“Right here,” I said, and jumped down. “Wulfmeier,” I said, holding out my hand. “Fancy meeting you here. Ev,” I called up, “come on down here and meet Wulfmeier.”
Wulfmeier didn’t look up. He looked at Carson, who’d moved off to the side. Ev landed on all fours and stood up quickly.
“Ev,” I said, “this is Wulfmeier. We go way back. What are you doing on Boohte? It’s restricted.”
“I told Carson,” he said, looking warily from one to the other of us, “something must have gone wrong with my gate. I was trying to get to Menniwot.”
“Really?” I said. “We had a verify that you were on Starting Gate.” I walked over to Bult. “What you got there, Bult?”
“I was emptying out my boot, and Bult wanted to see it,” Wulfmeier said, still watching Carson.
Bult handed me the chunks of quartz. I examined them. “Tch, tch, taking of souvenirs. Bult, looks like you’re going to have to fine him for that.”
“I told you, I got them in my shoe. I was walking around, trying to figure out where I was.”
“Tch, tch, tch, leaving footprints. Disturbance of land surface.” I went over to the gate and peered underneath it. “Destruction of flora.” I leaned inside the gate. “What’s wrong with it?”
“I got it fixed,” Wulfmeier said.
I stepped inside, and came back out again. “Looks like dust, Carson,” I said. “We have a lot of trouble with dust. Does it get in the chips? He better check it while we’re here, just in case.”
Wulfmeier glanced back at the lean-to and over at Ev, and then back at Carson. He moved his hand away from his side.
“Good idea,” he said. “I’ll get my stuff.”
“Better not,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to overload the gate. We’ll send it along afterward.” I went up to the gate controls. “Where’d you say you were trying to go? Menniwot?”
He opened his mouth to say something and then closed it. I asked for coordinates and fed the data into the gate. “That should do it,” I said. “You shouldn’t end up here again.”
Carson walked him over to the gate, and he stepped inside. His hand dropped to his side again, and I hit activate and got out of the way.
Carson was already back at the lean-to, rummaging through Wulfmeier’s stuff.
“What’d he have?” I said.
“Ore samples. Gold-bearing quartz, argentite, platinum ore.” He leafed through the holos. “Where’d you send him?”
“Starting Gate,” I said. “Speaking of which, I better go tell them he’s coming. And that somebody’s been messing with Big Brother’s arrest records. Bult, figure up the fines on this stuff, and we’ll send ’em special delivery. Come on,” I said to Ev, who was standing there looking at the place where the gate had been like he wished there’d been a fight. “We’ve gotta call C.J.”
We started down the gully. “You were great!” Ev said, scrambling over rocks. “I couldn’t believe you faced him down like that! It was just like in the pop-ups!”
We came out of the gully and down the hill to where he’d tied the ponies. They were still lying down.
“What’ll happen to Wulfmeier on Starting Gate?” he asked while I wrestled the transmitter off Useless.
“He’ll get fined for faking his location and disturbing land surface.”
“But he was gatecrashing!”
“He says he wasn’t. You heard him. There was something wrong with his gate. He’d have to have been drilling, trading, prospecting, or shooting luggage for Big Brother to confiscate his gate.”
“What about those rocks he was giving Bult? That’s trading, isn’t it?”
I shook my head. “He wasn’t giving them to Bult. He was asking if he’d ever seen anything like them. At least he wasn’t pouring oil on the ground and lighting it like the last time we caught him with Bult.”
“But that’s prospecting!”
“We can’t prove that either.”
“So he gets fined, and then what?” Ev said.
“He’ll scrounge up the money to pay the fines, probably from some other gatecrasher who wants to know where to look, and then he’ll try again. Up north, probably, now that he knows where we are.” Up in Sector 248-76, I thought.
“And you can’t stop him?”
“There are four people on this whole planet, and we’re supposed to be surveying it, not chasing after gatecrashers.”
“But—”
“Yeah. Sooner or later, there’ll be one we won’t catch. I’m not worried about Wulfmeier—the indidges don’t like him, and anything he gets he’ll have to find himself. But not all of the gatecrashers are scum. Most of them are people looking for a better place to starve, and sooner or later they’ll figure out where a silver mine is from our terrains, or they’ll talk the indidges into showing them an oil field. And it’ll be all over.”
“But the government—what about the regs? What about—”
“Preserving the indigenous culture and the natural ecology? Depends. Big Brother can’t stop a mining or drilling operation without sending forces, which means gates and buildings and people taking excursion trips to see the Wall, and forces to protect them, and pretty soon you’ve got Los Angeles.”
“You said it depends,” Ev said. “On what?”
“On what they find. If it’s big enough, Big Brother’ll come to get it himself.”
“What’ll happen to the Boohteri?”
“The same thing that always happens. Bult’s a smart operator, but not as smart as Big Brother. Which is why we’re putting the money from those out-of-stocks in the bank for him. So he’ll have a fighting chance.”
I punched send. “Expedition calling King’s X. Come in, King’s X.” I grinned at Ev. “You know, there was something wrong with Wulfmeier’s gate.”
C.J. came on, and I told her to send a message through the gate to Starting Gate and handed her over to Ev so he could fill her in on the details. “Fin was great!” he said. “You should have seen her!”
Bult and Carson were back. Bult had his log out and was talking into it.
“You find anything?” I said.
“Holos of anticlines and diamond pipes. Couple cans of oil. A laser.”
“What about the ore samples? Were they indigenous?”
He shook his head. “Standard Earth samples.” He looked at Bult, who’d stopped tallying fines and was going up the hill to get his umbrella. “At least now we know why Bult was leading us down here.”
“Maybe.” I frowned. “I got the idea he was just as surprised to see Wulfmeier as we were. And Wulfmeier was definitely surprised to see us.”
“He’d probably told Bult to sneak off and meet him after dark,” he said. “Speaking of which, we’d better get going. I don’t want Wulfmeier to come back and find us still here.”
“He’s not coming back for a while,” I said. “He’s got a loose T-cable. It’ll fall off by the time he gets to Starting Gate.”
He smiled. “I still want to make it to the other side of the Wall by tonight.”
“If Bult’ll let us cross the Tongue,” I said.
“Why wouldn’t he? He’s already had his conference with Wulfmeier.”
“Maybe,” I said, but Bult didn’t go half a klom before he led the ponies across, and not a word about tssi mitss, e or otherwise, which shot my theory to pieces.
“You know the best part about that scene back there with Wulfmeier?” Ev said as we splashed across and headed south again. “The way you and Carson worked together. It’s even better than on the pop-ups.”
I’d watched that pop-up last night. We’d caught Wulfmeier threatening the accordion and come out punching and kicking, lasers blazing.