Chapter 2

Nearby, on the highest spot, were the remains of four large lightning-blasted trees. They lay in a more orderly arrangement than I'd have expected. One of the giants had been split and splintered remarkably but the other three looked almost as if they had been pushed over and together with a purpose in mind.

This must be the safe area the greenie had mentioned but the dead trees weren't the result of natural lightning. They must be what passed for initial shelter for most new arrivals. Not really much in the way of shelter but better than nothing, at least I wouldn't have to settle for that.

The area wasn't newly created; the trees had been in this shape for a few years at least. Dozens of saplings had sprung up near them and I could see that several had been cut down, no doubt by newbies making clubs or spears.

The rise was near the center of a large, roughly circular, clearing. This wasn't natural either, though some effort had been made to make it seem so. I could tell that some type of mowing had to be taking place, at least once a year from the looks of the place.

I couldn't imagine greenies down here, planet side, riding tractors pulling bush hogs but something had to be mowing this large clearing. There were no bushes or weeds taller than a year's worth of growth would leave them.

The clearing had about a three hundred yard radius from this rise. It was completely surrounded by forest, hardwoods at that, looking remarkably like those on earth.

Ironically, I felt slightly let down. I'd been snatched from earth and put down on a planet probably light-years away, and from what I could see there was basically no difference.

Maybe I was on a different planet and maybe not. I'd have to wait to know for certain but it seemed possible that the aliens were playing a colossal joke on me. If they were, I couldn't understand why they'd go to the trouble.

The space ship hadn't been a joke or a put on and neither had the adjustments to my medical condition. No one on earth knew how to make something just appear out of nowhere in the middle of the night, and no doubt all the doctors and hospitals would be out of business if earth had the kind of medical technology these aliens had.

"No sense standing around scratching my ass," I said, to the trees I guess.

I made a circle around the ordered confusion of the deadfalls and the tangle of saplings and low brush, trying to discover what I'd have to deal with first.

It didn't take much thinking to see that I was probably better off than most people who found themselves captured on earth and released here. If a couple of pushed over trees were what the aliens thought of as shelter, I had a castle on wheels.

Shelter was waiting for me, in my truck, and I was well armed to boot. Ammunition wouldn't be a problem either, thanks to their odd rules. In fact, I had most of the comforts of home.

It was a good thing for me that I'd been able to swindle Bandor into bringing my truck along. Sure, I could have brought my guns and tools and other things with me if I had rushed like hell to bring them into the damned spaceship by hand.

I would have never thought to bring the spent brasses though, and they'd turned out to be my biggest treasure. It was very comforting to have a thirty-ought six and fifty thousand rounds on a planet that had few or no other firearms. This might not be so bad after all.

When I walked around the truck to see if there was anything worth looking at on the other side I got a big surprise. Then, when I started poking around in that surprise, I got an even bigger one.

I found the two motorcycle front wheels I'd bought at the estate sale. I'd intended to see about making some type of wagon or cart out of them. Truthfully, I would have probably just put them in the storage building behind my house and forgotten them. In fact, with all the excitement I had already forgotten them.

The surprising thing was that there were four of them now. I recognized the original two that I'd bought, but the other two, while similar, were made of a different metal and I wasn't sure that the tires were actually rubber.

This was confusing, and when I found what sure looked like a kit to make a wagon with the wheels, I was even more confused.

It came to me when I wondered about the extra wheels. It was as if a place in my mind opened up and made information available. I mentally wandered around in this new part of my brain and suddenly I could see a letter, to me.

Dear Billy Joe Stephens:

I was the project manager for the repair and replacement of your possessions. I would like to thank you for providing the most entertaining mission I have ever been on.

We have put everything you had into better condition than it was, and in fact it is in better condition than it ever was. We tried to be very thorough.

Unfortunately, some of our superiors would not allows us to repair your two motorcycles, saying that you never had them and only possessed the wheels which you had recently bought.

We in the engineering section felt that this was a breach of our regulations and of our responsibilities. We will be reporting it as soon as we return from this mission, but that will be fifteen of your years - on your present planet - and it seems too long for a redress of grievance to us.

To assuage our own consciences, we have done a few other things as a type of reimbursement for the disservice we were commanded to do you. If the administrators are not going to abide by the rules, why should we?

As I mentioned we repaired everything you had, and then we duplicated most of the things using some of our technical advantages. It was speculated that if you did not own the motorcycles you must have intended to use the wheels for a wagon, and we have provided a kit to assemble said wagon.

The ammunition containers we provided for your repaired ammunition are capable of repairing the spent ammunition on their own if you place the spent cases back in them. It takes approximately two hours for them to repair fifty cartridges.

The container for the twenty-two-caliber ammunition holds one hundred cartridges where the others hold fifty each. Since we only found twelve of these spent cartridges, we assumed that this ammunition was normally not repaired.

No matter, the containers for this ammunition simply create new ammunition once you remove some of it. I probably don't need to tell you that the containers are much more complicated than they seem.

We also took the liberty of upgrading your vehicles fuel tanks so that they always remain full, just as we upgraded the engine oil containers and the boxes which held fuel and oil filters.

We know that these small things cannot replace two motorcycles of the type that your wheels were from, but we hope that they will help you and will partially make up for this injustice.

Again we apologize for the wrong we feel has been done to you and we are intent on seeing it redressed, no matter how long it takes.

This tiny portion of your brain that we have used to give you this information is in a section of cortex that was not actually being used and I'm sure you know that there are large areas like this in the human brain.

We have included other information about the things we have provided and repaired for you and some other interesting things about your new home. If you have any questions, you need only access this area again and the answers will come forward promptly.

Yours sincerely,

Chakal, Repair Team Leader

I was dumbstruck. To make sure I wouldn't loose the information, they had simply put it into my head. And the ammunition containers, how in the hell could the containers reload the cartridges?

One thing was apparent from the message. The capture a dumb earthling gig was a union job, without a doubt. Chakal sounded just like a pissed off union man that had been shit on by management. He'd been happily planning to fabricate a couple of Harleys and someone had messed up his plans. He'd made sure he got his own kind of revenge.

By now I was in a much better mood than when I'd first arrived. It wasn't as if I had a choice in the matter, but at least I had a generous supply of things I would need to get by here. It seemed that I also had acquired some friends, or at least allies, among the aliens.

From the sun's position, it seemed to be noon, and I took a look at my watch to check. It showed a little past noon but a closer look let me see that it was ten minutes past thirteen o'clock. I guessed that this planet had a longer day than earth and it seemed that the clever engineers had repaired my watch to fit.

I found my ice chest, made a baloney and cheese sandwich, and opened a coke. Since I'd been unconscious for most of the journey, I assumed that my food had been repaired also. I tried not to think about how baloney might be repaired, but it tasted ok.

With my lunch gone, I started going through my possessions, organizing them, and trying to discover what the extra items were. The kit for a wagon got my attention first.

It was actually a framework for a wagon and I even had a small stack of some type of planks. They weren't wood and seemed to be a sort of plastic, but very strong. What the hell, I'd try out my new information storage.

As advertised, thinking of a question about the wheels yielded a description of the kit for a four-wheeled wagon. The other two wheels were duplicates of my originals but made with alien alloys and with an alien plastic for tires instead of rubber.

The plank like material was another alien plastic and the information described it as nearly indestructible. Once assembled, the wagon would be five feet wide, ten feet long, and the box would be three feet from floor to the top edge.

One of the engineers must have been a character, because I also had a set of bows and canvas and the finished wagon would resemble a Conestoga, except for the motorcycle wheels. It even had everything needed for a two-horse hitch: tongue, singletree, double trees, and all the harness.

It was a nice gesture and I sent a mental thanks to the engineers who had done this. I didn't think they'd receive it but I thought it anyway.

It still left me wondering why they'd gone to the trouble of making the wagon when I had the truck and all the fuel it could ever burn. Sure enough, I got another mystery message in my head. This one was even shorter but it wasn't sweet at all.

"There are no roads."

If that wasn't a fucked up deal I don't know what was. I had a perfectly good log truck and all the push-oil I could burn but there wasn't a damned place I could drive it.

It would be good to have it for a shelter if nothing else. A good heater for winter and cold air conditioning for summer would be great but looking around the edges of my safe area, I could see that I wouldn't even be able to get the truck out of it, there wasn't enough room between the trees. Maybe I'd need that wagon after all.

The wagon had me thinking about finding and catching horses and some more information popped up.

Supposedly there were horses near me. Several bands of them roamed in meadows and thin patches of forest about a mile north of my current location.

Wondering about leaving my clearing got a response that let me know that the unnamed greenie hadn't given me the full story. I was free to leave and re-enter my release area for thirty days, but no other humans could enter or leave it during that time unless I was with them and specifically allowed it. That part I'd understood.

The reason for this was something I hadn't considered. The me only access was so I could capture and keep slaves if I wanted to. It also made it impossible for others to capture me and commandeer my possessions before the thirty days were up. They could still capture me if I was out of the area but couldn't get back in to my things until my safe time was up.

I couldn't come up with a reason for collecting slaves though. Slaves, what in the hell did I want with slaves and what kind of place was this where slaves were legal.

My handy dandy information store let me know right away that everything was legal here, since there were no laws an no one to enforce them if there had been any.

Large groups of slaves weren't owned by one man though, as had been the case on earth at one time. It wasn't because it was illegal; it was because one person could not successfully ride herd on a large number of slaves. Invariably, when a man enslaved more than four or five others, they eventually banded together to kill or enslave him.

A sudden twinge in my abdomen let me know that a latrine was the next order of business. I poked around for the entrenching tool that I carried for just such occasions and found it shortly, along with the repaired alien version which looked the same but weighed less than half as much as the original.

The worn out and broken handled round point and flat point shovels I'd usually carried to help me out when I was stuck had been repaired to brand new status too and they also had alien versions. At least I was well set up to dig a shitter.

After finishing my business with the latrine, I decided that I had been mostly wasting time by poking around in my stuff. At first I was going to assemble my wagon and load most of my belongings into it, but the no road revelation changed all that. When my safe time was over I had to be able to get away with my truck.

I found my web belt, strapped on my holster and Glock and headed toward the widest gap in the trees that I could see.

When I reached it I wandered around in the woods near it. There wasn't a road of course but I though that with careful maneuvering and more than a little chain saw work I could fight my way through. In fact there was what looked like a natural trail I could use.

I started off down it, noting where I'd have to fell a tree here and there along the way. I did my best to avoid the biggest ones. A large stream brought me to a stop.

It was probably twelve to fifteen feet wide and could have been three feet deep near the middle. I knelt down beside it and was bringing water to my mouth with my hand when I thought I heard a short curse from upstream, but I couldn't tell how far upstream.

I started that way, slowly and quietly, looking around carefully as I went. I heard another curse and this time I could tell it was a female. She couldn't be more than a couple of hundred yards away. I wanted to go and take a look but I had to be certain I didn't run into more than I could handle, so I made slow and not so steady progress.

Keeping trees between me and where I thought she was, I soldiered on, and then there she was. Standing in the middle of the stream with her back to me, she was apparently looking into the water and concentrating.

In only a few seconds I saw why. She bent over and eased a hand under the surface, reaching slowly. She was trying to tickle a fish. I'd heard of or maybe read that you can ease your hand under them and sometimes raise it quickly and throw them out onto the bank.

It's exactly what she did, jerking her whole body up as she brought up her arm and throwing the fish onto the bank where it flopped and flipped, but was stranded. She let out a contented little laugh this time instead of a curse, and then turned back to her business.

I knew she was busy working for her supper, but all I could think of was the sight or her great ass as she bent over and the wink of her pussy between the backs of her thighs. My newly replenished dick stood up in my pants and I concentrated on being silent.

It was probably ten minutes later when she got another one and this time she whirled around slightly and as her long brown hair fanned out, her large titties swung into view, wiggling and wobbling on her chest. I got a glimpse of half her face too; she was pretty, very pretty.

The two fish must have been enough for her because she turned and headed toward the bank. Misjudging the situation, I stepped from behind the tree, still nearly thirty feet from her, and spoke.

"Nice work," I said.

She whipped her head toward me and her mouth fell open as she gasped. The next thing I knew she turned away, fish forgotten, and made for the opposite bank, still naked as a Jay bird and running as fast as she could.

"Hey, wait," I said stupidly, as she hit the bank running and kept on going.

I didn't intend to let her get away without answering a few questions at least. I was through the stream and after her at once.

If this had been anything like the woods I was familiar with from home, she'd have gotten away. The scarcity of undergrowth here let me catch her easily though. She didn't have a chance of out running me and I could see her plainly.

As I caught up I put a hand out onto her upper arm. She turned, swinging wildly and connecting beside my nose with her clenched fist, then she was off again and trying to run faster.

I didn't bother trying to be so gentle when I caught up again. I tackled her from behind with arms around her waist. I didn't try to drive her into the ground, like I would have in my old high school football days, but I did get her on the ground and hold on.

She squirmed, twisted, and struck out like a wildcat, cursing me almost incoherently now and making an all out effort at escape. Finally I had to take hold of both her wrist and straddle her waist to hold her still.