“How did you do it?” the ginger man snarled.
“Do what?”
“Manipulate the dimension slips so that we landed on Earth.”
“What gives you a crazy idea like that?”
“Don’t fool around, sonny. That mountain we almost hit was Mount Everest.”
Coburn was sick, shocked and angry—and he discovered he no longer cared about the other man’s gun. “Try to get it into your head that if I had invented a slip technique capable of doing that I’d be a billionaire and not …” His voice dried up as a weird thought struck him. The monstrous edifice of rock he had glimpsed in the forward screen had looked like Mount Everest. He struggled to his feet and looked at the screen, but it and all its companions had been blanked out by the crash. Other thoughts stirred in his mind.
“And I’ll tell you something else, mister,” he said. “We didn’t almost hit that mountain—we went straight into the side of it! We should have been vaporized.”
Eckert took a deep breath and scowled dangerously. “I happen to know there aren’t any mountains on Toner II, so …”
An alarm bell clamoured, signalling that lethal radioactive materials were escaping from ruptured casings into the ship’s living space.
“Sort it out later,” Coburn said. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”
He wrenched open an escape door, revealing a vista of steep white slopes, and leaped from the sill down into a snowdrift. Eckert followed a second later, almost landing on top of him. They sat up, breathing cool resinous air, and looked all around them. The ship lay at the end of a long shallow gouge, surrounded by the moraines of snow it had built up in its course, and beyond it the stark ramparts of rock soared into a leaden sky. Again Coburn was reminded of Everest—which was almost as peculiar as the fact of still being alive …
“This stuff’s warm,” Eckert shouted, lifting a handful of white flakes. “It isn’t like ordinary snow.”
Coburn held some close to his face and saw that the fluffy fragments were more like chips of plastic foam. The thickly resinous smell which seemed to pervade the atmosphere of Toner II cloyed his nostrils, making his head swim.
“Let’s get away from the ship,” he said uncertainly. “Something might blow.”
They trudged away from the slightly crumpled hull, instinctively heading down the slope. A strong breeze was trailing streamers of snow and mist across their vision, but occasionally they caught glimpses of what appeared to be a grey-green plain far below.
“I guess this can’t be Earth, after all,” Eckert conceded. “Something strange going on, though.”
An hour later they had made little progress towards the base of the mountain because the white material on which they were walking, although unlike Earth snow in some respects, was just as slippery underfoot and had a tendency to compress into glassy clumps around their boots. Coburn had lapsed into a dejected silence, broken only by occasional gasps or grunts whenever he lost his balance and fell. He was thinking yearningly about Erica, who was hundreds of lightyears away back on Earth, and wondering if she would ever get to hear about his mysterious disappearance, when his ears picked up a distant shout. The wind carried the faint wisp of sound away but it was obvious from Eckert’s face that he had heard it too.
“Over that way,” Eckert said, pointing to his left. “There’s somebody else here.”
They changed course, taking a lateral line across the slope, and in a few minutes Coburn became aware of an area of lime-green brightness illuminating the mists ahead. The light was obviously coming in from an artificial source. Coburn’s first impulse was to run towards it, but Eckert had his pistol out again and held him back.
“Not so fast, sonny,” he said. “I’m not sticking my head into any noose.”
They came to a low hillock beyond which the brightness was now very intense. At Eckert’s instigation they went down on all fours, crawled to the top and cautiously peered down the other slope. Barely a hundred paces away two black posts stood vertically in the snow, about four feet apart. At the base of each was a cluster of cables and metal boxes, and the rectangular area between the posts appeared as a sheet of flickering, crackling radiance which obscured the section of hillside right behind it. The snow in the vicinity was flattened by numerous footprints. For some reason, Coburn found himself thinking of a portal, a doorway which had been left open.
In a few seconds this impression was reinforced by the abrupt materialization of two brownish, shaggy-furred gorillas who stepped out of the glowing rectangle and shuffled around brushing ice droplets from their bodies. Violent flurries of snow spilled out of the rectangle behind them, although—Coburn noticed—the air of Toner II was relatively still and it was not snowing. He began to get a chilly premonition of the portal’s true nature.
“What ugly brutes!” Eckert’s voice was a whisper. “Any idea what they are?”
“They aren’t on the Mercantile’s identification chart, but you know the Earth Federation’s only a small part of the Galactic Commune. It contains thousands of cultures we know nothing about.”
“The less we know about yugs like those the better,” Eckert replied, displaying a chauvinism which—in view of his antagonism to all human standards—Coburn found mildly surprising. “There’s more of them. Say … could that thing be a matter transmitter?”
Another four gorillas had appeared, two of them carrying tripod devices which looked vaguely like surveyors’ theodolites. One of them began to talk in a loud braying voice which was so strangely modulated that it took Coburn a few seconds to realize the creature was speaking Galingua.
“… from the Chief of Structural Maintenance,” the gorilla was saying. “He reported that a small Earth-type vessel made an unscheduled planetfall less than two hours ago. The absorption fields prevented the structure from showing on its radar screens, so it hit the northern face right in the centre of the Great Couloir, carried away part of the new heating and refrigeration system, and emerged just above the Khumbu Glacier on the south side.”
Another gorilla hopped excitedly. “It went right through! That means it could be lying near here.”
“That’s why all the survey teams have been called in from Earth to help with the search. All construction work is suspended until we make sure the ship’s crew are dead.”
“Have we to kill them?”
“If necessary. Then we’ve to find the ship and shoot it clear of the Toner system before its beacons attract a recovery vessel.”
The hopping gorilla slowed down. “Seems a lot of trouble for one primitive ship.”
“Not too much. Can you imagine what the Committee would do to us if news about Everest Two got out? Two centuries of work would have gone down the drain!”
Eckert gripped Coburn’s shoulder. “Did you hear what he said? He talked about bringing survey teams back from Earth—and those brutes have been coming through that green light with survey equipment! I’d say that’s a matter transmitter and that I only have to step through it to arrive on Earth.”
“I thought you wanted to hide somewhere out of the way,” Coburn said numbly, his mind on other things. Disturbing things.
“If I got to Earth instantaneously and without leaving a trail, that would be the best hideout of the lot. Who’s going to look there for me?”
Coburn pushed the other man’s hand away impatiently. Who cares? Listen, I’ve just discovered why we were able to hit a mountain head on and not be killed, and why the air here smells of resin, and why this snow isn’t like real snow.”