Hella by David Gerrold

Hella by David Gerrold

Author:David Gerrold [Gerrold, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780756416577
Google: UOO3DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0756416574
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2020-06-15T23:00:00+00:00


* * *

The trucks left early for the landing site. I wanted to go with, but it was strictly a team-only mission, no observers, no interns. So I had to watch like everybody else through the monitors. But Lilla-Jack had given me a remote control, so I could focus some of the cameras on anything I found interesting.

The highland desert, where the pods would land, is mostly gray sand and huge blue-brown puffer-bushes, taller than the trucks. The puffer-bushes have a lot of empty space between them, each one is at least twenty to thirty meters from the next. It’s because there’s not enough water in the desert to support any more plant life, and once a puffer-bush gets rooted it sucks all the water out of its immediate radius. They all have deep taproots, so they’re mostly resistant to the terrible winds that sweep across the flats when the seasons change. There are some areas of the desert that are nothing but puffer-bushes and the bug-things and lizard-things that live inside and under them.

So the landscape is a maze of huge round plants scattered across a sandy floor. Sometimes it feels like it just goes on forever and there’s no way out. Only the distant wall of the Awful Mountains hints at an end. Because the puffers are so huge and so randomly placed, the trucks have to weave back and forth around them while trying to maintain a consistent heading. For some people, it can feel very claustrophobic.

Up north, at Summerland, the winds were still rising. Jamie called to tell me not to worry. He said the wind was like that video of a hungry craptor trying to get at a family of hoppers in a hollow log, sniffing and picking and plucking and clawing, pulling and tugging whatever it could, sticking its nose first in one end, then the other, scratching and scraping, looking for a way to get at all the fat little prizes inside. But so far, most of the tie-down cables were holding. Only one had snapped and that was one of the older ones that had never been serviced. So now they were sending crews up into the rigging to check on the rest of them. They expected the peak of the storm to hit before midnight and after that perhaps a couple days of easier weather before the next storm came howling in. They’d use those two days to restring and tie down and secure everything the wind had torn up or torn down.

Then the Cascade sent down some very upsetting weather advisories. HARLIE had been studying Hellan weather since before they’d arrived at orbit. He’d gone back through fifty years of recorded weather patterns, trying to make sense out of all the different cycles, warming and cooling, sunspots, winds, tides, ocean currents, and so on. Based on his observations, measured against the past, he projected that we were going to see a very severe season, possibly the worst winter ever since



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