He was not wrong. Late in the afternoon of the following day, we spotted a stationary mistwall dead ahead; and two hours later we set up evening camp a couple of hundred yards from it.
The countryside here was open pastureland, rolling hills with only an occasional tree but small strands of brush and marshy ponds. Here and there a farmer’s fence straggled across the landscape; and the two-lane blacktop road we had been following, since its sudden appearance out of nowhere ten miles before, ran at an angle into the mistwall and disappeared. The day had been cool. Our campfires felt good. Autumn would be along before long, I thought, and with that began to turn over ideas for the winter; whether to find secure shelter in this climate or head south.
I made one more attempt to get Porniarsk to tell me what lay on the other side of the mistwall; but he was still not being helpful.
“You could at least tell us if we’re liable to fall off a cliff before we come out of the wall, or step into a few hundred feet of deep water,” I growled at him.
“You won’t encounter any cliffs, lakes, or rivers before you have a chance to see them,” Porniarsk said. “As far as the terrain goes, it’s not that dissimilar from the land around us here.”
“Then why not tell us about it?”
“The gestalt will be of importance to you later.”
That was all I could get out of him. After dinner, I called a meeting. Porniarsk attended. I told the others that Porniarsk believed that, beyond this particular mistwall, there was an area different from any we’d run into so far. We might find equipment there that would let us do something about the time storm and the moving mistwalls. Bill and I, in particular, were interested in the chance of doing so, as they all knew. For one thing, if we could somehow stop the mistwalls from moving, we could feel safe setting down someplace permanently. Perhaps we could start rebuilding a civilization.
It was quite a little speech. When I was done, they all looked at me, looked at Porniarsk, who had neither moved nor spoken, and then looked back at me again. None of them said anything. But looking back at them, I got the clear impression that there were as many different reactions to what I had just said as there were heads there to contain the reactions.
“All right then,” I said, after a reasonable wait to give anyone else a chance to speak. “We’ll be going in, in the morning. The ones going will be Bill, me, and three others, all with rifles and shotguns both, in one of the jeeps. Anybody particularly want to be in on the expedition, or shall I pick out the ones to go?”
“I’ll go,” said Tek.
“No,” I said. “I want you to stay here.”
I looked around the firelit circle of faces, but there were no other volunteers.
“All right then,” I said. “It’ll be Richie, Alan, and Waite. Starting with the best shot and working down the list.”
The fourth man, Hector Monsanto, whom everybody called “Zig,” did not look too unhappy at being left out. He was the oldest of the four men we had acquired along with Tek, a short, wiry, leathery-featured individual in his late thirties, who looked as if most of his life had been spent outdoors. Actually, according to Tek, he had grown up in a small town and had been a barber who spent most of his time in the local bars.
He was the oldest of the four and the least agile. The other three were in their early to mid-twenties and could move fast if they needed to.
So, the following morning we tried it. It took about an hour or so for Bill to satisfy himself, by throwing a weighted line through the mistwall and pushing pipe lengths screwed together to beyond the mistwall’s far edge, that the terrain beyond was both level and safe. Then we brought the jeep we were going to use up to the wall and got in with our weapons. I climbed in behind the wheel with Bill on the other front seat. Alan, Richie, and Waite got into the back. We made a pretty full load.
Then Sunday, purring loudly, as if congratulating us all on a permission no one had given him, leaped up into Bill’s lap and settled down for the ride; and, before I could shove him out, the girl began to climb into the back seat holding a rifle.
“Hold it!” I roared. “Everybody out!”
We off-loaded, everybody except the girl and Sunday, who took advantage of the available empty space to settle down that much more firmly.
“Now, look—” I began to the girl.
“I’m going,” she said. Sunday purred loudly and cleaned the fur on top of one of his forepaws. It was a double declaration of insubordination.
Of course, there was no way I could stop them. I could put them out of the vehicle, but they could walk in right behind us. Sunday had proved that, unlimited times. In fact, I had known— everybody had known—that he would be coming along. I had not counted on the girl.
I glared around me. This particular expedition was sorting itself out in exactly the wrong way. I don’t know what made me so convinced that there might be danger beyond this mistwall. I’d gone into a number of others confidently enough. Perhaps it was Porniarsk’s refusal to tell me exactly what was beyond the wall. At any rate, I felt the way I felt; and for that type of feeling, I was taking all the wrong people and leaving all the wrong people behind.
An ideal expeditionary group would have been myself, Tek, and a couple of the men, none of whom meant a great deal to me—except myself; and I was too much of an egotist to think that I couldn’t survive whatever mystery lay in front of me. Sunday, the girl, Bill, even to a certain extent, Marie and little Wendy, were people I cared about to one degree or another and would just as soon have kept safely in the rear area.
But Bill could not be left behind, in justice. The quest to understand the time storm was as much his as mine. Sunday could not be kept out, in practice; and now the girl had proclaimed her intention to go in with us whether I wanted her to or not. Meanwhile Tek, who outside of myself was the one person fit to take charge of those left behind, if enemies of some kind suddenly appeared over the horizon behind us, could, by no stretch of common sense, be taken. Ever since Marie, Wendy, and I had run into him and his group, I had been half-expecting that any day, we might bump into another such armed and predatory gang.
“All right!” I said. “If everybody’s going to go, we’ll have to use the pickup. Let’s get it cleared out!”
The pickup was our main transport. In the back, it had all our camping equipment, food, fuel, and other supplies. We had unloaded part of what it contained to set up camp the night before; but if it was to be used as a battle wagon, the rest of the box had to be cleared. We moved back and went to work.
Twenty minutes later, we once more approached the mistwall; this time in the pickup, in low gear. The girl and Bill and I were in the front seat with the windows rolled up, with me as driver. In the open box behind were Alan and Waite and Richie, holding a disgruntled Sunday on a leash. I’d shut the leopard out of the cab by main force and snapped his leash around his neck when he tried to join the three of us in the cab. As I pushed the nose of the pickup slowly into the first dust of the mistwall, there was a heavy thud on the roof of the cab. I stopped, rolled down the window and stuck my head out to glimpse Sunday, now lying on the cab top. I rolled the window back up and went on.
The mist surrounded us. The dust hissed on the metal of the pickup’s body, as the motor of the truck grumbled in low gear. We were surrounded by an undeviating whiteness in which it was impossible to tell if we were moving. Then the whiteness lightened, thinned, and suddenly we rolled out into sunlight again. I stopped the truck.
We were in a rocky, hilly section of country. The thin, clear air that made everything stand out with sudden sharpness signalled that we were at a higher altitude, and the sparseness of vegetation —no trees and only an occasional green, spiny bush—suggested a high, desert country, like the altiplano of inland Mexico. The landscape was mainly rock, from hard dirt and gravel, to boulders of all sizes. Rough, but not too rough for the jeeps to get through; and, if a clear route could be found between the boulders, probably even the pickup could be nursed along.