Orne obeyed.
“O.K.,” said Stetson. “You come in loud and clear.”
“I ought to. I’m right on top of you!”
“There’ll be a relay ship over you all the time,” said Stetson. “Now ... when you’re not touching that mike contact this rig’ll still feed us what you say ... and everything that goes on around you, too. We’ll monitor everything. Got that?”
“Yes.”
Stetson held out his right hand. “Good luck. I meant that about diving in for you. Just say the word.”
“I know the word, too,” said Orne. “HELP!”
Gray mud floor and gloomy aisles between monstrous bluish tree trunks—that was the jungle. Only the barest weak glimmering of sunlight penetrated to the mud. The disguised sled—its para-grav units turned off—lurched and skidded around buttress roots. Its headlights swung in wild arcs across the trunks and down to the mud. Aerial creepers—great looping vines of them—swung down from the towering forest ceiling. A steady drip of condensation spattered the windshield, forcing Orne to use the wipers.
In the bucket seat of the sled’s cab, Orne fought the controls. He was plagued by the vague slow-motion-floating sensation that a heavy planet native always feels in lighter gravity. It gave him an unhappy stomach.
Things skipped through the air around the lurching vehicle: flitting and darting things. Insects came in twin cones, siphoned toward the headlights. There was an endless chittering whistling tok-tok-toking in the gloom beyond the lights.