“But”
“Keep quiet, can’t you? Yapping like a girl. Terrestrial planet, right?”
“Yes, but”
“Stow it and let me talk. Gtype star. Planetary rotation same as Earth.”
“But it’s not!”
“I made the same mistake. The first night I thought was a week long. But the truth was I was scared out of my skin and that made it seem endless. Now I know better. The rotation matches.”
“No, it doesn’t. My watch shows it to be about twentysix hours.”
“You had better have your watch fixed when we get back. You banged it against a tree or something.”
“But Oh, go ahead. Keep talking; it’s your tape.
“You’ll see. Flora compatible. Fauna compatible. I know how they did it and why and where they put us. It’s an economy measure.”
“A what?”
“Economy. Too many people complaining about school taxes being too high. Of course, keeping an interstellar gate open is expensive and uranium doesn’t grow on trees. I see their point. But Deacon Matson says it is false economy. He says, sure, it’s expensive but that the only thing more expensive than a properly trained explorer or pioneer leader is an improperly trained dead one.
“He told us after class one day,” Rod went on, “that the pennypinchers wanted to run the practices and tests in selected areas on Earth, but the Deacon claims that the essence of survival in the Outlands is the skill to cope with the unknown. He said that if tests were held on Earth, the candidates would just study up on terrestrial environments. He said any Boy Scout could learn the six basic Earth environments and how to beat them out of books . . . but that it was criminal to call that survival training and then dump a man in an unEarthly environment on his first professional assignment. He said that it was as ridiculous as just teaching a kid to play chess and then send him out to fight a duel.”
“He’s right,” Jack answered. “Commander Benboe talks the same way.”
“Sure he’s right. He swore that if they went ahead with this policy this would be the last year he would teach. But they pulled a gimmick on him.”
“How?”
“It’s a good one. What the Deacon forgot is that any environment is as unknown as any other if you don’t have the slightest idea where you are. So they rigged it so that we could not know. First they shot us to Luna; the Moon gates are always open and that doesn’t cost anything extra. Of course that made us think we were in for a long jump. Besides, it confused us; we wouldn’t know we were being dumped back into the gravity field we had left for that was what they did next; they shoved us back on Earth. Where? Africa, I’d say. I think they used the Luna Link to jump us to Witwatersrand Gate outside Johannesburg and there they were all set with a matched in temporary link to drop us into the bush. Tshaka Memorial Park or some other primitive preserve, on a guess. Everything matches. A wide variety of antelope type game, carnivores to feed on them I’ve seen a couple of lions and”
“You have?”
“Well, they will do for lions until I get a chance to skin one. But they threw in other dodges to confuse us, too. The sky would give the show away, particularly if we got a look at Luna. So they’ve hung an overcast over us. You can bet there are cloud generators not far away. Then they threw us one more curve. Were you warned against ‘stobor’?”
“Yes”
“See any?”
“Well, I’m not sure what stobor are.”
“Neither am I. Nor any of us, I’ll bet. ‘Stobor’ is the bogeyman, chucked in to keep our pretty little heads busy. There aren’t any ‘stobor’ on Terra so naturally we must be somewhere else. Even a suspicious character like me would be misled by that. In fact, I was. I even picked out something I didn’t recognize and called it that, just as they meant me to do.”
“You make it sound logical, Rod.”
“Because it is logical. Once you realize that this is Earth” He patted the floor of the cave. “but that they have been trying to keep us from knowing it, everything falls into place. Now here is what we do. I was going to tackle it alone, as soon as I could I haven’t been able to move around much on account of this bad arm but I decided to take you along, before you got hurt. Here’s my plan. I think this is Africa, but it might be South America, or anywhere in the tropics. It does not matter, because we simply follow this creek downstream, keeping our eyes open because there really are hazards; you can get just as dead here as in the Outlands. It may take a week, or a month, but one day well come to a bridge. We’ll follow the road it serves until somebody happens along. Once in town we’ll check in with the authorities and get them to flip us home . . . and we get our solo test certificates. Simple.”