Rafael MacAran started pulling his surveying instruments from his pack but he didn’t attend to them. He had needed this brief interval alone more than he had realized; a little time to recover from the repeated and terrible shocks of the last few hours-the crash, and a concussion which would have put him into a hospital on crowded, medically hypersensitive Earth. Here the medical officer, harried from worse injuries, tested his reflexes briefly, handed him some headache pills, and went on to the seriously hurt and the dying. His head still felt like an oversized toothache although the visual blurring had cleared up after the first night’s deep. The next day he had been drafted, with all the other able-bodied men not on the medical staff or the engineering crews in the ship, to dig mass graves for the dead. And then there had been the mind-shaking shock of finding Jenny among them.
Jenny. He had envisioned her safe and well, too busy at her own job to hunt him up and reassure him. Then among the mangled dead, the unmistakable silver-bright hair of his only sister. There hadn’t even been time for tears. There were too many dead. He did the only thing he could do. He reported to Camilla Del Rey, deputizing for Captain Leicester on the identity detail, that the name of Jenny MacAran should be transferred from the lists of unlocated survivors to the list of definitely identified dead.
Camilla’s only comment had been a terse, quiet `Thank you, MacAran.’ There was no time for sympathy, no time for mourning or even humane expressions of kindness. And yet Jenny had been Camilla’s close friend, she’d really loved that damned Del Rey girl like a sister–just why, Rafael had never known, but Jenny had, and there must have been some reason. He realized somewhere below the surface, that he had hoped Camilla would shed for Jenny the tears he could not manage to weep. Someone ought to cry for Jenny, and he couldn’t. Not yet.
He turned his eyes on his instruments again. If they had known their definite latitude on the planet it would have been easier, but the height of the sun above the horizon would give them some rough idea.
Below him in a great bowl of land at least five miles across filled with low brushwood and scrubby trees, the crashed spaceship lay. Rafael, looking at it from this distance, felt a strange sinking feeling Captain Leicester was supposed to be working with the crew to assess the damage and estimate the time needed to make repairs. Rafael knew nothing about the workings of starships–his own field was geology. But it didn’t look to him as if that ship was ever going anywhere again.
Then he turned off the thought. That was for the engineering crews to say. They knew, and he didn’t. He’d seen some near-miracles done by engineering these days. At worst this would be an uncomfortable interval of a few days or a couple of weeks, then they’d be on their way again and a new habitable planet would be charted on the Expeditionary Forces star maps for colonization. This one, despite the brutal cold at night, looked extremely habitable. Maybe they’d even get to share some of the finder’s fees, which would go to improve the Coronis Colony where they’d be by then.
And they’d ail have something to talk about when they were Old Settlers in the Coronis Colony, fifty or sixty years from now.
But if the ship never did get off the ground again… .
Impossible. This wasn’t a charted planet, okayed for colonizing, and already opened up. The Coronis Colony–Phi Coronis Delta–was already the site of a flourishing mining settlement. There was a functioning spaceport and a crew of engineers and technicians had been working there for ten years preparing the planet for settlement and studying its ecology. You couldn’t set down, raw and unhelped by technology, on a completely unknown world.
It couldn’t be done.
Anyway, that was somebody else’s job and he’d better do his own now. He made all the observations he could, noted them in his pocket notebook, and packed up the tripod starting down the hill again. He moved easily across the rock-strewn slope through the tough underbrush and trees carrying his pack effortlessly in the light gravity. It was cleaner and easier than a hike on Earth, and he cast a longing eye at the distant mountains. Maybe if their stay stretched out more than a few days, he could be spared to take a brief climb into them. Rock samples and some geological notations should be worth something to Earth Expeditionary and it would be a lot better than a climbing trip on Earth, where every National Park from Yellowstone to Himalaya was choked with jet-brought tourists three hundred days of the year.