Overhead the sky was brilliantly beautiful. It was easy enough to see the brighter stars even by daylight, especially for Roger, but at night they were fantastic. He could clearly make out the different hues: steel-blue Sirius, bloody Aldebaran, the smoky gold of Polaris. By expanding his visible spectrum into the infrared and ultraviolet he could see new, bright stars whose names he did not know; perhaps they had no common names, since apart from himself they had been seen as bright objects only by astronomers using special plates. He pondered about the question of name-giving rights; if he was the only one who could see that bright patch there in Orion, did he have the right to christen it? Would anybody object if he called it "Sulie's Star"?
For that matter he could see what was, for the moment, Sulie's actual star . . . or heavenly body; Deimos was not a star, of course. He stared up at it, and amused himself trying to imagine Sulie's face—
"ROGER, HONEY! YOU—"
Torraway jumped straight up and landed a meter away. The scream inside his head had been deafening. Had it been real? He had no way to tell; the voices from Brad or Don Kayman and the simulated voice of his wife sounded equally familiar inside his head. He was not even sure whose voice it had been— Dorrie's? But he had been thinking about Sulie Carpenter, and the voice had been so queerly stressed that it could have been either or neither of them.
And now there was no sound at all, or none except for the irregular clicks, squeaks and scrapes that came up from the rock as the Martian crust responded to the rapidly dropping temperature. He was not aware of the cold as cold; his internal heaters kept the feeling part of him at constant temperature and would go on doing so easily all through the night. But he knew that it was at least fifty below now.
Another blast: "ROG— THINK YOU OUGHT—"
Even with the warning of the time before, the raucous shout was painful. This time he caught a quick fugitive glimpse of Dorrie's simulated image, standing queerly on nothing at all a dozen meters in the air.
Training took over. Roger turned toward the distant dome, or where he thought it had been, cupped his wings behind him and said clearly: "Don! Brad! I've got some kind of a malfunction. I'm getting a signal but I can't read it."
He waited. There was no response, nothing inside his head except his own thoughts and a confused grumbling that he recognized as static.
"ROGER!"
It was Dorrie again, ten times life-size, towering over him, and on her face a grimace of wrath and fear. She seemed to be reaching down toward him, and then she bent curiously sidewise, like a television image flickering off the tube, and was gone.
Roger felt a peculiar pain, tried to dismiss it as fear, felt it again and realized it was cold. There was something seriously wrong. "Mayday!" he shouted. "Don! I'm in trouble—help me!" The dark distant hills seemed to be rippling slowly. He looked up. The stars were turning liquid and dripping from the sky.
In Don Kayman's dream, he and Sister Clotilda were sitting on hassocks in front of a waterfall, eating sponges. Not candy; kitchen sponges, dipped into a sort of fondue. Clotilda was warning him of danger. "They're going to throw us out," she said, slicing off a square of sponge and impaling it on a two-pronged silver fork, "because you got a C in homiletics"— dipping it in the copper-bottomed dish over the alcohol flame— "and you've got to, just got to, wake up—"
He woke up.
Brad was leaning over him. "Come on, Don. We've got to get out of here."
"What's the matter?" Kayman pulled the sleeping bag over his chest with his good hand.
"I can't get an answer out of Roger. He didn't answer. I sent him a priority signal. Then I thought I heard him on the radio, but very faint. He's either out of line of sight or his transmitter isn't working."
Kayman wriggled out of the bag and sat up. At times like this, when first awakening, his arm hurt the most, and it was hurting now. He put it out of his mind. "Have you got a position fix?"
"Three hours ago. I couldn't get a bearing on this last transmission."
"He can't be far off that line." Kayman was already sliding into the legs of his pressure suit. The next part was the hardest, trying to ease the splinted forearm into the sleeve. Among them they had managed to stretch the sleeve a little, sealing the beginnings of a rip, but it was barely possible, would not be easy even under the best of conditions. Now, trying to hurry, it was infuriating.
Brad was already in his suit and throwing equipment into a bag. "Do you think you're going to perform an emergency operation out there?" Kayman demanded.
Brad scowled and kept on. "I don't know what I'll have to do. It's full night, Don, and he's up at least five hundred meters. It's cold."
Kayman closed his mouth. By the time he was zipped in Brad had long since left the lander and was waiting at the wheel of the Mars vehicle. Kayman clambered aboard painfully, and they were moving before he had a chance to belt himself down. He managed to cling with heels and the one unbendable arm while buckling himself in with the other hand, but it was a close thing. "Any idea of distance?" he asked.
"In the hills somewhere," said Brad's voice in his ear; Kayman winced and turned down the volume on his radio.
"Maybe two hours?" he guessed, calculating rapidly.
"If he's already started back, maybe. If he can't move—or if he's moving around out there, and we have to try to track him with RDF—" The voice stopped. "I think he's all right as far as temperature goes," Brad went on after a minute. "But I don't know. I don't know what happened."
Kayman stared ahead. Past the bright field of light from the vehicle's headlight there was nothing to see except that the glittering field of stars was cut off, like the scalloped edge of a doily, at the horizon. That was the mountain ridge. It would be that, Kayman knew, that Brad was using as a guide; aiming always at that lowest point between the double peak on the north and the very high one just to the south. Bright Aldebaran was hanging over that higher peak, a good enough navigation aid in itself, at least until it set in an hour or so.
Kayman keyed in the vehicle's high-gain antenna. "Roger," he said, raising his voice although he knew that made no difference. "Can you hear me? We're coming out to meet you."
There was no answer. Kayman leaned back in the contoured seat, trying to minimize the swaying jolts of the vehicle. It was bad enough, rolling on the basket-weave wire wheels across the flattest part of the terrain. When they began trying to climb, using the stiltlike legs, he suspected he might be thrown clear out of the vehicle, belt and all, and was certain he would at least be sick. Ahead of them the jerking beam of the headlight was picking out a dune, a rock outcropping, sometimes throwing back a lance of light from a crystal face. "Brad," he said, "doesn't that light drive you crazy? Why don't you use the radar display?"
He heard a quick intake of breath on his suit radio, as though Brad had been about to swear at him. Then the suited figure next to him reached down to the toggles on the steering column. The bluish panel just under the sandscreen lit up, revealing the terrain just in front of them; and the headlight winked off. It was easier to see the black outline of the mountains now.
Thirty minutes. At most, a quarter of the way there.
"Roger," Kayman called again. "Can you hear me? We're en route. When we get close enough we'll pick you up on your target. But if you can, answer now—"
There was no answer.
A rice-grain argon bulb began to blink rapidly on the dashboard. The two men looked at each other through their faceplates, and then Kayman leaned forward and clicked the frequency settings to the orbit channel. "Kayman here," he said.
"Father Kayman? What's going on down there?"
The voice was female, which meant, of course, Sulie Carpenter. Kayman chose his words carefully: "Roger's having some transmission trouble. We're going out to check it."
"It sounds like more than plain trouble. I've been listening to you trying to raise him." Kayman didn't answer, and her voice went on: "We've got him located, if you want a fix—?"
"Yes!" he shouted, furious at himself; they should have thought of Deimos's RDF facility right away. It would be easy for Sulie or either of the orbiting astronauts to guide them in.
"Grid coordinates three poppa one seven, two two zebra four oh. But he's moving. Bearing about eight nine, speed about twelve kilometers per hour."
Brad glanced at their own course and said, "Right on. That's the reciprocal; he's coming right for us."
"But why so slowly?" Kayman denianded.
A second later the girl's voice came: "That's what I want to know. Is he hurt?"
Kayman said irritably, "We don't know. Have you tried radio contact?"
"Over and over—wait a minute." Pause, and then her voice again: "Dinty says to tell you we'll keep him located for you as long as we can, but we're getting to a bad angle. So I wouldn't rely on our positions past—what? Maybe another forty-five minutes. And in about twenty minutes after that we'll be below the horizon entirely."
Brad said, "Do what you can. Don? Hold on. I'm going to see how fast this son of a bitch will go."
And the lurching of the vehicle tripled as Brad accelerated. Kayman fought off being sick inside his helmet long enough to lean forward and study the speedometer. The trip recorder rolling off the strip map along the side of the radar screen told the rest of the story: even if they could maintain their present speed, Deimos would have set before they could reach Roger Torraway.
He switched back to the directional high-gain. "Roger," he called. "Can you hear me? Call in!"
Thirty kilometers away, Roger was at bay inside his own body.
To his perceptions he was racing back home, at a strange gait like a high-speed heel-and-toe race. He knew his perceptions were wrong. He did not know how wrong; he could not be sure in what ways; but he knew that the brother on his back had tampered with his time sense, as well as with his interpretations of the inputs of his senses; and what he knew most surely of all was that he was no longer in control of what happened to him. The gait, he was intellectually certain, was a ploddingly slow walk. It felt as though he were running. The landscape was flowing by as rapidly, to his perceptions, as though he were racing at full speed. But full speed implied soaring bounds, and there was no time when both of his feet were off the ground at once; conclusion: he was walking, but the backpack computer had slowed down his time sense, probably to keep him reasonably tranquil.
If so, it was not succeeding.
When the backpack brother took over control it had been terrifying. First he had stood straight up and locked; he could not move, could not even speak. All around him the black sky was rippling with streaks of aurora, the ground itself shimmering like heat waves on a desert; phantom images danced in and out of his vision. He could not believe what his senses told him, nor could he bend a single finger. Then he felt his own hands reaching behind him, palping and tracing the joints where wings came to shoulderblades, seeking out the cables that led to his batteries. Another frozen pause. Then the same thing, feeling around the terminals of the computer itself. He knew enough to know that the computer was checking itself; what he did not know was what it was finding out or what it could do about it when it located the fault. Pause again. Then he felt his fingers questing into the jacks where he plugged in the recharge cables—
A violent pain smote him, like the worst of all headaches, like a stroke or a blow from a club. It lasted only a moment, and then it was gone, leaving no more of itself than an immense distant flash of lightning. He had never felt anything like it before. He was aware that his fingers were gently, and very skillfully, scraping at the terminals. There was another quick surge of pain as, apparently, his own fingers made a momentary short.
Then he felt himself closing the flap, and realized he had failed to do that when he recharged at the dome.
And then, after another momentary stoppage of everything, he had begun to move slowly, carefully down the slope toward the dome.
He had no idea how long he had been walking. At some point his time perception had been slowed, but he could not even say when that had been. All of his perceptions were being monitored and edited. He knew that, because he knew that that section of the Martian terrain that he was traversing was not intrinsically softly lighted and in full color, while everything around was nearly formless black. But he could not change it. He could not even change the direction of his gaze. With metronome regularity it would sweep to one side or the other, less frequently scan the sky or even turn to look back; the rest of the time it was unwaveringly on the road he was treading, and he could see only peripherally the rest of the nightscape.
And his feet twinkled heel-and-toe, heel-and-toe—how fast? A hundred paces to the minute? He could not tell. He thought of trying to get some idea of the time by observing the clearing of the stars above the horizon, but although it was not difficult to count his steps, and to try to guess when those lowest stars had climbed four or five degrees—which would be about ten minutes—it was impossible to keep all of that in mind long enough to get a meaningful result. Apart from the fact that his vision kept dancing away from the horizon without warning.
He was wholly the prisoner of the brother on his back, subject to its will, deceived by its interpretations, and very much a worried man.
What had gone wrong? Why was he feeling cold, when there was so little of him that could feel a sensory reality at all? And yet he yearned for the rising of the sun, dreamed wistfully of basking in the microwave radiation from Deimos. Painfully Roger tried to reason through the evidence as he knew it. Feeling cold. Needing energy inputs: that was the interpretation of that cue. But why would he need more energy, when he had fully charged his batteries? He dismissed that question because he could see no answer to it, but the hypothesis seemed strong. It accounted for the low-energy mode of travel; walking was far slower than his usual leaping run, but in kwh/km terms it was far more cost-effective. Perhaps it even accounted for the glitches in his perceptual systems. If the backpack-brother had discovered before he did that there was insufficient energy for foreseeable needs, it would surely ration the precious store to the most essential needs. Or what it perceived as most essential: travel; keeping the organic part of him from freezing; conducting its own information-handling and control procedures. Which unfortunately he was not privy to.
At least, he reflected, the primary mission of the backpack computer was to protect itself, which meant keeping the organic part of Roger Torraway alive. It might steal energy from the part that would keep him sane: deprive him of communications, interfere with his perceptions. But he was sure he would get back to the lander alive.
If perhaps crazy.
He was more than halfway back already, he was nearly sure. And he was still sane. The way to keep sane was to keep from worrying. The way to keep from worrying was to think of other things. He imagined Sulie Carpenter's bright presence, only days away; wondered if she was serious about staying on Mars. Wondered if he was himself. He reminisced within himself about great meals he had eaten, the spinach-green pasta in the cream sauce in Sirmione, overlooking the bright transparent water of Lake Garda; the Kobe beef in Nagoya; the fire-hot chili in Matamoras. He thought of his guitar and made a resolve to haul it out and play it. There was too much water in the air under the domes to be good for it, and Roger did not much like to be in the lander; and outside in the open, of course, its sound was strange because it was all bone-conducted. But still. He rehearsed the fingering of chords, modulating through the sharps and sevenths and minors. He imagined his fingers fretting the E-minor, the D, the C and the B-seventh of the opening passages of "Greensleeves," and hummed along with them inside his head. Sulie would enjoy singing along with the guitar, he thought. It would make the cold Martian nights pass—
He snapped to alertness.
This Martian night was no longer passing quite so quickly.
Subjectively it seemed as though his gait had slowed from a race to a steady stride; but he knew that that had not
changed, his time perception had stretched back to normal, maybe even a bit slower than normal: he seemed to be walking quite slowly and methodically.
Why?
There was something ahead of him. At least a kilometer away. And very bright.
He could not make it out.
A dragon?
It seemed to leap toward him, breathing a long tongue of light like flame.
His body stopped walking. It dropped to its knees and began to crawl, very slowly, keeping down.
This is insane, he said to himself. There are no dragons on Mars. What am I doing? But he could not stop. His body inched along, knee and opposite hand, hand and opposite knee, into the shelter of a hummock of sand. Carefully and quickly it began to scoop the powdery Martian soil away, to fit itself into the hollow, scraping some of the dirt back over itself. Inside his head tiny voices were babbling, but he could not understand what they said: they were too faint, too garbled.
The dragon slowed and stopped a few dozen meters away, its tongue of frozen flame lolling out toward the mountains. His vision clouded and changed; now the flame was dimmed, and the bulk of the thing itself came up in ghostly luminescence. Two smaller creatures were dropping off its back, ugly, simian beasts that hulked along and exuded menace with every gesture.
There were no dragons on Mars, and no gorillas either.
Roger summoned up all of his energies. "Don!" he shouted. "Brad!"
He was not getting through.
He knew that the backpack-brother was still withholding energy from the transmitter. He knew that his perceptions had been skewed, and that the dragon was no dragon and the gorillas no gorillas. He knew that if he could not override the brother on his back something very bad was likely to happen, because he knew that his fingers were slowly and delicately wrapping themselves around a chunk of limonite the size of a baseball.
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