Impressed by the display of strength, Hargate said, “Next time you might have the manners to ask my permission.”
“Next time I might throw you in.” Lorrest got behind the chair again and urged it in the direction of a wooded area which lay about a kilometre ahead.
“What are you hoping to find anyway?”
“I’ve no idea,” Lorrest replied. “All we can deduce is that when old man Vekrynn came here he had one thing in mind. Secrecy. Concealment. And those trees make the best hiding place in this area.”
“You’re wasting your time,” Hargate sneered. He repeated the statement more than once as the wheelchair bounced and rocked on the uneven ground, and in between times he swore volubly and slapped at tiny winged creatures which rose up from the disturbed grass.
“I’m glad to see somebody else doesn’t like bugs,” Lorrest said, inconsequentially. “We don’t have them on Mollan, you know. Most of the pollination is done by birds. Our flowers are all white, like our birds, and they imitate birdsongs to attract business. It’s quite an experience for a Mollanian when he sees the kind of flowers you have on Earth.”
“Shove the botany lecture—I’m not interested.” Hargate made an ineffectual attempt to halt the chair by applying the brakes. “If you want to blunder around in those trees and risk getting your ass chewed off by monsters that’s all right with me, but I demand to be left out in the open where at least I can see what’s…”
His voice failed as shiftings of parallax caused by the chair’s rapid progress suddenly opened an avenue deep into the trees to where something large and apparently with a surface of polished gold reflected the sunlight. The object’s curvatures shone with a buttery lustre. Before Hargate could announce what he had seen Lorrest, now breathing hard from his exertions, gave a satisfied grunt.
“Vekrynn always had a weakness for shiny things,” he said. “It wouldn’t even occur to him to camouflage an aircraft.”
“What makes you so sure it’s an aircraft?”
“This is bad submarine country, mon ami. We’ll take a closer look.”
On being propelled into the vicinity of the machine, Hargate was able to confirm that it had been designed for flying, although the centrally positioned wings seemed too small for the fuselage and no control surfaces were in evidence. It appeared to have the capacity of a rail carriage and, now that he could examine it closely, Hargate realised that the aircraft was old. The golden skin, which had appeared immaculate from a distance, was dulled in some places and was peeling away from an underlying grey metal in others. On the side of the fuselage was a painted inscription in blocky characters which Hargate took to be Mollanian.
He pointed the lettering out to Lorrest. “What does it say?”
“It roughly translates as Peninsular Educational Tours,”
Lorrest said, shaking his head in bafflement. “This grows curiouser and curiouser. One disadvantage of being able to skord from point to point on a planet, the way we do on Mollan, is that kids can grow up with no idea what the territory is like in between. Some educational authorities try to put that right by flying them around in aircraft like this one.”
“What’s it doing here?”
“That’s something else I’d like to know. This is the safest aircraft ever devised—three entirely independent means of staying aloft—so it’s a logical type for a man like Vekrynn to use, but did he steal it? And how did he get it here? I daresay an assembly robot could have put it together for him quickly enough, but he’d have had to skord it out here bit by bit, and that would have taken a lot of his time. I just don’t get it.” Still shaking his head, Lorrest walked right round the aircraft once, then went to a large door forward of the wing. It resisted his attempts to open it. Apparently undeterred, he took out a brown wallet, riffled through its contents with great care and finally removed from it what appeared to be a rectangle of ordinary writing paper. He held the paper in the palm of his hand and pressed it against the aircraft’s skin, close to the door handle, for about ten seconds. Pausing to give Hargate a parodied conspirator’s wink, he tried the door again and this time it swung open immediately, revealing a roomy interior.
“That’s a smart piece of paper,” Hargate commented.
Lorrest nodded, putting the white scrap back into his wallet. “It’s a machine, of course, but I subscribe to the idea that no electronic device is perfect until it’s smaller and lighter than the original design sketch. And, luckily, I know this type of aircraft well. Let’s get you on board.”
“In there?” Hargate was taken aback. “Are you going to fly it?”
Lorrest’s shoulders heaved once before he frowned and clasped his left arm. “No more feed lines like that, please. Naturally I’m going to fly it.”
“But where to?”
“The plan is to fly it to where Vekrynn flies it, and find out exactly what he has tucked away on this planet. It seems an interesting way to pass a few hours.”
“How will you know where he goes?”
“You have just picked out the major weak point in the scheme,” Lorrest said, wheeling Hargate towards the open door. “A lot depends on whether Vekrynn has ever been stupid enough to let the plane take him to his destination under automatic control. If he has, it’ll be fairly easy to duplicate the flight plan; if he hasn’t, if he has always done the flying himself, the job will be a lot trickier. To be honest, it would probably be too much for the equipment I have with me—so keep your fingers crossed.”
Lorrest, again displaying a surprising degree of strength, lifted Hargate and the wheelchair under his right arm and with a single turning movement got them into the aircraft. The interior was a single large compartment, with a pilot’s seat and controls in the nose. Ranged around the sides were chairs, desks and storage cupboards which, despite their distant origin, had an obvious kinship to Terran classroom furniture. As further evidence that children tended to be the same everywhere, many of the desks and adjoining window frames had been drawn on and scribbled on with coloured inks.
Hargate, noticing a small object on one of the desks, rolled himself closer to it and found the stub of a perfectly ordinary pencil, the ends of which showed unmistakable signs of having been chewed. Intrigued, he picked the pencil up, but dropped it immediately when its outer casing crumbled into yellowish dust, suggesting that it could have been lying there for centuries. It came to him that no amount of similarities between Terran and Mollanian children could outweigh the fact that the latter measured their life expectancies in millennia. The disparity was something he had been too busy to brood upon, but now the sheer unfairness of it darkened his mind and mood. He turned and wheeled himself to the front of the aircraft, where Lorrest had knelt down and was beginning to remove panels from the control console.
“Is it true what Gretana told me?” he said. “Do people on all the other human worlds live for seven hundred or eight hundred years?”
“That’s the norm.” Lorrest continued working as he spoke. “Seven or eight centuries.”
“The first part of our Christian Bible quotes figures like that. It says that Methuselah clocked up nearly a thousand years—do you think that’s the way it might actually have been?”
“I doubt it,” Lorrest said abstractedly. “That implies that something happened quite suddenly some thousands of years ago to degrade Terran biomechanisms, and it doesn’t seem likely to me. I’m more inclined to believe it has always been that way. I’d blame it on the…”