Kennard loosed his clenched fists. He was staring at the sky. “Clouds enough,” he muttered, “if only they would rain! But with no wind, if the clouds just sit there—”
Larry took the murmured words as license to break his silence. Questions tumbled one over another, condensed themselves to a blurted, “How did they do that? Did they bring those clouds?”
Kennard nodded, not taking it very seriously. “Of course. Nothing much to that—I can even do it myself, a little. On a good day for it. And they’re Comyn—the most powerful psi powers on Darkover.”
Larry felt the chill run up and down his spine with cold feet. Telepathy—and now clouds moved by the power of trained minds!
His Terran training said, Impossible, superstitious rubbish! They observed which way the clouds were moving and bolstered up their reputation by predicting that clouds would pile up for rain. But even as he said it, he knew it was not true. He was not in the safe predictable world of Terran science now, but in the cold and alien strangeness of a world where these powers were more common than a camera.
“What now?” he asked, and as if in answer, Valdir said from the center of the circle, “Now, we pray for rain. Much good may it do us.”
Then, raising his head, he saw the boys, and beckoned to them.
“Have some breakfast,” he said. “As soon as it’s a little lighter they’ll send you out on the fire-lines again. Unless it rains.”
“Evanda grant it,” said the woman huskily.
Lorill Hastur raised his still face and gave Kennard a smile of greeting, which turned impassive as he saw Larry. Larry, under the man’s gaze, was suddenly aware of his soot-stained face, his raw and blistered hands, the torn and sweaty state of his clothes. Then he realized that Valdir Alton was in little better state. He had vaguely noticed, yesterday, that the men on the fire-lines were of all sorts: some soft-handed, in the rich clothing of aristocrats, some in the rags of the poorest. Evidently rank made no difference; rich and poor alike worked against this common danger. Of all those in the field, only the two telepaths were unstained by hard work.
Then he saw the gray look of fatigue in the eyes of the woman, the deep lines in the face of the Hastur. Maybe their work has been the hardest of all—
Kennard nudged him, and he accepted from one of the old men, a lump of bread and a battered cup of a bitterchocolaty drink. They found an unmuddied stretch of grass and sat to eat, their ears tuned to the distant roaring of the fire.
Kennard said, grimly, “They can bring the clouds and pile them up, but they can’t make them rain. Although sometimes just the sheer weight of the clouds will condense them into rain. Let’s hope.”
“If you had airplanes—” Larry said.
“What for?”
“On Terra, they can make rain,” Larry said slowly, thinking back to half-learned lessons of his schooldays. “They seed the clouds with some chemical—crystals—silver iodide,” he used the Terran word, not knowing the Darkovan one, “or even dry ice will do. I’m not sure how it works, but it condenses the clouds into rain—”
“How can ice be dry?” Kennard demanded, almost rudely. “It sounds like nonsense. Like saying dry water or a live dead man.”
“It’s not real ice,” Larry corrected himself. “It’s a gas—a frozen gas, that is. It’s carbon dioxide—the gas you breathe out. It crystallizes into something like snow, only it’s much, much colder than ice or snow—and it burns if you touch it.”
“You’re not joking?”
“I hope not,” said Valdir abruptly from behind them. “Kennard, what was Larry saying to you just now? I picked it up, but I can’t read him—”
With a curious prickly sensation again, Larry realized that Valdir had been well out of earshot. The Darkovan lord was looking down at him with an almost fierce intensity. He said, “Make rain? It sounds, then, as if the Terrans have a magic greater than ours. Tell me about this rainmaking, Larry.”
Larry repeated what he had said to Kennard, and the older man stood scowling, deep in thought. Without a word, Lorill Hastur and the frail, flame-haired woman had approached them, and stood listening.