Robert Sheckley: Prospector's Special

“I’m not turning back,” Morrison said. “Look!” He held the telephone close to the ground. “You see the traces, Eddie? See those red and purple flecks? There’s precious stuff near here!”

“Every prospector sees traces,” Eddie said. “Damned desert is full of traces.”

“These are rich,” Morrison said. “These are leading straight to big stuff, a bonanza lode. Eddie, I know it’s a lot to ask, but if you could stake me to a couple of tires—”

“I can’t do it,” Eddie said. “I just work here. I can’t ’port you any tires, not unless you show me money first. Otherwise I get fired and probably jailed. You know the law.”

“Cash and carry,” Morrison said bleakly.

“Right. Be smart and turn back now. Maybe you can try again some other time.”

“I spent twelve years getting this stake together,” Morrison said. “I’m not going back.”

He turned off the telephone and tried to think. Was there anyone else on Venus he could call? Only Max Krandall, his jewel broker. But Max couldn’t raise fourteen hundred dollars in that crummy two-by-four office near Venusborg’s jewel market. Max could barely scrape up his own rent, much less take care of stranded prospectors.

“I can’t ask Max for help,” Morrison decided. “Not until I’ve found goldenstone. The real stuff, not just traces. So that leaves it up to me.”

He opened the back of the sandcar and began to unload, piling his equipment on the sand. He would have to choose carefully; anything he took would have to be carried on his back.

The telephone had to go with him, and his lightweight testing kit. Food concentrates, revolver, compass. And nothing else but water, all the water he could carry. The rest of the stuff would have to stay behind.

By nightfall, Morrison was ready. He looked regretfully at the twenty cans of water he was leaving. In the desert, water was a man’s most precious possession, second only to his telephone. But it couldn’t be helped. After drinking his fill, he hoisted his pack and set a southwest course into the desert.

For three days he trekked to the southwest; then on the fourth day he veered to due south, following an increasingly rich trace. The sun, eternally hidden, beat down on him, and the dead-white sky was like a roof of heated iron over his head. Morrison followed the traces, and something followed him.

On the sixth day, he sensed movement just out of the range of his vision. On the seventh day, he saw what was trailing him.

Venus’s own brand of wolf, small, lean, with a yellow coat and long, grinning jaws, it was one of the few mammals that made its home in the Scorpion Desert. As Morrison watched, two more sandwolves appeared beside it.

He loosened the revolver in its holster. The wolves made no attempt to come closer. They had plenty of time.

Morrison kept on going, wishing he had brought a rifle with him. But that would have meant eight pounds more, which meant eight pounds less water.

As he was pitching camp at dusk the eighth day, he heard a crackling sound. He whirled around and located its source, about ten feet to his left and above his head. A little vortex had appeared, a tiny mouth in the air like a whirlpool in the sea. It spun, making the characteristic crackling sounds of ’porting.

“Now who could be ’porting anything to me?” Morrison asked, waiting while the whirlpool slowly widened.

Solidoporting from a base projector to a field target was a standard means of moving goods across the vast distances of Venus. Any inanimate object could be ’ported; animate beings couldn’t because the process involved certain minor but distressing molecular changes in protoplasm. A few people had found this out the hard way when ’porting was first introduced.

Morrison waited. The aerial whirlpool became a mouth three feet in diameter. From the mouth stepped a chrome-plated robot carrying a large sack.

“Oh, it’s you,” Morrison said.

“Yes, sir,” the robot said, now completely clear of the field. “Williams 4 at your service with the Venus Mail.”

It was a robot of medium height, thin-shanked and flat-footed, humanoid in appearance, amiable in disposition. For twenty-three years it had been Venus’s entire postal service—sorter, deliverer, and dead storage. It had been built to last, and for twenty-three years the mails had always come through.

“Here we are, Mr. Morrison,” Williams 4 said. “Only twice-a-month mail call in the desert, I’m sorry to say, but it comes promptly and that’s a blessing. This is for you. And this. I think there’s one more. Sandcar broke down, eh?”

“It sure did,” Morrison said, taking his letters.

Williams 4 went on rummaging through its bag. Although it was a superbly efficient postman, the old robot was known as the worst gossip on three planets.

“There’s one more in here somewhere,” Williams 4 said. “Too bad about the sandcar. They just don’t build ’em like they did in my youth. Take my advice, young man. Turn back if you still have the chance.”

Morrison shook his head.

“Foolish, downright foolish,” the old robot said. “Pity you don’t have my perspective. Too many’s the time I’ve come across you boys lying in the sand in the dried-out sack of your skin, or with your bones gnawed to splinters by the sandwolves and the filthy black kites. Twenty-three years I’ve been delivering mail to fine-looking young men like you, and each one thinking he’s unique and different.”

The robot’s eyecells became distant with memory. “But they aren’t different,” Williams 4 said. “They’re as alike as robots off the assembly line—especially after the wolves get through with them. And then I have to send their letters and personal effects back to their loved ones on Earth.”

“I know,” Morrison said. “But some get through, don’t they?”

“Sure they do,” the robot said. “I’ve seen men make one, two, three fortunes. And then die on the sands trying to make a fourth.”

“Not me,” Morrison said. “I just want one. Then I’m going to buy me an undersea farm on Earth.”

The robot shuddered. “I have a dread of salt water. But to each his own. Good luck, young man.”

The robot looked Morrison over carefully—probably to see what he had in the way of personal effects—then climbed back into the aerial whirlpool. In a moment, it was gone. In another moment, the whirlpool had vanished.

Morrison sat down to read his mail. The first letter was from his jewel broker, Max Krandall. It told about the depression that had hit Venusborg, and hinted that Krandall might have to go into bankruptcy if some of his prospectors didn’t strike something good.

The second letter was a statement from the Venus Telephone Company. Morrison owed two hundred and ten dollars and eight cents for two months’ telephone service. Unless he remitted this sum at once, his telephone was liable to be turned off.

The last letter, all the way from Earth, was from Janie. It was filled with news about his cousins, aunts and uncles. She told him about the Atlantic farm sites she had looked over, and the wonderful little place she had found near Martinique in the Caribbean. She begged him to give up prospecting if it looked dangerous; they could find another way of financing the farm. She sent all her love and wished him a happy birthday in advance.

“Birthday?” Morrison asked himself. “Let’s see, today is July twenty-third. No, it’s the twenty-fourth, and my birthday’s August first. Thanks for remembering, Janie.”

That night he dreamed of Earth and the blue expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. But toward dawn, when the heat of Venus became insistent, he found he was dreaming of mile upon mile of goldenstone, of grinning sandwolves, and of the Prospector’s Special.