Heechee rendezvous by Frederik Pohl

them as the parachutes popped open. Nearly all the capsules did in fact land safely. Only about three hundred colonists, so far, had been crushed or drowned. Yasmeneh was that lucky, at least, but when he tried to change careers from farming barley to prospecting heavy metals, his luck ran out because his party forgot to be careful. The tubers they’d fed themselves on when their store-bought food ran out contained, like almost every obvious food source on Peggy’s, a vitamin C antagonist that had to be experienced to be believed. They hadn’t believed even then. They knew about the risk. Everybody did. They just wanted one more day, and then another day, and another, while their teeth loosened and their breath grew foul, and by the time the sheepherders stumbled across their camp, it was too late for Yasmeneh, and pretty close to the same for the others.
    Walthers had to fly the whole party, survivors and rescuers together, to the camp where someday the loop would be built, and already there were at least a dozen permanent habitations. By the time he got back at last to the Libyans, Mr. Luqman was furious. He hung on the door of Walthers’ plane and shouted at him. “Thirty-seven hours away! It is outrageous! For the exorbitant charter we pay you we expect your services!”
    “It was a matter of life or death, Mr. Luqman,” Walthers said, trying to keep the irritation and fatigue out of his voice as he postflighted the plane.
    “Life is the cheapest thing there is! And death comes to us all!”
    Walthers pushed past him and sprang down to the ground. “They were fellow Arabs, Mr. Luqman-“
    “No! Egyptians!”
    “-well, fellow Moslems, anyway-“
    “I would not care if they were my own brothers! Our time is precious!
    Very large affairs are at stake here!”
    Why try to restrain his own anger? Walthers snarled, “It’s the law, Luqman. I only lease the plane; I have to provide emergency services when called on. Read your fine print!”
    It was an unanswerable argument, and how infuriating it was when Luqman made no attempt to answer it but simply responded by heaping onto Walthers all the tasks that had accumulated in his absence. All to be completed at once. Or sooner. And if Walthers hadn’t had any sleep, well, we would all sleep forever one day, would we not?
    So, sleepless as he was, Walthers was flying magnetosonde traces within the next hour-prickly, tetchy work, towing a magnetic sensor a hundred meters behind the plane and trying to keep the damned unwieldy thing from snagging in a tree or plunging itself into the ground. And in the moments of thought between the demands of, really, trying to fly two aircraft at once, Walthers thought somberly that Luqman had lied; it would have made a difference if the Egyptians had been fellow-Libyans, much less brothers. Nationalism had not been left back on Earth. There had been border clashes already, gauchos versus rice farmers when the cattle herds went looking for a drink in the paddies and trampled the seedlings; Chinese versus Mexicans when there was a mistake in filing land claims; Africans versus Canadians, Slays versus Hispanics for no reason at all that any outsider could see. Bad enough. What was worse was the bad blood that sometimes surfaced between Slav and Slav, between Latino and Latino.
    And Peggy’s could have been such a pretty world. It had everything- almost everything, if you didn’t count things like vitamin C; it had Heechee Mountain, with a waterfall called the Cascade of Pearls, eight hundred meters of milky torrent coming right off the southern glaciers it had the cinnamon-smelling forests of the Little Continent with its dumb, friendly, lavender-colored monkeys-well, not real monkeys. But cute. And the Glass Sea. And the Wind Caves. And the farms-especially the farms! The farms were what made so many millions and tens of millions of Africans, Chinese, Indians, Latinos, poor Arabs, Iranians, Irish, Poles; so many millions of desperate