"That’s it. As fresh as I am," he said, gasping, "I have no right to subject you to this pace. Let’s take a breather."
Julie sat heavily down. "Foof," she said. "I thought you’d never quit."
For five minutes they lay back and caught their breath, looking at the tops of the trees waving against the bright sky and listening to the tumbling water. Julie pulled the map from her pack and studied it. "Gideon," she said, "I think we’re there. The ledge ought to be across the creek, about halfway up the other side."
Gideon got to his elbows and stared. "Halfway up that?"
"What would you say," Julie asked, "to stopping here for the night and going up there in the morning? We could leave our packs down here."
"I would say yes, by all means, yes. It’s nearly six anyway. And," he said, suddenly realizing it, "I’m starving. We wouldn’t have any powdered escalope de veau in those shiny little packets we’ve been lugging around, would we? Or a few freeze-dried quenelles?"
"It’s beef stroganoff. And don’t laugh. It’s not bad, considering."
It was awful, but they gobbled it down happily, leaning over the camp stove for warmth when the sun dropped behind the peaks at their backs and plunged the cove into shadow. Afterwards, they made a tiny campfire and drank several cups of hot cocoa out of tin mugs, using water from the creek, and talked and laughed for several hours.
There was a little awkwardness and uncertainty when it came time to bed down, but they agreed, after a dignified and objective discussion, that precocious sexual relations might damage a burgeoning friendship. They would, therefore, as mature and rational adults, sleep in their separate sleeping bags.
But there was nothing wrong with putting those sleeping bags side by side and holding hands, and it was thus that they drifted to sleep after talking another hour. Julie fell asleep first, and Gideon watched her for a while, hungry for her but happy, too, with the way things had gone.
The first premonition came in the depth of the night. Awakened by some imperceptible movement, some soft, furtive sound, Gideon opened his eyes suddenly. He was lying on his back, holding his breath, and straining to listen. The air was fragrant and luminous, the huge plants sharply defined and frighteningly still. Next to him, Julie lay in her sleeping bag, her breath slow and steady. She had turned away from him onto her side so that now he could see only her black hair, stirring gently in the soft breeze.
There was the sound again. Not just the river burbling over the stones, but another sound, a sinister, dry whispering, a faint, drawn-out whirring that seemed everywhere, closing in on them with a terrible, hushed intensity. Still half asleep, he had almost leaped up shouting when he saw what it was.
He fell back then, relaxed and feeling foolish, and watched the fir needles float down. From the highest branches they came, pulled loose by a passing puff of wind far above and drifting to earth in a pale, twinkling rain, glinting silver as they passed in and out of shafts of moonlight. And they rustled minutely as they came. He closed his eyes as they neared the ground and let them fall like flakes of snow on his cheeks and eyelids.
A headline in thick black print ran across his mind: Professor Panicked by Attack of Fir Needles. He must be feeling very edgy indeed. He laughed softly but knew as he did that it was forced. There was a crawling tightness at the back of his neck that told him he was still tense; there was something else…
He had never had the feeling before, so it took a while before he recognized it and still longer until he owned up to what it was. Once, in fact, he had spent half an hour trying to prove to a stubbornly unconvinceable John Lau that there could be no possible validity to it, that it was a silly superstition without an ounce of empirical support. Nevertheless, silly or not, there was no question that he felt he was being watched; he knew he was being watched. He could feel the very points in his neck where the eyes bored in.
As inconspicuously as he could, he turned slowly to survey the scene around them. They were in a small cove made by a gravel shelf about ten feet wide, on the outside of a bend in the creek, their feet toward the water, their heads at the base of a hillside covered with ferns and giving root to great spruces and firs. Dark as it was, things stood out in the moonlight with a hard-edged, flat-planed clarity. Nothing moved, nothing sounded except Julie’s breathing and the faint hiss of the water over the pebbles. But somebody was there, on the mountainside, watching him, studying him, somebody-Gideon refused to even think "something"- somebody stood silent in the shadows of the somber, moss-laden trees, waiting to…what?
He looked at the trees for a long time and listened but he heard nothing, saw nothing, and after a while the feeling gradually passed. It must have been a dream that had set him off, or the delicate fall of the pine needles on his face, or the mere fact of lying in the dark and fantastic rain forest. He yawned and looked around once more, then nestled down, sleepy again, into the warm sleeping bag.
Julie’s back was still toward him, and he watched as the quiet eddies of air softly set the dark ringlets of her hair trembling, ringlets sculpted like those on the ancient stone busts of Assyrian kings.
Feeling positively degenerate but unable to resist the urge, he reached across the gravel between them and gently cupped the dense mass of hair. Some of it, not heavy at all but weightless and cool, fell over his hand, and he shivered as it brushed the backs of his fingers. He briefly considered waking her, thought better of it, and quietly pulled his hand back. When he put it under his cheek he could smell her hair’s fragrance, already familiar.
There was another gust of wind far above, another rustle, and another twinkling rain of fir needles. Julie moved, turned on her back, wrinkled her slightly convex nose-a movement that Gideon had always found attractive in a pretty girl-and brushed the needles from her face. He saw her eyes open.
"The moon’s so bright," she said.
"Uh-huh."
"It’s like…do you know that picture, Rousseau, I think, where that Arab is sleeping under the moon, with these gigantic flowers-"
"’The Sleeping Gypsy.’"
"And that strange, still lion is watching him… Doesn’t it look like that here?"
It did, and Gideon said so, strange, and still, and surreal.
"Rousseau wasn’t a surrealist," Julie said, "he was a primitive."
"Don’t be pedantic."
"Gideon, do you have the feeling," she said, and he knew perfectly well what was coming, "that something’s watching us?"
"No."
"Well, I do."
"Julie, don’t be silly. The idea of knowing when you’re being watched is based on the invalid idea that some kind of energy flows from the observer to the observed object. The most elementary principles of vision make it clear that light travels the other way around, from the stimulus-"
"Did someone say something about being pedantic?"
"Okay, in simple, nonevaluative terms: It’s stupid. You’re being ridiculous."
"Yes, sir." A long silence. She turned to face him. "But I feel it."
"Julie, the absurdity of it is empirically demonstrable, and there-"
"I liked it when you touched my hair."
"-were several experiments in the late sixties… What?"
"I liked your hand on my hair."
"I…didn’t mean to wake you. I’m sorry." Like hell he was.
She lay on her side, looking at him, her eyes enormous. The wind whispered in the tops of the trees again, and another gleaming rain of pine needles fell. Gideon brushed some from her cheek. Her face was warm.
"Gideon," she said, "you know that conversation we had about being adult and not letting animal passions interfere with a burgeoning, mature relationship?"