With practice, this thought projection became as automatic as speech, and could be described as speech.
“What’s your name?” asked George.
“Mara,” she said, exhibiting no surprise to find a voice other than her own speaking in her mind.
“Where are you from, Mara?”
She waved sticky fingers in the direction of the misty mountains, then stuck the same fingers in her mouth and sucked them.
“I see. I’m George. I come from another planet, Earth.”
She was incurious about him. The words “another planet” were meaningless, creating no mental image. She was much more interested in the texture of the parachute, which she fingered again.
“You may have that,” said George, kindly.
“Naturally. It’s mine.”
“Finders keepers, huh? Mara, what’s this war all about? What side are you on—white circles or green triangles?”
She remained expressionless. Not a thought came across to him: it was as though her Teleo were switched off. When she didn’t understand, or was uninterested, her mind seemed to become a complete blank.
“You don’t get it? Circles. Triangles. See here.”
He seized a sharp splinter from the wreckage and carved specimen circles and triangles in the turf. When he looked up, she was raiding the provision box, grabbing handfuls of food bars.
“Hey, what’s the game, Mara?”
She paused. “Game?” She pulled a piece of cloth from her pocket and tossed it to him. The strange marks on it conveyed only that it was something in another language. He gave it back, telling her to read it.
She read the whole verse beginning: “It’s all a pointless game…”
When she’d finished, he switched off his transmitter for a while, did some private thinking, took the food bars away from her, and said: “Mara, these are strictly rationed. However, I’ll give you another one if you tell me what this doggerel means.”
She said she didn’t know what the verse meant any more than he did, but Leep was a man of strange perception and… She told him about Leep, and her mother, and Fami and its history, and the glacier and her escape. He gave her the promised bar, and said: “It’s a pity my helicopter’s completely smashed. Otherwise, we could have flown up to Fami and interviewed your friend, Leep. He seems to know a lot of things.”
“Oh, yes, he does. He has made many cloth books of verses of this kind. They foretold many things which have come to pass.”
“The village Nostradamus, huh? A useful guy to have around.” He pondered, then said abruptly: “Well, it’s the only lead I can see. We’ll call on him, anyhow, using our flat feet.”
“But the glacier is too slippery to climb.”
George fished around in the fuselage and extricated a pick-ax from the bundle of implements he’d brought along. He tapped it, and said: “We’ll cut steps. Come on, now. My time is limited.”
He couldn’t persuade her to leave the parachute behind: It was too precious a find. He carried the provision box, the pick, spare Teleos, and his telescope. She followed sedately, carrying the bundled ’chute on her head. They both continued to wear their Teleos.
The glacier was a bigger affair than he’d imagined: wider, higher, steeper. This he decided on the fifth day of painful step-cutting, inching up a slope that seemed to mount forever. Every night they’d hacked out a niche in which to sleep, enfolded in the silken layers of the parachute. Even so he, in his thick air-suit, slept poorly because of the cold.
He marveled at the hardihood of Mara. Clad only in her thin frock, placing her bare feet unhesitatingly in the ice holes he’d chipped out, she climbed behind him without complaint or obvious fatigue. Nor did she question why she should have to retrace so tediously the route of her escape from Fami. There were no infantile regrets or crying for the moon in her make-up. She dealt only with facts.
Her simple line of reasoning, George suspected, was: This man has food. He is a fool, and gives it away. Therefore, if I stay with him, I shall have food. That night, as they lay in their small, artificial cave, he accused her directly:
“Mara, you’re not interested in the war, are you? You don’t care whether we find the white circle G.H.Q or not?”
“No.”
“And you don’t want to return to Fami?”
“No.”
“You only come with me because I feed you and there is no food on the plain?”
“It is nice to be fed. I always had to feed others.”
He sighed, and felt oddly regretful. He would have preferred that she kept him company just because she liked him. He’d certainly grown to like having her around in this cold, dreary desolation. She was, for instance, less unsettling company than Captain Freiburg, for she was uncomplicated, self-controlled, unfearful of the present or the future. And, underneath, deep down, he’d found a queer little streak of quiet humor. Not the purely surface kind of facetious humor, the cover-up for uncertainty, but the genuine vein, seeing things for what they were and smiling at them, unafraid.
Suddenly, she said: “Of course, if I wished, I could take the food any time I wanted to.”
“No, Mara, not now. The box is locked and the key is in my pocket.”
She made no answer, but presently fidgeted about as though she were trying to get in a comfortable position for sleep. George lay there dozing lightly and wondering formlessly about the men back at the space-ship. Had there been any further attacks? How was the work on the fins going? He’d been away almost a week now, and almost anything might have happened back there. Again, how was he going to get back to the ship? If he contacted the white circle Venusians soon, and they happened to be in a cooperative mood, they might provide transport. If not, if he never found them, then it wasn’t going to be easy.
The automatic direction-recorder in the helicopter had been pulverised in the crash. So he’d small notion of where the ship lay from here. He only knew that out on the plain were mountain ranges other than this one, and the ship was somewhere over the other side of them. Even if he attained the general locality, the ship, laying flat as it was, wouldn’t be easy to spot in this poor visibility, even through the telescope.
He might wander past it and get utterly lost.
Again, at this rate, it could be weeks before he got back there. By which time, if they’d got the ship operative, and Freiburg with his will-to-quit complex, they might well have given him up for dead and taken off for Earth, licking their wounds.
He started out of his gloomy reverie when he heard something—or rather, some things—fall onto his rough pillow. He identified them by touch; half a dozen food bars.
He sat up and stared into the freezing dark. He reached out and touched Mara’s quiescent form. With the other hand he fumbled in his pocket: the key was still there.
“Yes?” she said, without moving.
“Did I leave the box unlocked?”
“No. I don’t need keys. I have my own methods.”
“Oh.” He lay back. There was something wrong with this analysis of Mara’s reasoning. She could have helped herself to the food at any time, of course, and disappeared into the night. That should have been her natural course, thieving being her profession. They’d argued over the ethics of honest labor as opposed to honest thieving. He had explained the social code of Earth, but she had not been impressed. They’d agreed to differ about that.
“Mara,” he said, “you could have stolen all the food and left me. Why didn’t you?”
“Then I should have to carry it, and that box is heavy.”
He was disappointed. “So that’s all. It’s not because you like me?”