Before MacAran slept it seemed to him that in the distance he heard a high sweet sound, like singing, through the storm. Singing? Nothing could live out there, in this blizzard! Yet the impression persisted, and at the very edge of sleep, words and pictures persisted in his mind
Far below in the hills, astray and maddened after his first exposure to the Ghost Wind, coming back to sanity to discover the tent carefully set up and their packs and scientific equipment neatly piled inside. Camilla thought he had done it. He had thought she had done it.
Someone’s been watching us. Guarding us.
Judy was telling the truth.
For an instant a calm beautiful face, neither male nor female, swam in his mind. “Yes. We know you are here. We mean you no harm, but our ways lie apart. Nevertheless we will help you as we can, even though we can only reach you a little, through the closed doors of your minds. It is better if we do not come too close; but sleep tonight in safety and depart in peace…”
In his mind there was a light around the beautiful features, the silver eyes, and neither then nor ever did MacAran ever know whether he had seen the eyes of the alien or the lighted features, or whether his mind had received them and formed a picture made up of childhood dreams of angels, of fairy-folk, of haloed saints. But to the sound of the faraway singing, and the lulling noise of the wind, he slept.
Chapter FIFTEEN
“…and that was really all there was to it. We stayed inside for about thirty-six hours, until the snow ended and the wind quieted, then we went away again. We never had a glimpse of whoever lived there; I suspect he carefully kept away until we were gone. It wasn’t there that he took you, Judy?”
“Oh, no. Not so far. Not nearly. And it wasn’t to any home of his own people. It was, I think, one of the cities of the little people, the men of the tree-roads, he called them, but I couldn’t find the place again, I wouldn’t want to,” she said.
“But they have good will toward us, I’m sure of that,” MacAran said, “I suppose–it wasn’t the same one you knew?”
“How can I possibly know? But they’re evidently a telepathic race; I suspect anything known to one of them is known to others–at least to his intimates, his family–if they have families.”
MacAran said, “Perhaps, some day, they’ll know we mean them no harm.”
Judy smiled faintly and said, “I’m sure they know that you–and I–mean them no harm; but there are some of us they don’t know, and I suspect that perhaps time doesn’t matter to them as much as it does to us. That’s not even so alien, except to us Western Europeans–Orientals even on Earth often made plans and thought in terms of generations instead of months or even years. Possibly he thinks there’s time to get to know us any century now.”
MacAran chuckled. “Well, we’re not going anyplace. I guess there’s time enough. Dr. Frazer is in seventh heaven, he’s got anthropological notes enough to provide him with a spare-time job for three years. He must have written down everything he saw in the house–I hope they’re not offended by his looking at everything. And of course he made notes of everything used as food–if we’re anywhere near the same species, anything they can eat we can evidently eat,” MacAran added. “We didn’t touch his supplies, of course, but Frazer made notes of everything he had. I say he for convenience, Domenick was sure it was a woman who had led us there. Also the one piece of furniture–major furniture–was what looked like a loom, with a web strung on it. There were pods of some sort of vegetable fiber–it looked something like milkweed on Earth–soaking, evidently to prepare them for spinning into thread; we found some pods like it on the way back and turned them over to MacLeod on the farm, they seem to make a very fine cloth.”
Judy said, as he rose to go, “You realize there are still plenty of people in the camp who don’t even believe there are any alien peoples on this planet.”