Can you spare me a thousand or so?”
“Of course! Two thousand, if you like!”
“It is twice as good as a thousand. I will accept with thanks, and return whatever is left as soon as possible.”
'You need not concern yourself with money; if for nothing else, this is money spent for the Conservancy!'
“That is my opinion too. Ask the officer which bank at Trieste is their correspondent, and send me two thousand sols which I will pick up at once.'
“You can't imagine how you worry me,” growled Pirie Tamm.
Wayness cried: “Stop, Uncle Pirie! For the moment at least I am safe, since I have sent everyone off to
Bangalore! They will be very irritable when they find it is just a prank, but by that time I will be far away.”
“So when will I hear from you again?”
“At the moment I can't even guess.”
Wayness settled her account at the front desk, then returned to her room. The events at Trieste had been helpful in more ways than one. Wayness' concepts of evil had altered from the abstract to the real. She now knew with gristly certainty the quality of her opponents. They were persistent, cruel, smilingly callous. They would kill her if they caught her, and this would be a tragic event indeed from her point of view. It would mean the cessation of that quick and lively intelligence known as Wayness, with its special little graces and quirks and affectionate good nature and wry sense of humor. Tragedy indeed!
Wayness debated changing into her disguise of the morning, and compromised, by shrouding herself in the pea jacket and pulling the cap down over her dark curls. She accoutered herself with the weapons Alvina had given her and felt greatly comforted.
Wayness was now ready to leave. She went to the door, opened it a slit and looked along the hall. It was not at all unlikely for someone to be waiting, to overwhelm her as she opened the door and bear her back into the room, where she could be dealt with at leisure. Wayness grimaced at the idea.
The hall was empty. Wayness departed the hotel by the stairs and the timber door which opened upon the shingle under the wharf.
For three days and three nights Wayness practiced every tactic of evasion, concealment and dissimulation that her imagination could contrive, including trap's against mobile spy cells and tattletags. She made quick sorties through crowds, doubling back on her tracks, over and over, watching to see whom she might be confusing. She boarded an omnibus and when it halted for an instant at a village traffic stop, she jumped out and was quickly out of town on a van transporting farm laborers. At Lisbon on the Atlantic coast she boarded the northbound slideway, only to debark at the first stop, then to return aboard, to sequester herself in the women’s restroom until the next stop, where again she debarked and slipped aboard a car traveling in the opposite direction, which she rode all the way to Tanjer. Here she changed her semblance, discarding her green travel cape and the blonde wig she had acquired, to join a group of young wanderers, all dressed alike in dungarees and gray pullovers. She spent a night in the Tanjer hostel. The next morning she booked passage on the trans-Atlantic skytrain and six hours later was discharged at the sprawling city Alonso Saavedra, on the Rio Tanagra. She was by this time certain that she had eluded pursuit; but she continued to set traps for spy cells, hide in secret places to watch for trackers and to change vehicles unpredictably. In due course she arrived by skycoach at the provincial capital Biriguassu, then flew south and west across the pampas to the mining town Nambucara. She spent the night at the Stella d'Oro Hotel, and dined on a steak of startling proportions, served with fried potatoes, avocado sauce, and a roast bird — possibly a small long-legged chicken to the side.
Pombareales lay still far to the south, with catch-as-catch-can travel connections. In the morning Wayness somewhat dubiously climbed aboard an airbus of venerable vintage, which rose with a lurch and groan, then flew heavily south, wallowing to gusts of wind. The other passengers seemed to take the vehicle’s alarming peculiarities for granted, and showed concern only when one of the lurches caused them to spill their beer. A gentleman sitting beside Wayness described himself as a steady patron who long ago had abandoned fear. He explained that since the vehicle had been flying back and forth from north to south and north again for many years, there was no reason to suppose that on this day of all days it would collapse in mid-air and fail to do its duty. “In sheer point of fact,” he told Wayness, “the vehicle becomes safer each day it flies, and I can prove this point by mathematics, which of course is infallible. You speak with a good accent; may I assume that you are skilled in the use of logic?”
Wayness modestly admitted that this was the case.
“Then you will follow my reasoning without difficulty. Assume that the vehicle is new. Let us say that it flies safely for two days, then crashes on the third day. Its safety record is not good: one crash in three trips. If, however, the vehicle flies ten thousand days, as has this one, its safety record is at least one in ten thousand and one, which is very good! Furthermore, each succeeding day that passes without incident, the risk becomes smaller so that by an equal increment the passenger's sense of security should increase.'
The vehicle was struck by a particularly vicious gust of wind; it jerked and plunged and from somewhere came a wrenching tearing sound, which the gentleman ignored. ''We are probably safer here than if we were sitting at home in an easy chair, at the mercy of a rabid dog.”
'I appreciate your explanation, which is very clear,” said Wayness. “I still feel a bit nervous, but now I do not know why.”
“Late in the afternoon the airbus landed at the town Aquique, where Wayness disembarked, after which the airbus took off once again for Lago Angelina, to the southeast. Wayness discovered that she had missed the tri- weekly connection to Pombareales, still another hundred miles to the southwest, almost in the shadow of the Andes. She could either lay over two days at Aquique, or she could proceed by surface omnibus on the following day.
Aquique's best hotel was the Universo, a tower of concrete and glass five stories high adjacent to the airport. Wayness was assigned an airy room on the top floor, overlooking all Aquique: several thousand concrete and glass blocks arranged on a rectilinear grid concentric about the central plaza. Beyond, the pampas spread away to the edge of vision.
During the evening, Wayness felt lonely and homesick, and spent an hour writing letters to her father and mother, with an insert for Glawen, if he were still at Araminta Station. “I have given up expecting any word from you. Julian showed up at Fair Winds and did nothing to make himself popular; to the contrary. However, he mentioned that you had gone off somewhere to help your father, and as of now, I don’t know whether you are alive or dead. I hope alive, and I wish you were here with me now, as this enormous tract of wasteland is on the whole depressing. I find that I have only so much energy to devote to intrigues and plots, and then I start feeling miserable. Still, I will survive. I have an enormous amount to tell you. This is a strange countryside, and sometimes I forget that I am traveling Old Earth and believe myself off-world. In any case, I send you all my love, and I hope that we will be together soon.”
In the morning Wayness boarded the omnibus, and was transported south and west across the pampas. She relaxed into the seat and covertly appraised her fellow passengers: a routine which by now had become almost reflexive. She saw nothing to arouse her suspicion; no one showed any interest in her, save a young man with a narrow forehead and a wide big-toothed smile, who wanted to sell her a religious tract.
“No, thank you,” said Wayness. “I am not interested in your theories.'
“The young man produced a paper sack. “Would you care for some candy?”
“No, thank you,” said Wayness. “If you plan to eat it yourself, please move to another seat, as the smell will make me sick, and I will vomit on your religious tract.' The young man moved to a different seat and ate his candy in solitude.
The bus moved across a desolation of low hills, outcrops of rotten rocks, tufts of bracken, willow and aspens in the dips and declivities, a few low cypress trees bedraggled by the wind. The environment was not without its own bleak beauty. Wayness thought that had she been required to paint the landscape, she could have done so with a very limited palette. There would be several tones of gray: dark for the shadows, grays tinted with umber,
