Flatlander - Larry Niven [96]
“Alan Watson?”
“Yes, that’s right. You’re one of the conference delegates.”
“Gil Hamilton. ARM.” We shook gloves. He was a thin young man with straight black hair, a narrow nose, thick shaggy eyebrows, blunt-fingered hands as strong as mine. He couldn’t make himself smile. Frightened for Naomi? The smallish painting on his chest showed an esoteric spacecraft nearing the North America nebula, all in reds and blacks.
We set off, Naomi leading. The road west was a trade road; it sometimes carried heavy equipment, up to the size of a damaged spacecraft. It was broad and smooth but not straight. Follow it far enough and you would reach the Belt Trading Post.
We had come four or five hundred yards without much conversation when Naomi said, “I turned off here. I wanted to climb that rock.”
She was pointing at a faceted lump a considerable distance away. It was the tallest point around. I had first seen it glowing in darkness, lit by imminent dawn, when I had looked out my window last night.
We followed Naomi toward it. Marion asked, “Did you climb it?”
“Yes.”
The sun was only six degrees up in the sky. We walked in shadow most of the time. It would have been like wading through ink but for our headlamps. The footing was chancy. Naomi stumbled as often as I did, more often than the lunies. Marion had trouble, too.
She stopped Naomi at one point where our only route of approach would round a spur of black volcanic glass. “Okay, what’s around this turn?”
“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “It was dark; it was all different. I’m not even sure this is the way I came.”
The peak was a thousand feet high and not particularly steep. It would give a good view of Hove City, I thought, but we were north of where Chris Penzler had spotted his assassin. A cop directed Naomi to climb it.
She wasn’t exactly agile in unfamiliar gravity, with the inflated suit restricting her movements. But she didn’t have any trouble till she was three hundred feet up. Then she started yelping. She came down dangerously fast.
“It’s hot!” she complained. “It burned me right through the suit!”
“Where?” Alan Watson demanded.
“My chest and arms. It’s okay now, I think, but I can’t climb it in daylight. Shall I try the other side?”
Marion said, “No, skip it. Where next?”
Naomi led us south. I wondered if we would learn anything this way. Whether or not she was lying, her answer would be the same: it was dark, I don’t know the moon, this probably isn’t the way I came. Tentatively, she had lied already. When I’d climbed out of my tub, the peak had been sunlit for the upper hundred feet. Why had she tried to climb the sunlit side today if she’d had the chance to learn better last night?”
Of course she could have started earlier yesterday … and climbed in total darkness. I didn’t like that, either.
And I hated where she was leading us.
This was familiar territory. I had sifted it in miniature, felt its contours with my imaginary hand. I half remembered landmarks large or strange, and so, it seemed, did Naomi.
Like a hill-sized boulder that had split nicely down the middle, leaving flat planes uppermost, Naomi described it before we reached it. She pointed out one half of the split monolith and said, “I climbed up on that one. I lay on my back and looked at the stars and sometimes at Hove City. More than half the windows were dark by then. There was nice backlighting from behind, from the spaceport and the mirror works.”
She moved to climb up on it, but Marion yanked her back. The orange-clad cops searched with headlamps and powerful flashlights for boot scrapes, footprints, anything Naomi might have dropped. When they gave up on the sides, Watson and Jefferson reached the top in one leap and searched that. Slanted sunlight made the lamps unnecessary.
Marion jumped up and joined them. She balanced on boot toes and fingertips and searched with her face two inches from the rock.
“Nothing,” she said. “Are you sure you were in this territory?”
“I was right up there on that rock!”
Marion looked satisfied; Jefferson looked grim; Alan Watson had a haunted look.