"We might as well stay inside, then. We have the electric equipment, but it will take quite a while to set it up; and it hardly seems worth the trouble for a one-night stand. As you say, it will be a little crowded here. But we've all slept under worse conditions. Would anyone rather set up the fence?"
There was no answer to this question. At Lampert's direction a meal was served and eaten. Then the scientists settled down for the night, some to sleep at once, others to review plans or recheck equipment. Mitsuitei occupied himself with making careful measurements of the photographs he had been given; he was the last asleep....
Scores of miles to the southwest, the Felodon reached the river. It was no longer on the coast; some time since it had swerved inland. A casual compass check would have revealed that it was still heading straight for the now grounded helicopter. Even McLaughlin could not have told what led the creature on, familiar as he was with the animals of Viridis; but no one who had watched the thing since the flying machine had passed could have doubted its goal. Actually, it was now on the same bank of the river as the helicopter; but whatever guided it pointed across the great stream.
Without hesitating, the amphibid plunged into the water.
III
The men were awake well before sunrise. The human body takes a long, long time to accustom its physiological cycle to a change in something as fundamental as the length of day. But they did not attempt to resume flight until the green star was once more in the sky. Mitsuitei put forth a tentative suggestion that the interval be spent in a visit to the "city" site he had seen the night before, but McLaughlin vetoed it.
"Going on foot through the jungle at night is a fool's game, though I admit people sometimes get away with it. I could get you there, but even if we turned around and came back immediately there'd be a lot of time wasted. Dr. Lampert went over all that last night. Look, that hill of yours is right by the river. After we're set up in the main camp, it will be relatively easy to drop down to it. We have collapsible boats. Unless we camp above the rapids, you won't even have to fly. Even if we're farther upstream and do have to use the 'copter, the trip will take only a few minutes."
Mitsuitei had agreed, though with evident reluctance. No one else had any desire to go out; there was not enough rock exposed on the hilltop to excite the paleontologists, the hill itself presented nothing unusual to Lampert's geophysical eye, and McLaughlin was in no hurry to get to work. They waited, therefore, until the "Claw"—Lampert had recalled Beta Librae's Arabic name—had risen and the skyglow been replaced by its emerald brilliance; then the journey was resumed.
It took, as McLaughlin had said the night before, only a few minutes. The hill where they had slept was less than five miles from the face of the mountain range. Only the haze of the night before had prevented their seeing it. The river emerged from a canyon some fifteen hundred feet in depth, a couple of miles to the south of their eastward course line.