“Give us time,” Andrew said cynically. “We’ve only been on Mars a minute or two by your standards. What roadway?” We cut a roadway through the mountains when we built Shein-la Mahari.
“What about erosion? Would it still be there?” Kamellin had trouble grasping the concept of erosion. Rain and snow were foreign to his immediate experience. Unless the roadway had been blocked by a sandstorm, it should be there, as in Kamellin’s day.
Andrew pulled himself to a ledge. He couldn’t climb with Kamellin using part of his mind; the inner voice was distracting. He edged himself backward on a flat slab of rock, unstrapping his pack. The remnant of his morning coffee was hot in his canteen; he drank it while Kamellin’s thoughts flowed through his. Finally he asked, “Where’s this roadway?” Andrew’s head reeled in vertigo. He lay flat on the ledge, dizzily grasping rock, while Kamellin tried to demonstrate his sense of direction. The whirl slowly quieted, but all he could get from the brain-shaking experience was that Kamellin’s race had oriented themselves by at least eleven major compass points in what felt like four dimensions to Andrew’s experience, oriented on fixed stars—his original host-race could see the stars even by daylight.
“But I can’t, and anyway, the stars have moved.”
I have thought of that Kamellin answered. But this part: of the mountains is familiar to me. We are not far from the place. I will lead you there.
“Lead on, MacDufl7.”
The concept is unfamiliar. Elucidate.
Andrew chuckled. “I mean, which way do we go from here?”
The vertigo began to overcome him once more.
“No, no—not that again!”
Then I will have to take over all your senses—
Andrew’s mental recoil was as instinctive as survival. The terror of that moment last night, when Kamellin forced him into nothingness, was still too vivid. “No! I suppose you could take over forcibly, you did once, but not without half killing me! Because this time I’d fight—I’d fight you like hell!”
Kamellin’s .rage was a palpable pain in his mind. Have you no honor of your own, fool from a mad world? How could I lie to you when my mind is part of your own? Wander as you please, I do not suffer and I am not impatient. I thought that you were weary of these rocky paths, no more!
Andrew felt bitterly ashamed. “Kamellin—I’m sorry.”
Silence, a trace of alien anger remaining.
Andrew suddenly laughed aloud. Alien or human, there were correspondences; Kamellin was sulking. “For goodness sake,” he said aloud, “if we’re going to share one body, let’s not quarrel. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings; this is all new to me. But you don’t have to sit in the corner and turn up your nose, either!”
The situation suddenly struck him as too ridiculous to take seriously; he laughed aloud, and like a slow, pleasant ripple, he felt Kamellin’s slow amusement strike through his own.
Forgive me if I offended. I am accustomed to doing as I please in a body I inhabit. 1 am here at your sufferance, and I offer apologies.
Andrew laughed again, in a curious doubled amusement, somehow eager to make amends. “Okay, Kamellin, take over. You know where I want to go—if you can get us there faster, hop to it.”
But for the rest of his life he remembered the next hour with terror. His only memory was of swaying darkness and dizziness, feeling his legs take steps he had not ordered, feeling his hands slide on rock and being unable to clutch and save himself, walking blind and deaf and a prisoner in his own skull; and ready to go mad with the horror of it. Curiously enough, the saving thought had been; Kamellin’s able to stand it. He isn’t going to hurt us.
When sight and sense and hearing came back, and full orientation with it, he found himself at the mouth of a long, low canyon which stretched away for about twelve miles, perfectly straight. It was narrow, less than fifteen feet wide. On either side, high dizzy cliffs were cut sharply away; he marvelled at the technology that had built this turnpike road.
The entrances were narrow, concealed between rock, and deeply drifted with sand; the hardest part had been descending, and later ascending, the steep, worn-away steps that led down into the floor of the canyon. He had struggled and cursed his way down the two-foot steps, wishing that the old Martians had had shorter legs; but once down, he had walked the whole length in less than two hours—travelling a distance, which Reade had covered in three weary days of rock-climbing.
And beside the steps was a ramp down which vehicles could be driven; had it been less covered with sand, Andrew could have slid down!
When he finally came to the end of the canyon road, the nearly-impassible double ridge of mountains lay behind him. From there it was a simple matter to strike due west and intersect the road from Mount Denver to the spaceport. There he camped overnight, awaiting the mailcar. He was awake with the first faint light, and lost no time in gulping a quick breakfast and strapping on his pack; for the mail-cars were rocket-driven (in the thin air of Mars, this was practical) and travelled at terrific velocities along the sandy barren flats; he’d have to be alert to flag it down.
He saw it long before it reached him, a tiny cloud of dust; he hauled off his jacket and, shivering in the freezing air, flagged furiously. The speck grew immensely, roared, braked to a stop; the driver thrust out a head that was only two goggled eyes over a heavy dustkerchief.
“Need a ride?”
Protocol on Mars demanded immediate identification.
“Andrew Slayton—I’m with the Geographic Society—Reade’s outfit back in the mountains at Xanadu. Going back to Mount Denver for the rest of the expedition.”
The driver gestured. “Climb on and hang on. I’ve heard about that gang. Reade’s Folly, huh?”
“That’s what they call it.” He settled himself on the seatless floor—like all Martian vehicles, the rocket-car was a bare chassis without doors, seats or sidebars, stripped ,to lower freight costs—and gripped the rail. The driver looked down at him, curiously;
“I heard about that place Xanadu. Jinxed, they say. You must be the first man since old Torchevsky, to go there and get back safe. Reade’s men all right?”
“They were fine when I left,” Andrew said.
“Okay. Hang on,” the driver warned, and at Andrew’s nod, cut in the rockets and the sand-car leaped forward, eating up the desert.
Mount Denver was dirty and smelly after the clean coldness of the mountains. Andrew found his way through the maze of army barracks and waited in the officers’ Rec quarters while a call-system located Colonel Reese Montray.
He hadn’t been surprised to find out that the head of the other half of the expedition was a Colonel in active service; after all, within the limits imposed by regulations, the Army was genuinely anxious for Reade to find something at Xanadu. A genuine discovery might make some impression on the bureaucrats back on Earth; they might be able to revive public interest in Mars, get “some more money and supplies instead of seeing everything diverted to Venus and Europa.
Montray was a tall thin man with a heavy Lunar Colony accent, the tiny stars of the Space Service glimmering above the Army chevrons on his sleeve. He gestured Andrew into a private office and Listened, with a bored look, up to the point where he left Reade; then began to shoot questions at him.
“Has he proper chemical testing equipment for the business? Protection against gas—chemicals?”
“I don’t think so,” Andrew said. He’d forgotten Reade’s theory about hallucinogens in spinosa mortis; so much had happened since that it didn’t seem to make much difference.
“Maybe