Part 4 (1/2)
As the golden-white sun rose above the eastern treeline, Dennis made ready to go. He would make do alone.
He had to tie knots in the straps of his backpack to keep them from slipping. Apparently Brady had bought the cheapest equipment possible. Dennis muttered comments on his rival's probable parentage as he hoisted the pack and set off southeastward toward the road he had seen the day before.
4 Dennis hiked along narrow game paths, always watching out for possible dangers. But the forest was peaceful. In spite of the squeaky noises from his awkward pack, he found himself enjoying the suns.h.i.+ne and the fresh air.
He took bearings as well as he could with the cheap compa.s.s Brady had provided. When he took breaks by the banks of small streams he kept up a notebook on the ways this world differed from home. So far the list was brief.
The vegetation was very Earthlike, The predominant trees in this area looked a lot like beech, for instance.
It could be a sign of parallel evolution. Or the zievatron might open onto alternate versions of Earth itself. Dennis knew as much about the ziev effect as anybody back home did. But he admitted that that wasn't all that much. It was a very new field.
He kept reminding himself to move with caution. Still, as the forest became more familiar, he found himself pa.s.sing the time playing with the anomaly equations in his head, trying to find some explanation.
The animals of the forest watched suspiciously from cover as a preoccupied Earthman hiked their narrow paths in the direction of morning.
When evening finally came, Dennis camped under the trees by a brook. Not wanting to risk a fire, he tinkered with the rickety little gas stove Brady had provided. A weak flame finally sputtered to life and he was able to stir up a lukewarm batch of freeze-dried stew.
I'll have to start hunting soon, he realized. The favorable biochemistry report notwithstanding, Dennis was still uncomfortable with the idea of shooting any local creatures. What if the ”rabbits”
here were philosophers? Could he be so sure anything he aimed at wasn't intelligent?
When the tepid meal was done, Dennis activated his camp-watch alarm. It was no bigger than a deck of cards, with a small display screen and a tiny rotating antenna. He had to tap it several times to get it started.
Apparently Brady had been saving Sahara Tech money again. ”It may give me two seconds' warning if something the size of an elephant comes rooting through my pack,” Dennis sighed.
With the needler by his side, he laid back in his sleeping bag and watched through the gaps in the branches overhead as the constellations came out. The configurations were utterly alien.
That finished off the parallel Earth theory once and for all. Dennis scratched three lines of equations from his mental chalkboard.
While waiting for sleep to come, he watched the sky and named the constellations.
Toward the southern mountains, Alfresco the Mighty wrestled with the great snake, Stethoscope. The hero's piercing eyes shone unevenly, one red and twinkling, the other bright green and steady.
The green eye might be a planet, Dennis decided. If it moved over the next few nights, he would give it a name of its own.
Above Alfresco and Stethoscope, the Chorus of Twelve Virgins sang backup to Cosell the Loquacious as he chanted a monotonous description of Alfresco's mighty struggle. It didn't matter that the combatants hadn't budged in millennia. The announcer found color to fill out the time.
Overhead, the Robot rolled, squat and imperturbable upon a highway made up of a billion tiny numbers, pursuing the Man of Gra.s.s . . . the Alien.
Dennis stirred. He wanted to look at the destination the Man of Gra.s.s so doggedly sought. He wanted to turn his head. But he finally realized, with the complacency that comes in dreams, that he had been asleep for some time.
5 He came to the road late on the afternoon of his fourth day.
His journal bulged with notes on everything from trees to insects, from rock formations to the local varieties of birds and snakes. He had even tried to drop rocks from a cliff, to time their fall and measure the local force of gravity. Everything seemed to support the idea that this place was not Earth but was an awful lot like it.
About half of the animals seemed to have close cousins back home.
The other half were unlike anything he had ever seen.
Already Dennis felt he was becoming a seasoned explorer- like Darwin or Wallace or Goodall. And best of all, his boots were beginning to wear in.
He had hated them at first. But after the initial painful blisters, they seemed to become more comfortable day by day. The rest of his equipment still caused him aggravation, but he seemed to be getting used to the stuff, gradually.
The camp-watch still awakened him several times every night, but he apparently was getting the hang of its tiny controls. It no longer went off every time a leaf blew through his camp.
Last night, though, he had started awake to see a troop of hairy- hoofed quadrupeds skirting the edge of his camp. They stared into the beam of his flashlight while his heart pounded. Then they scampered off.
On reflection they had seemed harmless enough, but why hadn't the alarm warned him?
Dennis's equipment worries dropped from his mind as he eagerly skidded down the last gravelly slope to the highway. He dropped his pack and approached to kneel by the shallow curb.
It was an odd road, barely wide enough for a small Earth landcar to pa.s.s. Uneven and twisty, it followed the contours of the land instead of cutting straight through, as a highway on Earth would have done.
And its edges were ragged, as if no one had bothered to trim them when the bed was laid.
The s.h.i.+ny pavement felt smooth and yet tough. Dennis scuffed it and walked a few paces. He tried to scratch it with a metal buckle and dribbled water from his canteen. It seemed skidproof and weatherproof, and offered resilient traction.
Two narrow grooves-exactly one point four two meters apart-ran down its center, following every twist and turn. Dennis knelt to peer into one of the thin channels, its cross section a near-perfect semicircle. The inside surface was almost slippery smooth to the touch.
Dennis sat down on a nearby stump, whistling softly to himself.
This road was a very advanced artifact, He doubted a surface like it could be made on Earth.
But why the ragged edges? Why the grooves, or the twisty, inefficient path?
It was perplexing, like the illogical way in which the return mechanism and the robots had been taken apart. The locals seemed to think differently than men.
Back at the airlock, Dennis had found most of the metal parts taken away from the zievatron. He thought this might mean he had arrived on a metal-poor world. But in the past few days he had seen at least three areas where iron and copper ores lay open and available.
It was a mystery. And there was only one way to find out more.
To the west, the road climbed higher into the mountains. Eastward, it seemed to descend into a broad watershed. Dennis picked up his pack and started off along the road, away from the afternoon sun- toward what he hoped would be civilization.
6 It wasn't an easy idea to get used to, but Dennis was coming to the conclusion that he had misjudged Bernald Brady.
The night after encountering the highway, Dennis thought about it as he stirred a pot of soup over his little stove. Perhaps he had been unfair to his old S.I.T. nemesis. During his first few days on this new world, he had complained a lot about the quality of his equipment, blaming Brady for his blisters, his chafed shoulders, and his tepid meals. But those problems had all abated with time. Obviously he had needed time to adapt. Brady and the equipment must have merely been a convenient set of scapegoats for his initial misery.
Now that he had apparently found the knack, the little stove seemed to work just fine. Its first fuel canister had been used up in a day. But the second had lasted much longer and heated his food better All it seemed to have taken was a bit of practice. That, he confessed a bit immodestly, and a little mechanical apt.i.tude.
While the soup cooked, Dennis examined the little camp-watch alarm with new respect. It had taken him days, but he had finally found out that the colors of the little lights on its screen corresponded roughly with the carnivority of the creatures nearby. The correlation had been made clear when he witnessed a pack of foxlike creatures stalking a covey of small birds and watched the counterparts on the screen. Maybe it had to do with body temperature, but somehow the alarm had distinguished the two separate groups clearly into red and yellow dots on the screen.
It bothered Dennis a little that it had taken him so long to notice all this. Perhaps he had spent too much of the journey playing with equations in his head.
Anyway, the trip would be over soon. All this day he had pa.s.sed signs of quarrying in the surrounding hills. And the road had broadened somewhat. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, he knew he would, come upon the creatures who ruled this world.
The camp-watch hummed in his hands, and its little antenna suddenly swung about to point westward. The pale screen came alight and an alarm began to buzz softly.
Dennis cut off the sound and reached over to draw the needler from its holster. He turned off the stove. When its faint sigh died away, Dennis could hear only the soft, rustling wind in the branches.