The Winds of Altair Read Online Free PDF Page B

staff members had no desire to lose their share of the colony's eventual wealth. With the exception of Dr. Carbo, each scientist, social technician, and minister had little on Earth to return to. Yet, strangely, it was Carbo more than any of the others who led the work to tame Altair VI.
    They had a huge task facing them, and they knew it. They had to alter an entire planet, almost the size of Earth, enough to make it livable for millions of colonists. If they succeeded, they would become rich. If they failed, they would return to Earth empty-handed, three years older, with nothing to show for their efforts except defeat.
    Change the air. Purify the water. Alter the climate. Turn hell into Eden.
    They tried.
    But they soon found that humans could not work down on the planet's surface. Even in their sturdiest pressure suits, it was too dark and dangerous to remain there for more than a few hours at a time. Robot machinery, controlled from orbit, fared little better. The corrosive air and stubborn plant life knocked the machines out of commission too quickly for them to do any good.
    Then Carbo got his chance for personal salvation. There were huge, powerful animals on the planet. Use them. Implant neuro-electronic probes in. their brains and control them from the ship. The staff agreed, and excitement ran high. Landing crews of pressure-suited men stunned several animals and implanted the probes in their skulls. Two of the men were seriously injured. All of the animals, with the exception of one wolfcat, died within a few days of the implantations.
    Then it turned out that no one on the staff could establish contact with the implanted beast. Carbo's heart sank, and the entire staff turned funereal. Reluctantly, Carbo suggested testing the students. The staff argued against it, but in the end it was either the students or total failure.
    Two months almost to the day after they first established orbit around Altair VI, Jeffrey Holman scored their first success by making solid contact with the wolfcat.

CHAPTER 4

    The tubes that connected one globe of the Village with another were thickly green with foliage. It was like walking through a miniature forest. The floor was grass, soft underfoot and fragrant. The curving tube walls were lined with shrubs and stunted trees, many of them bearing edible fruit. In addition to providing a share of the Village's food and a large part of its oxygen, the greenpaths provided something even more important to the people who lived inside this artificial world: beauty.
    The greenery also helped to camouflage one of the disconcerting things about the Village. The globes were clustered together tinker-toy fashion, with no particular respect to direction, either front-to-back or up-and-down. Since gravity inside the Village was artificially generated and controlled, it always felt as if you were walking along a straight and level path under normal Earth gravity. But the tubes actually made strange turns and bends, like the tracks of a roller coaster, plunging sickeningly downward at one point, arrowing up at an impossible angle somewhere else. Even though you could not feel it as you walked along, your visual sense would send up wild alarm signals when it saw your path suddenly veer sharply to the left and drop out of sight. The shrubs and greenery kept you from seeing ahead far enough to frighten your inner mind.
    Jeff and Laura were strolling slowly through one of the greenpaths along a trail that wound past a lush garden of flowering shrubs and oriental trees. Neither of them realized that the sounds of an Earthly forest were missing: there were no birds singing, no insects, no water splashing. Only the faint pervasive background hum of the ship's electrical power systems which provided the heat and light necessary for life.
    Taking her arm, Jeff led Laura off the trail, pushing through the shrubbery toward the all-but-hidden curving metal wall of the tube. Finally they found what they were