*
*
Lake selected Gene Taylor, Tony Chiara and Steve Schroeder to go with him. They were well on their way by daylight the next morning, on the shoulder of each of them a mocker which observed the activity and new scenes with bright, interested eyes. They traveled light, since they would have fresh meat all the way, and carried herbs and corn only for the mockers. Once, generations before, it had been necessary for men to eat herbs to prevent deficiency diseases but now the deficiency diseases, like Hell Fever, were unknown to them.
They carried no compasses since the radiations of the two suns constantly created magnetic storms that caused compass needles to swing as much as twenty degrees within an hour. Each of them carried a pair of powerful binoculars, however; binoculars that had been diamond-carved from the ivory-like black unicorn horn and set with lenses and prisms of diamond-cut quartz.
The foremost bands of woods goats followed the advance of spring up the plateau and they followed the woods goats. They could not go ahead of the goats—the goats were already pressing close behind the melting of the snow. No hills or ridges were seen as the weeks went by and it seemed to Lake that they would walk forever across the endless rolling floor of the plain.
Early summer came and they walked across a land that was green and pleasantly cool at a time when the vegetation around the caves would be burned brown and lifeless. The woods goats grew less in number then as some of them stopped for the rest of the summer in their chosen latitudes.
They continued on and at last they saw, far to the north, what seemed to be an almost infinitesimal bulge on the horizon. They reached it two days later; a land of rolling green hills, scared here and there with ragged outcroppings of rock, and a land that climbed slowly and steadily higher as it went into the north.
They camped that night in a little vale. The floor of it was white with the bones of woods goats that had tarried too long the fall before and got caught by an early blizzard. There was still flesh on the bones and scavenger rodents scuttled among the carcasses, feasting.
“We’ll split up now,” he told the others the next morning.
He assigned each of them his position; Steve Schroeder to parallel his course thirty miles to his right, Gene Taylor to go thirty miles to his left, and Tony Chiara to go thirty miles to the left of Taylor.
“We’ll try to hold those distances,” he said. “We can’t look over the country in detail that way but it will give us a good general survey of it. We don’t have too much time left by now and we’ll make as many miles into the north as we can each day. The woods goats will tell us when it’s time for us to turn back.”
They parted company with casual farewells but for Steve Schroeder, who smiled sardonically at the bones of the woods goats in the vale and asked:
“Who’s supposed to tell the woods goats?”
*
*
*
Tip, the black, white-nosed mocker on Lake’s shoulder, kept twisting his neck to watch the departure of the others until he had crossed the next hill and the others were hidden from view.
“All right, Tip,” he said then. “You can unwind your neck now.”
“Unwind—all right—all right,” Tip said. Then, with a sudden burst of energy which was characteristic of mockers, he began to jiggle up and down and chant in time with his movements, “All right all right all right all right—”
“Shut up!” he commanded. “If you want to talk nonsense I don’t care—but don’t say ‘all right’ any more.”
“All right,” Tip agreed amiably, settling down. “Shut up if you want to talk nonsense. I don’t care.”
“And don’t slaughter the punctuation like that. You change the meaning entirely.”
“But don’t say all right any more,” Tip went on, ignoring him. “You change the meaning entirely.”
Then, with another surge of animation, Tip began to fish in his jacket pocket with little hand-like paws. “Tip hungry—Tip hungry.”
