Something on my Mind
by Grey Rollins
Illustration by Nicholas Jainschigg
Mid-morning, early summer. A stiff, dry breeze blew across the exposed face of the hill. The movement of the air neatly counterbalanced the rising heat.
Behind me was a broad, round-bottomed, glacial valley, filled with the local equivalent of trees—almost exactly like trees, except for an internal skeleton of something about the consistency of cartilage. Before me, written in the naked rock, was a tale of unimaginable power and violence. The country rock had been rent by the salt-and-pepper glitter of intrusive dikes of a fine-grained pegmatite. Long, forking lines reached across the barren side of the hill like lightning etched on a gray stony sky.
Ascendance was the ninth habitable planet discovered by humans. I and my co-workers were an advance team, here to explore prospective sites for settlements and to get some rudimentary infrastructure in place before the colonists arrived.
My contribution consisted of identifying the gross geologic features and trying to find any obvious, easily accessible deposits of minerals. So far, I had found traces of iron, no more. Pegmatites often yield other riches, such as radioactives, so I was still hopeful.
The wind backed, shifted, and whipped dust into my eyes and mouth. The pain was sudden and intense. I stumbled backwards, simultaneously pawing at my eyes and spitting grit.
Naturally, my radio picked that moment to announce a call. Just as inevitably, I had left it on my pack a good ten meters away.
Cursing in a steady stream, I fumbled blindly, as much by sound as sight. It took an eternity to find the idiot thing. I sat heavily next to my pack, picked the radio up and said, “Stills here.”
It was Susan Blankenship, back at the camp. “Have you seen Mike?”
“Nobody out here but me and the dust devils.”
“Cut it out. I’m serious.”
“Cut what out? He’s not here.”
Susan sighed heavily, as though having to talk to me was the worst kind of imposition. “Listen, smartass, I asked you if Mike was out there.”
“Mike’s not here. What could be simpler?”
There was a lengthy pause during which I imagined her counting to ten. Judging from the tone in her voice, I had managed to irritate her again. This seemed to be a special talent I alone possessed. As far as I knew, I was the only person, man or woman, who could anger her just by the way I held my fork.
Her voice, when it came back, was clipped and curt. “Where are you?”
“I’m on the far side of Bareback Ridge, about even with the fork in the stream.”
“And you haven’t seen Mike?”
“No, Susan, I haven’t seen Mike. Not since breakfast.”
“Not at all?”
My turn to count to ten. “What’s wrong, dearie, did he-man leave his loincloth behind again?”
There was an abrupt click.
“Susan?”
No reply.
I shrugged. I wouldn’t miss talking to her, but now my curiosity was stirring. Obviously, Susan had misplaced Mike Gaston. Since they were an item, she would be quick to worry. On the other hand, Mike was quite capable of taking care of himself.
Still, complacency can kill you, and no place more easily than on a new world. I blinked sore eyes experimentally a couple of times, then stood and made my way to the top of the ridge, the better to see. Five minutes of fruitless scanning through my binoculars reinforced my impression that I was alone.
I keyed my radio and said, “Susan, this is Heath, I’m on top of Bareback now, and I still don’t see Mike. Is this an emergency? Should I drop what I’m doing and look for him?”
The sun beat down on my shoulders as I waited for a reply. Minutes passed. I heard a wallah calling down in the valley below me. Wall-ah, wall-ah, wall-ahh! I shrugged again and gave up, slipping my radio into my shirt pocket to free my hands for the descent back to where I had left my pack.
The radio beeped. I pulled it back out and keyed it. “Stills here.”
“Did I say it was an emergency?” Susan demanded querulously. “No! So go on back to whatever you were doing. I’m sure your rocks are waiting on you.”
“That they are, my dear. Millions of years, they’ve waited, and I’d hate to keep them waiting another minute. Stills out.”
As I slipped and skidded back down to my pack, I saw the wallah at the edge of the trees below me. Partly arboreal, they were nimble climbers, but not much else. In size and shape, they resembled a cross between some of the smaller Earthly primates and a koala, but appeared to be scavengers, eating the remains of kills made by other animals.
By the time I got to my pack I was mildly winded. I squatted on my heels and took a sip from my canteen, swirled it through my mouth, then spat. That took care of the remaining grit in my mouth, but my eyes still smarted. Not much I could do there.
Why hadn’t Susan simply queried Mike’s radio? There was a communications satellite in synchronous orbit that would report back to her in seconds. Presumablv, Mike s radio would be somewhere near Mike, and her question would be answered.
That left two possibilities. One, hopefully the most likely, was that Mike had simply turned his radio off. It wasn’t unlikely. If your radio was queried, it beeped so you would know that someone was looking for you. Mike, in his role as biologist, could easily be trying to stalk an animal. The beep would ruin his approach. The other, more ominous, possibility was that the radio had been destroyed, but if Susan didn’t think there was any reason to worry, then I wasn’t going to pursue that train of thought.
Mike turned up safe and sound. I saw him that evening at supper with Susan almost literally hanging on his arm. I wouldn’t have thought anything more about it had I not seen him trade a significant glance with Gilda Orr.
That raised a third possibility—that Susan simply hadn’t liked what Mike’s radio had been telling her.
The next day, I did something I didn’t normally do. I took my rifle with me when I went out into the field. Even if it had been prompted by jealousy, Susan’s call the previous day had spooked me a bit. No one had ever been attacked by the local fauna, but I had gotten complacent. Not good.
I resented the weight of the gun, and I resented the bulk, or at least the length of it. It snagged on branches and tangled in every vine. I was all but ready to sling the damned thing into the brush by the time I got back to the far side of Bareback Ridge. I just hadn’t quite come up with a plausible story about how I had managed to lose it, especially as I was known to be almost neurotically careful with my equipment.
I had no ideological quarrel with carrying a weapon. It’s the futility of it that galled me; I’m a terrible shot. The inborn ease with which Mike Gaston could swing a rifle to his shoulder and effortlessly place small holes in a tight pattern on a target I could barely see was forever beyond me. Should the need to defend myself arise, I would be more likely to shoot myself and save a predator the effort of pulling me down.
I carefully placed the gun on the ground, half-afraid it would fire if I looked at it wrong. I then shrugged out of my pack and placed it next to the gun. After a few minutes of rest to get my breathing back in line, I started working my way up one of the dikes.
Small black crystals of magnetite, but not in sufficient quantity to be useful as iron ore. Pale blue hexagonal prisms of apatite. Pretty, but not really useful. Then a stretch where I saw nothing but the mica, quartz, and feldspar that made up the pegmatite. Each useful enough in its own way, but not worth getting excited about.
Wall-ah, wall-ah, wall-ahhh!