Authors: Poul Anderson
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.