Is That What People Do? Read Online Free PDF

observer.
    He had tried other jobs in the Advance Exploration Corps, but none had suited him. PEP—Primary Extraterrestrial Penetration—faced him with too many unpleasant surprises. It was work for daredevils and madmen. But Base Operations was much too tame and restricting.
    He liked the work of a planetary observer, though. His job was to sit tight on a planet newly opened by the PEP boys and checked out by a drone camera crew. All he had to do on this planet was stoically endure discomfort and skillfully keep himself alive. After a year of this, the relief ship would remove him and note his report. On the basis of the report, further action would or would not be taken.
    Before each tour of duty, Clayton dutifully promised his wife that this would be the last. After this tour, he was going to stay on Earth and work on the little farm he owned. He promised....
    But at the end of each rest leave, Clayton journeyed out again, to do the thing for which he was best suited: staying alive through skill and endurance.
    But this time, he had had it. He and Nerishev had been eight months on Carella. The relief ship was due in another four months. If he came through alive, he was going to quit for good.
    “Just listen to that wind,” Nerishev said.
    Muffled, distant, it sighed and murmured around the steel hull of the station like a zephyr, a summer breeze.
    That was how it sounded to them inside the station, separated from the wind by three inches of steel plus a soundproofing layer.
    “It’s rising,” Clayton said. He walked over to the wind-speed indicator. According to the dial, the gentle-sounding wind was blowing at a steady 82 miles an hour—
    A light breeze on Carella.
    “Man, oh, man!” Clayton said. “I don’t want to go out there. Nothing’s worth going out there.”
    “It’s your turn,” Nerishev pointed out.
    “I know. Let me complain a little first, will you? Come on, let’s get a forecast from Smanik.”
    They walked the length of the station, their heels echoing on the steel floor, past compartments filled with food, air supplies, instruments, extra equipment. At the far end of the station was the heavy metal door of the receiving shed. The men slipped on air masks and adjusted the flow.
    “Ready?” Clayton asked.
    “Ready.”
    They braced themselves, gripping handholds beside the door. Clayton touched the stud. The door slid away and a gust of wind shrieked in. The men lowered their heads and butted into the wind, entering the receiving shed.
    The shed was an extension of the station, some thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. It was not sealed, like the rest of the structure. The walls were built of openwork steel, with baffles set in. The wind could pass through this arrangement, but slowed down, controlled. A gauge told them it was blowing 34 miles an hour within the shed.
    It was a damned nuisance, Clayton thought, having to confer with the natives of Carella in a 34-mile gale. But there was no other way. The Carellans, raised on a planet where the wind never blew less than 70 miles an hour, couldn’t stand the “dead air” within the station. Even with the oxygen content cut down to the Carellan norm, the natives couldn’t make the adjustment. Within the station, they grew dizzy and apprehensive. Soon they began strangling, like a man in a vacuum.
    Thirty-four miles an hour of wind was a fair compromise-point for human and Carellan to meet.
    Clayton and Nerishev walked down the shed. In one corner lay what looked like a tangle of dried-out octopi. The tangle stirred and waved two tentacles ceremoniously.
    “Good day,” said Smanik.
    “Good day,” Clayton said. “What do you think of the weather?”
    “Excellent,” said Smanik.
    Nerishev tugged at Clayton’s sleeve. “What did he say?” he asked, and nodded thoughtfully when Clayton translated it for him. Nerishev lacked Clayton’s gift for language. Even after eight months, the Carellan tongue was still an undecipherable