TUNNEL IN THE SKY by ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

“She has indeed!”

“Then”

“‘Then’ nothing!” Jacqueline said sharply. “My name is ‘Jack.’ Rod. Forget ‘Jacqueline.’ If either of you starts treating me with gallantry we’ll have all those troubles you warned me about. ‘Pure poison’ was the expression you used, as I recall.”

“But you can reasonably expect”

“Are you going to be ‘logical’ again? Let’s be practical instead. Help me skin this beast and make a new water bag.”

The following day Jimmy took over housekeeping and Jack and Rod started hunting together. Jim wanted to come along; he ran into a double veto. There was little advantage in hunting as a threesome whereas Jack and Rod paired off so well that a hunt was never hours of waiting, but merely a matter of finding game. Jack would drive and Rod would kill; they would pick their quarry from the fringe of a herd, Jack would sneak around and panic the animals, usually driving one into Rod’s arms.

They still hunted with the knife, even though Jack’s gun was a good choice for primitive survival, being an air gun that threw poisoned darts. Since the darts could be recovered and re-envenomed, it was a gun which would last almost indefinitely; she had chosen it for this reason over cartridge or energy guns.

Rod had admired it but decided against hunting with it. “The air pressure might bleed off and let you down.”

“It never has. And you can pump it up again awfully fast.”

“Mmm. . . yes. But if we use it, someday the last dart will be lost no matter how careful we are . . . and that might be the day we would need it bad. We may be here a long time, what do you say we save it?”

“You’re the boss, Rod.”

“No, I’m not. We all have equal say.”

“Yes, you are. Jimmy and I agreed on that. Somebody has to boss.”

Hunting took an hour or so every second day; they spent most of daylight hours searching for another team mate, quartering the area and doing it systematically. Once they drove scavengers from a kill which seemed to have been butchered by knife; they followed a spoor from that and determined that it was a human spoor, but were forced by darkness to return to the cave. They tried to pick it up the next day, but it had rained hard in the night; they never found it.

Another time they found ashes of a fire, but Rod judged them to be at least two weeks old.

After a week of fruitless searching they returned one late afternoon. Jimmy looked up from the fire he had started. “How goes the census?”

‘Don’t ask,” Rod answered, throwing himself down wearily. “What’s for dinner?”

“Raw buck, roast buck, and burned buck. I tried baking some of it in wet clay. It didn’t work out too well, but I’ve got some awfully good baked clay for dessert.”

‘Thanks. If that is the word.”

“Jim,” Jack said, “we ought to try to bake pots with that clay.”

“I did. Big crack in my first effort. But I’ll get the hang it. Look, children,” he went on, “has it ever occurred to your bright little minds that you might be going about this the wrong way?”

“What’s wrong with it?” Rod demanded.

“Nothing . . . if it is exercise you are after. You are and scurrying over the countryside, getting in and nowhere else. Maybe it would be better to sit back and let them come to you.”

“How?”

“Send up a smoke signal.”

“We’ve discussed that We don’t want just anybody and we don’t want to advertise where we live. We want people who will strengthen the team.”

“That is what the engineers call a self defeating criterion. The superior woodsman you want is just the laddy you will never find by hunting for him. He may find you, as you go tramping noisily through the brush, kicking rocks and stepping on twigs and scaring the birds. He may shadow you to see what you are up to. But you won’t find him.”

“Rod, there is something to that,” Jack said.

“We found you easily enough,” Rod said to Jim. “Maybe you aren’t the high type we need.”

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