It was Kat Socolov who disagreed now. “If you think I like the idea of parading around all you men stark naked, you’re wrong,” she told them. “Still, I would bet that this stuff doesn’t go down far into the soil, and it probably dissipates shortly if it doesn’t act. Think about it! The Dutchman’s man got to an old security backup station that had to be much closer to the surface than where we’re going! And something kept enough humans alive here to register on satellite scans even though we know they scoured the whole land area before readjusting and replanting. No, if that signal got out, them what we want is still there. Besides, the message said it was. We’re just gonna have to depend more on brawn for protection, that’s all. Now we’ll see how you guys do with only your muscles, huh?”
N’Gana sighed. “Well, then, that’s the way it is. We’ll have to find some fig leaves, looks like, and see what is sturdy enough to make a pack or two for some vital supplies. Maybe there will be some plants whose leaves will be strong enough. We have to retain what we can for a while, even though we know it’s going to run out.” He looked at the melted packs and ripped clothing. “Damn! You’d think the damned Dutchman would have at least mentioned this effect!”
“You’ve got a point,” Father Chicanis told him. “If this were common or usual on Occupied worlds, I think he would have told us. I think that it is probably what trapped his man here. He didn’t expect to wind up naked and defenseless. He was caught just like us. That’s why he couldn’t get out! I do wish that he’d mentioned this in his reports, but, well, maybe this is something local. Something in Helena’s makeup, either original or from our reworking, interacts with whatever they use. It doesn’t seem to bother them or their stuff, so why should they care? Or even notice?”
They did what they could. A few rifles still seemed whole and tested out okay, probably because they’d been in the bottom of one box, with a wooden partition on top of them, and the reaction hadn’t reached them yet. It would eventually unless they could figure out some way to protect the weapons, but at least they had one more day to consider. They also had a good breakfast, since many of the containers were not much longer for this world, either.
The pharmacy and first aid kit needed protection more than anything, though. It wasn’t much, but it was what they had.
“Perhaps when we hear the rains we can wrap it in the cloths,” Father Chicanis suggested. “Maybe doing that, and possibly shielding it with big leaves or maybe burying the whole thing might protect it.”
“Worth a try,” N’Gana agreed. Kat Socolov noted that he really did have huge bodybuilder’s muscles, and Mogutu’s weren’t that bad either, although he was slighter of build and it didn’t show as much. Harker, in fact, was probably the one in as poor condition as any of them, something he ruefully noted. Kat Socolov was no push-over; she’d definitely spent a long time lifting weights. She managed to rig up a basic halter top and reworked some cloth in her personal kit for a bottom, but it wasn’t much and probably wouldn’t last all that long.
Oddly, the boots didn’t seem to be getting any worse; it was only the gloss and the laces. Father Chicanis recognized a native vine that had very tough properties and experimented using thin and stripped lengths for his own laces; it seemed to work. They all agreed that they looked somewhat stupid, but the foot protection was still welcome. In this environment you weren’t sure what you were stepping on until you stepped on it, and nature seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of sharp edges.
On day seven they were still only about halfway to their goal, but they came across what must have been the overgrown remnants of a once grand highway.
Like their equipment, the highway had been mostly dissolved long before, but the concrete and gravel pack underneath remained, as did, curiously, rusted remnants of the control rods and wiring for the magnetic levitation and auto guidance systems.
“The Grand Highway,” Father Chicanis sighed. “From Eden to Olympus. You can see Olympus sometimes from high points around here. Not the mighty one of legend, but the tallest peak in the far range, always snow-covered and mysterious-looking. It’s tall enough to make some of its own weather and obscure itself early on in the day, which is why they named it after the legendary abode of the ancient Greek gods.”
“I’m surprised your church wasn’t upset with all this naming of things after ancient pagan gods,” Harker commented.
“Oh, well, it is a good thing to remember your heritage and where your people came from. That’s not at all blasphemous. That age produced the first great thinkers of what came to be called `western’ civilization, to differentiate it from the east. Geometry and the higher mathematics, much physics, the first great plays—it was quite a time. The only blasphemy would be to worship the old gods, and I’m not even sure many of the Greek thinkers really believed in them, either. They just had no alternatives at that time.”
N’Gana cleared his throat. “Um, Father, interesting history, but where does this road go?”
“It’s on the old maps—oh, yes, I forgot, they’re pretty well dissolved by now. Well, it started in Ephesus, coming out of a kind of ring road around the city, and it extended diagonally across the valley and then went through a tunnel almost sixty kilometers long before it emerged in a glacial valley on the other side. More tunnels, more valleys, and finally it reached all the way to Corinth on the opposite coast. It used to take a few pleasant hours at a steady four hundred kilometers per hour.”
N’Gana was only interested in the Ephesus route. “All right, then, so if we can follow it with this overgrowth it should take us where we want to go.”
“The road was built to hit the big truck farms this region had,” the priest told him. “It isn’t exactly straight. At a guess, we’ll go inland from here to go around the coast range and then to Sparta, and then swing around through the pass and down into the coastal plain and Ephesus.” He sighed. “I wish I had a landmark, something that would tell me where we are now. If I knew that I almost certainly could determine if it would be faster or slower to follow the roadbed.”
“What’s the worst case?” N’Gana asked him. “How much would it add?”
“A day, maybe two, of walking,” Chicanis told him. “Why?”
“It’s still here, that’s why,” the colonel replied. “It makes a decent path to follow. We know that the road goes where we want it to and we know that all the major land obstacles would have been removed except—what’s the name of that river?”
“The River Lethe,” Chicanis replied.
“Yes. That we’ll have to contend with, perhaps using ingenuity this close to the ocean. I don’t expect any bridgeworks will have met any better fate than the road surface or our own gear. Still, this will give us a trail that may make our going a bit easier. We’re already dependent on the land for most of our food; the road connected the truck farms to the cities and towns. We’ll follow it.”
That night the storms were particularly fierce, and the lightning struck close to them many times. Some of the magnetic materials left over from the old road made nice targets for the bolts, something they hadn’t really thought about. N’Gana was firm, though, that they would stick close to the road although not camp exactly on it. They had still not seen much sign of other humans. If the lightning kept them away, all the better, and the walking was much easier than it would have been otherwise.
The eighth night on the mainland, Harker and Socolov drew first watch, which now began after the storm passed. There was virtually nothing left of their fine packs, tough clothing, or anything else. Even the weapons had disintegrated to the point where they were barely scraps of junk metal and wood. Rifle barrels were now truncheons, and very lethal ones, too, if it came to that. Using a leathery leaf from a common wild bush that Chicanis said was one of the few thriving native species of plant left on Helena—that is, not an import by the terraformers—they managed to create pouches and saved a great many bullets. They were metal and were also filled with gunpowder; they had not been affected by the rot and were still a possible weapon if there was time to use them. The knife handles, unfortunately, proved to be of less natural origin. The blades survived, but they were unbalanced and useful mostly for digging or scraping.