White Death

by Robert Sheckley

  I could see where this idea was leading, and I protested violently. The roof was exposed, I said, and it would be impossible to maintain a grip there over rough roads. Whoever took the position of rear gunner wouldn’t last ten minutes.

  Dain disagreed with me. He pointed out the catwalk that ran along the roof of the truck, and the raised hatch near the rear. A man could get a good grip on the catwalk, and be protected behind the hatch.

  Except on curves, I said.

  “I’ll take the first hour,” Dain said. “Then you’ll relieve me.”

  I couldn’t very well refuse. We had no more time to waste, for the Arabs probably were almost ready to take the road again. Hansen and I got into the cab, and Dain crawled down the catwalk along the roof. He had a rifle and a bandolier of ammunition slung over his shoulder. Hansen looked at his shattered windshield and shook his head. Then he started up. Soon we were rolling at a good speed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Late in the day we came to Tabbas, a wretched oasis village in the middle of the Dasht-i-Kavir. We replenished our water supply, bought what food we could from the fifty-odd inhabitants, and moved on. Ahead of us lay the worst of the desert, and somewhere behind us was a jeepload of armed and angry Arabs.

  We were moving over flat country, under a full moon, so we continued through the night. I relieved Dain at the rear gunner’s post on the back of the truck. Toward dawn, he took over the position again. The Arabs hadn’t shown themselves, and I began to think they had suffered some disabling injury to their jeep.

  But they appeared shortly before noon, and for half an hour they stayed well behind us, apparently looking us over and planning their tactics.

  When they made their move, it was done with great dash and suddenness. Partially concealed by dense streamers of dust, the jeep charged toward us like a troop of cavalry. Dain fired steadily from the roof, and I, leaning far out the window, fired whenever the jeep came into my sights. I saw dots and streamers of red coming from the jeep; they were firing at us with automatic weapons. I heard bullets hammer against the rear of the truck, and one lucky burst creased the door on my side. Then Dain put a bullet through their windshield and two more bullets through their fenders, just missing the tire. The jeep immediately dropped back out of range.

  Two more times the Arabs tried to advance against us, and each time they were driven back. Their firepower was much greater than ours, but it was lacking in range and accuracy. Also, the front of their jeep was extremely vulnerable. There was nothing to hit in the rear of our truck except the tires or the gunner, and these were difficult targets. Dain kept himself well down, and the rear tires were tucked under the frame of the truck and partially protected by the overhang of the body. After their third try, the Arabs dropped back and followed us at a safe distance, apparently trying to think of some new course of action.

  We continued through the blistering day, stopping at noon to refuel from our extra cans of diesel oil. We found that two cans had been punctured by gunfire; but Hansen thought that we still had enough to reach Yezd. During this stop, we parked the truck across the road. Dain and I took up defensive positions in the rocks while Hansen filled the fuel tank. The Arabs tried to edge in, but our long-range rifle fire held them at a safe distance.

  I could imagine their feelings. Here they were, with beautiful new submachine guns, marvelous creations which made a satisfying chatter and threw out brightly colored tracer; and yet they were thwarted by two men with rifles. Our effective range was at least fifty yards greater than theirs, and it made all the difference. But Arabs have always had a weakness for ferocious-looking toys of war.

  When our refueling was done, we continued on our way. Dain and I changed guard positions regularly as the sun crept down the sky, but we anticipated no trouble. There seemed to be no reason why we couldn’t lead the Arabs into Yezd, not more than a hundred miles away, and there arrest them with the aid of the local police.

  But of course I wasn’t considering the treacherous nature of the Dasht-i-Kavir. The desert had been unbelievably benign so far; but only in order to lure us to our destruction. At early twilight it showed its true nature by bogging us down on a wide salt flat.

  We maneuvered the truck out and proceeded with greater caution. A wind had sprung up, and the dusty surface of the desert was flung in our faces. Hansen had to slow down. But even exercising all his skill, he couldn’t keep us out of another bog. The truck sank to the top of its hubcaps, and we got out to survey our situation.

  Once we were immobilized, the desert struck in all its fury. The wind changed in pitch from a hum to a scream. The air was nearly solid with dust, sand, and rock fragments. We continued to work, attaching a rope to the rear axle and anchoring the end in the firm ground behind us. The wind rose to blizzard force, blotting out any separation between land and sky. It was like a midnight within a midnight, for you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. We stopped work and crawled under the truck for protection.

  No sooner were we sheltered than Dain put his mouth to my ear and shouted, “This would be a good time for them to attack.”

  I shouted back, “If they move ten feet from their jeep, they’ll never find it again.”

  But Dain didn’t believe me, and I didn’t even believe myself.

  Arab nomads are true children of the sands. No man can say what is possible for them in the desert and what is not. I gripped my rifle tightly and glared into the sandstorm. Nobody could be moving in it, I told myself. It was impossible, suicidal, and not to be considered.

  But somehow I knew that the impossible was happening now, and that those five murderous sons of a diseased whore were moving across the sands toward us—shadowy figures hidden in the darkness of the storm.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  We three held an immediate council of war, head to head, speaking in shouts which became whispers when the wind snatched our voices away. Our immediate problem was to protect ourselves and our truck—especially the truck. If the Arabs were able to immobilize us out here in the desert, we were as good as dead. The Dasht-i-Kavir kills as surely as a bullet in the stomach, and nearly as fast.

  Hansen, made nervous by the sudden loss of visibility, wanted to entrench himself with some solid object at his back, there to blast away at anything that moved. My own scheme was more elaborate. I wanted to stake out an overlapping set of triplines, with myself at their center, like a spider.

  Dain made short work of these ideas, which I suppose were more representative of our state of mind than of our wits. Hansen’s scheme he called static and suicidal; and mine, Dain said, was unworkable and easily circumvented.

  He was right, of course; and Hansen and I, rather sulkily, asked him what he would suggest.

  With his maddening flair for improvisation, Dain had an answer ready. We would go out on ropes, he told us, ropes fastened to the truck on one end and to a man on the other end. Thus, tethered like goats, we would be able to patrol the area around the truck, crawling along the ground like earthworms.

  Hansen and I were opposed to this scheme. But Dain asked us if we preferred to sit in the truck and wait for someone to shoot us, and we had no effective answer. I doubt if any man has ever successfully prevailed against Dain, once he has made up his mind.

  So, in a matter of minutes, Hansen was tied to a short line, to guard the motor and front wheels of the truck. Dain, on a long rope, planned to guard the right side where the fuel tank and most of the extra cans of diesel oil were located. I, on another long line, was to patrol the rear.

  I crawled out with a rope tied to my waist and a rifle slung across my back. In less than five feet I was unable to see the truck or anything else. The wind shrieked like a gigantic beast in agony, and the desert churned up like a storm-driven sea. The land had ceased to obey the law of gravity; what had been vertical and stationary was now horizontal and in violent motion. I had grown accustomed to an endless stream of sand being blown into my face; what was disconcerting
was the fact that this happened no matter what direction I faced. The wind of the desert, obeying no law but its own, came at me from all sides, pelting me with an endless assortment of sand, gravel, rocks, and thorn bushes.

  I crept forward, praying that my rope was knotted securely, and also praying that the Arabs had the sense to remain in their jeep. Through streamers of murky air I crawled, my turban wrapped around my face and my eyes nearly closed, over an infernal landscape of unmistakably malign intent. Foot by foot I progressed to the end of my tether, turned to crawl back—and then my outstretched hand encountered rough cloth.

  My hand recoiled as though it had touched a scorpion. I lay absolutely still, glaring into the wind and seeing nothing, listening for a suspicious movement and hearing nothing. I am not ashamed to say that for a second I thought I would faint with fright.

  In a moment I pulled myself together and considered the situation with icy calmness. My fingertips still retained a distinct impression of the cloth. It had been a rough fabric, and loose in the weave. In my mind’s eye I could see the coarse unbleached cotton from which an Arab’s djellabah is woven. Obviously my groping hand had detected one of our enemies. The immediate question was, had the Arab felt that touch? Had I put him on his guard? Was he waiting now, ready to cut me apart with his machine gun as soon as I gave away my position?

  I held my breath through an eternity of seconds, anticipating my death at any moment. But nothing happened. There was no sound except for the iron roar of the wind, and no movement except for the blown sand, rock, and thorn. I realized that my enemy could not have known my fingers from the tugging fingers of the storm. The advantage was mine, and I readied myself for action.

  But what sort of action should I take? The rifle, digging painfully into the small of my back, was a clumsy weapon at close quarters. If I should miss with it, or only wound, the Arab would surely kill me with his machine gun. Perhaps I could fire, and then try to club him with the rifle butt; but this struck me as a dangerous sort of blindman’s buff.

  That left the long knife in my belt. My best move, it seemed to me, was to leap upon the man and stab repeatedly. But I hesitated, for a knife is a peculiarly unpleasant weapon, and a berserk stabbing-bout is not to everyone’s taste. I went so far as to withdraw my knife and grip it in fighting position; but the cold, slick feel of the blade made me quite sick to my stomach.

  I honestly believe that it was not cowardice which made me withdraw. As everyone knows, the man who can kill with a rifle at a hundred yards is not necessarily the man who can kill with his bare hands at no distance at all. For the former, one needs a hunter’s instinct; for the latter, one must possess the mentality of a butcher. Besides, my primary job was to guard the truck, not to slaughter Arabs. Therefore I cautiously began to crawl back toward the truck in order to consult with Dain on our best course of action.

  I had gone no more than five feet when some instinct made me stop. I glared into the swirling sands, and my ears ached with listening. Then, very slowly, I put out my hand. Gently, very gently, my fingers advanced—and touched the same coarse fabric as before. I pulled back as though I had been burned.

  Somehow, the damnable Arab had gotten behind me. My retreat was cut off, and there was nothing to do now but use the knife.

  I readied myself, sitting upright with my knife hand pulled back, my other hand reaching in front of me, my total concentration focused on my searching fingers. I touched cloth; my pounding heart tried to leap into my mouth, and I flung myself forward with an involuntary scream, stabbing downward with all my strength.

  I felt a body twist beneath me, moving with the strength and suppleness of a python. My knife missed its target, plunging into the sand. I pulled it free; then my assailant had one hand on my knife-wrist, the other in my hair. He banged my head severely against the ground, and I tried to remember, my prayers.

  Then I heard Dain’s voice in my ear, shouting, “Achmed, will you for Chrissakes stop trying to stab me?”

  More out of reflex than recognition, I stopped struggling. Dain released my hair but kept a hold on my knife-hand. He asked, “Do you know who I am, Achmed?”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” I said angrily. “Please release me, Mr. Dain.”

  He did so. Feeling that I had been made a fool of, I asked him, “What are you doing in the area I’m guarding? How am I supposed to know—”

  “I’m in the right area,” Dain said. “But you seem to have strayed.”

  “Impossible!” I said. “Anyhow, how was I to know it was you?”

  “I told you twice,” Dain said.

  “What?”

  “When you first touched me, I told you who I was. I also told you to get back to your own area. You backed to one side, then came at me again. I told you again, the second time you touched me, and then you leaped.”

  “By God!” I said. “You must have whispered, for I didn’t hear a word.”

  “I shouted. You must have been concentrating too hard to hear me.”

  “Preposterous,” I said, feeling more foolish than ever, and unable to think of an adequate answer. “The wind must have confused me. … How did you know who I was?”

  “I could hear you cursing to yourself,” Dain said.

  “Well, well,” I replied, “strange things happen in these desert storms. I suggest that we return to our areas, and not sit here discussing things like a pair of old women.”

  “Good idea,” Dain said, and crawled away, vanishing into the storm.

  I followed my rope back to the truck and started out again, taking the utmost care with my orientation. Never in my life had I felt more chagrined. I had known for a long time that strange hallucinations can occur in the Dasht-i-Kavir, and that the senses can temporarily become deranged. I knew of the panic that sometimes strikes men during a desert storm, obliterating the plainest common sense. But I had never thought myself subject to these things. It was especially embarrassing for it to have happened in front of Dain, who tended to project a spurious but uncomfortable image of infallibility. Still, I found some comfort in the thought that Dain probably did not have sufficient imagination to experience a real hallucination.

  The hours of the night passed, and the wind kept up its efforts to smother us. I patrolled carefully inside my area, with every nerve stretched to an aching tension, waiting for an enemy who never appeared. From time to time I drank a little sand and water from my canteen, and ate a morsel of sand and rice to keep up my strength. The treacherous dark hour before dawn came, the hour usually favored by Arabs for their attack. I struggled to keep awake and alert; but my fatigue was so great that my eyelids seemed to droop under soft, heavy weights, and a delicious sensation of peace stole over me.

  Recognizing the danger, I rallied and forced myself to crawl. But sleep enveloped me even as I was moving, and I dreamed of blue mountain lakes beneath a soft azure sky, of tall fountains with multicolored jets of water rising and falling along the white marble rim, of green irrigated fields beneath a mist of rain, of a water-soaked rag to lay across my forehead—

  Abruptly I awoke with every sense alert. I had slept and dreamed while crawling, and the dreams had seemed unutterably real. The water-soaked rag was still in my hand, but dry now, and subtly altered. Then I realized that, instead of a rag, I was holding a piece of rope.

  My nerves jangled an alarm. I waited, and in a moment, it slithered for a foot or two, then stopped.

  Determined to make no absurd mistakes this time, I traced my own rope to be sure I had not circled across it. But it was not my rope. It belonged to someone else; the question was, who?

  I sat and thought, and every few moments the rope moved, roughly parallel to my own rope, toward the truck. After due thought, I decided it had to be Dain’s lifeline. Apparently I had strayed into his area again; or perhaps this time he had strayed into mine.

  I was about to tell him this when a disturbing thought settled over me. I touched the rope again, fingering it with great delicacy. Our
ropes were made of heavy, hard-twisted manilla. But this rope had been braided out of flat cotton strips. Unless I had completely lost my senses, this rope belonged to one of the Arabs.

  I drew my knife. But the long vigil, the accidental encounter with Dain, the fury of the storm, all had drained me of energy and initiative. My hands were shaking, and I knew that I could never bring myself to follow that rope and stab the man at its end. I nearly wept with frustration. At last, making the best of my frailties, I reached out and severed the Arab’s rope, seized it by the end, and gave a violent tug. Then I flung myself aside and rolled away.

  The response was immediate; a burst of machine-gun fire stabbed the ground near the place where I had cut the rope. I kept on rolling, and the Arab kept on firing. He whirled in a circle, firing all around him; but I was far away now.

  Three rifle shots stabbed out from a different direction, and there was a high-pitched scream of pain. Dain had evidently fired at the Arab’s muzzle-bursts. There were no more shots. I could imagine the Arab crawling on the ground, trying to find the severed end of his lifeline. I waited for a moment, then followed my own line back to the truck.

  In the east, a dim sulphurous glow lightened the horizon. With the first trace of dawn, the storm moved away. In less than an hour the wind had fallen to a whisper, and we were able to look into each other’s blistered faces.

  There was little time for congratulations. We went to work at once, digging out the truck. It looked exactly like a tall, slope-sided sand dune, and if we had not been fastened to it we would never have found it. In four hours we had removed enough sand to let Hansen assist us with the motor. And an hour later, by the use of shovels, ropes, and levers, we were under way again.

  But we were not done. Looking back, we saw a familiar cloud of dust on the road. Those accursed Arabs were still pursuing us. Dain watched them for a long time through his binoculars. At last he was able to tell us that our five enemies had been reduced to four.