by Ben Bova
"Can we move him?"
"Got to. Can't leave him hee-yuh."
They bound Will's chest as tightly as they dared, Alec tearing strips from his own shirt. Then Alec sent the scout on ahead to get help as he wedged himself under Will's arm, on his good side, and started to help him to his feet.
"What about . . . " Will sagged, nearly dragging Alec to his knees, " . . . those kids."
"Don't worry about them."
It wasn't as bad as Alec had feared. Although they barely made two klicks by sundown, trudging along with most of Will's weight on Alec's shoulders, just before it got truly dark a trio of scouts met them. They had a stretcher and the four of them carried Will to an overnight camp that the old man had set up. It was only a lean-to, but it sheltered them from the wind. They slept next to a big, hot fire.
The next morning a wagon came up and took Will and Alec back to the base. Douglas and Angela and half the base's people were at the first gate to meet them.
Two nights later, Douglas banged open the door to Angela's house, She and Alec had eaten dinner in the mess hall, then walked the snow-banked paths to her house. They were sitting in front of the fire, drawing a charcoal sketch on a piece of fabric together, when Douglas strode in without warning. Suddenly the little room was overcrowded.
"Well, at least you're dressed," Douglas said.
The two of them scrambled to their feet.
"Of course we're dressed," Angela replied cooly.
"Now close that door or it'll be freezing in here."
Douglas nudged the door shut. "You're wanted over at Will's place, right away."
"What's happened?" Alec demanded.
"No time for explanations. Come right now."
Alec took Angela by the hand and the three of them trotted through the icy darkness down three houses to Will's place, while Alec's mind raced. An infection. Something's happened to Will. Maybe the wound was worse than they thought.
They burst into Will's house, and there was the big oversized puppy dog, sitting on the sofa in the main room of the house with half a dozen half-drunk men and women sitting on the floor around him. A merry fire roared in the fireplace and they were all laughing and waving glasses.
"Oh-ho!" Will called as the three of them stepped into the house. "He's here! Give them all glasses and let's drink a toast to my companion-in-arms and rescuer."
Someone shoved a glass into Alec's hand. Someone else filled it eight centimeters deep with whisky.
Everyone except Will stood and faced Alec as the big redhead intoned, with enormous seriousness:
"To Alec, who brought me back alive."
"To Alec," they all repeated.
The whisky was beautiful, smooth as free-fall and warmer than sunshine. But then, "What is all this?" Alec asked, slightly dazed. Angela looked puzzled too, but happy.
Will sat there grinning happily. He was fully dressed, but Alec could see the bulk of the bandaging under his shirt.
He said, "My medical colleagues have finally admitted that I'm out of danger and can be up and about . . ."
"In a few days," said one of the older men, trying hard to look dour. "In a few days, Will."
"Right. In a few days," Will agreed. "So I thought to myself, if I can be up and about in a few days, that means I can go back to Utica and hunt for more whisky. So why don't we celebrate my miraculous recovery with the bottles we already have on hand?"
"Sound strategic thinking," Douglas boomed, and the party was officially launched.
It went on all night. Toward dawn a few of the women disappeared, murmuring about getting breakfast together and hot, black coffee. Douglas was slouched on the sofa beside Will. Most of the others had bunched into little knots of conversation in corners of the rooms. Douglas pounded the empty space on the sofa alongside him and said to Alec, "Come here, son. Sit down." It was a command.
They were all drunk enough to drop most of the pretenses that people live with. So Alec, knowing that his grin was as unsteady as his walk, made his way past a quartet of men sitting cross-legged by the dying fire and dropped onto the sofa next to his father.
"Well," Douglas said, in the nearest thing to a quiet conversational tone that he could muster, "you've been with us for almost three months now. Still think I'm an ogre?"
Alec could see Will watching him, beyond Douglas' bulky form, grinning hugely as if he'd arranged a reconciliation between David and Absalom.
"No," Alec admitted, "I guess you're not a monster. I still don't agree with you, but I think I can see why you did what you did."
"Good!" Douglas raised both hands in the air, like a victorious gladiator. One of them held an empty glass instead of a sword.
"Now then," he went on, letting his hands drop, "there are a few things to be settled. First, I think you ought to marry the girl. She's like my very own daughter, and I'll admit I had mixed feelings . . ."
"Wait a minute," Alec said. "Marry Angela?"
"Of course."
"That's between her and me. You don't have anything to say about it."
"The hell I don't!" Douglas exploded. "She's practically my daughter. You are my son. If you think you're going to go fucking around and leave her pregnant, you goddamned better well think again."
"Now wait . . ."
"No, you wait," Douglas insisted. "You're going to marry her, and then head a delegation to meet Kobol. There are a few things I want you to make clear to him."
"I'm not sure I want to!"
"Not sure? What the hell do you mean, not sure? You can't have your cake and eat it, too. You're either with us or against us. There aren't any neutrals around here. You just said you're on our side."
"I didn't say that!"
"Then you're against us!" Douglas roared.
Will put a hand on his shoulder. "Hold on, Doug . . . just a . . ."
But Douglas shrugged him off and lumbered to his feet. Alec stood up beside him, barely coming up to his father's shoulder.
"Now you listen to me, son," Douglas said, his voice low and threatening. "I've let you sit around here and have your fill of food and warmth and shelter for three months. You've sneaked around behind my back to make it with my virtual daughter. And what have I asked from in return? Nothing! Not a goddamned thing. Except loyalty. And you refuse?"
Trembling white hot inside, Alec answered in a voice so choked and low that he himself could barely hear it, "That's right. I refuse."
"Then get out!" Douglas roared, pointing to the door. "Take whatever you own and get the hell out of here!"
"That's just what I'm going to do."
Alec started for the door. Everyone else in the house was staring at him now, all pretense of polite disinterest vanished. Will looked worse than when he had been shot.
"Just a minute," Douglas snapped as Alec reached the door. "You can take whatever you please from this base. But you leave Angela alone. You're not good enough for her, no matter how cleverly you've tricked her."
"I'll take what I want," Alec said.
"Try taking her and I'll have you hunted down like an animal and killed. I promise you!"
BOOK FOUR
Chapter 24
Alec stormed blindly out into the frozen night.
He passed Angela's house, saw the lights and glimpsed a bustle of women inside. He guessed that they were preparing breakfast, talking together, laughing and gossiping.
He went on past. By the time he had put together his own few belongings and saddled a horse, dawn was streaking the eastern sky. But it was a dull, overcast day that arose, with a sky as grimly sullen as Alec's own thoughts. He rode beyond the checkpoints and the guarded fence gates, away from Douglas's base.
Riding most of the day, he camped up in the hills under a stand of firs. Their branches made a poor fire that burned too quickly, then smoldered without heat. By morning he was shaking with bone-deep cold. And hungry.
The only weapon he had brought with him was the automatic rifle he had come in with origi
nally.
It was heavy and cumbersome to use on small game, even when choked down to single-shot action.
And Alec quickly discovered that his shooting was not good enough to hit a rabbit or smaller rodent as it scurried across the frozen ground. His dilemma was painful: squirt a clip of rounds at a rabbit and you might hit the animal, you might even have enough of it intact to gnaw on, but you'd be out of ammunition in a day or two.
On his third day of wandering it snowed, a heavy fierce blizzard that howled through the woods and blotted out everything except the very nearest trees. Alec was lucky enough to find a cave and enough hardwood to make a fire that lasted through the night. The horse needed it as much as he did. There was no forage to speak of, and the animal was weakening rapidly. Briefly he thought of killing the animal for food, but then he would be on foot in the middle of this snowy wilderness.
He spent two days in the cave, locked in by the blizzard. No firewood, no food, nothing but the stench of the horse and the moaning wind. When it ended and the sky shone blue again, the world was completely covered with white. Snow plastered the trees and made their laden branches sparkle crystalline in the newly risen Sun. Drifts heaped up against the mouth of Alec's cave waist high.
The land beyond was a rolling featureless unmarked expanse of white.
He admired its beauty for several minutes. Then his hunger and his fear of dying drove him out into the snow's cold embrace.
The horse died that morning. It collapsed under him in a shuddering groan and floundered in the snow. Alec could feel the warmth of life seeping out of its body. Now he was totally alone. Nothing alive was in sight. There were no landmarks, no direction to aim for, no hope. He stood in the thigh-deep snow, wet and cold and trembling between despair and bleak fear.
He looked at the horse's emaciated carcass, flirted with the thought of carving off some flesh and eating it raw. But he couldn't bring himself to do it. Sleep, he told himself. That's what I need.
Rest and sleep.
And the wind sighed, making the trees croon to him, Sleep . . . yes, sleep.
But then, from somewhere deep within his memory came a fragment of poetry that he hadn't realized he knew. It spoke itself in his mind, and he jerked erect. He muttered it to himself, then flung his head back and, arms outstretched, shouted it to the trees and wind:
To sleep! Perchance to dream:—aye, there's the rub;
"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come ..."
That sleep of death. Alec repeated it to himself.
And he hunched forward and fought his way through the snow. It was a bitter exhausting battle, as much against himself as against the elements.
Cold, hungry, weary, he clamped an iron determination over his aching, protesting muscles and empty gut as he pressed forward.
There are villages all around here, he told himself.
Look for smoke, or maybe a road.
He found a road first. He barely recognized it; there was nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the snow-covered landscape except a faint pair of ruts where sled runners had pressed down. It was easier to walk in the ruts, though, and thankfully Alec staggered along, heading slightly downhill, away from the base and toward the valley floor where the farmlands and villages stood.
It was nearly dark when he tottered up to the village. It was either the same one they had taken months earlier or another just like it. Then Alec saw the old man who sat by the gate. Underneath his muffling coat and heavy, pulled-down hat he was the same man. With the same shotgun across his lap.
They said nothing to each other. Alec stood by the gate on unsteady feet, clutching his automatic rifle feebly, numb with cold, puffing with exhaustion.
The old man faced him, shotgun in his gloved hands, looking uncertain and red-faced in the last dying rays of the Sun.
Finally the old man shrugged and beckoned to Alec, then turned and headed into the village. Alec followed him, staggering, down cold deserted lanes where the snow had been pounded flat and solid by the passage of many feet.
The old man led him to a hut. "In there," he said, in a ragged, age-roughened voice.
Alec pushed the door open and stumbled into the room. A flood of warmth from the fireplace was the first thing he sensed. It made his face hurt. Then he saw the two men at the table, startled, half out of their chairs, a steaming bowl of food on the table between them.
They were two of Alec's men. That was all he noticed. He fell face down and was unconscious before he reached the hut's bare earthen floor.
They spent a couple of days pumping warm food into him and letting him rest on their pallet.
Miraculously, Alec realized, he had not come down with a fever. A touch of frostbite and a lot of raw, chaffed skin. But otherwise no damage that rest and food could not cure.
The men—Zimmerman and Peters—had decided to remain at the village when Alec's force had broken up. Most of the group had joined Will Russo's band, once they learned that Alec was Douglas's prisoner. Jameson had taken the rest south. No one knew what had become of Ferret; he had disappeared. Gradually, Alec realized that Zimmerman and Peters were living together as lovers. He was startled at first, although homosexuality was not rare in the lunar community.
After a few days, Alec was more embarrassed than anything else. He wished he had another hut to live in.
"You say Jameson headed south?" he asked Peters over breakfast on the third day. Zimmerman had already left to help the other village men who were shovelling newly-fallen snow out of the village lanes.
Peters shook his head solemnly. He had grown a luxuriant dark beard since Alec had last seen him.
Now it was speckled with crumbs of bread and beads of honey.
"He said he would try to link up with Kobol,"
Peters explained, between bites.
"How did he know Kobol had landed?"
"Russo told us. Jameson let us make up our own minds about what we wanted to do. That's when Zim and I . . . well, we decided we'd done enough soldiering. We helped the people here take in their harvest and they invited us to stay. They've been very kind and understanding."
Alec thought, And they probably think everybody on the Moon is homosexual. Aloud, he asked, "How many of the men went with Jameson?"
"Four, I think. No, it was five."
Alec sank back in his chair. There's no one left to join you, he told himself. You're completely on your own.
After a week the elders of the village came to Alec. They were polite, even deferential. But they were also firm. They had no desire to be caught in whatever high politics was taking place between The Douglas and his son. And they had only so much food, which had to last the winter. So would Alec please leave as soon as he was strong enough?
They would give him food and ammunition and even a good horse. But he must leave the village, and tomorrow would be an excellent day for his departure.
Alec smiled and agreed with them. The next morning they solemnly led a big, gentle-looking chestnut mare from their communal barn and loaded it with a bedroll, packs of food, and boxes of ammunition. Peters gave Alec an ancient singleshot rifle, good for hunting small game. Zimmerman gave him his own pistol, holster, and cartridge belt.
The elders watched without a word as Alec said goodbye to his two former comrades and swung up into the saddle. With a nod to the older men he kicked the horse into motion and trotted through the gate and out of the village.
To where? he wondered. South to join Kobol?
Instinctively he shook his head, vetoing the idea.
He puzzled over his situation for the whole day, and when the Sun dipped low on the brow of the western hills he found a cave in a little snowcovered ridge and decided to spend the night there.
Kobol will come here in the spring, he thought as he unsaddled the horse. Let him come to me.
But another part of his mind answered ironically, You have to get through the winter, first.
He pulled enough deadwood fro
m the bare trees outside the cave to make a small fire. He tethered the horse near the cave's entrance. The smoke from the fire wasn't bad, once he got used to the stinging of his eyes. It was better than the horse's smell. Briefly he debated trying Peters' rifle on some small game, but it was already getting too dark. He ate from the stores the villagers had given him: a bit of salted meat and some dried grains.
The horse was standing as still as a rock. The fire had burned down to a few barely glowing ashes. Alec was stretched out in the bedroll, trying to sleep, trying not to think of Angela. But there was nothing else to fill his thoughts. The night outside the cave was dark and silent, with only an occasional sigh of wind breaking the frigid hush.
Would she have come with me? he asked himself.
Good thing she didn't; I damned near killed myself. Wouldn't want her to . . .
A crunching sound. Alec's eyes snapped open but there was nothing to see in the darkness. The cave was black, its entrance only slightly lighter.
The sound had been faint, but—he heard it again.
Footsteps squeaking on the packed snow.
Alec slid his hand down to the pistol inside his bedroll. The automatic rifle was within arm's reach. He silently rolled over onto his stomach and turned enough to face the entrance to the cave, thinking, It must be the villagers coming to take their gifts back. If The Douglas' son just happens to die in some cave, it's not their fault.
And why should they lose a valuable horse?
Listening carefully, Alec thought he heard two horses slowly advancing toward the cave.
"Mr. Morgan?" a young voice called out.
He did not answer.
"Mr. Morgan." A silhouette appeared at the cave's mouth. Then another. "We'd like to join with you, if you'll have us."
They were young, barely into their teens. Bored with life in the village. They saw in Alec a chance to find adventure, an opportunity to see the great wondrous world. Alec tried to dissuade them, told them all he had to offer was danger and an early grave. They grinned and insisted that they weren't afraid and they would follow wherever he led.