A Steller’s jay flapped into the tree behind Depeaux, called once with its raucous voice, then flew across the valley into the trees of the far slope.
Depeaux watched the bird’s flight with peculiar interest, realizing it was the first higher life form he’d seen in Hellstrom’s valley. One damned jay! That was some record for a day’s work. But he was supposed to be a bird watcher, wasn’t he? Just a simple little old vacationer, a traveling salesman for the Blue Devil Fireworks Corporation of Baltimore, Maryland. He sighed, worked his way back to the oak’s shade. He had studied the maps, the aerial photographs, Porter’s descriptions, all of the accumulated reports. Every detail had been committed to memory. He scanned his back trail with the binoculars. Nothing moved in the tall grass of the open area or in the trees beyond it. Nothing. The oddity of this became increasingly demanding of his attention.
One damned jay?
It had been a thing long inserting itself into his awareness, but now he focused on it to the exclusion of all other considerations. One bird. It was as though animal life had been swept away from the region around Guarded Valley. Why hadn’t Porter mentioned that? And the grazing cattle down there to the north toward Fosterville. No fence kept them from approaching the farm, but they kept their distance.
Why?
In that instant, Depeaux recognized what it was that had made the farm’s fields appear so strange to him.
They were clean.
Those fields had not been harvested. They had been swept clean of every stalk, every leaf, every twig. An orchard occupied the upper reaches of the valley and Depeaux crawled back to study it through the binoculars. There were no bits of rotten fruit on the ground, no culls, no leaves or limbs—nothing.
Clean.
But the tall grass remained all around on the perimeter hills.
Hellstrom’s own addenda to the dietary notes.
The key workers must, of course, take the supplemental leader foods without fail, but it is equally important that they keep up their intake from the vats. It is here that we get the markers that maintain our awareness of mutual identity. Without the chemical sameness provided by the vats, we will become like those Outside: isolated, alone, drifting without purpose.
By late afternoon, Depeaux had become almost obsessed with the desire to find something animal and alive in the valley. But nothing stirred there and the sun had moved several long notches toward the horizon.
Perhaps another vantage point, he thought.
The longer he stayed on the hill above the farm, the less he liked his cover story. Bird watcher, indeed! Why hadn’t Porter mentioned the absence of animal life? Insects, of course: the grass was alive with them, crawling, buzzing, flitting.
Depeaux slid and crawled away from the crest, got to his knees. His back ached from all of the unnatural movement. Grass burrs had invaded his collar, under his belt, under his stockings, up his sleeves. He managed a smile, half grimace, at his own discomfort; he could almost hear Merrivale commenting, Part of the price you pay for engaging in this line of work, old bean.
Son of a bitch!
Porter’s careful reports had indicated no guards posted outside the farm’s perimeter, but that was just one man’s account. Depeaux asked himself how he felt about his position in the open under the oak. You stayed alive in this business by trusting only your own senses ultimately—and Porter was missing. That represented an important piece of information. It could be innocent or ominous, but it was safer to believe the worst. At the worst, Porter was dead and the people of Hellstrom’s farm were responsible. Merrivale believed this. He’d made that clear, and the secretive bastard could have information to confirm it without any of his agents being the wiser.
“You will proceed with the utmost caution, keeping in mind at every juncture our need to determine precisely what has happened to Porter.”
The son of a bitch probably already knows, Depeaux told himself.
Something about the emptiness of the region spoke of hidden dangers. Depeaux reminded himself that agents who leaned too heavily on the reports of others often ended up dead, sometimes in painful and ugly fashion. What was it about this place?
He swept his gaze around his back trail, saw no sign of movement or watching eyes. A glance at his watch told him he had slightly more than two hours before sunset. Time to get to the head of the valley then and scan the length of it.
Bending low at the waist, Depeaux got to his feet and, in a crouching trot, moved swiftly toward the south below the concealing ridge. His breathing deepened easily with the effort and he thought for a moment that he wasn’t in such bad condition for a man of fifty-one. Swimming and long walks weren’t the worst recipe in the world, and he wished he were swimming that instant. It was dry and hot under the ridge, the grass full of nose-tickling dust. Desire for a swim did not bother him greatly. Such wishes had come often in the sixteen years since he’d moved up from an office clerk in the Agency. He usually passed off the fleeting desire to be elsewhere as an unconscious recognition of danger, but sometimes it could be attributed to no more than bodily discomfort.
When he’d been a mere clerk in the Baltimore office, Depeaux had enjoyed his daydreams about working as an agent. He’d filed final reports on agents “wasted in action” and had told himself that if he ever got to be an agent, he would be extremely cautious. That had not been a hard promise to keep. He was, by nature, careful and painstaking—“the perfect clerk,” some of his fellows carped. But it was painstaking care that had led him to commit the farm and its surroundings to memory, to note possible cover (little enough of that!), and the game trails through the tall grass indicated on aerial photos.
Game trails but no visible game sign, he reminded himself. What kind of game ran these paths? It was another note added to his increasing sense of caution.
Depeaux had once overheard Merrivale commenting to another agent, “The trouble with Carlos is he plays for survival.”
As though old Jollyvale didn’t do the same! Depeaux told himself. The man hadn’t reached his present eminence as operations director without an eye for the main line.
Depeaux could hear the faint trickling of the waterfall. A clump of madronas stood at the invisible line on Depeaux’s mental map, marking the northernmost reach of Hellstrom’s valley. Depeaux paused in the shade of the madronas and made another survey of his surroundings, paying special attention to his own back trail. Something about that open area—nothing moved in it, but Depeaux made a decision then and there to wait for darkness to cover his return across that space.
Thus far, it had not been too bad a go, he told himself. Just that faintly disquieting sense of an unknown danger. The second examination of the valley from this upper vantage point should not take too long. Perhaps he might reconsider and go back by daylight to the bicycle and an early check-in with Tymiena at the van. Perhaps. That first sense of decision to wait for darkness had gone deeply into him, though.
Play it safe, he reminded himself. Play for survival.
He turned left briskly, unslung his binoculars, and slipped up through a stand of oak and madrona to a clump of oily green bushes behind the rock face of the valley’s upper limit. The tinkling waterfall was quite noisy off through the undergrowth. At the bushes, Depeaux dropped to all fours, tucking the binoculars under his shirt and cinching the pack tightly against his right side. He went through the now-familiar stalking crawl, turning partly onto his left side to protect the binoculars and keep the pack off the ground. The bushes ended presently in a short rock lip which exposed a lengthwise view of Guarded Valley.