Six or seven steps from my door, I heard that teeny sizzle again, and dropped flat on another damned patch of pale yellow button grass. The stuff dug into me just as uncomfortably as before—this was a continent, or at least an area, where rolling around on the greensward, or yellowsward, was never going to be wildly popular—and this time he was shooting low and to his left. He was also, judging from the sound, shooting a different size and make of beamer, God alone knew why.
A sizable patch of buttons had turned dead-black, over there to my right; much larger beamer, check. I stayed flat, tracking back as well as I could out of the comer of my eye.
Much less wind today. No button movement.
Ten seconds of dead silence.
Buttons moving over there, just to my left. Some sort of bird, animal or waterfall gave a scream like a duchess whose feet were being stepped on by several unruly commoners. The buttons stopped moving, and then resumed, a little more slowly.
I had my own beamer in my left hand—frightening animals was not what I was after; stampedes were contraindicated—and I shot at the moving buttons before I could spend any time on aiming or shifting position. There was a small, rather odd-sounding thunk, and the whole damned area went up in flames.
Not a forest fire. Not even a button-grass fire.
I watched a rocket—a very small rocket—take off from the patch of button-grass, head for the sky, arc over toward the forest and away from my log cabin, and sizzle right on out of sight.
A rocket?
A rocket?
All right. He’d been hiding in a hollow, the button-grass giving the hollow sufficient cover; there’d been more of him than flat ground-level would have allowed. I would check on the hollow in a few seconds. I would check very damned carefully on the hollow. Later on I would scream and curse and otherwise blow off some steam, while trying to fit together some of the goddamnedest pieces, claiming to be one puzzle, I had ever seen.
First, I was going to spend several lengthy seconds in adjusting.
Yes, I know: this is not supposed to be necessary. We Survivors adjust instantly to anything, with our beamers at the ready and our laconic swaggers unholstered and to hand.
In real life, however…
A rocket?
Whatever I had thought up to that point became instantly subject to massive revision. While revising, I got up and walked over to where the hollow had to be, and found out that it was there.
It had been dug, very carefully and very smoothly, by some sort of machine; human beings dig raggedly, and this was as smooth a post-hole as I have ever seen. It was about seven feet deep, and about three feet in diameter, and the dirt of Tree, at the bottom of the hole, was burnt to a sort of slag that looked like a fifty-fifty combination of glass and glue. The sides were glass-smooth, with two little indentations running at opposite sides of the cylindrical hole, top to bottom.
The rocket, obviously, had dug the damned hole during the night, and waited partway inside it, its beamer itching with readiness, until I’d come out in the morning. The thing seemed too small to have a human pilot, and I hadn’t really offended any teeny races over the years. Obviously, I’d run into a rocket that hated me.
That conclusion didn’t make a great deal of sense, but then, at the moment, I wasn’t making a great deal of sense. Inside, where it didn’t show (so the flora and fauna of Tree could go on appreciating my laconic swagger, I suppose), I was jumping up and down and screaming.
I’d marked the direction the rocket had taken, and I realized that I was going to have to go on being a target for a while. A fully generated protective field is an uncomfortable sort of thing to have to walk around in—sweat collects; despite the manufacturers’ claims about blowers and cycling temperatures, sweat collects—but I was going to have to walk around in it for at least some of this new day. Inside the field, little could damage me except poison gas, and so far I had no evidence of poison gas anywhere in the picture.
That, like damned near everything else, was of course subject to change at any second.
Being a target cheerfully collecting vegetables wasn’t going to work twice; there is a limit to just how insane people (let alone vengeful rockets) will believe you are likely to be. But a vengeful target would be almost plausible, I thought, and as I went back to my log cabin to collect some heavier weaponry I was screwing my face up to look vengeful, just for practice.
Once inside the log cabin, though, I relaxed the muscles. I got ready and collected some fairly heavy armament, suitable for carrying, together with some fancy instrumentation, and piled all of it near the door; then I went for the detail maps.
The forests got in the way a little, but not nearly as much as you’d think; drones can collect large piles of bare scientific facts, even when the area involved is not as bare as would be really helpful. The map showed me very few places where a miniature rocket might land without instantly setting a forest, or at least a large glade, on fire, and I translated those into the ground I’d seen, worked out the directions and came up, to my complete surprise, with only a single really hopeful-looking candidate.
All this was assuming, of course, that the damned thing had landed somewhere nearby, somewhere I could get to on foot. For all I really knew, it had traveled five thousand miles to its home base, which was somewhere under the ice of the polar ocean with Captain Nemo and the crew of Old Ironsides.
But the rocket did seem to be marked Local; why jump across continents yesterday if you were planning on coming right back today and doing more shooting? Commuting is definitely the hard way to arrange to murder somebody.
I mused about remote control for a minute. That seemed even more unlikely; the controls necessary would be complicated, leaving little time for actual aiming and shooting. All the same, if there had been someone inside the rocket he’d been a very small someone, and—it occurred to me— perfectly relaxed about getting his feet heated. Of course, there were protective fields… in fact, I was still wearing one.
Which showed me how completely I had been upset. I took the damned thing off, wiped myself down, thought about a fast shower in the almost-water my shower was geared to provide, and sighed. Then I put the field back on, grabbed up my weaponry and instruments, and started out on foot for Rocket Central.
I kept my eyes open for vegetables most of the trip, in an abstracted sort of way; the fact that I was doing that, more or less on automatic, cheered me when I noticed it, because it meant that the back of my head had figured there was a fair chance of my returning. Why waste time on a census of vegetables you were never going to get to cook?
It was a nice, normal sort of trek, in fact, barely two miles. Fall was rather hot in this particular area of Tree, or else the manufacturers were lying even more than usual about the protective field, but what’s a little sweat between friends? I slogged through a glade or two, and the yellow-tan trees rustled gently in the wind, waving a little stiffly and being nourished by all the small furry animals that happened by. Flyers, a very few of the animals were—I had no idea how flyers made fur do for feathers on Tree, though I admit it’s an interesting question; in fact, it might have been the most interesting question for me to answer while I was on the planet. At the time, of course, I was silly enough to believe that I was otherwise involved.
Rocket Central—a clearing among several glades—was a quarter of a mile ahead when I stopped, sat down with a carefully inaudible sigh of relief, and began to put some of the weaponry in order. There is a great deal to be said for weapons not marked Some Assembly Required, but if you have to carry the damned things before use, you may not have many options. I owned a medium-range beamer assembly, complete with sights so complicated they were almost useless, and a bomb-thrower our ancestors would have called a Bazooka, though why a bomb-thrower would be named for a chewing-gum I have never really figured out.