XXIII
LUNO AND BEYOND
With no weapons except a steel knife and wooden rapier, the unkempt and bearded earth-man set out resolutely along the twenty-stad road which led to Lake Luno. All the rest of the afternoon he tramped along, avoiding the towns, and taking cover whenever a kerkool approached.
Night fell—the velvet, fragrant, tropic-scented night of Poros; yet, still he kept on, for he knew the road.
As he trudged along he tried to picture to himself the state of affairs in Cupia. Back in Vairkingi, when at last he had succeeded in getting the Princess Lilla on the air, she had mentioned the whistling bees, just before Prince Yuri had cut her off.
These bees were called “whistling” because of the heterodyne squeal with which they appeared to converse; but Myles had discovered, by means of the greater range and selectivity of his own artificial radio speech-organs, that this whistle was due to the bees sending simultaneously on two interfering wave lengths, for signal purposes. When simply talking they used a wave length beyond the range of Cupian speech!
Cabot had been able to adjust his portable set to this wave length, and had talked with the bees. As a result of this conversation an alliance had been formed between Cupia and the Hymernians—as the bee-people called themselves—which had driven Yuri and his ants from the continent. Thereafter the bees had lived at peace with the Cupians, a special ration of green cows being bred for their benefit.
What, wondered Cabot, had the returned Yuri done to disturb this state of affairs? If Portheris, the king of the bees, still lived, Cabot could not imagine him siding with Yuri.
But, whatever had happened, it was clear that the bees were at the bottom of it. Time would tell very speedily.
Traveling on foot at night on the planet Poros is necessarily slow and tedious, for the blackness of the Porovian night is dense beyond anything conceivable on earth. On earth even the light of a few stars would enable a man to distinguish between a concrete road and the adjoining fields and woods and bushes, but on Poros no stars are visible. Accordingly Myles had to feel his way with his feet, and fell off the road many times before he reached his destination. Due to the mountainous character of the country, most of these falls were extremely painful, and some were positively dangerous.
Yet on he kept, and before long the lights of Luno village loomed ahead. Even here it would not do to reveal himself in his present state of appearance, so he skirted the town and made his way down the steep path which led to the shore of the lake.