygen-but from the loam and vegetation that the exhaust had incinerated as it blew a crater in the field on landing.
A handful of air-cushion jeeps, each holding two people in orange coveralls, drove across the field. One of them was nearly a mile from the starship. The survey party was setting fluorescent white rods in the ground at intervals of several hundred yards.
The starship's main hatch was lowered to the ground. A flyer like the Bannocks' sat close by. A figure in Greenwood leather waved as she argued on the boarding ramp with three figures in tailored white uniforms. Several other flyers approached in the clear sky, but none of them were as close as the Bannock craft.
Yerby landed at the edge of the ramp. Amy came down a fraction of a second behind him, dropping from the sky with a verve that left Mark's stomach fifty feet behind. The flyer's frame flexed dangerously. Mark tried to take some of the shock on his own legs and managed to bury his feet ankle-deep in the soft field.
"Amy, child," Yerby said as he got out of his flyer's space-framed cockpit, "why don't you stick by the radio and relay things to the neighbors flying in. I'd like them to stay in the air just for now."
He didn't look back at the other flyer. Mark hadn't seen Yerby unstrap the heavy flashgun from his rack, but it was cradled now in the crook of his left arm. The weapon's squat barrel, a Cassegrain laser, was six inches in diameter and only a foot long.
Mark stayed a pace behind and to the left as Yerby strolled up the ramp toward the four waiting figures. "'Lo, Dagmar," Yerby said. Even standing below them on the slope, he was as tall as any of the three Zeniths, two men and a woman. "Like you to meet Mark Maxwell, a friend of mine. Gather you've got a problem here?"
Dagmar Wately was younger than Desiree but of similar build. She wore leather breeches and a jacket whose loops and pockets were full of tools. She thumbed toward the uniformed trio. "I come out when I heard them land," she said. "Thought they might be in trouble. Seems they're from Zenith and they think they got a right to be here."
"We do have a right to be here," said the younger of the two men. His epaulettes were orange, like the garments of the survey crewmen in the jeeps. "We're laying out a city of fifty thousand here. The construction crews will arrive as soon as we've completed our end. The first of the immigrant ships from Earth will be landing before the year is out."
"There's no mistake about our landfall," said the older man. "We're right in the center of the grant. You can come with me to the bridge and check the navigational data if you like."
Yerby grinned. He looked as cheerful as he had the moment before he knocked the heads of two Zeniths together in the caravansary. "You know, Dagmar," he said, "I'd always thought this was part of your grant."
"You know damned well it is, Bannock!" Dagmar said. "We fought long enough over our boundary lines that we know where each other's property lies, don't we?"
"You're talking about Hestia grants," the woman in uniform said. "We're employed by Vice-Protector Finch of Zenith under Zenith grants. If you've got a problem, take it up with him."
"Ah, but you lot are closer than Finch, ain't you?" Yerby said. "Amy, love, tell the boys to start picking up them spikes, will you? I reckon there's not much of a survey without markers."
The Zenith with orange surveyor's tabs reached into his pocket. Dagmar kicked him in the crotch. The Zenith gasped and bent forward. Mark dipped a gun out of the pocket, then stepped clear so that the overbalanced man could tumble down the ramp. Dagmar kicked him in the ribs as he fell past.
The uniformed woman took a step backward. She touched her own jacket pocket.
"Please don't do that," Mark said to her politely. "I won't hit you, but Ms. Wately will."
The flyers were dipping down across the soybean field. One buzzed an air-cushion Jeep. While a man piloted the flyer, the woman slipped from the other saddle and stood on the lower frame to snatch a surveyor's cap.
Another flyer pivoted around a survey stake-the white rods contained transponders to provide precise measurement to the satellite the ship would have dropped in orbit-and the pilot himself snatched it out of the ground. Mark wouldn't have thought that was possible.
Yerby continued to smile at the two Zeniths still standing. Mark looked at the gun he'd taken from the groaning man. It was a nerve scrambler like the one the baggage handler had carried. No way Mark could rip the weapon apart the way Yerby'd done the other one, but…
The upper surface of the ramp was made of plates welded to an internal framework. There was a slight gap between the edges of the two plates at Mark's feet. He stuck the needle point of the pistol's muzzle between them and snapped it off with a quick twist.
"You can't do this!" the older Zenith cried.
"Now," said Yerby, "there's another difference of opinion."
The jeeps were rushing back toward the ship, jouncing high at every bump and grounding jarringly as the plenum chamber spilled air. For a moment Mark wasn't sure he should have destroyed the nasty little gun, but it was pretty obvious that the surveyors were fleeing rather than coming to help their officers.