Something else that’s working right, Jonelle thought with satisfaction. The southern hemisphere, though,… There had been talk among some of the statistics people that attacks in the southern hemisphere did seem to be increasing. Jonelle thought someone should look into it. Africa in particular was such a big continent that she wondered whether it was wise to have just the one base there. And it was possible that a South African-based X-COM facility might be useful. Then again, Jonelle thought, God help me, what happens if I suggest it, and they tell me to go build it? Maybe I should just keep my big mouth shut.
She changed into her civvies again and swung by the cafeteria long enough to grab a sandwich. As she ate it, Jonelle reflected that this was definitely becoming a proper X-COM base, for the sandwich was badly made and showed signs of going stale already, even though it had almost certainly been made only that morning. Oh, well, maybe I can get something in town. She left the second half of the sandwich there and headed off to the elevator, to catch what had now been christened “the Tooner-ville Trolley.”
When she walked into her office in Andermatt, Jonelle found a level of tension there that she had never yet seen The office was occupied by all her assistants, their various local translators, Ueli, and about four other people, members of the cow-betting cartel that had been drinking in the bar the other night. Half of them were talking at the tops of their lungs, and the other half were listening with dreadful interest.
“Gruezi mitenands, hello, everybody!” Jonelle shouted, also at the top of her lungs, and some semblance of quiet fell, though she got a clear sense that it was temporary. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”
Ueli came over to her. “Jonelle,” he said. “You remember when you asked me to ask whether people had seen strange things? Well. Quite a few people have—strange lights at night, and strange noises. That’s nothing unusual around here—we get those all the time.” There was much nodding from the other men. “However,” Ueli said, “just a while ago we had a phone call from someone who says he spoke to someone who said he spoke to a lady who lives up on the alp across the valley—Rotmusch, the spot is called, just under the Spitzigrat Ridge. She says—they said—well, the person who talked to the person who talked to her says—that she saw a spaceship, she saw a spaceship come down and take our cows from the alp the other night!”
“You mean she saw it take your cow? Rosselana?”
“Well, it sounds like it, yes. The problem—” He looked embarrassed. “Jonelle, you must forgive me, there is no politically correct way to say this. She’s a crazy lady. She’s been telling everybody about howling ghosts and monsters in the ravines for years. To hear her say that she’s seeing spaceships now, well, maybe she’s just changing a little with the times—”
“Ueli,” Jonelle said, “eyewitnesses may sometimes see more than they suspect. Don’t you think we should go talk to this lady and see what she has to say?”
“Well, it’s up to you. It’s not easy to get up there. The road doesn’t go all the way, it stops and there’s just a foot track for a mile or so. Anything heavy has to go by the wire-elevator, it’s so steep.” Jonelle had seen these contraptions before: wire pulleys with electric motors attached to them. The motors would pull themselves and a pallet of cargo along a wire strung between two points; this was a favorite way of getting things up to otherwise inaccessible chalets and huts in the mountains, and the presence of one suggested immediately how easy—or not—it was going to be to get to a certain place.
“1 think we should go see her,” Jonelle said. “Assuming that she’ll see us. Is she going to take kindly to having strangers come out of nowhere to grill her? Does she have—” Jonelle stopped. Local etiquette suggested that it was impolite to inquire too closely about your neighbors’ weaponry or how much of it they had; this was a private matter.
“Oh, she’s safe enough. She might shoot you with a crossbow, but not with a gun.”
“I feel much safer,” said Jonelle. “What’s the best way to go?”
“We can take my four-wheel drive up,” Ueli said. “That last mile, though, we’ll have to walk. Or climb, rather.”
“As long as you don’t make me go up on the cargo pulley. Who else—” She looked at her statistician. “You, I think, Matt. Geneva might want to hear your take on it. Let’s go.”
Ueli had not been exaggerating when he said the run up would be difficult. They left Andermatt on the back road that led out of town past the pilgrimage chapel of Maria-Hilf, and went under the train tracks and the main road just past the train station. The road went across a small bridge over the river Reuss, its banks there reinforced with concrete to prevent flooding from the glacier-melt in the spring, and then started to climb the far side of the Reuss’s flood plain and up onto the lower walls of the Spitzigrat Ridge.
They passed a few houses and a farm, and then the road gave out and turned into a rocky track, a narrow switchback trail that zigged and zagged back and forth across the face of the ridge. Jonelle hung on tight as the ride got more and more jarring. Biggish stones were all over the track, and more of them fell down onto it as they passed, as she watched. Ueli drove like a man who knew the road well, but this was no particular consolation to Jonelle. There were no guard rails, and the hairpin turns at the end of each straight stretch of the road showed that it was an appallingly long way down, and getting longer all the time.
This road ran into another, after about twenty bone-shaking minutes—a road patched with snow and ice as ‘the lower one hadn’t been, and with snow piled on either side. “Odd to see this here,” Ueli said conversationally as they turned north, onto the other road, and started to climb again, “but this spot tends to hold the snow. The ridge top is practically scoured clean, at the moment. It’s the wind.”
“Tell me about it,” Jonelle said, shivering. Ueli smiled tolerantly and turned the heat up.
Very shortly thereafter, this road, if one could grace it with such a name, simply ran out in a large field full of boulders. Upslope—a slope that topped out at least two hundred feet higher than the spot where they stood, if Jonelle was any good at judging such things—she could see a tiny, brown wooden house with the typical broad, shallowly sloping Alpine roof. The place looked to have been there since the Flood.
“It’s about three hundred years old, that house,” Ueli said, “maybe older.”
“And this lady lives all by herself up here?” Jonelle said, looking around in bemusement. “She must have a heck of a time getting down to do the shopping.”
“Ah, she does well enough,” Ueli said as they started climbing. “About twenty years now, since her husband died, she has been there by herself. People tried to get her to move down into town, but she wouldn’t. She said she’d been moving all her life, and she wasn’t going to do it anymore. She does all right, Duonna Mati does. She has money put aside so every few weeks she comes down to town for things: She hunts, too. She has wood for the stove, a generator for electricity if she wants it, a cellphone if she needs it. But she doesn’t use the more modern things very much, as far as I know.”
They kept climbing. Once or twice Ueli had to stop to let Jonelle and Matt get their wind. Finally, after about another twenty minutes, they came out on top of the ridge and found themselves at the edge of a small, incongruous patch of green, a grassy place that appeared to have been laboriously weeded of its stones and boulders over a long period. Off to one side, a tethered goat grazed the greenery, looking at them incuriously out of its strange eyes.