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"Perhaps we're frozen down. Try the thrusters."
He tried the thrusters. Something snapped and creaked. When he tried
again, the skimmer shook. He rocked it. Ice outside cracked and rattled. The
deck pitched. Suddenly, they were in the air.
"We're on the way!" She clapped her hands. "We'll see our peo-ple soon."
"Not today," he warned her.
The strip and the snow-banked huts shrank and dimmed under yellow haze as
they rose. When the Polarians had flown it, with the hull pressurized and the
thrusters at full power, it might have climbed above the dust to cross the
continent in half a short Andorandan day.
But now it was a limping wreck. The damaged hatch could not be fully
sealed. The navigation gear had been designed for Earth, and the monks had
installed nothing he could find to show distance and direction here. With only
the map for a guide, they would have to keep beneath the dust. The old cell
banks held power for lift, but with little left for the thrusters. When he
tried them, the skimmer felt sluggish and slow.
"We can't take long." Buglet shivered. "We can't take long."
Sharing her dread, he pushed the thrusters to the limit of their
fal-tering power. With the tattered map spread between them on the navigation
table, they left Station One to follow the long curve of that enormous muddy
river until it poured through a chain of dead volcanoes in red-foaming rapids
and a mile-wide fall that thundered down into blood-colored mist. When the
abrupt night caught them, they dived to land on a black lava-plain.
That night it was his turn to sleep, while Buglet watched. She looked
small and forlorn when she woke him at dawn, her lean face bleak beneath the
grime, her eyes too large, her pale lips quivering.
"It's here," she whispered. "Already in this universe."
With no delay for breakfast, because the last of the ration bricks was
gone, they took off at once. In a vast basin beyond the fall the river widened
into an endless brown inland sea, scattered with is-lands of dirty ice. All
day they traced its shore and came down on the mud-plain beside it when night
fell again.
Next day the river led them through spectacular red-walled can-yons into
an immense desert of wind-carved orange dunes. There it disappeared. Ahead of
them, all the way to the coastal range perhaps a thousand miles, he
guessed the map was blank. Guess-ing direction by the shape of the dunes, they
went on till darkness forced them down. He slept while Buglet watched. The
night seemed too short, and he woke groggy and depressed.
"It hasn't caught up yet." She seemed alert and oddly cheerful.
"We ought to get across the range today. Maybe all the way to Sta-tion
Two."
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Grinning weakly at her, amazed at her radiant vitality, he wanted to ask
if she had learned to exist without food, drawing energy out of the multiverse
the way the gods did. But the mere effort of speech had become a burden. He
said nothing.
When the hazy sky grew bright enough to show the lift and hollow of the
dunes, he lifted the skimmer. Beyond the sand desert, now with only the slope
of the land for a compass, they kept heading for higher ground. Bare dark
foothills beckoned them across a great plateau scattered with monumental
buttes. Black lava-fields rose and vanished at last under a wilderness of snow
where the glacier-bitten peaks towered into stormy clouds.
The cockpit chilled as they climbed. In the thinning air, they were
breathing heavily. Red lightning began to flicker in the wall of cloud ahead,
and he turned uneasily to Buglet.
"I'm going to land. If night catches us in that storm, we could crash the
skimmer all over again. By morning the weather may be better "
She wasn't listening. Hunched against the cold, she had twisted around to
stare blankly back the way they had come. With a shud-der she turned suddenly
to face him.
"It's here," she whispered. "Trailing us from Station One. We can't
stop."
Keeping to valleys and canyons, searching for a pass, they climbed into
the storm. Lightning blazed around them. Savage winds tugged and hauled,
tossed them into foggy voids, flung them toward ice-armored peaks.
"No!" He heard Buglet's stifled sob. "Please, no "
A sharper chill numbed him, and he felt power drained from the thrusters.
The skimmer dropped through swirling snow. Jagged gran-ite loomed ahead. With
inches to spare, he brought them through a narrow gap into wind and mist and
fury.
"It has caught us." Hushed with dread, her voice was almost lost in a
volley of hail. "It's riding on the hull. Sucking power out of the cells I
don't know how trying to drag us down."
He fought it. With the thrusters dead, he dived for speed enough to gain
control. They skimmed past sudden cliffs, dodged a volcanic cone, slid down a
black-walled gorge.
"I think that gap was the pass." Feeling her bleak desperation, he tried
to seem hopeful. "I think we've got the main range behind us. If we can live
to find the station "
The cockpit lights went out. The controls froze. Dead metal, the skimmer
swirled down through dense fog. He heard her anguished gasp, felt her cold
lips brush his cheek.
"We can't just die! Her voice in the dark had a calm force that startled
him. "We won't "
The wind of their fall screamed around the skimmer. Dark rocks sprang at
them out of the fog, grazed the hull. Torn metal shrieked. The skimmer spun.
Flung against the seat restraints, he glimpsed a long snow-slope.
Something struck his head
It was dark and quiet and deadly cold. For a moment he didn't know
anything else. Then all the tension and the terror of their flight came back a
jolting impact. The demon on the skimmer. Their crash across the cliffs into
the snow. He reached for Buglet in the seat be-side him, but his numb fingers
found nothing at all.
"Bug "
He tried to call her name, but no sound came. His breath was gone, and a
great weight crushed his chest. He had to lie back gasping. It took a long
time to fill his lungs, and the air he inhaled seared them with cold.
"Bug " Hoarsely, he tried again. "Bug?"
No answer came.
He tried to unlock the padded arms that held him in the seat, but his
clumsy fingers couldn't find anything. What pinned him down was something
heavy across his knees, which he couldn't see and couldn't move.
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Listening, he heard a faint groan of bending metal and a dull crunch of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]