Josh felt that he had about a hundred. But it was Amethyst Karpov who was first off the mark.
“When will we be going, sir?”
Brewster glanced at his watch. “Shall we say, we will leave one hour from now? That will give you ample time to pack whatever you feel you need, and provide us enough daylight when we get there to establish our camp. I will, of course, review what each of you proposes to take. Carlson and I will decide on the general equipment and food supplies.”
“Me?” Winnie Carlson stared at Brewster as though she had heard him wrong. “I won’t be going, will I?”
“You certainly will. I will need your help.”
“But I was sent to service the equipment, and most of that is right here in these buildings.” Winnie ignored her own advice to say as little as possible. She went on, “I haven’t so much as looked in three of the buildings yet, and I’ve done no service work at all in the others. I suppose I could check the vehicles that we use, and the field trip equipment, but if I were away that would be all I could do and I know from what I’ve seen already that much of what’s installed here is badly overdue for inspection and maintenance and really cries out for my attention.”
She paused for breath, while Brewster glared at her. He had been listening with icy attention.
“Have you finished, Ms. Carlson? Are you quite, quite sure? Good. Now let me make myself perfectly clear, since you do not appear to have understood what I said the first time. We are all going to make the field trip. Did you hear that, Ms. Carlson? All.
As for your other concerns, I thought that we had agreed on something earlier today: You work for me, and you do exactly what I tell you to do. Agreed?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then I want you ready to leave with the rest of us in one hour. And before that you and I need to assemble adequate supplies of food for eleven people, plus such equipment as we will need. We will do that in my quarters.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Right now.”
Winnie swallowed audibly. “Yes sir.”
Sol Brewster headed for the door, with Winnie Carlson trailing submissively after him. No one spoke until the two were safely out of the building. Then Sapphire said, “What an absolute wimp.”
“Winnie?” Sig Lasker nodded. “Dead right. A total wimp, working for a total jerk. What did we do to deserve them?”
“They deserve each other,” Topaz said. “They ought to get married.”
“Maybe they will.” Amethyst was lolling back in her chair, a faraway look in her innocent blue eyes. “But don’t you think we are missing a basic point?”
“That we’re all as big wimps as Carlson?” Topaz suggested. “When Brewster tells us to do something, we salute and run.”
“There’s certainly that. But I was thinking of something else. Do you remember what Brewster told us yesterday? He was very specific. He said that we’d be staying here for a few days to get used to the air and gravity. After that, we’d begin to travel. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think twenty-four hours is the same thing as a few days.”
“So he changed his mind,” Sapphire said.
“He did. But I want to know why. And why do we have to leave in so much of a hurry? We could have waited until morning. What happened, in the last day, to make him change his mind?”
“She found a spangle.” Ruby pointed at Dawn. “And I didn’t.”
“We found a bodger,” Hag and Rick said in unison. They had to explain that whole incident to Sapphire, Amethyst, and Ruby, before Topaz could offer another suggestion: “Bothwell Gage left.”
“And Winnie Carlson arrived,” Josh added.
“All very true.” Amethyst nodded slowly. “But I don’t see how any of those things are relevant. So what do we do?”
“I can answer that.” Sapphire stood up. “Unless you want to get skinned, you go and pack whatever you need to take with you. Then we all head off on this crazy field trip with Sol Brewster. And then we hang loose, and see what happens next.”
Chapter Nine
The cargo aircar, heavy with passengers and supplies, was in the air and on its way. It was flying low in a strong and gusty wind, and the journey had been a bumpy one. Josh had a window seat in the back row. He was staring out and down. It was easy enough for Brewster to tell them to compare the aerial views of Earth and Solferino, but that made certain assumptions. Josh didn’t know about the others, but his own experience of flying was limited.
There had been the trip west, when his mother had the summer job in Seattle. That was eight years ago and he didn’t remember much about it. He and Mother had made plenty of other trips from town to town, but they had mostly been by bus and car and train. There had been one flight from Boston to Atlanta, but with clouds and turbulence all the way he hardly saw the ground, and anyway it was hard to think about scenery when people were throwing up all around you. And, of course, there was the recent ascent to orbit, when he had been too scared to notice anything at all.
Josh was convinced that when they landed there would be some sort of test on what they had seen and learned, and he would look like an idiot compared with the others. He turned his head and glanced along the row of seats. Dawn was next to him, staring raptly at nothing. Next to her sat Rick and Hag. They were absolutely rigid, eyes straight ahead and hands gripping the armrests. It was clear that they were trying to keep the vehicle in the air by sheer willpower. They were what his mother used to call “white-knuckle fliers,” people who hated to be aloft and wouldn’t be able to think straight until they were back on solid ground.
Feeling a good deal better, Josh turned again to look out of the window.
From the compound, the country all the way to the triple peaks of the Barbican Hills had been one smooth floor of purple and pale yellow. Seen from above there was far more variety. At the moment the aircar was passing over a river that meandered and wandered all over the place. Josh could see in the middle of the broad stream a group of islands shaped like teardrops. The plants on the island formed a mauve cover that looked as flat as a pancake, but Josh knew that was not the case. He could see little round circles all over the place. They had to be the tops of balloon plants, and he had learned from experience that they stuck up well above everything else. When Grisel was lower in the sky the balloons would throw their shadows on the rest of the vegetation, and the flat look would disappear.
Sol Brewster had been dead accurate about one thing: You learned better by seeing for yourself, and you took a lot more notice of what you were being told if the object you were being told about was sitting right in front of you.
“As you will see by looking out of the window, Solferino is a somewhat smaller planet than Earth. You can tell this, because the horizon is much nearer. You are traveling at a height of one thousand meters, and on a clear day you will be able to see a distance to the horizon of about one hundred kilometers. From this, can you estimate the radius of Solferino?”
Josh stared at the landscape and listened to the voice in his ear—not that he had much choice, since the signal came from multiple sources and reached a focus at his ears alone. No matter how he moved his head, the loudness of the voice did not change. If he asked a question, he alone would hear the reply. The others also had individual information services, designed to take account of differences in age and intelligence. Josh had decided in the first minute that his service thought he was either older or smarter than he was.