Brazil nodded. “I understand. Somehow they must all have fallen through to here.”

“Well, some Peruvian revolutionaries had camps just along the border, and they were in alliance with some very powerful drug barons, one of whom had guaranteed the newspeople’s safety. We had fears that the crew had been disposed of for some reason, but we found only cooperation from the Peruvians. It seems one of Don Campos’s sons was among the group that vanished. We searched for weeks before giving up. Nothing. But this meteor, it was so strange that they were flying in scientists from all over to test and check and measure it. There seemed no harm there, though. They’d poked it and probed it and tried to drill into it, and nothing much had changed. The Americans sent a liaison, a NASA astronaut who was a geologist, to help coordinate. The two of us stupidly agreed to pose atop the meteor for the news media. It seemed harmless enough. The next thing we knew, we were here.”

Brazil listened carefully to the account, musing over the implications he couldn’t fully discuss with the colonel or anybody else. Why had a huge chunk of meteor with a fully operative Well Gate fallen so far inland? Hell, that was a thousand miles from Rio, where he was, and the Well computer hadn’t had any trouble almost hitting him on the head with one. Had Mavra been in Brazil as well? Maneuvered there by the subtle shifts of probability the Well was capable of when it concerned a Watcher? That still didn’t make sense. One didn’t go to the upper Amazon for a casual trip, but he couldn’t see her either in the drug trade or playing local revolutionary. Not unless she was leading the rebels, anyway. Or…

Just why had he decided to take his holiday in Brazil? Maybe it was he who’d been manipulated. The savage looks of the other party, the accounts of how primitive they and the girl had seemed… Mavra living with a tribe of Stone Age Indians deep in the jungle? That had to be the answer. How and why would have to remain a mystery, at least for now, but it explained a lot. But the colonel and the astronaut had come through weeks, maybe longer, before Mavra’s group.