"Look.  The sides aren't very steep.  I've been down worse a hundred times.  We'll just take it slow and easy, okay?"

"The land ahead is impassible," the truck said.  "Please return to the originally scheduled course."

Wagner was on now. Tannhauser.  Impatiently, he thought it off.

"If you're so damned heuristic, then why won't you ever listen to reason?"  He chewed his lip angrily, gave a quick shake of his head.  "No, going back would put us way off schedule.  The rille is bound to peter out in a few hundred meters.  Let's just follow it until it does, then angle back to Murchison.  We'll be at the park in no time."

Three hours later he finally hit the Murchison road.  By then he was sweaty and smelly and his shoulders ached with tension.  "Where are we?" he asked sourly.  Then, before the truck could answer, "Cancel that."  The soil had turned suddenly black.  That would be the ejecta fantail from the Sony-Reinpfaltz mine.  Their railgun was oriented almost due south in order to avoid the client factories, and so their tailings hit the road first.  That meant he was getting close.

Murchison was little more than a confluence of truck treads, a dirt track crudely leveled and marked by blazes of orange paint on nearby boulders.  In quick order Gunther passed through a series of landmarks:  Harada Industrial fantail, Sea of Storms Macrofacturing fantail, Krupp funfzig fantail.  He knew them all.  G5 did the robotics for the lot.

A light flatbed carrying a shipped bulldozer sped past him, kicking up a spray of dust that fell as fast as pebbles.  The remote driving it waved a spindly arm in greeting.  He waved back automatically, and wondered if it was anybody he knew.

The land