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"He'll bring it back."
"Did he tell you that?"
Sylvia laughed. "Don't I wish. No, but he will. He hasn't any use for a Skeeter, Zack. He isn't out to hurt the Colony. He just wants—anyway, you watch, he won't take more than his share."
"Yeah. I guess I always knew that. Goddamn him!" Zack exploded. "Hell, Sylvia, it isn't the stuff he took! It's him. We need the son of a bitch."
"And if you'd—"
"And if I'd said it loud enough and early enough he'd still be here.
Yeah. Thanks for reminding me."
The Skeeter returned eight hours later. It landed two kilometers from the camp. Everyone came outside, but no one wanted to go closer. After a moment Cadma
The last Sylvia saw of him was a tiny, lonely figure climbing into the pass, disappearing into the distance and the mist.
Chapter 12
DINOSAUR KILLER
He that goeth about to persuade a multitude, that they are not so well governed as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favorable hearers.
RICHARD HOOKER, Ecclesiastical Polity
"Save it!" Sylvia screamed as lights flickered throughout the camp. Jerry's hands flew over the keyboard. Cassandra's memory banks had just begun saving when the entire camp plunged into darkness. Shadows flashed back as the sizzling flare of arc welders beyond the communal dining hall created brief lightning storms in the Avalonian midnight.
Jerry shouted out the window to the welders. "Goddamn it, you could warn us!" There was no answer. He sighed. "What did we lose this time?"
"Maybe nothing." Sylvia glanced at her watch. "Know in a minute. I'll be glad when they get the power plant rebuilt."
"Yeah." He tapped idly at the keyboard. "They say you can get used to hanging if you hang long enough, but I'll never get used to the power going out." A brief flare of light, and Jerry's face was outlined in the darkness as he lit a cigarette. "Have one?"
"You know better than that."
He shrugged. "Good time to start." He put the stiff foil package away.
This was a bad time, miserable in almost every way that Sylvia could think of. If Cassandra hadn't been damaged by the monster, her automatic power backups would have allowed them to continue the process of collating the satellite data. If she hadn't been damaged, all data would have been automatically backed up. If the power plant hadn't been damaged, there'd be no need to run cables from one of the two Minerva shuttles. There would have been a smooth, uninterrupted flow of electricity to the camp.
They were lucky to have power at all. The solar collectors uphill didn't collect enough power, and the storage capacity was tiny. And they had dynamite. How do you get power out of two hundred kilos of dynamite? They'd found an answer: they'd dynamited a cliff to dam the river. Now the river featured a long, narrow lake downstream from the camp, a landing field for the Minerva, and now the Minerva's motor could be brought within reach of cables from the half rebuilt power plant.
"There she goes," Jerry said as the lights winked back on.
"I don't know how much more of this I can handle," Sylvia said, wiping moist fingers on her pants.
"All that it takes," Jerry answered bluntly.
Cassandra booted back up almost at once, and they breathed a paired sigh of relief: none of the data had been lost. Sylvia spoke softly.
"Cassandra. Correlate and evaluate: optical-infrared scan, North Sea."
"Acknowledged." The computer continued its cross-referencing of the data it received from the geosynchronous satellite above the campsite and the transient data gathered by the lower, faster-moving Geographic.
"Northland is heavily populated." Jerry's voice held irritation now.
The two were like an emotional seesaw. "Conclusive signs of aquatic life. How in the hell are we going to zero in on something like our monster coming over?"
"Data, Jerry. There's an answer for everything that happened, but right now we just have to correlate data. We can't even say exactly what we're up against. If the protein spectrophotometer can be repaired, we'll get a look at the thing's DNA. Until then, we're doing autopsies on a corpse made of charcoal."
"There must be a pattern. This island is underpopulated. We know that.
Not enough differentiation. Samlon, plants, and those damn pterodons high up in the mountains, and they all look alike. It's—"
"And insects—"
"Okay, insects. All tiny. All flying things, no crawlers, and all these empty ecological pockets. It's like... maybe... Sylvia? It's like the Earth must have been after the Dinosaur Killer. Nothing big. Most of the species wiped out. O—kay. Let's start looking for iridium in the soil, shall we? A layer of vaporized asteroid, buried, but not deep. And maybe the satellites can find us a fresh crater."
"Dinosaur Killer—Jerry, could that be it? A big asteroid strike, long winter, planetary die-off—when? A thousand years ago? Five thousand? The plants have all come back, but not the animals?"
"Even half a million wouldn't be too long." He frowned. "There are other answers, though. Something regular, something that breaks the reproduction cycle. Something subtle... maybe it doesn't even show up for two or three generations... "
She felt momentary fear. Then she patted her bulging abdomen and laughed. "Ugly thought, but no. We've had three generations of chickens, and four generations of mice. Go for the Dinosaur Killer."
Her fingers flew over the keyboard, bringing to the screen the endless biological sets they had worked out: animal to vegetable kiloto
The answers were always the same. No hostile life on the island. There couldn't be. Nothing for it to live on. A simple, near-pastoral ecology. We're missing something obvious. Something I ought to remember. Is this what the—others—Mary A
"What?" Jerry asked.
"Nothing. Jerry, I like your Dinosaur Killer. I think you've got it."
Jerry carefully blew his smoke in the other direction. "Do you think that an expedition will really go out now?"
"No. Zack won't approve it."
"He'll be lucky if anyone listens a damn to what he has to say after this mess."
"Greg spoke for everyone? You included?"
"Not you?"
She paused. "I think Zack made an honest mistake, one that any of us might have made, and most of us did! Zack's a scapegoat. The fact that Cadma
"I would have expected a comment like that out of Terry."
"No—this isn't a putdown. As far as Cad is concerned, somebody has to play Devil's Advocate."
The program purred on quietly and efficiently by itself. "Cadma
The power didn't come back for fifteen minutes. Enough, Sylvia thought. "I quit, Jerry. You should too. ‘Bye." She didn't wait for his answer.
Early dawn, but the camp was a hive of activity. The wreckage had been cleared away. New buildings sprouted, bare skeletons rising into the chill morning air. Three work crews in overlapping ten-hour shifts kept the jobs humming along smoothly. Everyone got just enough time to sleep, but not enough to grouse.