It was another bright, balmy, beautiful morning, and their rocky perch above Stinktown afforded the three shipmates an excellent view. Haze and distance softened the outline of the eroded remnants of the Taconian highlands. That ancient range was now only barren hills. Its substance, reduced by wind and water to particles of grit, had washed down to form great banks of estuarine mud in the bays and inlets of the submergent coastline. Low tide at Stinktown exposed acres of glistening, iridescent muck. It had no attraction for Walls, Berry, and McNiel. There was nothing to see out on the tidal flats except arthropods poking around in search of breakfast, scientists poking around in search of specimens, and other bored Navy men poking around just for the hell of it. Moreover, estuarine mud was glutinous and full of bubbles of gas produced by the decaying organic matter within it, so that one not only risked becoming mired with every step but also releasing a potent whiff of rotten eggs. The air on the heights was much sweeter. Beyond the tidal flats was a broad, shallow bay where a Navy ship lay anchored amid its brood of auxiliary craft. The ship represented everything sailors came ashore to escape, but the consensus was that Stinktown itself had very little more to offer. Stinktown was a collection of tents and Quonset huts at the edge of a marshy area overgrown with tiny stem-like plants and infested, word had it, with centipedes the size of dachshunds. The approved pastimes available to enlisted personnel on liberty--soccer, softball, movies, virtual realities--were good for an hour or two each, if one was in the mood. There was 3.2 beer at the exchange; getting drunk on it entailed real work, but a determined man could do it. Hard liquor was difficult though not impossible for Navy men to obtain. Other illicit diversions were good only until one's stake was gone, or tempers flared, or the shore patrol hove into view. There were no women, unless one counted female officers and scientists, and there was no point in counting them. Female officers were, of course, strictly off limits. Scientists, male and female alike, belonged to an incomprehensible alien species. Each scientist seemed to be crazy in his or her own way, but all of them seemed to exist in a state of constant excitement, which naturally made them objects of both scorn and resentment to men hard-pressed to achieve even intermittent excitement. All along the coast, longshore currents had cut the divides between neighboring valleys into headlands. It was to one of these low, steep cliffs that Walls, Berry, and McNiel had retired with their beer coolers. From atop the cliff they could look back into the drowned river valley, or down upon a narrow beach and the slender crescent of a tombolo linking an islet to the mainland, or out across the shimmering surface of the Iaepetus Ocean. They wasted little time admiring the view, however. They were men with a mission and went at their weak beer with fierce resolve. As morning passed quickly into midday, they went often, singly or en masse, to the cliff's edge and relieved themselves, to the accompaniment of much self-congratulation, onto the beach below. They had managed to get themselves somewhat beyond the feel-good stage of inebriation, if somewhat shy of the feel-nothing stage, when Berry vehemently declared that he had seen all the Silurian Period had to offer and would not give two cents for any of it. It had been obvious to his buddies since coming ashore that he was building to an eruption. Therefore, when it came, Walls gave no sign of noticing it. He had opened his shirt, stretched himself out on a nearly level slab of rock, and pulled his cap down over his eyes. His wiry black arm dangled over the edge of the slab, and a beer dangled from his fingertips; he swung it gently, like a pendulum, keeping time as he hummed some indefinite tune. It was barely audible above the crash of waves breaking against the beach. For his part, McNiel took a long, unsatisfying pull on his beer, belched resonantly, and said, "Prehistoric times sure suck, all right." "Five billion years of earth history," Berry said, "and this has got to be the wettest and dullest stretch of all." "Can't even watch the grass grow," McNiel said mildly. "What I'd give to have a dinosaur in my sights right now." McNiel asked, "What sights?" and when Berry took aim at an invisible target with an imaginary rifle, "What dinosaur?" "Like it goddamn matters. This is the first tour I've ever done where a seventy-two-hour liberty's actually bad for the morale of enlisted personnel." McNiel grinned. "You think it's just bizarre coincidence the enlisted women never come ashore when the enlisted men do?" Although he continued to swing his arm in time, Walls left off humming to say, "The Navy doesn't want you unmarried fellows getting laid. Might dull your fighting edge." "We might's well go queer," McNiel told Berry. "That'd show the Navy." Berry's mouth twisted with disgust. "All I know is, I've never been so bored in one place in my whole life." "Beer's pretty lousy, too," said McNiel. Walls interrupted his humming again. "Beer doesn't time-travel well. It's all that shaking up it gets when it comes through the hole. Knocks the fizz right out of it." "Izzat a fact?" "Well, it's a theory." Walls went back to humming. "I got my own theory," McNiel said. "Some contractor back home's selling the Navy canned horse piss." Nevertheless, he sucked out the last foamy mouthful before crumpling the can and flipping it into the cooler nearest him. There was an entire stratum of crumpled cans in there; he started to dig down through it with both hands. "I can't believe," Berry said to Walls, "this is your second tour." "What's not to believe? Here, you get most of the perks of submarine duty and none of the claustrophobia." "Uh oh," said McNiel. "We're about out of brew. How'd that happen?" | |