As soon as he had rejoined her she triggered one of the autotherm trays and they ate their first meal on Hassan IV. Harben periodically checked the approach from the north with his binoculars, and between times tried to decide if he was perceiving his surroundings in a completely normal manner. There was no repetition of the delusion, but as he moved around the camp there were moments, always as he was relaxing his vigilance, when he got an unaccountable feeling he was in a party of three. The impressions were so vague and fleeting that they could have been a consequence of his edginess, and he learned to dismiss them. Sandy, dictating notes into a recorder, appeared to be untroubled.
Late in the afternoon Harben detected a movement in the folds of grey rock to the north, and he made ready with his main camera, snorting with excitement as he checked its settings. A few minutes later two animals which bore a superficial resemblance to antelope came through the pass, delicately picking their way over the broken ground. One was a doe, and even at a distance it was obvious she was soon to give birth.
Being careful to remain in cover, Harben filmed their progress. As the animals began to draw level with him he saw that what he had taken to be the doe’s tail was actually two spindly legs of her nascent fawn projecting from the vagina. His heart began a steady pounding as the animals reached the flat area where the petraforms lay in waiting. He pressed a button on his remote controller, setting the four automatic cameras in operation, and watched through his viewfinder as the quasi-gnu reached the deadly circles.
As though guided by a powerful instinct, they threaded a path through the danger zone – passing within a metre or so of the ill-defined perimeters – and continued south-wards into the safety of the higher ground. Harben shut down his cameras, wondering if the disappointment he felt was being shared by the three immobile predators lurking below the surface. He turned to Sandy, who had been watching the animals through her own binoculars.
“Too bad,” he said. “Still, we couldn’t really expect to connect first time.”
She looked at him with sombre eyes. “Bernard, was the female giving birth?”
“She wasn’t far off it.”
“But that’s awful! Why don’t they stop and rest?”
Harben smiled at her concern, suddenly reminded of how little she knew about wildlife. “Animals like that, which stay alive through being able to run fast, usually keep on the move. Especially if they feel threatened. When she drops the fawn it’ll have maybe five minutes to learn to walk – then they’ll be on their way again.”
Sandy glanced about her and shivered. “I don’t like this place.”
“It’s the same on any Earth-type planet,” he told her. “You can see the same sort of thing back in Africa.”
“Well, I’m glad that one got away. It would have been too horrible if those monsters had caught the mother.”
It was not a good time for an argument, but Harben decided he should straighten out Sandy’s thinking before she actually witnessed a kill. “In nature there aren’t any monsters,” he said. “There aren’t any good guys or bad guys. Every creature is entitled to take its food, and it doesn’t matter whether that creature is a robin or a rocktopus.”
Sandy shook her head, lips compressed. “There’s no comparison between a robin and one of those… things.”
“They both have to eat.”
“But a robin is only a…”
“Not from a worm’s point of view.”
“I’m cold,” Sandy said, looking away from him. All at once she seemed absurdly small and defenceless, and he felt a pang of remorse over having allowed her to accompany him to a world which was so foreign in every way to her own milieu.
There were no more sightings that day, and as soon as it began to get dark Harben laid out the alarm cord in a large circle around the shelter. Sandy crawled into their artificial cave almost immediately, but Harben sat on the ground outside it for another hour, staring into the total blackness and listening to the complex, conflicting whispers of nearby streams. Once he developed a conviction that he was being watched, but none of the green-glowing needles on the alarm panel even trembled, and he concluded there was still some tension lingering in his nervous system.
When he moved in beside Sandy she moulded her body into his so that they fitted together as neatly as two spoons. The love-making they had planned earlier in the day would have relaxed Harben and made it easier for him to sleep, but – sensitive to her mood – he made no advances. He lay awake for a long time, enduring the stretched-out hours and waiting impatiently for the morning.
The return of daylight, the aromas of hot food and coffee, the purposeful domesticity of the morning chores – all combined to elevate Sandy’s spirits, and Harben felt a corresponding lift within himself. He moved around a lot, driving the stiffness from his limbs, and talked rather more than was necessary about their plans for the next few years. Sandy may have realized he was scheming to influence her attitude towards his work as a whole, and to the Hassan IV expedition, but there was no adverse reaction on her part. She even started a running joke based on the notion of treating the planet as a luxury resort in an article for a travel magazine.
Harben’s principal concern while this was going on was that during the night the cloud ceiling had descended almost to ground level. He kept a watchful eye on it as he ate and was relieved to find that the sandwich of clear air was – in response to the action of the invisible sun – gradually growing wider, revealing more and more of the high branches of trees. It gave him the sense of being at the bottom of a glass of aerated water which was steadily clarifying from the base upwards. As soon as the northern hill slopes beyond the pass had come into view he raised his binoculars and at once saw a small herd of quasi-gnu patiently filtering down through rocky obstacles.
“I think we’re in business,” he said, sliding his hand through the wrist-strap of his main camera. “Perhaps you should stay here.”
He doubled over and ran to a hummock from the lee of which he had a good view of the flat area and the sentient circles. A glance at the remote controller told him the automatic cameras on their vantage points were ready to function and, as a precaution against being forgetful in the forthcoming excitement, he switched them on early. He sensed Sandy taking up a position close behind him, but was too busy getting long shots of the approaching herd to speak to her. The quasi-gnu were emerging from the pass and their leaders were heading straight for the waiting circles.
Harben watched the entire scene in enlargement through his viewfinder as the herd of about twenty came level with him and began crossing what, for them, was the danger zone. Again, as though protected by an extra sense, the animals threaded tangential courses between circles. He was beginning to think none of them would make the fatal mistake when a large buck, which was being followed by a pregnant female, walked into the nearest circle. Harben’s mouth went dry as the creature, unaware of its peril, stepped over the depression marking the petraform’s eighth arm. It crossed the ring of stones which were not stones and, moving with a stately nonchalance, passed safely out the other side.
Harben’s disappointment was as sharp as a blow. Could the petraform be dead? Would he have to look for another site?
He tensed again as the doe followed her mate’s footsteps into the circle. There was an explosive flurry of movement in the entrance depression. A slim black tongue snapped upwards and, with an easily audible whipcrack, coiled around the legs of the partially-born fawn which protruded from the doe’s haunches. The doe screamed in terror and immediately came to a standstill.