Power Lines

Chapter 13

Johnny landed his passengers at Kilcoole; then, once he and Diego had carried Sean into Clodagh's house, he flew on to report to Whittaker Fiske at SpaceBase.

"That's very interesting, son," his boss said when Johnny had completed the debriefing. "Found the lost Rourke child and brought Shongili back, too. You didn't happen to spot Torkel anywhere down there, did you?"

"No, sir, I didn't." Johnny kept private his notion that the presence of Captain Torkel Fiske would have been one burden too many. "Is he with one of the other investigative teams?"

Whit shook his head and then dismissed that problem with a wave of his hand.

They both looked up at the unmistakable rumble of a shuttle coming in to land.

"Cut it fine, didn't you, son?" Whit grinned as he rose. "I'd best go out and see what I can do to pacify Matthew."

"Sir, I had wounded…"

Whittaker Fiske nodded vigorously, raising his hand to reassure his copter pilot. "You did exactly as you should. And so did Major Maddock. The very idea of polygamy, especially for a religious purpose, with a prepubescent child is revolting in this day and age. And specifically against the Collective Interplanetary Societies' Bill of Individual Rights. Better get that copter serviced, son. I want it kept ready to scramble.''

Johnny raised his eyebrows, hoping for a little off-the-record advice, but Whittaker's expression suggested that he tend to his current orders.

Contrary to Whittaker's expectations, he received neither call nor visit from Matthew Luzon, nor was there a complaint officially logged in against Captain John Greene. Nor, during that day, was there any message from his son or a whisper concerning his where abouts. Only the matter of a concussed guard found at one of the side access gates to SpaceBase.

Torkel Fiske was angry enough, but Satok was livid with rage, kicking at the crates, splintering half a dozen, and paying no attention to the rocks that bounced down on his boots, as if he welcomed the pain. Torkel also listened to the invective Satok cast on the head of that slatternly Luka and what he intended to do to her when he found her again. From the brief glimpses he'd had of the girl, Torkel could not quite believe that she had had the intelligence, much less the strength, to remove all the genuine ore samples, which Torkel had himself handled and seen, in the time they'd been absent from the shuttle.

Without proof of the find, however, the commission would pay scant attention to Satok and might reach their decision before the man could gather more samples. There were other ways to assert company control of this planet, of course-the company-built and maintained roads, power plants, hospitals, and schools Torkel suggested to Marmion. All in the name of taking care of the colonists, of course. If they were better treated, more civilized, they'd be more cooperative. Especially when the planet was over run with corps troops-not originally from Petaybee: he'd make sure of that this time-doing the building and maintaining. Especially if company doctors also made sure that the physiological aberrations peculiar to Petaybeans were studied and eliminated, and if birth control was strictly monitored so that the Petaybeans at no time grew too numerous to control. Company teachers would slant their curriculum to insure the loyalty of their students, and company communications systems would insure that inhabitants, both original and new to the planet, accepted the company agenda and kept the company side of any dispute foremost in their minds at all times. And if they didn't, troops could travel by company roads to make sure people remembered their manners.

And the planet? The living planet? Within himself, Torkel didn't sneer at the idea. Petaybee was sentient. He knew it. He had felt it, seen it, heard it himself. But that didn't mean he liked it. That Satok had stolen ores from the body of the beast itself impressed Torkel no end-but only if the man could show the lodes. All they had in the shuttle were common rocks and dust. The ore was no better than the fairy gold of Grandmother Fiske's bedtime stories.

He would have preferred to play with his coin collection or dissect a roundworm before bedtime, but Grandmother Fiske, who, he supposed, was responsible for the weird streak in his father, was a great believer in the twentieth century philosopher Joseph Campbell. She thought that children needed myths and fairy tales to inform their lives. She had never understood him, Grandma Fiske. Torkel was an explorer, a womanizer and a developer precisely because he loathed mysteries. He liked everything well explained.

And now he and Satok both would have some explaining to do if they were going to convince the company commission that Petaybee contained secrets valuable enough for them to make the necessary investments to civilize and control the planet. At the moment, all he had to show was one green hunk of copper-bearing rock and one small gold nugget that had rolled out of the crates into a dark corner.

"That was a good trick," he told the still-fuming Satok. "I don't know how you treated these rocks to make them appear to be the ores I thought they were, but in this state they'll never convince the commission." He knew as well as Satok that the ores had been replaced by Luka and those Kilcoole women, if not by a conspiracy of the whole village of Shannonmouth, but he wanted to force Satok to reveal more. As long as the man kept his secrets to himself, they were of no use to Torkel or the company. "There's more where those came from!" Satok growled.

"And where, exactly, is that? McGee's Pass?" The man had said he was shanachie there, so Torkel's guess wasn't that wild. Space probes had shown some ores in that general area.

But Satok shook his head. "Nah, that vein's played out for now. But I got other sources. Only thing is, and the reason I decided to cut the company in, I need supplies. For my method."

"Like what?"

Satok grinned for the first time since they'd discovered Luka's treachery. "That's right, Cap'n. When I tell you what I use, you think you're gonna have some ideas about my method. And you will have. Only thing is, it's somethin' you've been using all along. What I need the most is Petraseal. You get some of these boys to load up the shuttle with Petraseal, and I'll get you some more ore samples within a couple of days."

"I go with you and you show me," Torkel said, negotiating, "and I'll get you all the Petraseal you want."

But the hairy bastard had the gall to shake his head. "No way. Not till I have a contract with the company patenting my methods and with full claim to my sites."

"You can't get that without proof," Torkel said.

"Well, without my help, man, you can't get samples of ores you need for proof the planet's worth something to Intergal, so I guess if you don't get me my supplies, we're both out of luck."

"All right," Torkel said on a long exasperated sigh. "I'll release you the Petraseal. But go get those samples ASAP, okay? I'm not sure how long the commission is going to take to come to their conclusions."

"Then have your boys start loadin' my shuttle. Oh, and fill 'er up while you're at it, will you?"

Torkel agreed, still seeming reluctant for the sake of verisimilitude. Actually, he would go along whether Satok agreed or not. He could easily plant a bug and track the man to his mine. He could even invite the commission along to see the results of the new mining operation first-hand, and learn something of Satok's secret process while they were at it.

Birds-songbirds, ravens, ducks, geese, hawks, and herons-brought them, as did relays of rabbits, foxes, wolves, feral cats, tame cats, track-cats, bears, and squirrels. Each bird, each animal, carried in its mouth a cutting, a root, a shoot, of coo-berry bramble. The birds flew directly to the farthest points, to Dead Horse, Savoy, Wellington, Portage, Mirror Lake, Harrison's Fjord, and McGee's Pass. Following the cats' directions, they dropped the shoots near the planet's portals, the places where humankind could commune with Petaybee. The largest deliveries went to the places where the planet was at its most open and vulnerable, and could be most easily looted. All of these places were caves, and around the entrance of each cave and on the ground above the entrance, and all along the length of the cave, the shoots and roots and cuttings were dropped by birds and buried by the other animals, the badgers, the squirrels, the rabbits, and the foxes. Every quarter of an hour or so for two days, fresh bits of coo-berry bush arrived, supplied by the tireless efforts of Clodagh, Whittaker Fiske, and assistants from the town and the surrounding forests and tundra's of Kilcoole.

In most places, the increased and highly specialized activity of the animals was little more than a curiosity. In some places, no one even noticed what was going on. At McGee's Pass, Krisuk Connelly and his family, who had been keeping watch on Satok's old house, noted the odd influx of animals and, between deliveries, sneaked in to see what they could possibly be doing.

The coo-berry plant was one of the planet's great puzzlement's. Most things on Petaybee were good for many things: medicine, food, shelter, warmth. Coo-berries had never been much good for anything. They were poisonous if you ate more than a handful, and the ailment that might have been devised by the planet to cure it had yet to be discovered. The thorns were sharp and stingy, the leaves were sticky, and the blossoms were as small, and rare, as the coo-berry itself. Once they got a start on any little dab of dirt, the damned bushes were almost impossible to kill. Worse, they grew so fast you could watch them grow, which was what Krisuk spent two days doing: watching the infestation of coo-berry. While the birds were still ferrying shoots in daily, bushes sprang up from the first plantings and grew waist high overnight, their roots spreading out to cover the field between the town and Satok's house and climbing up the house's stone exterior and covering the out-buildings.

When that happened, Krisuk called the whole village to come and see. His mother's mouth was set in a bitter line and her dry eyes watched the incursion despairingly. "Now," she said, "now Petaybee is punishing us. For ever listening to Satok. For letting him harm it."

Matthew Luzon resisted the urge to hold his nose. Really! The things he did for the company in the name of humanity. To say the least, Brother Howling smelled extremely gamy. Even Braddock was tempted to open the helicopter's door to escape the stench and showed signs of wanting to divest himself of his most recent meal over the ice-speckled sea.

At least the headphones in this helicopter worked properly, and Matthew could occupy himself by listening to the pilot's transmissions and the messages received from SpaceBase and MoonBase.

As they approached land again at Harrison's Fjord, a crackling message came in from MoonBase.

"Captain Torkel Fiske requests that all council members get in touch with him immediately. He is currently tracking the activities of the shanachie of McGee's Pass."

Matthew needed to hear no more. McGee's Pass was on the way back to SpaceBase from Harrison's Fjord, and a break from his present company would be most welcome.

"Take us directly to McGee's Pass, pilot," he ordered, and the man gave him a thumbs-up signal and headed up the coast.

As they approached the pass. Matthew saw that the village was built on an incline, gradually scaling the foothills leading up to the pass itself.

"Well, for frag's sake!" The pilot cursed as he flew beyond the village over a field heavily over grown with vines stretching from the houses all the way to a stone farmstead about half a mile distant. "What the frag have they done to the fragging helipad?"

"Set it down anywhere, man!" Matthew commanded. "The plants'll cushion the skids."

The pilot sounded doubtful as he said, "Well, okay. You're the boss, Dr. Luzon."

Finally, someone who did as he was told, Matthew thought with relief.

The pilot landed, crushing a good half meter into the surrounding vegetation. When he made no move to leave the aircraft, Matthew impatiently tore open the door and leaped out, and instantly regretted it.

His legs caught fire all the way to his crotch, and thousands of tiny needles stung through his pants, boots, and undergarments to tear at his flesh with each tiny movement.

In fact, he didn't even have to move. The wind from the copter rotors drove the plants all around him. Involuntarily, he screamed. Braddock jumped down to help him, and he, too, began to scream.

The Shepherd Howling stood in the doorway, one hand uplifted, his mouth moving and his other hand pointing.

"What?" Luzon managed to ask as the chopper engines stopped.

"The Great Monster has thee in its grasp!" Shepherd Howling cried. "Beware!"

"For pity's sake, man, it's no great monster, just some sort of vine!'' Matthew screeched. "Help!-"

A young man sitting atop a rock that was a virtual island in the sea of stinging brambles called out, "Can I help you, sir?"

"Get us out of here!" Matthew demanded.

"Ah. Your aircraft will be the safest place for that, sir. I suggest you get back in it before the vines overgrow it."

"What? No plant can grow that fast!" Braddock replied, doubting his own words as he unsuccessfully tried to disentangle the vines from his legs.

'The Great Monster is devious and wily and tireless in clutching for the souls and bodies of virtuous men!" Shepherd Howling declaimed.

"Indeed!" Matthew snapped at him. He turned to the boy. "If I wished to return to the helicopter I would never have landed here, young man. Please assist us out of these weeds and take us to your shanachie and Captain Fiske at once."

"Never heard of no Captain Fiske," the boy called back lazily, obviously enjoying their situation, "and we run the shanachie off."

"Did you?" Matthew stood among the stinging brambles and digested that.

"You heard him, sir. Let's get out of here," Braddock whined.

But any inclination Matthew might have had to do just that had vanished with the boy's words. "Now why did you do that, son?"

"He was a wicked man, sir. Tryin' to make us think the planet wanted one thing when it wanted the other."

"I'd very much like to talk to you about that, son. Please get us out of here." Matthew, despite the stings, turned on the force of his not inconsiderable charisma.

The boy shrugged and disappeared. Matthew and Braddock shoved Shepherd Howling back and sat in the copter while a crew of villagers arrived with various stones and pieces of board to make a path for them. Matthew was somewhat surprised that they hadn't brought machetes or sickles to hack the weeds down. Before he could ask about that, the boy ran across the stones and grabbed him by the arm.

"You'd best hurry, sir, or the coo-brambles will be a-growin' over these, too, like."

"You will be rewarded by the company, my son," Shepherd Howling said, pushing Matthew aside to sprint over the stones with the agility of a mountain goat. The speed with which he took advantage of the temporary path and his nimbleness in avoiding questing bramble tendrils caused Matthew to re-evaluate the man's degree of insanity.

Matthew followed quickly, Braddock somewhat more reluctantly. The pilot opted to remain with his ship.

With the boy leading them, Shepherd Howling on his heels, and Matthew followed more slowly by Braddock, they reached the nearest of the hovels. There they were joined by a man and woman and a pack of whooping children. The rest of the village crowded in after them.

Shepherd Howling slowed to hover noisomely by Matthew. "This is possibly a wholesome place, Brother Luzon. None of the orange minions of the underworld one sees in many of the heathen towns are visible. And nowhere did I see the monster's yawning maw waiting to be fed by the ignorance of the unenlightened."

"That is good news," Matthew said tersely, and turned to their adolescent guide. He was far more interested in what the villagers had to say.

"Now, my boy, you must explain something to me, for I am a bit confused. I was supposed to meet Captain Fiske and the shanachie of this village here. Now you tell me you've banished the shanachie. Being a stranger to this planet, but one very interested in your customs, have I indeed been brought to McGee's Pass?"

"That's where you are, sir," said the woman of the house, undoubtedly the boy's mother, pushing herself to the front. "And the best way to explain, sir, is by singing you the song we made."

Groaning inwardly at the prospect of another of the Petaybean songs, Matthew arranged his features in an engaging and interested smile.

"We sing it together," explained the man who seemed to be the woman's husband and the boy's father. "Because it happened to us all."

"We were all duped, he means," the boy said.

A 1ittle girl said, "All but Krisuk. He wasn't fooled."

"Please sing," Matthew said, trying to cut to the performance if he had to hear it to learn what they were talking about.

"You start, Krisuk," the mother said.

The boy stood stock-still, arms at his sides, not a foot from Matthew, and began to chant in an eerie singsong style:

The other villagers joined in, some crying loudly, some mumbling, all reciting the nonsense words at the end of the verses as if they were expletives.

And here, quite alarmingly, people began to tear their hair. All of the villagers sang the next verse loudly and lamentingly.

"Oh, dear," Matthew said when they had finished. "And all this because of your shanachie, eh?"

"Yes, sir," the boy said. "He took all of our best for himself and betrayed everyone."

Matthew could scarcely keep from rubbing his hands together with glee. "Oh, that's terrible. Terrible indeed. Right, Brother Howling?"

Howling's lips twitched with a smile. "That's what comes of trafficking with monsters."

"You can say that again, mister," the woman said. "Can you stay and eat, sir?" she asked Matthew, but he waved a negative.

"I'm sorry, dear lady, but your story distresses me so much that I really think our best course is to resume our journey and seek to bring justice to you and people like you who are taken in by those who would mislead you. I hope I can count on you to repeat your song before the council when I call on you!" he added, addressing the boy, who had sung every word in a voice unexpectedly good, loud, and clear.

"I'd be honored, sir," the boy said, although he sounded puzzled and wary.

The villagers had to throw fresh stepping-stones and logs over the brambles for Matthew's party to return to the helicopter. Even then, the pilot had to climb out and hack at the vines with a machete before he could free the copter's skids. The vines were tight against the belly of the ship, strands attempting to encircle the narrow stern. Matthew thought that such fast-growing vegetation would also bear scrutiny. George, he rather thought, had some botanical knowledge. He'd send him to get a sample-if one could be contained long enough.

Satok landed the shuttle, loaded with barrels of Petraseal, at Savoy. His three assistant "shanachies" were still there, drinking and talking.

"Where's Luka?" Reilly asked.

"Ran off," Satok replied. "Don't worry. I'll get her back, and when I do, I'll make her sorry she was ever born. The fraggin' bitch stole the ore samples and put rocks in their place."

"So you didn't get to make a deal with the company?"

"Course I did! Guy named Fiske saw them first before Luka switched 'em, but he wants to have genuine samples to show off."

"It was hard enough getting together what we did without you letting it get snitched," Reilly complained. He liked easier work than mining.

"Hold it! All we gotta prove is that there is genuine ore available. We'll use the one here, and who's to know if we don't tell 'em, huh? Fiske gave me some more Petraseal, so Reilly and I will mine the earlier veins while you two paint us a path back."

"Shit! I hate doing that," Soyuk grumbled. "Damn caves give me the creeps."

"Stop bellyachin'," Satok told him. "If we make this deal with the company, you'll have enough money to go off-planet permanently."

They climbed onto the Petraseal-laden shuttle and flew to the cave mouth, which was inconveniently distant from the village. In Satok's absence, the location had grown even more inconvenient.

"Where the hell did these weeds come from?" he demanded, astounded by the sea of tangling vines choking the cave mouth and cloaking the cliff and mountain meadow where they usually landed.

Reilly shrugged. "I dunno. They weren't here a coupla weeks back, but the season's gone nuts. We can torch 'em?"

"Not enough time. The fraggin' cave would fill with smoke and we'd never get at the ore."

"We could try the site back at my place," Soyuk suggested.

"No, hell, we'll hack 'em back and splash 'em with Petraseal as we go. We only need to get inside the cave."

The stalks were amazingly tough and the stinging vines clung to the men with fierce tenacity, but they hacked and splashed until they reached the entrance of the cave.

"Just hack this crap away from the front here, and it'll all be clear back where the Petraseal is, boys," Satok directed.

The way was not as clear as he had hoped. They had to make several trips to lug the vats of Petraseal into the cave. Left on his own while the others pumped the Petraseal in, Satok wondered how the weeds had managed to penetrate right through the ceiling of the cave. Had the latest tremors shaken a hole in the roof? Roots and tendrils of vines drooped from the ceiling.

When Soyuk, Clancy, and Reilly returned, he sent the first two on ahead to paint where they could excavate, and told Reilly to start patching farther back in the cave. In order to listen for Fiske's copter, Satok took the area nearest the entrance-he wanted to make sure the captain didn't see too much of the operation.

He hacked and daubed and hacked and daubed. The interior of the cave, now insulated by the cover of vines, seemed hotter than it ever had before. The light grew dimmer and greener as he worked, almost as if he were working underwater.

He thought at one point he heard some scuffling, and the others seemed noisier than they had been for a while, hollering and swearing as they worked. Getting stung, no doubt, he thought with a grin, but that noise was soon masked by the steady chop and daub of his own work. The beat of his own heart, the rasp of his own breath, was all he heard.

In this new rhythmic silence, he worked and sweated, the faint drip of his perspiration landing on the cavern floor the only other sound he heard as he strained to listen for the engines of Fiske's copter.

He didn't notice when he first heard the slithering sound, a soft rustle followed by a dry whispering crackling noise, as if paper had fallen-or leaves.

Then it came to him, just as he felt something slide across the toe of his boot and curl to brush his pant leg, that he had heard nothing from the others for some time. The thought crossed his mind just before the thorns bit into his leg as the vine tendril tightened.

"Reilly!" he hollered. "Soyuk!"

For an answer, another rustle, another slither. It was darker now, and as he turned toward the doorway, he saw that a thick net of greenery had replaced what they had hacked away a bare hour before. More alarmingly, some of the greenery bore splashes of white. He tried to kick off the vines clinging to him, but succeeded only in embedding the thorns deeper into his ankles. Feeling an edge of panic, he switched on the flashlight he'd brought along.

It seemed to attract the plants, as if they couldn't tell the difference between the light and sun. First roots, then more tendrils dropped from the roof, opening leaves as they slid.

This shouldn't be happening, Satok thought. This couldn't be happening! The Petraseal should have impeded any new growth, reduced it to dust. Where he had painted so industriously, he now realized that the Petraseal was marbled with cracks, fine in places, broadening in others to allow the plants to burgeon forth. Even the swath he had just painted had opened to emit tendrils.

And all of them seemed to be sliding toward him. From its sheath on his belt, he took his machete and hacked himself free, running to the rear of the cave as fast as he could without tripping over the vines.

He found Reilly first, hanging upside down by his ankles, which were pinned to the upper part of the wall. The vines twined down his legs and wrapped his arms tightly to his sides. His machete lay useless on the floor. The end of the vine-or maybe the first part to catch him-had wrapped around his neck five or six times, very tightly. Tender green shoots grew out of his mouth, nose, and ears.

Satok wasted no more time looking for Soyuk or Clancy. He didn't even worry about why the Petraseal hadn't worked. He jumped, hopped, and ran for the entrance, hacking and slicing.

He went at such a speed that he dropped his flashlight. That's why he didn't see the root looping down from the ceiling, to lash itself around his throat while another knocked him to the floor.

He didn't scream for long as the stinging, snatching vines overwhelmed him. As the sound died in his throat, he seemed to hear from the cave a low grumbling hum. As oxygen was cut off from his brain and optic nerve and his sight failed, the light from the setting sun pierced the leaves, lighting the greenery in the cave's entrance like the watchful eyes of a thousand gloating cats.

Marmion and her entourage had returned to Kilcoole, bringing with them Luka and an injured cat for the attention of Kilcoole's fat witch doctor, leaving Rick O'Shay's bird available to fly Torkel to Savoy to meet Satok.

Torkel was not actually rubbing his hands together with glee, but he felt like it. O'Shay had received a radio message that Matthew Luzon, his assistant, and an unspecified passenger had just cleared the coast at Harrison's Fjord. Torkel considered Luzon his staunchest ally, and he quickly sent a message asking Matthew to meet him and the McGee's Pass shanachie at Savoy.

''Hope they got that clear, Captain,' O'Shay said, shaking his head. "Terrible amount of static lately."

When they circled the Savoy settlement, Torkel thought nothing of the brambles growing some distance outside the town until he saw the gleam of metal beneath them. Even then he thought it was some piece of cast-off machinery a local had allowed the vines to overgrow.

When he inquired in the village for the shanachie, he was told that the man had been conferring with his fellow shanachies for days and yesterday had made a visit to the cave and had not yet returned.

"Important gentlemen such as yourself should be sittin' and restin' and havin' a cuppa, and not go worryin' after the shanachies. Sure they was all together and they'll be after makin' powerful decisions and discussions and such like out to the cave. I shouldn't like to be the one to interrupt them." This advice came from a middle-aged woman in raggedy clothes.

Why did Torkel get the feeling that there was something spurious about her rustic humility? Perhaps it was because he had lately had occasion to hear many Petaybeans speak. They seemed to use that broad colorful accent only when addressing company officials.

So he was uncharacteristically curt with her as he said, 'Take me to this cave at once. Shanachie Satok's business is with me and I've come to meet him."

"Ah, well, sir, I'm too old a woman to take you on that sort of a hike, sure I am. But my son now, he'd be after takin' ya on his way up to the fields with the sheep like."

"Then let him take us, but let's go," Torkel snapped.

A boy appeared abruptly, a human island in a white woolly sea. He shook his head when Torkel wanted to use the copter to get them there. "Coo-berries'll take that, too. C'mon!"

It irritated Torkel no end that Rick O'Shay had the time to relax, drink tea, and exchange gossip with the woman while he traipsed after the boy. About a mile from the end of the vil1age, the boy started swinging in a wide arc around the lake of weeds.

"Just where is this cave, son?" Torkel asked him, panting slightly at the uphill climb. He'd have to get back into working out again at the station.

"Over there, sir, but you won't want to go there, sir. Only shanachies go there."

"Are all you people nuts? I already told your mother I have business with the shanachies. Now then, how do we get through this shrubbery and into the cave?"

"Ah, sure and I couldn't be doin' that, sir. Coo-berries is dead poison to sheep, and they've not sense enough to keep from eatin' them. Worse, I'd never get the stickers and thorns out of the wool."

"Then don't take the sheep, son. Did that ever occur to you?"

"But like, what would I do with 'em then, sir?"

Torkel was about to make a suggestion when he heard the engine of another copter. Seeing it over fly their position and head for the village, he abandoned the boy and sprinted back down the hill to intercept it.

He arrived winded, back where he'd started from, in time to see the pilot shut down the copter and jump down, followed by the imposing figure of Vice-Chairman Matthew Luzon; one of his entourage, who looked a bit pale; and an individual dressed in ragged leather and fur. As Torkel approached, his nose twitched at the rancid stench that exuded from the creature.

"Dr. Luzon, thank you for coming. I'm afraid there's been a bit of a delay, however."

Luzon smiled knowingly. "Ah, yes, the vines. I encountered the same problem when I serendipitously ended up at McGee's Pass on my way to meet you. It's a small problem, but a bit tricky, Captain. You simply enlist the aid of the villagers to throw boards and stones on top of the weeds to form a path. We found that worked fine when we landed in the middle of a patch ourselves."

'You went to the cave at McGee's Pass?"

"Cave? Ah, was that what the locals were singing about? No, we didn't examine the cave. When we discovered that you were, in fact, here, we came as soon as that… ah… song was over. I did, however, make a quite satisfying discovery during our brief stay which I'll discuss with you later. Now then, where's this fellow we were supposed to meet?"

"He's in the cave," Torkel said. "Beyond the weeds. Though I'm damned if I know how he got through."

"Easy enough if you think about it," Matthew said superciliously. He turned to the villagers who had gathered to watch the company men confer. "I want a work party to gather boards, stones, sheets of plasglas, anything that can be thrown across the weeds for a path. Now, step quickly, will you! We must reach the cave."

"Sure, carryin' enough things to get back there, that's a week's work you're talkin' about, sir," said a local man with the broad weathered face of an Eskirish cross, scratching his head at the prospect.

"We've used all that sort of stuff we had building bridges across the streams when they flooded," the woman said. "There's not a scrap left hereabouts."

"Then we'll send back to SpaceBase," Torkel said with a curt nod to O'Shay. "You radio for a team."

O'Shay got on the radio, and in a moment he emerged and said, "None of the other copters are at SpaceBase, sir, or even available later today."

"Then one of you fly back and pick up help and material," Torkel said, vastly annoyed at all of the delays and rather surprised that Satok, who'd had twenty-four or more hours to work ore, had not been on hand to guide them.

"It will have to be your pilot, Captain Fiske," Luzon said. "I require the full time services of my own."

Torkel nodded to O'Shay, who climbed back aboard and restarted his engine. By now it was well into the afternoon.

"Why do you suppose we haven't heard from your shanachie?" Torkel demanded of the woman as the noise of the copter faded in the distance.

"Cave's a powerful ways back, sir."

"How did he and the others get there, then?" Torkel demanded. "We could try the same thing."

"Ah, sure, sir, shanachies has their ways as wouldn't be known to others."

Matthew Luzon nodded to Braddock, who hastily made a note of that remark.

"Yet more misguided souls in league with the Great Monster," wailed the unwashed man.

"Ah, Captain Fiske, this is a particularly valuable… acquaintance. From the southern continent. Brother Howling, meet Captain Torkel Fiske, who has spearheaded the effort to have this planet fully investigated. Captain Fiske, the Shepherd Howling, a major spiritual leader from the Vale of Tears. A most influential man."

Torkel gave the scruffy man an impatient look and limited his response to a mumbled "Delighted."

While they accepted the dubious hospitality of the village, Torkel gave the commissioner the details of his meeting with Satok and the ore samples he had himself handled and identified. To his relief, Luzon did not appear at all skeptical about the authenticity of the ores. He knew the planet was ore-rich: every space probe had verified that, even pin pointing the exact sites from space. Finding the precise locations on the surface had proved to be impossible.

Howling had apparently been listening carefully and now he nodded wisely. "The monster is treacherous. Perfectly capable of transforming gold into stone, winter into summer, harmless plants into murderous serpentine weapons. Time and again I have warned my flock they must rise up and subdue the monster with no hint of capitulation, but they were weak and faltering."

Torkel glanced at Luzon, appreciating what merit the lunatic could provide in discrediting the Kilcoole interpretation of the planet's behavior. He smiled at Luzon. "We need a few more new… acquaintances like this good and wise Brother Howling, don't we?"

Matthew wore a smug expression while Brother Howling said gravely, "Thank you, my son."

Matthew mentioned to Torkel, in an amused tone, what the villagers had sung of Satok at McGee's Pass.

"We've constantly been given the impression here that shanachies are universally respected and their views reflect those of their communities. At McGee's Pass, this was not so."

"I see. Discrediting what we have been told of the whole system. Yes, definitely, Dr. Luzon, we will need to have testimony from McGee's Pass at the hearing. And Brother Howling here, too, will represent a unique viewpoint at odds with the Kilcoole party line."

"My thoughts, exactly. Although Brother Howling also falls into the error of believing this planet to be sentient, his view is that the planet, far from being a benefactor and friend, is in fact a great monster. He believes that the colonists were brought here by the company as banishment for misbehavior elsewhere and that one day, if they do well and obey his teachings, the company will redeem them."

"Verily, have I said it thusly, my brethren," Shepherd Howling said. "I have done the company's work on this forsaken rock, Brother Matthew, that I and my family may be delivered from the monster and into the grace of the company once more. I will commune with the planet here, if you will excuse me."

His absence was welcome on several counts: the obviously fresher air, and the chance for Torkel and Luzon to make plans based on their respective discoveries. Torkel listened intently to Luzon as the man talked of similar investigations he had conducted into the folkways of various planets and systems and how he had corrected mistaken concepts and behaviors. The dialogue was briefly interrupted when a bewildered and bruised Shepherd Howling was herded back at the end of their hostess's broom.

"With all respect, gentlemen, you keep this maniac away from my little girl or I'll geld him!" the woman said and stomped away.

"Sit in the sun, Brother Howling," Luzon suggested, pointing to a half-broken bench against the outside wall-downwind of them.

All the while, Torkel kept expecting Satok to arrive to guide them to the rich ore faces as he'd promised. But several hours went by with no sign of the man. Finally the sound of helicopter engines once more routed the four men from their chairs.

Two helicopters approached the village. Torkel figured one would have men and one equipment to rid the area of the bushes, but when the passengers disembarked, he was annoyed to see that there were no figures in fatigues emerging, except the pilots, O'Shay and Greene. No one useful at all, in fact. Marmion and her entourage had come, along with George and Ivan from Luzon's group. And to his further irritation, he watched as Clodagh Senungatuk was courteously helped to descend by O'Shay from his copter.

"You're on report, O Shay, for disobeying orders," he told the pilot.

"Oh, please don't punish the dear boy, Captain Fiske," said Marmion, with a flourish of fashionable fabric scarf and a charming move. "It's all my fault really. Captain Greene returned from the southern continent with Yana Maddock, Dr. Shongili, and those sweet youngsters, plus another little girl Dr. Shongili says is the sister of his other niece-"

"Goat-dung!" Shepherd Howling said. "She is mine. She is to be my wife."

"Oh. surely not," Marmion said, smiling brightly at him. "The girl's less than twelve years old. But, at any rate, our teams were in need of one of Clodagh's hearty meals and we sat listening to Yana and Sean tell us the most fantastic adventures-ah, but I needn't tell you, need I, Matthew? You were present for some of them."

Luzon inclined his head, his eyes half-hooded and dangerous.

"Well, Johnny Greene heard Captain O'Shay's message about the weeds here, and then Clodagh said that a work party wouldn't do much good and might even be in danger. But that she knew something that would work." Marmion paused, as if expecting approval, her eyes all wide and innocent. "Et viola! We have come to offer assistance."

Before anyone could say anything else she added ingenuously, "Also, Matthew, your young friends were absolutely pining for you, and I simply had to help reunite you, isn't that so, boys?"

Luzon's muscular assistants nodded-rather miserably, Torkel thought.

While everyone was standing around thinking of a response to Marmion's gabble, Clodagh Senungatuk started walking out of the village.

"Where the devil do you think you're going?" Torkel demanded.

"To make a path to the cave,' she said simply, and kept walking.

By the time she had gone five more steps, Torkel recovered from his surprise enough to tell her that she wouldn't be able to penetrate such a hedge of weed, and where were the boards and other spanning materials he had sent for? She gave no answer, plodding up the track toward the cave. The other new arrivals followed, plus half the village, which seemed to consider this expedition fine entertainment.

At the edge of the vast jungle of waist-high vines, which seemed even more impenetrable since Torkel's first look at them, Clodagh paused. She bent down and gently touched the center of one of the leaves.

So what are you doing? Asking it nicely? Torkel demanded.

"Lookin' at this white stuff. Wondering why somebody tried to paint the bushes. This is the only thing that works." She drew out a large clear flask filled with a greenish liquid, uncorked it carefully, and then inserted a sprinkler head of home manufacture. She shook the bottle a bit in front and to each side of her.

Instantly the vines retracted as if they had been mowed with a scythe, and as she moved forward, Marmion fell in step behind her, followed by Sally Point-Jefferson, who had had the good sense to put on heavy boots.

Marmion turned around and said, "Quickly, boys. I don't know how long the effect lasts. Clodagh's very mysterious about it.

They followed with alacrity. Torkel felt like a fool, trailing behind the big woman as she doused her concochon to the right, the center, and the left, like some ancient prelate dispensing holy water or preparing a pontiff's path with incense.

When they reached a wall of greenery where the vines from the meadow above the cave spilled down over into the field, she increased the area and parabola of her casting, widening the path. The vines drew back like curtains, and Torkel saw the entrance to a largish cave.

"Better use lights," Clodagh said, though she imperturbably stepped into the dimness, Marmion behind her.

"Oh!" Marmion said. "What ever has happened here?"

"Somebody tried to kill this place," Clodagh said. "But Petaybee fights back." She indicated the streamers of vines and roots extending from the ceiling.

She proceeded until, farther inside the cave, she stepped cautiously around what looked like a green hillock.

"Ah! Here. Captain," she said to Torkel, sprinkling the hillock so that the vines gradually shrank away to show the body they had encased. "Is this yer man here that you were looking for?"

The popped eyes, protruding tongue, and cyanosed face were nevertheless identifiable as those of the former shanachie. The bloodied grooves tightly scored about his neck gave ample proof of the agency that had killed him.

"He said he had a sure fire mining method," Torkel said. "Something to do with Petraseal."

Faber knocked on a piece of the roof that had remained vineless thus far. "This is Petraseal all right, but this on the cracks-" He ran his fingers over it and shone his flashlight beam on the result and on what had covered the ends of the withered vines. "Look. It's not even white. It's pale lime green and it's not Petraseal, Captain Fiske. This is exterior wall paint, and not a real high quality at that."

Shepherd Howling, visibly shaking, suddenly sprang at Matthew Luzon as if attacking him. "Get me out of here! I must escape the Great Monster before it devours us all as it devoured that man."

"Uh, Dr. Luzon," one of the assistants called nervously. "Can you come back here?" He had followed Clodagh, who was continuing to sprinkle, undeterred by her grisly discovery, farther into the cave. "We've got three more corpses."

"I demand that this woman be held for questioning and that the bottle containing her weed-killing solution be seized and analyzed," Matthew Luzon said.

Marmion Algemeine, still unhappily abstracted by the grotesque deaths of the four men, regarded Matthew with stupefaction.

"Held for questioning? Whatever for?" she demanded.

"Clodagh helped! Without her we'd never have found those poor men."

Matthew didn't exactly say "aha!" but a malicious light did glitter in his eye as he said, in a quiet voice, "And how exactly did she know that these particular vines would need her particular remedy? And how did she just happen to have it available?"

"And I," Torkel said sternly, "only requested materials and manpower to reach the cave."

Marmion was not to be confounded. "Why, I would suppose that plants as aggressive as these might be a fairly common nuisance. Is that how you knew, Clodagh?"

Clodagh shrugged but didn't defend herself.

A woman from Savoy spoke up quickly. "And how wouldn't she know that? Sure, coo-berries has never been this bad before. It's that hard to root them out wherever they grow, but they never strangled anybody before this. Still, it's been an uncommon early spring, and everything is growin' the like of which I've never seen before in all my life."

"So you would say, would you, madam," Matthew said "that the weather was unusual and the plants are unusual? Tell me, if what Ms. Senungatuk used on the coo-berries was an ordinary remedy for their sting, why didn't the rest of you use them?"

"Sure, why should we?" she asked. "Coo-berries wasn't botherin' us any, were they? And only 'cos you come, did we know they was up at the cave. And another thing," she went on, winding up to unburden all her complaints, "back before Shanachie Reilly arrived, people used to come here for latchkays and have a chat with the planet, like. Only then Reilly gave us to understand that a lot of our problems, the floods, the avalanche, the quakes, were on accounta we were too pig-ignorant to understand properly what it was the planet was sayin' to us. After the time lightnin' struck the meeting hall and burned up all them people, just before Reilly came to us, we let him do the talkin' and I would say things have been pretty peaceful since." She paused and said, "But for all that many folk thought Reilly knew best, he never did learn the remedies like Kilcoole's Clodagh. Our old healer died two winters back and we've been wanting to get someone new trained up, 'cos I've known about her since we was both younglings. Village even had a promising girl child ready to go 'prentice' herself to Clodagh, iffen Clodagh Senungatuk'd have her, but Reilly wouldn't allow it."

"Thank you, madam, for the testimonial." Matthew said. "We'll let you know if you'll be needed to repeat your statement at the hearing. Meanwhile, I must insist Ms. Senungatuk be placed into company custody and her flask seized for analysis, along with the contents of the barrels the deceased had with them in the cave. Autopsies must be performed on the bodies and the entire area sealed."

'No worries on that score, sir," Ivan told him. They were standing just outside the field of coo-berries, and Ivan's nod indicated the place where Clodagh's path had been. It was once more covered with twining brambles.

Two weeks later, the investigation was finished and all the data collected had been entered by Luzon's overworked computer men and hard copies made for presentation.

First, however, at Shepherd Howling's insistence, he was sent off-planet on the same shuttle that carried the bodies. He couldn't have been on the MoonBase for more than an hour before angry messages arrived from first MoonBase command, then the hospital facility on Bethany Station, which indicated that the Shepherd was urgently proselytizing on a broad scale for converts to his just cause of trying to raise an army to fight the monster, which must be over come before the planet could be truly holy. He had a real knack for spouting his cant to the already disaffected, the misfits, and those in the lower ranks who were more easily swayed by his rhetoric. Within the first three days, he came close to single-handedly instigating a mutiny.

Such complaints made Matthew thankful that the man was out of the way so that he would not be part of the group greeting the remaining commissioners. They were soon to arrive on the planet's somewhat seismic-shaken surface to read and evaluate the information prior to the final hearing. He wished there had been someplace he could have immured Marmion Algemeine and her assistants, but her absence would have caused embarrassing questions even if he had thought of a way to rid her, however temporarily, of her three constant attendants.

Torkel Fiske was invaluable in helping Matthew and his committee. It was he who suggested that they should also interview newly arrived colonists in the most recently formed villages far from the influence of such people as Shongili and the Senungatuk woman, or even families such as the brood that had entertained Matthew in the south.

The new people, it was hoped, would be more objective and scientific in their outlook. When Matthew noted that the influx had come from the Mariana Islands and the Scottish highlands, where large deposits of deutronium and molybdenum had recently been located, and some resettled from the disastrous colonies of Bremer, he was equally ready to cancel that idea if the initial interviews proved negative. He resolved to read each of the collected reports before permitting them to be admitted as evidence. Meanwhile, his assistants and Marmion's vied with each other to be the first to record the testimonies of people from the villages of the four murdered shanachies.

Matthew himself had made a special, personal effort to reach Goat-dung and persuade her to tell the truth about her part in the sudden disappearance of "the monster" who had been injured by members of Howling's community-an injury rather too similar to the one from which Shongili was recovering. Matthew also had placed a strong letter of reprimand in the file of Captain John Greene, who had certainly exceeded his authority by removing the girl from Matthew's custody at a critical time.

Now no one seemed to know where either the girl or Shongili was. Shongili's mannish sister and her girlfriend were also nowhere to be found. Through Marmion's influence, Clodagh Senungatuk, much to Matthew's dismay, remained in her own home, under nominal "house arrest," and still ran the village. And the whole planet, as far as he knew-including Whittaker Fiske, who actually seemed to have the poor taste to be besotted with the fat cow-paused to gossip to her through her windows. Unstoppably, of course, those damned cats went in and out as they pleased. Discreet efforts to capture any of them-either by the lure of choice cuts of meat or by chasing them with otherwise savage canines-had met with abysmal failure. They had spurned the food and terrified any dog set on their spoors.

He had tried to insist that Shongili and Clodagh both be sent off-planet in detention cells pending the hearing. Whittaker Fiske and Marmion Algemeine had immediately blocked that, just as they'd quashed the off world reassignments he tried to engineer for captains Greene and O'Shay.

He let himself be consoled by the fact that it was only a matter of time for all their little petty tricks to come tumbling down about their ears. Once he presented his evidence at the hearing and it was seen how these two-bit shamanistic charlatans were preying on the people's fears and hopes to influence them against the company, Shongili and Clodagh and all their helpers would be evicted from their cushy company homes and Maddock, Greene, and O'Shay would be busted back to KP duty.

The workload was overwhelming. While he seemed able to gain momentum in his search for truth, his assistants, who had previously seemed so promising, had grown unaccountably bumbling and incompetent. Their reports did not have bottom-line conclusions that satisfied his requirements. And then the computers kept developing break downs and suffering from sporadic erasures.

The locals, including company troops, were hostile; the working conditions were appallingly primitive, and the weather-how he loathed wild weather-was unspeakable. Lashing rains and electrical storms alternated with spitting snow and heat far above the comfort zone. The SpaceBase facility was constantly quaking with unexpected convulsions on land that had originally been tested as geological

stable. Matthew longed for the sane and sanitary shipboard ambiance, one engineered for human comfort by rational minds such as his own. No mold grew there, as it did on the walls of his lavatory despite the repeated scrubbings of some low-ranking corpsman. No thunderclaps disrupted his concentration, and despite the fact that one was always moving in space, one never experienced sensations of bobbing like bubbles in a test tube as buildings bounced.

To make matters worse, another volcano erupted, ten klicks to the northwest, sending ash into every crack and crevice. This emergence occurred in a meadow, near nothing else, and didn't even cause copters to falter over flying it. However, a seaquake of 9.3 on the Richter scale had a mid-ocean epicenter that caused tsunamis in every direction and quite devastated the small facility at Bogota.

The company would simply have to face facts. This planet was not working out. The terraforming was faulty, the terrain had not fully stabilized, the whole place should be evacuated, scraped clean, and either abandoned or reformed with more modern techniques. It would put an end to all this talk of sentience and settlements.