He turned off the radio and gripped the steering wheel tightly in both
hands. He unclenched one hand and looked at his watch. Nine-fifteen
in the morning. At ten-thirty he would stop and take a nap. A man had
to have rest in this heat. But only a half-hour nap. Treasure lay
somewhere ahead of him, and he wanted to find it before his supplies
got much lower.
The precious outcroppings of goldenstone _had_ to be up ahead! He'd
been following traces for two days now. Maybe he would hit a real
bonanza, as Kirk did in '89, or Edmonson and Arsler in '93. If so, he
would do just what they did. He'd order up a Prospector's Special, and
to hell with the cost.
The sandcar rolled along at an even thirty miles an hour, and Morrison
tried to concentrate on the heat-blasted yellow-brown landscape. That
sandstone patch over there was just the tawny color of Janie's hair.
After he struck it rich, he and Janie would get married, and he'd go
back to Earth and buy an ocean farm. No more prospecting. Just one rich
strike so he could buy his spread on the deep blue Atlantic. Maybe some
people thought fish-herding was tame; it was good enough for him.
He could see it now, the mackerel herds drifting along and browsing at
the plankton pens, himself and his trusty dolphin keeping an eye out
for the silvery flash of a predatory barracuda or a steel-gray shark
coming along behind the branching coral....
Morrison felt the sandcar lurch. He woke up, grabbed the steering wheel
and turned it hard. During his moments of sleep, the vehicle had crept
over the dune's crumbling edge. Sand and pebbles spun under the fat
tires as the sandcar fought for traction. The car tilted perilously.
The tires shrieked against the sand, gripped, and started to pull the
vehicle back up the slope.
Then the whole face of the dune collapsed.
Morrison held onto the steering wheel as the sandcar flipped over on
its side and rolled down the slope. Sand filled his mouth and eyes.
He spat and held on while the car rolled over again and dropped into
emptiness.
For seconds, he was in the air. The sandcar hit bottom squarely on its
wheels. Morrison heard a double boom as the two rear tires blew out.
Then his head hit the windshield.
* * * * *
When he recovered consciousness, the first thing he did was look at his
watch. It read 10:35.
"Time for that nap," Morrison said to himself. "But I guess I'll survey
the situation first."
He found that he was at the bottom of a shallow fault strewn with
knife-edged pebbles. Two tires had blown on impact, his windshield was
gone, and one of the doors was sprung. His equipment was strewn around,
but appeared to be intact.
"Could have been worse," Morrison said.
He bent down to examine the tires more carefully.
"It _is_ worse," he said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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