"I"m sorry, sir," the woman said with an apologetic wince. The only craft now available has room for the pilot and two other people. That"s all."
"Then make another craft available. Do you think my work is so trivial it can be performed unaided?"
"You said that, sir, not me."
"What is your name?" Matthew sputtered.
"Rhys-Hall, sir. Captain Neva M. Rhys-Hall, communications officer. No offense intended, sir. If it"s the pilot"s name you"re wanting, sir, it"s John Greene. He"s scheduled for Harrison"s Fjord anyway at 1220 hours, can refuel there and take you southward. If you can be ready and at the field by then, you"ll save time and be there before dark."
"And accommodations?"
"You"re on your own there, sir. Up till recently, the company never considered this planet worth two depots and command centers. I"d take a sleeping bag and a survival tent, if I were you."
"Thank you for the advice, Captain. I will not forget it." Or you, you impertinent b.i.t.c.h, he told himself.
One a.s.sistant, then? The decision was not difficult to make. Braddock Makem, a man who thought much as Matthew himself did, was the most trusted and resourceful of his a.s.sistants. He found Braddock in his spartan quarters, studying the various reports, and told him what was required of him, in perfect confidence that the gear and Braddock would be ready at the appointed time.
Chapter 9.
When Marmion arrived at the building-which was painted a really awful murky dark green-where Matthew Luzon had set up his office, she found only his five minions, all industriously tapping out commands while their screens showed curves and graphs and columns of figures. She didn"t approve of statistics of any kind: they only proved what the statistician wished them to. Credit reports and prospectuses were, of course, in an entirely different category.
They had the good manners to stand when she entered the room, so she smiled at them while she made a show of peering about.
"I don"t see Dr. Luzon, and I did so wish to have a word with him," she said, beaming at the nearest of the lot. "You are . . ." She struggled to remember Sally"s tips on how to distinguish them one from another. "Ivan, aren"t you?"
"Yes"m."
"And where is Dr. Luzon?" Marmion noted the absence of one-Braddock Makem-and began to realize she might have underestimated Matthew"s devious zealotry. How embarra.s.sing. "Has he gone off into the wilds on adventure and left you here, slogging away at the tedious details?"
One after another of the physically fit young men cleared their throats.
"Ah, I see that he has, and it"s very much too bad of him, as I"d arranged for Captain O"Shay to take all of us to that so-mysterious cave for an on-site investigation. Matthew"s so keen to do on-sites," she put in, managing a little move of disappointment, "and this is one of the most important ones, so Whittaker Fiske a.s.sured me." She paused to consider her disappointment. Then, brightly, she smiled around at them. "But that doesn"t mean that you can"t come with me, since it"s so hard to get a big enough copter to take us all. In fact, just us will take up all the room. So, come on, now. Save those important programs, laddie bucks, grab your anoraks and let"s be off . . ." When another of them-ah, yes, the very blond one was Hans-started to object, she said, "Now, now, I won"t hear any excuses from you, Hans. This is as important as all those figures, because it"s subjective, not objective, and it will certainly show the commission how diligent you are in examining every facet of this investigation."
Sally and Millard had deftly slipped in behind her and were handing out outer wear to the men, who were so accustomed to obeying authority that they automatically complied. They were out the door and in the personnel transport and on their b.u.mping way across to the big copter before they knew what had happened.
Rick O"Shay hurried them aboard, directing the seating in order to balance the load. "Real glad you fellows could make the time for this side trip, because you don"t see much from a shuttle. Blink your eyes and you"re past the interesting points. Miz Algemeine, you"re up front . . . Hey, where"s Dr. Luzon? Rick looked around, surprise and disappointment on his face. I thought he was the one wanted so much to come."
Marmion could have kissed the young man-he was very attractive, anyway-because Ivan and Hans were obviously having second thoughts about the advisability of this sojourn.
"h.e.l.l"s bells." Rick shook his head, a lugubrious expression on his face. Then he brightened up and took a deep breath. "Well, you guys can give him a full report on what he"s missing. That"s it, now buckle up."
The big copter swung up and headed north by east, barely troubled by the turbulence.
Sally was wedged between Hans and Marcel, with Millard at the window and facing Ivan, George, Jack, and Seamus Rourke, whom Marmion had introduced as their expedition guide. Seamus had been Clodagh"s suggestion. "He"s as good, bar Sean or myself, as you"d want or need," Clodagh had a.s.sured her.
"You"ve often been to this cave site, Mr. Rourke?" Sally asked conversationally when she saw the first hint of "should we really be here?" anxiety on Jack"s well-tanned, handsome face. With Marmion out of earshot in the front, Sally felt responsible for keeping things running smoothly in back.
"Not this particular one, Miz Sally," Seamus said affably, twiddling his thumbs: sitting down, doing nothing while traveling a long distance was new to him. "Been in most on the east coast, whenever the folk there invite us to a latchkay. We exchange hospitality like, us in Kilcoole and them on the coast, once a year. Good things, latchkays," he went on when he saw her look of inquiry. "Gets folks from nearby and as far away as the weather permits figurin" out how to solve any problems that"ve come up since the last one. And we get some fine singing done. Too bad you weren"t all here for the last one we had. Fine songs from Major Maddock and young Diego. Kind of songs that ease the heart and mellow the soul. Maybe we could fix it that we have another one, sort of to welcome you all to Petaybee," he added. "What with the early thaw, we couldn"t"ve planned another short of June, but I don"t see why we can"t show you lads a bit of Petaybean hospitality while you"re here. You do like dancing, don"t you?" He asked that with such skepticism that one of Luzon"s men had to reply.
"I think we all do, sir," Hans told him.
"We wouldn"t expect you to sing a" course, unless," Seamus hastily added, not wishing to insult anyone, "you had a song you wanted to share with us."
Luzon"s men looked totally out of their depth. Sally and Millard managed to keep their expressions merely receptive. but they dared not look at each other.
"Ah well, you can always listen," Seamus said, "and eat some real good chow, and a" course, Clodagh makes the best blurry on Petaybee."
"Blurry?" Hans jumped on the word.
Everyone turned toward Seamus.
"Blurry"s a tradition here," Seamus said, warming to his subject. "Drink it cold, warm, hot, and it soothes the c.o.c.kles of the heart. Doesn"t take a man"s senses from him like al-ki-hall-ics do-" He frowned, " and no one"s ever had a hangover like the s.p.a.ceBasers get from that rot gut they drink. You could say . . ." He considered his next words carefully. ". . . that it"s a tonic for what ails you. Give it to the kids when they"re feeling puny, and next day they"re up and out again. "Bout the only thing it can"t cure is frostbite, but I wouldn"t be surprised if Clodagh"ll figure out how to do that soon, too."
Sally and Millard exchanged significant glances. Marmion Algemeine would have to hear every detail of this.
"Is this blurry of yours good for indigestion?" Sally asked, seizing on the common complaint as the safest.
"Sure it is, and as good for labor pains as it is for flatulence, heartburn, and yer all-purpose bellyache," Seamus a.s.sured her, turning his face toward her so that she alone saw the broad wink "Do you use many . . . Local remedies here, Mr. Rourke?" Ivan asked, his eyes sharp on the old man"s face.
"We"ve not much else to use, laddie," Seamus said, hitching his hands up under the slight sag of his belly on his thighs. "And I"m not criticizing s.p.a.ceBase folk if they keep their own medicine for their own people. We got ours and it works for us. Petaybee takes care of us real well, you know."
"That"s exactly what we"re here to decide," Hans said, setting his jaw at an obstinate angle.
Inwardly Sally groaned. Maybe kidnapping these young men out from under Matthew"s rigid authority had not been such a good idea after all. Certainly having Seamus Rourke as a guide was turning disastrous, since he had already implied the existence of one questionable substance in the "blurry." The wink had indicated that perhaps he was simply having a joke on them, but people like Matthew Luzon had no sense of humor, and Sally knew that Luzon would be delighted to learn of blurry"s "miraculous" properties and suggest the possibility of "drug-induced hallucinations." First thing she would do when they returned to s.p.a.ceBase would be to get herself some blurry and run it through exhaustive tests, just to be safe. Sometimes even innocuous elements, when combined, produced potent, if not lethal, results.
A glance at Millard told her he was thinking the same thing.
Fortunately, before any other dangerous subjects could be raised, the helicopter went into hover mode and began its descent. The cliff loomed over them higher and higher, rock crags like upturned claws avoided by inches as Rick Amaluk O"Shay neatly put the skids in the footprint of his previous landing.
There was the bustle of disembarkation, with Rick and Millard distributing hand torches, a blanket-"to sit on during the show"-and a packet of rations, so that Sally didn"t have a chance to report to Marmion. When Seamus enthusiastically urged them to follow him into the cave, there was no option to refuse or hang back, especially with Rick acting as rear guard.
One of Luzon"s lads was talking into a handheld recorder, but when Sally got close enough to hear him, he was merely mumbling about the composition of the rock surfaces and reminding himself to look up examples of luminescent rock types.
Suddenly they were in a cavern that stretched incredibly far in all directions, with Seamus chivvying them to find themselves a comfortable spot, in case they had to wait a bit.
"What? No blurry?"" one of the lads murmured.
"You don"t need no blurry in a cave, boy," Seamus said severely. With a sniff of disgust, he found himself a comfortable k.n.o.b to settle on.
"What"s this "blurry"?" Marmion asked Sally.
"It"s a native drink," Sally began. Then she noticed the mist rising from the water, and started taking note of their surroundings. "Why, Marmion, this is just like-"
Marmion"s hand on her arm stopped her surprised exclamation. "Exactly what Whittaker Fiske and that doubting Thomas of a son of his reported .. . We"ll talk later."
Marmion always sat upright and managed to do so even on the hard surface of the cave, crossing her legs and resting her hands lightly on her knees. Sally felt that the ancient meditational position was quite suitable and copied it as the mist began to thicken and swirl around them.
She remembered sniffing deeply, wondering if there was some sort of hallucinogenic in the very air they were breathing, but if there was, it was nothing she had ever encountered anywhere. And she had been just about everywhere Intergal went.
Everyone heard the thwump-thwump of the copter echoing back and forth across the fjord. Yana rushed out of the kitchen where she"d been helping cut veg for the evening meal. Shielding her eyes against the westering sun, she saw the flash of sunlight off the rotors.
Fingaard and some of the other men were rushing down the switch back road to the wide terrace of the wharf area. Sean had gone out with the fishermen that morning. Turning her back on the incoming copter, Yana looked down the long high-walled fjord for a glimpse of returning fishing boats. She"d been appalled when she"d seen how insubstantial the curraghs were: no more than hides bound to a larchwood framework with a wide slat, bored through the center so a slim mast could be stepped into the hole and a small sail attached. The current carried them out with the tide and in with the tide; otherwise it was a long, hard paddle up the Fjord unless the wind was just right to use the sail.
She breathed a sigh of relief to see black blobs on the horizon raise small white triangles of sails as they made their way up the fjord. Then she turned again to head in the direction of the approaching copter. She had her foot on the first step when Nanook casually barred her way.
"C"mon now, I need a word with Johnny, Nanook!"
From the big black-and-white cat issued a noise that was half snarl, half voice command. Bunny had said Nanook could speak to those he chose to have listen to him. This comment didn"t need words. Nanook"s warning was too clear.
"Something"s wrong with the copter, Nanook?" Yana asked.
Nanook sneezed and sat down, barring her way up the steps.
She peered more intently and saw two men in the front of the copter. And only one of them was someone she wanted to see.
"Ooops!" She turned and hurried back into the house. Nanook followed. That did surprise her. "I won"t go out if you don"t want me to," she told him.
He sneezed again and settled himself by the hearth.
"Ardis, is there any way you can hint to Johnny Greene that I"m here, and Sean"s out with the curraghs? They"re on their way in."
"Sure, if that"s what"s needed," Ardis said, grinning as she hauled off her ap.r.o.n. "Johnny might just have a letter for me from my sister up New Barrow way. She"s expecting-again."
The last cat in McGee"s Pa.s.s was named Shush, because in her youth she had been a noisy kitten. Those days were long past. Shush was not the last cat left in the pa.s.s because she lacked discretion. She was silent as smoke, quick as a spark, and very, very discreet. She had learned discretion shortly after Satok came to live among the people. The skull on his staff had once graced her father"s shoulders.
It was she who had sent word to the Kilcoole cats that the people of McGee"s Pa.s.s would vote to mine, as Satok had been urging them to do. Frankly, she didn"t know if they would or not, but saying so could have brought someone to challenge Satok. Stupid cats of Kilcoole to send only two half-grown kittens! And now Satok had taken one of them. Perhaps soon her skull would be an ornament for him, as well.
Shush"s family had been murdered. More critically from her viewpoint, all the toms had been murdered. She had gone through heat after heat alone, risking death in the woods to keep her cries from reaching the ears of Satok. Krisuk Connelly commiserated with her occasionally, but everyone else had been told the cats were spies; which, of course, they were, since it was only natural to lurk and spy and satisfy one"s curiosity.
Until she had heard from the Kilcoole cats, in fact, she had imagined herself the last cat on Petaybee.
Well, the last proper cat anyway. There were lynxes, of course, and bobcats, and she had once or twice heard the hunting cry of a track-cat, but her mother had told her that those sorts of creatures, if you caught them on a bad day or when they had nothing in particular to socialize about, would eat you as soon as look at you.
So Shush stayed solitary for years, living off her wits, spying on the village and making herself invisible whenever Satok was around. It had taken a great deal for her to lead the Kilcoole cats" people to the cave, but she had in mind that somehow, being from elsewhere, these ones might not succ.u.mb to Satok.
When the girl was taken there was no one to cry to. The dog lay stricken, as Shush"s own family had been stricken, by Satok"s cruel staff. Krisuk and the Kilcoole boy were in the dead place. Not even to save a litter of her own would Shush brave that place.
Instead she bounded off in the opposite direction, down the road and out of town, back tracking the hoofprints of the big horses, already nearly lost in the snow. When she was tired, she rested, licked the snow from her feet, and thought. The Kilcoole cats had contacted her, but she didn"t know how they had done it. She had been trying to flush out a rabbit at the time, pawing at the half-thawed ground, when a voice spoke to her in her own tongue, within her mind. She asked the voice who it was, thinking it was perhaps the ghost of one of her relatives, asking if it was safe to spend another life there, but the voice replied that although it was, like herself, a cat, it was from the village of Kilcoole.
The voice belonged to a tom. She was sure of that. The question was not highly detailed. It wanted to know if the people of McGee"s Pa.s.s would mine for the company or not. She said they would if they were told to, which had been her experience of them. They weren"t bad people, but Satok had taken away their partnership with the planet and creatures like herself and turned it to his own purposes and against them.
The tom had said nothing about people coming, but Shush sensed that there would be visitors. They had come! And now Satok was dividing them and destroying them as he had so much in the village.
So Shush left, having nothing more to wait for. She leaped from one horse track to another. She sniffed when the track disappeared; she felt the howling wind roughing her fur the wrong way.
Late that night she found where the horse and dog tracks met with other tracks, including those that made her lift her lips in recognition. A track-cat, quite likely a Kilcoole cat, since the people had come from Kilcoole. A large one. And more horse tracks, like those of the people. She clawed at the cat tracks, rubbed her head against them, marked them with her scent. From the other scents mingled with the big cat"s, he had been among others of her kind and probably was unlikely to eat her.
Thinking that these new folk might be camped just ahead, she followed the tracks. But she was small and the trail was long, and Satok had won again. She yowled for the Kilcoole cats to answer her, but none did.
Finally, at daybreak, she slept for a few hours, then began moving again, though the tracks were older and much harder to follow. What other choice did she have?
Matthew Luzon felt aggrieved and aggravated by the pilot"s att.i.tude. He had felt from the first that this Captain Greene did not take him and his mission with sufficient gravity. He did not exude a positive att.i.tude. He also appeared to be an uncommonly bad driver, hitting every pocket of turbulence no matter which alt.i.tude he attained, flying far too close to mountain tops at times and into cloud banks at others.
And that was after they were finally on their way. The man had dawdled an unconscionably long time loading various items into the cargo net behind the seats. In fact, the copter would have been quite large enough for all of Matthew"s a.s.sistants, had it not been for this cargo.
"Here, can"t you leave that behind?" he"d demanded at one point when his patience was strained, but the pilot just smiled and said, "No can do, sir. The villagers at the Fjord need this stuff. Be with you in a jiff."
Then had come the dreadful flight and Braddock regurgitating all over the floor, so they"d had to smell it during the entire first leg of the trip.
When they landed at Harrison"s Fjord, a pretty little place, he disembarked from the aircraft to allow Braddock to clean up his mess and found himself a boulder to occupy up wind, where he could continue his annotations. The pilot opened all the windows and doors to flush out the rest of the stench.
"Gotta unload, Dr. Luzon," the man said, although Matthew had a.s.sumed an att.i.tude that few would have bothered to interrupt. "And refuel. Might as well take on some grub now." Then he lowered his voice so that his words would not carry to Braddock, lying on a mossy stretch of ground, legs drawn up to his aching belly. "They do good fish fries." Matthew waved his hand dismissively at the mention of such greasy fare. "And," the pilot went on, indicating Braddock, "get him an air sickness pill. He ought to have mentioned the problem before we took off."
Matthew nodded, wondering why the pilot had not had the courtesy to inquire before they took off from s.p.a.ceBase. Then the village folk arrived to help unload, and the pilot turned to greet the one woman in the group. She was a slightly different rustic type from those Matthew had seen in Kilcoole. She chatted affably with the pilot as he and some of the men unloaded the helicopter. Matthew wrote down the iniquities of the flight he had just endured to be sure they were entered onto the pilot"s record. He noticed that someone had given Braddock a blanket to keep off the chill of wind stirred by the idly rotating propeller blades.
Scanning the village, Matthew a.s.sumed that the chief industry was fishing. No doubt this would present a fruitful sub-culture to study, since coastal peoples occupying somewhat more temperate areas undoubtedly had customs, mores, and folkways that differed from those in the interior. He made a note, since Braddock was in no position to take dictation, to return for a proper investigation later.
When he made one more sweeping scan of the village before reboarding the newly lightened copter, he was surprised to notice, sunning itself in the doorway, a very large cat. About the size of a panther, he supposed, except that it did not have the conformation of one of those sleek, predatory, and now almost extinct beasts. Though large, it was more like an immense domestic feline, with rather common black and white markings. Possibly one of the track-cats he had heard so much about: one of the miraculous beasts said to have aided in the rescue of the Fiskes and to have been instrumental in the healing of Frank Metaxos.
He stood up, closing his notepad and wondering if it was wise to approach the beast. It did not seem to be under anyone"s control. If it happened to be a stray, perhaps he could acquire it for the laboratory and extensive examination. He was about to order the pilot to have the beast caged until he could return for it when the pilot beckoned urgently to him and unceremoniously boosted him back aboard. Braddock was already belted in, thankfully looking more sleepy than nauseated. Before Matthew could mention the cat or protest their precipitous departure, the rotors were whirling and the aircraft was up over the deep waters of the fjord, well above the masts of some primitive sailing craft.
Oddly, the flight to the southern continent was markedly absent of the turbulence they had encountered over land. Matthew attempted to shout over the noise in the cabin, a query about the village they had just left. He finally resorted to touching Greene"s shoulder to get his attention. The man merely smiled affably. tapping his earphones, and shrugged. Matthew subsided in his seat and tightened his seat belt-then had to loosen it slightly or risk cutting off the circulation in his torso. He did not like being isolated by the exigencies of travel and wondered why there was only one headset. So he made a tremendous effort to contain himself during what was likely to be a very dull and long journey. Fortunately the cold air and the smells of machine oil covered the faint residue of Braddock"s indiscretion.
Every time Matthew flew in one of these vehicles, he resolved to take flying lessons, for the procedures seemed ridiculously simple, but he never seemed to find the time for the formal course. Once, a long-gone member of his bevy of a.s.sistants, a perhaps too easily influenced young man, had showed an apt.i.tude for flying. Unfortunately, as soon as he had learned to fly, his personality changed, and he no longer demonstrated the qualities of unswerving loyalty and unquestioning obedience Matthew insisted upon in an a.s.sistant.
He suspected that the man flying the copter was not of the caliber required in an aide either. Matthew"s opinion was confirmed when he retrieved a report from his case and noticed, stowed under his seat, the headphones that should immediately have been offered to him by Greene. At once, he plugged these into the socket on the armrest and placed them over his ears. A burst of static poured through them that made him wrench them off.
Tapping the pilot authoritatively on the shoulder, he pointed at the headset. Grinning, the pilot shook his head, moved his mouth piece aside, and leaned over to say, "Don"t work!"
Matthew"s reactions included amazement, anger, frustration, and total disgust with the inefficiency and indifference shown by the inhabitants of this world. People were scattered all over the universe, some of them living in highly sophisticated, totally engineered environments, all scrupulously maintained by Intergal. He ended up on an incredibly primitive world with a headset, similar to hundreds he had used before, that failed to work due to what was surely an easily remedied technical difficulty.
Of course, this sort of aircraft was only slightly improved over its ancient counterpart. The old ones had had neither speed nor range and had been limited in the alt.i.tudes they could achieve. This particular one, with its incidental malfunctions, was by no means state-of-the-art: it hadn"t the power to lift out of the planet"s atmosphere, and was excruciatingly noisy.
However, it required very little s.p.a.ce to land, could hover, and could set down safely, if necessary, at night unaided by light from the ground. That ability, he reflected, as he studied the map printout on his wrist unit, was a necessary requirement.
He wanted to ask the pilot if flights to the southern continent were frequent. Surely they must be. This planet north and south, had long been used for troop recruitment, an occupation the so-called sentient world did not seem to obstruct. Ah, and he qualified that as he remembered his notes. It was the young who answered recruitment drafts: those who had not yet been mutated by whatever toxins in their soil produced the glandular deformity and the deposit of "brown fat" that supposedly allowed older members of the population to survive the extreme temperatures.
The nearest city to Harrison"s Fjord on the southern continent was Bogota, at the mouth of the Lacrimas River. The sizable peninsula on which the city was situated extruded like a big, clumsy thumb into the sea. He had, of course, scrutinized the maps of this region, now entering its winter season. Most of the population centers-one could hardly call them cities-were situated on the coastal plains near the major rivers: Bogota on the Lacrimas, Kabul on the eastern fork of the New Ganges, and Lhasa on the Sierra Sangre. Another village called Sierra Padre was located farther up the Sierra Sangre at the foot of the Sierra Padre Mountains. A settlement known as Kathmandu was isolated within yet another mountain range, optimistically dubbed the Shambalas.
Kathmandu seemed a likely place to look for culture uncontaminated by the crackpot pseudo-mystical theones of the natives of the north. Bogota, being the largest and most accessible population center, was the most likely to have been influenced.
For hours after they left the warm harbor of Harrison"s Fjord, flanked by the ice-packed coast of the rest of the northern continent, they skimmed the cold gray of the ocean, which didn"t particularly depress Matthew, as cold gray was one of his favorite colors. Huge chunks of ice floated in these waters, as large as islands or small continents themselves. Initial reports had suggested that the southern edge of the northern continent had many glaciers which constantly calved into the un.o.bstructed oceans that girdled the planet.