Free Forty Thousand in Gehenna by C. J. Cherryh

with a combination of strange scents; felt the gravity which was different than the standard G of ships and a little different than that of Cyteen. He felt a slight sense of panic and refused to betray it.
    The staff waited, solemn, at the foot of the ramp. He walked down—he wore civilian clothes now, no uniform; and took the hand of Ada Beaumont and of Bob Davies and of Peter Gallin…in shock at the change in them, at shaved heads and shaved faces, when the rest of the mission was now at least well-stubbled.
    “I didn’t authorize this,” he said to Ada Beaumont. Temper surged up in him; outrage. He remembered they had witnesses and smothered the oath. “What’s going on?”
    “It seemed,” Beaumont said firmly, “efficient. It’s dirty down here.”
    He swept a glance about him, at the sameness; at military officers converted to azi-like conformity. Beaumont’s democracy. Beaumont’s style. He scowled. “Trouble?”
    “No. My initiative. It seemed to create a distinction down here—apart from regulations. I apologize, sir.”
    In public. In front of the others. He took a grip on himself. “It seems,” he said, “a good idea on that basis.” He looked beyond them, and about him—at the last load coming off the last shuttle flight, his personal baggage and less essential items, and the last few techs. He let his eyes focus on the mountains, on the whole sweep of the land.
    On the far bank of the river rose grassy mounds, abrupt and distinctive. He pointed that way. “Those are the neighbors, are they?”
    “That’s the caliban mounds, yes, sir.”
    He stared at them. At uncertainty. He wished they had not been so close. He scanned the camp, the tents which stretched row on row onto the plain at their right…azi, above forty thousand azi, a city in plastic and dust. The earthmovers whined away, making more bare dirt. Permanent walls were going up in the center of the camp, foamset domes, obscured by the dust of a crawler. “What’s in?” he asked Beaumont. “Got the hookup?”
    “Power’s functioning as of half an hour ago, and we’re shifted off the emergency generator. We’re now on the Newport Power Company. They’re laying the second line of pipe now, so we’ll have waste treatment soon. Hot water’s at a premium, but the food service people have all they need.”
    He walked with them, beside Beaumont, gave a desultory wave at workers who had come out with a transport to carry the baggage to camp. He walked, electing not to use the transport…inhaled the dust and the strangeness and the unfamiliar smell of sea not far distant. In some respects it was like Cyteen. There was a feeling of insulation about him, a sense of unreality; he shook it off and looked about him for plant life that might prove to his senses that he was on an alien world—but the earthmovers had scraped all that away. There were only the azi tents, all of them in neat lines stretching away into the dust; and finally the camp center, where earthmovers dug the foundations for more plastic foam construction, where dome after dome had already sprung up like white fungus among the tents, one bubbled onto the next.
    They were thirty six hours into the construction.
    “You’ve done a good job,” he said to Ada Beaumont, loudly, amends for the scene at the ramp, in which he had embarrassed himself. “A good job.”
    “Thank you, sir.”
    There was caution there. In all of them. He looked about him again, at the entourage of department heads who had begun to follow them, at others who had joined them in their walk into the center of the camp. “I’ll be meeting with you,” he said. “But it’s all automatic, isn’t it? Meetings aren’t as important as your building and your job schedules. So I’ll postpone all of the formalities. I think it’s more important to get everyone under shelter.”
    There were nods, murmurs, excuses finally as one and another of them found reason to move off.
    “I’d like to find my