Read Online Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One by Jack Vance - Free Book Online

port swung open. A man stood in the opening. For a moment he teetered on loose legs, then fell headlong.
    Root, springing forward, caught him before he struck ground. “Barbara!” Root called. His wife approached. “Take his feet. We’ll carry him inside. He’s sick.”
    They laid him on the couch and his eyes opened halfway.
    “What’s the trouble?” asked Root. “Where do you feel sick?”
    “My legs are like ice,” husked the man. “My shoulders ache. I can’t breathe.”
    “Wait till I look in the book,” muttered Root. He pulled out the Official Spaceman’s Self-Help Guide , traced down the symptoms. He looked across to the sick man. “You been anywhere near Alphard?”
    “Just came from there,” panted the man.
    “Looks like you got a dose of Lyma’s Virus. A shot of mycosetin should fix you up, according to the book.”
    He inserted an ampoule into the hypospray, pressed the tip to his patient’s arm, pushed the plunger home. “That should do it—according to the Guide.”
    “Thanks,” said his patient. “I feel better already.” He closed his eyes. Root stood up, glanced at Barbara. She was scrutinizing the man with a peculiar calculation. Root looked down again, seeing the man for the first time. He was young, perhaps thirty, thin but strong with a tight nervous muscularity. His face was lean, almost gaunt, his skin very bronzed. He had short black hair, heavy black eyebrows, a long jaw, a thin high nose.
    Root turned away. Glancing at his wife he foresaw the future with a sick certainty.
    He washed out the hypospray, returned the Guide to the rack, all with a sudden self-conscious awkwardness. When he turned around, Barbara was staring at him with wide thoughtful eyes. Root slowly left the room.
    A day later Marville Landry was on his feet and when he had shaved and changed his clothes there was no sign of the illness. He was by profession a mining engineer, so he revealed to Root, en route to a contract on Thuban XIV.
    The virus had struck swiftly and only by luck had he noticed the proximity of Dicantropus on his charts. Rapidly weakening, he had been forced to decelerate so swiftly and land so uncertainly that he feared his fuel was low. And indeed, when they went out to check, they found only enough fuel to throw the ship a hundred feet into the air.
    Landry shook his head ruefully. “And there’s a ten-million-munit contract waiting for me on Thuban Fourteen.”
    Said Root dismally, “The supply packet’s due in three months.”
    Landry winced. “Three months—in this hell-hole? That’s murder.” They returned to the station. “How do you stand it here?”
    Barbara heard him. “We don’t. I’ve been on the verge of hysterics every minute the last six months. Jim—” she made a wry grimace toward her husband “—he’s got his bones and rocks and the antenna. He’s not too much company.”
    “Maybe I can help out,” Landry offered airily.
    “Maybe,” she said with a cool blank glance at Root. Presently she left the room, walking more gracefully now, with an air of mysterious gaiety.
    Dinner that evening was a gala event. As soon as the sun took its blue glare past the horizon Barbara and Landry carried a table down to the lake and there they set it with all the splendor the station could afford. With no word to Root she pulled the cork on the gallon of brandy he had been nursing for a year and served generous highballs with canned lime-juice, Maraschino cherries and ice.
    For a space, with the candles glowing and evoking lambent ghosts in the highballs, even Root was gay. The air was wonderfully cool and the sands of the desert spread white and clean as damask out into the dimness. So they feasted on canned fowl and mushrooms and frozen fruit and drank deep of Root’s brandy, and across the pond the natives watched from the dark.
    And presently, while Root grew sleepy and dull, Landry became gay, and Barbara sparkled—the complete hostess, charming, witty and the