Timothy Zahn - Spinneret

… but the flaw was easy to find. "Besides, that would only get rid of elements in the bottom half of the periodic table. Sodium is far too light a metal to fizz, but Astra hasn't got any of it, either."

"Oh. Wait a minute." She threw him a puzzled look. "No sodium either? But I thought Astra's ocean was salty."

"Not really. There's a fair assortment of stuff dissolved in it, but none of it strictly qualifies as salt. A salt, you see, is formed by replacing the hydrogen atom in an acid by a metal, as in hydrochloric acid to sodium chloride. Without metals, the acids remain as is or make bonds with oxygen or silicon." He shook his head.

"We're sitting on a genuine treasure trove of strange chemistry here. Compounds that wouldn't last five seconds on Earth are just lying around waiting to be examined. I think we're up to eighteen brand-new carbon compounds alone since we've landed."

"Anything valuable?"

"You mean in terms of sending to Earth? So far, no. But we haven't even scratched the surface. We'll find something useful here—I'm sure of it."

"I hope you're right." She paused. "All right, I'm starting a clockwise circuit of Olympus. Pick your spot this time around, because I've got to get the flyer back soon."

"Right." A metallic glitter a few kilometers south of the cone caught Hafner's eye; but even as he opened his mouth to shout the discovery he realized what it was.

Even with the incredible scarcity of metal, no one had yet found it worthwhile to come out here and scrape up all the tiny fragments of steel and magnesium scattered across the landscape by the ill-fated Flyer Two. Shivering, he resolutely turned his eyes back to the volcano.

He found the spot he was looking for in less than half a circuit: a small lump halfway up the slope that might indicate an old pipe vent. "There," he told Carmen, pointing. "It's at least a ten-degree slope, though—can this thing handle that?"

"Easily," she told him. The dull background roar changed pitch as she switched back to vertical thrusters. Three minutes later they were down.

Hafner's core-sampling equipment, while bulky, was not very heavy, and it took only fifteen minutes to unload it from the flyer and move it out of range of the repulsers. "Now you sure you're going to be all right?" Carmen asked as he dropped the last load of bracing bars onto his pile.

"I'll be fine," he assured her. "It's not like this is my first time on an all-day expedition, you know. I know what I'm doing."

"Fine. Okay, then, I'll be back to pick you up around twenty hundred. "Bye."

It was closer to twenty-one hundred by the time she returned, but the delay didn't especially matter to Hafner. With all his samples taken, he had nothing to do for the moment but sit on the ground and brood … and brooding he could do anywhere.

"Zilch," he told Carmen as the flyer lifted off. "Not a single bit of metal in any of the half-dozen samples I ran."

"So that means Astra's magma is metal-free, too?" she asked.

"I don't know. Maybe I just got anomalous samples. The rock looked more heattreated than actually melted—and, no, I don't know what could account for that.

Say, would you take me the rest of the way around before we head back? I might as well look for a second test site while we're here."

The flyer tilted slightly as she complied. "I'm afraid it'll probably be a month or so before you'll be able to get back—I don't think I'd better pull this trick again."

He grunted. "Unless the borings show something promising it'll be a good stretch longer than that."

For a moment he studied the ground in silence. Directly ahead the blue water of the Dead Sea glinted in the fading sunlight; a couple of kilometers to the west of it he again saw the wreckage of Flyer Two. To his immediate right Olympus sat profiled against the multicolored western sky, and he noticed for the first time that the southern slope of the volcano seemed climbable, a bit of information he filed away for future reference. As the flyer continued its slow circle, the Dead Sea began to disappear from his view. He glanced one final time at it … and frowned.

"Carmen, take us back to the east, would you? There's something funny in the Dead Sea."

"What is it?" Carmen asked as the flyer banked to the left.

"I'll let you know in a minute."

Seconds later they leveled out, bringing the Dead Sea into Hafner's view again.

"Look down there," he told her. "The Sea's northwestern shore. See it?"

"You mean that white stuff? Looks like the offshore mineral deposits near the colony."

"Right. Like its namesake, our Dead Sea hasn't got any outlets, so minerals collect there. As the water evaporates, some of them are left to encrust the shoreline. But why only on the northwestern side?"

"Well … why do the offshore deposits only show up near Splayfoot Bay?" she countered.

"Presumably they're just more visible there because the continental shelf has a very gradual slope," he said, with waning enthusiasm. "You're right; it's probably something like that. Let's go on home—I think I've had it for one day." A fast dinner and right to bed, he told himself firmly. For once, the samples can wait till tomorrow.

An hour later he was at the lab, eating a sandwich at his desk as the analyzers chugged industriously away. The results, when they finally came, were painfully predictable: no metal, of any sort, in any of the borings.

"… and unless the military leaders become more responsive to the people, there will never be the close cooperation and mutual respect that distinguishes a people from a mere assemblage of individuals." Perez paused for a smattering of applause, led by the other four Hispanics on the Council.

Grimacing, Meredith slapped the video player's Off switch, blanking the screen as Perez's image began speaking again. "Quite the demagogue, isn't he?" the colonel commented.

Carmen looked as uncomfortable as her image on the tape had. "There's very little I can do," she told Meredith. "He is a duly elected representative, and I think it's obvious he speaks for the other Hispanic councillors, as well."

Beside her, Major Brown cleared his throat. "It seems to me, Colonel, that all these thinly veiled demands for Council authority could be construed as incitement to disaffection. Maybe we could get him sent back to Earth on that basis."

"I doubt it," Meredith shook his head. "It's becoming rather clear that he was shipped here specifically to get him out of the Arizona authorities' hair."

"The hell," Brown growled. "What are we running here, Devil's Island West?"

"Not yet. But almost certainly someone's been thinking along those lines. Or hadn't you noticed the odd mixture of highly skilled scientific people and low-tomoderately- skilled Hispanic laborers?"

"You didn't find that significant a month ago," Carmen put in quietly.

Meredith looked at her. "No, I didn't," he agreed. "I've had time to think about it since then. It's pretty clear that, at least as of our departure date, Congress hadn't really decided whether or not it really wanted us to succeed. At least a dozen senators thought the UN was playing us for fools, putting just enough international support in to keep the U.S. from simply cutting its losses by pulling out. An even bigger group was sort of behind us but busy arranging cover for their own tails for whenever we eventually failed. Somewhere in all that hostility someone surely ran the numbers and realized that Astra doesn't cost much more per person than a maximum-security prison—and if we get any reasonable agriculture going that price tag will come down." He paused, taking a moment to get out of what had been referred to as his preachy mode. "You'll forgive my slight bitterness toward Congress, Olivero, but it should be clear now why Perez's high democratic goals have got to be cooled down. I don't want us to be ordered home on the grounds that we're spending too much time rioting to accomplish anything, and I don't want anyone to start thinking how nice it would be if all troublemakers could be put this far away from the voters. You understand?"