Against Infinity Read Online Free PDF Page A

first time. He looked around the cramped white ravine and felt trapped. He turned uneasily, fighting the sudden leap of fear that there was something, some movement, just behind his back, where he could not see it in time.
    “You found this?” he said unnecessarily, just to be saying something and not have the silence.
    “No. I saw some ruts over in the next valley. Looked like they came this way. I was taking you there.”
    Manuel nodded. He felt an anticipation and also a thick dread, a scent in his nostrils like hot copper in the metal-working shops. The smell swarmed up through him and brought a sensation in his stomach and bowels, a tightening, as he saw for the first time the sign that this was a mortal thing, living and actual, not a mere form that lumbered through his dreams and moved in the stories the men told when they were half-drunk and could not be trusted to get it right—not a fragment of his world but bigger than it.
    “You think it’s still here?”
    “Might. The scientists said it stays in a place for a while—searching, they think. Dunno. Maybe it comes to have a look at us, then it goes on.”
    “Tomorrow, we can all come. Maybe corner it.”
    He laughed. “Corner it? Might’s well trap a man in a box of fog.”
    “We can try .”
    “Sure. We can try.”
    That night Petrovich fell into a political argument with Major Sánchez and the two men got loud, the whiskey doing most of the talking. The news had come through that Asteroid Conglomerate United wanted to push development of a petroleum-synthesizing capability on Ganymede, and the moon as a whole had to vote on the measure.
    Major Sánchez said it was trouble enough to grow the food for the goddamn ’roids and what did Ganymede get out of the trade anyway except doodads nobody wanted except the townies, and they weren’t the ones who’d have to bust their butts building a goddamn petro plant.
    Petrovich thought that was stupid and not forward-looking, or did the Major want to forever be buying petro from Luna or even, God-help-us, from Earth itself, paying percentage on percentage for every middleman between here and Brazil?
    What-the-hell, Major Sánchez bellowed, there wasn’t a liter of petro in the Settlement that hadn’t been squeezed out of seeds or stems, it was sure enough all right for their purposes, and if the ’roids wanted higher-quality stuff they could buy it What’d they need it for anyway, when they used servo’d animals for their work mostly, and animals didn’t need lubricants like machines anyway—that was the reason for developing good servo animals in the first place, to save on lubricants out here, as any damn fool knew if he studied any history instead of pigging it up with the smeerlop every night to scramble his brains every minute he was off work—right?
    Petrovich opened his mouth to shout back, but his eyes were glazed and he had trouble thinking as fast as Sánchez because of the smeerlop, and at that moment Colonel López stepped in and broke it up, telling them both to get to bed.
    Petrovich sat on his bunk and shook his head for a while, muttering, knowing he should sleep but not wanting to seem to be following the orders from the Colonel, and then he saw Manuel and asked in a slurred, gravel voice, “You thinking you hit it tomorrow.” When the boy did not answer Petrovich prompted him with “Eh?”
    “No point.”
    “Sure is point. Learn to shoot. Maybe get lucky, hurt it.”
    “Don’t know what to aim at.”
    “Nobody does. It is round, like an egg. Nothing to fix eye on.”
    “No, it isn’t!” Major Sánchez sprang up. “Mierda! It is blocks, three blocks stuck together. The legs they come down from the corners, each block with four—no, not at the middle, so there are eight legs.”
    “Is round,” Petrovich said. “I saw it three, four times. Round and rolling.”
    “There are pictures! We get back to Sidon, I show you fastframe; they—”
    “It crawls, blind man. And on