One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries Read Free

colonists had laughed and hugged one another with joy that their world seemed so rich and abundant.
    You never could tell, he said, what you were getting, no matter how many bribes you’d paid. There were always stories of colonists being sent to desert planets, or frozen wastelands, or worse. After all why should the Earth authorities care? It wasn’t as though you could go back and ask for a refund.
    As it turned out, our world was a sort of wasteland after all. And he’d been right, we couldn’t go back.
    Once the track was cleared, I hauled water in buckets up to our straggly vegetable garden, which covered most of the cleared area of our yard. Something was still eating the cabbages. I examined the neat semicircular defects along the edges of the leaves and searched for the hundredth time for caterpillars or other insects. There was nothing. I suspected it was a fuzzer, one of the matted puff-ball rodents that lived in the underlayer of The Grass. The thing had obviously braved the exotic terrain of the open yard and developed a taste for something besides Grass stems, but there was nothing to make a trap with and no money for netting.
    I hated cabbage anyway; it made the whole house stink like garbage for days.
    Clearing the edges of the yard took longer. I was half way around when something caught my eye out in the grass. It was red; a red that I’d never seen before. Pure and vibrant, it glowed in the afternoon sun like a beacon a little more than a metre out in the sea of blades. I stared at it for long minutes trying to work out what it was. It had to be man-made to be a colour like that, though I couldn’t remember seeing anything in the town that had ever been that red. How would it get out here, on our claim?
    I reached out a gloved hand, shuffling up to the wall of the Grass. Blades pushed against my treated leather coveralls but none came as high as my face. I stretched as far as I dared, leaning out, careful not to overbalance, acutely aware that the further I stretched the closer my face came to the knife edges below me.
    My fingers brushed the red thing and it swayed. It seemed to be attached to the Grass around it. A second attempt and I’d grabbed whatever it was attached to and pulled, but the Grass refused to break.
    Carefully, I stretched out with my other hand, which held the secateurs. I’d need to cut the thing free of the Grass. It was much harder reaching out with both hands. I found myself standing on tip-toes in an effort to get more reach, my balance hanging by a thread. Then the secateurs bit into the Grass and the red thing came free. It did so with a sudden jerk and suddenly I was unbalanced and falling.
    It happened in slow motion. I windmilled my arms, desperately trying to stay away from the wall of Grass before me. A picture came into my mind of Amy Rice, who had tripped and fallen face first into the Grass. It had cut off her nose and sliced open her lips and one of her eyes. I wanted to scream, to let out the fear and horror that had blossomed in my chest, but in this sluggish, treacle world I had no control over my body.
    Then I fell, hard and backward, landing bottom first with a thump on the cleared soil of the yard.
    For a few moments the world swayed and shifted around me as I sucked air down into my lungs. Then it all settled and I was able to look at the thing I held in my hand.
    It was a flower; five luminescent, gently curving petals with a round yellow bulb at the centre. It was half way up a long stalk that must have come up from the Grass. There were more flower buds at intervals along its length, but none of them had opened.
    Taking off my left glove, I carefully stroked a fingertip along one of the delicate petals. It was soft and warm and left a faint tingling sensation on my skin. Leaning close, I put my nose to it. There was no smell. I gazed at the wall of green before me. Now I was looking, I could see other stalks with buds. They looked almost exactly like