by Jerry
He turned and ran back to the sled, moving with the delicate high-stepping run of somebody that has lived all his life on hard ice.
The Philosophy Sled, like all the others, was the framework for a box mounted on runners. The interior of the box was divided into smaller compartments by the struts and ties that braced the masts, and pieces of thick fabric nailed to these members made the compartments into semi-private cubicles. At the front and rear of the sled were small bridges from which it was possible to see down into the cubicles but the people of the tribes were incurious by nature and found sled life tolerable.
Underneath the bridges were the supplies of bread cane which grew thickly on the lowermost slopes of the polar mountains. Chandrill let his thoughts return to the group on the bridge and realised that Fearthell was still talking.
“I don’t understand you, Chandrill,” he was saying in his usual tautological style, “I really don’t. At a time when this sled is in need of every man you tell me you want to leave the sled! Not only that, but you want others to go with you. And for what?
“Nothing but a meteor! Just a piece of rock from the sky. Nothing at all, you might say.”
“That wasn’t a meteor,” Chandrill stated flatly.
“What was it then?”
“I wouldn’t like to guess,” replied Chandrill, “but I know it wasn’t a meteor.” He kept on speaking, ignoring the amused smile that Fearthell slid around the other men. “And don’t worry about your runner. Minnatose won’t let this sled be left behind. He said he could use it for something useful and it’s not hard to see his point of view.
“When I was a boy on the Royal Sleds I heard old Ardinetter, who was the Philosopher at that time, talk about the past and the future. The world was a challenge to him. He seemed to think it was a privilege to live on a world whose spin had almost stopped, stretching the days and nights into years so that it was useless even to go underground. Ardinetter believed that we wouldn’t always have to follow the sun around the world.
“But that’s all we have done. It is our miserable little history.”
“I think I am safe in saying that all of us here are familiar with our own history, Chandrill,” remarked Fearthell, nodding to the others.
“I’m trying to show you Minnatose’s point of view about the sled,” Chandrill said curtly. “In the times when the trek was just beginning they realised that if they could only reach the poles there would be no need to keep moving. The south pole was out because the winds were wrong below this latitude, and the north pole is a thousand miles over the mountains. Night would have us before we reached the first peaks.
“We travel along the southernmost skirt of those mountains, round the world and round the world, never getting anywhere. And the only way we’ll ever break the cycle is by being smart. By using our brains to get out. That is why this sled was built. It was to be a place where the best brains could work on the problem of escape.
“If you continue to sit there arguing over the possibility of the Absolute or the reality of the perceived universe Minnatose will have the sled out from under you—and he’ll deserve it.”
“I had no idea there was so much empathy between Minnatose and you,” remarked one-eyed Tronpat. He smiled slightly.
“There’s a logical refutation,” Chandrill said sarcastically.
“All right then,” Fearthell put in, “keeping everything on a strictly logical basis. Would you explain just how the meteor will carry the tribes to the poles? Can you make it fly again after it has buried itself in the ice?”
“No, I can’t, but it is something new,” Chandrill said. “It’s new data. New material to work with, so I say we can’t afford to neglect it. I’m going to take my own yacht and go out after it. Anybody else?” He looked around the group in their loose dark trousers and broad belted jerkins. None of them spoke.
“Party coming back from the rest of the tribe,” shouted Novice Mondaquee from the rear bridge. Chandrill went down and dragged out the body of his little yacht from its makeshift brackets between the timbers at the rear. He had it ready to sail when the party reached the sled.
It was Minnatose again and behind him were four men in the dark blue of Ironworkers who were trailing two heavy runners. Minnatose glanced up at the bridge as he came up, moving fast, and scraped to a halt beside Chandrill. “Throw that thing back in there,” he snapped, pointing at the yacht, “and get one of these runners onto the sled.” His face was white and stiff with barely controlled rage and Chandrill felt the old nervousness stir in his stomach.
You took my wife, he thought in an effort to whip up a reckless temper. Aloud he said, “One of the boys can do it. It’s important to me to go.”
Minnatose caught Chandrill’s jerkin and twisted it tight across his chest. “You know the Pass, don’t you? You know the Pass?”
“Yes,” Chandrill said, shocked at his cousin’s sudden descent to violence. In the long trip round the world there were several places from which the mountains could be seen on the southern horizon. The Pass was the only point at which they approached the great polar ranges of the north; it was actually a narrow strait of ice between two continents. All the sleds of all the tribes converged there to get through to the other side.
“You know the Pass. It’s gone! The meteor hit the northern edge of it and . . . damn you, Chan! We can’t get through!”
The main sense of Minnatose’s words were too much for Chandrill. “Damn me!” he said stupidly, trying to get back from the other man. “Why damn me?”
“You were the one that stopped us from getting this sled long ago. But for that this tribe would have been in the lead—the advance tribes were through the Pass when the meteor struck.”
“You mean,” Chandrill demanded, “that because you crippled this sled and slowed the tribe by trying to blackmail us with refusing our sail cloth and runners, it is my fault?”
“Shut up, Chan,” Minnatose snarled. “It was you blocked me.”
“What is it? What about the Pass?” It was Fearthell from the bridge. Minnatose released Chandrill and strode forward, a tautmouthed giant in the royal white, to beneath Fearthell. He turned back to Chandrill and pointed at him.
“Get that runner on now and get this sled moving,” he ordered. “I’ll need every man at the Pass to get some of the stuff through if it can be done. And do it now.”
Chandrill dropped one hand to the haft of the whipstick slung on his belt. He stood like that for a few seconds, only then beginning to realise that for the first time there was no way ahead for the tribes to take. He straightened his jerkin and ran to help the men manoeuvre the runners.
When Chandrill came up out of his cubicle the Philosophy Sled, the last one of all, had neared the Pass. It was darker than usual due to the smoke and dust that was riding high above the Pass, and to the north were the lines of the sleds belonging to the other tribes. Most of them seemed to be deserted. The lines converged a mile ahead and disappeared behind an outshoot of the northern cliff of the Pass.
When they swung round the curve of the cliff, Chandrill found that there was nothing to see ahead but wrecked sleds that had piled headlong into each other. There was a ragged wall of them blocking the way. Chandrill saw the smoky red smudges of flames to the north, then the wind backed suddenly bringing with it the smoke and dust and the sickening sense of disaster. He felt the brakes go on and the sled slowed rapidly but not soon enough. The wind smashed back harder and the sails twisted their booms round to the rear of the masts. Blinded with the flying ash Chandrill heard the masts and rigging crunch down into the rear of the sled and then a lurch threw him to the deck. He rolled into one of the handrail standards, caught it and managed to get his feet onto the diagonal bracing in the side and slide down to the level of the runners.
The wind turned again and drove the smoke back into the Pass sufficiently for Chandrill to see several yards. He ran across the ice away from the sled which was using up its kinetic energy in a slow
spin, dragging a train of rigging and spars. When he was well clear he took his skates from his belt and clamped them to his boots, then the darkness raged over everything again. Chandrill bent forward into the wind and thrust off moving with short quick strokes.
An indefinite time went by during which he passed two deserted sleds, wondering all the time where he was trying to go and why. It took him some time to realise that he was looking for Sinoon.
The dark curtain lifted just in time to prevent him running straight into the main mass of the wreckage. He turned to the right and headed towards the southern end of the Pass faintly visible through the twilight. By reckless leaping of scattered timbers he managed to reach the first slopes before the smoke closed down. There were runner tracks along the edge of the ice here and Chandrill followed them.
The sled marks were heavy and he realised that all the sleds at the rear of the lines had come this way, probably being poled along most of the way, in the hope of finding a way through to the other side. Something ahead was flaming intermittently with a fierce white light, and as he came nearer the light source Chandrill found that it was getting warmer. The way ahead became too crowded with close packed sleds and he moved up on to the slope feeling as though he was moving helplessly through a hazy flickering dream.
He climbed until he had crossed over a shoulder of the hill and had a view of the Pass below him. A mile ahead, at the narrowest point, something that could hardly be seen for the swirling clouds of dust and soot was flaming and glaring, shooting weird beams of light in all directions when the movements of the smoke let them through. The floor of the Pass leading up to the light was obscured but Chandrill glimpsed men moving and he heard their shouts on the wind.
Far up in the mass of sleds he caught a flash of the near white timbers and sails of the Royal Sled of his own tribe. He took off his skates and began to run down the slope.
He fought his way through a stream of men and women who wanted to get away from the unknown thing ahead. When he reached the sled, a mass of motionless darkness against swirling greyness, he found Sinoon curled on the ground close to the bottom of the forward ladder. There was no sign of any of the others about. She was motionless except for a slight trembling. The furs she wore had been transformed by mud and water into a mass of sticky spikes.
Chandrill did not try to find out what had happened to her. He lifted her in his arms and looked into the white face with its myopic seeking eyes. “You want me to take you out of this?” he asked. Sinoon nodded and let her head fall against his shoulder. Chandrill turned and climbed back up the hill, sliding in the mud. At the top of the shoulder he could go no further. He set Sinoon on the ground in the lee of a rock and dropped down beside her.
For a moment he felt good that he had brought her up out of the smoke and chaos to where they could rest then he remembered that it made no difference. They were dead anyway.
Alone he might have had a chance to cross to the other side of the mountains, but not with Sinoon. There was nothing to do now but sit and wait until it got dark. Until they were dead. Down below them in the Pass the sounds were dying out but Chandrill no longer cared. For most of the tribes the trek was over and perhaps they were luckier than those who had got through the Pass. For them there was nothing but another circuit of the world ahead with nothing to do but think about how, when they again reached the Pass, there would be no way through . . .
“Sinoon! Sinoon!” The shout, faint as it was coming up the slope, startled Chandrill. He had forgotten Minnatose.
He shot a glance at Sinoon, who rested with her eyes closed and did not seem to have heard it, then got to his feet and looked down the slope. Minnatose was weaving up the hill following the tracks in the snow and, all at once, there was nothing else in the world save Chandrill and his cousin and the wavering line of footprints joining them together.
“Don’t come any further,” he shouted causing Minnatose to raise his head and see him. Minnatose stared up the hill at him for long seconds and then he shouted something.
Just one word, “You,” and he started up the hill again, and Chandrill knew what it was for. The way in which Minnatose stared up the slope, stumbling unseeingly over rocks and brush, made it obvious.
He felt for the whipstick and got it out of its sling. It was a length of springy steel an eighth of an inch in diameter which had a handle at one end. Keeping his eyes fixed on Minnatose he groped in his pouch and brought out a needle-pointed piece of steel about six inches long which he fitted over the end of the rod.
“I’ve warned you,” he shouted, drawing his arm back, but the words had no visible effect. Chandrill had not expected them to, he had just felt it necessary to give the other man every chance. Minnatose came on up the hill, his eyes blank.
Ignoring the sick feeling in his stomach Chandrill brought his arm down hard. He heard the steel head go whistling down the slope and Minnatose went down sideways with it buried in the bulge of his thigh. Chandrill automatically groped for another head, the finisher, then checked his hand—he would not be able to make another throw. Not at a man anyway.
Minnatose began to get some control over the noises he was making and sat up holding his leg with both hands. He had on his face the hurt, indignant look of the bully who has been hit and is now convinced that he must bully harder than ever to teach the offender a much needed lesson. Chandrill turned and pulled Sinoon to her feet.
“Come on, Sin,” he whispered, “we’ll have to keep moving,” He reckoned that it would take Minnatose at the most twenty minutes to recover and stop his leg bleeding and then he would be coming after him. With a sudden flash of insight Chandrill realised that there was nothing else in life for Minnatose but to kill the one that had been, as he saw it, the cause of the end of his world. It was logical. One man had stripped him of everything; of the past and the future—even life, but a fine piece of irony was there. By virtue of having deprived him of so much that man had provided him with one remaining, shining, all-important goal. Revenge.
Chandrill knew that better than he knew anything and he was running because, although he had the normal man’s disbelieving indifference to the idea of simply dying, he was horribly afraid of the intimate reality of being killed. He wanted to die in his own way.
South of the Pass, along the bottom slopes of the mountain continent, things had not changed at all because nobody had ever travelled that far away from the tribal route. The wind blew from the north having carried the sleds round the world, tried to squeeze its massive invisible self through the Pass and swung along the line of the hills. Since the instant in which the Pass had been destroyed the only evidence that there was still time was in the green sky which had grown several shades darker as the long night slid ponderously across the ice sea from the east.
Chandrill’s foot went blindly over the edge of a crevice and he threw himself back, bearing down on Sinoon for support. Her knees buckled under his weight and they fell awkwardly onto the stiff coating of snow that had fallen ages ago before the last water had become permanently frozen.
From where he lay, too tired to get up now that he was down, Chandrill stared dully at the fresh clean greyness of newly split rocks and, underneath them, the snow-scattered brownness of upthrown soil. It took the facts a long time to penetrate, then he sat up and looked down into the crevice.
The first thing he knew was that this was not a natural formation at all. It was a long shallow gouge in the surface of the hill. One end of it pointed out across the silent horizon of ice and the other on up the slope. The top of it was not visible because a few hundred yards above him the hill he was on reached its highest point then fell away again on the other side. Miles beyond the low ridge thus formed the actual mountains rose distantly.
Sinoon had gone to sleep lying against him, in the position in which she had fallen, with the ease of a tired child. She was a child, Chandrill thought not for the first time. He got to his feet and pulled Sinoon up beside him.
; “Come on, Sin,” he whispered. “Up this way.” She walked with him blindly, dragging her feet and leaning on him.
At the top of the slope the green-white lumpy ground dropped away from them in a long gentle fall into some rough land covered with stunted trees and briar clumps. Almost at his feet the furrow started in the hard snow, narrow at first then broadening out as it went down the hill until at the bottom it was thirty feet wide. Near the broad end the gouge was kinked round a sled-sized rock and, lying outside the trail of violence altogether, was the thing that had caused it.
It was a shining silver egg that had been split open almost vertically from the end nearest Chandrill practically the whole way through to the other end. Inside the egg was a tangled mass of crumpled metalwork and massed interlacing wires.
Chandrill knew with an instinctive judgement, that held good even for things as far outside his sphere of knowledge as this, that he was looking at the ultimate development of the sled. A machine that moved through the sky—like a meteor.
The picture of a mother ship roaming between the stars came to him suddenly. He could almost see the great machine approaching his own tiny sun, the unforeseen accident which sent it winging down, too fast for a landing on his own world, the panic aboard as the mountains appeared ahead right across the horizon, the futile efforts to bring the ship round to go through the one gap in the barrier and the spectacular failure which had snuffed out his race. Chandrill felt his mind reel with the very bigness of the concept.
This glittering shattered thing must have been the flier’s equivalent of his own ice yacht. Chandrill knew then why he had been so uplifted when he had seen the light in the sky. Something, some half-memory inherited, had whispered that here was the way out for the tribes.
He walked down the slope keeping inside the track of the egg and peered into it hoping to see and at the same time afraid of seeing the creature that might be inside. He was unable to see more than a few feet into the interior because of the masses of plates and equipment that blocked his vision and a dense grey-white gas that lingered far inside the hull. At the open end of the egg was a squat machine, heavily flanged and moulded to one half of the hull which Chandrill took to be the floor.