Oddly, the flight to the southern continent was markedly absent of the turbulence they had encountered over land. Matthew attempted to shout over the noise in the cabin, a query about the village they had just left. He finally resorted to touching Greene’s shoulder to get his attention. The man merely smiled affably. tapping his earphones, and shrugged. Matthew subsided in his seat and tightened his seat beltthen had to loosen it slightly or risk cutting off the circulation in his torso. He did not like being isolated by the exigencies of travel and wondered why there was only one headset. So he made a tremendous effort to contain himself during what was likely to be a very dull and long journey. Fortunately the cold air and the smells of machine oil covered the faint residue of Braddock’s indiscretion.
Every time Matthew flew in one of these vehicles, he resolved to take flying lessons, for the procedures seemed ridiculously simple, but he never seemed to find the time for the formal course. Once, a longgone member of his bevy of assistants, a perhaps too easily influenced young man, had showed an aptitude for flying. Unfortunately, as soon as he had learned to fly, his personality changed, and he no longer demonstrated the qualities of unswerving loyalty and unquestioning obedience Matthew insisted upon in an assistant.
He suspected that the man flying the copter was not of the caliber required in an aide either. Matthew’s opinion was confirmed when he retrieved a report from his case and noticed, stowed under his seat, the headphones that should immediately have been offered to him by Greene. At once, he plugged these into the socket on the armrest and placed them over his ears. A burst of static poured through them that made him wrench them off.
Tapping the pilot authoritatively on the shoulder, he pointed at the headset. Grinning, the pilot shook his head, moved his mouth piece aside, and leaned over to say, “Don’t work!”
Matthew’s reactions included amazement, anger, frustration, and total disgust with the inefficiency and indifference shown by the inhabitants of this world. People were scattered all over the universe, some of them living in highly sophisticated, totally engineered environments, all scrupulously maintained by Intergal. He ended up on an incredibly primitive world with a headset, similar to hundreds he had used before, that failed to work due to what was surely an easily remedied technical difficulty.
Of course, this sort of aircraft was only slightly improved over its ancient counterpart. The old ones had had neither speed nor range and had been limited in the altitudes they could achieve. This particular one, with its incidental malfunctions, was by no means state-of-the-art: it hadn’t the power to lift out of the planet’s atmosphere, and was excruciatingly noisy.
However, it required very little space to land, could hover, and could set down safely, if necessary, at night unaided by light from the ground. That ability, he reflected, as he studied the map printout on his wrist unit, was a necessary requirement.
He wanted to ask the pilot if flights to the southern continent were frequent. Surely they must be. This planet north and south, had long been used for troop recruitment, an occupation the so-called sentient world did not seem to obstruct. Ah, and he qualified that as he remembered his notes. It was the young who answered recruitment drafts: those who had not yet been mutated by whatever toxins in their soil produced the glandular deformity and the deposit of “brown fat” that supposedly allowed older members of the population to survive the extreme temperatures.
The nearest city to Harrison’s Fjord on the southern continent was Bogota, at the mouth of the Lacrimas River. The sizable peninsula on which the city was situated extruded like a big, clumsy thumb into the sea. He had, of course, scrutinized the maps of this region, now entering its winter season. Most of the population centersone could hardly call them citieswere situated on the coastal plains near the major rivers: Bogota on the Lacrimas, Kabul on the eastern fork of the New Ganges, and Lhasa on the Sierra Sangre. Another village called Sierra Padre was located farther up the Sierra Sangre at the foot of the Sierra Padre Mountains. A settlement known as Kathmandu was isolated within yet another mountain range, optimistically dubbed the Shambalas.