So much for possible survivors, he thought. One more blank on his report filled in, one left to go. A few small digging things scurried for cover as the shadow of Evan's helmet covered them. They had four-centimeter-long legs and spiral bodies of brown glass.
"Nothing subtle about this one," he murmured to the suit. "Looks like he was run over by a ten-ton transport." With a finger he nudged aside shards of Humula's fragmented helmet. "Plexalloy visor. Should be as strong as the rest of a standard survival suit. Something made garbage out of it."
"Yes sir. Excuse the interruption, but I think you should know that something is crawling up your right leg."
Evan idly glanced down. The climbing creature was smooth-backed and curved. Instead of legs, it laid down a track of glue just ahead of itself. Four long, graceful antennae patted the path ahead, relaying information to the patient crawler. Evan could not see any eyes. The composition of the light blue glue intrigued him. It occurred to him then that the gunk might be acidic. "Suit integrity check," he said, his voice a little higher than usual.
"I would warn you immediately, sir, if there were any problem with-“
"Run the check."
It took less than ten seconds. "Suit integrity is intact, sir."
Was Evan imagining it or did the suit sound slightly miffed? "Thank you," he replied sarcastically. The creature had stopped moving. "What's it doing now?"
"Trying to penetrate, sir. Still another voracious local lifeform. I should guess that its red coloring is due to the presence of large amounts of alumina in its silicate exoskeleton. It is not a photovore."
"I can see all that. Get rid of it." He started to reach down with an arm. The limb froze halfway.
"That would not be advisable, sir. There is no point in putting excessive strain on my fabric."
Within the suit, Evan frowned. "What are you talking about? It can't tear the duralloy."
"No sir, but I can. I can damage myself. You see, the adhesive slime the creature is secreting is extremely powerful. You could rip the creature to shreds but the glue would remain on my exterior. Wouldn't a complete removal of all foreign substances be preferable?"
"Of course."
"Then relinquish control of your left arm, please."
Evan did so, watched with interest as the small laser cane back to life. The creature died instantly when the beam pierced it but it took nearly five minutes to boil away the rest of the extraordinary glue it had secreted. By the time the messy task had been completed, Evan could see several more of the glue producers making their way toward him through the ground cover. A couple of casual giant strides carried him well beyond their reach.
"Another integrity check," he muttered. The suit complied without comment.
He refused to admit that he was concerned. Admittedly, the survival suits that had been provided for the station staff were not in a class with his MHW, but it was still unsettling to see how poorly they'd fared in protecting their wearers. It took only seconds to run a check and he wasn't in the mood to take chances.
Twenty-three of the station's twenty-four inhabitants were now accounted for. Find the twenty-fourth and he could prepare for the return home. In the time it would take for a company ship to reach Prism to pick him up, perhaps he could find out what had happened. He was less and less sure he wanted to. "What about the remaining beacon?"
"I have been solidifying a fix on it, sir. It is extremely weak, though that may not be due entirely to loss of battery strength."
Evan's interest perked up and he forgot about the corpse that now lay half a dozen meters behind him. "What are you getting at?"
The MHW turned toward the northwest. "The nature of the fluctuation is not constant."
"You mean, it's moving?"
"Within a small area, yes. That is the most reasonable explanation."
"°A survivor!" A survivor might be able to tell him in detail what had happened to the station and its staff, saving him days of drudgery and securing his triumph.
Of course, there could be other reasons for the beacon's restricted range of movement. The beacon and the wrist it was embedded in might be resting in the belly of some carnivore. Or the moldering corpse of Martine Ophemert might be drifting back and forth in the eddy of a river.
He forced himself to put a leash on his excitement even as he directed the suit to start tracking. It was unlikely anyone could have survived for so long without the support facilities of the station. There was plenty of water, but food was hard to find and possessed unique methods of defending itself. Still, if this Ophemert was sufficiently resourceful and if her survival suit was still intact, she might still be alive.
If that slim possibility panned out, he would have a chance to play the hero. He'd always wanted to be a hero. It would suit him. Hard to become a hero in the civilized, regulated confines of a major city.
So there were several reasons for wanting to find Martine Ophemert alive.
The suit did all the work, choosing a course through the vegetation and operating the long metal legs. It was easy to be bored.
"Let's see the plot." He slowed to a halt.
Instantly the visor video came to life. Bright green lines formed a small grid. In the center of the grid and off to the left pulsed a bright red dot.
"Abstracts don't tell me anything," he grumbled.
"Depending on topography we should reach the place in four or five days, sir."
"Not bad." It would give him the opportunity to observe and record a better cross section of local lifeforms for the company archives. "Resume tracking." He readied himself for the resumption of motion.
The suit did not move.
"What's the matter?" He was suddenly fearful the beacon had chosen that moment to die.
It did not involve the distant, tantalizing signal, however.
"Look down at your feet."
Evan complied. A vitreous yellow-green gel was crawling up both legs. It appeared to bubble straight out of the ground and was already up to his knees.
"What the hell is it?"
"Cyanoacrylate structure. Quite unique, sir."
"Everything here's quite unique. It doesn't look like much. Come on, let's get moving." He pressed his right thigh against the appropriate sensors. Servos whined in protest but the leg wouldn't budge. The gel continued its rapid climb up his lower limbs.
"All right, I'm convinced. It's unique. Now break free."
“I cannot, sir."
"What do you mean, you `cannot'? It's just a different kind of glue, like the stuff that other thing was secreting."
"Your pardon, sir, but it is not merely a different kind of glue. It is not being secreted by a single small animal but is oozing directly out of the ground. It is a far denser compound with a considerably more versatile molecular structure."
Evan refused to panic. "Then bum it off, like you did the other."
"Yes sir." Once more the laser was brought into play. Evan found he was beginning to sweat as the minutes passed without any reduction in the volume of gel.
"It's not working."
"I could have told you that, sir. The gel is capable of dispersing the heat of the beam throughout its substance. It cannot penetrate my exterior, of course."
"At the moment that's not very reassuring. You have to break free."
"I am considering the problem, sir."
Evan fell quiet to let the suit's computer devote all its efforts to finding a solution to the current predicament. He tried his legs again, was unable to move them at all. The gel was working its way rapidly up his thighs. It was thick and syrupy.
He wondered where it was coming from.
What would happen when it reached his neck and began to cover his helmet? What would happen when he was completely encased? They'd already encountered one species which utilized nitric acid as gastric juice. What else besides adhesive gel could the abomination buried beneath him produce? The process reminded him of the way in which a spider immobilizes its prey in a silken cocoon before it begins to dine. Something huge had to be down below, concealed by the sandy soil. It was wrapping him up, slowly and methodically. To produce so much gel so quickly it had to be of considerable size. Would it come up beneath him or would it pull him down under the surface? Down into the darkness, where he wouldn't be able to see, where he'd only be able to feel it probing and picking at the suit, hunting for a way in.
But it couldn't break into the MHW. He was sure of that, though not quite as positive as he'd been a day earlier. And if it couldn't, what then? If it let him go, all well and good. If not-if not, it might choose to keep him for a while. A day, perhaps, down beneath the surface. Or a couple of days. Or more. Until his air began to run out because it couldn't recycle.
He would be buried alive, entombed within the suit. The impregnable MHW would become an impregnable coffin.
He had to get out of that inexorable, crawling grip. Reaching down, he used both massive metal hands to dig into the material. There was resistance from the gummy substance and when he tried to pull it away from his hips he found he could not. Worse, his hands were now glued to his sides. The gel continued its uninterrupted progress up his body, flowing outward now to encase his hands and lower arms as well.
"You know," the suit informed him thoughtfully, "if I were able to synthesize a powerful acid like certain local lifeforms it might be that it would damage this gel. Unfortunately, I was designed to synthesize only foodstuffs."
Evan ignored the MHW's lament. He wasn't interested in what it couldn't do.
Think, he shouted at himself. He'd been put down here to find answers and provide solutions to problems. He needed one now. The suit could only do his bidding. Beyond a certain point it could not initiate action, could only respond to his requests. He fought to remember everything he'd learned about Prism since the cursed moment when he'd touched down on its surface.
At the same time he couldn't help but stare in fascination as the malevolent goo came crawling up his arm, surmounting the elbow and hurrying toward his shoulder. When it reached that point it would start for his neck.
Something moved, ever so slightly, under the ground.
Acid might be effective, but the suit couldn't synthesize acid. What else could it do? What else might prove effective against an inanimate assault? What else did the inhabitants of Prism utilize to . . . ?
"You can generate frequencies on every wavelength, can't you?"
"Yes sir. As part of my internal communications system I am able to-"
"Try ultrasound. Remember the spiked plants we encountered outside the station? Try that; put all the power into the broadcast that you can! Even if it's potentially harmful to me."
"Excellent suggestion, sir."
A slight hum filled the suit. Evan knew he wasn't hearing the sound the MHW was generating but rather the suit's instrumentation operating at far more than communications strength.
Several minutes passed. Then the gel stopped its advance, centimeters from his visor. It began to solidify, to harden around him.
"I believe we may have found a possible solution."
"Don't stop! Pour it on."
He stood there, listening to the humming from within. If the suit overdid it and burned out a component or two . . . But the MHW continued to fill the air with sound waves far above his range of hearing.
Not Prism's, though. The forest around him was suddenly alive with frantic, outrageous lifeforms fleeing in all directions, a blur of fractal shapes and silhouettes.
His helmet audio pickup conveyed a new sound to him. It sounded as if someone had dropped a basket of eggs on his head. It was repeated, with increasing frequency.
All over his body the hardened gel was starting to shatter. Something heaved underfoot and he nearly fell. It was the last time he sensed motion from below. The cracks continued to multiply and widen. Then the solidified gel was flaking off, in tiny chips at first, then in big, waxy chunks, tumbling off his arms and torso. Experimentally, he tried to lift his left leg. It took three tries before he broke free of the weakened casing. Now he was able to use his hands to rip away huge pieces of the encumbering substance.
When he'd cleaned the last fragments from the exterior of the suit and had climbed to the safety of a large, sloping chunk of schist, he looked back at the place where he'd almost been entombed like a fly in amber. There was nothing to suggest a trap, nothing to hint that something vast and lethal had lain in wait in that spot just under the ground.
As blowers dried the sweat from his face he relaxed by lambasting the suit for its failure to detect the danger.
"I am sorry, sir. I was not designed to cope with so subtle an attack. One looks for fang and claw, not ooze. It began so slowly that I was taken by surprise. Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between a perfectly natural occurrence and a hostile act. There are those worlds on which rain is lethal to the native lifeforms. I had believed the first secretions to be nothing more than a manifestation of some local climatic or plutonic condition, which I am more than prepared to deal with."
"Next time jump, then analyze," Evan growled, refusing to be appeased by logic. "Or ask. Maybe I don't have your capability for instantaneous retrieval of information, but my brain is a damn sight better at rapid analysis."
"Of course, sir." The MHW was appropriately contrite. "I do not wish to burden you with unnecessary queries involving moment-to-moment operation."
"That's all right. Go ahead and burden me." He surveyed the terrain ahead, trying to see into the depths of the glittering, adamantine silicate forest. The sky overhead was blindingly bright. Crystal shells crunched underfoot as he stepped off the rock and their bright green growths hastened to regenerate the protective transparent bubbles.
"Let's find that damn beacon."
"Yes Sir."
Covering meters with each of the suit's long, tireless strides he resumed the search, the sensors clinging tenaciously to the weak electronic spoor that marked the location of the twenty-fourth and last member of the research station staff-or of her body.
In the days that followed he had numerous encounters with the lifeforms that swarmed over Prism's surface in fractal profusion. None of them threatened his progress. All were appropriately imaged, digitalized, and locked away in the MHW's memory for future study. Some were more outlandish than believable and a few so outrageous in shape and form Evan wasn't sure he'd be able to convince his colleagues back home that they actually existed.
He was particularly taken with the needlepuffs.
They filled an entire arroyo, almost hiding the small stream that ran through its center. Each was a different color. They varied in size from tiny globular structures no bigger than his fist to giants four meters in circumference. They were pure silicate forms and they filled the little canyon with frozen fireworks.
From each hidden nucleus a thousand spines radiated outward in every direction. Each spine was lined with additional thousands of smaller spines, and these in turn boasted thousands more, the duplication repeating itself down to the submicroscopic level.
Only his Hausdorf lenses brought order out of this prickly chaos. Blue and camelian, onyx and amber yellow and metallic green, the needlepuffs displayed a false fragility that didn't fool him for a minute. Safe within his suit he could stride through them with indifference, leaving a carpet of glittering color in his wake, but anything not similarly defended would have been cut by a billion tiny knives.
Instead of turning constantly to keep themselves facing always toward the sun, the needlepuffs remained immobile. Hundreds of light-sensitive surfaces would always be in position to gulp a few billion photons no matter where the sun hung in the sky.
As for the valuable salts and minerals their hidden bodies contained, that remained safe from any predator. The smallest needlepuff made the most intimidating terrestrial cactus appear defenseless by comparison.
On the fourth day he was stopped by the hedge.
Actually, "hedge" was something of an understatement, wholly inadequate to describe the barrier which confronted him. He found himself facing a solid silicate wall which varied in height from four to ten meters and stretched from horizon to horizon. Each of the growths comprising the hedge was more than a meter thick at its base. They clustered so tightly together that nothing larger than a glass mouse could slip between them.
Two thirds of the way up its trunk, each "tree" was pierced by three or four thick, girderlike branches. The outer surfaces of these projections were highly polished and rotated about a common axis to reflect as much light as possible onto the light-gathering upper portion of the trunk. The rest of the organism had the color and sheen of pink chrome.
The hedge had crowded out all vegetation from its immediate vicinity. The suit estimated the wall to be some five meters thick. They were less than a day's run from the location of the beacon.
"No telling where it stops," Evan muttered, glancing first to his deft and then right. "Can we cut through?"
"I can try, sir."
Evan approached the nearest tree and studied the smooth, unbroken surface appraisingly. Then he made a fist and hammered down. A big chunk of pink silicate- (lithium aluminate, no doubt, he mused)- broke free, fell to the ground. For an instant he thought the parent growth might have shuddered slightly, but that had to be an illusion. Surely a plant analog like this one was incapable of generating so visual a reaction to minor destruction. He struck again. The fragment that crumbled under his armored hand this time was smaller than the first.
"Take too long and it's energy-wasteful," he muttered. "Bum through."
"I am not sure that will be any more efficient, sir. A laser is not as effective on highly reflective forms, and from what I can see of their internal structure they are highly dispersive as well."
"Try it anyway. I'm not interested in spending hours punching my way through like a demented boxer."
His arm rose and the laser began to cut. The silicate surface in front of him reacted by bubbling and melting away. The suit's concern seemed unfounded.
Evan waited impatiently while the suit cut a gap wide enough to pass through in the first row of growths and went to work on the second. Work there proceeded a little more slowly, but soon the second row too had been breached. The suit began on the third. Evan could see daylight beyond.
A single tree more than a meter thick was cut clean through and he had to step aside as it fell backward toward him. It shattered when it struck the ground, sending splinters flying. Casually he straddled it as the laser went to work on the last pair of trunks blocking their path.
In the center of the cut-through stump was a darker material the color of morion, an almost black quartz. It bore an uncanny resemblance to the heartwood of a normal tree.
Perhaps the darker material served as the conduit for raw silica drawn from the soil which the tree utilized for growth. Fertile ground for speculation outside his own field.
Then he was through the last barrier. At the same time, a small nova went off in front of his eyes.
Fortunately his vision darkened quickly enough to save him from permanent blindness, but the flare still hurt. Tears streamed from his eyes, trickled down his cheeks despite the efforts of the suit's humidity control to soak them up. The visor was black and he couldn't see what was happening. Occasionally the blackness was marred by a brief silvery cloud, evidence of new flashes.
The suit reminded him of his position. "We must move forward, sir."
He nodded absently, staggered through the gap the laser had cut. The silvery mists grew fainter as he moved away from the hedge. Soon the visor began to lighten. After a while he could see again. Forest ahead, sky above. He turned and looked back toward the barrier recently breached.
Flashes continued to fill the gap, but they were greatly lessened in intensity and frequency. The energy required to generate the bursts must be considerable.
"Interesting." He turned to continue on. Neither leg responded.
"I fear I have sustained some damage, sir."
"Damage?" That word wasn't supposed to be in the MHW's vocabulary. "From what? A little light? What kind of damage?"
"The growths which form the line behind us are slow to react to attack, sir. Perhaps because they rarely are attacked. As a result they have evolved a unique method of defending themselves. Unique and yet obvious. It is quite remarkable."
"I'm sure it is. This world is one remarkable discovery after another. You can detail it for me later." He tried to walk again, with the same ineffectual result.
"I am very much afraid, sir, that my lower motor drive has been burnt out."
Evan sensed the short hairs on the back of his neck beginning to stiffen. "What do you mean, `burnt out'?"
"If you care to look down, sir."
Evan did so. It took an effort because the suit servos were not responding smoothly. Behind him, the hedge was now putting forth only intermittent, feeble flashes that were somehow familiar.
Black scars ran the length of the MHW. In a few places the supposedly invulnerable duralloy exterior had been melted completely away, revealing smoking components and circuitry. The area around the suit's right knee was gone entirely. Thin wires and connectors hung from the hole. Wisps of gas drifted out, showing where the supercooling insulators had been violated. He was leaking liquid nitrogen from several joints. No wonder he couldn't move.
Anxiously, he looked back at the hedge. Another burst of light, a long pause, and then a last. At the same time it struck him. What he was seeing in action was an ultraviolet laser.
But that was insane. People used lasers against hostile primitive lifeforms. Primitive lifeforms didn't use lasers against people.
The suit confirmed the impossible. "Remarkable, sir, most remarkable. There are no previous records from anywhere in the Commonwealth of a living form lasing naturally. Perhaps such an evolutionary development here should have been anticipated."
"It's not possible-no," he hastily corrected himself, "obviously it is possible."
"It is fortunate that we are no longer perceived as a danger. I reacted as quickly as possible, sir. I was barely able to recognize the threat in time to protect you from serious harm."
"I still don't see how one or two plants could generate enough energy to cut through duralloy."
"One or two could not. However, we were not attacked just by those growths we were cutting through. Apparently a danger to one is perceived as danger to all. It took a while for the hedge to mount a collective response to our penetration. On Earth, trees under attack warn one another by chemical means. Here the method must be different, but it is no less efficient, and the response considerably more so.
"These growths are photovores, like many we have seen. Unlike those encountered previously, however, these apparently have developed the ability to concentrate enormous amounts of energy within themselves and then to release it all at once, in powerful bursts. As each growth adds its own quota of energy to the pulse, the effect is magnified repeatedly. We were attacked by a single entity ten meters in depth and five in height and at least several kilometers in length, that constitutes a laser of considerable potential. Strong enough even to penetrate duralloy.
"I am sorry, sir. I was designed to cope with assaults from unexpected nonsentient alien lifeforms, but as nothing like this has ever been encountered before it could not possibly have been foreseen. Prior experience on new worlds suggests an explorer needs to be ready to fend off tooth and claw, venom, or sheer muscle. I am capable of dealing efficiently with infinite variations of same, including such unlikely forms of attack as ultrasound and acid, which we have already encountered. I was designed to defend against hostiles which can bite, cut, bludgeon, spit, secrete, or vibrate. I was not designed to cope with a lifeform which can lase."
Evan considered this while he watched the hedge begin to repair itself. He wasn't overly concerned. The suit had suffered some damage, that was all.
"How long will it take you to fix the trouble?"
"It is true that I am self-repairing, but only to a degree. Even I have limits." A pause. "It appears on introspection that the damage extends to internal functions more complex than motor drives. I am attempting to isolate the fire-"
"Fire?" Evan's eyes widened slightly.
"-and prevent its spread to more sensitive components. It is not easy. Integration precludes much isolation without compounding-“
"How long will at take you to fix it?" He was growing warmer.
"You do not understand the extent of the damage, sir. It is not as if something broke. I carry ample spares for replacement where required. But entire integrated blocks have been vaporized, along with their connections. The cooling unit has also been affected and this compounds the problem."
So I'm not the only one who's sweating, Evan thought anxiously.
"I am sorry that I have not been able to live up to my designers' expectations, but they could not have anticipated, a n t i c i p a t e d, a n t i c i ..."
As he sat in his seat the voice of the MHW, the strong, reassuring voice that had comforted him from the moment he'd stepped out of the ship high in orbit above Prism, the voice of knowledge and infinite resourcefulness, the voice of Commonwealth technology, died.
"We have to find a place where you can shut down nonessential functions while you repair yourself. That means we have to move." The faint siren call of the beacon was forgotten now. Everything else was forgotten. He tried to take a step. This time not even a complaining whine greeted his efforts. He jammed his leg viciously against the sensors. He might as well have been kicking granite.
"Come on, suit," he whispered nervously, "respond." He nudged switches on a panel near his belly. "Manual emergency override. Basic systems functions, respond. Come on, damn you, respond!"
Only the echoing silence of dead metal, loud in his ears.
The audio membranes filled the suit with the unshielded sounds of Prism: electronic whispers and buzzes, harsh whistles and ratcheting growls. Unsettling sounds, alien sounds, suddenly much closer than they'd been before. Behind him the trees rose immobile, drained and drinking in the sunlight, a tall pink wall separating him from the ruins of the station. They took no interest in the tall, immobilized metal shape standing not far away. They weren't interested in him anymore. He was no longer perceived as a threat. And rightly so.
Then he was falling, unable to slow the descent or stop it. He'd halted on a slight slope and the suit's internal stabilizers had finally succumbed to the pervasive damage. He couldn't do anything to regulate the fall, of course. His own muscles were nowhere near strong enough to hold the heavy metal and plastic MHW upright against the pull of Prism's gravity.
There were no compensators to cushion the shock when he struck. His face bounced off the inside of the visor and blood started from his nose. At least he'd landed on his back. Whether that was sheer luck or a parting gesture by the suit's systems he had no way of knowing. He put his head back and waited for the bleeding to stop. Nor was he in danger of being blinded by the glare outside, since the material of the visor was largely self-adjusting. As he lay there in the bright light of day it compensated for the increased glare. That rapid chemical response to light was all that had saved him from being permanently blinded by the first burst of the hedge laser.
It was still comfortable within the suit, though several degrees warmer than optimum. That would soon begin to change. He knew that the cooling system was ruined and that if he lay in the sun very long he'd cook as efficiently as if in an oven.
Nothing lay unattended for very long on the surface of Prism, however. It wasn't long before he had company.
It was crawling onto the visor and he flinched even though he knew it couldn't get at him. Short red legs propelled a squat, triangular body. At the fore point were two bright green crystalline eyes mounted on weaving eyestalks. They swiveled to stare down at him.
What did they see? What was the mind like behind that shiny, slick-backed body? Could it feel, or was it no more than a mobile machine? The glassy stare was not enlightening.
The lower foresection of the body between the eyes dropped open. Out came something small, thin, and spiral shaped. It started to drill into the visor, directly over Evan's right eye, at high speed. He could hear it whine through the audio pickups. He sweated a little heavier for a few seconds until it became clear his visitor was incapable of penetrating the plexalloy.
The creature kept it up for more than a minute before finally giving the transparent material up as a bad job and moving away. It hadn't so much as scratched the visor. Even so, Evan found his stomach was churning.
It returned a couple of minutes later and decided to try the place where the visor was sealed to the body of the suit. Each of its legs operated independently of the others. Again the disconcerting whine, again the suit's integrity remained intact. Of course, if it found one of the places lower down where the hedge had sliced open the duralloy- but maybe it wasn't even interested in him. Maybe it was after the minerals in the suit itself. Still, Evan knew from personal observation at the station that there were plenty of scavengers who would find his body more than palatable. He was full of magnesium, potassium, calcium, zinc, iron, and all sorts of tasty spices. If he lay there long, sooner or later something would come along that would be ready and able to take him apart.
A second driller joined its cousin. Evan lay quietly, trying to ignore the intensified whine as he considered possible courses of action. He'd always been good at planning and organizing with a minimum of resources, but the latter usually included more than a dead survival suit. Now it was broken, and he was going to die. He could not think of a way out.
The drillers went away before nightfall, leaving him to ponder his fate in the darkness. He was only four days out from the station. Four days suit time, that is. Considerably longer for a human traveling on foot without the assistance of mechanical muscles.
Less than a day to the location of the feeble beacon. The beacon that moved around within a confined space. Even if Ophemert was dead, her suit might still be functional. If that was the case and he could salvage it, his chances of making it back to the station alive would be improved immeasureably.
Or maybe she was still alive. Perhaps she'd been out on a field trip, had been informed of the disaster in time to save herself, and was even now awaiting word that it was safe to return. He could convey that information to her and they could return together.
Except that he knew there was no way he could survive on Prism's surface without a suit. A suit was vital to his continued survival. It moderated the temperature, supplied food and water, protected its wearer from the elements, provided communications, advice, and even entertainment. All he had now was his light day-suit, the one he'd brought along to wear within the civilized confines of the station. How could he trade the armored safety of the MHW for a suit of thin, nonfunctional artificial fabric?
If he didn't, his only alternative was to remain within the corpse of the MHW and hope that the company would come looking for its wayward explorer. One day they would. Trouble was, one day might be months in the future. By then he wouldn't care when they found him.
Dawning of a new day found him rummaging around inside the suit, having slept well despite his fears. He found that he was able to extricate most of the concentrates from their storage compartments by hand, as well as the majority of vitamins. If he wore only his underwear, he might be able to rig a pack from his day-suit pants. He would then have food for a while and a means to transport it.
Evan Orgell was not passive. However assured the demise fate appeared to hold out to him, he refused to accept it as inevitable. Some might call such an attitude arrogance. Evan would have defined it as persistence in the face of adversity.
Maybe his suit was broken, but his legs still worked. He'd done a lot of walking on Samstead and thought he was in pretty good physical condition. He could still run and dodge. Human beings had been running and dodging for millions of years, just as they had survived without suits. Surely he, a modern man, could do as well as his ignorant ancestors?
No, he could manage physically without a suit. Mentally was something else again. He'd been outside without a specialized suit only twice in his life, both times to go swimming with friends at the beach. On a dare, they'd gone in without surf suits to propel them through the waves and protect them from the sun and salt. It had been a nerve-wracking ordeal, but he'd survived it.
He discovered that he was shaking as he contemplated what he was about to do. That was interesting. A new experience. Welcome to Prism. He forced himself to wait until he'd regained control of his muscles before starting in on the latches that sealed him inside. Each opened easily at his touch. The emergency manual release was a bit more complicated, but eventually it, too, yielded to his ministrations.
The latch was freed. All he had to do was twist the handle a hundred eighty degrees and shove. He did so, and as terrified as he was by the thought of it opening and exposing him suitless to the world outside, he was even more frightened that it wouldn't.
He pushed. The only advantage he had over a newborn chick emerging from its egg was that he knew what kind of world he was being born into.
If that counted as an advantage. At the moment, he might have found a little ignorance comforting.