17: ELEVATOR
For Barlennan himself it was hardly routine. The upper plateau was as it had seemed from the beginning: arid, stony, lifeless, and confusing. He did not dare go far from the edge; once among those boulders, direction would quickly vanish. There were no hills of any size to serve as land marks, or at least none which could be seen from the ground. The thickly scattered rocks hid everything more than a few yards away, towering into the line of sight in every direction except toward the edge of the cliff. Travel itself was not too difficult. The ground was level, except for the stones; these merely had to be avoided. Eight hundred miles is a long walk for a man, and a longer one for a creature only fifteen inches long who has to “walk” by rippling forward caterpillar style; and the endless detours made the actual distance covered much more than eight hundred miles. True, Barlennan’s people could travel with considerable speed, all things considered; but much had to be considered. The captain actually began to worry somewhat about the food supply before the trip was over. He had felt that he was allowing a generous safety margin when he first conceived the project; this idea had to be sharply modified. Time and again he anxiously asked the human beings far above how much farther he had to go; sometimes he received an answer — always discouraging — and sometimes the rocket was on the other side of the planet and his answer came from Toorey, telling him to wait a short time for a fix. The relay stations were still functioning, but they could not be used to take a directional reading on his radio. It did not occur to him until the long walk was nearly over that he could have cut across among the stones after all. The sun by itself, of course, could not have served him as a directional guide; it circled the horizon completely in less than eighteen minutes, and a very accurate clock would be necessary to calculate the actual desired course from its apparent direction. However, the observers in the rocket could have told him at any time whether the sun was in front of him, behind him, or to a particular side with respect to his desired direction of travel. By the time this occurred to anyone, the remaining distance could be covered about as easily by keeping the edge in sight; the cliff was nearly straight between where Barlennan then was and the rendezvous point. There was still a little food, but not too much, when they finally reached a position where the Earthmen could find no significant difference in the positions of the radios. Theoretically, the first thing to do should have been to proceed with the next phase of Barlennan’s plan in order to replenish the supply of eatables; but actually there was a serious step to be taken first. Barlennan had mentioned it before the march began, but no one had really considered the matter with any care. Now it stared them in the eye. The Earthmen had said they were about as close to the
Bree as they could get. There should be, then, food only a hundred yards below them; but before they could take any steps toward getting it, someone — and probably several people — must look over the edge. They must see just where they were in relation to the ship; they must rig up lifting tackle to bring the food up; in short, they must look fully three hundred feet straight down — and they had excellent depth perception. Still, it had to be done; and eventually it was done. Barlennan, as befitted his position, set the example. He went — not too rapidly, it must be admitted — to the three-foot limit and fixed his eyes on the low hills and other terrain features visible between him and the distant horizon. Slowly he let his gaze wander downward to closer and closer objects, until it was blocked by the lip of rock directly ahead of him. Without haste, he looked back and forth, getting used to seeing things that he could tell already were below him. Then, almost imperceptibly, he inched forward to take in more and more of the landscape near the foot of the cliff. For a long time it looked generally the same, but he managed to keep his attention principally on the new details he could see rather than on the fearful thing he was doing. At last, however, the river became visible, and he moved forward almost rapidly. The far bank was there, the spot where most of the hunting parties had landed after swimming across; from above, even the branching and rebranching trails they had left — he had never realized that such things showed so plainly from overhead. Now the near bank could be seen, and the mark where the