But I was glad of the interruption. I had a feeling that Paul had said considerably more than he had intended to and more than he would be happy to recall, come light phase. I blamed it on the sleeping pills. Sleeping pills are all right when necessary, but they tend to make you babble and tell your right name–treacherous things.
19. The Other People
By the end of the second light phase it was clear–to Paul, anyhow—that this second valley would do. It wasn’t the perfect valley and maybe there was a better one just over the ridge—but life is too short. Paul assigned it a score of 92% by some complicated system thought up by the Commission, which was seven points higher than passing. The perfect valley could wait for the colonials to find it … which they would, some day.
We named the valley Happy Valley, Just for luck, and named the mountains south of it the Pauline Peaks, over Paul’s protests. He said it wasn’t official anyway; we said we would see to it that it was made so—and the boss topographer, Abie Finkelstein, marked it so on the map and we all intialed it
We spent the third light phase rounding up the details. We could have gone back then, if there had been any way to get back. There wasn’t, so we had to dope through another dark phase. Some of them preferred to go back on a more normal schedule instead; there was a round-the-clock poker game, which I stayed out of, having nothing I could afford to lose and no talent for filling straights. There were more dark phase bull sessions but they never got as grave as the first one and nobody ever again asked Paul what he thought about the future prospects of things.
By the end of the third dark phase I was getting more than a little tired of seeing nothing but the inside of our portable range. I asked Paul for some time off.
Hank had been helping me since the start of the third dark phase. He had been working as a topographical assistant; flash contour pictures were on the program at the start of that dark phase. He was supposed to get an open-lens shot across the valley from an elevation on the south just as a sunburst flash was let off from an elevation to the west.
Hank had a camera of his own, just acquired, and he was shutter happy, always pointing it at things. This time he had tried to get a picture of his own as well as the official picture. He had goofed off, missed the official picture entirely, and to top it off had failed to protect his eyes when the sunburst went off. Which put him on the sick list and I got him as kitchen police.
He was all right shortly, but Finkelstein didn’t want him back. So I asked for relief for both of us, so we could take a hike together and do a little exploring. Paul let us go.
There had been high excitement at the end of the second light phase when lichen had been discovered near the west end of the valley. For a while it looked as if native life had been found on Ganymede. It was a false alarm—careful examination showed that it was not only an Earth type, but a type authorized by the bionomics board.
But it did show one thing—life was spreading, taking hold, at a point thirty-one hundred miles from the original invasion. There was much argument as to whether the spores had been air borne, or had been brought in on the clothing of the crew who had set up the power plant. It didn’t matter, really.
But Hank and I decided to explore off that way and see if we could find more of it. Besides it was away from the way we had come from camp number one. We didn’t tell Paul we were going after lichen because we were afraid he would veto it; the stuff had been found quite some distance from camp. He had warned us not to go too far and to be back by six o’clock Thursday morning, in time to break camp and head back to our landing point, where the Jitterbug was to meet us.