Bennu had completed the latest in a seemingly unending series of bus rides. This one, like so many others, was an overnight journey, so he'd gotten his sleep in, as well as using the facilities on board the bus. He'd also had his breakfast on board - Sunpower enabled him to preserve sandwiches and the like, and he'd stocked up recently. This trip was planned as a "hit and run" - since, for once, he had a reasonable amount of money and didn't have to look for a job. Premminger was getting much too good at locating him, and he preferred being seen by as few people as possible when he could manage it.
It was a pleasantly warm late June day, and the Sun felt good on his body. A gentle breeze added to the pleasure, too - it was near-perfect hiking weather. Fortunately! It was a good two dozen miles from the stop to Lookout Knob, and there was at least a 1500 foot climb as he walked up Skycrest Ridge Road to figure in, too. Even though the daylight hours were at maximum length, between the hike and the complexity of the site, it looked like another overnight camp-out. He adjusted his backpack, began that easy stride that was a compromise between speed and exertion, and soon found himself a few miles away from the bus stop and the small town it was in.
As expected, he'd seen no cars on the road. Strangely enough, there seemed to have been a lot of traffic quite recently, though. He didn't know what that was all about, but on this planet, it usually meant trouble!
Trouble! He'd decided that his interest in Adventuring was already more than satisfied. Missionary Healing was considered the most noble of Professions, but this really was overdoing it! IF he ever got out of this mess and safely back to Eldebran, he was going to settle down, become a combination farmer/veterinarian (he really DID like animals!), and do nothing more exciting than retell his experiences to his offspring (and, as a Lecturer, to many others). A quick mental scan picked up nothing more than the local wildlife. He shrugged. Time for a SunCharge.
He'd had to skip his last one - there'd been a solar flare yesterday, and Sunpoisoning was no joke! Speaking of Sunpoisoning ... His mind drifted back to his Adolescence. The community Council had Adjudged him Adolescent only two days before, and he was already planning his strategy for persuading his parents to let him take spaceship piloting lessons. Like so many of Eldebran's youth, the thought of actually visiting at least a Moon by his own actions excited him. Parents tended to be indulgent - many of them had done the same thing (and most had at least fantasized about it ) when they were young, no matter what Profession they intended to become. Few actually made Space a career, and, in Bennu's case, it was obvious, even at this early stage of his development, that he was destined to be a Healer, but, no matter how realistic telepathic lectures were, they weren't the same as knowing you'd actually been there and done that!
Unfortunately, he was fantasizing in class, and that was a no-no. Especially since this one was about "Solar activity and its effects on the ionosphere". His Teacher called out - vocally, no less! - "Bennu! If you want the privileges of an Adolescent, you must act like one. Perhaps you consider Sunpoisoning a joke, but, even if it isn't fatal - and it can be - it's hideously uncomfortable - never mind the dangers of Z-flux overload! And you're radiating your thoughts, too - Adolescents control their minds! At least let the other class members learn this lesson." {Here is where a writer who prefers a freckled Bennu would have done this as "You, of all people in this class, should know Sunpoisoning is no joke ..."} Boy, was he embarrassed! (Yes, it can happen to Eldebranis, though quite rarely after they leave Childhood.) It also annoyed his parents, who delayed his piloting lessons a good half year.
Bennu's thoughts returned to the present. His Teacher had been right, of course, and he had to be especially careful on Earth. He was certainly not familiar with the more subtle relationships between Sol and this ionosphere, especially since, as with so much else, he didn't remember what the Survey Team had learned. But then, they were certainly present on Earth for only a small fraction of a solar cycle, anyway.
He removed his shirt and carefully "felt" the various wavelengths of Sunlight. Good - the flare was definitely subsiding. He recharged himself and put his shirt back on. Now he was ready for a light snack. He chose a large moss-covered rock by the roadside, sat down, and dug an apple out of his backpack. Hmm. Sunpower or not, he probably should eat it soon. As he did so, he idly scanned the area. Still nothing more than wild animals. In fact, one of the omnipresent small rodents - they were called "squirrels" on this planet - was foraging nearby. Bennu tossed it the mostly eaten apple, stood up, and resumed striding.
A few miles later, an aged stepvan bearing the markings "Cidras County Emergency Preparedness" came rattling down the road towards him. A quick mental probe showed the driver to be in a very good frame of mind - not what one would expect if there WERE serious trouble up ahead. That, at least, looked promising. But on this planet, it was hard to be sure about almost anything! Well, he'd learn exactly what was going on in some hours when he reached Lookout Knob.
Actually, it didn't take nearly that long. A little while later, the van came rattling back up the road toward the Knob. It pulled over and the driver called to him: "Name's Fred. Want a ride? I'm headed to Lookout Knob, but I guess you are, too."
Bennu was only too happy to accept. It had been a pleasant hike - and getting more so as he climbed steadily upwards into cooler weather - but he could put the time and energy to better use.
Bennu got in the back of the van - it was partially filled with boxes of prepared foods and containers of drink (the front seat was completely filled up). Fred, who appeared to be around 50, apologized.
Fred: "Sorry to make you sit in the back, but I wasn't expecting any passengers. I assumed everybody was already on site. Field Day's for the young - staying up all night copying callsigns and digging the weak ones out ..."
Bennu looked puzzled. True, it wasn't utterly weird to guess his destination - there really wasn't anything else up the Ridge for a long way. He'd just picked up a vacuum tube, of all things - one of many that littered the back of the van - and his mind was drifting back to life on Eldebran again. He remembered the Museum of Communications. (It was located near the main spaceport, and, until the possibility of his accepting this Assignment arose, he'd never had reason to travel to a large city.) He hoped that the word "field" had nothing to do with field work, as in a mass archaeological exploration, and Fred had also used words like "site", and even "dig" ... "Field Day? What's that? I'm an amateur archaeologist, and I want to check out the Indian mounds up there."
Fred: "Sorry, I just assumed ... well, no matter. It really is sort of your lucky day, especially about getting a BUMP! ride. Normally, you'd have to hike all the way up and back, and then sneak in - those sites are on state property and off-limits to the public. In fact, this is the first time we've been allowed to operate up on the Knob. Anyway, it's an emergency radio communications exercise. We set up portable radio stations using emergency power and try to work other stations."
Bennu: "Very wise idea." (Even on Eldebran, the emergency communication equipment was tested on a regular basis.)
Fred (continuing): "Usually it's so quiet up there aliens could land a spaceship and set up an invasion base, but today and tomorrow there will be some forty-eleven hams filling the air with RF."
Bennu: "I hope I'm not intruding."
Fred: "Nah, when there's a contest on, especially if the skip is in and DX is coming through, you could walk naked through the set-up and nobody would pay attention." {Note: being a ham radio operator myself, that might not be much of an exaggeration, even with someone as good-looking as Bennu and female hams.}
Bennu was normally the gregarious sort, and always polite, and his distraction was most unusual. But that tube - he was still staring at it - had triggered not only memories, but an emotion he had no name for. Earth people call it "homesickness".
Still, he was following the conversation with part of his mind, and he replied - fortunately without speaking the first word - "Immatures! The people on this planet seem to make a competition out of everything!"
Fred: "This planet? Which one are you from?"
Bennu (obviously still distracted): "Eldebran."
Fred left Bennu to his thoughts. Bennu finally put the tube down and began looking around. A book's title: "Radio Wave Propagation and the Ionosphere" caught his eye. He picked it up and began studying it intently. Though he had no need for most of the theory or formulas - he'd learned them long ago, classroom daydreaming or not - there was much fine detail about the interactions between the Sun and Earth's ionosphere he found most useful. In addition, if he had access to an all-band radio receiver, he could learn even more about the current conditions! He quickly memorized the pertinent chapters and happily put it down - the day had already started off quite successfully. He resumed his looking.
A pamphlet with an all-too-familiar illustration on the front cover caught his eye. To his surprise, a number of different ones on the same subject were scattered about. "For an area well away from Tornado Alley, you sure seem to be concerned about them!"
Fred: "You ever been in one?"
Bennu: "Smithburg, last year. I later learned it was an F3. It almost killed me - the town fire siren woke my host up and he got us into the cellar just as it hit. It left nothing but the cellar. Spent the night rescuing other unfortunate people. UGH!"
Fred: "Ever wonder who sounded that siren - or who might have told him to? The spot's coming up, anyway. You might as well see for yourself."
They crested a rise and he pulled the van off to the side of the road, climbed out, and pointed. Bennu got out and looked down the Ridge into the valley alongside it. Cut into the forest was an ugly slash. That slash passed directly through a small collection of buildings - clearly a little town.
Fred: "I was operating my radio portable from here - aside from the Knob, it's the highest spot around - and I saw it form. Used my handheld to call a friend and he got the alarm sounded. Most people reached shelter in time, though we lost a few," (one had been a good friend of his and Bennu felt the pain the memory brought him), "but it could have been much worse. School was in session and we got the auditorium evacuated just before it hit."
Fred stood silently. Bennu put one hand on Fred's shoulder, slipped the other under his own shirt, and grasped his medallion. Fred, his grief eased, relaxed.
Fred: "One of our senators was born in that town. In gratitude to amateur radio, he persuaded the state to let our club, the Waveriders, operate Field Days from Lookout Knob - it's the best site for 100 miles around."
They got back in and Fred drove away. Now having a common ground, they chatted until they reached the site. Pulling through the open gate, Fred parked the van. Bennu helped unload it and began carefully picking his way between the various operating positions. Fred's statement seemed to be accurate, at least as far as Bennu was about to test it! Nobody paid him any notice, except for one young woman sitting off to the side sulking. He assumed - correctly - that she was just the friend of one of the operators, and there was no reason to expect her to ignore his presence.
Speaking of operators, he was just passing one of them - a young man using a telegraph key and wearing headphones - when the man took them off, slammed them down in disgust, pushed the key aside, and complained: "The band's so dead I think I could work this contest in my sleep! What's the use of being a high-speed CW {Morse code} operator if there's nobody to work! This is boring!" (His girlfriend, who, as it turned out, was the one sulking off in a corner, would most certainly have given him an "I told you so!") "The Sun sure picked a bad time to throw a fit!"
It had been several hours since Bennu had SunCharged. He felt the various solar fluxes again, compared the result with that of earlier in the day, and used his newly-learned knowledge to come to a conclusion.
Bennu: "Save your strength. I feel" (quite literally!) "that conditions will improve quite a bit in, say, another hour and a half."
Young Operator: "Gee, you think so? Great! I'll get somebody to take over for a while - I could use a break, anyway."
Bennu continued on his careful path, and soon enough found himself clear of the radios and at the mounds. This was a very odd site - apparently the various mounds had originally been connected by narrow passages. Many of them, as well as the mounds themselves, had collapsed, and he could understand why the site was closed to the public. What was "intact" was probably dangerously unstable, and he very cautiously entered the first mound ...
What with so many of them ruined, things went quite rapidly, and in a few hours he was entering the last and largest of them by the back passage. (This one happened to also be closest to the operators.)
Suddenly he paused. His ears were picking up a strange, faint booming sound, seemingly coming from up ahead. NOW what? Yago certainly wouldn't be doing anything to deliberately alert him, but he automatically reached for his medallion. Strangeness on this planet frequently meant trouble. He cautiously continued his exploration. As he did so, the sound grew slowly louder. It was now clear that there was a complex, somewhat repetitive pattern to it - that is, it was music. Bennu relaxed and shrugged.
By the time he was approaching the central part of the mound, it had gotten quite loud. As expected, there was at least one human up ahead - in fact, there were two, dimly illuminated by the greenish glow of emergency light sticks. He didn't have to wonder what they were doing in the mound - they were radiating a most unmistakable emotion - mating activity.
He turned off his flashlight, moved back towards the wall, and politely waited for them to finish - it rarely took long, and he was far ahead of schedule, anyway. He presumed that the music was being used to warn others away, but why did they have to play it so loud? He could actually feel the low-frequency vibrations through the walls and floor of the mound - no wonder that particular style of radio had gotten the Earth name "boom box"! He idly brushed some dirt out of his hair.
Brush, brush, brush - NOW what? His head naturally turned towards the ceiling - PTOOEY! He'd just gotten a faceful of dirt. Apparently, the music was jarring material loose. He grasped his medallion and let his mind reach out ...
To his horror, he could plainly see a crack growing and widening above him. Not unexpectedly, it started back towards the sound source - and the humans! He fired a mental warning of "cave-in!", and threw his body into overdrive.
The first thing they saw was a tall, pale, ghostly figure seemingly flying towards them. Fortunately, they hadn't gotten any further than the "clothes off" stage, so Bennu was able to bend down, scoop one of them up in each arm, and race towards the exit without breaking stride as the mound began to collapse.
It looked like he would make it - and then an obstacle loomed. The exit was half-blocked by piles of cases. Bennu timed his jump carefully and was just springing when one of the two people, naturally enough not believing he could make such a leap, twisted to protect himself from impact and threw Bennu's timing off.
His foot caught the top of a case and the three of them came squirting out of the exit like toothpaste from a tube just as it collapsed.
Thud! OOF! Ow!
With a start, Bennu realized who he'd rescued - the young operator he'd suggested take a break and his bored girlfriend. Not that she was likely to be bored any longer!
Young Operator: "My radio!"
Girlfriend: "My clothes!"
Several operators on a break: "Our beer!" One of them walked over, grabbed the male by the ear, and, tugging on it, yelled: "Danny, where have you been! Your band's been open for a while now and you're our best CW operator. Get back to work! This is a contest!"
Danny got up, walked over to his position - much to the relief of his substitute, who was quite overwhelmed by the flood of stations replying to his calls - and, still nude, sat down. He picked up a pencil, put on his headphones, reached for the key, and began writing furiously in a logbook. A look of bliss spread across his face ...
The girl - her name was Linda - was livid. That blond stranger had actually gotten Danny away from his stupid radios and, after prying him away from the off-duty operators and the beer, they were finally doing what a boy and his girlfriend ought to be doing when another of his radios had almost gotten them killed - would have, if not for the same stranger. Now Danny was back with his beloved toys, and, by the all-too-familiar look on his face, not interested in anything except funny beeps coming out of his headphones. Fine, let him sleep with them! On second thought, maybe she'd better not make that threat.
Speaking of "that stranger", Bennu, having satisfied himself that neither of the two humans was suffering from anything physically more severe than minor external damage, turned to repairing a small ankle sprain, courtesy of that case. After completing that task, he waited out the short rest period necessitated by brief overdrive use by retrieving a map and bus schedule from his backpack and, oblivious to his surroundings, plotting his next journey.
Linda looked at him. "My Hero!" she thought. Danny was a nice-looking male her own age, but my-oh-my ... oh, what's the use! He was sitting not two feet from a young, and, in her opinion, quite attractive, woman whose life he had just saved, and, for all of the attention he was paying her, she could have been an alien from another planet!
She got up and stormed off to find Fred, her frustration and anger, combined with the aftereffects of a severe adrenaline surge, making her forget her current state of undress.
Bennu finished making his plans and turned to put his papers away. He blinked. That young woman really was walking naked through the Field Day site without attracting more than an occasional quick glance and head-shake. Extraordinary!
He'd studied Immature races in "History of Societal Development" classes - ones he found most interesting (no daydreaming in them!), and then continued his learning in the advanced classes Healers took. (This was one area the Local Group Societies exchanged as much data on as possible.) By the time he'd finished, he had extensive knowledge of no less than 14 separate Immature races, and had never heard of any nearly as competitive as this one!
Competitions to attain social status were standard among the Immature, of course, but turning an emergency preparedness exercise into a contest which, for most, as he'd learned from Fred in his chat on the way up, was only going to bring a few lines of recognition in a hobby magazine, was a bit extreme. And after that display he was witnessing ...
Bennu reconsidered the matter. At least in this case, it was serving a socially useful function. Emergency communications on an Immature planet would undoubtedly often involve long hours of sending and receiving communications under far less than ideal conditions, and "contests" were a perfect way to get a corps of operators to self-train themselves for it. Still, exception or not, the general principle remained unchanged.
Bennu Smiled. This extreme competitiveness undoubtedly explained much about the motivations of Earth humans, and was very valuable data indeed! Even if the Waveriders didn't do too well, he had had a great Field Day - and no Yago or Premminger, either. He stood up, gave himself a thorough dusting off, and trotted after Linda towards Fred.
As she had expected, Fred was in the refreshment tent. He was busy emptying a soda bottle when she stormed in, dirty, dishevelled, and disrobed. Soda sprayed in all directions as he had a major coughing fit!
Fred: "Linda! What happened to you?"
Bennu (just entering the tent): "Low-frequency sonics from Danny's 'boom box' caused the mound roof to collapse. Luckily, I was just finishing my explorations and was able to rescue them."
Fred: "I guess I'll have to head into town and stop at Linda's parents' house for a new set of clothes for her. Trying to explain that is going to be fun! I guess you want a ride. Hey, take a few sandwiches while you're at it. We've got more than enough, and you've sure earned them!"
So off they went, rattling down Skycrest Ridge Road.
Meanwhile, Premminger had had a good hunch. He had been unable to persuade the local Agency personnel to give him any more assistance than the loan of one of those big black Lincolns so beloved of writers, but it DID have good air conditioning and better shocks.
He had managed to get lost three times on his way to the town and was in an even worse mood than usual. He finally found it and screeched to a halt in front of the general store. Striding angrily in, he pulled out his badge and showed a drawing of Bennu to the clerk. The clerk, used to giving directions most of the day, had noticed the whip antenna still vibrating from the abrupt stop. He answered without looking at the drawing: "Lookout Knob. Keep going down the road a couple of miles until it meets Skycrest Ridge Road. Make a right - the Knob's about 25 miles up it. Watch out for the potholes."
Premminger was so glad to get some cooperation from somebody for a change, he didn't even wonder how the clerk knew the destination. Or perhaps, he thought that Bennu had mentioned it. Anyway, he had reached the Road and was headed up to the Knob, the Lincoln's shocks absorbing all of the bumps. The only vehicle he saw was Fred's rattly old van bumping its way back down towards town.
Bennu rolled his eyes as the Lincoln approached. Oh, no, not again! Well, what else to expect? The day had gone very well, indeed - surely something had to go wrong. And it was better than Yago! Why couldn't Yago solve two of his problems by chasing Premminger for a while?
Because, Bennu, Yago has already caught him!
He took out his map and bus schedules and began replotting his route. Yes, that looked right. It involved a long hike through the woods, but he should escape Premminger's unwelcome attention ...
Premminger, meanwhile, had arrived at Lookout Knob. He pulled through the gate and stopped the car. Getting out, he produced his badge and called out: "I'm a Federal agent! Who's in charge here?"
After a few calls, somebody wandered over. "What do you want?"
Premminger: "Bennu." (showing the drawing) "Anybody here seen this person?"
"I'm the coordinator of the county Office of Emergency Preparedness. Are you from the Federal Communications Commission?"
Premminger: "No, I'm from the Agency."
Coordinator: "Do you have a warrant?"
Premminger: "No. My superiors just want to question him."
Coordinator: "Sorry. We're going to be much too busy for the next several hours to answer questions. This is an official activity under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission, and, in the absence of a court order, you have no legal standing here. Furthermore, this is state property, and is closed to the public except for the purposes of emergency preparedness. Leave now or I will have the police summoned and you will be arrested!"
Premminger's face turned so red the coordinator wondered if he might have a stroke. Not that he cared - it was very easy to dislike Premminger within a minute of meeting him.
Premminger finally gave up, raced back down the Road, hit a large pothole, and blew a tire.
It could have been worse - he did have a spare. Bennu now had no problem escaping.
Copyright November 9, 2000 Three Cheeks Productions (Richard Kaplan & Peter Beck)