"Rena!" I whispered violently. "Watch out!" The copter was black and
purple; it bore on its flank the marking of the Swiss Guard, the Roman
police force.
* * * * *
She pressed my hand. "Poor Tom," she said. She walked boldly up to one
of the officers lounging beside the copter and spoke briefly to him,
too low for me to hear.
It was only when the big vanes overhead had sucked us a hundred yards
into the air, and we were leveling off and heading south, that she
said: "These are friends too, you see. Does it surprise you?"
I swallowed, staring at the hissing jets at the ends of the swirling
vanes. "Well," I said, "I'm not exactly _surprised_, but I thought that
your friends were, well, more likely to be--"
"To be rabble?" I started to protest, but she was not angry. She was
looking at me with gentle amusement. "Still you believe, Tom. Deep
inside you: An enemy of the Company must be, at the best, a silly
zealot like my father and me--and at the worst, rabble." She laughed
as I started to answer her. "No, Tom, if you are right, you should not
deny it; and if you are wrong--you will see."
I sat back and stared, disgruntled, at the purple sunset over the
Mediterranean. I never saw such a girl for taking the wind out of your
sails.
* * * * *
Once across the border, the Guards had no status, and it was necessary
for them to swing inland, threading through mountains and passes,
remaining as inconspicuous as possible.
It was little more than an hour's flight until I found landmarks I
could recognize. To our right was the bright bowl of Naples; far to our
left, the eerie glow that, marked bombed-out New Caserta. And ahead,
barely visible, the faint glowing plume that hung over Mount Vesuvius.
Neither Rena nor the Guards spoke, but I could feel in their tense
attitudes that this was the danger-point. We were in the lair of the
enemy. Undoubtedly we were being followed in a hundred radars, and the
frequency-pattern would reveal our copter for what it was--a Roman
police plane that had no business in that area. Even if the Company let
us pass, there was always the chance that some Neapolitan radarman,
more efficient, or more anxious for a promotion, than his peers would
alert an interceptor and order us down. Certainly, in the old days,
interception would have been inevitable; for Naples had just completed
a war, and only short weeks back an unidentified aircraft would have
been blasted out of the sky.
But we were ignored.
And that, I thought to myself, was another facet to the paradox. For
when, in all the world's years before these days of the Company, was
there such complacency, such deep-rooted security, that a nation just
out of a war should have soothed its combat-jangled nerves overnight?
Perhaps the Company had not ended wars. But the _fear_ of wars was
utterly gone.
We fluttered once around the volcano, and dipped in to a landing on a
gentle hump of earth halfway up its slope, facing Naples and the Bay.
We were a few hundred yards from a cluster of buildings--perhaps a
dozen, in all.
I jumped out, stumbling and recovering myself. Rena stepped lightly
into my arms. And without a word, the Guards fed fuel to the jets, the
rotor whirled, and the copter lifted away from us and was gone.
Rena peered about us, getting her bearings. There was a sliver of
a moon in the eastern sky, enough light to make it possible to get
about. She pointed to a dark hulk of a building far up the slope. "The
Observatory. Come, Tom."
* * * * *
The volcanic soil was rich, but not very useful to farmers. It was not
only the question of an eruption of the cone, for that sort of hazard
was no different in kind than the risk of hailstorm or drought. But the
mountain sides did not till easily, its volcanic slopes being perhaps
steeper than those of most mountains.
The ground under our feet had never been in cultivation. It was pitted
and rough, and grown up in a tangle of unfamiliar weeds. And it was
also, I discovered with considerable shock, warm to the touch.
I saw a plume of vapor, faintly silver in the weak light, hovering over
a hummock. Mist, I thought. Then it occurred to me that there was too
much wind for mist. It was steam! I touched the soil. Blood heat, at
least.