All the animals were yowling now. Darkened windows behind him filled with light.
"What son of a bitch is screwing with those dogs?"
"Zee virgin, she is mine!"
Another light blinked on. A male voice bellowed, "Hey, you! I just got to sleep. Will you for Christ's-? Oh. Cadmann. Cadmann, a lot of us are on the night shift. Cam you wrap that up fast?"
"Sure, Neal. Sony."
The window slammed. The dog strained at his hold on her mane. "Easy, girl-" Cadmann dug in his heels. Never go out at dusk without a flashlight. Rule One. And I forgot.
"Cadmann!"
Cadmann jumped. Sheena strained just at that moment, and his grip slipped. The shepherd sped baying into the dark.
"Good going, Weyland."
Bloody idiot. Cadmann recognized the angry whine, had trouble matching the thin, almost effeminate frame of its owner with the label Terry Faulkner: Sylvia's husband. "She'll be back as soon as she's hungry."
"Eh?"
"Sheena."
"Oh. The dog. Yeah, I hope so. Listen, Sylvia sent me to get you. If you want to come to the beach party, get moving. We've got the last jeep and we're leaving now."
"Yeah, well..." There was nothing out there now, no sound but rushing water. Screw the picnic. I need a flashlight.
"Are you coming?"
Damn you! "Sheena! Come, Sheena."
"I'm leaving." Terry's thin lips twitched with a nervous tic that made it hard for Cadmann to look him directly in the face. His small fists balled up and set on his hips. "Sylvia said you should come."
Did you ever recover from puberty? What if I throw you in the creek? The dogs were quiet now. Heidi nickered and came to the edge of the pen seeking sugar. "All right."
The jeep slewed around in a tight circle, so quickly that only the ballast of several enthusiastically inebriated colonials kept it from tipping over on two wheels. Zack Moscowitz leaned out of the driver's seat. He was wearing driving goggles above a shaggy black mustache. "All aboard! Will each passenger kindly check his or her own tokens?"
Cadmann grinned in amusement. His or her. Like a book from the twenty-first century. "H'lo, Boss."
Moscowitz wiped at his goggle lenses but only succeeded in smearing the dirt more evenly. "Good to see you, Cadmann. How'd the outing go?"
"Great." Cadmann stood unmoving. Terry had already claimed the seat in front next to Zack's wife, Rachel. There was no other place to sit.
"Here we go, Cad." George Merriot squeezed over to make room. It took some squeezing-George could use a few extra sit-ups.
"Thanks, Major."
"Not any more. Cad."
"Right." Weyland climbed over Barney Carr and Carolyn, one of the
McAndrews twins. He wiggled his way into the middle.
"Seat belts, right? Everybody, right?"
There was a chorus of bored assents. Zack gunned the jeep and roared out of camp. The road out to the beach was smoother than that leading to the mountains, and more frequently traveled. It served the orbital shuttle, which made water landings.
"No problems, Cadmann?" the Administrator shouted.
"Ah-nothing, Zack." Cadmann was momentarily distracted by a whiff of perfume. Carolyn had taken advantage of a bump in the road to lean closer to him. Now if it had been Phyllis... but Phyllis and Hendrick Sills were a pair, and the twins were not identical. Carolyn was sallow in both complexion and personality. He smiled at her anyway.
"What about the fence?"
"Nothing serious. Break. I fixed it."
George Merriot laughed. "Hey, Zack, for a bare instant there, I thought you weren't playing company director this evening."
Moscowitz wove deftly around a pothole. "Never happened. Check that fence in daylight tomorrow, would you, Cad?"
"Enough!" Rachel Moscowitz shouted. "No business tonight. The night shift's on duty. Remember?"
"There was something," Cadmann said.
Moscowitz slowed, his eyes still on the road. "Yes?"
"Bit of disturbance with the animals. They were acting like rush hour at the stockyard. Scared. Crazy." The jeep lurched, and Cadmann gently removed someone's elbow from the back of his neck. "Might not be anything, but you never know. I took out one of the dogs. Sheena. She got away."
"Aw, not Sheena. Where'd she go?"
"Who cares?" George demanded. "They all got out last week. She'll come back."
Zack kept the jeep burning along the track at a racing pace, and as they bumped over a rise near the ring of thorn bushes, Cadmann could see taillights in front of them. We're in the last jeep? Christ, he drives fast. Cadmann asked, "Something special about Sheena?"
Zack said, "Naw, I've been slipping her a few scraps, that's all."
"He wants her in our home," Rachel said. "And we don't have enough room."
"Wouldn't be fair anyway." When Zachariah Moscowitz laughed, his heavy arching eyebrows and thick mustache simply cried for a thick cigar and a round of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady. "Ten dogs, and a hundred sixty colonists. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to get proprietary, does it?"
"No. Zack, stop. I'll go back and find her."
"Come on." Moscowitz flipped up the filthy goggles. "Gives me a whole new outlook on life. George, give the Colonel a drink, will you? Cad, we're not on duty tonight. Smell the sea and drink the beer and the hell with it."
Cadmann didn't laugh. The salt breezes tickled his nose now, and it cleaned away some of his worry. But he'd lost Zack's dog!
Zack was still talking. "I don't suppose that this really impacts on you. Cad, but I've been a paper pusher most of my life. Administration type."
"You're still the only man I know with pencil calluses behind his ear."
"Ah, but things aren't the same anymore. I still ride a keyboard, but I ride it light-years from home, on a planet still two twitches this side of the Jurassic."
"And so?" Cadmann could hear the breakers now, rolling in steady rhythm against the shore.
"And so on Earth I made decisions and was responsible for maybe one five-billionth of what happened on the planet. Here, I'm one one hundred and sixtieth of this planet's history. I'll have cities, states named after me. We'll be in the history books, Cadmann, and schoolchildren will know our names."
They always did name cities after their founders. They used to name them after warriors, too, but what's to fight here?
The jeep slowed to a crawl as the road ended at the edge of the beach. Bonfires had already been lit and tended down to a low roar, and the other colonists waved in greeting.
Minerva One was ass-on to the beach. A team had anchored a winch in the rock so that the shuttle could be pulled up after landing. Nice design there. Land on water, take off on water, never worry about finding an airport. Its desalinization plant was a box floating alongside, with membranes inside to filter the seawater. The shuttle would be flying up to the mother ship tomorrow, one of Sylvia's monthly jaunts. She wouldn't be able to take it next month. Regardless of her protests, no one was going to allow an obviously pregnant biologist to undergo unnecessary g-stresses.
As soon as the jeep slewed to a halt, Cadmann and the others piled out. A cooler lay open on the beach. Cadmann fished out a pouch of cold beer. "Zack! I knew you were the right man to head up this trip."
"Damn straight. You have no idea how hard I fought for that beer." He dipped into the cooler and extracted a pouch. "We'll have our brewery next year."
"Thirty months?" Hendrick Sills shouted, his arm tight around Phyllis's admirably trim waist.
"Earth year," Zack answered. The Avalon year was two point six times as long as Earth's.