Free Worlds Apart by J. T. McIntosh Page B

stony parts of Mundis stood out, bleak and bare, amid the dusky green of grass and bush and forest. Mundis wasn't ugly, but it couldn't be said to have much real beauty either. Beauty needed variety of shape, color, texture; the Mundan landscape never offered more than a few variations at one time.
    They found occasional streams. The first time Toni stared for hours, fascinated by the sight of so much water in motion. Sometimes the rain swept about hard ground like a flood, but when the rain stopped, the rivulets were gone. Pertwee tried to explain to her what a river was like. That gave her another purpose in making the journey. She wanted to see a river. Surely if there were streams, there must be rivers somewhere?
    But though they found other streams, they were usually mere trickles of water, less impressive than the rain floods.
    There was plenty of variety in the vegetation, but not in its color. Mundan plants had come to a certain tacit agreement. Where one thing grew, another could not grow. The roots were different, their needs from the soil were different, except for the water and sunlight that they all needed. When the soil no longer comfortably supported the coarse grass, a space would clear itself. In this space, within a short time, a bean plant or a bread tree or a berry bush would grow, unmolested.
    Being a vegetarian on Mundis was no hardship. The Mundan blueberry was largely protein, the bread tree supplied digestible carbohydrates, and the yellow berry -- unfortunately rather rare -- was the milk of the Mundis. It had a rather stringent taste which had put the founder colonists off it but which the young Mundans relished. It contained all the essential constituents of food, and was easily digested. The founders had tended to ignore it, but the young Mundans were experimenting with it as a major crop.
    Traveling as they did, Pertwee and Toni had no food problem. They never stayed long enough in one place to exhaust the supply of what was readily available. Pertwee wouldn't have liked to live for ever on the vegetable products of Mundis; but Toni didn't seem to find it a hardship at all.
    Indeed, when Pertwee once mentioned going back to Lemon, not as an immediate goal but as something they would have to do eventually, Toni nodded disinterestedly. She was in no hurry.
    On the twenty-seventh day -- by which time they must have covered over five hundred miles -- Toni had her wish and more.
    They had been climbing slightly most of the day. The rise was so even and gradual that only when looking back could they see how high they had risen.
    "It would be about fifteen hundred feet above sea level," Pertwee remarked, "if there was a sea to have a level."
    Just as gradually the rise leveled out, and again they only noticed it by looking all aboxt them. The effect was that the the world had shrunk. The horizon was only about five miles away. They had a curious feeling of being at the top of the world and very much alone. They were almost afraid to go forward in case they found themselves looking over a precipice a mile high into a sea of sulfur. It was borne in on them for the first time that no human being had ever been this way before them.
    But when at last they came to a drop which was very abrupt, for Mundis, and saw into the valley beyond, Toni gave a cry of delight, began to run forward, and then checked herself and waited for Pertwee, a little frightened. The entire floor of the valley was a lake. Pertwee wondered at sight of it if there were not in fact a sort of sea level on Mundis, a level far below the average land level.
    The valley was vast -- it would take thousands of years yet for the vegetation to come within reasonable distance of leveling it out, if it ever did. Surrounded by ground fifteen hundred feet above the level of the plain, it dropped at least two thousand feet to the lake.
    Pertwee took Toni's arm. "This settles one thing," he said contentedly. "We can go back to Lemon on our own terms,