New America

PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN

After three hours of troubled sleep, Dan Coffin awoke to the same knowing: They haven’t called in.

Or, have they? his mind asked, and answered: Unlikely. I gave strict orders I be told whenever word came, whatever it was.

So Mary’s voice has not reached us since dusk. She’s lost, in danger. He forced himself to add: Or she’s dead.

Forever stilled, that joyousness that ran from the radio to him especially? “Remember, Dan, we’ve got a date exactly three tendays from now. ‘Bye till then. I’ll be waiting.” No!

Understanding it was useless, and thinking that he ought to get more rest, he left his bunk. The rug, a cerothere hide, felt scratchy under his bare feet, and the clay floor beyond was cold. The air did surround him with warmth and sound —trillings, croakings, the lapping of waves, and once from the woods a carnivore’s scream —but he hardly noticed. Paleness filled the windows. Otherwise his cabin was dark. He didn’t turn on a light to help him dress. When you spend a lot of time in the wilderness, you learn how to do things after sunset without a fluoropanel over your head.

Weariness ached in him, as if his very bones felt the drag of a fourth again Earth’s gravity. But that’s nonsense, he thought. His entire life had been spent on Rustum. No part of him had ever known Earth—except his chromosomes and the memories they bore of billionfold years of another evolution—I’m simply worn out from worrying,.

When he trod outside, a breeze ruffled his hair (as Mary’s fingers had done) and its coolness seemed to renew his strength. Or maybe that came from the odors it brought, fragrances of soil and water and hastening growth. He filled his lungs, leaned back against the rough solidity of walls, and tried to inhale serenity from this, his homeland. A few thousand human beings, isolated on a world that had not bred their race, must needs be wary. Yet did they sometimes make such a habit of it that there could be no peace for them ever?

The two dozen buildings of the station, not only the log shelters like his own but the newer metal-and-plastic prefabs, seemed a part of the landscape, unless they were simply lost in its immensity. Behind them, pastures and grainfields reached wanly to a towering black wall of forest. Before them, Lake Moondance murmured and sheened to a half-seen horizon; and above that world-edge soared mountains, climbing and climbing until their tiers were lost in the cloud deck.

The middle of heaven was clear, though, as often happened on summer nights. Both satellites were aloft there. Raksh was nearly at maximum distance, a tiny copper sickle, while Sohrab never showed much more than a spark. The light thus came chiefly from natural sky-glow and stars. Those last were more sharp and multitudinous than was usual when you looked up through the thick lowland air. Dan could even pick out Sol among them. Two sister planets glowed bright enough to cast glades on the lake, and Sohrab’s image skipped upon it as swiftly as the moonlet flew.

It’s almost like a night on High America, Dan thought. The memory of walking beneath upland skies, Mary Lochaber at his side, stabbed him. He hurried toward the radio shack.

No one ordinarily stood watch there, but whoever was on patrol—against catlings, genghis ants, or less foreseeable emergency makers —checked it from time to time to see if any messages had come in. Dan stared at the register dial. Yes! Half an hour ago! His finger stabbed the playback button. “Weather Center calling/’ said a voice from Anchor. “Hello, Moondance. Look, we’ve got indications of a storm front building off the Uranian coast, but we need to check a wider area. Can you take some local readings for us?” He didn’t hear the rest. Sickness rose in his throat.

A footfall pulled him back to here and now. He whirled rather than turned. Startled, Eva Spain stepped from the threshold. For a moment, in the dim illumination of its interior, they confronted each other.

“Oh!” She tried to laugh. “I’m not an urso hunting his dinner, Dan. Honest, I’m not.”

“What are you after, then?” he snapped.

If that were Mary, tall and slim, hair like sunlight, standing against the darkness in the door—It was only Eva. In the same coarse coveralls as him, with the same knife and pistol—tools—at her belt, she likewise needed no reduction helmet on her red-tressed, snub-nosed, freckle-faced head. Also like him, she was of stocky build, though she lacked the share of Oriental genes that made his locks dark, cheekbones high, skin tawny. And she had a few years less than he did, whereas Mary was of his age. That didn’t matter; they were all young. What mattered was that this was not Mary.

Now don’t blame Eva for that, Dan told himself. She’s good people. He recalled that for a long while, practically since they met, everybody seemed to take for granted that in due course they would marry. He couldn’t ask for a better wife, from a practical viewpoint.

Practicality be damned.

Her eyes, large and green, blinked; he saw light reflected off tears. Yet she answered him stiffly: “I could inquire the same of you. Except I’d be more polite about it.”

Dan swallowed. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude.”

She eased a little, stepped close and patted his hand. Her palm was not as hard as his; she was a biologist, not an explorer who had lately begun farming on the side. Nevertheless he felt callouses left by the gear and animal harness that every low-lander must use.

(Mary’s touch was soft. Not that she was an idler. Even on High America, survival required that every healthy adult work, and she did a competent job of keeping the hospital records. But she never had to cut brush, midwife a cow, cook on a wood fire for a campful of loggers, dress an animal she herself had shot and cure its hide. Such was lowlander labor, and it would be death for Highland Mary to try, even as it was death for her to be long marooned in the wilderness around Lake Moondance.)

“Sure,” Eva said gently, “I understand. You’ve fretted your nerves raw.”

“What does bring you here at this hour?”

“The same as you.” She frowned. “Do you think I’m not concerned? Bill Svoboda and the Loch-abers, they’re my friends as well as yours.”

Dan struck fist in palm, again and again. “What can we do?”

“Start a search.”

“Yes. One wretched little aircar available, to scout over how many thousands of square kilometers? It’d take days to assemble a fleet of vehicles. They haven’t got days. Bill does, maybe, but Mary and Ralph… very possibly don’t.”

“Why not? If their helmets are intact——”

“You haven’t seen as many cases as I have. It takes a pretty strong man, with considerable training, to wear one of those rigs almost constantly. When your own chest expansion has to power the reduction pump—the ordinary person can’t sleep in one of them. That, and sheer muscular exhaustion, make the body extra vulnerable to pressure intoxication, when the victim takes the helmet off so he can rest.”

Dan had spoken in a quick, harsh monotone. Eva replied less grimly: “They can’t be any old where. They were homebound, after all.”

“But you know they, the Lochabers, they wanted to see more of the countryside, and Bill promised he’d cruise them around. They’d’ve been zigzagging the whole way. They could have landed at random, as far as we’re concerned, for a closer look at something, and come to grief. Even if we pass near, treetops or crags or mists can hide their vehicle from us.”

“I’m aware that this is a rather large and not especially mapped country.” Eva’s response was dry. It broke into anger. She stamped her foot. “Why are you moping around like this? Dan Coffin, the great discoverer! Won’t you try?”

He hit back indignation of his own. “I intend to start at dawn. I assure you it’s no use flying at night, it’s a waste of fuel. Light-amplifier systems lose too much detail, in that complicated viewfield where the smallest trace may the one that counts. The odds are astronomical against chancing in sight of a beacon fire or in metal-detector range or——” He slumped. “Oh, God, Eva, why am I being sarcastic? You’ve flown more than I have. It’s so huge a territory, that’s all. If I had the slightest clue——”

Once more her manner mildened. “Of course.” Slowly: “Could we maybe have such a lead? Some faint indication that they might have headed one way rather than another? Did Mary—did Mary tell you she was especially interested in seeing some particular sight?”

“Well, the geysers at Ahriman,” he said in his wretchedness. “But the last call-in we got from them was that they’d visited this and were about to proceed elsewhere.”

“True. I’ve played back that tape a few times myself.”

“Maybe you put an idea into their heads. Eva? You saw considerable of them, too, while they were here.”

“So I did. I chatted about a lot of our natural wonders. Ralph’s fascinated by the giant species.” She sighed. “I offered to find him a herd of tera-saur. We flew to Ironwood where one had been reported, but it had moved on northward, the trail was clear but there was a thunderstorm ahead. I had ;rouble convincing Ralph how foolish we’d be to fly near that weather. Just because lowland air currents are slow, those High Americans always seem to think they lack force…. No, Ralph’s bright, he knows better; but he does have a reckless streak. Why am I rambling? We——”

She broke off. Dan had stiffened where he stood. “What is it?” she whispered.

“That could be the clue we need.” The night wind boomed under his words.

“What?” She seized him by the wrist. Only afterward did he notice that her nails had broken his skin.

“Terasaur—they migrate upward in summer, you know. Bill could’ve promised to locate a herd for the Lochabers, maybe the same herd you failed to see. Their tracks are easy enough to spot from above—” He grabbed her to him. “You’re wonderful! It may turn out to be a false lead, but right now it is a lead and that’s plenty. Come daybreak, I’m on my way!”

Tears broke from her, though her voice stayed level. “I’m coming along. You may need help.”

“What? I’ll take a partner, certainly——”

“The partner will be me. I can pilot a car, shoot a gun, or treat an injury as well as anybody else. And haven’t I earned the right?”

In the several years of his career as an explorer, Dan Coffin had often returned to High America. Not only did the scientists and planners want the information he gathered about this planet that they hoped to people with their descendants; but he himself must discuss further expeditions and arrange for equipping them. Moreover, he had family and friends there.

Additionally, at first, he found refreshment of both body and spirit in the land. High America rose above the cloud deck that covered most of Rustum most of the time; its skies were usually clear, its winters knew snow and its summers cool breezes through their warmth. Compared to the low country, it was almost like Earth.

Or so he imagined, until gradually he began to wonder. He had gotten a standard teaching about the variations. The sun was smaller in Earth’s sky though somewhat more intense, its light more yellowish than orangy. Earth took one-point-seven years to complete a circuit around Sol, but spun on its axis in a mere twenty-four hours. There was a single moon, gigantic but sufficiently far off that it showed half the disc that Raksh did and took about eleven days (about thirty Earth-days) for a cycle of phases. Dan Coffin, who weighed a hundred kilos here, would weigh eighty on Earth. The basic biologies of the two worlds were similar but not identical, for instance, leaves yonder were pure green, no blue tinge in their color, and never brown or yellow except when dying….

Searching his memories, then asking questions carefully framed, he came to realize how poorly the older people—even those who had grown to adulthood on Earth, and even when helped by books and films—were able to convey to him some sense of what the mother globe really was like. Did the differences add up to such alienness that they themselves could no longer quite imagine it? And if this was true, what about the younger folk, the Rustumites born? And what about the children whom they in turn were starting to have?

So did Dan Coffin really need High America?

Most humans absolutely did, of course. The air pressure at lower altitudes was too much for them, made them ill if they were exposed more than very briefly, eventually killed them. But his body could take it, actually thrive on it. In fact, on each return he missed more keenly the high-metabolism vigor that was his down below, the clarity of sound and richness of smells. Besides, High America was too damn cramped. Oh, there was still a lot of fallow real estate; but the future belonged to those who could settle the lowlands. Already the whole wild, beautiful, mysterious, limitlessly beckoning surface of the world was theirs.

He continued to enjoy his visits as a change of pace, a chance to meet people, savor the civilized amenities, roister a bit in what few establishments Anchor supported for that purpose. Yet it was always good to get back to Moondance. This became especially true after Eva Spain arrived there.

Like him, she had been an exogenetic baby, her parentage selected with a view to tolerance of dense air. The result was equally satisfactory for her. He and she could both descend to sea level in comfort, which made them natural partners. Most of those who were beginning to settle the lowlands did not care to go that far down; Moondance station was at two kilometers altitude. Eventually, man as a whole would be able to live anywhere on the planet. That evolution wouldn’t take a dreadfully long time, either: because the few who now had full freedom were sure to have a disproportionate share in the heredity.

Dan and Eva… they worked well together, liked each other, there was no burning romance but there was a growing attraction and certainly a marriage would make excellent sense from every standpoint. But then, for the first time since school days, he encountered Mary Lochaber.

This near summer solstice, at this middle latitude, daylight would endure for about forty-two hours. The searchers intended to lose none of them. Their aircar was aloft before the first eastward paling of the clouds.

Those had again covered the sky. Dan remembered Mary wondering how he could endure such almost perpetual gloom. “It’s not like that at all,” he answered. “Still another thing you ought to experience for yourself.”

Finally she had come, and—His knuckles stood white on the controls.

Eva turned her eyes from the forest. Beneath silver-bright heaven, in the absence of clear shadows, its treetop hues were an infinitely subtle and changeable intermingling. Their endlessness was broken by the upheaval of a plutonic tor, the flash of a waterfall and a great river, the splendid northward climbing of the entire land. Kilometers away, uncountable birds moved like a storm.

“You really are suffering, aren’t you?” she asked quietly.

He heard his own voice, rough and uneven: “I used to revel in the sheer bigness of the country. Now, when we have to find one speck that’s gotten lost somewhere, it’s horrible.”

“Don’t let it get to you that way, Dan. Either we learn to live with the fact of death—here—or we can never be happy.”

He recalled the tidal cross-chop that had capsized their boat when they were taking biological samples off the Hephaestian coast. Half-stunned, he might have drowned if she hadn’t come to his aid. Toshiro Hirayama, who had been like a brother to both of them, was indeed lost. The rest of the crew clung to the keel for hours before a rescue flyer found them. She got back her merriment as fast as any of the others. Nevertheless she still laid a wreath now and then before Toshiro’s little cenotaph.

“You’re a fine girl, Eva,” Dan said.

“Thanks,” she answered low. “However, it’s another girl on your mind, isn’t it?”

“And Ralph. And Bill.”

“Mainly her. Right?”

Brought up in his stepfather’s tradition that a man should not reveal his private feelings to the world, Dan had to struggle for a moment before he could nod and say: “Yes.”

“Well, she is beautiful.” Eva spoke without tone. “And a very charming, gracious person. But a wife for you?”

“We… haven’t discussed that… yet.”

“You’ve been giving it some mighty serious thought. And so has she.”

His heart stumbled. “I don’t know about her.”

“I do. The way her look dwells on you, the voice she speaks in when you are there—it’s obvious.” Eva bit her lip. “Is either of you in earnest, though? Truly?”

He thought of long talks, of hikes and horseback rides across her father’s lands, of dances in Wolfe Hall and afterward walking her home under frosty stars and hasty Sohrab and the bronze light of Raksh upon a clangorous river. There had been kisses, no more; there had been words like, “Hey, you know, I like you,” no more. Yet he had felt that when he came to dinner, her parents (and Ralph, her brother, who shared her blond good looks and sunny temperament) were studying him with a certain amiable intensity.

She herself? “I’m not sure,” he sighed. “They’ve got such a… a different style on High America.”

Eva nodded. “It might not count as a decent-sized village on earth,” she said, “but Anchor is where most of the population on Rustum centers, and where the industry and wealth and culture are. The alpine hinterland may be sparsely settled, but essentially it’s been tamed. People have leisure for fine manners. They may even be overcultivating that kind of thing, as a reaction against the early hardships. Meanwhile, we’re the raw frontier folk.”

“You’re hinting at a social gap? No, the Lochabers aren’t snobs. Nor are we yokels. We’re scientists, carrying out research that is both interesting and necessary.”

“Granted. I don’t want to exaggerate. Still, it was getting to know those friends of yours—a sort of overnight intimacy that never quite happens in their own safe environment—that drove home to me the fact that there is a difference.”

He could not kiss Mary at Moondance. A glassite bulb sealed off her head, maintaining an air pressure that was normal for her. The same pressure was kept in the station’s one small guesthouse; but it took discouragingly long to go through its decompression chamber when one’s own lungs were full of lowland atmosphere. Anyway, she shared it with her brother.

But there were rich compensations. At last he could show her something of his world, that overwhelmingly greatest part of the planet she had known only from reading, pictures, a few stereotyped tours, and his words. During five magical days, she and Ralph could wander with him and Eva through the templelike vastness, intricacy, and serenity of the woods, or go ahorseback on a laughing breakneck hunt, or see how biological engineering joined slowly with hard work and patience to make the soil bear fruit for man, or….

Rakshlight glimmered on the curve of her helmet and the long fair tresses within. It made a rocking bridge across the waters, which lapped against the boat louder and more chucklingly clear than ever waves did in the highlands. Wind had died, though coolness still breathed through the summer air, and the sail stood ghostly. That didn’t matter. Neither he nor she were in any hurry to return.

She asked him: “Where does the name Moondance come from?”

“Well,” he said, “the lake’s big enough to show tides when Raksh is as close as now; and then the reflections gleam and flash around the way you see.”

She caught his hand. “I was thinking,” she murmured, “it ought to be Moon-Dan’s. Yours. To me it always will be. What you’re doing is so great.”

“Oh, really,” he stammered. “I’m just a servant. I mean, the scientists give me instrument packages to plant and collect, experiments and observations to carry out, and I follow orders. That’s all.”

“That is not all, as you perfectly well know. You’re the one who has to cope and improvise and invent, in the face of unending surprises. Without your kind of people we’d forever be prisoners on a few narrow mountaintops. How I wish I could be one of you!”

“Me too,” he blurted.

Was she suddenly as half-frightened as he? She was quick to ask: “Where did Ralph and Eva go?”

He retreated likewise into the casual: “I’m not sure. Wherever, I’d guess their flit will pass over the Cyrus Valley. She’s mighty taken by your car. She’s been faunching to try it out under rough conditions. The updrafts there——”

Her tone grew anxious. “Is that safe?”

“Sure, yes. Eva’s an expert pilot, qualified to fly any vehicle at any air density. This model of yours can’t handle much unlike the H-17, can it? It’s only a modification.” Because there was around him the splendor of his country, he had to add: “You know, Mary, what worries me is not how well the craft performs, but what its engine may signify. I’ve read books about what fossil fuels did to the environment on Earth, and here you’re re-introducing the petroleum burner.”

She was briefly taken aback. “Haven’t you heard?” A laugh. “I guess not. You seem to have other things on your mind when you visit us. Well, the idea is not to replace the hydrogen engine permanently. But petroleum systems are easier to build, with far fewer man-hours; mainly because of fuel storage, you know. Dad thinks he can manufacture and sell them for the rest of his lifetime. By then, there should be enough industrial plants on Rustum that it’ll be feasible to go back to a hydrogen economy. A few hundred oil-fired power plants, operating for thirty or forty years, won’t do measurable harm.”

“I see. Good. Not that I’m too surprised. Your brother was telling me yesterday about the work he does in his spare time, drilling into children how they must not repeat the old mistakes….” Again he skirted too near the thing that was uppermost in his heart. “Uh, by the way, you mentioned wanting to see more of the lowlands on your way home, if you could get a pilot who can safely take you off the mapped and beaconed route. Well, I may have found one.”

She leaned close. Her gaze filled with moonlight. “You, Dan?”

He shook his head ruefully. “No. I wish it were, but I’m afraid I’ve taken too much time off from work as is. Like Eva. However, Bill Svoboda is about due for a vacation and——”

The three of them had flown away into silence.

Eva’s yell cut like a sword. “There!”

She swung the car around so the chassis groaned and brought it to hover on autopilot, a hundred meters aloft and jets angled outward. Dan strained against the cabin canopy, flattening his nose till tears blurred vision and he noticed the pain that had brought them forth. His heart slugged.

“They’re alive,” he uttered. “They don’t seem hurt.” Mutely, his companion passed him his binoculars. He mastered the shaking of his hands and focused on the survivors below him and the scene around them.

Mountains made a rim of russet-and-buff woods, darkling palisades, around a valley shaped like a wide bowl. Save for isolated trees, it was open ground, its turquoise grass rippling and shimmering in wind. A pool near the middle threw back cloud images. That must have been what first attracted the terasaur.

They numbered some thirty adults, five meters or more of dark-green scaliness from blunt snouts to heavy tails, the barrels of their bodies so thick that they looked merely grotesque until you saw one of them break into a run and felt the earthquake shudder it made. Calves and yearlings accompanied them; further developed than Terrestrial reptiles, they cared for their young. The swathe they had grazed through the woods ran plain to see from the south. Doubtless Bill Svoboda had identified and followed it just as Eva had been doing.

A hill lifted out of the meadowland. On its grassy lower sloper the other vehicle had landed, in order to observe the herd at a respectful distance. Not that terasaur were quick to attack. Except for bulls in rut, they had no need to be aggressive. But neither had they reason to be careful of pygmies who stood in their way.

“What’s happening?” Eva breathed. “They never act like this—in summer, anyhow.”

“They’re doing it, though.” Dan’s words were as jerky as hers.

The car from Anchor was not totally beyond recognition. Tough alloys and synthetics went into any machine built for Rustum. But nothing in the crumpled, smashed, shattered, and scattered ruin was worth salvage. Fuel still oozed from one tank not altogether beaten apart. The liquid added darkness to a ground that huge feet had trampled into mud. Now and then a beast would cross that slipperiness, fall, rise besmeared and roaring to fling itself still more violently into the chaos.

The hillcrest around which the herd ramped was naked stone, thrusting several meters up like a gray cockscomb. There the three humans had scrambled for refuge. The berserk animals couldn’t follow them, though often a bull would try, thunder-bawling as he flung himself at the steeps, craned his great wattled neck and snapped his jaws loud enough for Dan to hear through all the distance and tumult. Otherwise the terasaur milled about, bellowed, fought each other with tushes, forelegs, battering tails, lurched away exhausted and bleeding till strength came back to seek a fresh enemy. Several lay dead, or dying with dreadful red slowness, in clouds of carrion bugs.

Females seemed less crazed. They hung about on the fringes of the rioting giants and from time to time galloped clamoring in circles. Terrified and forgotten, the calves huddled by the pool.

High overhead, light seeping through clouds burnished the wings of two spearfowl that waited for their own chance to feast.

“I’d guess—well, this has got to be the way it was,” Dan said. “Bill set down where you see. The herd, or some individual members, wandered close. That seemed interesting, no cause for alarm. Probably all three were well away from the car, looking for a good camera angle. Then suddenly came the charge. It was a complete surprise; and you know what speed a terasaur can put on when it wants. They had no time to reach the car and get airborne. They were lucky to make it up onto the rock, where they’ve been trapped ever since.”

“How are they, do you think?” Eva asked.

“Alive, at least. What a nightmare, clinging to those little handholds in darkness, hearing the roars and screams, feeling the rock shiver underneath them! And no air helmets. I wonder why that.”

“I daresay they figured they could dispense with apparatus for the short time they planned to be here.”

“Still, they’d’ve had the nuisance of cycling through pressure change.” Dan spoke absently, nearly his whole attention on the scene that filled the lenses. At the back of his mind flickered the thought that, if this had gone on for as many hours as evidently was the case, the herd would have wiped itself out by now had it not been handicapped by darkness.

“Well,” Eva was saying, “Ralph told me more than once how he longed to really experience the lowlands, if only for a few breaths.” Her fist struck the control panel, a soft repeated thud. “Oh, God, the barrier between us!”

“Yes. Mary remarked the same to me. Except I always had too much else to show her and try to make her see the beauty of——”

Bill Svoboda was on his feet, waving. The glasses were powerful; Dan saw how haggard, grimed, and unkempt the man was. Mary looked better. But then, he thought, she would forever. She must in fact be worse off, that bright head whirling and ready to split with pain, that breast a kettle of fire… together with hunger, thirst, weariness, terror. She kept seated on her perch, sometimes feebly waving an arm. Her brother stayed sprawled.

“Ralph’s the sickest, seems like,” Dan went on. “He must be the one most liable to pressure intoxication.”

“Let me see!” Eva ripped the binoculars from him.

“Ouch,” he said. “Can I have my fingers back, please?”

“This is no time for jokes, Dan Coffin.”

“No. I guess not. Although——” He gusted a sigh. “They are alive. No permanent harm done, I’m sure.” Relief went through him in such a wave of weakness that he must sit down.

“There will be, if we don’t get them to a proper atmosphere in… how long? A few hours?” Eva lowered the binoculars. “Well, doubtless a vehicle can arrive from High America before then, if we radio and somebody there acts promptly.”

Dan glanced up at her. Sweat glistened on her face, she breathed hard, and he had rarely seen her this pale. But her jaw was firm and she spoke on a rising note of joy.

“Huh?” he said. “What kind of vehicle would that be?”

“We’d better take a minute to think about it.” She jackknifed herself into the chair beside his. Her smile was bleak. “Ironic, hm? This colony’s had no problems of war or crime—and now, what I’d give for a fighter jet!”

“I don’t understand—No, wait. You mean to kill the terasaur?”

“What else? A laser cannon fired from above… Aw, no use daydreaming about military apparatus that doesn’t exist on Rustum. What do you think about dropping a lot of fulgurite sticks? Bill’s dad can supply them from his iron mine.” She grimaced and lifted a hand. “I know. A cruel method of slaughter. Most of the beasts’ll be disabled only. Well, though, suppose as soon as our friends have been taken off, suppose a couple of agile men go afoot and put the creatures out of their misery with some such tool as a shaped-charge drill gun.”

Shocked, he exclaimed: “You’d destroy the entire herd?”

“I’m afraid we must,” she sighed. “After all, it’s gone crazy.”

“Why has it? We’ve got to find that out, Eva. Otherwise somebody else’ll get caught by the same thing, and might not survive.”

She nodded.

“I doubt if we can learn the cause from a lot of mangled dead meat,” he told her.

“We can arrange experiments on other herds, later.”

“To what effect? Look at the damage here. We could wipe out the terasaur in this entire region. They aren’t common; nothing so big can be. But it appears they’re mighty damn important to the ecology. Have you seen Joe de Smet’s paper on how they control firebrush? That’s a single item. It’d be strange if there aren’t more that we haven’t discovered yet.” Dan gulped. “Besides, they’re, oh, wonderful,” he said through the tumult below. “I’ve seen them pass by in dawn mists, more silent than sunrise….”

Eva regarded him unbelievingly, until she whispered: “Are you serious? Would you risk Mary Lochaber’s life, and two more, to save a few animals?”

“Oh, no. Of course not.”

“Then what do you propose?”

“Isn’t it obvious? We carry field gear, including a winch and plenty of rope. Lower a line, make them fast, and we’ll crank them right up into this car.”

She sat for an instant, examining his idea with a fair-mindedness he well knew, before the red head shook. “No,” she said. “We can’t hover close, or our jet turbulence may knock them right off that precarious perch. Then we’d have to drop the line from our present altitude. This is a windy day; the hill’s causing updrafts. I don’t expect the end of a rope could come anywhere near—unless we weight it. But then we’ve made a pendulum for the wind to toss around, and very possibly to brain someone or knock him loose. See what tiny slanty spaces they’ve got to cling to, and think how weakened they are by now.”

“Right,” he answered, “except for one factor. That weight isn’t going to be any unmanageable lump. It’s going to be me.”

She nearly screamed. One hand flew to her opened mouth. “Dan, no! Please!”

Lowland air need not move fast to have a mighty thrust. And the topography here made for more flaws, gusts, and whirlings than was common. To control the winch, Eva had to leave the car on autopilot, which meant it lurched about worse than when hovering under her skilled hands. Dan swung, spun, was yanked savagely up and let drop again, scythed through dizzy arcs, like the clapper of a bell tolled by a lunatic.

The winds thundered and shrilled. Through his skull beat the brawl of jets aimed to slant past him, groundward. Below him the terasaur bellowed and trampled a drumfire out of the earth. Knotted around his waist, the line wouldn’t let him fall, but with every motion it dug bruisingly into his belly muscles. He grasped it above his head, to exert some control, and the shivers along it tore at his palms and thrummed in his shoulders. An animal rankness boiled up from the herd, into his nostrils and lungs. He didn’t know if that or the gyring made him giddy.

Here came the rock!

Two meters above, he swept through a quarter circle. “Lower away!” he cried futilely. His partner understood, however, and let out some extra rope. His boots reached for solidity. All at once the car stumbled in an air pocket. He fell, snapped to a halt, and saw the cliff face rush toward him. He was about to be dashed against it.

He heaved himself around the cord till he stretched horizontally outward. The curve of his passage whistled him centimeters above bone-shattering impact. He caught a glimpse of Bill Svoboda, wildly staring, and folded his legs in bare time to keep from striking the man.

Then he was past, and swarming up the rope. On the return arc, the soles of his boots made contact with the stone. He let them brake by friction. It rattled his teeth, but it practically stopped his swinging. The next touch, on the next sway of the pendulum bob—which was himself—came slow and easy. He got his footing and stood among his friends.

Immediately, Eva released more rope. Hanging loosely now, it couldn’t haul him back if the car should suddenly rise. He sank to the rock and spent a minute sweating, panting, and shuddering.

He noticed Bill crouched at his side. “Are you all right?” the other man babbled. “Lord, what a thing! You might’ve been killed! Why’d you do it? We could’ve held out till—”

“You’re okay?” Dan croaked.

“Y-yes. That is, the Lochabers are sick, but they ought to recover fast.”

Dan crawled on hands and knees to Mary. “I came for you,” he said, and held her close. Dazed, she responded only with a mumble. He let her go, rose, and conferred with Bill.

Taking in still more line, they secured bights around bodies at five-meter intervals. Bill would go first, he being in condition to help Eva; next came Ralph; then Mary (as he made her fast, Dan thought what an odd and deep intimacy this was); finally Dan himself, who could best endure the maximum oscillation.

The remnant of the task proved simple. Eva raised the car, at the lowest possible rate, until one by one the four on the rope dangled free in the sky. She continued to rise till they were in calm air. Thereafter she left the vehicle again at hover and winched them in.

Though reduction helmets were always on hand, she depressurized the cabin on the way back to Moondance. The Lochabers sat half asleep, half in a faint. Eva called the station medic. He said the highlanders should stay in the guesthouse till they had regained enough strength for a flight home; but on the basis of Bill’s account, he didn’t think that would take long, nor that treatment need consist of more than bed rest and nourishment.

Dan spoke little. He was sunk in thought. Directly after landing, he prepared to take off again.

When he had cycled through the lock, he found Eva on hand. The quarters were a dormitory with kitchenette and mini-bath—cramped, austere, and relieved only by windows that gave on a view of lake and forest, but they could never be opened to the breeze that sang outside. Eva had drawn a chair into the narrow aisle between rows of bunks. Ralph lay at her left, Mary at her right. The siblings were in pajamas, propped up on pillows. Nearby stood a vase of triskele that the visitor must have brought. The room had grown vivid with the goldenness of the blossoms, pungent with their summery odor.

Dan halted. Eva had been crying! She’d washed her face afterward, but even though she seldom wept, he knew the traces of it upon her.

“Why hello, stranger,” Ralph greeted. His tone was a little mechanical. Both the Lochabers already seemed well on their way back to health —and less than happy. “How did your expedition go?”

“Successful, I think.” Dan’s gaze went to Mary and would not let itself be hauled away. Her hair was molten amber across the pillows and her eyes like the heavens about High America. She smiled at him; but the smile was uncertain, even timid.

“How are you doing?” he said, 99 percent to her.

“We’re coming along fine.” She spoke so low that he had to strain to hear her in this thin air. “Thanks to you.”

“Oh, that wasn’t much.” Curiously, he didn’t blush. Rather, he felt the ghost of a chill.

“It was plenty.” Ralph’s words came firm. He, too, was a leader. “Damn few men could have done what you did, or would have dared to risk their necks like that.”

“I did try to talk him out of it,” Eva said in a dulled voice.

“A heroic action,” Ralph went on. “You saved us several extra hours of suffering. Please don’t think we’re ungrateful. Still, we can’t help wondering. Why?”

“Your lives,” Dan answered. “Or, maybe, worse, brain damage.”

Mary shook her head. “That wasn’t at stake, dear, once you’d located us,” she said gently. “We could have waited awhile more.”

“I couldn’t be sure of that,” he said, with a slight upstirring of anger that she should be thus withdrawn. “I didn’t know how long you’d been marooned, and you just might have been among those people whose pressure tolerance is abnormally low.” As low as mine is high.

“We aren’t,” Ralph said. “But anyway, it was quite an exploit, and we owe you our sincerest thanks.” He paused. “And then you flew back at once, not even stopping to rest. I stand in awe.” He chuckled, though his heart wasn’t in it. “Or, I will stand in awe as soon as the doctor lets me out of bed.”

Dan was glad to shift the subject. “My job, after all.” He drew up a chair to face Eva and them. It was good to sit. Hour upon hour had drained him. (The flight from here to the valley again, through air that in places had gotten heavily turbulent; the hovering above the rampage; the squinting and studying, while the agony of the herd tore in him almost as if it had been his own; the final thing he did; and not even his triumph able to lift the weariness off his bones, during the long flight back.) Maybe he should have caught some sleep after his return, before coming here.

“Was it the terasaur you were concerned about?” Mary asked. “Eva told us you were going back to them, but she didn’t know more than that herself.”

He nodded. “Uh-huh. They’re an important part of the environment. I couldn’t pass up this chance to learn more about them, and try to save what was left.”

Eva half rose. Something of the woe behind her eyes disappeared. “Did you?” she cried.

“I think so.” A measure of joy woke likewise in him. “Frankly, I feel more like bragging about that than about a bit of athletics at a rope’s end.”

“What happened? What’d you do?” Eva reached toward him.

He grinned. The tide of his pleasure continued to flow. “Well, you see, terasaur do go rather wild in rutting season. The cause must be a change in body chemistry, whether hormonal or pheromonal we don’t know—but we do know how micro amounts of such substances will affect animal behavior, humans included. Now, this herd wasn’t mating and its antics were crazy even for that time of year. However, there were certain basic similarities. I wondered what new factor might have triggered the madness.”

He stopped for breath. “Go on!’” Eva urged.

Dan sought Ralph’s gaze. “Petroleum is complicated stuff,” he said. “Besides long-chain hydrocarbons, it contains all sorts of aromatics and the chemists alone know what else. In addition, your jet fuel probably has polymers or whatever, produced in the course of refining. My idea was that in among those molecules is one, or a set, that happens to resemble the terasaurian sex agent.” Mary drew a gasp. “Not your fault,” Dan added hastily. “Nobody could have known. But it does underline the necessity of learning everything we can about this planet, doesn’t it?”

The blond young man scowled. “You mean… wait a minute,” he said. “A few bulls drifted near our car, probably just curious. They got a whiff of unburned fuel dissipating in the exhaust; we’d left the motor idling as a precaution—what we thought was a precaution. That whiff was enough to make them charge, cutting us off from the car. Then, when the first tank was ruptured and fuel spilled out by the hundreds of liters, it drove the entire herd into a frenzy. Is that what you mean?”

Dan nodded again. “Correct. Though of course the total situation was wrong, unbalanced, for the poor beasts. The molecules involved must have similarities but no doubt aren’t identical with their natural gonad stimulator. Besides, it’s the wrong time of year and so forth. No wonder they ran amok. Suppose someone injected you with an overdose of any important hormone!”

“It’s an interesting guess. Are you certain, though?”

“The biochemists will have to check out the details. But, yes, I am certain in a general way. You see, I flitted back to the site, where they were still rampaging. I ignited the spilled fuel with a thermite bomb. It went up fast, in this atmosphere. Almost immediately, the herd started to calm down. By the time I left, the survivors had returned to their calves.”

“M-m-m—”

“I know why you’re glum, Ralph. Your family business is getting set to produce oil-fired motors. And now it’ll have to do a lofrmore research first. What’s at stake isn’t merely the terasaur, you realize. It’s every related species, maybe the entire lowland ecology.”

“That’s why you were so anxious to save the herd,” Mary said low. “Eva’s told us how you insisted.”

“Oh, I didn’t have any definite ideas at that time,” Dan replied. “Only a—general principle.” His mood drooped. Trying to lift it, he said, “This doesn’t mean your father’s project has to be cancelled. Once the chemicals have been identified, I’m sure they can be taken out of the fuel.”

“Indeed.” Ralph forced a smile. “You’ve done us a considerable favor, actually. Besides the rescue, you’ve saved us a number of further losses like this.”

“But you didn’t know!” tore from Mary.

Dan started half out of his seat. “What’s that?”

“You didn’t know—then—and anyway, even if you had known, there are other herds—” She began to weep.

Appalled, he went to her, knelt by her bunk, and gripped her hand. It lay cold and moveless in his. “Mary, what’s wrong?”

“I was afraid of this… what Ralph and Eva were getting at… before you came… don’t you see? You, you care so greatly about this land… that to save a part of it… you’d risk—”

“Not your life, ever!” he exclaimed.

“No, I s-s-suppose not… but your own!”

“Why shouldn’t I, if I want to?” he asked in his bewilderment.

Her look was desperate upon him. “I thought—I hoped—All the years we might have had! You risked those!”

“But… but Mary, my duty—”

In long, shuddering breaths, she mastered herself enough to say, with even the ghost of a smile: ” ‘I could not love thee (Dear) so much, Lov’d I not honour more.’ Dan, I never really sympathized with that attitude. Or, at least, I think two people have to share the same, well, the same honor, if they really want to, to share each other. We belong to different countries, you and I. Can you understand?”

He shook his head as he spoke, harshly. “No. I’m afraid I don’t.” He rose to go. “But you’re still exhausted, Mary. I’d better not keep after you about this, or anything. Let’s talk later, shall we?”

He stooped above her bed, and their lips touched, carefully, as if they were strangers.

Though the air outside was hot and damp, a rising wind roared in treetops; and over the lake came striding the blue-black wall of a rainstorm that would cleanse and cool.

Nobody else was in sight when Dan and Eva left the guesthouse. Nonetheless they did not continue on among the neighbor buildings, but went down to the shore. The water chopped at their feet. Afar, lightning flashes were reflected off its steeliness, and thunder rolled around heaven.

“Well,” he said at last, into the wind, “I guess that’s that.”

“You’ll get over it,” said Eva, no louder or livelier than he. “You both will, and be friends when you happen to meet.”

“Except why couldn’t she see—?”

“She could, Dan. That’s precisely the trouble, or the salvation. She sees far too clearly.”

“You mean, because I care about the land, she doesn’t imagine I care about her? No! She’s not that petty.”

“I didn’t say she is, Dan. In fact, she’s very large, > very wise and kind. Look, she can live here, never going outside of cages like a house and a helmet. But to make you stay all your days, or more than a bare fragment of them, where she can be—that’d cage you. You, who now have the whole world before you. Better to say goodbye at once, while you’re still fond of each other.”

And you, Eva, inherit me, he thought in bitterness. He glanced down at her, but her head was averted from him and he saw only flying cinnabar locks.

Wind skirled, thunder cannonaded. He barely heard, after a minute: “That’s what I had to tell Ralph before you arrived. When he asked me to marry him.”

The breath went from Dan. The first stinging drops of rain smote him in the face.

Then she turned back and took both his hands. In her eyes he saw—not a plea, not an invitation— the challenge to make a new beginning.