"We're checking that, and it may provide a lead. These things aren't too common."
"Recent manufacture," McKie said. "You sure?"
"The animal from which that hide was removed has been dead about two standard years. Intracellular structure was still reactive to catalyzing."
"Two years. Where would they get a real steer?"
"That narrows it down. There are some around for story props in the various entertainment media, that sort of thing. A few of the outback planets where they haven't the technology for pseudoflesh still raise cattle for food."
"This thing gets more confusing the deeper we go into it," McKie said.
"That's what we think. Oh, there's chalf dust on the whip. "
"Chaff! That's where I got the yeast smell!"
"Yes, it's still quite strong."
"What would they be doing with that much quick-scribe powder?" McKie asked. "There was no sign of a chalfmemory stick - but that means little, of course."
"It's just a suggestion," Tuluk said, "but they couldn've chaff-scribed that design on the Palenki."
"Why?"
"Give it a false phylum, maybe?"
"Perhaps."
"If you smelled chalf after the whip came through, there'd have to be quite a bit of it around. You thought of that?"
"The room wasn't all that big, and it was hot."
"The heat would explain it, all right. Sorry we didn't have more for you."
"That's all?"
"Well, it might not be any use, but the whip had been stored in a hanging position supported by a thin length of steel. "
"Steel? Are you positive?"
"Positive."
"Who still uses steel?"
"It's not all that uncommon on some of the newer planets. R&R has even turned up some where they build with it."
"Wild!"
"Isn't it, though?"
"You know," McKie said, "We're looking for an outback planet, and that's where I seem to be."
"Where are you?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
McKie explained his predicament.
"You field agents take awful chances sometimes," Tuluk said.
"Don't we just."
"You wear a monitor. I could ask this Taprisiot to identify your location. Want to invoke the monitor clause?"
"You know that's an open payment clause," McKie said. "I don't think this is a sufficient emergency yet that I can risk bankrupting us. Let me see if I can identify this place by other means first."
"What do you want me to do, then?"
"Call Furuneo. Have him allow me another six hours, then get the Caleban to pick me up."
"Pick you up, right. Siker said you were onto some doorless S'eye thing. Can it pick you up anywhere?"
"I think so."
"I'll call Furuneo right away."
***
Facts can be whatever you want them to be. This is the lesson of relativity.
McKie had been walking for almost two hours before he saw the smoke. Thin spirals of it stood in the air against the backdrop of distant blue hills.
It had occurred to McKie during his walk that he might have been set down in a place where he could die of thirst or starvation before his legs carried him to the safe companionship of his civilized fellows. A self-accusatory moroseness had overtaken him. It wasn't the first time he had realized that some accident of the machinery he took for granted might prove fatal.
But the machinery of his own mind? He cursed himself for using the Caleban's S'eye system this way when he knew the unreliability of communication with the creature.
Walking!
You never thought you might have to walk to safety.
McKie sensed the eternal flaw in sentient relationship with machinery. Reliance on such forces put your own muscles at a disadvantage in a universe where you might have to rely on those muscles at any moment.
Such as right now.
He appeared to be getting nearer to the smoke, although the hills looked as remote as ever.
Walking.
Of all the stupid damn foul-ups. Why would Abnethe pick a place like this to start her kinky little game? If this were the place it had started. If the Caleban hadn't made another communication error.
If love could find a way. What the devil did love have to do with all this?
McKie plodded on, wishing he had brought some water. First the heat of the Beachball, now this. His throat felt as though he'd built a fire in it. The dust kicked up by his feet didn't help. Every step stirred up a puff of pale red from the narrow track. The dust clogged his throat and nostrils. It had a musty taste.
He patted the toolkit in his jacket pocket. The raygen could burn a thin hole in this parched earth, might even strike down to water. But how could he bring the water up to his demanding throat?
Plenty of insects around. They buzzed and flew about, crawled at the edge of the track, attempted at times to alight on his exposed flesh. He finally took to carrying his toolkit's stim like a fan, setting it at medium potency. It cleared the air around his face whenever a swarm approached, dropped jittering patches of stunned insects behind him.
He grew aware of a noise - low, indistinct booming. Something being pounded. Something hollow and resonant. It originated out there in the distance where the smoke stood on the air.
It could be a natural phenomenon, McKie told himself. Could be wild creatures. The smoke might be natural fires. Still, he brought the raygen from his kit, kept it in a side pocket where he could get at it quickly.
The noise became louder in slow stages, as though it were being amplified to mark consecutive positions of his approach. Screens of thornbush and gentle undulations in the plain concealed the source.
McKie trudged up a gentle rise, still following the road.
Sadness transfixed him. He'd been cast away on some poverty-stricken backyard world, a place that stiffened the eyes. He'd been given a role in a story with a moral, a clipped-wing fairy story. He was a burned-out wanderer, his thirst a burnished yearning. Anguish had lodged in him somewhere. He pursued an estranged, plodding dream which would dissolve in the awakening doom of a single Caleban.
The toll that Caleban's death would bring oppressed him. It turned his ego upside down and drained out all the lightness. His own death would be a lost bubble burst in such a conflagration.
McKie shook his head to drive away such thoughts. Fear would pluck him of all sensibility. He could not afford it.
One thing sure now; the sun was setting. It had descended at least two widths toward the horizon since he'd started this stupid trek.
What in the name of the infinite devils was that drumming? It came at him as though riding the heat: monotonous, insistent. He felt his temples throbbing to an irritating, counterpoint - beat, throb, beat, throb. . . .
McKie topped the low rise, stopped. He stood at the brim of a shallow basin which had been cleared of the thornbush. At the basin's center, a thorn fence enclosed twenty or so conical huts with grass roofs. They appeared to be made of mud. Smoke spiraled from holes in several of the roofs and from pit fires outside others. Black dots of cattle grazed in the basin, lifting their heads occasionally, with stubby whiskers of brown grass protruding from their mouths.
Black-skinned youths carrying long poles watched the cattle. More black-skinned men, women, and children went about various occupations within the thorn enclosure.
McKie, whose ancestry contained blacks from the planet Caoleh, found the, scene curiously disturbing. It touched a genetic memory that vibrated to a wrong rhythm. Where in the universe could people be degraded to such primitive living standards? The basin was like a textbook scene from the dark ages of ancient Earth.
Most of the children were naked, as were some of the men. The women wore string skirts.