Deadman Switch

She wanted to believe the worst of them... and down deep I knew that nothing I could say would change that desire. Even Watchers could blind themselves to reality if they wanted to badly enough.

Perhaps that was how Aaron Balaam darMaupine had managed to get as far as he had.

A stray fact ticked at my consciousness: the Seeker out there had been wearing gloves. "Are the valeer plants sharp-edged?" I asked Calandra, as much to change the subject as anything else.

She glanced out at the Seeker again, and I could tell she was also relieved that another argument about Adams's group had been deflected. "It could be just the plants themselves. The Mustains told me that Spall's soil is highly acidic."

I grimaced. Great. And us about to go out poking around in it without any protective clothing. "How acidic is acidic?"

"Oh, it's not dangerous or anything like that," she assured me. "Just gives you a rash if you dig around in it too much."

Yes—the Seeker had been wearing the same general style of daywear clothing we'd seen at the settlement di

"Probably," Calandra nodded. "Whatever the method, it seems pretty effective—I haven't seen any signs at all of native plants where the soil's been treated. I wonder," she added thoughtfully, "if that means it's the chemicals in the fusion drive exhaust, after all."

My stomach tightened as academic curiosity faded and the huge task facing us flooded back on me. "Could be. Speaking of which, I suppose we'd better get down to business."

"Right." Calling up a map of the area on the car's display, she tapped for a contour overlay. "I presume you'd pla

I nodded. "Unless, of course, we spot some place straight out that looks like it would be a good hiding place for an illegal shuttle or starship."

She peered at the display, then slowly sca

"Agreed." I tapped a spot on the display, ahead and to our left. "That's probably that hill over there," I said, pointing to a small rise in the distance. "Ten to fifteen minutes away, I'd guess. Shall we start there?"

She shrugged, and I could sense her brace herself. "Might as well."

With only the unfamiliar plant life around to judge by, the distance proved deceptive, but we still made it to the hill in under half an hour. The only slope gentle enough for the car to manage was unfortunately also too rocky for me to want to risk the tires on, and so we wound up spending another ten minutes struggling to the top on foot.

Shepherd Zagorin had been right: both the landscape and the flora facing us were remarkably different from that which we'd seen on the drive between Shekinah and Myrrh. Added to the basic blue and gray-purple we'd already seen were touches of red, dark yellow, and even a delicate lavender. Most of the color seemed to belong to flower-like structures, but some was simply the plants themselves.

There was animal life out there, too, the first we'd yet seen on Spall. Dozens of tiny spots flitted low over the ground or circled the flowers in the semi-random pattern of insects everywhere, and I discovered that if I watched the nearest foliage carefully I could see the subtle leaf movements that implied small ground animals underneath.

And in the midst of the thickest and richest patches of plant life stood the thunderheads Zagorin had mentioned.

Even never having seen one before, I had no doubt as to their identity. Growing up to probably a meter in height, standing singly or grouped together in twos or threes, their oddly asymmetric, flat-topped breaking-wave shapes towered over the shorter plants surrounding them. Their shape, coupled with their dirty-white color, made the name "thunderhead" practically inevitable.

"They seem to prefer the lusher areas," Calandra commented into my thoughts.

I dug out the noculars from our ship's survival pack and studied a quick sampling of the thunderheads within view. She was right—each one was indeed surrounded by several meters of colorful plants, making a sharp contrast with the thunderheads' own whiteness. "Lusher areas, or the presence of some particular insect," I offered, lowering the noculars. "I can see small clouds of something surrounding each one."

"Probably coincidental," she shook her head. "More likely the insects are going for the more attractive plants around them."

"Though who knows what's attractive to an insect?" I shrugged. "You suppose they're some variety of fungus?"

"They sure don't have whatever the local equivalent of chlorophyll is," she said. "I don't know, though—those don't exactly look like ideal places for dead vegetation to have collected."

"Maybe a parasitic fungus, then," I said, reaching back as best I could into the classroom biology I hadn't used in years. "It would make sense—any parasite that size would have to have a lot of host material around to live off of."

Calandra nodded thoughtfully. "Sounds reasonable. If so... it may mean they're a sort of reverse indicator for fusion-damaged plants."

I considered. "Maybe," I agreed. "Assuming the pattern here also holds further out, anyway. We'll have to keep an eye on that."

"Right. Well..." Straightening her back, she took a deep breath and fell silent. Taking the cue, I raised the noculars again and began my own search.

Nothing. No indication of the sort of inhibited plant growth we'd seen at the landing area near Shekinah Fellowship. Also no scorch marks, no landing skid tracks, and no odd reflections that could be from plastic or metal.

I didn't have to look to sense Calandra's disappointment. "Like you said," I reminded her gently, "we're still pretty close to Myrrh."

Her eyes, when I turned to look, were haunted. Haunted with the threat of failure... or with the threat of the death that would follow that failure. "Come on," I said softly. "We can do it."

She closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them the haunted look was gone. "Sure," she said. Almost as if she believed it.

Biting the back of my lip, I slipped the noculars back in their case. Taking her hand, I led her carefully down the hill and back to the car.

—

I don't know how many hills we drove or climbed up that day. There were at least ten—that many I remember clearly—but much of the ordeal remained afterward little more than a fatigued blur in my memory. The pattern of that first attempt remained with us the rest of the day: choose a local high point, drive there across bumpy ground, climb or drive up—driving being the rare exception—and gaze out at the landscape until our eyes ached. Climb or drive back down, head for the next spot, and repeat.

It was incredibly draining. Physically, it was clear that neither of us was in shape for this kind of activity, and by the time the first fluffy clouds began to form about noon my eyes, head, and legs all ached with fatigue. Calandra, with the normal woman's higher stamina in such things, fared a shade better, but not enough to really matter. By midafternoon she was stumbling as much as I was, and leaning on me for balance as much as I leaned on her.

But as bad as it was physically, it was even worse emotionally.

I'm not sure really what I was expecting when we started out that morning. That God had guided me in a lucky guess, I suppose, and that within a couple of hours we would spot the telltale signs of fusion-drive damage and could scamper back to Shekinah and call Commodore Freitag down on them. But it wasn't happening. To gaze at an unfamiliar landscape and try to pick something "abnormal" from it took incredible amounts of both painstaking attention and equally painstaking imagination. The existence of the thunderheads helped, but not as much as we'd hoped it would. The dirty-white plants grew in small clumps, never with more than three or four together, and never in the kind of widespread daisy field that would eliminate large sections of territory from our consideration.