Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) (4 page)

Mike was prepared for hot weather, but not
the oppressive, wet heat of Verde. He hoped he could get used to it. By the
time he walked to the bottom of the shuttle’s ramp, he was sweating through his
clothes. The air was so thick and wet it clogged his throat. He was glad there
was plenty of water on the planet.

The warehouse was cluttered and disorganized
to Mike’s eye, but the others took no notice. Eddie introduced himself to a guy
who was stacking containers with a forklift and asked him where he could find
Joan Thomas. He pointed to an office attached to the dock a few hundred meters
away. On the way, they walked past hundreds of coffin-sized Number 10 shipping
containers packed with goods ready for distribution.

The warehouse was open to the air on all
sides and covered with a dense screen high above that let in plenty of light
but kept most of the hot sun off the containers. There were big lights hanging
down on conduits so the crews could work nights, too.

“Jeez, there’s a lot of stuff here,” Mike
said.

“This ain’t nothin’,” Bruce said, spitting
down through the grates. “This place can expand in all directions if it has
to.”

“Yeah, this dock is small,” Peter Ho added.

“Wait ‘til they start bringing down the big
stuff every day. All the pipe and building materials and shit. You ain’t seen
nothin' yet.”

Neatly colored lines ran parallel like roads
all over the floor grates, and big areas of the warehouse had been divided into
colored sections. Most of the sections were completely empty. Above each
section hung big, number-coded, three-sided signs that could be seen from any
angle.

“By next year at this time,” Eddie said. “All
this shit will be stacked and organized like you wouldn’t believe. Wait ‘til
they get the stackers in place; that’s what these big holes are for.” Mike fell
back with Peter Ho as they walked along. Peter had worked with Eddie before,
but had scarcely more experience than Mike.

“Isn’t this somethin’?” Mike asked him.

Peter had been only half-listening and kept
his attention split on the wall of jungle to the west. When Peter didn’t answer
him, Mike just shrugged.

A few steps later, Peter answered as if he’d
been in a daze, still keeping his eyes on the distant foliage.

“Yeah . . . I guess so.”

* * *

Mike took to Joan Thomas right away. He could
tell she knew what she was doing by the way she kept her office clean and neat.
A clean and neat work area was important. That’s what his dad always said.

Joan was pretty, and Mike saw the other guys
looking at her breasts where her cottons were open when she reached for things.
Mike looked, too, but he wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do.

It was nearly lunchtime so Joan called the
other Light Expeditors in and introduced everybody around. Joan provided lunch,
and they spent the next half hour getting to know each other.

When she sent the other guys back to work,
everyone shook hands. Shaking the hand of the older lead, Don Krupp, Eddie
smiled. Krupp didn’t smile back. Eddie was taking over his job.

Joan showed them the overall plan for the
project and gave them maps of the facility that showed where everything was.
After that, she called in the order for their shelters to Rigging and Assembly,
and they all sat stock-still, listening to the order being placed. Their
shelters would be installed later that same day. When she asked them if they
had any preferences about shelter mates, they all shook their heads. She put
Mike in with Bruce and Peter with Eddie. It made sense to put an experienced
guy with an inexperienced one.

“Any man-eating plants on this planet?” Bruce
asked suddenly as kind of a joke.

Eddie groaned.

Everybody chuckled, except Joan.

“Not that I know of—but I’d stay out of the
jungle.” There was nothing funny about the tone of her voice.

“How come?” Eddie finally asked.

Joan thought about it before she answered.
She wasn’t the kind to keep her people in the dark about anything, but these
kids were really spooked by the green and black woods. Some corner of her
psyche took a little delight in that fact.

“Well, we haven’t found anything that’s
killed anybody yet,” she smiled. She thought about the nasty bug that attached
itself to Bill’s leg before Christmas. Thank God
they
didn’t turn up very
often. “But I’d keep my doors closed at night,” she said. “Nearly everything on
the planet is nocturnal. Did you notice there were no bugs around to speak of?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, wait until nighttime.”

When she looked at Peter Ho, the blood had
drained from his face.

That one’s really spooked. “
None of you are afraid of bugs, are you?” she
asked.

“Naw,” they all said, laughing in false
bravado.

She grinned.

There wasn’t much to do that afternoon, but
they moved the forklifts and trucks off the shuttle and put them over by the
dock. Mike was almost too lathered up to work. The idea of having his own
shelter filled him with a twitchy joy he could scarcely contain. He kept
waiting for Eddie to call it a day so they could go see them. The idea of the
shelters and running water and private beds was like a sweet dream. The last
work they did that day was to pick up their bags at the dock and pile them into
the back of one of the trucks, so they’d be ready to go.

They gravitated to the side of the truck as
if it were a magnet. Leaning against it with their arms folded, they waited
with foot-tapping impatience for Eddie to set them loose. No one actually got
in
the truck. That would have seemed
too
impatient.

The guys were watching Eddie like a hawk but
tried not to let it show. Eddie looked at his watch a time or two before he
said the words they were dying to hear:

“Let’s go check out those shelters.”

They piled in the truck with big grins,
trying to bust out, just under the surface of their faces. When Mike looked at
Peter, he thought he looked a little concerned but was trying to hide it
somehow.

“I’m taking a shower tonight!” Mike said
cheerfully.

“I’m taking two,” Bruce said.

“I told ya this job would be great, Mike,”
Eddie said.

“Yep,” Bruce added.

Eddie drove the truck down the ramp off the
dock and over the bumpy terrain toward the rows of shelters in the distance.
They sat like blocks about a hundred meters from the jungle perimeter in neat
orderly rows. Identical in size and shape, some of them were considerably more
battered than the others. It didn’t matter to Mike. He’d take anything with a
bed and a shower in it, banged up and dirty or not. There was space enough for
a truck or RTV between them, and they could see several of each already parked
there. Mike guessed there were about fifty or so shelters. That would put the
number of people on the surface at about a hundred.

Eddie slowed down to a crawl as he went
across the front of the first row. He and Bruce were looking for something.
Bruce leaned over the seat to look out Eddie’s window. They didn’t see what
they were looking for, and Eddie turned down at the end and headed down the
side.

“How can you tell which ones they are?” Mike
asked.

“Our names. Our names are on the side,” Eddie
answered.

“Really?”

“Yep. Look. Right next to the door—those
little signs. See ‘em?”

Mike had to look a little but found the neat
name tags right where Eddie said they were.

“Here we go,” Eddie said and stopped the
truck at the two backmost shelters. Mike strained his eyes and saw his own name
under Bruce’s in bold black letters. He could scarcely believe it. Their
shelters were as neat and clean as any of them, maybe cleaner.

“Home!”

“Yeah!”

“Closest ones to the jungle, though,” Peter
said.

Eddie got out his ID badge and ran it through
the reader next to the door handle. There was a quiet click as he pulled the
door open.

Bruce opened the door to the other shelter,
and Mike followed him in, the grin still trying to bust out of his face.

“You want the front or back bedroom, Mike?”

“I don’t know. You pick. I don’t care.”

“Then I’ll take the front, if you don’t
mind.”

“Sure. I don’t care.”

Mike went back outside and retrieved his bag
from the back of the truck. He didn’t want to seem too excited by the whole
thing and stiffened his face as he walked back in past Bruce. He carried the
bag to his bedroom and put it down quietly and neatly next to the bed. The bed
was built into the wall, and there was a screened window right next to it half
way up. He slid the window open to get some air.

The room was small but big enough for Mike.
There was a closet in one wall with built-in drawers and a sliding door. The
door had a big mirror on it. A clear window in the ceiling provided a skylight
about a meter square. He looked around for some way to open it but couldn’t
figure out how.

The little bathroom was neat and laid out
with the sink and toilet on the same wall. When he turned on the light, it took
him a cold-sweated minute to realize that the noisy buzzing above his head was
a ventilating fan and not a big bug somewhere. Mike tried the hot water spigot
and washed down some dust and dirt in the sink. The water was very hot. Another
big mirror above the sink in the bath made the room seem much larger than it
was. His shower was also built-in, and he slid the door back and smiled at it.
He put a single, wrapped bar of soap he found on the shower floor in the tray
where it belonged. He tried the water in the shower, too, just to make sure it
worked okay.

The mirrors were streaked and dirty, and
ground-in dirt covered the smooth floor. The wall areas around the light
switches and door slides were filthy with oily dirt. He could take care of all
that later.

There was another closet adjacent to the
bathroom that had a sloppy stack of dull-white towels in it and some sheets and
another light blanket. Mike picked up one of the towels and smelled it. It had
a sweet, clean scent to it. He put it back and straightened the pile as best he
could.

Heaven.

First things first—and that was a shower. He
stripped out of his sweaty clothes, turned on the water, adjusted it until it
was just right—a little on the cool side—then stepped in. The feeling of
clean, cool water beating on his neck and back filled him with a feeling of
absolute luxury. He stood in the running water until it chilled him.

He dried himself with a clean towel, then
hung it up neatly on the rack to dry. He started to sweat again almost
immediately and tried again to find a way to open the window above. When he
still couldn’t find a way to do it, he turned the fan back on in the bathroom.
If it was okay to do it, he figured he could leave it on all the time. He hoped
the towel would dry in the wet air.

He had three sets of underclothing to his
name and three sets of cottons. He pulled his clean clothes out of the bag and
laid them out. The dirty clothes went into the wireframe hamper next to the
closet. He wasn’t sure if the company would provide laundry services or if
there were a washing machine in the shelter. He’d have to find out.

When he picked the hamper up to move it, the
folded legs came apart in his hands. He leaned the crippled thing against the
wall to fix later.

Before he got dressed, he stretched out on
the squeaky bed and flopped on it a little to test it. It was every bit as good
as the one on the transport. The pillow was thin but firm and felt just fine.
He pressed his face into the mattress and smelled it. It smelled clean and new.
The wall next to the bed was soiled as if the last occupant had slept with his
body against it. He wondered why someone would do that and made a mental note
to clean that spot, too.

He got up and put on his clothes. He gave his
boots the once-over with a special rag he had just for that purpose. He hoped
he could get a new pair of boots soon; the ones he had were hurting his feet
something awful. He was putting them on when Bruce knocked on the door.