not much in it for them. So there will be some hostility.'
McAuliff started to speak, then hesitated. He was bewildered. 'I... I may have missed something. What's that got to do with his listening?'
Whitehall blinked slowly, as if patiently explaining to an inept pupil - which, obviously, he felt was the case. 'In the primitive intelligence, hostility is usually preceded by an overt, blunt curiosity.'
'Thank you, Dr Strangelove.' Alex did not hide his irritation. 'Let's get off this. What happened over in the hill community?'
'I sent a messenger to Maroon Tower. I asked for a very private meeting with the Colonel of the Maroons. He will listen; he will accept.'
'I wasn't aware a meeting was that tough to get. If I remember what Barak said, and I do, we just offer money.'
'We do not want a tourist audience, McAuliff. No tribal artifacts or Afro-Carib beads bought for an extra two-dollah-Jamaican. Our business is more serious than tourist trade. I want to prepare the Colonel psychologically; make him think.'
Alex paused; Whitehall was probably right. If what Barak Moore had said had validity. If the Colonel of the Maroons was the sole contact with the Halidon, the decision to make that contact would not be lightly arrived at; a degree of psychological preparation would be preferable to none at all. But not so much as to make him run, avoid the decision.
'How do you think you accomplished that?' asked McAuliff.
'I hired the leader of the community to act as courier. I gave him one hundred dollars, which is like offering either of us roughly a quarter of a million. The message requests a meeting in four days, four hours after the sun descends over the mountains - '
'The Arawak symbols?' interrupted Alex.
'Precisely. Completed by specifying that the meeting should take place to the right of the Coromanteen crescent, which I would presume to be the Colonel's residence. The colonel was to send back the exact location with our courier... Remember, the Colonel of the Maroon Tribes is an ancestral position; he is a descendant and, like all princes of the realm, schooled in its traditions. We shall know soon enough if he perceives us to be quite out of the ordinary.'
'How?'
'If the location he chooses is in some unit of four. Obviously.'
'Obviously... So for the next few days we wait.'
'Not just wait, McAuliff. We will be watched, observed very closely. We must take extreme care that we do not appear as a threat. We must go about our business quite professionally.'
'I'm glad to hear that. We're being paid to make a geological survey.'
Chapter Twenty-Four
TWENTY FOUR
With the first penetration into the Cock Pit, the work of the survey consumed each member of the team. Whatever their private fears or foreign objectives, they were professionals, and the incredible laboratory that was the Cock Pit demanded their professional attentions.
Portable tables, elaborately cased microscopes, geoscopes, platinum drills, sediment prisms, and depository vials were transported by scientist and carrier alike into the barely penetrable jungles and into the grasslands. The four-hour field sessions were more honoured in the breach; none cared to interrupt his experiments or analyses for such inconveniences as meals and routine communications. The disciplines of basic precautions were swiftly consigned to aggravating nuisances. It took less than a full working day for the novelty of the ever-humming, ever irritating walkie-talkies to wear off. McAuliff found it necessary to remind Peter Jensen and James Ferguson angrily that it was mandatory to leave the radio receiving switches on, regardless of the intermittent chatter between stations.
The first evenings lent credence to the wisdom of Charles Whitehall's purchases at Harrod's Safari Shop: The team sat around the fires in canvas chairs, as though recuperating from the day's hunt. But instead of talk of cat, horn, spore, and bird, other words flew around, spoken with no less enthusiasm. Zinc, manganese and bauxite; ochres, gypsum, and phosphate... Cretaceous, Eocene, shale, and igneous; wynne grass, tamarind, bloodwood; guano, grosmichel, and woman's tongue... arid and acid and peripatus; water runoffs, gas pockets, and layers of vesicular lava - honeycombs of limestone.
The overriding generalization was shared by everyone: The Cock Pit was an extraordinarily fruitful land mass with abundant reserves of rich soil, available water, and unbelievable deposits of gases and ores.
All this was accepted as fact before the morning of the third day. McAuliff listened as Peter Jensen summed it up with frightening clarity.
'It's inconceivable that no one's gone in and developed. I dare say Brasilia couldn't hold a candle! Three-quarters