There was no path, only the almost vertical ascent. Crumbled rock for a
few yards, with the roots of sage finding their scanty life in the dry soil.
Then jagged outcroppings of crude crags, sometimes with accidental footholds,
sometimes with overhanging and untrustworthy branches of greasewood, sometimes
with no aid to climbing but the leverage of your muscles and the ingenuity of
your balance.
The sage was as drably green as the rock was drably brown. The only color
was the occasional rosy spikes of a barrel cactus.
Hugh Tallant swung himself up onto the last pinnacle. It had a
deliberate, shaped look about it—a petrified fortress of Lilliputians, a
Gibraltar of pygmies. Tallant perched on its battlements and unslung his field
glasses.
The desert valley spread below him. The tiny cluster of buildings that
was Oasis, the exiguous cluster of palms that gave name to the town and shelter
to his own tent and to the shack he was building, the dead-ended highway
leading straightforwardly to nothing, the oiled roads diagramming the vacant
blocks of an optimistic subdivision.
Tallant saw none of these. His glasses were fixed beyond the oasis and
the town of Oasis on the dry lake. The gliders were clear and vivid to him, and
the uniformed men busy with them were as sharply and minutely visible as a nest
of ants under glass. The training school was more than usually active. One
glider in particular, strange to Tallant, seemed the focus of attention. Men
would come and examine it and glance back at the older models in comparison.
Only the corner of Tallant's left eye was not preoccupied with the new
glider. In that corner something moved, something little and thin and brown as
the earth. Too large for a rabbit, much too small for a man. It darted across
that corner of vision, and Tallant found gliders oddly hard to concentrate on.
He set down the bifocals and deliberately looked about him. His pinnacle
surveyed the narrow, flat area of the crest. Nothing stirred. Nothing stood out
against the sage and rock but one barrel of rosy spikes. He took up the glasses
again and resumed his observations. When he was done, he methodically entered
the results in the little black notebook.