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there, dormant now but ready to grow if and when the soil’s metal content should jump—say, if one of those asteroids circling a million kilometers away comes down. Some of our fertilizer’s bound to be blown off the fields, and if it starts something growing I want to have some ‘before’ pictures available.”
    Brown whistled under his breath. “I never thought about that,” he admitted. “I guess that’s why I’m in charge of runways and spaceports. Straightforward stuff.”
    â€œActually, I can’t take credit for the idea, either—it was the biology people who came up with it. When you think about it, the situation’s analogous to desert ecology, except that here it’s trace metals instead of water that’s missing.” Meredith paused as the faint sound of a sonic boom wafted in through the window. “Sounds like that last shuttle’s coming in.”
    Brown hauled himself to his feet. “Yeah. I’d better take a quick look at how the unloading’s going and hurry all the hovercraft back to Martello. If your terminals are on-line by the time we’ve got the inventory list I’ll send it through; otherwise, I’ll bring you a hard copy later.”
    â€œFine. Make damn sure we’ve got everything before you let the Aurora leave.”
    â€œRight.” Brown saluted and was gone.
    Picking up the top printout, Meredith turned to the last page and scanned the loss/breakage list. Not too bad: a small amount of laboratory glassware broken and several bags of the metal-enriched fertilizer split. One item made him grimace—one of the broken dishes was a critical part of the apparatus for combining the fish ova and sperm they’d brought to Astra. There were spares, of course, but not enough to satisfy either Meredith or the scientists. Idiots, he thought harshly. They give me a job to do, and then make sure I’ve got the absolute minimum I need to do it with. Which wasn’t entirely fair, he knew. President Allerton was a hundred percent solid behind the colony and always had been; but it was a handful of shortsighted congressmen who held Astra’s umbilical. They obviously considered the whole thing a UN plot to drain the United States of manpower and resources and had adjusted the colony’s budget accordingly.
    Laying the printout aside, Meredith picked up the next one from the pile. The months of logic, persuasion, and arm-bending were behind him now, and there was nothing more to do but get Astra running just as fast and as well as he possibly could. Uncle Sam’s honor—not to mention his own chance of ever making brigadier general—was on the line here. The scoffers would be proved wrong.
    And with that settled once again in his mind, he got to work.
    It was just over an hour later when his phone buzzed with bad news. “Flyer Two has gone down, Colonel,” a tense-sounding lieutenant reported. “Somewhere south-southwest of Mt. Olympus, we think.”
    Meredith felt a shiver go up his back. Near the volcano? He threw a quick look out the window as he headed across the room, but there was no sign of any smoke rising from the distant cone. “What happened?” he asked, throwing open the door and hand-signaling his aide to get the car.
    â€œWe’re not sure, sir. We got just a fragment of something about the repulsers going crazy, and then they were cut off.”
    Damn unreliable alien technology. “Are any of the normal planes in service yet?”
    â€œOne of them is, sir.”
    â€œPut a medical team aboard and get it in the air. Have them pick me up east of Unie—they can land on the Unie-Crosse road. Where’s Flyer One?”
    â€œHeading toward Olympus, sir. It was over the Kaf Mountains south of here when Two went down.”
    â€œCancel that. Have One return to base immediately.”
    â€œYes, sir.” The phone went dead for a few