Unreasonable Facsimile

Coburn gazed at his girl friend with a growing sense of dread. He had heard about things like this happening to perfectly normal young women, but he had always considered Erica to be immune.

“You never mentioned marriage before,” he said numbly. “Besides—you’re a zoologist.”

“Implying I have fleas? Or brucellosis?” Erica drew herself up to her full height, bringing her green eyes half-an-inch above Coburn’s. The movement had the effect of making her athletic Swedish body more desirable than ever, but Coburn was reminded of a cobra spreading its hood in menace.

“No, no.” He spoke hastily. “All I meant was that somebody in your line of business must be aware how unnatural the monogamous state is among …”

“Animals. Is that how you think of me?”

“Well, you certainly aren’t a vegetable or a mineral.” Coburn smirked desperately. “I meant that as a joke, sweetie.”

“I know you did, darling,” Erica softened unexpectedly and leaned towards him, swamping Coburn’s senses with impressions of warmth, spun-gold hair, perfume and mind-erasing curvatures. “But you would enjoy being married to a healthy animal like me, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I …” Coburn stopped speaking as he realized what was happening. “The trouble is I can’t marry you.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you see …” His mind raced, seeking inspiration. “As a matter of fact … ah … I’ve joined the Space Mercantile.”

Erica recoiled instantly. “To get away from me!”

“No.” Coburn unfocused his eyes, hoping it would give him the appearance of being space-struck. “It’s the outward urge, sweetie. I can’t fight it. The wild black yonder’s calling to me. My feet are itching to tread the surface of alien stars.”

“Planets,” Erica said severely.

“That’s what I meant to say.”

“In that case, I too will go away.” Her eyes were magnified by tears. “To forget you.”

Coburn was basically a soft-hearted young man and he was distressed to see that Erica was upset, but he consoled himself with the thought of having escaped marriage which, as any citizen of the 21st Century knew, was a tedious anachronism.

He was all the more surprised, therefore, to discover—three days after Erica had left on a field trip to some unpronounceable corner of the world—that life no longer seemed worth living. None of the pleasures which had seemed so attractive when Erica was talking marriage were pleasures any longer.

In the end—deciding he had reached the lowpoint of his life—he did what seemed the only logical thing to do.

He joined the Space Mercantile.

Coburn discovered later that he had been mistaken about the lowest point in his life. This realization came, suddenly, after he had been in the service about three months.

With no previous experience of piloting a spaceship, and no particular aptitude for the work, he had nevertheless been able to get through the basic course in two weeks—thanks to the Universal Cockpit, which was a virtually identical feature in all forms of transport from cars through aeroplanes and submarines to spacecraft. It allowed a man to concentrate on where he was going instead of on how to get there.

Coburn had been doing just that—concentrating on transferring a cargo of luminous furs between two star systems far out on the Rim—when something cold and metallic was pushed against the back of his neck. His yelp of surprise was occasioned mostly by the discovery that there was a stowaway on his one-man spaceship, but it acquired overtones of alarm as he tentatively decided that the only object a stowaway would thrust against his neck was a gun.

“This is a gun,” a hoarse voice confirmed. “Just do what you’re told and you won’t get hurt.”

“All I want to do is get back home, if that’s all right with you.”

“It isn’t.” The intruder moved from behind the control chair into Coburn’s field of view. He was a thickset gingery man, about forty, with a shaven head and an even frosting of reddish stubble over his skull and face.

Coburn nodded. “If you’d wanted to get to my base you’d have stayed hidden till the end of the trip?”

“Correct.”

“Which means you want me to land somewhere else, I suppose.”

“Right again, sonny. Now head for the second world of Toner there.” The ginger man tapped a flaring bright spot near one side of the ship’s forward viewscreen.

“You don’t want to go there—it’s uninhabited!”

“That’s why I want to go there, sonny. I’m Patsy Eckert.”

The name brought a momentary loosening of Coburn’s bowels. Eckert could not be described as a master criminal—he had been caught too many times for that—but he was wanted on a hundred worlds because he was apparently incapable of performing a lawful action. Larceny, blackmail, rape and murder were his way of life just as easily and naturally as other men worked and played.

“I thought,” Coburn whispered, “that you had been …”

“Executed? Not this time. I got away, but I guess I need to hide out for a few years. Somewhere they’d never think of looking for me.”

Coburn was not stupid, and he tried to prevent his thought processes reaching a certain inevitable conclusion concerning his own fate. “But you must be able to find a better hideout.” He gestured at the encircling viewscreens. “Look how much space there is in the galaxy. Every one of those thousands of points of light is a planet …”

“A star,” Eckert put in, eyeing Coburn curiously.

“That’s what I meant to say. Surely somewhere in those vast empty spaces …”

Eckert raised his gun. “Sonny, unless you want some spaces let into your head, put this ship down right where I told you.”

Coburn nodded glumly, and began tapping out the instructions which would cause the ship’s computer to change course towards the nearest sun and autoland on its second planet. It was obvious that once Eckert had gone to ground he could not permit the ship to proceed on its way, so the best Coburn could hope for was to be kept prisoner on an unexplored planet. The alternative was a quick death shortly after landing. He preserved a moody silence while the ship did a series of dimension slips, the target system blurring and expanding by jumps in the viewscreen until the second world was a saucer-sized disc directly ahead. It was a bland white orb, completely covered with cloud.

“No landing aids here, so we can’t ooze in,” Coburn said. “It’ll have to be a normal-continuum linear approach.”

“Don’t worry—I’ve had this planet in mind a long time. Under that cloud it’s just one big grassy plain.”

While Coburn was confirming that description on the long-range radar, Eckert moved in behind him again and nudged the muzzle of his gun into the hollow at the base of his skull. Coburn thought wistfully and hopelessly about the state of married bliss in which he could have been living with Erica had he not been so crazy as to leave her and the warm security of Earth. This is it, he told himself as the vessel plunged into a rolling misty atmosphere. This is the real lowpoint of my life—things just can’t get any worse.

He was wrong again.

As the ship’s long, slanting descent brought it through the lower side of the cloud cover, he saw dead ahead—where there should have been only a featureless plain—the massive and strangely familiar shape of a snow-capped mountain.

He barely had time to scream before his ship went straight into a wall of rock.

Coburn regained consciousness to find himself lying on the tilted but undamaged floor of his control room. Eckert was draped across the instrument console, looking both puzzled and shaken. Various electronic monitors were making urgent noises but the fact that there was enough of them left intact to produce any sound at all was, in Coburn’s opinion, an undiluted miracle. He shook his head weakly and was pondering the impossibility of the situation when Eckert retrieved his gun and levelled it once more.

“How did you do it?” the ginger man snarled.

“Do what?”

“Manipulate the dimension slips so that we landed on Earth.”

“What gives you a crazy idea like that?”

“Don’t fool around, sonny. That mountain we almost hit was Mount Everest.”

Coburn was sick, shocked and angry—and he discovered he no longer cared about the other man’s gun. “Try to get it into your head that if I had invented a slip technique capable of doing that I’d be a billionaire and not …” His voice dried up as a weird thought struck him. The monstrous edifice of rock he had glimpsed in the forward screen had looked like Mount Everest. He struggled to his feet and looked at the screen, but it and all its companions had been blanked out by the crash. Other thoughts stirred in his mind.

“And I’ll tell you something else, mister,” he said. “We didn’t almost hit that mountain—we went straight into the side of it! We should have been vaporized.”

Eckert took a deep breath and scowled dangerously. “I happen to know there aren’t any mountains on Toner II, so …”

An alarm bell clamoured, signalling that lethal radioactive materials were escaping from ruptured casings into the ship’s living space.

“Sort it out later,” Coburn said. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”

He wrenched open an escape door, revealing a vista of steep white slopes, and leaped from the sill down into a snowdrift. Eckert followed a second later, almost landing on top of him. They sat up, breathing cool resinous air, and looked all around them. The ship lay at the end of a long shallow gouge, surrounded by the moraines of snow it had built up in its course, and beyond it the stark ramparts of rock soared into a leaden sky. Again Coburn was reminded of Everest—which was almost as peculiar as the fact of still being alive …

“This stuff’s warm,” Eckert shouted, lifting a handful of white flakes. “It isn’t like ordinary snow.”

Coburn held some close to his face and saw that the fluffy fragments were more like chips of plastic foam. The thickly resinous smell which seemed to pervade the atmosphere of Toner II cloyed his nostrils, making his head swim.

“Let’s get away from the ship,” he said uncertainly. “Something might blow.”

They trudged away from the slightly crumpled hull, instinctively heading down the slope. A strong breeze was trailing streamers of snow and mist across their vision, but occasionally they caught glimpses of what appeared to be a grey-green plain far below.

“I guess this can’t be Earth, after all,” Eckert conceded. “Something strange going on, though.”

An hour later they had made little progress towards the base of the mountain because the white material on which they were walking, although unlike Earth snow in some respects, was just as slippery underfoot and had a tendency to compress into glassy clumps around their boots. Coburn had lapsed into a dejected silence, broken only by occasional gasps or grunts whenever he lost his balance and fell. He was thinking yearningly about Erica, who was hundreds of lightyears away back on Earth, and wondering if she would ever get to hear about his mysterious disappearance, when his ears picked up a distant shout. The wind carried the faint wisp of sound away but it was obvious from Eckert’s face that he had heard it too.

“Over that way,” Eckert said, pointing to his left. “There’s somebody else here.”

They changed course, taking a lateral line across the slope, and in a few minutes Coburn became aware of an area of lime-green brightness illuminating the mists ahead. The light was obviously coming in from an artificial source. Coburn’s first impulse was to run towards it, but Eckert had his pistol out again and held him back.

“Not so fast, sonny,” he said. “I’m not sticking my head into any noose.”

They came to a low hillock beyond which the brightness was now very intense. At Eckert’s instigation they went down on all fours, crawled to the top and cautiously peered down the other slope. Barely a hundred paces away two black posts stood vertically in the snow, about four feet apart. At the base of each was a cluster of cables and metal boxes, and the rectangular area between the posts appeared as a sheet of flickering, crackling radiance which obscured the section of hillside right behind it. The snow in the vicinity was flattened by numerous footprints. For some reason, Coburn found himself thinking of a portal, a doorway which had been left open.

In a few seconds this impression was reinforced by the abrupt materialization of two brownish, shaggy-furred gorillas who stepped out of the glowing rectangle and shuffled around brushing ice droplets from their bodies. Violent flurries of snow spilled out of the rectangle behind them, although—Coburn noticed—the air of Toner II was relatively still and it was not snowing. He began to get a chilly premonition of the portal’s true nature.

“What ugly brutes!” Eckert’s voice was a whisper. “Any idea what they are?”

“They aren’t on the Mercantile’s identification chart, but you know the Earth Federation’s only a small part of the Galactic Commune. It contains thousands of cultures we know nothing about.”

“The less we know about yugs like those the better,” Eckert replied, displaying a chauvinism which—in view of his antagonism to all human standards—Coburn found mildly surprising. “There’s more of them. Say … could that thing be a matter transmitter?”

Another four gorillas had appeared, two of them carrying tripod devices which looked vaguely like surveyors’ theodolites. One of them began to talk in a loud braying voice which was so strangely modulated that it took Coburn a few seconds to realize the creature was speaking Galingua.

“… from the Chief of Structural Maintenance,” the gorilla was saying. “He reported that a small Earth-type vessel made an unscheduled planetfall less than two hours ago. The absorption fields prevented the structure from showing on its radar screens, so it hit the northern face right in the centre of the Great Couloir, carried away part of the new heating and refrigeration system, and emerged just above the Khumbu Glacier on the south side.”

Another gorilla hopped excitedly. “It went right through! That means it could be lying near here.”

“That’s why all the survey teams have been called in from Earth to help with the search. All construction work is suspended until we make sure the ship’s crew are dead.”

“Have we to kill them?”

“If necessary. Then we’ve to find the ship and shoot it clear of the Toner system before its beacons attract a recovery vessel.”

The hopping gorilla slowed down. “Seems a lot of trouble for one primitive ship.”

“Not too much. Can you imagine what the Committee would do to us if news about Everest Two got out? Two centuries of work would have gone down the drain!”

Eckert gripped Coburn’s shoulder. “Did you hear what he said? He talked about bringing survey teams back from Earth—and those brutes have been coming through that green light with survey equipment! I’d say that’s a matter transmitter and that I only have to step through it to arrive on Earth.”

“I thought you wanted to hide somewhere out of the way,” Coburn said numbly, his mind on other things. Disturbing things.

“If I got to Earth instantaneously and without leaving a trail, that would be the best hideout of the lot. Who’s going to look there for me?”

Coburn pushed the other man’s hand away impatiently. Who cares? Listen, I’ve just discovered why we were able to hit a mountain head on and not be killed, and why the air here smells of resin, and why this snow isn’t like real snow.”

“What’s on your mind, sonny?” There was a trace of careless indulgence in Eckert’s voice and his eyes were fixed hungrily on the glowing green rectangle.

“Don’t you get it? These creatures are building a glassfibre replica of Mount Everest!”

“Balls,” Eckert commented in an amiable voice, without turning his head. He lay perfectly still, watching as the group of aliens moved off purposefully. They took a course which led them only slightly to the left of the sheltering hillock, but none of them noticed the two men. As soon as they had vanished into the flurried snow Eckert turned to Coburn, pistol at the ready.

“This is the parting of the ways for us,” he said. “I’m going through the green light.”

“I want to go too.”

“I daresay, but you’re the one guy who could blow the whistle on me. Sorry.” He aimed the pistol.

“Our hairy friends will hear if you shoot me. They could be all round us. They could go after you.”

Eckert considered. “That’s right. I’d be better to wreck the black boxes on those posts after I’m through and close the door behind me. That’ll hold you in the meantime.” He thrust the muzzle of the gun into Coburn’s solar plexus with the force of a karate blow. Coburn felt the breath driven from his lungs, and—although he remained conscious—his paralysed thorax refused to take in any more air. He began to worry about dying. Glutinous clicking noises were emerging from his throat as Eckert stood up and, with red-furred head bent low, ran towards the portal.

He had almost reached it when another gorilla stepped through.

Eckert shot the gorilla in the stomach. It sat down with a bump, clutched its middle, then gently fell backwards. Honking shouts came from the direction in which the original group had vanished. Eckert glanced all around him, jumped into the green rectangle and disappeared from view.

Coburn had a sudden conviction that Toner II had become an even more unhealthy place for him to be. So intense was the feeling that he overcame his paralysis and rose to his knees in an effort to reach the portal, but already he could hear the aliens returning and knew he could not escape in time. He threw himself down again as running humanoid figures emerged blurrily from the haze. Four of them were of the now-familiar gorilla type, but two were hairless, much thinner, with green-tinted skins partially covered by yellow tunics. Their bald heads glistened like carefully polished apples.

They all gathered round the supine, motionless form of the shot gorilla, talked quietly for a moment, and began to scan the immediate vicinity with fierce, brooding scowls. Coburn abruptly became aware of Eckert’s footprints leading directly from the portal to his protective hillock, and a moment later the aliens noticed the same thing. They spread out in a crescent and began to advance on Coburn’s position. He was trying to sink into the unyielding ground when there was an unexpected diversion.

Patsy Eckert stumbled back out through the rectangular brilliance of the portal.

He was coated with real snow from head to foot, shivering so violently he could barely stand, and the little to be seen of his face beneath its icy covering had assumed a corpse-like pallor. One of the gorillas saw Eckert immediately, gave a shout and the others ran at him in a bunch. Eckert tried to raise his pistol but it dropped from his fingers. A hairless creature brought him down with a passable football tackle and he was lost to view in a confusion of alien bodies and limbs.

In his place of comparative safety Coburn’s ideas about the glassfibre copy of Mount Everest were crystallizing. If his thesis was correct, the portal did not lead to just any random location on Earth—it had to emerge at the corresponding point on the real Everest so that the survey teams could easily transfer their measurements. Eckert therefore had emerged on Mount Everest in the middle of winter, in an environment where a man could live for only a matter of seconds without a heated suit and facemask. Apparently the gorilla beings could survive in those conditions with their long shaggy coats, and if they had been surreptitiously visiting Earth for a couple of centuries …

My God, Coburn thought, I’m looking at Abominable Snowmen!

All the old unconfirmed sightings, all the inexplicable footprints in the Himalayan snow, all the legends of the Yeti had originated with these alien creatures who—for reasons of their own—were making a plastic imitation of Earth’s highest mountain.

The mystery of the gorillas’ motives was threatening to swamp Coburn’s mind when he was distracted by new developments near the portal. Ignoring the body of their dead companion, the aliens gathered up the helpless Eckert and carried him away into the green-tinted mists. They passed close by the hillock, again without noticing Coburn. His breathing had returned to normal and the path was now clear for him to leap through the portal, but he had learned there was no escape that way. He took a sustainer pellet from his belt pouch, sucked on it thoughtfully, then set off to follow the group of aliens at a discreet distance.

Less than a kilometre along the slope, at an area of rocky outcroppings, they were met by a party of four of the hairless beings who stopped to examine the still-shivering form of Patsy Eckert. One of them put his face too close to Eckert, who demonstrated his returning powers of mobility by punching it in the region of the nose. Coburn felt a grudging respect for some aspects of the ginger man’s character as he edged near enough to hear what the aliens were saying. He had begun to believe both types of creature were rather shortsighted and he felt little sense of immediate danger in wriggling in so close.

“… by what we found in the ship there were two Earthmen,” one of the newly arrived green humanoids was honking in Galingua. “We must find the other before the chief gets here.”

“I suppose we’ll get the blame as usual,” the smallest gorilla complained. “I always said we should have orbital defences.”

“And attract attention? You know how strict the Galactic Games Committee are about infringements of the rules. If they found our mountaineering team practising the ascent of Everest in advance of the Games we’d be disqualified for a minimum of ten centuries.”

The small gorilla was not satisfied. “Why did they have to pick Everest, anyway?”

“You’re beginning to sound disloyal, Vello,” the hairless alien said. “Everest is an excellent mountain, well up to competition standard. And you know how difficult it is for the Committee’s scouts to find a suitable new mountain every five centuries when they can choose only from worlds they are sure will be eligible to join the Galactic Commune before the next Games. It’s far from easy, specially when the natives have good eyes and start making UFO searches,”

“I still don’t think this practice model is worth all the effort.”

“My dear boy, you’re obviously too young to appreciate the value of the prestige, the enormous political capital a competing world acquires by fielding a winning team.” The others joined in, ganging up on the small gorilla. Coburn became so interested in trying to decipher the babble of voices that he incautiously raised his head above the level of the glassfibre rock. A chilling sensation gripped him as he found his eyes met by those of Eckert, who was lying at the aliens’ feet. Coburn did not know why he should feel alarmed at having been seen by the other human, because the gorillas and hairless creatures were now in a full-scale bull session and had not noticed him. He raised one hand and wiggled the fingers slightly in a comradely greeting—Eckert had been prepared to kill him earlier, but now they were two Earthmen on an alien world, facing a hostile environment together.

“There’s the other one,” Eckert shouted, pointing straight to Coburn’s rock. “He’s hiding over there!”

An abrupt silence descended on the aliens and they stared myopically in Coburn’s direction as he sank downwards, cursing Eckert and saying anguished mental goodbyes to Erica. Eckert used the distraction to bold for freedom. With animal swiftness he scrambled to his feet and darted away. Two aliens grabbed for him but he avoided them by easily surmounting a boulder and leaping down on to the flat ground on the other side. There was a sharp splintering sound as he went right through the surface. Coburn glimpsed a jagged black hole from which drifted a despairing scream, fading and Döpplering away into a low moan. It sounded as though Eckert was falling a long way down.

“I knew there were thin patches around here,” one of the gorillas commented. “Mildo’s been skimping on materials again.”

“Never mind that,” a hairless alien said waspishly. “We’d better check out those rocks.” The group fanned out, exactly as they had done once before, and began converging on Coburn. He lurched to his feet and ran, instinctively heading back towards the greenish glow of the portal.

“Get him! Kill him!” an alien shouted. Coburn swore nastily as he recognized the nasal honk of the smallest gorilla, the one he had already classified as a troublemaker. He had always been a pretty good runner, but now—boosted by fear of being caught or of falling through the surface—he skimmed across the snowscape, unable to feel any pressure between his feet and the ground. As the aliens fell behind the green glow brightened ahead and resolved itself into the familiar glowing portal. The dead gorilla was still lying close to one of the black posts.

During the early part of his flight Coburn had had a dreamy conviction he could run clear round the planet at the same speed, but now—one kilometre further on—he was rapidly losing steam, and the aliens were in full cry not far behind. He staggered up to the portal, put one foot through the rectangular sheet of light and quickly withdrew it. The Himalayan winter had seized on his flesh like a ravenous animal.

Breathing noisily, mouth filling with the salt froth of exhaustion, he slumped to the ground. His choices were sharply limited—to a fairly quick death in the cold snows of the real Everest, or a possible very quick death at the hands of the aliens on the fake Everest. Coburn chose the latter, mainly because it absolved him from the trouble of standing up again. The shouts of his pursuers grew louder.

This is it, Erica, he thought. And I did love you.

He looked around with dispirited eyes, striving for a philosophical calm, but derived little comfort from the unlovely form of the dead gorilla. The long hairs of the coat were stirring listlessly in the breeze, revealing a glint of brassy fittings close to the skin. Ornaments? Coburn crawled over to the inert body, pushed the hairs aside and discovered a zip fastener running from the creature’s chin to groin.

Glancing up, eyes full of surmise, he saw the vanguard of the hunting party scrambling over rocks in the middle distance. The greenish aliens were in the lead. There was perhaps a minute left to him. He unzipped the gorilla, pushed back its animal facemask, and found one of the bald-headed greenish aliens dead inside. The hairy outer covering had been both a disguise and a protective suit for the illicit excursions to Earth.

Coburn was jabbering with excitement and panic while he hauled the alien out of its cocoon. The cries of his pursuers became more urgent as they saw what he was doing. They were almost on him now. He struggled into the floppy skin, drew the gorilla-helmet down over his head and, without waiting to do the zip, jumped through the portal just as a clawing greenish hand raked down his back.

The Himalayan wind, accompanied by an incredible stab of cold, entered through the open front of the gorilla suit. Coburn closed it up, hampered by the clumsiness of his gloved hands, and moved away from the portal which from this side manifested itself merely as two black posts. The wind was fierce and he found it almost impossible to keep his balance on the uneven surface, but it was imperative that he put distance between himself and the portal. Those aliens who had been wearing their suits were slower in catching up on him than their unhampered companions had been, but they would come spilling out after him very soon.

Coburn stumbled away into the blinding snowclouds. Within ten minutes he began to feel reasonably safe from capture; an hour later he was absolutely certain he would never see the green-skinned aliens again. The only trouble was he had begun to suspect he would never see anybody again. This was Everest, the awesome king of the Himalayas, howling in elemental triumph all around, and Coburn had neither the experience nor the equipment to get clear.

He kept going, doggedly, heading downwards as best he could and hoping the heater elements in his suit were of heavy duty standard. Gradually, though, his strength began to fail. He began taking more falls and requiring longer to get up. Eventually it was not worth the effort to go on. Coburn sat down on a low rock and waited for the snow to cover him, to blot out all trace of his futile existence. He reconciled himself to facing his eternal rest.

About thirty seconds of eternal rest had passed when a coarsely woven net enveloped his body and pulled him to the ground.

Coburn gave a startled gasp and tried to break free, but the tough cords bound themselves tighter around his arms and legs. The aliens had found him after all, he realized, and this time they were taking no chances. Improvising swear words in Galingua he fought to stand upright, to die like a man, but even this modest ambition was thwarted when something hit him a crushing blow at the base of the skull. As the light faded from his eyes he noticed his captors were wearing ordinary human-style snowsuits …

There followed a confused period in which he was partly unconscious but at times aware of being dragged through the snow in the net. When he recovered sufficiently to voice a protest he discovered the mouth of his gorilla-mask had jammed shut, making intelligent speech impossible. Coburn gave up, lay back and concentrated on avoiding the jagged rocks which seemed to bestrew the path. A few minutes later the group stopped walking, and one of them opened his faceplate.

“We got one,” he called in English to someone outside Coburn’s field of view. We captured a Yeti!”

“How marvellous!” replied a woman.

Coburn’s indignation at being classified and treated as an animal faded abruptly as the voice reached his ears. He sat up and began struggling feverishly with his zip.

The woman knelt in front of him. “A Yeti,” she breathed. “My own Yeti!”

Coburn got the zip undone and pushed back his gorilla-helmet. “Erica,” he said. “My own Erica!”

“Christ Jesus,” she said strickenly. Then her face broke into a radiant smile which even the cold could not dim. “Oh, you foolish, wonderful man! And I really believed you had run away to space and forgotten about me.”

“Never,” he replied, reaching for her.

“No time for that now.” She helped pull him to his feet. “We’ve got to get you indoors before you freeze. And no doubt you’ll have some fantastic story to explain how you came to be following my expedition in an animal suit.”

Coburn put his arm around her waist. “I’ll try to think of one.”