Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“You mean it really is all in our heads?” An Li asked, sounding skeptical.

“I think so. It’s this very effect, though, that makes many drugs so attractive to some people, and it’s what makes these things unique and valuable to others. I think after we sleep but before we go down again and start setting up we ought to swap stones and see what happens. If we get the exact same sensations from different stones, then it’s proof that the signals are random and our brains are doing it from the Magi’s Stone’s stimulation. If it’s wildly different, or if we get each other’s sensations, then there might be something external that they’re picking up. An Li’s seeing much the same thing in her stone as she saw in Sanders’s gem, though, makes me suspect it’s us.”

“Regardless, how the hell are we going to mask the effect so we can harvest the pile?” Nagel wanted to know. “And how far away can we stow them here so they won’t have any effect on us, or maybe even the captain?”

“I get nothing from the samples you brought up,” the captain assured them.

“Yeah, maybe, but we’re not talking about a kilo or so. We’re talking a ton of the stuff that went right through and along the labs’ neural nets,” Nagel pointed out. “I keep wondering if some of those derelicts from the Kings weren’t because of the shielding or wormholes at all, but maybe were because people went nuts.”

“Well, we’ll just have to try and be smarter than they were,” An Li put in. “I don’t like the damned things one bit, but if we pick up a ton of them and get out of here and back home, I do know we’ll have one hell of a nest egg for all our futures. We sure haven’t found anything else we can carry.”

“Maybe we did,” Jerry replied thoughtfully. “Hell, our primary job is salvage, and we’ve got a ship designed for it. If we can pick up that alien whatever, bring it up, and stick it in the hold, then we’ve got an extra-value cargo that might really make us all rich, particularly if there’s some remains of dead aliens left inside it.”

“Great,” Randi sighed. “Going back, which nobody’s ever done before in any case, with a ship stuffed with hallucinogenic gemstones and rotting alien corpses. What fun!”

“Nevertheless, at sun—er, at planetrise , Lucky and we take the C&C down to the surface and we get to work,” An Li declared. “Let’s get this over and out of here before one of those multiple ugly mountains down there decides it doesn’t like us, either!”

The experiment with swapping stones was inconclusive. None of the trio had the same complete set of hallucinations as before, but each had visions more in tune with their original experiences than with the others’, and Queson felt confident that her theory was correct.

Sark seemed convinced that it was a natural sort of thing as well, but he wanted no part in playing with them. They didn’t ask why; everybody’s past was their own in this sort of business. Still, it was clear that he’d had some kind of run-in with drugs or other stimulations, and the experience had been bad.

Now that it was suddenly more of a familiar operation for them, they felt more confident in spite of the effects that the stones induced. Lucky detached the modular C&C from the Stanley with the shuttle docked in it and then brought the whole thing down through the atmosphere of the big moon and onto the huge plateau of lava about a kilometer from the rockfall, where it could be easily docked and lifted off in a hurry but would be away from any sudden avalanches and could be settled fairly level, its support legs doing the rest to make it not just solid as a rock, but considering the area, much more solid than these rocks had ever been.

Conditions, however, were much poorer than they’d been when they’d landed the first time. Clouds had rolled in, covering the sky and descending even below the high volcanic peaks all around them, and they rushed to scoop up and dump inside the containers within the C&C complex what they could of the slide and its strange but valuable cargo before it became impossible to do so. They managed to accumulate quite a lot, perhaps a third of their capacity, before the lightning started all around them, striking with increasing rapidity and force and causing thunderous explosive sounds to echo off the mountainsides and cliffs, finally accompanied by rain that seemed to come from under vast waterfalls rather than to precipitate from clouds.

They rushed fearfully back on their scooters to the C&C in the distance, thinking that at any moment the magnetic drives would pull down some of the fierce lightning and electrocute them as they fled for cover. The air already smelled of ozone, but they made it back, soaked and exhausted.

“I wouldn’t even want to take off in this stuff if I didn’t have to,” Lucky Cross told them. “The only good thing is it’s not bloody likely that any of those alien thingies are gonna venture out this way, either.”

“So we lose a little time,” Nagel told them. “And, yeah, we’d probably have been happier losing it up top, but we’re better off down here, acclimating to the gravity. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling like I just had to fight my way out of the toughest bar on Sepuchus just from yesterday’s action, and we rode almost the whole way!”

“Well, take a little painkiller and relax,” An Li told him. “Any idea how long this shit will last?”

“Observations say it could be days, but probably won’t be,” Cross assured her. “Man! You think it’s bad now, try it with my weight! I feel like I’m in a permanent squat!”

“You weren’t out in that stuff!” Jerry Nagel replied, then sighed. “Well, let’s spend some time setting up as much in the way of an automated security perimeter as we can. We did that when we thought we were alone, and we know that there are other races, many races, with colonies on this dirtball, and that at least one of them knows where this place is, and who knows with this little crew and no mother hen whether or not we’ll all doze off. I wouldn’t want one of those headless snakes showing up with boundless curiosity during that time.”

As they set up the scanners and established both automatic warnings and weapons thresholds, Randi Queson couldn’t help thinking of that funny-looking vehicle they were going to try and salvage at the end of this. “I wonder why they left it?” she mused, aloud.

“Huh? What do you mean? Who’s ‘they’ and what did ‘they’ leave?” Jerry responded.

“Oh—just thinking aloud. But this isn’t exactly on the known trade routes, and anything as sophisticated as that alien vehicle had to be brought here as part of their exploration and maybe prospecting, salvage, or whatever operation. One, maybe a lot more, were put into it just like we’re here in the C&C module and sent out to look things over, maybe even discover and pick up Magi’s Stones. There’s no sign of any settlement of anything, least of all something that could build and drive that, anywhere on this side of the island, so it was brought here—flown here, floated here, who knows?—to do what it did. And then it got tripped up, stuck, and had to be abandoned or whatever. So why hasn’t anybody come for it to fix it? It’s got to be very valuable to them, even as salvage. Why did they leave it abandoned?”

“Maybe everybody inside made it back on foot or whatever they travel on and they didn’t have what it took to fix the thing,” Nagel suggested. “What’s the big deal? It’s not going anywhere.”

“But it is! Don’t you see? If it doesn’t eventually get rolled over and possibly washed away by storms like these over time, or by a new slide caused by one, then one of these mountains is going to rumble and maybe spew in this direction, or at least cause some major and minor volcanic quakes. That’s why we put this unit where we did, and the best we could get was a seventy-six percent probability that we’d be okay here for the duration of our job. No, I would love to know why they abandoned it.”