"Sure. Three packs here inside my Archer. Mighty small hospitality gift, Mitch..."
After the 'copter drifted away, it seemed that a curtain drew over Nelsen's mind, blurring the whole memory. It was as though they had planned that. It was almost as though Mitch, and Selma, as he had just seen them, were just another mind-fantasy of the Heebie-Jeebie Planet, created by its present masters.
"Should we believe it?" Nance whispered.
"My cigarettes are gone," Frank told her.
At the Survey Station they got weary looks from Ed Huth. "I guess I picked a wrong man, Nelsen," he said.
"It looks as though you did, Ed," Frank replied. "I'm really sorry."
They got worse hell from a little doctor from Italy, whose name was Padetti. They were asked a lot of questions. They fibbed some, but not entirely.
"We sort of blanked out, Doctor," Nance told him. "I suppose we spent most of our time in the desert, living in our Archers. There were the usual distorted hallucinations of Syrtis Fever. A new strain, I suspect... Four months gone? Oh, no...!"
She must have had a time evading his questions for the next month, while she worked, again, in the lab. Maybe he did divine half of the truth, at last. Maybe he even was sympathetic toward the thickets that he was trying to defeat.
Nelsen wasn't allowed to touch another helicopter. During that month, between brief but violent seizures of the fever, he was employed as a maintenance mechanic.