Will

2029 July 14 20:00 UT
Test Year 2, Day 283, 20:00 CST
Tau, Caltech, Mina Grohar’s Apartment

It had been eighty-six days since the four young men had left Caltech, riding recalcitrant zards to the north as fast as Dan Wing had taught them. The plains held hazards, the predatory version of the domestic animal, as well as pedes and other risks, but the cowboys were usually able to handle them, and had kept going for seventy-three days. By then, their supplies had long since run out, and they had all lost their mounts. They had wearied of each other’s company and split apart, only to rejoin at the only waterhole for twenty kilometers, and eventually they had decided to turn back. They might have been planning to raid the outer fields instead of spending so much time hunting and searching for food, or they might have been simply penitent, as they claimed when Matt Wing’s ninja patrol found them.

There were still eleven exiles unaccounted for, but after the meeting to decide the fate of this group, Will ran through the heavy rain of the latest wet-season storm to strike this coast. He had been promised dinner by Mina, since she was at campus until two days from now, when she moved out to the Iron Hills bunker. But he had something rather more important than domesticating the small pede to discuss with her. Knowing himself, he realized that he had accelerated this because of the war at MIT and the threat of Chao’s missiles getting through, but that he would have done it eventually anyway. He burned with anticipation.

Mina had found the gold deposit; nuggets in a tributary of the Throop in the Gell-Manns, with a vein in the rock further up. She had also found silver and what might be low concentrations of platinum-groups in the same area, but Will had restricted himself to a small piece of nearly pure gold. For three nights, he had worked in the student shop. He alloyed the metal slightly to strengthen it, and cast a ring of the precise size for Mina’s hand. Examiner-heightened senses have some unforeseen uses. With the permission of the keeper of the Geology Museum, he had liberated a pre-cut blue diamond and carefully set it in place. Most of the gem-quality diamonds on campus were synthetics, of course, but this one had been extracted from South Africa long ago.

She did not refuse it, or its bearer.