"Miss MacIver? What can she tell? Aren't you forgetting, Cosmo, that I rescued her from you. Yes sir. What's more, I've captured you, and I'm turning you over to the officials." His eyes twinkled. "Who's she going to tell, anyway?"
Cosmo's lean visage was unreadable. So that, he thought, was the line Bemmelman planned to take. Only Mia MacIver would never be released. He wondered if the planter really considered him such a fool. He said: "You don't give me much choice," and twisted to his feet. He hobbled to the desk, dropped awkwardly into the chair. "Give me pen and paper."
Bemmelman produced writing material, spread them before him.
"Here's the Cloud Mountains." Hindered by the manacles, Cosmo sketched a chain of hills, indicated north with a crude compass. He placed a dot halfway into the mountains, then laid off a line from the dot running diagonally into the most rugged sector. He shoved the paper across to Bemmelman. "The first dot's the Ormoo's nest. You know where it is?"
Bemmelman nodded, wrote "Ormoo's nest" on the map.
Cosmo closed his eyes, sighed faintly. "The mountains are impassable except by plane, and then its all blind flying. Rise to an altitude of four thousand meters. You'll clear any peaks that way. Starting at the Ormoo's nest, fly due North, Northwest for a distance of ninety-three kilometers." He paused.
Only the scrape of Bemmelman's pen could be heard as the planter wrote the directions on the bottom of the map.
"Drop straight into the valley," Cosmo went on as the pen scratching ceased. "It's narrow, a canyon. The floor of the valley is at an altitude of one thousand, seven hundred meters, so you'll be in clouds all the time. It's tricky navigating."
Bemmelman stopped writing, waved the paper dry. Then he folded it, put it away in the wall safe, behind the sliding panel. "This had better be right," he said ominously.