Warlock

the next leg of the trek. Also, he hoped to make a good many miles before camp, even if it meant marching until darkness barred any further progress.
        
        And darkness came early here, in the shadow of the great mountains to the west.
        
        It was not that he was in such a hurry to find the place to the north-two hundred miles east of the Oragonia High Cut-where the enemy was mining the treasures of the Blank, though he certainly did wish to fulfill his mission. No, what plagued him more was the urgency to be gone from this open ground, to be secreted as deeply as possible in these thickly growing trees and ferns, these vines and flowers that barred their way but would part before them. If a patrol plane cruised over their exit point from the Cloud Range, found their path, trackers might be set upon their trail; the more jungle between the Oragonian hunters and themselves, the better their chances of survival.
        
        And now that he had lost more than half his men, now that his own and-figuratively-the General's son had died under his command, only the eventual success of his mission could redeem him. And even that would not erase the screams he had heard these last days. Even that would not erase from his memory the sight of the men falling from that rope across the chasm, the sight of slit throats and dead men whom he had known as friends and almost as sons. Those things would remain with him; he could only accept them and go on if he had eventual success with General Dark's plan.
        
        The world, as Shaker Sandow had said, had made him pessimistic. Maybe he could force it to give him his optimism back.
        
        Shaker Sandow sat down on the cool carpet of ferns before Richter, looked around at the verdant landscape. “A geographic impossibility, wouldn't you say?” he asked.
        
        Richter noticed how the old Shaker's fatigue seemed to have disappeared. Out of the mountains and the cold, finally in the east where knowledge waited, Sandow was almost young again. “I hadn't noticed,” he said.
        
        “Here we are but a short distance from the frost line of the Cloud Range, from a climate of snow and wind and ice. Less than half a day's travel, even by foot. And yet we find ourselves in a tropical world of palm trees and what appear to be orchids. I have only seen pictures in old books and stories about the flowers of the Salamanthe Islands, but I would say this is much like the land about the equator: humid, heavily grown, with its own breed of animals and insects. Geographically, such a closeness of opposite climes is impossible.”
        
        “Yet it's here,” Richter pointed out.
        
        “Aye, and I've been attempting to discover why.”
        
        “And what have you found?”
        
        In the jungle, strange birds called in ululating lullabies to each other while others squealed atonally and rustled in the high branches.
        
        Sandow placed the palm of his hand against the earth after brushing away the ferns that obscured it. Richter followed suit, looked perplexed a moment. “It feels warm. But should that be unusual in a warm place such as this?”
        
        “It is unusual,” Sandow said, “when you compare it to the earth only ten feet farther on-there where nothing grows but a few mutant ferns that haven't adapted.”
        
        “What is the difference?” Richter asked.
        
        “There,” Sandow said, “the earth is cool, almost chilly. I traced the temperature change and found a precise line where the warmth ceases altogether and where the cold begins. There is no melding space at all.”
        
        “And what do you make of that?” the commander asked, genuinely interested.
        
        Almost too interested, Sandow thought, in such a minor mystery as this. To the Shaker, the old officer's motives were plainly obvious. In his desperation to forget the dead they had left behind them-the slit-throat boys buried in the snow and all the others back to Stanton's Inn where it had begun-Richter grasped at any diversion in order to remove the memories from the fore of his mind. It was a standard method of overcoming grief, of forgetting tragedy. If it should continue more than a day or two, however, it could swiftly become a psychosis that would endanger all the men in the expedition; Richter needed to be awake and alert with no regrets and