Holy Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior," Yerby Bannock murmured softly as he stumbled to the hatch from which Mark was getting his first look at Greenwood. Yerby pressed his head with both hands as though he were trying to keep the brains from leaking out through his temples. "How are you feeling, kid?"
"I'm always a little woozy after sleep travel," Mark said. "This was a longer trip than some. But I'm all right."
The ship had landed on a grid a hundred feet in diameter, big enough for a single ship but far too small hold two at a time. The steel spiral against which ships braked themselves was buried ten feet down in the stony soil, but the ground still radiated heat from the mutually repelling magnetic fluxes. On more highly developed spaceports the surface was thick concrete or even vitrified earth. Here ships landed on dirt, and a few plants between the twists of the steel managed to survive the heat that baked their roots at every landing.
Landing-site preparation was the factor that limited interstellar trade. Ships traveling between prepared sites braked orbital velocity against the planet's magnetic field, but for actual landing they required a denser flux to cushion them down. Except for a few nickel-iron asteroids, that meant burying a huge mass of magnetic material in which the incoming ship could induce a field to repel that of the vessel itself.
The bigger the ship, the greater degree of site preparation. Even small tramp freighters like the one Mark arrived on required hundreds of tons of metal to ease them in safely. That was a major project for a completely raw planet, but until it was accomplished all ships had to land by rocket. The weight penalty of the rocket motors and fuel was enormous, and it was a lot more dangerous than almost idiotproof magnetic landings besides.
"Boy, I think there was something wrong with the gin I got on Dittersdorf," Yerby said. He closed his eyes, shuddered at whatever he saw inside his head, and opened them again. "The top of my skull feels like it's going to pop off."
"You drank more than two quarts of liquor immediately before we got into our sleep capsules," Mark said, trying not to scold. "I was afraid you might have poisoned yourself drinking so much."
Yerby shrugged and winced at the motion. "Oh," he said, "I always do that before transit to keep from scrambling my brains. The doc's got a machine but it never worked for me. I just get drunked up before I go under, and I come through okay."
Yerby didn't look okay, but Mark wasn't in perfect shape himself. Nobody was at his best following days of electronically induced suspended animation. Mark knew how to bring his brain waves in line with the induction apparatus instead of fighting it, but sleep travel still wasn't his idea of a fun time.
The alternative was to stay awake during transit between bubble universes, where all physical laws changed and life itself was an unnatural intrusion. Starship crews had to do that, and by the time a voyage was over they were virtually psychotic.
The flight crew had disembarked before ground personnel brought the passengers out of their sleep capsules. The navigator stood near the ship, punching violently at nothing at all. Two crewmen sat catatonic at the edge of the field, their eyes focused a thousand miles away. The chief cargo handler was sobbing uncontrollably in the cargo hatch; three stevedores waited to unload the ship, but they knew that if they disturbed the crying woman she might claw them like a wounded leopard.
The captain plaited grass blades into a chain. As his fingers formed the chain from the bottom, he swallowed the other end.
There were worse things than Mark's wooziness, or even than Yerby's hangover.
The landing site was a rough plain. A dozen winch points—bollards set down to bedrock—ringed the field three hundred yards out. A ship could skid itself off the magnetic mass to allow another vessel to land. Two ships similar to the freighter Mark stood in were on the margins of the field now.
Most of the hills surrounding the field were heavily forested. "Greenwood" wouldn't have been a bad name for the planet even if the Protector of Hestia had been a Mr. Smith. On the knoll five hundred yards to the east sprawled a complex of stone and concrete buildings. Several brightly colored dirigibles bobbed on tethers above the courtyard wall; winged flyers, seemingly too delicate to be machines, lifted toward the ship.
"There's the Spiker, lad," Yerby said. He pointed toward the buildings with the care his throbbing hangover demanded. "Blaney's Tavern to the ship crews, but all the folk on Greenwood call it . . . See the critter there at the front gate?"
Mark squinted. "I thought it was a truck," he said. "Or a tank."
"The critter" was thirty feet long, ten feet broad, and ten more feet high. It stood on six stumpy legs and appeared to have neither a neck nor a tail. The huge head was jagged with scores of spines a foot or two long; rows of similar projections ran down the backbone and the flank Mark could see from this angle.
"A spiker," Yerby said. "Ain't very many of them. Guess there couldn't be or they'd eat the place down to the rock. That one charged a bulldozer while they were building the field. Would've flipped the dozer over, too, if old Blaney hadn't finally managed to burn through the hide."
The freighter's winch hummed, tracking the first load of cargo out of the hold. Much of it was Amy's luggage. "Guess I'm ready to do some work," Yerby said. To Mark he didn't look ready for anything but embalming, but it wasn't Mark's place to judge.
Ground personnel had extended the hatch steps when the ship arrived; in the grip of transit psychosis, the flight crew had simply jumped or fallen out of the vessel. There was no railing. Mark led Yerby gingerly down to the hot soil.
"Hope Desiree's here with a blimp," Yerby said. "My wife," he added with an apologetic grimace. "Damned if I know why I ever married her. Drunk, I suppose."
Mark's lips pursed. It wasn't his place to comment on Yerby's attitudes or domestic arrangements, either.
Amy appeared at the hatch above them, gray-faced. She moved with short, shuffling steps like a mummy whose feet were still wrapped together. She started to walk out into space.
"Amy!" Mark shouted as he bounded up the ten steps a lot faster than he'd have bet he could manage in the aftermath of suspended animation. He caught Amy by the shoulders an instant before she went off the edge of the top step.
"Something hurts," Amy said in a tiny voice. Her eyes didn't point in quite the same direction. "I think my head hurts."
"Here, lad, I got her," Yerby said. He reached past from the step below Mark. "Jump clear and I'll lift her down. Didn't the little gadget work for you neither, darling? The doc showed me the best one and I bought it."
"Do you think—" Mark said. Do you think you're in shape to carry jour sister, Yerby? he'd have continued, but obviously Yerby did think that and nothing anybody else said was likely to change his mind.
Mark jumped the six feet to the ground. Yerby lifted his sister and carried her as delicately as porcelain down the unrailed steps. He must still have the hangover, but Mark supposed Yerby had a lot of experience doing things hungover. And probably dead drunk, too.
"I don't know," Amy said. "If it worked, then I'm never going to travel anywhere again. Oh, Yerby, I hurt."
She was still wearing a net of fine wires with a lead to the pocket of her jacket. Mark removed the net and pulled a flat, four-inch square metal box from the pocket.
"My goodness," he said in horror. "You were using this? No wonder you've got a headache. My goodness, this is worse than nothing!"
"The doc said it was the best kind," Yerby said doubtfully. "It sure cost enough, I'll tell you that."
A dirigible had lifted from the Spiker's courtyard. Three individual flyers were circling closer. The upper surfaces of the flyers' thin, rigid wings were covered with solar cells. A small electric motor drove a propeller above the central spine, and the tubular frame beneath would hold two people if they were good friends.
"Twenty years ago," Mark said, "they thought you could lock your own brain patterns over those imposed by the ship's mechanism. Some people thought that. What really happened is the two systems set up harmonics that changed every time the ship transited to another bubble universe."
He glared at the device in his hand. "Look," he said, "I can teach you both how to bring your patterns into synch with the ship instead of fighting it. When the ship changes universes, you'll stay under but you'll shift too. That's what the newer electronics try to do, but none of them are really subtle enough and you don't need a machine."
"Guess we don't need this one," Yerby said. He took the device, crushed it in his right hand, and dropped the remains on the hard soil. He stroked his sister's hair very gently. "You teach Amy if you would, lad," he said. "Me, well, the booze works well enough for me."
He looked up at the hatch and called, "Hello, Doc—"
Dr. Jesilind walked into the hatch coaming. He spun counterclockwise at the impact and pitched out of the hatchway. Jesilind hit the ground flat and lay there on his back. His face bore a dazed smile.
Mark walked over to Jesilind.
"Oh, don't worry about the doc," Yerby said. "When he comes out of the capsule, it's like he's been tying one on for a week. You know a drunk never hurts himself falling."
"I didn't know that," Mark said. He didn't believe it, either. "But I can't say I was terribly worried."
Jesilind wore a wire induction net like Amy's. Mark fished into the doctor's pocket and brought out an identical control box. He looked at it, shook his head, and put the box back where he'd found it.
Yerby raised an eyebrow. "Want me to take care of that one, too?" he asked.
Mark shrugged. "I think we ought to assume that Dr. Jesilind is capable of deciding such things for himself," he said. Like you and your two quarts of gin, Yerby. "I just wanted to make sure that he hadn't given Amy advice that he wouldn't take himself."
"Naw, he wouldn't do that," Yerby said. "It's just that what works for the doc didn't work so good for Amy, I guess. You know how delicate women are."
Amy straightened and pushed herself out of her brother's arms. "Delicate?" she said. "Because I thought you might find some better way to relax on Kilbourn than getting stinking drunk and wrecking a bar? Does that make me delicate, Yerby? Because if it does, you could use some delicacy yourself, brother!"
"Now, Amy, I wasn't drunk," Yerby said abashed. "Now, be a good girlie—"
"Yerby!" Amy said. "You can't help being a fool, but if you'll shut up you'll be able to conceal the fact longer. In the future please remember that my name is Amy or sister or Miss Bannock. Can you manage that?"
Mark turned his head so that he could pretend not to be hearing a family quarrel. There was no doubt of the brother and sister's affection for one another, but they really did come from different worlds.
And Mark came from a world different from either of theirs. Well, they were all together now. At least for the time being.
There was almost no wind over the spaceport. Two of the flyers landed simultaneously, passing one another in opposite directions. When the little wheels touched the ground, the wings tilted into air dams and the riders put their feet down to help slow the vehicles. One of the newcomers was a man clad in leather imprinted with the pattern of scales.
A woman rode the other flyer. She was short, stocky, and looked madder than a wet hen. "Well, there you are, Bannock!" she called, still within the framework of her flyer. "Decided to come home at last, did you? How long are you going to stay? As much as a week, maybe?"
"Desiree?" Yerby said. He looked surprised. "Ah, I thought you'd bring the blimp. I've got a lot of gear for—"
"Wait for you with the blimp, should I?" the woman said. Her outfit was much like Yerby's own, a leather vest over a checked shirt, with canvas trousers and boots that looked like they'd been made by an amateur. "No, thank you. I guess you can bring it back yourself—and you can walk to the grant, too. I just came to see if there'd be news that you'd managed to get your head knocked in by something even harder."
"Mark, this here's my wife Desiree," Yerby said with a broad, false smile. "Desiree, Mr. Maxwell here's a real gentleman from Quelhagen. Wait till you see—"
"Two more mouths to feed is what I see," Desiree snapped. She was at least half a dozen years older than her husband. She couldn't ever have been strikingly pretty, but if she managed to smile and let her hair down from its tight bun, she could have come a lot closer. "Him and your sister and your fine Dr. Jesilind's back, more's the pity."
"Madam!" Mark said. "I assure you I have no intention of trespassing on your hospitality!"
Though Mark had planned to put up at the caravansary until he could make more permanent arrangements, Greenwood didn't have a caravansary. Such amenities were for planets with considerable transit trade, while Greenwood was the end of the line—the farthest that human settlement went in this direction. Well, the Spiker probably has rooms.
"Just who's talking about mouths to feed, Desiree Cartwright?" Amy said, answering Mark's unasked question of whether the two women knew one another from Kilbourn. "My share of Dad's estate was twice what you brought with you to the marriage, so I'd say if anybody was eating what another provided, it's you!"
"Come along, lad," Yerby said to Mark in a stage whisper. "I guess Miss Altsheller didn't teach Amy nothing that keeps her from holding her own."
He shook his head. "And with Desiree, too, which I could never do in a million years. Sober."
The women continued their discussion. Amy's language and tones were refined, but as her brother said, that didn't prevent her from making her point.
Mark was blushing and horrified. It wasn't just that the scene was angry: love, joy, or sorrow would have embarrassed him just as much. On Quelhagen, people just didn't let their emotions out in public.
A dirigible settled beside the pile of cargo discharged from the starship. The external cover that streamlined the gasbags was about a hundred feet long and painted in streaks of red, yellow, and gold.
"Hey Chuck!" Yerby bellowed to the man in the dirigible's cab. "Do me a favor, will you? Run me and my gear out to the grant. Desiree came in the flyer."
"Can it wait till tomorrow, Yerby?" the pilot said. He was a round-faced man, young-looking but so completely bald that Mark wondered if he'd lost his hair from disease or an accident. "That's sixty miles there and sixty back, and I'd really like to get these seedlings in the hothouse today yet"
"Say, you don't think I'd put my sister Amy up at the Spiker, do you?" Yerby said. "Come on, Chuck. Remember how glad you were I was around to help you run pipe when your first well failed."
"I never said I wouldn't, did I?" Chuck grumbled. "C'mon, let's get loaded and maybe I can get some work done myself anyhow."
Yerby strode toward the cargo. "Tomorrow you and me'll go off hunting, lad," he said. He nodded in his wife's direction. "That'll give Desiree a while to cool down. Or anyways, we won't have to listen to her."
Mark grabbed a trunk and began to drag it toward the dirigible's cargo sling. He didn't comment on Yerby's plan.
But since Desiree was obviously angry about the amount of time her husband spent avoiding her, it struck Mark as an extremely bad plan in the long run.