Orbit 2

“Space is nailed down better too,” Garcia said. “There are all kinds of trees now that stay put and can be looked at.” He slapped at a fly buzzing around his head.

“Hello!” Kinross exclaimed. “Insects!”

“Yes,” Garcia agreed sourly. “Little animals in the brush, too. Rats and lizards, I think. And I got rained on once. It ain’t all good, Kinross.”

“Let’s go see that cave,” Kinross proposed. “I’ll tell you what happened to me on the way.”

They walked half a mile upstream. The valley narrowed and its walls became more vertical. A tangled growth of dark timber trees filled it. The diffuse light from the permanently overcast sky scarcely penetrated its gloom. Then they came into a clearing perhaps a hundred yards across and Kinross could see the darkly wooded slopes rising steeply on three sides. Directly ahead was the cave.

Two relatively narrow basaltic dikes slanted up the slope for more than a hundred feet, coming together at the top to form an inverted V. The stream ran out of the cavernous darkness at its base, bisected the clearing and lost itself in the dark wood. Near where the stream emerged, Kinross could see the cairn like a low stone platform about ten feet across and he could see and hear Silva, who sat wailing beside it.

“I can’t talk to Silva no more than Kerbeck,” Garcia said. “Silva thinks I’m a devil.”

They walked across the clearing. The giant Bo Bo came out of the cave to meet them.

“You have not brought fruit,” he said, in words that Kinross knew were never his own. “Go away and return with fruit.”

“Okay, Kruger,” Kinross said. “That much I’ll do for you.”

Days passed. To Kinross they seemed interminable, yet curiously void of remembered activity. He and Garcia tried marking off time with stones from the creek, but overnight the stones disappeared. So did banana peels and papaya rinds. The land would not hold a mark. The two men wrangled over what had happened in the preceding days and at last Kinross said, “It’s just like before, only now everything happened last week.”

“Then my beard grew an inch last week,” said Garcia, stroking its blue-blackness. Kinross’ beard was crinkled and reddish and more than an inch long.

“What’s the end of this?” the Mexican asked once. “Do we just go on in this two-mile-across world forever?”

“I expect we’ll get old and die,” Kinross said.

“I ain’t so sure even of that,” Garcia said. “I feel like I’m getting younger. I want a steak and a bottle of beer and a woman.”

“So do I,” Kinross agreed, “but this is still better than the boat.”

“Yes,” Garcia said feelingly. “Give Kruger that much, even if he did set the whole thing up.”

“I think Kruger is a lot less happy than we are,” Kinross said.

“Nobody’s happy but Kerbeck,” Garcia growled.

They saw Kerbeck often as they gathered fruit or tramped the confines of the little valley seeking relief of boredom. The giant Swede ranged through the land like an elemental spirit. He wore the remnants of his khaki trousers and singlet and his yellow hair and red beard were long and tangled. He seemed to recognize Garcia and Kinross, but made only humming noises in response to their words.

Kinross often felt that it was the unrelieved blackness of the nights which oppressed him most. He wanted stars and a moon. One night he awoke feeling uneasy and saw a scattering of stars in the sky, strangely constellated. He moved to wake Garcia but sleep overcame him again and he dreamed for the first time he could remember in that world. He was back on the rock pinnacle in the desert talking to Kruger. Kruger was wearing Fay’s body and he was worried.

“Something’s happened, Kinross,” he said. “There are stars and I didn’t shape them; I couldn’t. This world has suddenly received a great increase in animation and not all of it is under my control.”

“What can I do about it? Or care?”

“You care, all right. We’re in this world together, like in a lifeboat, Kinross. And I’m scared now. There’s an alien presence, perhaps a number of them, seeking our world. They may be hostile.”

“I doubt it, if they bring stars,” Kinross said. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know. Wandering outside of our space here, looking for us, I suppose. I want you and Garcia to go and find them.”

“Why can’t you do that?”

“Your guess was partly right, Kinross. I have my limits and my need for men like you and Garcia. I’m asking, not commanding. We’re still in the same boat, remember.”

“Yes. Okay, I’ll go. But how. .”

“Just start walking. I’ll let you through the re-entry barrier again.”

Kinross awoke with a start. The stars were still in the sky and a crescent moon hung above the horizon across the little stream. Garcia snored nearby.

“Wake up!” Kinross said, shaking him. The Mexican snorted and sat up.

“Madre de Dios!” he gasped. “Stars and a moon! Kinross, are we back. .?”

“No,” Kinross said. “Let’s go hunting. I’ve just been talking to Kruger.”

“Hunting? At night? Hunting what?”

“Maybe what made the stars. How do I know? Come on, Garcia, my feet are burning.”

Kinross strode off, leaping the creek and heading directly toward the crescent moon. The Mexican stumbled after him muttering in Spanish.

Once more Kinross reached the height of land, and the moon, fuller now, hung above the horizon on the right, in the same direction he had gone before. He walked briskly, the Mexican following in silence. Once Garcia exclaimed and pointed down to the right. Kinross looked and saw the cave mouth far below, the dwarfed clearing and the mighty slope curving convexly up from it to his present level. The moonlight touched the dark treetops with silver.

As they walked Kinross told Garcia about his dream. The Mexican did not doubt that it was genuine. Kinross warned him about the peculiar timelessness of experience outside the re-entry barrier. “It’s like everything happened two minutes ago,” he said.

“Yes,” said Garcia. “Look at that moon now, three-quarters full. Maybe we’ve been walking for a month.”

“Or a minute,” Kinross said.

It was not to be the same trip as before. Once on the high, gently curving plain he remembered, he found they were bearing sharply to the right, going up a gentle rise. Then the land pitched the other way and they began crossing shallow ravines with running water in their bottoms. The land grew rougher and the ravines deeper until, crossing one of them, Kinross saw that it bore directly for the moon. He continued down the stream bed in ankledeep water instead of climbing out.

The banks were of wet, dark stone and became steeper and higher as they went. The stream narrowed and became knee-deep and the current tugged fiercely at them, forcing them to cling to the stones to maintain their footing. The sharp V of the ravine ahead almost cradled the full moon and Kinross could hear a distant roar of falling water.

“Looks rough up ahead, Garcia,” he called to the Mexican ten feet behind him. “Watch it.”

He moved ahead another hundred yards toward the increasing noise and edged around a rock shoulder against which the water swirled angrily. The force of the current quickened suddenly, almost snatching his legs from under him, so that he flattened himself against the rock and called a warning back to Garcia.

Over the glassily smooth, veined lip of the waterfall twenty feet in front of him, Kinross looked into a vast pit, steeply conical and many miles across. It was beaded around the rim and threaded down the sides with falling water that whispered enormously across the distance. The full moon riding directly above washed the whole with silver. At the bottom of the pit was another moon which, Kinross thought fleetingly, must be a reflecting pond or lake.