Jonah yawned cavernously over his morning coffee, then hauled the crisp air deep into his lungs as he stretched work-stiffened muscles. It was a cool morning, a relief before the long blazing heat of the day. Alpha Centauri was rising red over the mountains to the east, and the eye-hurting bright speck of Beta hung on a peak like a jewel on a wizard’s staff. No mountain on Earth could have been so slender and so steep, but Wunderland pulled its heights less fiercely. Birds and orthinoids were waking down in the ribbon of forest that filled the valley purling and cheeping. None of the kzin were present, which was not surprising in itself. The aliens had fallen into a gorge-and-fast cycle which seemed to be natural to them, and the bacon and eggs frying in the pan would be repulsive to them.
They used to be that way to me, he admitted: far too natural. After this much pick-and-shovel work, he just felt hungry all the time.
“Want some hash-browns?” Hans asked.
“You’re bleeping right I do,” Jonah said, yawning again.
“See you didn’t get any more sleep than the rest of us,” Hans said.
“The rest of us?” Jonah paused with his fork raised over his loaded plate.
“Oh, I may be getting on, but that don’t make me sleep any sounder. Just the opposite. First the big ratcat goes out to check nobody’s found his goods-then the little one. Then you. Then the big one again…”
Jonah flushed. “I just had to piss,” he said.
“Funny you went in that direction, then,” Hans said, and cackled with laughter. “This’ll get worse the longer we’re out here. That’s why I wanted to stop at twenty thousand, mostly. Now we’ll all have to check nightly. And each of us worry about the others ganging up on him”
Jonah forced himself to eat. His body remembered his hunger, even if his mind was telling him his stomach was full of lead.
“You don’t seem too worried,” he said.
“Well, it’s a matter of possibilities,” Hans said. “The two ratcats could take us out-but they don’t get on too well, you may have noticed. Still, blood counts for something. Or you and Spots could take the rest of us
– Spots will be seeing Bigs as a real challenge down in his balls, while we’re just monkeys. Or-”
“Or you could know where it all is and just take it and clear out,” Jonah said harshly, feeling the hair on his back creep. As a programmer, he knew what an infinite regression setup could do to your logic; also how the Prisoner’s Dilemma generally worked out in real life.
Hans lit his first pipe of the day with a stick from the fire. “No, don’t think so. You three are a lot tougher than you were when we started. You’d catch me and kill me. Still, it’s something to think about, isn’t it?” He blew a cloud of smoke. “Enough lollygagging-nobody told us to stop working.”
“Sure,” Jonah muttered to himself “Send me back to Neu Friborg for supplies. Why me?”
Another charge of water went down the sluice, to his left past the beaten trail up to the shaft. The wood groaned less now after a week of operation; water had swollen it until the pegged joints were tight, and there was less leakage too. He ignored it, concentrating on strapping the pack-saddle tight; the mule just seemed quietly relieved to be free from hauling loads out of the mine. The pack was mostly empty, except for some hides and dried meat to lend credence to their cover-story of hunting for pelts. The last thing they needed was contact with the authorities. The Provisional Government was hard-up and had even more than the usual official determination to see that the citizenry and their money were soon parted. All four of them agreed on that, if nothing else, although it had been a bleeping struggle to get the kzinti to skin their kills before they ate them.
Is Hans out of his mind? Or is he in it with them? Jonah thought. It would be a four-day trip. Four days he’d be unable to check on his goods, and that was nearly fifteen thousand krona by now. Without that gold he’d be back cadging handouts in Munchen soon enough. I put up more money than the others, he thought bitterly. As it is I’m getting less than my share. Tanjit, but it’s hot. He reached for the canteen and poured more water on the cloth draped over his head. He could hear Spots coming down the trail, dragging another load of dirt for the boxes. With a scowl, he led the mule behind a boulder it was downwind from the trail this time of day, so he wouldn’t have to talk to the kzin.
Spots stopped for a moment, moaning softly and pulling the rope yoke over his head. His effort at grooming the matted, worn spots on his sloping shoulders seemed half-hearted, and after a few swipes he simply lay down in the roadway, groaning more loudly. Something he would never do if he were aware of being watched, of course… Jonah felt a moment’s guilt. I should cough or something, he thought. Then: No. If he did, he would have to explain why he was hiding behind the rock-and that would make Spots more suspicious than he was already. At least they were still talking when business made it necessary, while Bigs was barely speaking even to his sibling and not at all to the humans.
The kzin lay still, panting in the sparse shade a pile of rocks threw over the path. Then his head came up, the big pink bat-ears swiveling downslope. Jonah held his breath, eyes narrowing in suspicion. Spots drew his w'tsai and headed down the steeper slope, leaping over the water furrow and dodging along agile and swift as the hillside grew steeper. When the kzin stopped to cut a pole from a broombush and began prying up a large flat rock suspicion grew to rage. Jonah drew his magrifle out of its slings along the pack saddle and stepped out from behind the rock.
I should let him have it right now, he thought, taking up the slack. No, he decided, as the back of the kzin’s head sprang into the holosight. No, I want him to see it coming.
“Freeze, ratcat!” he shouted, and sent a round whack through the air over him.
Spots whirled and leaped backward instead, the stone thumping back down on the others that supported it. His ears flared wide with surprise, as did the wet black nostrils, then folded away in anger. He crouched, opening his mouth wide and extending his hands to either side; one gripped the w'tsai, and the claws slid out on the other, needles against the black leather of the hand.
“What-put that rifle down, monkey!”
“Right,” Jonah sneered; the ratcat had gotten good enough at Wunderlander to put indignation into its tones. “So you can cut me up-and then take my goods.”
Spots’s pupils flared wider still, in surprise. “Oh, so that was where you put them,” he said. “Clever, clever, the spray from the furrow would obscure your scent.”
The human had been moving downslope; he climbed across the furrow carefully, not that there was any danger with sixty-nine rounds still in the cassette, and baited beyond leaping distance.
“Drop the knife,” he said, his voice flat and ugly.
“I saw a fuzzball crawling under there,” Spots went on, staring at him in deliberate rudeness. “I was going to pry up the rock and kill it.”
“Murphy, can’t you invent something more plausible than that?” Jonah jeered. There was a bounty on fuzzballs… although they were commoner here in the Jotuns than in more settled regions.
Another footfall sounded on the trail Jonah risked a quick glance upslope; it was Hans, trotting up with his rifle at high port. He stopped at the sight of the tableau below and then climbed down, standing midway between Spots and Jonah but out of the line of fire, with the muzzle of his weapon carefully down.
“You fellers mind telling me what’s going on?” he said mildly.
They both began to speak at once. Jonah gestured Spots into silence with the rifle.
“The bleeping ratcat found my goods, and I caught him trying to lift the rock”-he nodded at the lever still jutting into the air, and then at the boulder upslope where the mule still stood-“and clean me out.”