If they tried to go down through that. Who knew what hill they would run into? He would have been petrified had he known that Mount Elgon was higher than they were flying but mercifully he did not know that. Nor, even more frightening, that they had passed by a couple of peaks even higher. Magnifying his alarm, Monsieur Tyler had come back to the pilot seat and hummed a strange song. Mon dieu, one did not sing when one faced certain death. Lunacy!
Victoria gave them permission to land and Jonnie felt his way down through the rain clouds. His screens didn't clear up, but knowing the area, he could identify the scraps of image he sometimes glimpsed. It was useless to look through the screen: it looked like it had a fire hose being played on it.
Jonnie felt for the ground with his skids, more concerned about a bump affecting his passengers than about where he was. He did it very smoothly and Pierre was again alarmed when Jonnie turned off the motors– he thought they were still in the air!
The rain was actually making it hard to talk in the cab of the plane. Jonnie threw open the door and there was Ker standing there, water cascading off him in the plane lights.
Even allowing for the deluge, Ker was awfully glum-looking. He was usually very glad to see Jonnie.
The last time Jonnie had been in Africa, he and Ker had spent three nights working the Kariba rig. The planet Fobia had been very elusive: they had no coordinates for it beyond “somewhere around the Psychlo sun,” and for a while it had seemed they would never discover it and Ker would eventually die from having no breathe-gas.
The planet was, however, located: it was doing a squashed ellipse. Fobia's perihelion (the point in its orbit where it was nearest its sun) was so much closer to its sun than its aphelion (the point in its orbit where it was furthest), and the distance to its sun from these two points was so vastly different, near and far, that anyone trying to live on Fobia would have perished, even a Psychlo.
Fobia went through three states: as it swung away from its sun, its atmosphere chilled and became liquid; as its distance increased, the liquid froze to solidity; as it again approached its sun, the sequence reversed and the atmosphere became gaseous again. But this long period of having a “summer”– and the Fobia year was about eighty-three of Earth's– permitted moss and other plants to grow and these flourished for a time and then, as the atmosphere liquefied, remained in a state of suspended animation until summer came again.
Although they had an awful time with camera triangulation to estimate its orbit, the end product had been beyond Ker's wildest dreams. The planet was well into “autumn” and it was no real trick to pump huge cable tanks full of liquid breathe-gas. Not only that but they had brought back about fifty tons of the material needed to make real goo-food. Yes, Ker had been acting like a Psychlo gone to heaven, a most unlikely event, when Jonnie and he had last met.
And here he stood, glum in the rain.
“Hello, Jonnie," he said woodenly.
“What's the matter with you?” said Jonnie. “Lost your loaded dice?”
“Oh, it's not you, Jonnie. I’m always glad to see you. It's that Maz. He was chief engineer here when the place was operating. One of the wounded ones. I got about seventy ex-prisoners from all over and I’m trying to earn my pay by getting this tungsten mine going again.”
He moved nearer, the rain cascading down his breathe-gas mask, his tunic sodden with the hot rain that battered him. “I’m no engineer!” he suddenly wailed. “I was an operations officer. We ran out of ore body and the next one is just beyond it someplace. That -– Maz and all those other --– Psychlos just sit down there on their butts and gloom! Some -– fool showed them the pictures of Psychlo blowing up and they just won't do anything!
“I don't know any -– math and I can't calculate the next ore deposits!”
That's two of us, thought Jonnie. He was glad the girls didn't speak Psychlo. The ex-underworld midget could really swear. But he almost never did unless he was terribly upset. “That's why I’m here,” he said.
“Really?” Ker brightened up like a mine charge had gone off in him.
“Has MacKendrick arrived?” said Jonnie.
“Control got a drone report on a plane from Scotland. That MacKendrick? He'd be about three hours behind you.”
Three hours! Jonnie had wanted to get to work right away. Well, there was something else he had to do first any way– get some Psychlo corpses.
“There's people in the back. Do me a favor and get them into the compound.”
“Right,” said Ker, cheered up. He had a folded mine tarp on his arm he could use on the others as a rain shield. He sloshed toward the rear door unfolding it.
Pierre had been recovering. But now he was horrified to find that Jonnie was rummaging around in a locker for high-altitude suits. Jonnie threw one at him and began to pull on another one.
Jonnie heard the door slam in back and saw dim figures running toward the compound in the rain. He finished zipping up his suit and checked his fuel.
Plenty.
Twenty seconds later they were hurtling into the sky again. Pierre was still struggling into the unfamiliar high-altitude suit. Mon dieu, life around Monsieur Tyler was hair-raising!
Jonnie was unperturbed about it all. Up above the rain clouds the screens were clean and by seeing what stars were omitted he could even eyeball the peaks. He left the plane lights on, heading for the glacial snows where they had left the Psychlo corpses. He needed two, he thought. A workman and an executive.
It did not help Pierre's frame of mind at all not to be told where they were going, nor why. Charging into the ink at such speeds appalled him. He did not even look at the viewscreens. His eyes were riveted through the now-streaked windscreen.
Very shortly Jonnie was in the right location. He knew they had left a forklift up here. He would use that to guide in. He supposed that after all this time, the corpses would be pretty well covered with snow.
But Pierre, not knowing what was being looked for or where or why, simply looked through the windscreen, his eyes dilated with something that was getting up close to terror.
Suddenly Pierre saw a whiteness. It had puffs blowing off it in the plane lights. With horror he heard the engines wind down for a landing.
“Don't!” he screamed. “Don't! Don't! You're landing on a cloud!”
Jonnie glanced up through the viewscreen. It did look like a cloud at that, seen from this angle. A high wind was blowing snow about.
Ah, there was the forklift! Up to its seat in snow and ice. The corpses would be lying, covered up, just beyond it.
He had been flying by screens only. They were a long way from the nearest drop-off. He let the ship crunch down into the snow and shut off the motors. The wind was screaming up here; enough to make the plane tremble.
Jonnie settled his air mask on tighter. “Get out and give me a hand!”
Pierre was in a total confusion. He had clearly seen them land on a cloud and he could not understand what was holding the ship up. He knew from their earlier course that they must be close to, if not on, the Earth's equator, and recent studies had told him that the equator was very hot. So snow was the furthest thing from his imagination.
His small tribe had been under the domination of Jesuit priests and they had controlled by instilling a heavy fear of heaven and hell, mostly the latter. The reputation of Monsieur Tyler was itself a matter of growing superstition and awe. It surprised him less that they had landed on a cloud than it did to be told to get out.