only about fifty miles away,” I said. “I could walk it in a day.”
“There isn’t a highway,” Karen pointed out.
“No, but those slopes are very shallow. And there’s no obstruction worthy of the name. With the day here being as long as it is, and this being summer hereabouts, there must be nearly twenty hours daylight in our terms. I could do it.”
“Fifty miles is a hell of a long way,” she said.
“I’m fit. And I’m also interested. If that’s Dr. Livingstone I’d love to play Stanley.”
“Sure,” she said. “And I’m She-who-must-be-Obeyed.”
“You have to stay with the ship anyhow,” I pointed out. “More repairs. Anyhow, it’s less than fifty. Maybe only forty. Depends how far off the edge of this last print we are. It can’t be all that far—I can see that peak clearly enough and that’s a good twenty miles farther on.”
“You can see a long way in the mountains,” she said, “when you’re looking at other mountains.”
I eyed the clock speculatively. “I can sleep most of the day,” I said. “Then put the idea to Nathan late this afternoon. We could make an early start, assuming he wants to come too.”
She shrugged. I couldn’t tell whether it was because she thought it was a dumb idea or because she wouldn’t be able to come along. “Mme. Levasseur isn’t going to like it,” she said, ominously.
“I’m sure Nathan can put it to her in a way that makes it very difficult for her to forbid it. Besides which, she can’t forbid it without giving us a reason, and that would mean giving up her policy of playing the cards so close to her chest.”
I paused, then added: “One of these days we’ll land on a world where everything is nice and straightforward.”
“Hardly,” she replied. “Our next stop’s the least straightforward place in the universe.”
CHAPTER FOUR
It was, of course, a good idea in principle. The words “fifty miles” roll off one’s tongue so lightly, and the words “less than fifty miles” have a positively enthusiastic tone about them. But our mouths have more ambition than our feet. Words, whatever common parlance may say, speak a great deal more loudly than actions. By the time we’d walked for three hours the distance still to be covered no longer seemed like an easy prospect. It seemed to have stretched to mammoth proportions.
It had been easy enough to talk Nathan into coming along. He was exasperated by the annoyingly secretive Helene Levasseur, who was on her way to “find” us and to “rescue” us, but who was in the meantime taking pains to see that nothing disturbed our blissful ignorance of the way things were on Geb. Nathan had tackled her with the information that there seemed to be people up here in the mountains, camped in an elliptical crater a mere day’s walk away. She admitted that she’d known of the man’s presence somewhere in the vicinity—she gave his name as Johann Gley and spoke as if there were only one of him—but she advised us to stay away from him, on what seemed to be the rather slender excuse that he was not known for his sociability.
When Nathan made it clear that we intended to make contact she was obviously peeved but merely repeated that it wasn’t a good idea. She came forth with no hints whatsoever about what Gley might be doing up here. When asked point blank she said she didn’t know, and added the acid comment: “He owns the mountains.” She didn’t seem delighted by the fact. She assured us that she was on her way up into the hills with a party of Sets and would reach us in four or five days, provided that there were no accidents en route. Whether her estimate was reasonable we had no way of knowing. Nathan asked if the other individuals who appeared to be in the crater with Gley were also Sets, and she replied that it was probably a reasonable inference. That wasn’t telling us anything we couldn’t have worked out for ourselves—and, indeed, was bordering on insult.
Nathan tried to make light of the issue. “She doesn’t trust us,” he said. “And why should she. She thinks we’ve come to make some kind of report on what’s happened on this world. And she’s right. She probably thinks that the UN might disapprove strongly of certain things that might have happened—and might be happening—here. And she’s probably right. She’s worried about what, if anything, we or the people we report to might do about it. There she probably has nothing to worry about, in that there’s very little we can do. But she doesn’t know that and she isn’t going to take our word for it. She wants a good, long, close look at us before she starts to tell us what we want to know.”
But it is no real consolation to know that the mistrust of others is to a large extent justified. It still left us in the frustrating position of speculating much and knowing little. And so we elected to take action. Nathan fell in with my plan, and we set out shortly after dawn on the next day, with a long, long walk ahead of us. It took, as I said, about three hours for much of our enthusiasm to drain away through tired feet—but by then we were committed.
We rested on a patch of bare ground that was cold beneath our backsides. Although it was summer the air was crisp, and when the wind blew it cut into our faces. But it was by no means unpleasant once we grew used to it, and the continuous action of our muscles kept us warm enough internally. There was no snow here, although the distant peaks we could see all had white patches on the high slopes. There was a low murmurous sound made by insects meandering through patches of flowering plants that interrupted the coarse grasses. Occasionally we could hear birds calling, though none came very close except when we skirted great carpets of prostrate thorn-creepers which had purple berries on which the smaller birds fed.
“It’s downhill for a long way now,” I said.
“Then it’s uphill for a long way,” said Nathan, choosing to look on the dark side. “With maybe a few bumps and ditches thrown in for variety.”
“It’s easy country,” I reminded him. “And if we have to camp out for the night we can.” We had only light packs, but we’d prudently packed sleeping bags. We had a small radio to keep in touch with the Daedalus, but it wasn’t very powerful. Our number one mobile communications apparatus had been lost, along with a lot of other equipment, on Attica.
“While you were asleep,” he said, changing the subject, “I asked Mariel what she made of Helene Levasseur’s voice. There was something in her tone I thought odd. I didn’t expect much—Mariel’s talent for thought-reading depends much more on sight than on sound—but Mariel thought it was odd too. There’s some anxiety in her voice that was there from the very first moment. Quite apart from the shock of our arrival. It was as though when we turned up it was just an extra problem on the stack—an additional inconvenience. Asking us to get those pictures was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and since we had to ditch I think she’s been half regretting it. On the one hand she wants the pictures, but on the other she’s not sure she wants us to have them. I think Gley’s up here looking for something, and she wants to find it too. Something important.”
“El Dorado?”
“Wrong scale of values.”
“The Fountain of Youth, then.”
Nathan shook his head. “It’s a little more pressing than that.”
“The survey team did an aerial scan of the whole continent for mapping purposes,” I said. “But what she wants obviously didn’t show up there.”
“They took their
