“They’re not ripe yet—”
“Not for eating. For the lab.”
“Yes, sir.”
I went down the row, taking care where I stepped, photographing everything. Maybe if I found some interesting new species, they’d name it after me. There is no shortage of undiscovered plants and animals on Hella, so I collected samples of everything that looked unusual, which was pretty much everything.
After twenty minutes, Captain Skyler called me back. Despite the air conditioning in Jamie’s suit—my suit now—I still felt sweaty.
“Find anything?” he asked.
I held up a box of collection vials. “Lotsa raisins.”
He peered close. “Yeah, that looks like the same little munchers. Nothing new. But the lab will be interested to see if they’re digesting Terran cellulose any better. This many generations in, we should start seeing some adaptation. Good job.” He touched his com-set. “Everybody up. We roll in five.”
Back in the trucks, we headed as straight across the plain as the terrain would allow. The grass was taller here and a lot stiffer. It crunched beneath the tires of the trucks. Here and there, we crossed furrows cut by things that were not Rollagons. We didn’t see any animals. Not during the heat of the day. They’d be seeking their own shelter.
But Captain Skyler had us all watching out anyway, not just the scanner displays, but the eyeball view as well. Plus we had an umbrella of six drones, three orbiting close and three more circling at a distance. We stopped every ten or fifteen minutes to look and listen and sniff. Sometimes we got out of the truck to gather samples of dirt and grass. A few times we sank monitors into the ground. And whenever we crossed a furrow cut through the grass, two or three of us would get out and follow it in one direction and two or three would follow it in the other, all of us looking for footprints and droppings. This time we wore our helmets. I was “the mouse.”
Let me explain that.
Everyone else wore battle helmets, which have integrated weapon displays. I did not. I wore a special helmet with two big parabolic receivers, mounted at ten and two o’clock positions. It also had a conical snout for sniffing the air. And it had two saucer-sized lenses for the primary eyes. The whole thing looked like a famous Earth mouse, so that was why they called whoever wore the helmet “the mouse.”
But it’s very practical.
The big eyes record everything in ultra-high resolution stereoscopy, other cameras spaced around the helmet pick up a 360-degree view, enough for a complete holographic recreation for mission control. They almost always watch in real time, sometimes in VR sets. The battle helmets do the same, but they don’t have all the scientific sensors.
The interior display of the mouse compresses the spectrum so that the wearer sees a wider representation of frequencies—all the way from the darkest ultraviolet to the deepest infrared. The parabolic dishes are ultra-sensitive ears. They scan for all kinds of auditory signals, and they compress that spectrum as well. So the wearer can hear the ultra-high frequency shrieks of bat-things as well as the very low frequency subsonic rumbles produced by the saurs. It’s possible to hear their footsteps from as far away as ten or fifteen kilometers, depending on the local geology. If you wait until you can feel the ground shaking, it’s probably too late.
The conical rebreather on the front of the helmet adds enough carbon dioxide to every breath so that the wearer doesn’t accidentally go hyper-toxic from too much oxygen, but more important it also sniffs the air for all kinds of particles—it’s an electronic super-nose. The helmet integrates all this information and superimposes the augmented data onto the display. It even includes a visual representation of all the various smells and odors and scents it can recognize. It shows us which way the scents are blowing and that helps us know from which direction any carnivores are most likely to approach.
The odor overlay on the display can get very complex because there are so many different smells in the air. The plants and flowers give off pheromones to attract insects and even herbivores of all sizes. These usually show up as pale blue or violet. But the bigger herbivores, especially the saurs, they leave orange and yellow scent trails that can hang in the air for days and be carried hundreds of klicks downwind, so the predators always know where the herds are.
Before anyone can be trusted to go outside, they have to play a lot of simulations. Jamie told me I should think of each one as a puzzle. What problem do you have to solve? Even without the noise helping me—I wasn’t allowed to use it anyway in the simulators—I could tell how fresh a scent was and which way the herd was headed. Knowing where the herds are is important if we want to avoid the things that follow and feed on them. There are a lot of those, from the very small to the very large. The large ones usually leave bright red swaths of stink floating in the air. A lot of times you don’t need the display, you can smell it yourself.
Wearing the mouse helmet is supposed to be a special privilege. But the job of the mouse isn’t.
I collected dung.
Or anything else that might have fallen off of or out of whatever made this particular channel in the grass.
Down on the ground, we were in an amber canyon with walls that waved and rustled. We were swimmers in a dusty yellow smell, and sometimes overpowered with the occasional stink of dung. If it was from a herbivore, the dung would have a grassy smell. If it was from a predator, it had a darker stink, sometimes so bad I could smell it in the helmet. Some of the piles of dung were as tall as Marley, and still moist though fortunately not steaming. That would have meant we were way too close to something dangerous.
It wasn’t hard work. It was methodical. I’m good at methodical stuff, so I didn’t mind. But other people do. They think it’s a dirty job. I wondered if this was the reason Captain Skyler had brought me along, so nobody else would have to do it. But I’m a scientist. I think it’s exciting. Most of science is gathering a lot of facts and looking for patterns
And it’s not a dirty job. I would put the collection bag over my hand, grab a fistful of dung, then turn the bag inside out around the dung and slide the seal shut with my other hand. Usually, it was herbivore stuff, dryish lumps of stuff, mostly grass or even pink-tree skin, but on one of our stops we found a different kind of heap. It was dark and gooey. It had thick fragments of bone throughout. I tried not to think about where those pieces of bone had come from, but I knew that the lab techs back at the station were already getting excited in anticipation. I could hear their chatter in the noise.
We didn’t stay on the ground too long in any one place. Fifteen or twenty minutes max. It was almost as if we were afraid that the grass would grow so tall around us we’d never get out. Some people say you can actually see the grass growing. You can certainly hear it, an endless whispering. Sometimes, you can almost make out the words. It sounds like, “What are these things? Who are these strangers?”