And why, for God’s sake?
That was a question that had any number of possible answers. The least plausible was that some competing person or persons was trying to be a Survivor and underbid me for the job. There was no way I could make real sense out of that one; but ideas that began with: “Someone wanted a planet that wasn’t yet inhabited, and that wouldn’t kill him on the spot—for some purpose or other,” sounded a little more as if they could be heading for plausibility.
But a) Why was this someone shooting at me? and b) Where the hell was he, so I could shoot at him?
The answer to the first question isn’t: “Because he wants me dead.” The right answer has to tell me why, on a continent the size of some small planets, this fellow is within shooting range of me. Why is he not five thousand miles away doing whatever it is he’s planned on doing?
The answer to the second question sounded as if it might be simpler to find.
Off to my left. Within range of the burned button-grass. I tried looking without moving, getting a view out of the comer of my eye. There was a little wind blowing, and button-grass was moving slowly and unwillingly. I looked for any motion against the wind, and in a minute or so I saw some. I fired the slug gun without taking the time to notice that I was aiming it.
About seventeen animals screamed and panicked, all of them out of my line of sight and well into the trees. There was a lot of trampling, trumpeting, and pushing and shoving out there as everything tried to get out of the way of whatever had just made all that noise.
A slug gun will frighten animals you weren’t even aiming at. It will also cover a retreat by a human being— and just by the way, why was I assuming the being with the beamer was human?—who had missed with his first shot, but, all in all, not by very much.
Question three: Is he going to stop, turn, aim, and try for me again?
Answer: Those seventeen fleeing animals are still fleeing, and making the hell of a racket in the process. A calm, cool, collected fellow might just manage to stop, turn and aim in the face of a small stampede of unfamiliar animals, but he’d have to be a good bit better than I am to do it well.
If there are hand-weapon users a good bit better than I am, they belong to a club I have never heard of. I stood up, and I didn’t get shot at.
Slowly the screaming, trumpeting, trampling and so on faded into the distance. The normal sounds of the forest resumed, hesitatingly at first. I walked the remaining four steps, picked up a new fistful of bulbous orange whatevers, and took them back to my log cabin for frying.
Or possibly roasting.
Much later that day, it turned out that if you mashed the stuff into a pulp, and then removed the bits of husk or skin or whatever it was that held the globs of orange stuff together, you had something that would fry up pretty well, with an interesting taste of peppered cod. If you left the husk in the mix you had a sort of highly spiced glue, but with a little work a strainer would separate the bits out fairly well.
Recipe #1 for the joy of Tree’s cooking. I had spent a profitable day.
And I had spent a good deal of it— while working away in my kitchen area—wondering about my invisible assassin. There wasn’t much I could do about him actively (and “him” is of course a term of pure convenience; the term I actually used is not printable, so “him” will have to do for now), but maybe I could figure out a) what he thought he was doing, b) why he thought he was doing it, and c) where I could make an appointment with him to discuss a) and b).
His having arrived near me might, after all, have been pure coincidence. If that were the case, maybe he’d just shot at me out of panic—not expecting another drop-in anywhere near his own site. It’s easy to kick coincidence out of your thinking, but it isn’t bright; coincidences happen.
All the same, this seemed a coincidence the size of the damned continent, possibly the size of Tree itself. I filed it as a small possibility, and went on to wondering about other possibilities.
First: let’s suppose he wanted the planet to himself, and had to get rid of any intruders as rapidly as possible-had to cancel me out as soon as I turned up.
This seemed to require, at first, that he know about my arrival and landing, hurry to my landing area, and wait for me to emerge from my cabin.
Possible, again, but very, very unlikely; to know about my landing and to arrive that fast through quite a lot of Tree jungle, he’d have to have tracked my ship down somehow—in which case he’d have been able to arrive when I did, and he’d have shot at me before the jiffy-built cabin got jiffy-built. Why wait till the last minute?
But maybe, instead, he had detected the cabin being built, or some other sign of my arrival, just that little bit later. For all I knew the behavior of animals or trees gave him a due; it was perfectly possible that he knew the place better than I did then and there.
So he arrived as rapidly as he could, set up, and fired at me as soon as I came out.
Because he wanted the planet to himself. Because he needed the planet to himself. Because he hated me, Gerald Knave, Survivor, from some little adventure somewhere else, or from some previous lifetime. Because he enjoyed hunting, and hunting people was better sport than hunting orange bulbous vegetables, or even strange Tree animals, even if you limited yourself to the somewhat rare large types.
Because…
It was becoming obvious that I did not have the materials I was going to need to think with, and I was going to have to get some more materials somewhere.
It was going to interfere with my Joy of Cooking, but that was something I’d expected. Interrupted by urgencies I couldn’t predict… hadn’t I said that?
Well, I certainly hadn’t predicted an anonymous damned fool with a beamer. Who the hell would have?
The way to collect more facts, of course, was to make myself a target. But this is a job that really ought to be done with great care; I planned to be a target with a safe, well-protected bull’s-eye.
So.
I dug into my bag of tricks, feeling lucky that large animals usually call for a bit more in the way of equipment, all in all, than simply large guns. By the next morning I was about as ready as I was going to get.
I walked out into the little clearing around my log cabin—still no small animals, which seemed normal by then—and looked for food. Joy of Cooking still had to be put together, and it only made sense to start with the easy foods to get at—vegetables. Meat, which has to be run after and caught, could come a little later.
The bulbous orange things were, if not a solved problem, at least one recipe ahead of the rest. I looked around me, and found some large, tan buttons scattered among the pale-yellow ones that seemed to serve as a sort of grass, or ground cover, or icing on the planet’s dirt. These, I had been assured, were edible (in the largest sense: they would not quickly poison anybody), and though they looked somewhat tough, it might be that they were even edible raw. I grabbed up several handfuls, not moving quickly and not trying to move slowly, just ambling along in a thoughtful manner, as if I were doing my job while trying to remember the name of the Comity Vice-Assistant’s Assistant in Charge of Overcharging.
I wasn’t whistling, or humming, but I tried hard to look as if that was my basic mood. Given that I had been shot at the previous day, it would have been an insane mood for me to be in, but it’s interesting, in a way, to realize just how many people will cheerfully accept anybody’s insanity except their own.
I’d collected about as many Tender Buttons (copyright Gtde Stein, back before the Clean Slate War, though as far as I know she’d never been off-planet) as I could comfortably carry, and I ambled slowly back to my log cabin with the load, trying not to look either disappointed or expectant.