‘If we can get up there,’ he whispered, pointing. ‘We shall be able to look down on them and get a decent view.’
Barbara shivered. ‘What if there’s one of them sitting on top?’
‘It’s a risk,’ he admitted, ‘but not much of one. Not at this time of night. There’s not much point in having a guard this far away from camp.’
They scrambled up the cliff face quite easily. It was far from being vertical, and there were plenty of footholds. At the top they found that they had an almost clear view of the whole camp area, which was now about seventy feet below them and nearer, horizontally, than when they had first glimpsed it.
The golden people had found a different way of protecting themselves than building their camp on a rock. They had made a small clearing in a thickly wooded area. From the trees they had cut down, they had constructed two quite large hexagonal huts, complete with windows, doorways and porches. By the side of each hut there was a hemisphere whose smooth surface was almost dazzling in the moonlight. The hemispheres, thought Avery, were probably some kind of opaque glass or plastic. They appeared to be used as store-chambers. Standard equipment, perhaps—like cabin trunks….
The two main huts were at a distance of about ten yards from each other. The fire was between them. On each side of it there were home-made benches and a table. The whole camp was surrounded by a moat, perhaps two yards wide. The water in it appeared to be flowing quite quickly. Avery could just make out what seemed to be a narrow supply channel disappearing into the trees and a small exit channel that took the surplus water down towards the beach. In the camp area on the shore side, he could discern a structure that looked like a portable bridge. Probably it was pushed across the moat every morning and withdrawn every evening.
Only one of the golden people, a man, was visible. He was sitting on one of the benches and appeared to be constructing something out of wood. But on the flimsy evidence of the two huts, and on a sort of vague principle of symmetry, Avery decided that altogether there must be a population of four. Goddammit, there had to be! They—the tantalizing, inscrutable They—had set up some kind of experiment involving two opposed groups.
Avery was filled with admiration for the golden people—and also with an intensely personal feeling of inadequacy. Assuming—as a reasonable hypothesis— that both groups had been set down on this planet at the same time, and again assuming that they, too, were strangers to each other and just ordinary representatives of their race, they had already achieved a hell of a lot. Not for them the easy existence. They had set about establishing a base that could later be expanded. They were builders, pioneers—not indolent, expatriated city types…
Of course, there was still the possibility that they were indigenous. But the more Avery thought about it, the more improbable it seemed. No, they were not in-digenous. They, too, were guinea-pigs in exile. But what guinea-pigs! Already they had diverted the course of a stream and made their own houses and furniture. Guinea-pigs with a difference!
Avery hoped desperately that the kind of experiment They had devised was not the kind he suspected. But he began to feel that the hope was a forlorn one.
He wanted to stay and observe the camp a little longer, but Barbara was getting distinctly unhappy. ‘Please, darling, let’s get away from here now,’ she whispered. ‘The more I see of this place, the less I like it. These golden people give me the shudders.’
He squeezed her hand, and nodded. ‘The bigger they come, the harder they fall,’ he murmured lightly, but his voice lacked conviction.
They scrambled back down the cliff. Just as Avery had decided to make a wide detour inland, one of the moons was obscured by cloud. They took advantage of the brief and partial darkness to creep stealthily past the camp of the golden people, as close to the sea as possible.
The cloud was not as co-operative as they had hoped, and the moon emerged once more when they were almost parallel with the man on watch. He was no more than forty yards away, and if he had looked towards the shore he must surely have seen them. Avery gripped his tomahawk apprehensively, but the man was intent upon his work. After all, there was no need to keep a strict watch when your camp was protected by a six-foot moat!
With the camp safely behind them, Avery and Barbara kept up a brisk pace for the next couple of hours. They wanted to have as much distance as possible between them and the golden people when daylight came.
At last they were too tired to go any farther, and wearily unrolled the sleeping bag in a sandy hollow just above the high-water mark. They were too tired even to make love, and fell asleep very quickly. Dawn came far too soon.
They were still tired, but not too tired. And somehow —quite strangely separate from the physical aspect— they needed it. The love came quick and fierce and curiously refreshing. Afterwards, they bathed in the sea. Breakfast hung from a tree and was theirs for the reaching. .
‘This, I’m afraid, is the point where we have to decide,’ said Avery reluctantly.
‘Decide what, darling?’ Barbara used the word ‘darling’ on every possible occasion. It was still a luxury. It gave her much pleasure.
‘Whether to play fair with Tom and Mary, and turn back—I promised we’d not be longer than four days—or whether to be damned selfish, take a chance and press on.’
Barbara sighed. The exploration did not matter to her all that much. But it mattered to Avery, therefore it mattered….
‘Actually,’ she said at last, ‘we’ve only really been away one and a half days. If you are so keen, we could keep going for nearly another day—but then we’d have to come back at a cracking pace and walk through most of the afternoons.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t suppose there would be any time for love.’
‘When we get back, we’ll have all the time in the world for love.’
She smiled. ‘It still won’t be enough.’
They—or, rather, Avery—finally decided to take the gamble and continue going forward. As Barbara had said, they could afford the best part of another day; and then, if they found nothing worth finding, they would head back for camp at top speed. Provided they could get safely past the camp of the golden people a second time, the extra day would cost nothing more than two pairs of sore feet.
But as it happened, the gamble paid off. By lunch time they had reached a stretch of coast that suddenly and inexplicably seemed familiar to Avery. There were no outstanding features—it was pretty much the same as the miles of coastline they had already passed—yet still there was something he associated with it. His bewilderment lasted for a few minutes, then suddenly he remembered.
‘This is where I saw the metal sphere,’ he told Barbara exultantly. ‘A few miles farther on, there’s a rock pool where I found some footprints God, it seems ages ago….’ He grinned happily at her. ‘We’re only a couple of hours from Camp Two, sweetheart…. So it’s an island, after all.’
‘You’re sure this is the place?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘How can you recognize it?’
‘I don’t know—but I do recognize it Don’t worry, I’m not suffering from delusions.’
Suddenly, Barbara was jubilant. ‘Then if we’re so near, there’s no need to hurry. We can have a glorious afternoon without any problems and still get back a day ahead of schedule. We could even ’
‘No we can’t.’ He knew what she was thinking. ‘Tom and Mary have probably been worrying their heads off. We ought to get back this evening.’