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Psychic? Maybe so. What did he have to lose?
"Everyone hold hands," he directed, more in gesture than words, "If we lose each other we'll never find each other again." Gripping one another tightly, they began to struggle toward the place that was only a darker darkness against the trees.
Dr. Frazer's grip tightened hard on his arm. He put his face close to MacAran's and shouted,
"Maybe I'm losing my mind, but I saw a light."
MacAran had thought it was afterimages spinning behind his wind-buffeted eyes. What he thought hesaw beyond it was even more unlikely; the figure of a man? Tall and palely shining and naked even in thestorm--no, it was gone, it had been only a vision, but he thought the creature had beckoned from thedark loom... they struggled toward it. Janice muttered, "Did you see it?"
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"Thought I did."
Afterward, when they were in the shelter of the thickly laced trees, they compared notes. No two ofthem had seen the same thing. Dr. Frazer had seen only the light. MacAran had seen a naked man,beckoning. Janice had seen only a face with a curious light around it, as if the face--she said--were reallyinside her own head, vanishing like the Cheshire cat when she narrowed her eyes to see it better; and to Domenick it had been a figure, tall and shining--"Like an angel," he said, "or a woman--a woman withlong shining hair." But, stumbling after it, they had come against trees so thickly grown that they couldhardly force their way between them; MacAran dropped to the ground and wriggled through, dragging
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them after.
Inside the clump of thickly growing trees the snow was only a light spray, and the howling windcould not reach them. They huddled together, wrapped in blankets from their packs and sharing bodywarmth, nibbling at rations cold from their dinner. Later, MacAran struck a light, and saw, against thebole of the tree, carefully fastened flat pieces of wood. A ladder, against the side of the tree, leadingupwards... .
Even before they began climbing he guessed that this was not one of the houses of the small furredfolk. The rungs were far enough apart to give even MacAran some trouble and Janice, who was small,had to be pulled up them. Dr. Frazer demurred, but MacAran never hesitated.
"If we all saw something different," he said, "we were led here.
Something
spoke directly to our minds. You might say we were
invited
. If the creature was naked--and two of us saw him, or it, that way--evidently the weather doesn't bother them, whatever they are, but it knows that we're in danger from it. I suggest we accept the invitation, with a proper respect."
They had to wriggle through a loosely tied door up through on to a platform, but then they foundthemselves inside a tightly-built wooden house. MacAran started to strike his light carefully again, anddiscovered that it was not necessary, for there was indeed a dim light inside, coming from some kind ofsoftly glowing, phosphorescent stuff against the walls. Outside the wind wailed and the boughs of thegreat trees creaked and swayed, so that the soft floor of the dwelling had a slight motion,
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not un-pleasant but a little disquieting. There was a single large room; the floor was covered with something soft and spongy, as if moss or some soft winter grass grew there of itself. The exhausted, chilled travellers stretched out gratefully, relaxing in the comparative warmth, dryness, shelter, and slept.
Before MacAran slept it seemed to him that in the distance he heard a high sweet sound, like singing,through the storm. Singing? Nothing could live out there, in this blizzard! Yet the impression persisted,and at the very edge of sleep, words and pictures persisted in his mind
Far below in the hills, astray and maddened after his first exposure to the Ghost Wind, coming backto sanity to discover the tent carefully set up and their packs and scientific equipment neatly piled inside. Camilla thought he had done it. He had thought
she
had done it.
Someone's been watching us. Guarding us.
Judy was telling the truth.
For an instant a calm beautiful face, neither male nor female, swam in his mind. "Yes. We know youare here. We mean you no harm, but our ways lie apart. Nevertheless we will help you as we can, eventhough we can only reach you a little, through the closed doors of your minds. It is better if we do notcome too close; but sleep tonight in safety and depart in peace..."
In his mind there was a light around the beautiful features, the silver eyes, and neither then nor ever
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did MacAran ever know whether he had seen the eyes of the alien or the lighted features, or whether his mind had received them and formed a picture made up of childhood dreams of angels, of fairy-folk, of haloed saints. But to the sound of the faraway singing, and the lulling noise of the wind, he slept.
Chapter
FIFTEEN
"…and that was really all there was to it. We stayed inside for about thirty-six hours, until the snow
ended and the wind quieted,
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then we went away again. We never had a glimpse of whoever lived there; I suspect he carefully kept
away until we were gone. It wasn't there that he took you, Judy?"
"Oh, no. Not so far. Not nearly. And it wasn't to any home of his own people. It was, I think, one of the cities of the little people, the men of the tree-roads, he called them, but I couldn't find the place again, I wouldn't want to," she said.
"But they have good will toward us, I'm sure of that," MacAran said, "I suppose--it wasn't the same
one you knew?"
"How can I possibly know? But they're evidently a telepathic race; I suspect anything known to one
of them is known to others--at least to his intimates, his family--if they have families."
MacAran said, "Perhaps, some day, they'll know we mean them no harm."
Judy smiled faintly and said, "I'm sure they know that you--and I--mean them no harm; but there aresome of us they don't know, and I suspect that perhaps time doesn't matter to them as much as it does tous. That's not even so alien, except to us Western Europeans--Orientals even on Earth often made plansand thought in terms of generations instead of months or even years. Possibly he thinks there's time to getto know us any century now."
MacAran chuckled. "Well, we're not going anyplace. I guess there's time enough. Dr. Frazer is in
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seventh heaven, he's got anthropological notes enough to provide him with a spare-time job for three years. He must have written down everything he saw in the house--I hope they're not offended by his looking at everything. And of course he made notes of everything used as food--if we're anywhere near the same species, anything they can eat we can evidently eat," MacAran added. "We didn't touch his supplies, of course, but Frazer made notes of everything he had. I say he for convenience, Domenick was sure it was a woman who had led us there. Also the one piece of furniture--major furniture--was what looked like a loom, with a web strung on it. There were pods of some sort of vegetable fiber--it looked something like milkweed on Earth--soaking, evidently to prepare them for spinning into thread; we found some pods like it on
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the way back and turned them over to MacLeod on the farm, they seem to make a very fine cloth."
Judy said, as he rose to go, "You realize there are still plenty of people in the camp who don't even
believe there are any alien peoples on this planet."
MacAran met her lost eyes and said very gently, "Does it matter, Judy? We know. Maybe we'll just
have to wait, and start thinking in terms of generations, too. Maybe our children will all know."
On the world of the red sun, the summer moved on. The sun climbed daily a little higher in the sky, asolstice was passed, and it began to angle a little lower; Camilla, who had set herself a task of keepingcalendar charts, noted that the daily changes in sun and sky indicated that the days, lengthening for theirfirst four months on this world, were shortening again toward the unimaginable winter. The computer,given all the information they had, had predicted days of darkness, mean temperatures in the level of zerocentigrade, and virtually constant glacial storms. But she reminded herself that this was only amathematical projection of probabilities. It had nothing to do with actualities.
There were times, during that second third of her pregnancy, when she wondered at herself. Neverbefore this had it occurred to her to doubt that the severe discipline of mathematics and science, herworld since childhood, had any lacunae; or that she would ever come up against any problem, except forstrictly personal ones, which these disciplines could not solve. As far as she could tell, the old disciplinesstill held good for her crewmates. Even the growing evidence of her own increasing ability to read theminds of others, and to look uncannily into the future and make unsettlingly accurate guesses based onlyon quick flashes of what she had to call "hunch"--even this was laughed at, shrugged aside. Yet she knewthat some of the others experienced much the same thing.
It was Harry Leicester--she still secretly thought of him as Captain Leicester--who put it most
clearly for her, and when she was with him she could see it almost as he did.
"Hold on to what you know, Camilla. That's all you can do; it's known as intellectual integrity. If a
thing is impossible, it's
impossible
."
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"And if the impossible happens? Like ESP?"
"Then," he said hardily, "you have somehow misinterpreted your facts, or are making guesses based
on subliminal cues. Don't go overboard on this because of your will to believe. Wait for facts."
She asked him quietly, "Just what would you consider evidence?"
He shook his head. "Quite frankly, there is nothing I would consider evidence. If it happened to me,
I should simply certify myself as insane and the experience of my senses therefore worthless."
She thought then,
what about the will to disbelieve? And how can you have intellectualintegrity when you throw out one whole set of facts as impossible before you even test them?
Butshe loved the Captain and the old habits held. Some day, perhaps, there would be a showdown, but shehoped, with a quiet desperation, that it would not come soon.
The nightly rain continued, and there were no more of the frightening winds of madness, but thetragic statistics which Ewen Ross had foreseen went on, with a fearful inevitability. Of one hundred andfourteen women, some eighty or ninety should, within five months, have become pregnant; forty-eightactually did so, and of these, twenty-two miscarried within two months. Camilla knew she was going tobe one of the lucky ones, and she was; her pregnancy went on so uneventfully that there were times whenshe completely forgot about it. Judy, too, had an uneventful pregnancy; but the girl from the Hebrides Commune, Alanna, went into labor in the sixth month and gave birth to premature twins who died withinseconds of delivery. Camilla had little contact with the girls of the Commune--most of them were workingat New Skye, except for the pregnant ones in the hospital but when she heard that, something wentthrough her that was like pain, and she sought out MacAran that night and stayed with him a long time,clinging to him in a wordless agony she could neither explain nor understand.
At last she said, "Rafe, do you know a girl named Fiona?"
"Yes, fairly well; a beautiful redhead in New Skye. But you needn't be jealous, darling, as a matter
of fact, I think she's living with Lewis MacLeod just now. Why?"
"You know a lot of people in New Skye. Don't you?"
"Yes, I've been there a lot lately, why? I thought you
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had them down for disgusting savages," Rafe said, a little defensively, "but they're nice people and I like their way of life. I'm not asking you to john them. I know you wouldn't and they won't let me in without a woman of my own--they try to keep the sexes balanced, though they don't marry--but they treat me like one of them."
She said with unusual gentleness. "I'm very glad, and I'm certainly not jealous. But I'd like to see
Fiona, and I can't explain why. Could you take me to one of their meetings?"
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"You don't have to explain," he said, `They're having a concert--oh, informal, but that's what it is--tonight, and anyone who wants to come is welcome. You could even join in, if you felt like singing. I do sometimes. You know some old Spanish songs, don't you? There's a sort of informal project to preserve as much music as we can remember
"Some other time, I'll be glad to; I'm too short of breath to do much singing now," she said. "Maybe after the baby's born." She clasped him hand, and MacAran felt a wild pang of jealousy.
She knows Fiona's carrying the Captain's child, and she wants to see her. And that's why she isn't jealous she couldn't care less...
.
I'm jealous. But would I want her to lie to me? She does love me, she's having my child, what