"I didn't ask you to come."
"But you wouldn't care."
"Ah, shut up."
McLaren went for Harker's throat.
Harker hit him, with great care and accuracy. McLaren sagged down and
took his head in his hands and wept. Sim stayed out of it. He shook his
head, and after a while he began to sing to himself, or someone beyond
himself. "Oh, nobody knows the trouble I see...."
Harker pulled himself up. His ears rang and he shivered uncontrollably,
but he could still take some of McLaren's weight on himself. They were
climbing a steep ledge, fairly wide and not difficult.
"Let's get on," said Harker.
About two hundred feet beyond that point the ledge dipped and began
to go down again in a series of broken steps. Overhead the cliff face
bulged outward. Only a fly could have climbed it. They stopped. Harker
cursed with vicious slowness. Sim closed his eyes and smiled. He was a
little crazy with fever himself.
"Golden city's at the top. That's where I'm going."
He started off along the ledge, following its decline toward a jutting
shoulder, around which it vanished. Harker laughed sardonically.
McLaren pulled free of him and went doggedly after Sim. Harker shrugged
and followed.
Around the shoulder the ledge washed out completely.
They stood still. The steaming clouds shut them in before, and behind
was a granite wall hung within thick fleshy creepers. Dead end.
"Well?" said Harker.
McLaren sat down. He didn't cry, or say anything. He just sat. Sim
stood with his arms hanging and his chin on his huge black chest.
Harker said, "See what I meant, about the Promised Land? Venus is a
fixed wheel, and you can't win."
It was then that he noticed the cool air. He had thought it was just
a fever chill, but it lifted his hair, and it had a definite pattern
on his body. It even had a cool, clean smell to it. It was blowing out
through the creepers.
Harker began ripping with his knife. He broke through into a cave
mouth, a jagged rip worn smooth at the bottom by what must once have
been a river.
"That draft is coming from the top of the plateau," Harker said. "Wind
must be blowing up there and pushing it down. There may be a way
through."
McLaren and Sim both showed a slow, terrible growth of hope. The three
of them went without speaking into the tunnel.