"My robot tells me. A machine can reason logically, better than a colloid brain."
I closed my eyes, trying to think. Surely it should not be difficult for me to retrace my steps, to find a path out of this valley. Yet I hesitated, feeling a strange impotence.
"Can't your robot guide me?" I persisted.
"He will not leave my side. Perhaps—" Lhar turned to the sphere, and the cilia fluttered excitedly. "No," she said, turning back to me. "Built into his mind is one rule—never to leave me. He cannot disobey that."
* * *
I couldn't ask Lhar to go with me. Somehow I sensed that the frigid cold of the surrounding mountains would destroy her swiftly. I said, "It must be possible for me to get out of here. I'm going to try, anyway."
"I will be waiting," she said, and did not move as I slipped out between two trunks of the banyan-like tree.
It was daylight and the silvery grayness overhead was palely luminous. I headed for the nearest rampart of fog.
Lhar was right. Each time I went into that cloudy fog barrier I was blinded. I crept forward step by step, glancing behind me at my footprints in the snow, trying to keep in a straight line. And presently I would find myself back in the valley....
I must have tried a dozen times before giving up. There were no landmarks in that all-concealing grayness, and only by sheerest chance would anyone blunder into this valley—unless hypnotically summoned, like the Indio girls.