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plant in operation.”
“The giants who built the city in Stoner’s Valley?” Rodrick asked.
“Hell, even modern Cambodians feel that a race of giants built the temples at Angkor Wat, ” Max said.
“Theresita,” Rodrick said, “in your opinion, was the abandoned city I showed you pictures of built by
ancient Whorsk?”
“It’s possible. They have the manual dexterity. They do fine work in tanning hides and scraping them
thin for the covering of the gasbags on their airships. They work wood well with basic metal tools to
build the gondolas. They have, with the exception of the airships, a basic hunter-gatherer society, doing
only the minimum work required to build the ships and their log huts.”
“It wouldn’t be the first known instance of regression of a society,” Mandy said. “It could be as simple
as this: The development of the lighter-than-air craft freed them to roam a pretty interesting and very
large world.”
A silence fell.
“Any further comment?” Rodrick asked. There was none.
Jacob had a companion as he flew in from the mouth of the Great Misty River on the western
continent, only to find dense fog covering the valley for about fifteen hundred miles.
AHpeacfhleewOne on up the
river, saw the huge cascade that had so impressed Theresita, and then she was remembering a lot of
things as he traced the wide, brown river northward into the dense jungles. According to Theresita’s
estimate of time and river-current rate, she had crashed almost in midcontinent over three thousand air
miles from the coast, even more miles when one considered the curves and windings of the river.
Flights over the river on three other days had the same results. “Now we know why they call it the
Great Misty River,” Jacob said. The dense fog that hung over the river valley was, they decided, some
sort of local natural phenomenon. Surveys of Whorsk settlements on that continent and the two in the
northern hemisphere in the west showed nothing new about the Whorsk.
Four days after being picked up by Jacob, Theresita finally kept her appointment for a medical
examination. She came to like Mandy Miller immediately and, knowing the story now, felt that
Mandy’s smudged eyes and distracted attitude were signs of mourning for her dead husband.
The examination took place late in the day, and when Theresita was finished, she met Jacob at the
clubhouse, an attractive, multihued plastic-stone building that someone had found spare time to build
on the rocky headland at the mouth of Stanton Bay, a five-minute crawler ride from HamiltoSnpiarnitd
the
of America . Juke, the entertainment robot, and Makeitdo, the RD-77 repair robot, had installed large
screens and a sound system, which, if it were ever to be cranked up full blast, would shatter stone. Juke
had decided that he’d become a nightclub host and, if anyone would ever listen to him, a nightclub
comic. That last had not yet been realized because every time he started to tell his jokes, people yelled,
“Not now, Juke!” But they did appreciate his selection of music.
On a Saturday night a representative group could be found at the club, filling the three tennis courts
and the swimming pool, cooking on the grills in the picnic areas, lounging on the ocean beach, or just
sitting on one of the open balconies and watching the gloriously colored Omega sunset.
