Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

uncertainties, retreated from
them, and then returned to face and examine them. It was all very well, she
thought, to say that phase two had been triumphantly accomplished, but there
was no getting around the fact that the rescue of Wang was to have been phase
three, not phase two. X was tucked away now but with a long and dangerous wait
ahead of him, and obviously with nothing to eat or Peter wouldn’t have
mentioned collecting food; and what if—perish the thought—Peter could never
return to rescue him? As soon as I see Peter alone, she decided, he
must tell me where the cave is. Both of us should know... and in the meantime
we must pray that he’s not discovered by the Sepos.
    Her eyes went back to the land, to a long flat lovely valley they were
crossing, the mountains a marvelous pastel blue in the distance. Far away her
gaze picked out a walled clay compound, dusty beige against the dusty beige of
the earth. The mountains drew closer here to them, incredibly wrinkled like
very old faces, and then—suddenly—in the midst of nowhere they came upon a
factory with nothing in sight but piles of slag, the sky, the road, and the
distant mountains.
    Such space, thought Mrs. Pollifax, such enormous tawny space.
But why a factory here, and how does anything arrive or be taken away!
    Her thoughts returned to Peter’s message in the bus. She could collect
food for X, yes, lining her purse with that plastic bag she carried and
slipping food into it at the table, but this meant that Peter would have to
make still another trip out into the night when they returned to Urumchi. This
meant no rest for him; how long could he go without a decent night’s sleep, she
wondered, and still think clearly for what lay ahead?
    Across the aisle Jenny was growing restive. ”Let’s wake him up,” she
told Joe Forbes in a loud voice directed at Peter in the rear. ”He’s slept long
enough, don’t you think? Hey Peter!”
    ”He looks very comfortable,” pointed out Joe Forbes, smiling.
    ”But he went to bed early last night, right after dinner,” Jenny said,
pouting, ”and jogging can’t take that much out of anyone!”
    Mrs. Pollifax turned and said politely, ”I’m not sure that he went to
his room to sleep last evening, he mentioned letters and cards to write.”
    Clearly Jenny didn’t welcome this intrusion; she looked startled,
mumbled, ”Oh well,” and subsided. It occurred to Mrs. Pollifax that it had been
clever of Peter to use Jenny as cover during the early days of the tour, but
his choice was showing signs of boomeranging. Jenny looked ready to cry again;
she was not going to take his defection graciously. A strange girl, she
thought, and wondered what caused this penchant for overreacting.
    On either side of the road the country was flat and empty, with the
consistency of gravel, but there were surprises: a sudden glimpse of rail
tracks, of freight cars on the dusty horizon being loaded with crushed stone,
and then of workers strolling along the road wearing dust masks, and
then—abruptly—a huge body of water in the middle of this arid dead land, fed by
runoffs from the mountains and dropped like a shimmering blue jewel into the
warm dry panorama.
    In midmorning they stopped beside a shallow irrigation stream and Mr. Li
produced Lucky Kolas for them. After this they were off again through the Koko Valley to begin their descent into the Turfan depression, crossing an interminable
valley of gray slag, the only signs of civilization the crisscrossing railroad
and power lines. At times it gave the illusion of being a gray beach stretching
toward a gray sunless sea in the distance.
    ”Very prehistoric,” Malcolm said, leaving his seat to join her. ”I hope
by now you’re a trifle bored with your thoughts, as I am with mine. Feel like
talking?”
    She smiled. ”Yes there’s a time for thinking and a time for talking.” And
a time to stop worrying, she added silently.
    He said easily, ”I find I can all too easily succumb to group mentality;
it has a nice cozy hypnotic quality, rather sheeplike and very comfortable.”
    ”Are you feeling refueled now, after being quiet?”
    ”Definitely. I don’t feel that you’re a group person, even if you do
function well in one. George Westrum, for instance, is a group person totally,
mainly because he lacks any original thoughts to entertain himself while
alone.”
    Mrs. Pollifax gave him an amused look. ”Rather hard on him, aren’t you?”
    Malcolm said