mockers give
me the peculiar feeling that you're right on the edge of becoming a new
and intelligent race and no fooling."

Tip wiggled his whiskers and bit into the herb leaf. "No fooling," he
agreed.

* * * * *

He stopped for the night in a steep-walled hollow and built a small
fire of dead moss and grass to ward off the chill that came with dark.
He called the others, thinking first of Schroeder so that Tip would
transmit to Schroeder's mocker:

"Steve?"

"Here," Tip answered, in a detectable imitation of Schroeder's voice.
"No luck."

He thought of Gene Taylor and called, "Gene?"

There was no answer and he called Chiara. "Tony--could you see any of
Gene's route today?"

"Part of it," Chiara answered. "I saw a herd of unicorns over that way.
Why--doesn't he answer?"

"No."

"Then," Chiara said, "they must have got him."

"Did you find anything today, Tony?" he asked.

"Nothing but pure andesite. Not even an iron stain."

It was the same kind of barren formation that he, himself, had been
walking over all day. But he had not expected success so soon....

He tried once again to call Gene Taylor:

"Gene ... Gene ... are you there, Gene?"

There was no answer. He knew there would never be.

* * * * *

The days became weeks with dismaying swiftness as they penetrated
farther into the north. The hills became more rugged and there were
intrusions of granite and other formations to promise a chance of
finding metal; a promise that urged them on faster as their time grew
shorter.

Twice he saw something white in the distance. Once it was the bones of
another band of woods goats that had huddled together and frozen to
death in some early blizzard of the past and once it was the bones of a
dozen unicorns.

The nights grew chillier and the suns moved faster and faster to the
south. The animals began to migrate, an almost imperceptible movement in
the beginning but one that increased each day. The first frost came and
the migration began in earnest. By the third day it was a hurrying tide.

Tip was strangely silent that day. He did not speak until the noon sun
had cleared the cold, heavy mists of morning. When he spoke it was to
give a message from Chiara:

"Howard ... last report ... Goldie is dying ... pneumonia...."

Goldie was Chiara's mocker, his only means of communication--and there
would be no way to tell him when they were tu