THE HILLS OF HOME
by Alfred Coppel
The river ran still and deep, green and gray in the eddies with thewarm smell of late summer rising out of the slow water. Madrone andbirch and willow, limp in the evening quiet, and the taste ofsmouldering leaves....
It wasn’t the Russian River. It was the Sacred Iss. The sun had touchedthe gem-encrusted cliffs by the shores of the Lost Sea of Korus and hadvanished, leaving only the stillness of the dusk and the lonely cry ofshore birds.
From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been aphonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly AnnRoost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cryof the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast ofvictims borne into[116]this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.
Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checkedhis harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there wasnothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turnedup-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows inthe river that would permit him to cross and continue his search alongthe base of the Golden Cliffs—
The sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, threehundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”
Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. Itwould have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he hadbeen remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.“Coming up.”
He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing hehadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the texturedtaste of the cigaret on his tongue.
Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that wasmuch stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into thedesert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamedrusset-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. Solong a road, he thought, from then to now.
Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t beenan easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddampsychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the dealbecause of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and theirRorschach blots.
“You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”
“Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”
How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires runningout of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or thepennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way thetiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?
Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus onefifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.
The water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behindthat madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunkan