It was long after dark when I got back to camp.
As I trudged up to the gate, I could see a solitary figure pacing just inside the fence.
Gilda.
I forgot myself. I ran towards her, gun and pack banging against my back, and caught her in my arms.
“Heath?” she gasped, startled.
“I’m the man of the hour, my dear!” I exulted. “At long last, I have earned my keep on this damned expedition!”
“God, you terrified me! I didn’t know what had happened to you. I thought—” She broke off in mid-sentence, seized me by the ears, and pulled my face down into the kiss that I had been fantasizing about for the last three months. “Don’t you ever do that again! I don’t care if you’re the man of the year! When I call you on that radio, you answer me, understand?”
“Radio?”
She gave me a look that seemed to indicate that she thought that I had been born with substandard mental powers. “Yes, radio, Heath. A small electronic device intended for communications. Something I was glued to throughout the afternoon. Something I have here in my hand, hoping that you would call in so I would know where you were—so I could come rescue your broken body, if need be. In case you don’t get the message, idiot, I was worried sick about you! I don’t know whether to hit you or kiss you.”
“Actually, if you’re offering me a choice, I—”
This time we didn’t come up for air for quite some time. Just as I was beginning to fear anoxia, she pulled back and said, “All right. So you’re alive and well after all. I’ll get around to forgiving you next Friday. Put it in your appointment book. Now, what is it that’s made you so smug?”
I started telling her about the copper on Tea Kettle Dome.
“Tea Kettle? Tea Ketffe? You didn’t tell anyone you were going to Tea Kettle! We all thought you were out on Bareback!”
She called me more names and threatened me with dire consequences. “Oooh, I’m so mad at you!” she said finally, stamping her foot.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you cared.”
“Didn’t know…” she began, then subsided, shaking her head. “Men! It’s a wonder the species has survived this long! If it weren’t for women throwing themselves at men, we wouldn’t be here.”
Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a single instance where Gilda had thrown anything, much less herself, at me. But the implications of what she had said…
“So why didn’t you answer your radio?” she demanded. “Are you too important to talk to us normal people now that you’ve found green rocks?”
I was saved from having to compose a reply by the arrival of Adam Anderson. He went through the same sequence of fussing at me for not answering my radio, demanding to know if I was still in one piece, fussing at me for not answering my radio, wanting to know where I’d been, fussing at me for not answering my radio, listening to the first ten words of my description of the copper, fussing… after the tenth time, it finally sunk in.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” I yelled, in order to override the increasing noise level—others had begun to gather, drawn by the commotion. I reached into my pack, drawing out my radio. In the wash of light from the floodlight at the command hut I could see that the switch was in the off position. “Mystery solved!” I said, holding the radio aloft. “It’s turned off.”
“Jeez, smarty, couldn’t you figure out how to turn it on?” came a voice from the back of the small crowd.
Gilda chimed in. “You knew you were late coming back. Couldn’t you have called to let me know you were all right?”
“OK, OK. I was bad. I didn’t tell anyone I was going to Tea Kettle, my radio was off—why, I don’t know, unless it got switched off when I fell, and I didn’t call home when I knew I was running late. Go ahead, make me eat worms. But! Don’t do it until you see how much copper there is out there. Surface indications are that there’s quite a bit. If the formation is as big as I’m hoping, the colonists will have a useful product as soon as they arrive.”
Adam congratulated me. “What will you need to check this out?”
I thought for a second, then told him I’d like a skitter to haul the coring drill and some other odds and ends out into the field. Without thinking, I also added that it would be nice to have a little help. Although I could do it myself, it would go much faster if I had someone along.
Illustration by Bob Eggleton
Almost before the words were out of my mouth, Gilda piped up. “I’ll go,” she volunteered. “I’m caught up on my lab work.”
He looked from her to me. “Well?”
I wasn’t sure I trusted myself to speak. “Uh… sure. I d love to have her along.”
After that, the crowd dissipated. Mike Gaston had apparently been among those listening in on the exchange, although I hadn’t seen him walk up. Gilda saw him at the same instant I did. She made a show of slipping her arm through mine. A look passed between them that has no name, but there was an element of defiance about Gilda as she walked off with me, chattering gaily, leaving Mike staring after us.
The expression on his face was not pleasant.
The ride out to Tea Kettle the next morning was pure bliss. Gilda and I had started early, and the sun had just cleared the horizon as we skimmed above the tree tops.
A skitter is like an oversized pickup truck with wings and a retractable roof. It being summer, I had the top down. The wind of our passage whipped Gilda’s hair as I slalomed between the hills, following the stream bed rather than flying higher and taking the direct route.
“This time, I’ll know where you are,” Gilda told me. “Even if you do come back late.”
I grinned in response. “I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell you that I packed a picnic.”
“Lunch?”
“Well, that too. But what I had in mind was dinner, actually.” I glanced at her. “I even brought a candle.”
Her eyebrow raised. “Why, Heath, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you just revealed a romantic streak. Perhaps I’d better do a little prospecting to see how deep the vein goes. It might be worth mining.”
I banked the skitter into a tight circle, whooping at the top of my lungs, just to let off steam and let the world know that I was happy.
Gilda turned out to be an excellent partner. Her lab work had made her a stickler for detail—a useful trait to have when working with a laser capable of punching a hole the size of your fist into solid rock.
Basically the laser moved in a five centimeter track on top of a tripod, round and round, burning a circular hole into the ground. When it was done, the laser head swung aside and an electric winch lifted the heavy core out. By lunch, we had three short but decent ones from holes spaced across the base of the hill.
I spent lunch wiping the sweat out of my eyes, but I didn’t care. Gilda was laughing at everything I said and I felt like a claustrophobic genie who’d just popped out of a thousand year confinement in a lamp two sizes too small.
Late that afternoon, we carefully laid the last section of the last core on the ground. “Now… about that candle-lit dinner…” Gilda prompted.
“Did I mention a beautiful sunset?”
She glanced over her shoulder at the oranges and reds condensing on the horizon, then turned back to me, smiling. “No, I don’t believe you did.”