John Brunner by A Planet of Your Own Read Free Book Online Page B

taken
star-sightings, sitting up all night for breaks in the cloud while you two snored your heads off?"
    "And
haven't you snored your head off while we sweat over
these damned paddles?" Coberley thundered back.
    "Don't
argue," Horst pleaded wearily. "We can't be certain we're on the
right course—as you've pointed out, Coberley , they
may be withholding some of the pelts for next year because there seem to be so
many of them—but Victor is almost always right, and I don't know how he manages to keep track of so
many calculations in his head."
    The
others were both mollified by that, and for a while they simply forged ahead,
turning a little to the right as directed when they approached the next mat of
weed.
    Horst didn't look at it except
to make sure they were running clear of its fringe of roots; he was far more
concerned about the risk of it being grounded on a mudbank ,
in which case they'd have to backtrack and go around the other side after all.
Getting around Zygra in a powerboat would have been a
slow job; the only sensible transport would be a hovercraft, and at that you
might run into a floating forest with trees of a sort rising fifty or sixty
feet from a base ten miles long-
    " Lookl " Victor shrilled. "Look there, on the edge
of the mat!"
    Their
heads jerked around to see what he was pointing at, and they gasped.
    On
the very edge of the mat, half in the water, lay a
stocky man with one arm crudely bandaged.
    "Can we get him off?" was Hoist's
first question, knowing that they had to. There was only one explanation for
his presence, which Coberley voiced by implication.
    "Damn
the Zygra Company! May Shuster rot eternity away! "
    "You think that's the latest of the
supervisors?" Victor muttered.
    "How
else could the poor bastard have got here?" retorted Coberley savagely.
    "Then we are in the right area of the planet!" Victor exclaimed. "What did
I tell you?"
    "Oh,
shut up!" Coberley blazed. "He may have
been drifting for weeks! And in any case they wouldn't have trapped the poor
bastard until the last possible moment, the same way we were trapped, so we can
be damned sure the harvesting ship is due at any time now."
    "I wonder if he's
still alive," Horst whispered.
    He
was. The pain of having his arm touched while they wrestled him aboard the boat
made him stir and moan, and when they revived him by squeezing the sour but
nourishing juice of a dinglybell into his mouth he
cursed loudly in a language they didn't know, musical and full of open
vowel-ended syllables.
    The
cursing ran dry. He licked his lips and rolled his eyes, surveying them in
mingled wonder and dismay, naked as he was himself, sick-looking, wild-haired.
    "You too?" he
said.
    "Us too," Horst
agreed.
    And
at that instant of time they heard the beginning of what they had hoped not to
hear before sighting the main station: the faint drumming across the sky that
marked the arrival of a spaceship to take away the annual yield of pelts.
    "Are
we far from the main station now?" Victor asked hopefully.
    "How
should I know?" the man with the broken arm answered bitterly. "For
all I can tell, I've been unconscious for days on end."
    Shuster was a man capable of harboring a
grudge, nurturing it, encouraging it until the time was ripe for getting even. Kynance realized the fact with a sinking heart and
set about trying to elude him long enough to garner clues to his likely deceits
from some sympathetic crewman.
    Even
when the ship had set down at the main station on Zygra ,
however, he prevented her from talking to people.
    'The
business of harvesting is no concern of yours," he snapped at her.
"Your responsibility begins when this year's pelts are aboard, and ends
when we come back next time—if you're still validly contracted, of
course."
    He
said that with a peculiar relish. It was a meager hint, but it was a hint. Kynance turned it over in her mind and decided that it
yielded only the same conclusion she had previously reached: whether it was
Shuster's