take on this kind of dangerous work. If anything happens to you, it will
be my responsibility!" I was going to have enough trouble, I was
thinking, without shepherding along one of the most revered Personages
on the whole damned planet! I didn't want anyone around who had to be
fawned on, or deferred to, or even listened to.

* * * * *

He frowned slightly, and I had the unpleasant impression that he knew
what I was thinking. "In the first place--it will mean something to the
trailmen, won't it--to have a Hastur with you, suing for this favor?"

It certainly would. The trailmen paid little enough heed to the ordinary
humans, except for considering them fair game for plundering when they
came uninvited into trailman country. But they, with all Darkover,
revered the Hasturs, and it was a fine point of diplomacy--if the
Darkovans sent their most important leader, they might listen to him.

"In the second place," Regis Hastur continued, "the Darkovans are my
people, and it's my business to negotiate for them. In the third place,
I know the trailmen's dialect--not well, but I can speak it a little.
And in the fourth, I've climbed mountains all my life. Purely as an
amateur, but I can assure you I won't be in the way."

There was little enough I could say to that. He seemed to have covered
every point--or every point but one, and he added, shrewdly, after a
minute, "Don't worry; I'm perfectly willing to have you take charge. I
won't claim--privilege."

I had to be satisfied with that.

* * * * *

Darkover is a civilized planet with a fairly high standard of living,
but it is not a mechanized or a technological culture. The people don't
do much mining, or build factories, and the few which were founded by
Terran enterprise never were very successful; outside the Terran Trade
City, machinery or modern transportation is almost unknown.

While the other men checked and loaded supplies and Rafe Scott went out
to contact some friends of his and arrange for last-minute details, I
sat down with Forth to memorize the medical details I must put so
clearly to the trailmen.

"If we could only have kept your medical knowledge!"

"Trouble is, being a doctor doesn't suit my personality," I said. I felt
absurdly light-hearted. Where I sat, I could raise my head and study the
panorama of blackish-green foothills which lay beyond Carthon, and
search out the stone roadway