Alan Dean Foster Humanx 5 Sentenced To Prism

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to go more than a hundred meters from the suit.
Ducking back inside, he worked his way up toward the visor and searched for a
release. There was none. The visor was heat‑sealed in place and couldn't
be removed without the facilities of a fully equipped machine shop. So he
would have to improvise.
The food concentrates came in heavy plastic packets. He'd pulled one apart and
was studying the material when it occurred to him that he didn't have a single
tool; not even a pocketknife. Everything was built into the MHW and secured as
tightly as the photochromic visor.
Another foray outside and another search of his imme-diate surroundings
assured him he was in no danger of imminent attack by crystalline carnivores.
Crying like a baby, he hunted around the fringe of the suit until he found
what he wanted: a section of bubble grass that had been shattered by the
suit's fall.
One curved edge seemed sharp enough.
The plastic cut more easily than he'd hoped. When he finished he was the owner
of a strip five centimeters wide and thirty long. He wrapped it around his
head and knot-ted it in back. He hoped he wouldn't have to do any running.
The next time he stuck his head back out into the light and tentatively opened
his eyes he found that he could see without pain, though not very clearly. His
first attempt at scavenging had proved more successful than not. He squirmed
back into the suit to see what else might be salvageable. It wasn't
encouraging.
His leisure duty suit, which he'd expected to wear on the journey home, became
a crude pack with the legs knotted and then tied together and the belt secured
at the waist. It wouldn't hold much, but so far he'd been unable to find much
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to carry. He was more concerned about his footgear than anything else. Sunburn
he would suffer when his underwear gave out, but his light shoes would have to
last or else his feet would be cut to ribbons. Once more he was grateful for
all the walking he'd done at home. At least the soles of his feet were tougher
than those of the average desk‑minder.
He spent a futile half day trying to get at the rest of the food, which was
secured within the MHW's dispens-ers. Without the proper tools he was doomed
to failure; but that didn't stop him from cursing the suit's designers
fiercely.
One more thing needed to be done before he abandoned the suit permanently; he
wrapped one piece of legging over nose and mouth. The air might smell
refreshing, but it was full of minute particles of silicon. Silicosis was one
disease he intended to avoid at all cost.
Thus garbed and muffled he took a deep breath, thank-ful that the surface
temperature was mild, and stepped clear of the suit. He was standing virtually
naked and alone on the surface of a hostile alien world.
He checked his wrist beacon. It came to life immedi-ately, light strong,
battery fresh. The light would grow brighter if he came close to another
beacon, a feature designed to enable survivors of a disaster to find one
another. He was going to use it to find Martine Ophemert's beacon. Its range
was short, but he should be close enough for it to be useful.
Eventually it would also guide his rescuers to him. Until that blessed day he
had to survive, probably for several weeks or more. It would take that long
for the company to get worried enough to send a shuttle after him.
He remembered the line the MHW had been taking prior to its demise: northwest.
Orienting himself by the sun, he started off in what he thought was the right
direc-tion. If his beacon light did not grow noticeably brighter by the
evening, he would backtrack and choose a different tack.
The suit was utterly useless to him now. Still, he aban-doned it with
reluctance. It was his last real link with Samstead and safety.
The forest closed in around him. Every growth, how-ever
innocuous‑looking, presented a hostile appearance to Evan. Every one
seemed to follow his steps, waiting for just the right moment to explode, or
spit acid, or envelop him in some horrible alien web. It took him several
hours to realize that not every living thing on Prism was intent on his
destruction. So long as he did not threaten them, they were quite indifferent
to his presence.
As to which were actually dangerous he couldn't have said. Slick growths which
appeared unyielding proved to be soft and flexible when he accidentally
brushed up against them, while those which looked cuddly turned out to be full
of barbed hooks. He spent half an hour pulling the curved objects of that
lesson out of his left leg and resolved to avoid contact with everything, even
if it meant deviat-ing from his chosen path and going the long way around.
On the plus side, his shoes were holding up well. The soles were thin but
tough, a quality common to the major-ity of modem footwear. Also, most of the
silicate growths that filled the ecological niche for ground cover were
soft-er than their spiky, larger cousins. On some, like the
bubble‑encased chlorophyllic growths, the danger was not cutting himself
so much as it was slipping on the slick glassy curves and breaking his neck.
He found he had to skate as much as walk across them.
Water was no problem. If anything, there was too much of it. Late afternoon
found him taking shelter beneath a condarite. The big growth reminded him of
several dozen glass umbrellas growing one inside the other. Each shell was a
different color, but all were tinted green by sym-biotic bacteria. Small
six‑legged creatures with triple light- absorbing back plates lived
between the umbrella shells. They crawled out to peep curiously down at him,
vanished instantly if they caught him looking at them.
He wondered if growths like the condarite made any use of the water. It seemed
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likely they would need it to transport salts and minerals for growth and
health throughout their structure, but they were devoid of the woody pulp
which formed the body of normal trees. Per-haps they made use of some kind of
porous silicate mem-brane. Another question best left to the
botanists‑or the geologists.
It rained all the rest of that day and through the night. He was up before
dawn and on his way again. It would take his system a while to get used to the
longer days and nights. Still, he felt refreshed and almost confident as he
approached a small pool for a drink the following morning.
He hesitated only because something‑it looked like a glass
centipede‑had chosen the best place for drinking. The thing had just
shuffled to the pool's edge
and dipped its mouthparts into the water.
As Evan stared, crouched among a soft clump of what looked like
steel‑wool cactus, the worm began to sizzle. Startled, he jumped
backward. The reaction did not spread, however, and he slowly resumed his
vantage point.
The water parted and something like a giant amoeba emerged. Slowly and
patiently, a gel enveloped the dead worm and sucked it down into the pond.
Evan moved forward cautiously and stared downward, risked a peek beneath his
plastic eye‑shield. Except that the bubble grass grew only to within two
meters of the water's edge and then halted abruptly, there was nothing to
indicate that the
"pond" was actually filled by something powerful, dangerous, and perfectly
transparent.
Nearby grew a variety of thin photovore that flourished in thick stands like [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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