John Brunner by A Planet of Your Own Page A

lulled into apathy and the assumption that the whole of his
stay would be a lonely vacation, but they couldn't stand further delay); either
invoke his help, which he couldn't give without breaking his contract, or goad
him into exposing himself where they could overpower him, then set about
wrecking the automatics so thoroughly that the company would have to send an
unscheduled ship. Which might excite interest at government
level, and save them from simply being killed off.
    A thin chance indeed. But it was all they had. And Horst felt it might work. After all,
unless something more blatant had been installed since he'd last seen the main
station, all its weapons had had to be disguised as something else and excused
as "devices to prevent willful sabotage." The Nefer -titian
inspectors hadn't winked at computer-operated laser guns or anything of that
kind.
    He
wasn't looking at anything now—hadn't been, for how long he didn't know. His mind
was far away and his motions were as unthinking as a machine's. He hadn't heard Coberley tell him to stop paddling; it took the man's
savage backhanded slap to make him aware of his surroundings.
    Dazed,
he stared over the water. There was the coating station, apparently just
beginning to get up power to go hunt weeds; there were the substations and
monitors in a sea of unripe pelts; there was the main station, its landing-deck
glistening in the watery sunlight, and on the deck—
    "It's a woman," Horst said softly.
    Coberley , who had been snapping out some sort of
orders from sheer habit, broke off. "What?"
    "It's
a woman!" Horst repeated, trying to rise to his feet and re-learning what
he had forgotten in the heat of the moment: this craft had no bottom except for
the clumped bladderwrack cysts.
    "How do you know?"
    "My eyes aren't that bad." Horst closed and rubbed them, then looked again. "Yes,
there's no question about it—a woman. Do you hear me, Coberley ?"
    But Coberley wasn't listening. He was trying to stop Victor
from waving at the new supervisor.
    "Get
your head down! We want this damned boat to look like a raft of flotsam,
not—"
    "He- elp !" Dickery Evan ignored him, flinging his good arm into
the air and waving as frantically as Victor. "He-e- elp !"
    Why
shouldn't a woman who'd taken on this job be as callous as a man? She'd have
taken the post for the same reasons as they had, her predecessors, and she'd
know as well as they that even to wave back was to forfeit her pay at the end
of her year's tour: signaling to someone not employed by the Zygra Company voided the contract.
    Yet
Horst was waving too, now, and shouting, and after a moment of silent fury even Coberley gave in and did the same.

XI
    Doomed or not , Kynance realized
sickly, nothing in the galaxy could prevent her from giving assistance to those
men on their weird makeshift boat. So within a couple of days of starting her
year-long tour, she could kiss goodbye to her chance of repatriation. For all
her attempts to persuade herself that she was going to win out, it had been an
illusion all along. Unless those were survivors from a starship which had
crashed on Zygra —and the odds against that were
enormous— their presence could be accounted for in only one way.
    They
must be what Shuster had called "previous incumbents," deliberately
disqualified from the company's employ and left to live or die as the planet
let them.
    Their
arrival proved one thing, of course: the Zygra Company's
insistence that this place was uninhabitable without millions of credits' worth
of equipment was at least an exaggeration and probably a downright lie. She
shuddered as she contemplated the idea of having to wrest a living from this
boundless marshland.
    Among the—how many? She narrowed her eyes and counted: four men.— Among them, there must be at least one of remarkable talent and determination. You'd
have expected resignation or even suicide by this time.
    Somebody
like that shouldn't be abandoned to fate, even by a