On the ground, the senior geologist had split the cartridge and was telling his way down the boring with a mass-pencil. He shot Amalfi a quick reptilian glance as the mayor’s blocky shadow fell across the table.
“No dome,” he said succinctly.
Amalfi thought about it. Now that the city was permanently cut off from the home galaxy, no work that it could do for money would mean a great deal to it. What was needed first of all was oil, so that the city could eat. Work that would yield good returns in the local currency would have to come much later. Right now the city would have to work for payment in drilling permits.
At the first contact that had seemed to be easy enough. This planet’s natives had never been able to get below the biggest and most obvious oil domes, so there should be plenty of oil left for the city. In turn, the city could throw up enough low-grade molybdenum and tungsten as a by-product of drilling to satisfy the terms of the Proctors.
But if there was no oil to crack for food—
“Sink two more shafts,” Amalfi said. “You’ve got an oil-bearing till down there, anyhow. We’ll pressure jellied gasoline into it and split it. Ride along a Number Eleven gravel to hold the seam open. If there’s no dome, we’ll boil the oil out.”
“Steak yesterday and steak tomorrow,” Hazleton murmured. “But never steak today.”
Amalfi swung upon the city manager, feeling the blood charging upward through his thick neck. “Do you think you’ll get fed any other way?” he growled. “This planet is going to be home for us from now on. Would you rather take up farming, like the natives? I thought you outgrew that notion after the raid on Gort.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” Hazleton said quietly. His heavily space-tanned face could not pale, but it blued a little under the taut, weathered bronze. “I know just as well as you do that we’re here for good. It just seemed funny to me that settling down on a planet for good should begin just like any other job.”
“I’m sorry,” Amalfi said, mollified. “I shouldn’t be so jumpy. Well, we don’t know yet how well off we are. The natives never have mined this planet to anything like pay-dirt depth, and they refine stuff by throwing it into a stew pot. If we can get past this food problem, we’ve still got a good chance of turning this whole Cloud into a tidy corporation.”