Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh Page A

did, at least two of them, for those two engaged a ship home, to Sol, the same which had brought them, a smallish and decrepit jump-freighter, the only merchanter with an ec designation which had docked at Pell in the better part of a decade, laden with Downbelow curios and delicacies for its return, as it had brought in goods from Earth, which sold high, for their curiosity. The four other Company representatives upped their offers, and boarded a freighter for an unguaranteed run on the freighter’s own schedule, to call at Viking and wherever else the uncertain times left safe.   They accepted Mallory’s conditions from a merchanter captain, and paid for the privilege.
     
     

Chapter Six
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    Downbelow main base: 5/20/52
    It was storm on Downbelow when the shuttle came down, and that was not uncommon, on a world of abundant cloud, when all the winter on the northern continent was wrapped in sea-spawned overcast, seldom cold enough to freeze, not warm enough for human comfort—never a clear sight of sun or stars for month on dreary month.   The unloading of the passengers at the landing site was proceeding in a cold, pelting rain, a line of tired and angry people trudging over the hill from the shuttle, to be settled into various warehouse digs amid stacks of mats and musty sacks of prosh and fikli. “Move it over and stack it up,” the supervisors shouted when the crowding became evident; and the noise was considerable, cursing voices, the beating of rain in the inflated domes, the inevitable thump of compressors. The tired stationers sulked and finally began to do as they were told… young, most of them, construction workers and a few techs, virtually without baggage and no few of them frightened at their first experience of weather. They were station-born, wheezing at a kilo or so extra weight from Downbelow’s gravity, wincing at thunder and at lightning which chained across the roiling skies. No sleep for them until they could set up some manner of dormitory space; no rest for anyone, native or human, who labored to carry foodstuffs over the hill to lade the shuttle, or the crews trying to cope with the inevitable flooding in the domes.
    Jon Lukas oversaw some of it, scowling, walked back to the main dome where the operations center was. He paced, listened to the rain, waited the better part of an hour, finally suited up again and masked to walk to the shuttle. “Goodbye, sir,” the com operator offered rising from his desk. Others stopped work, the few who were there. He shook hands, still frowning, and finally walked out the flimsy lock and up the wooden steps to the path, spattered again by the cold rain. His fiftyish overweight was unflattered by the bright yellow plastic. He had always been conscious of the indignity and hated it, hated walking in mud up to the ankles and feeling a chin which penetrated even the suit and the liner.   Raingear and the necessary breathers turned all the humans at the base into yellow monsters, blurred in the downpour. Downers scurried about naked and enjoying it, the brown fur of their spindly limbs and lithe bodies dark with moisture and plastered to them, their faces, round-eyed and with mouths set in permanent o’s of surprise, watched and chattered together in their own language, a babble in the rain and the constant bass of thunder. He walked the direct trail to the landing site, not that which led on the other leg of the triangle, past the storage domes and barracks domes. This one had no traffic. No meetings.   No good-byes. He looked across to fields which were aswim; the gray-green brush and the ribbon trees on the hills about the base showed through curtains of rain, and the river was a broad, overflowed sheet on the far-side bank, where a marsh tended to form, for all their attempts to drain it… disease among the native workers again, if any Downers had slipped in unvaccinated. It was no paradise, Downbelow base. He had no reluctance to leave it