“Be quiet and eat your food, father,” said Colette. Ethan looked more closely at the girl, who looked like a pink Buddha in her survival suit. Who was chairman of what, here?
She returned her gaze to Ethan. It was a frank, open, un-compromising stare. Sizing him up. No no… that was supposed to be his prerogative. He turned away and she must have sensed his nervousness.
“You got the hardest knock of us all, I think, Mr. Fortune,” she said consolingly. Ethan knew she was deliberately trying to make him feel better. But the knot at the back of his head conceded the truth of her comment.
“He had a gun?” Ethan asked her. Her reply was coldly matter-of-fact.
“No, as a matter of fact, I think he broke his neck. Neat job.”
“Oh,” said Ethan. “Look, I want to apologize for calling you f… I mean, for what I said back there.”
“Skip it,” she muttered softly. “I’m used to it.” And that, he reflected, was the first obvious untruth she’d uttered.
Du Kane seemed to sense the awkwardness. He cleared it away nicely. “You’re wearing the dead chap’s coat, I believe.”
“Doesn’t fit very well, does it?” Ethan murmured absently. He held up his arms. If he wasn’t careful he could lose the gloves. But his funny looks didn’t bother him. It was warm. Though not as warm as Colette du Kane probably was. He glanced around.
“Where is this guy… uh…”
“September. Skua September,” supplied Williams.
“Yeah, him.”
Colette gestured loosely in the direction of the door. “After we discovered that this compartment was still fairly intact… he carried you in, by the way… it seemed the natural place to take refuge. Conserve body heat, get out of this wind. The emergency boat rations are in this twisted locker behind me. I’m glad to say they survived, by and large. He had a bite to eat and disappeared outside. That was some time ago. He hasn’t come back.”
“Quiet sort,” put in du Kane. Food dripped from his mouth and he suddenly mopped at it embarrassedly.
“I expect he’ll be all right,” put in Williams. “He took one of the two beamers with him. I,” he continued, holding up the little weapon, “have the other. He suggested I use it to discourage any antisocial actions left in our nemesis, here.” He indicated the sullen Walther.
The latter eyed the gun, a bit wistfully, Ethan thought. “Huh! Fat lot of good it’d do me, too!” He shivered. Apparently he was even colder than Ethan. Several bunched-up shirts, plus an emergency thermal poncho from the lifeboat’s stores gave him a squat look, like a fat frog. But the poncho hadn’t been designed with temperatures like this in mind and the little hood was having a hard time of it. Well, that was just too bad.
Ethan considered the clothes worn by du Kane and his daughter. They fitted almost perfectly, as if they’d been made to order in a thranx tailor-shop. Which they might have been. Clearly the kidnappers wouldn’t want their charges to freeze to death. Williams, then, was probably wearing Walther’s fur. He’d already noted the grisly origin of his own.
Well, if someone was destined to freeze to death, he had no compunctions about nominating the ugly little man with the busted wing. When he thought of the commissions this little detour was going to cost him…
Wait a minute. If he was wearing the dead Kotabit’s jacket, and Williams was using Walther’s, and the du Kanes had their own—then that meant the odd Mr. September was prowling around outside somewhere without a coat. Unless the kidnappers had carried extras, and that didn’t seem likely. Well, that was September’s problem. Just now there were other items uppermost in his mind.
“Any idea,” he asked Williams, “where we are?” It was Walther who replied, however.
“We were supposed to land,” he began bitterly, “about 200 kilometers southeast of Brass Monkey. The rendezvous was all arranged. Thanks to several damn delays though, and some bad fusing, we got caught in the explosion we set in the Antares. Chewed hell out of our navigational capacity. I can’t be sure, the way all those instruments were whining, with a busted ’puter, but I’ll bet we’re halfway around the planet. And if you want to buy my chances of getting out of this, you can have ’em for a ’Sime.”
“Set explosion?” prodded Ethan. But Walther had obviously said all he intended to for now. He lapsed into glum silence and slid further back into his corner.
“Probably a fair-sized bomb, set to go off after we’d left the Antares,” commented Colette professionally. “Since no alarms went off when we entered the lifeboat or sealed from the ship, I assume they took care of that earlier. Obviously the bomb was a cover maneuver, designed to convince rescuers that anyone in that section of the ship had been vaporized—especially father and myself.”
“I see,” nodded Ethan. “That way everyone would assume you two were dead… until these two were safely away and ready to put their demands. And no pursuit. Very clever. Of course, anyone walking that section of the ship when the bomb happened to go off would just be plain out of luck.” He glared at Walther, who ignored him.
“That’s about it,” continued Colette. “But with all the hemming and hawing, they blew their timetable and didn’t quite get away in time. Wouldn’t have gotten away at all if Father hadn’t…” She shrugged.
“You ought to thank him for saving your life,” Ethan said reprovingly.
She gave him another withering stare. “What life? Got any idea what it’s like to be rich, Mr. Fortune? It’s great. But to be rich and laughed at…”
“Why don’t you re—?” He bit his tongue. But she noticed.
“Reduce? Can’t. Glandular—irreversible, the docs say.” She turned away irritably. “Oh, go freeze yourself!”
“Listen,” put in Walther, sticking his head out into the light. “Regardless of what you think, we planned it so nobody would get caught in that blowup. That’s the only reason I didn’t shoot you, and you, the minute you stuck your faces into that lifeboat bay. If a search team found your body, or his, or bits and pieces, then they’d start wondering just maybe why there was no sign of theirs,” he indicated the du Kanes. “A small chance, but Kotabit and the others wanted to be sure. Yeah, good and sure! And now,” he concluded with acidic finality, “we’ll all freeze good and surely dead.”
“I’m not thrilled about dying in your company, chum,” said Ethan with as much toughness as he could muster, which wasn’t much. “And I sure don’t plan to. Anybody think of checking the boat tridee?” He didn’t have to ask if it was in working order.
Colette du Kane was shaking her head slowly. “Just scrap. That’s what September told us, anyhow. I wouldn’t know about such things myself, but I’m inclined to believe him.”
“It certainly seems that we have nothing capable of even rudimentary communication,” agreed Williams heavily. “Let alone something that can transmit a continental distance.”
“I venture to say that, being on a starship, no one had a personal comm unit on them anyway.” He glanced upward. “On a world like this there's likely to be only a single weather satellite. It would be stationed above the outpost, in a fixed orbit.” A gesture indicated the ruined lifeboat. “In a few days this is likely to be covered with snow and ice and invisible even to a high-resolution satellite scan.”
Briefly, then, they were stuck.
Less briefly, they were stranded on a barely known world, thousands of kilometers from its only humanx settlement, in weather that would make a corpulent walrus dive for his winter woolies. And the only people they could inform of their predicament were each other.
Worse, unless by a very long, long chance someone had seen the boat tumbling toward the surface, no one would come looking for them, no one would believe they were alive. Including Walther’s partners, who’d be expecting him a few kilometers from the town.
Ethan didn’t mind frozen food—but he wasn’t ready to become some!
Thinking it over, he had to confess that his prospects for the immediate future were anything but heartwarmi
ng. Or anything warming. On the other hand, he never made a sale by sitting on his duff and waiting for the customer to come to him. At least moving around would keep his blood from getting any funny ideas about going on strike.
He scrambled to his feet. The hood fit loosely over his head but the goggles and shield were adjustable and snugged down tight.
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked Colette.
“Outside, to have a look at the neighborhood. And to see if there’s a store around that sells electric beds.”
He snapped the top snap on the coat, tried to tighten the floppy hood and failed. Flip went the goggles. Things immediately grew darker. He had to fumble twice before he got a hand on the door latch. Turn and push—so.
It didn’t budge—so.
He shoved again. “Stuck.”
“Oh deity!” she began, “save us from such awesome, overwhelming, analytic…!”
That was another good reason for getting outside. The door received a good swift kick and a couple of choice curses. Either the kick knocked it free, or maybe the curses had a warming effect on the frozen joints. In any case, it popped open a few centimeters. From there it moved, reluctantly, on its bearings.
He shut the door carefully behind him and turned. Making sure of his footing—the snow could have covered all kinds of holes—he started down the center aisle of the ship. Cold flakes crunched under his feet. It sounded as though he was walking on glass. The wind moaned and howled through the torn metal. His breath formed a tiny cumulus cloud, a small shadow of life that stayed just ahead of him.
He could feel his lungs expanding and contracting. They seemed pitifully tiny in the frozen air. Each breath was painful, full of bee-stings and wire-wool.
The center aisle was tilted downward. Nose down, the shuttle had come to an abrupt halt.
Then he did what might have been considered by some a foolish thing. But he was a purveyor of cultured gee-gaws, not a planetary scout. And his taped information said nothing against it. So he knelt and scooped up a small ball of snow. It certainly looked like regular, old-fashioned, smack-in-the-face type snow. It caught the light like snow.
He brought it to his mouth, felt a sudden momentary chill greater than the air. It dissolved in the oral furnace, went down, stayed down. Plain old usual terran-type H2O snow. He knew from the recordings that Tran-ky-ky’s atmosphere was practically Terra-normal. What he did not consider was the possibility that the snow might contain acquired traces of toxic elements.
But it didn’t, and nothing happened. The snow and his stomach got along just fine.
By way of experiment, he raised his goggles just a smidgin. It was a short experiment. He had to blink away a couple of freezing tears before sliding the dark glass back into place. The glare was fierce and, unyielding. With the goggles, everything showed as clearly as before, but he could look at the snow without having his optic pathways turned to mush.
He reflected that a man caught here without goggles could go blind without even being aware the process was going on. It was far more deceptive than night blindness. Being caught in the light, it seemed, was worse than being caught in the dark.
A slick part of the floor and he slipped, had to catch himself with his gloved hands. For a minute he didn’t move, just stood, caught his breath. Watch it, stupid! This was no place to twist an ankle.
He reached the end of the aisle. A fast glance back to the total destruction in the passenger compartment, and then he turned to look into the pilot’s cubby. The door had been bent inward like the lip of a can. The shuttle’s nose was buried. The lensless ports were filled with a mixture of loose earth and snow. It poured into the small forecabin, oozing over the panel and instrumentation.
What he could see of the mangled console and the precision switches made him wonder that the little kidnapper had been able to bring them down safely at all. As for the boat tridee, it was so battered he barely recognized it.
Turning to leave the cabin, he stumbled again. Once more he was lucky and didn’t hurt himself. But he was beginning to get mad. He turned with the intention of visiting a few suitable gripes on the twisted hunk of metal that had so cleverly insinuated itself between his legs. The gripe got as far as his lips, fizzled there when he saw the obstacle wasn’t metal.
It was twisted, however.
The body was nude, lightly dusted with snow, and had begun to turn a color that did not imply a state of advanced good health. The back was facing him. He’d apparently stumbled over the head.
Kneeling, he put a hand on the back of the motionless skull. It moved freely when he touched it. Too freely. Du Kane had been right.
He experienced a sudden, sickening urge to see if the eyes were open or closed, like in the tridee shows. He could close them gently if they were open, just like the fictional heroes. However, he opted for backing away carefully, without even checking.
Brushing the snow from his knees, he averted his eyes from the half-frozen corpse. Instead he tried to imagine how this September fellow could go rambling about outside the protection of the boat without one of the special coats. Then it occurred to him that he’d have a double set of clothing.
Nothing in the cabin looked operable, useful. However, if one took the extent of his engineering knowledge into account, this observation meant nothing. He left without touching anything. Slipping and sliding, he made his way to the gaping tear which dominated the left side of the boat. Torn insulation puffed out from the double walls. Bracing himself against it, he cautiously looked out.
The snow-dusted ground lay only a half-meter down. To the right he could see where the boat had burrowed its crumpled snout in what seemed to be a hill of good, solid earth. It didn’t look like much of a hill. Probably you could walk around it. But it had been high enough and solid enough to arrest the forward slide of the boat.
From the hill, what looked like stunted evergreens stuck their bristly crowns sunward. They hardly bent at all in the stiff gale. By now he was so numb he hardly felt the wind anymore. Needles shifted their position relative to the sun. A few flakes of snow scudded lazily from one pebble to a little hollow. The trunks of the trees were thick and looked solid as duralloy.
Much of the ground to the west and north of the land was covered by a greenish down. It looked like short, very thick grass. Turning and raising his head, he looked out into the west, toward the horizon. That supplied another interesting discovery.
It looked as though it had been drawn with a pen. The line dividing earth and sky was straight, flat, and altogether too sharp to be real. Human eyes expected something slightly blurred or wavering on most inhabited planets. Not here. You could grab that line and pluck it.
Overhead, the sky was a deep cerulean blue, pure as old pewter dishes. The even oil color was unsullied, the dome of heaven smooth as a baby’s bottom. It was utterly devoid of clouds, which was just as well. A cloud in that pit of ice-blue would immediately surrender its aspect of lightness and take on the character of solid white rock. A real cloud floating overhead would be upsetting.
With the exception of their tiny blot of dirt, there was nothing else in any direction but flat, sparkling, virgin ice, lightly dusted now with snow. Another bit of taped knowledge drifted upward to the surface. Mostly shallow seas, frozen solid. They were adrift on an ocean of ice.
The glare of the unchallenged sun on that unwavering sea would have been intolerable without the goggles.
He jumped down to the ground. Mildly worried that the snow might make things awkward, he was relieved to discover it was barely a centimeter deep. Inside the boat it had piled a little, forming tiny drifts.
He walked a few paces away from the ship. Looking back toward the tail he could make out a pair of deep grooves in the ice. They ran straight toward the southern horizon. He couldn’t see under the boat, but it had obviously skidded badly on setdown. The landing struts had probably been torn away or worn down to stubs. Then the boat itself slid who knew how many meters on
its belly, until it had chanced to run up against this swept-together dustpile of dirt and rock.
A few steps brought him down to where the ground vanished. Brushing away the snow, he found that he could see for a few centimeters into the ice. There the ground sloped away beneath, to unknown frozen depths. The grass, he noticed, grew right out into the ice itself. It clustered thickly, but in a very orderly fashion. There was always a little space, however small, between each blade and its neighbor.
None of this told him how big the island—for such it had to be—was. The inside of his mouth was a frozen crust. Running his tongue along it was like caressing cardboard. With thoughts of circling the island, he took a step out onto the ice.
Another facet of Tran-ky-ky promptly introduced itself. Any man trying to walk normally without special equipment would soon find himself in closer contact with the surface.
Fortunately, he didn’t slide very far on the freezing ice. But he had to crawl back on his hands and knees. By the time he’d regained solid ground his palms and knees were thoroughly numbed.
The boat’s emergency supplies were designed mainly with median range humanx-type worlds in mind. Therefore, if anything they tended to lean more toward the upper register of the thermometer in supply execution.
He didn’t believe ice skates had been included in the inventory.
As if to insure that he shouldn’t get any more comfortable than was necessary, the wind picked up and was now proceeding to cool things down a bit. The planet was clearly determined to freeze him solid and then blow away the remnant.
Tonight, when it first grew cold—the very concept of cold was taking on new meaning in Ethan’s mind—any real gust would add a chill factor that would make things very dangerous. They’d have to take care to prevent being thoroughly cubed—and not in the mathematical sense, either.
Without the relative shelter of the boat, of course, they’d probably freeze to death even with the special coats.
His vision was improving or the cold was starting to work its way into his brain. The horizon remained sharp as a paper cut on a fingertip. But now he thought he could make out what might be larger land masses far off in the distance. He couldn’t be certain.
The Icerigger Trilogy Page 3