But it was not always—not even often!—life of a sort compatible with humankind. For the Reefs were formed from clusters of fusorians, feasting on the hydrogen formed between the stars according to the laws of the Neo-Hoyle Hypothesis, converting it into heavier atoms, then into atoms heavier still. The life in the Reefs was sometimes warm-blooded, carbon-based, oxygen-breathing animal. But more often it was metal or crystal—at best, worthless for food; at worst, a deadly danger.
The bright star Sol was near the south celestial pole, Gann discovered. That put him more or less galactic north of the sun—and, therefore, almost straight out from Polaris Station. How far out? He had no way of knowing, except that the major Reef clusters were thought to be some two hundred astronomical units from Sol. At a guess, twenty billion miles.
Gann turned his eyes from the stars and looked about him. He had a world to explore. It might be less than a hundred yards in its longest axis, but it was all he had.
He rubbed his aching wrists and ankles and began to explore. He climbed carefully out of that small, glowing green dell—carefully, because he knew the danger of a reeflet. The fusorian symbiotes held an atmosphere, somehow; but it was like a soap bubble, and if Gann was so incautious as to step too high and soar through it, he would find himself in the hard vacuum of the space between the stars, and death would come in a horrible explosive burst as his blood boiled off and his cells ruptured.
He climbed toward the ridge, paused, and looked around.
Ahead of him was another dell, this one bearing some sort of glittering bush. The plants were shoulder-high, with plumes of narrow gloss, sprinkled with what seemed to be individual fusorian cells that glowed with their own light. Each leaf darkened from green at the base to black at the tip, and each ended in a bright red berry.
Queerly, they grew in rows.
They looked, in fact, like a truck farm in Earth's populous market valleys, and at once Gann's hunger surged forth. They looked like food! He started toward them at a shambling run . . .
And from behind him a voice spoke. "Well, good for you. See you woke up finally. Headed right for the feedbag too, eh?"
Machine Major Boysie Gann's training had prepared him for any shock. It was trained reflex that stopped him in midflight, turned him, brought him back down to the glowing mossy surface of the reeflet in a half crouch, ready to do battle.
But there was nothing warlike in the figure that was coming toward him. He was a stubby little man with a big belly and a dirty yellow beard. His clothing was woven out of some kind of rough fiber. It was ragged and filthy and half unbuttoned.
And clinging to his bald brown head was a black-fanged, green-scaled, red-eyed creature the size of a capuchin monkey. It looked like a toy dragon. And from under the knife-sharp edges of its scales seeped little wisps of smoke.
Boysie Gann said warily, "Hello."
"Why, hello," the man said in a mild voice. "You was sleeping. Figured I'd best leave you to sleep it off. Nice to have you here. I wasn't expecting company."
"I wasn't exactly expecting to be here."
The man nodded and thrust out a dirty, gnarled hand. "Figured that. Couple fellows dropped you five, six hours ago. Looks like they gave you a rough enough time, so I let you be."
The creature on its head wheeled to face Gann as its owner moved, glaring at him with hot red eyes. Gann shook the man's hand and said, "I need some water. And food."
"Why, sure. Come along then." He nodded, the creature scrambling back and forth, and turned to lead the way across the cultivated field toward what seemed to be a tiny black lake. "Omer don't like strangers," he called over his shoulder, "but he won't bother you none. Just don't make any sudden moves is all. Omer's a pyropod—just a baby, of course, but they can be mean."
Silently Gann agreed. The little creature looked mean enough, with its oozing plumes of smoke and fiery eyes. They loped across the glowing rows of the man's little farm and reached the shore of the lake—no more than a pond, really, fifty feet across, its surface disturbed with the slow, tall waves of low-gravity fluids. On its far bank a sharp cliff rose in a glitter of metallic outcroppings, softened by glowing plants and mosses, and in the base of the cliff was a metal lean-to that hid the mouth of the cave.
"That's home," said the man cheerfully. "Welcome to it, such as 'tis. Come in and rest yourself."
"Thanks," said Gann. "By the way, we didn't really introduce ourselves."
"Oh? Guess you're right," said the man. "I'm Harry Hickson. And you"—Gann started to speak, but Hickson didn't pause—"you're what you call it—Machine Major Boysie Gann, out of the spy school on Pluto."
For twenty-four hours, Gann rested in the cave of the hermit Harry Hickson, and his thoughts were dark. How had Hickson known his name? Even more, how had he known that he was not a shanghaied radar-laser tech, but a graduate of the spy school?
There was no answer in Gann's brain, so he shut off his mind to conjectures and applied it to restoring his physical condition and recon-noitering his surroundings.
Evidently he had been unconscious for longer than he had thought on the ship that had dumped him on this reeflet, for he had lost weight and strength and there was a straggly stubble of beard on his chin. But Hickson fed him and cared for him. He gave Gann a bed of sorts to sleep on —only a stack of reeking blankets, but as good as the one he slept on himself—and fed him from the same pot of greasy stew as himself. The diet was crude but filling, supplemented with fruits and roots and shoots of the plants he grew on the rock. The reddish berries, which tasted like a sort of acid citrus fruit, were a good source of all necessary vitamins, Harry told him earnestly, and one of the lichens was a source of protein.
Gann did not question the food. Clearly it had kept Harry Hickson alive for a long time—the cave showed that it had been his home for months or even years—and it would keep Gann alive for at least as long as he intended to stay on the reeflet.
And that would not be long. For he had learned from Hickson that there was a way of communicating that would bring help if he needed it. "Never needed it, o' course," he said, fishing a long string of a rhubarblike vegetable out of his bowl of stew and licking his fingers. "But it's comforting to know it's there . . . Say, you worried about that collar, Boysie?"
Gann stopped in mid-gesture, suddenly aware that he had been tugging at it. "Not exactly," he said quietly.
"Get it off of you, if you like," Hickson offered mildly. "No trouble. Done it lots o' times."
Gann stared. "What the Plan are you talking about?" he demanded. "Don't you know what this is? These things are built with automatic destruct circuits, as well as the remote triggering equipment. If anybody tries to take them off—" He touched both sides of the collar with fingertips and flipped them up and outward, pantomiming the explosion of a decapitation charge.
"Oh, sure, I know all about that," said Hickson. "Hold still. No, not you, Gann. You, Omer! Don't wiggle so. Makes me nervous."
He got up from bis squatting position at the rude plank table where they ate and came around behind Gann. "Just you sit there, Boysie," he said. "Can move if you want to—it don't matter—but don't look toward me . . . Omer, confound you! Get your claws out a my scalp! Raised him from an egg, that little devil, right here in my own smoke pot, but he gets jumpy when he knows I'm going to . . . Well, here we are."