Quantrill pursed his mouth in irritation. Only once had he found it necessary to bag a guilty bystander, rover parlance for anyone who knew he had witnessed homicide by an S & R rover. Beyond the punishment meted out by Control for that gaffe, Quantrill's own brutalized, manipulated sense of fair play had punished him more. He willed the damn' guide to decide- he'd heard nothing of importance, to squat again at the firepit — and finally, with a single shake of his head, the man did so.
Quantrill reseated his chiller, wriggled backward several paces, then began the feverish process of enclosing a fattish adult male in a polymer bodybag.
The bag was dull green outside, dull tan inside, and he chose the green face outward as camouflage.
From a half-klick, he might be spotted as a man toting something heavy — perhaps a butchered-out antelope. He zipped the bag shut, perspiring now, risking a quick scan that rewarded him with the sight of the guide who was heading downstream in search of his missing client.
For a two-hundred-meter span downstream, Quantrill judged, the guide's path would bring him in sight of the bodybag — if he knew where to look. Quantrill hauled the bag toward the boulder, cursing his heelmarks. He felt justified in his caution when, before disappearing downstream, the guide stood atop a treetrunk which the annual spring runoff had abandoned.
The man seemed to stare directly at Quantrill for a moment, but even in the high clean air of Wyoming it is impossible to distinguish a squinting green eye and a patch of medium-blond hair from three hundred meters. Unless they moved.
The rover knew better than that. If his own incompetence led to a second death then and only then, in Quantrill's beleaguered value system, was the rover guilty of manslaughter. He had argued it out with Sanger, twice upon times, using their old T-Section short-hand sign talk. This manual conversation avoided any monitoring by Control through their mastoid critics. Control, and their cadre of hard-bitten instructors, came down hard on rovers who were disposed to argue ethics. The survival ethic, they said, had been proven paramount in a billion years of evolution — and S & R wanted acceptance, not argument.
Waiting for the guide to disappear, Quantrill looked about him for Gilson's flyrod, presumably dropped in the grass. Then he gave it up. If he couldn't find the thing, neither would a search party. He burrowed under the bag, came to one knee, then lurched off with ninety kilos of dead weight in a fireman's carry.
He did not slow his pace until, sweat-sodden and breathless in the thin air, he had lugged his quarry nearly a kilometer from the stream.
Quantrill could have told Control of his progress then and there, via his critic and the relay stations at Mayoworth or Hazelton Peak. Some rovers seemed pathetically eager to keep Control advised of every step, like anxious children placating a stern, unknowable parent. Quantrill had found Control too free with pointless instructions and rarely initiated contact until his mission was complete. If he had any faith in the corporate state he served, it was faith that he would not be expended so long as his usefulness exceeded the rover average. His faith was not misplaced.
For all his physical gifts, Quantrill was not particularly quick in adjusting to the thin air of northern Wyoming. Control's human and electronic modules had juggled many variables; decided that S & R's youngest rover boasted a better success rate in rough country than anyone but the S & R instructors, Seth Howell and Marty Cross; and arranged for Quantrill to spend five days in a wilderness-area seminar before this’ surveillance' mission. The S & R regulars, almost all of staunch Mormon stock, were an altruistic friendly lot; but they'd been taught to let rovers rove without asking for details. Quantrill had left the seminar, and with luck might return to it, without a ripple in their routines.
At length, the rover felt rested enough to resume his carry and chose the route with the most cover, avoiding the few animal paths he struck. The main thing was to get well beyond the radius of any reasonable search by Gilson's guide, as quickly as possible. The guide probably would not succeed in bringing in a search party until after midnight — an S & R team of regulars, like as not — and no one knew better how to avoid a search pattern than a trained searcher. Long before that, the bodybag and its contents would be under a meter of earth, the bag's pheromones repellent to carrion-eaters. Quantrill put another klick behind him before awaiting dusk under a ledge, and learned then what had been poking into his shoulder. Gilson had been a meticulous man: his flyrod, in five short sections, lay ranked in tubular pockets along his trouser leg.
"One day," Quantrill said to the bodybag, "I'll be able to afford a packrod like this." He was not even remotely tempted to steal the rod while studying Gilson's wallet with gloved fingers. Expensive equipment was often marked with tiny dipoles, and getting caught with a missing man's toys was an error too stupid for serious consideration. Gilson had lived and died in a political clime that favored the already-favored, and equated price with value. Gilson's property was better protected than his life.
Quantrill lost another liter of perspiration before dark. The cold light of his chemlamp yielded less IR
signature than his body did and, if the guide's 'mayday' came to officialdom, Control would know it immediately. Haste to be away on his own, not fear of discovery, prompted Quantrill's speed with his collapsible trenching tool.
Sometime after eleven P.M., Quantrill's critic intruded. "This is Control, Q." Who else? Well, stray tightband messages had been known to piggyback a beam upstream of a scrambler circuit.
"Rover Control, rover Control," Quantrill responded. In an IFF module near White House Deseret, his freq. pattern passed muster. His key phrase, its syncopation, and the voiceprint said that the rover Quantrill was on-line.
"Your program is running. Is it green?"
"Like Giuseppe Verdi."
Pause. It was dangerous to pique Control with dessicant humor but you sometimes provoked a suggestion of mirth if a human operator and not a pure machine intelligence happened to be on-line.
"Your program is running. Is it green?" No change of inflection but higher gain and slightly slower delivery. Exactly what a machine tries first to cure a communication problem.
"Green," he said. "Message delivered, disposition per orders." Gilson dead; buried.
"Can you go on the carpet, Q?" Are you situated where you can be picked up by air?
"I can in ten minutes," he said, uncoded. "I'm a klick North of the DZ."
Pause. "North? Say again, Q."
Quantrill sighed. When would Control intuit that rovers had to misdirect S & R pilots as well? "North.
They'll find me walking South," he said as if to a simpleton.
"Affirm," said Control. "If you can cut your surveillance short, Q, a team of regulars can pick you up en route to an MP mission your area."
Quantrill chuckled. The missing person, of course, would be Ralph Gilson. He was not so pleased when Control added that he would be expected to aid in that search. For a brief instant he wondered what Control would do if he simply led the innocent regulars to the burial site and dug up the bodybag — would do exactly, that is. The general gist he knew well enough. It would serve Control right for scheduling him to work all night at an exercise in futility — but would serve Quantrill ill. Fatally.
Control coded out, leaving Quantrill at peace.
He'd remembered to reset his coverall's chameleon stud, but rechecked anyway, splitting his concentration between his equipment and a big buck — mulie, to judge by the big ears — that had moved downwind of him, sampling the rover's scent. The image intensifier on his helmet visor made hikes in darkness a cinch, but better still it let Quantrill study a night world peopled by creatures as wary as any he had stalked in government service. A curious vixen with her two fox kits came so near they might have been tame, but only a fool would think them so. They merely assumed the visored man was blind, and Quantrill let them. He liked to study other predators, too.