Orbit 2

Mary walked apart too, always in a flutter of birds. He saw dainty green and blue sun birds, green and white pittas, green and bronze drongos and the demure white nutmeg pigeons she loved most of all. When they met he tried to talk to her and found her aloof and remote.

“This world is harmful to you, Mary,” he urged one day. “It disintegrates you, makes you lose part of yourself. Don’t you want to go back to Queensland while you still can? Before it’s too late?”

“I send out my birds and I call them back,” she replied. “No harm here.”

“That’s no answer, Mary,” he protested. He looked at her untroubled face with the red lips and the smooth brow and laid his arm across her shoulders. She slipped away from him.

“Mary, I’m going to take you back to Queensland,” Kinross said sharply. “It’s my duty to you.”

She hummed like Kerbeck and moved away. Kinross looked after her morosely. Shortly after, he saw her high on the hillside talking to Kerbeck. . Or humming with him.

New arrivals came in almost daily, by ones and twos, and melted at once into the village pattern. One day Kinross asked von Lankenau how long he thought it would go on.

“The rate is dropping off,” von Lankenau said. “I expect it will decrease asymptotically and never quite stop. But the gate apparently sweeps a quite narrow path and has already caught up most of the susceptibles. And it may be that, as this world fills, its power of attraction lessens also.”

“When will it be full?”

“Never, I hope. We want thousands, a large gene pool, a larger world. I estimate our surface is only about five miles in diameter now, Mr. Kinross.”

“Can’t Kruger make it larger if he likes?”

“Only at the expense of internal definition. He is striking a workable balance. But it is boundless by re-entry, and is not that a most fascinating experience, Mr. Kinross?”

“I found it disturbing and then frustrating,” Kinross said.

“Ah! The limits, of course. But with more people we can extend our surface to more comfortable limits. In the end, I suppose, we shall make it spherical and remove the re-entry barrier to a higher dimension. But I shall be just a bit sorry when we do. Do you take my feeling, Mr. Kinross?”

“Just who are ‘we’?” Kinross asked with a sudden edge in his voice. “You and Kruger?”

“Oh no. All of us. The culture, the Herr Kruger. . you will have a part.”

“You are kind, Mr. Lankenau.”

The tall man looked at him sharply. “Mr. Kinross,” he said solemnly, “any time that you wish to, you may take your rightful position in this world. I urge you to do so. I command by your default, and you know that very well.”

“I’ll have no part of it,” Kinross said. “Damn Kruger and his world, snatching up a young woman like Mary Chadwick. .”

“The Herr Kruger loves you, Mr. Kinross. You and Mr. Garcia are his sensorium, due to the peculiar circumstances of your coming here. He can be aware of his world only indifferently through the rest of us and through the Kabeiroi on the hillside.”

“Well, I don’t love the Herr Kruger. I hope he’s still mad with thirst.”

Von Lankenau raised a cautionary hand. “He does still suffer from thirst,” he said in a low voice, “but your words are unworthy of you, Mr. Kinross. Hate me, if you must, but not the Herr Kruger.”

“Why in hell do you have to shave every day?” Kinross asked angrily as he turned away.

He looked back from a distance and tugged at his beard. Mary Chadwick was talking to von Lankenau, standing close, looking up at him. Kinross reflected with a twinge that she had never looked up at him in that way. Then he remembered that she was as tall as himself and could not. He walked away swallowing a curse.

That night in their hut Kinross suggested to Garcia that next day they try to break the reentry barrier. The Mexican declined, saying that he and von Lankenau were working out a path-marking ritual with the villagers.

“Well, I will,” Kinross said. “I’ll go up there and walk right through it by not believing it’s there, just like I should have done in the boat.”

“Yes, and got your throat cut,” Garcia said. “But it’s there, all right. You’ll find out.”

Kinross found out. He fought the barrier all day, knowing its impossibility, striving to locate the exact point of reversal in order to step boldly across it. He came near doing so. Again and again, with the tiny instant of vertigo almost upon him, he saw the leering Kabeiroi drift by him and birds fly over, but each time he was turned back, suddenly half a mile down the hill and headed the wrong way. He came home in the evening ¡disgruntled and exhausted.

“Lankenau called it a world of magic,” he reflected. “Well, magic, then. Birds fly through the barrier. I’m doing this for Mary. If she would only help me—”

He decided to try again during the next thunderstorm, when he hoped Kruger would be too busy with his storm devils to guard the barrier. One morning several days later the sky darkened and the queer light lay along the ground and he knew a storm was making. The black things from the hillside invaded the valley in gusts of damp wind, sidling and eddying through the shrubbery just out of eye reach. Poised on rocks, treetops and all pointed things, the gray women strained upward in a tension of half-visible air. With the first drops of rain Kinross set off up the hillside.

As he neared the barrier zone, the storm grew more violent. Thunder boomed and roared at him, rain slashed at him in sheets, jagged lightning flashes gave him glimpses of the storm devils. The Kabeiroi scurried around him with obscene menaces; over his head the gray women streamed by on the gusty wind. Once he saw Kerbeck, head thrown back, great chest bared to the wind.

All day he fought the barrier, spitting curses into the storm, and all day the storm spat and thundered back at him. He fell and rolled and rose again, over and over, straining up the hill with aching chest. Wind-driven twigs and branches lashed his face and body. Smothering rain drilled at him; wind snatched his breath away. At last his pounding heart and trembling knees convinced him that he was beaten. He turned back down the hillside.

“Well, Kruger, I gave you a fight,” he gasped aloud. The storm abated as he limped down the slope and he saw downed trees and scattered branches and raw-earth gullies swirling with runoff. The thought came to him that he had at least forced Kruger to wreck von Lan-kenau’s precious village. Then he was on the valley floor and the storm cleared entirely. Half a mile away he could see the village and its trees seemingly intact.

As he neared his hut, Mary came from behind a screen of shrubbery. White nutmeg pigeons perched on her head and shoulders. She smiled at him oddly.

“Regular cockeye bob up there, wasn’t it, Allan?”

He looked at her stupidly. “Didn’t it rain down here?” he asked.

“Only a sprinkle,” she said, smiling. “Go in by the fire and dry your things. You look tired.”

He walked on, soaked, mud-stained, limping on a wrenched ankle. “She smiled and called me Allan,” he thought. “No storm here. Called me Allan. Oh, hell.

One morning, remote from the village, Kinross heard a pounding noise. In a clearing he found Peter White and two others beating mulberry bark with rounded paddles. The bearded Rhodesian looked tanned and fit and merry-eyed. The three men avoided looking at Kinross, as all the villagers tended to do, but they were aware of him and the rhythm of their pounding faltered.

On impulse Kinross called out, “White! Come over here!”

White paid no attention. Kinross spoke more sharply. White, without looking around, mumbled something about the Herr Kruger.