The Practice Effect by David Brin Read Free Book Online

landcar to pass. Uneven and twisty, it followed the contours of the land instead of cutting straight through, as a highway on Earth would have done. And its edges were ragged, as if no one had bothered to trim them when the bed was laid.
    The shiny pavement felt smooth and yet tough. Dennis scuffed it and walked a few paces. He tried to scratch it with a metal buckle and dribbled water from his canteen. It seemed skidproof and weatherproof, and offered resilient traction.
    Two narrow grooves—exactly one point four two meters apart—ran down its center, following every twist and turn. Dennis knelt to peer into one of the thin channels, its cross section a near-perfect semicircle. The inside surface was almost slippery smooth to the touch.
    Dennis sat down on a nearby stump, whistling softly to himself.
    This road was a very advanced artifact. He doubted a surface like it could be made on Earth.
    But why the ragged edges? Why the grooves, or the twisty, inefficient path?
    It was perplexing, like the illogical way in which the return mechanism and the robots had been taken apart. The locals seemed to think differently than men.
    Back at the airlock, Dennis had found most of the metal parts taken away from the zievatron. He thought this might mean he had arrived on a metal-poor world. But in the past few days he had seen at least three areas where iron and copper ores lay open and available.
    It was a mystery. And there was only one way to find out more.
    To the west, the road climbed higher into the mountains. Eastward, it seemed to descend into a broad watershed. Dennis picked up his pack and started off along the road, away from the afternoon sun—toward what he hoped would be civilization.
6
    It wasn’t an easy idea to get used to, but Dennis was coming to the conclusion that he had misjudged Bernald Brady.
    The night after encountering the highway, Dennis thought about it as he stirred a pot of soup over his little stove. Perhaps he
had
been unfair to his old S.I.T. nemesis. During his first few days on this new world, he had complained a lot about the quality of his equipment, blaming Brady for his blisters, his chafed shoulders, and his tepid meals. But those problems had all abated with time. Obviously he had needed time to adapt. Brady and the equipment must have merely been a convenient set of scapegoats for his initial misery.
    Now that he had apparently found the knack, the little stove seemed to work just fine. Its first fuel canister had been used up in a day. But the second had lasted much longer and heated his food better. All it seemed to have taken was a bit of practice. That, he confessed a bit immodestly, and a little mechanical aptitude.
    While the soup cooked, Dennis examined the little camp-watch alarm with new respect. It had taken him days, but he had finally found out that the colors of the little lights on its screen corresponded roughly with the carnivority of the creatures nearby. The correlation had been made clear when he witnessed a pack of foxlike creatures stalking a covey of small birds and watched the counterparts on the screen. Maybe it had to do with body temperature, but somehow the alarm had distinguished the two separate groups clearly into red and yellow dots on the screen.
    It bothered Dennis a little that it had taken him so long to notice all this. Perhaps he had spent too much of the journey playing with equations in his head.
    Anyway, the trip would be over soon. All this day he had passed signs of quarrying in the surrounding hills. And the road had broadened somewhat. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, he knew he would, come upon the creatures who ruled this world.
    The camp-watch hummed in his hands, and its little antenna suddenly swung about to point westward. The pale screen came alight and an alarm began to buzz softly.
    Dennis cut off the sound and reached over to draw the needier from its holster. He turned off the stove. When its faint sigh died away, Dennis could hear only the