As they pressed through the dripping foliage, bright light burnished their faces. They were standing on a small cliff that looked down the mountain. Fog the color of pale gold, the same gold the boy had seen so rarely in the sunset, rolled across the entire sky. The center flamed with the misty sun, and way below them through the fog was the shattered traces of water, the color of magnesium flame on copper foil, without edge or definition.
"That's a lake that lies between this mountain and the next," Quorl said, pointing to the water.
"I thought...." the boy started softly, his tongue rough against the new language. "I thought it was the sea."
Beside them appeared the crouching figure of Tloto. Drops from the wet leaves burned on his neck and back, over the drying blood. He turned his blank face left and right in the golden light, and with all his knowing could communicate no awe.
CHAPTER IX
Clea Koshar had been installed in her government office for three days. The notebook in which she had been doing her own work in inverse sub-trigonometric functions had been put away in her desk for exactly fifty-four seconds when she made the first discovery that gave her a permanent place in the history of Toromon's wars as its first military hero. Suddenly she pounded her fist on the computer keys, flung her pencil across the room, muttered, "What the hell is this!" and dialed the military ministry.
It took ten minutes to get Tomar. His red-haired face came in on the visiphone, recognized her, and smiled. "Hi," he said.
"Hi, yourself," she said. "I just got out those figures you people sent us about the data from the radiation barrier, and those old readings from the time Telphar was destroyed. Tomar, I didn't even have to feed them to the computer. I just looked at them. That radiation was artificially created. Its increment is completely steady. At least on the second derivative. Its build-up pattern is such that there couldn't be more than two simple generators, or one complexed on ..."
"Slow down," Tomar said. "What do you mean, generators?"