Chapter Six
Thinking Long Term
Nine eyed their searches, and fetched his own computer.
Checked the distribution of the big popular resorts. There were two main highways . . . they were off the eastern one, maybe a third of the way to the first of the towering mountains.
Not that there weren’t perfectly beautiful mountains down both sides of the Great Northern Basin, but not as beautiful and overwhelmingly tall as the northern stretch.
All government property, the traffic that paid for the daily Portals also maintained thousands of miles of trails, a big forest service with a forest fire fighting network . . .
There were tons of areas along the freeways designated as available.
Not much close to the only city on the World. Very little left in the big arc around the north of the basin. The center, very lightly claimed.
He traced the route of the eastern highway. A halfway point with a little town . . . a little further the highway swung out a bit around a broad high area . . . A little too gradual, not to mention wrong climate to call a mesa, but the south slope was steep.
He called up a satellite topographic map . . . looked at the south side of the high area. A few streams, some eroding back into the slope.
Catch the winter sun, maybe less wind in the nasty cold winters here . . .
Here’s a dip in the top of the highplateau, a stream coming off the high area . . . Might be some pretty rapids?
He looked at his left arm. Wiggled the fingers. Still responsive. Never as good as the real arm . . . that last day, knowing they were going to . . .
He jerked his thoughts away.
“We should do a road trip. Check along these cliffs for . . . a waterfall would be nice . . . there’s a couple of streams that come off this boring flattish high . . .”
They took two days, and three vehicles, and camping equipment . . .
Nine slowed as they crossed the bridge over the stream . . . a wide stony stream bed, fast flowing water in the middle . . . “So, we’ll need to find a place to park . . .” Up closer to the steep rise, they pulled over onto the shoulder.
Nine eyed a brushy patch, with no trees, and slashed down at ground level, shoved the brush to the side to clear enough space to park.
He eyed the shape of the ditch along the road, and off to the side of their new parking space, chopped out a nice big wedge and levitated it into the ditch.
They drove over it to park, and he shifted the rather battered wedge back where it came from.
Hiking off the trails was slow but it was only five miles until they found a stream coming in from the north and followed it uphill into a narrow canyon that widened out.
. . and there it was. A fifty-foot-tall waterfall crashing around and over rocks, framed by a few gnarled pines that had found anchorage in cracks in the rough walls of a roughly circular amphitheater.
“Now that’s worthy of a tourist stop.”
Wes looked around. “But the high-water mark . . . at the height of the snowmelt, no one will be able to come up here.”
Nine looked at the cliffs. “Solid rock. Must have been a crack here that the stream eroded all the way back. It’s going to take some excavating, to get a walking path through up there.”
They all looked at him.
Dmitri shook his head. “Were you some rogue Master Mentalist or something?”
“No . . . just . . . my mother was a nurse for an old man, who might have been. He amused himself training me, but then he died and the relatives sold us . . .” He shrugged.
“Gonna go back to your old name?”
Nine swallowed. “Michael . . .” house Pine. “After the surgery.”
“Michael. Yeah, well, a couple more months and you’ll really look like a Michael.”
“I hope so. Shaving my head so no one notices something’s happening is getting old.” He looked up and around. “So, let’s take a look at where we might be able to put the money-making part of this enterprise . . .”
“And you can start giving us Mentalist lessons . . .”