"Yeah," said Yann. "The hell with 'em. Well, let's pick up our traps and go."
Trehearne thought the First Officer was probably right. It was the most comforting explanation. He clung to it. It seemed that if anyone had really wanted to kill, and had tried once, he would have tried again. They'd been to a lot of worlds and done a lot of things. There had been plenty of other chances.
Or had there? Who knew what might appeal to a murderer as a good chance? And he couldn't just kill. He had to make it look like an accident. That wouldn't be so easy.
Oh, hell, forget it. It was an accident.
He did forget it, deliberately, as much as he could. But a certain uneasiness stayed with him, and he dreamed more often of the fungoid forest and the ghastly sensation of breathing without air. He began to want a change. He wouldn't have believed it a few months before, but he was getting sick of the ship, the confinement, the close quarters, the manufactured air and the palatable but synthetic food. He was not the only one. The most hardened veterans aboard were suffering from the ennui of a long voyage. They looked forward more and more to the landings, even on unpleasant worlds, and grumbled because they were so brief. By the time the Saarga reached the system of the green star, the terminal point whence she would start the equally long return voyage, Trehearne was so hungry for land that even that lurking unease was thrust out of his mind by the sheer joy of making worldfall.
Yann was full of excitement. "This is the system I told you about, Trehearne—the one where I was factor so long. I got to know the natives like a brother." He laughed and clapped Trehearne on the shoulder. "We make a good stop here, and when our work's done I'll show you some things!"
The Saarga set down on a world of emerald heat. Besides the starship the landing field contained half a dozen battered interplanetary craft, brought out piecemeal by the Vardda and operated by them between the wild planets of the system. The great stockaded factory was one of the largest Trehearne had seen and the strangest.
The "logs" that formed the stockade and made the walls of the warehouses were of crystal, cut from the crystalline forests that covered much of the land. Trehearne thought of them as trees and forests, simply because they had stems and branches, but they were inorganic, the glittering proliferation of sublimated alien chemicals. They glowed and flashed under the fierce green sun, showing glints of weird color where a prism formation broke the light. And also, in their shining branches, they netted the many-colored rays of the brighter stars that burned even in the daylight sky.
There was a town beyond the factory. It too was built of the crystal logs over foundations of black rock sunk in the ooze. Thick vines clambered everywhere, bearing bulbous fruit. Undergrowth, green almost to blackness, stood between the trees. There was a smell of fragrant rottenness, cloying, sweet.
Trehearne worked his long shifts, moving and sweating through a bath of molten jade. It was a large world and heavy. The gravity dragged at him. The letters of the freight lists swam under his eyes. When his own job was finally finished, he found Rohan and Perri still hard at it, but Yann was through and waiting for him.