Polymath by John Brunner Page B

as though fire symbolized some innate friendliness in nature.
    There had been no trouble picking Lex’s team. From among his own salvage workers he invited Minty, a wiry woman in her early thirties with the spare figure of an athlete, and brawny, imperturbable Aykin; these two had been among the first couples to indicate their intention of starting a family, and Lex took that as a sign of determination.
    Then, before he spoke to the other pair he’d had in mind, a point struck him which he’d overlooked in committee. He himself knew the route to the other party’s site because he had accompanied Arbogast when he led a brief and hazardous trip there. Of course, by then the country had been dying toward winter; at this time ofyear it would look very different. Nonetheless, just in case something happened to himself, it would be a good idea to have one person along who had also been that way before. He knew who he wanted, too: a tall fair man called Baffin, who had studied hydraulics and hydrodynamics and ought in any case to get another look at the river.
    “Oh, take him!” Cheffy said. “There’s nothing for him to do until the water comes back!”
    Fritch recommended a sober young man called Aggereth, to whom Lex bunked close in the single men’s house. He thought the choice a good one; Aggereth was reliable and hard-working. Bendle’s recommendation was a woman, Lodette, plump-faced and dark-skinned. She had been concentrating on the study of the inland fauna and knew almost as much about it as Bendle himself.
    Lastly, Jerode came hurrying in search of him with a new suggestion: should the party not include one of the girls who had constituted themselves an emergency nursing staff last winter and were now spending most of their time studying medicine and surgery from the ship’s manu-als? Zanice would be pleased to go along, a gray-eyed blonde woman of forty-odd, known to Lex by sight like everyone in the town, though he could not remember ever exchanging a word with her.
    So: a balanced group, with a good range of skills. Lex was well-pleased with the outcome.
    Against the risk that not everyone else would be, though, and in accordance with Jerode’s principle of allowing people to be seen to volunteer when a tough job was ahead, even if in fact they’d made up their minds long before, Lex asked his chosen six to scatter themselves among the crowd at assembly time and come forward when he called for them. There was no risk of a rush of volunteers; there would be a psychological lag. What he was worried about was the problem of people who might try to argue that he was unsuited to lead the party. In the event, no one actually rose and said so out loud.
    Nor, fortunately, did anybody—even Ornelle—harp on the expedition’s subsidiary purpose, that of visiting the other party’s site. It was quietly accepted as a logical thing to do while people were upriver.
    The questions were much what he had expected. Was the river dry simply because it was summer? There hadn’t been any rain here for nearly two months, after all, hadthere? What about arrangements for drinking and washing until the river was flowing again? Why had the self-appointed leaders of the community allowed such a thing to happen? (The last wasn’t said in so many words, but it was implicit in the acid face of Nanseltine’s wife, who spent most of the meeting having a furious but whispered argument with her husband. However, Nanseltine seemed to be learning a bit of sense at long last and didn’t rise to her gibes.)
    Lex was pleased when a ripple of laughter effectively silenced Rothers, who had raised some totally irrelevant point, and left Jerode free to call on him as nominated leader of the expedition.
    On his request for companions, the six got up—not too hurriedly—and stood while he noted them, nodded, and beckoned them to him. But there was one other volunteer, not someone he had expected, indeed almost the last person he would have