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little clubs outside Chicago-if the engagements bad been consecutive she would have been well enough off, but there were weeks and months between them. She did not, however, actually starve. By the time Dolly got to Peggy’s Planet the jagged corners of The Act had banged against so many hostile audiences or drunk ones that it had worn into some sort of serviceable shape. Not good enough for a real career. Good enough to keep her alive. Getting to Peggy’s Planet was a desperation move, because you had to sign your life away for the passage. There was no stardom here, but she wasn’t any worse off, either. And if she was no longer saving herself, exactly, at least she didn’t spend herself very profligately. When Audee Walthers, Jr., came along, he offered a higher price than most others had proposed-marriage. So she did it. At eighteen. To a man twice her age.
    Dolly’s hard life, though, wasn’t really that much harder than anyone else’s on Peggy’s-not counting, of course, people like Audee’s oil prospectors. The prospectors paid full fare to get to Peggy’s Planet, or their companies did, and every one of them surely had a paid-up return ticket in his pocket.
    It did not make them more cheerful. It was a six-hour flight to the point on West Island they had chosen for a base camp. By the time they had eaten and popped their shelters and said their prayers a time or two, not without arguments about which direction to face in, their hangovers were pretty well dissipated, but it was also pretty well too late to get anything done that day. For them. Not for Walthers. He was ordered to fly crisscross strikes across twenty thousand hectares of billy scrub. As he was merely towing a mass sensor to measure gravitational anomalies, it did not matter that he had to do it in the dark. It did not matter to Mr. Luqman, at any rate, but it mattered a lot to Walthers, because it was precisely the sort of flying that he hated most; his altitude had to be quite low, and some of the hills were fairly high. So he flew with both radar and searchbeams going all the time, terrifying the slow, stupid animals that inhabited these West Island savannahs, and terrifying himself when he found himself dozing off and waking to claw for altitude as a shrub-topped hill summit rushed toward him.
    He managed five hours’ sleep before Luqman woke him to order a photographic reconnaissance of a few unclear sites, and when that was done he was set to dropping spikes all over the terrain. The spikes were not simple solid metal; they were geophones, and they had to be set in a receiving array kilometers in length. Moreover, they had to drop from at least twenty meters to be sure to penetrate the surface and stand upright so that their readings would be trustworthy, and each one bad to be placed within a circular error of two meters. It did Walthers no good to point out that these requirements were mutually contradictory, so it was no surprise to him that when the truck-mounted vibrators did their thing the petrological data were no use at all. Do it over, said Mr. Luqman, and so Walthers had to retrace his steps on foot, pulling out the geophones and hammering them in by hand.
    What he had signed on to do was pilot, but Mr. Luqman took a broader view. Not just trudging around with the geophone spikes. One day they had him digging for the tick-like creatures that were the Peggy’s equivalent of earthworms, aerating the soil. The next they gave him a thing like a Roto-Rooter, which dug itself down into the soil a few dozen meters and pulled out core samples. They would have had him peeling potatoes if they had eaten potatoes, and did in fact try to lumber him with all the dishwashing-backing off only to the extent that it was finally agreed to do it in strict rotation. (But Walthers noticed that Mr.
    Luqman’s turn never seemed to come.) Not that the chores weren’t interesting. The tick-like bugs went into a jar of solvent and the soup that