Promised Land by Brian Stableford

place better than you could ever hope to know it. Doesn’t it strike you as a considerable idiocy to march in here, knowing next to nothing about the practicalities of jungle expeditions, as if...’ I paused ‘...as if you owned the bloody place.’
    I should, of course, have realised before I began.
    â€˜Oh, the hell with the lot of you,’ I said, with feeling. ‘Give me that gun.’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Look,’ I said, adopting the wrong approach as a matter of course, ‘you aren’t fit to be trusted with a bucket and spade. Give me the gun.’
    â€˜Go to hell,’ he said.
    I shook my head in tired despair. ‘We very probably will,’ I said. ‘All of us. And sooner than you think.’
    Which dire prediction closed the conversation.
    I could count two things on my side—experience and the wind. Apart from those, I would have to place my meagre faith in the Anacaona and blind chance. What I didn’t know about what could go wrong would have filled an encyclopaedia. I only hoped that Danel’s years as a spiderhunter had given him all the expertise he needed. Somehow, I doubted it. He wasn’t that old. I wondered how many spiders he had chopped to death with his trusty axe. He, at least, was appreciative enough of danger to carry a beamer to back him up in the event of unforeseen circumstance.
    I couldn’t relax.
    I was concerned for Eve even more than for myself. She hadn’t done anything to deserve this. She was going to be more uncomfortable than I. She was going to get a lot more tired than I. And she was in quasi-blissful ignorance of how bad it all was, which might keep her from being scared, but sure as hell wouldn’t keep her from being careless. If anyone was fated to die on this crazy joyride, she was the number one candidate. I didn’t like that. My life had already been sufficiently plagued by dying Lapthorns.
    I found the excess of fellow-feeling an embarrassment.
    We walked all day, and we sat still all night. So much for optimism.
    When it began to get dark—and darkness in the forest was as black as the caves of Rhapsody—we lit lamps and set about industriously clearing a space to pitch our tents in. The clearing was easy, because the plants which made up the bulk of the undergrowth were soft-structured and not attached to their roots with any degree of intimacy. For the first time, however, we were able to appreciate the multitudinous size of the creepy-crawly population. Though the insects here could grow as big as they wanted, most of them obviously found it convenient to stay small. The bugs looked offensively like bugs everywhere else. Shake a bush on virtually every populous world in the known galaxy, and the living detritus which falls to the ground will look pretty much the same. I’ve known bugs awaken quite a sense of nostalgia in some spacemen on worlds where everything else was noticeably unearthly. Not me, of course.
    The kindly authorities who had been prevailed upon to supply our little expedition had seen fit to supply only three tents. We were obviously going to be crowded. Somewhat against my will, I was persuaded to share with Max.
    The one good thing about our source of supply was that they didn’t make us eat gruel. This was one advantage to their being so wilfully primitive. They just didn’t realise how unusual it was for us to go such a long time without encountering either gruel or masquerading synthetics.
    After supper, Max called up the base we’d left that morning and chatted amiably to the people who were theoretically looking after us. We didn’t need a drop so soon, of course, but Max let them fix our beep so that they knew where we were. Just in case. I was surprised by this hint of caution—although it would have been matter-of-course under slightly different circumstances.
    I wondered how much information about our progress was being reported back to