Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds Read Free Page B

your back to the wall, and that was exactly what I intended to do. Unless Raj got into trouble. Then I would help him—if it looked like it would do any good—but my fee would be quadrupled. Raj agreed to this with the easy confidence of a man who lacks the imagination to picture his own death, or who simply holds death in contempt. I never got to know him well enough to figure out which.
    Even after we were allowed out of the dome, we had to spend a day in preparation. I had to weave the equivalent of rucksack and canteen out of local materials. A xenologist on Selva had showed me how—but it’s one thing to duplicate a primitive craft under controlled conditions, with the help of an experienced tutor, and quite another to go outside and hack down the materials and try to do it from memory. The first half-dozen canteens I wove would have made decent colanders.
    I gave up trying to work outdoors. The cold didn’t bother Raj—Qadar is no tropical paradise—but it made my fingers numb and clumsy. Finally I pieced together two rucksacks and four liter-sized canteens. We rested and set out at first light.
    The map I’d memorized didn’t do much good. No compass and no sun, just uniform dull gray from horizon to horizon. Fortunately, it was easy to follow the trail the scientists had made, a conspicuous path of crushed fungi.
    It was certainly the most depressing world I’d ever seen. The scenery was like the magnified surface of a diseased organ. The dominant form of fungus was a sort of mushroom with an inverted cap, like a bowl, always full of scummy evil-smelling water. Pasty white with streaks of brown and gray. The only green in the landscape was an occasional stand of bamboo-like grass, which had provided the material for my weaving and Raj’s spear shaft. It was a sickly mottled chartreuse of a green.
    Also slightly green was the fungus that began to grow on us after about an hour, a slick powdery fungus that crawled out of armpits and navels and the moist crease between scrotum and thigh. It looked bad enough on my olive skin, but on Raj, whose skin was so black as to be almost blue, it was spectacularly ugly.
    (It’s very strange for an alien life form to find humans amenable as hosts, or food. Because of divergent evolutionary patterns, we’re usually incompatible at the level of DNA. We’d discussed the possibility that the balaselis would turn up their noses, if they had noses, at Raj. In that unhappy case, I would get a “no-kill fee,” equal to one third of the standard guide’s fee.)
    I’d made my rucksack twice as large as Raj’s; it was actually a double-compartmented cage with carrying straps. We both kept our eyes sharp for specimens, and we couldn’t have missed much. Anything that twitched on that moldy mausoleum of a landscape would have stood out like a live bug in a plate of cold spaghetti. We went all day without seeing anything, though, which was boring but not surprising. Most of the loathsome creatures who crabbed or slithered through the toadstools were nocturnal. I was sure there would be plenty of them around when we were trying to sleep.
    We didn’t talk much during the trek. I tried to start conversation a few times but Raj damped it with monosyllables. So I was sort of relieved, looking for some human contact, when we came over a small rise and saw the archaeologists’ encampment. It was a well-tramped circle a couple of hundred meters from an Obelobelian “village,” which was just a scatter of belongings and shared fires. About a dozen of the skinny pale horse-sized dinosaurs that the Obelobelians followed around, the tytistu, grazed mushrooms or slept standing up. A thin man with a white beard walked up the path to meet us.
    He didn’t look happy. Before I could introduce us, he said, “You’re the adventurers. Fuentes and Benhaden.”
    â€œYou’re in touch with Dr. Avedon?”