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By Root 1549 0

find him,” Solari pointed out. “Like I said—we all brought some pretty sick stuff in our mental luggage. Reflexes shaped by Earthly distress and paranoia. Reflexes that make us lash out, even at people adapted for life in half-gee, who might not be able to take the punches. Maybe it was a reflex of exactly the same kind that killed Delgado. Maybe the glass spearhead was never intended as a murder weapon—maybe it was just the first thing that came to hand. The person who stabbed him might have seen those knife-fight VE-tapes they were beginning to peddle back on Earth, and got the impression that good IT could protect people from wounds of that sort. Delgado was unlucky, you know—if the blade hadn’t slid between his ribs and penetrated his heart he’d have been okay. Any of them could have done it, Matt. Even the ones you think you know. If you didn’t have such a good alibi, I’d have to suspect you. You’d be suspect number one, after what you did to that poor guy’s jaw.”

“Okay,” Matthew said, conceding the point. “That was a mistake. I’m ashamed—but the bastard was following me, and he was on to me as soon as I’d tried and failed to put the gunman down. Maybe he didn’t have the power to hurt me the way I hurt him, but it wouldn’t have stopped him trying. It wasn’t me who decided that crew and cargo are no longer on the same side. That was the so-called revolutionaries.”

“The people on the surface also seem to have decided that they aren’t all on the same side any more,” Solari pointed out. “And having decided that … we all come from a violent society, Matt. Even those of us who never lifted a hand against anyone. I wish we had arrived here with a determination to do no violence to anyone, but the simple fact is that we haven’t had the practice necessary to lend force to any such determination.”

Matthew could see his point. He could also see that, given the situation aboard Hope, the potential for further violence—not merely of murder but of all-out war—was far too considerable for comfort.

FIFTEEN

The shuttle in which Matthew had left Earth had been a reassuringly solid construction shaped as a shuttle ought to be shaped, with extendable delta wings for use on reentry. It had, admittedly, been hitched to an intimidatingly massive rocket cylinder, which he could not help but imagine as a potential bomb, but the statistics of past failure and success had made the possibility of disaster seem comfortingly remote.

The knowledge that if the rocket were to turn bomb he would die instantaneously without realizing the fact had further reduced the awfulness of the seeming threat.

The shuttle in which Captain Milyukov intended to send him down to the surface of the new world was an entirely different proposition. It did not look solid, it had no wings and its shape was like no real or imaginary aircraft or spacecraft that Matthew had ever seen depicted. The teardrop-shaped chamber in which Milyukov proposed to stow Matthew and Solari—stow seeming the operative word, given the amount of cargo that was to be crammed in with them—was equipped with a conical shield at the base, made from some kind of organic material, but it was alarmingly thin. A long, slender and supple rod extended from the top of the chamber to a limp structure that looked more like a folded spiderweb than a parachute.

A sideways glance at Vince Solari told Matthew that the policeman was as dismayed as he was.

“It’s perfectly safe,” the captain assured him. “We haven’t lost a single life or sustained a serious injury during any of the drops. It’s disposable, of course—the only reason the shuttles you were used to looked so very different is that they were designed to go up and come back rather than simply going down. You’re a biologist, Professor Fleury—think of it as an extremely tough and extremely smart dandelion seed. It’ll float you down so gently you probably won’t even feel the bump. The method’s accurate to within a few hundred meters—it’ll put you down right on the doorstep of Base Three’s main bubble.”

It occurred to Matthew as he continued