"We're all very pleased that you've chosen to participate, my friend," the maseni said. "We believe that your refreshingly alien viewpoint may tear this case wide open."
Jessie said, "Where are we going — into those mountains?" He indicated a range of snow-capped peaks that flanked the rushing fluttercar, needling the leaden sky a great distance west of them, beyond the flat grass plains that now lay all around.
"That's correct, my friend," Tesserax said. He was speaking in his own language now; and whereas his form of address in English was "sir", now it had become "my friend" in translation. Jessie, Brutus and Helena had all taken speed-teach hypno lessons in the maseni tongue on the way from Earth and, in two short days, had absorbed enough to speak it well. "Those mountains are among the highest on our world and are called the Gilorelamans, which is an Old Tongue word that means 'Home of the Gods'."
"That's where the beast has been marauding?" Helena asked. She leaned toward the window and stared at the rugged slopes, and she thought that was just the sort of place for some invisible gargantuan to play havoc with an unsuspecting populace. The mountains looked remote, more alien than anything she had yet seen on this world though, in actual fact, they did not look that much different from mountain ranges back on Earth.
"Yes, up there, my friend," Tesserax said. "The beast has slaughtered nearly five hundred flesh-and-blooders and more than four hundred maseni supernaturals, all residents of the Gilorelamans."
The robot chauffeur made several turns onto smaller freeways and, in time, took them close to the foothills that lay around the greater peaks. They started the climb on a two-lane road that was closely framed by black-boled, white-leafed trees that swayed in the wind like fragile dancers, now and then bending to canopy the road with a frothy lace of snowy leaves.
They were more than an hour into the foothills when a car passed them doing quite a bit more than their sedate hundred miles an hour. It forced them toward the burm, horn blaring, then whipped over a rise and was out of sight.
"You have highway crazies here, too," Jessie said.
When they topped the hill over which the car had gone, they found that it had turned and was barreling back at them, on the wrong side of the highway.
The robot wheeled the car into the other lane.
The unknown driver countered, turned back to his proper lane and came at them at full speed.
"He'll kill us all!" Helena cried.
The robot jerked their limousine violently back into their own lane and narrowly avoided a collision.
As the other car flashed by, Jessie thought he saw a middle-aged, bald, red-faced man looking over at them and laughing. "Was that an Earthman?" he asked Galiotor Tesserax.
"I think—" the maseni began.
The red-faced man in the car roared past them again, slued back and forth on the road in front of them, disappeared over another hillock.
"It was a human being," Helena said. "Is that how our scientists behave when they come here to study maseni society?"
When they crested the next rise, the stranger, as before, had turned and was roaring back at them, blowing his horn and weaving from side to side of the narrow road.
"I can't watch," Helena said.
"I wish I had a dish of bourbon," the hell hound moaned. The stranger weaved past them, somehow avoiding a collision, was gone, his horn fading, gradually, until they could no longer hear it at all.
"I think that wasn't a real Earthman," Tesserax said. "I believe that was one of our more recent myth figures."
"You maseni have a myth figure that looks like an Earthman?" Jessie asked, watching pebbly gray lids slide down and lift off the deepset yellow eyes.
"Yes, my friend," Tesserax said. He fluffed his orange robes. "We maseni are incapable of becoming intoxicated, as you may know. Indeed, your own race is somewhat unique in that respect, compared to all the races we have thus far encountered. Certainly, we have drugs that make us — as you might say 'high'. But we are always in command of our senses, perfectly rational and able to exercise as good judgment as before taking drugs. It fascinates our people that your race can become so mindlessly drunk. The fact that tens of thousands are killed every year on your highways by drunken drivers has sparked the imagination of the maseni people. A Drunken Driver is a rather mysterious, inexplicable creature to us. And, in the past few years, a new myth has arisen to explain accidents on our own highways."
"The myth of the Drunken Driver?" Jessie asked, not quite able to get that one down.
"Yes," Tesserax said. "Enough superstitious people have taken up belief in the marauding Drunken Driver who haunts our home world highways that, in fact, he has come to exist. Fortunately, though he's a recent supernatural, laws have been passed to keep him from killing anyone. He may only careen around, frightening people — as you just saw."
For a while, everyone was silent, digesting this. Then the detective said, "I didn't realize that diplomatic and social relations between our two races could give rise to new superstitions."
"Oh, yes, my friend. It's surprising there are no new Earth-born myths based on things your people have picked up from our culture."
Jessie said, "Is it possible that this marauding behemoth in the mountains is such a new myth?"
Tesserax shook his large head. "It's unlikely. We've run computer depth studies of new trends in maseni society, and we found nothing that could account for this murderous mountain giant."
"Still…"
"I don't want to cloud your fresh perspective," the maseni said. "But I truly believe you'd be wasting time in following up that possibility."
The black-boled, white-leafed trees grew thicker at the sides of the road, and the hills grew steeper and the clouds gradually came down like heavy blankets onto a bed. They drove on toward Gilorelamans Inn, an ancient hotel on the slopes of the high peaks, which would serve as their base of operations until the case was closed.
Chapter Eighteen
Gilorelamans Inn lay on the lush green lower slopes of the largest peak in the whole range, Piotimkin. It was as far down the rocky mountain as it could get without moving into the foothills, but the view from its grounds was staggering, no matter which direction one looked. Behind were the snow forests and then the bare granite cliffs and finally, high above, the snowfields themselves. On the other three sides one could view vast panoramas of lower lands: hills, hillocks, sparse woods, plains and robot-tended fields.
The inn was pleasing to the eye. It was made from the wood of the conifers which had replaced the black-boled trees as the land rose and the temperature dropped. Its roof had three peaks and two steep valleys between and was shingled with slabs of wood stained black by sap and tar. The windows were deepset and flanked by wooden shutters, reflecting the late afternoon sun and the moving clouds that raced across the sky. Not a single daub of paint marred the inn's natural beauty.
The two-lane road fed directly into the inn's drive, and their robot chauffeur brought them right around the spouting fountain to the front door, which was fully ten feet high and six wide, graced by a shining coppery knob and knocker, each so large it seemed a man would need two hands to grasp them.
"It's lovely," Helena said. "It must be very old."
"The whole place is a mythical establishment," Tes-serax said. "It dates back centuries. And because it is mythical, it remains constant, unweathered, untouched by decay."