The Winds of Altair

by Ben Bova

  He roared out a warning.

  The humans jerked to a stop and stared up at him. The apes dropped what they were doing and began to cluster together. The other wolfcats roared back at Crown, to tell him that they understood him, even though their human controllers did not and would not let them run to safety.

  What is it, Crown? He sensed within his mind the presence of his friend, the shared consciousness of his alien companion. What's the danger, Crown? How can we warn them?

  The wolfcat's sudden roar nearly froze Carbo's blood.

  He turned around so abruptly inside his heavy suit that he wrenched his neck.

  "Damn!" he yelped. "What now?"

  The other wolfcats began roaring, somewhere out there in the darkness. The landing team came sprinting toward Carbo.

  "What's the matter? Why are they roaring?"

  "I don't know," Carbo said, irritatedly, as he tried to rub the back of his neck and was thwarted by the plastic helmet. "Something's bothering them."

  "The most astute observation of the week."

  Out of the murky gloom a huge gray figure took shape, a six-legged mountain of sleek muscle that padded slowly toward the humans.

  "God Almighty, it's coming straight for us!"

  "Stand back," Petrocelli said, clicking his rifle together.

  "No, wait." Carbo put a restraining hand on the student's arm. "I think it's Jeff's wolfcat—Crown."

  "How can you tell one from another?"

  "I saw him before, the first time I came down here. Besides, the animal doesn't want to harm us."

  The wolfcat's claws were sheathed as it walked up to the frightened knot of humans. It stood taller than any of them at the shoulder, frighteningly huge. The animal sniffed at them, seemed to peer at them one at a time, then turned toward the hills that overlooked the beach. It took a few steps toward the hills, then came back to the humans.

  "What's it doing?"

  "It wants something . . . but what?"

  The wolfcat singled out Carbo and stared at him, its head, bigger than Carbo's whole torso, lowered to the human's eye level.

  "Whatever it wants," Carbo said, his voice shaking, "I am willing to give it."

  As if it understood what the human said, the wolfcat turned back toward the hills again, took a few steps in that direction, then looked back over its shoulder.

  "Does it want us to follow it?"

  "Where?"

  "And why?"

  "I don't understand what . . . oh, my God! Look at the ocean!"

  Carbo turned and peered into the midnight darkness.

  The ocean was going away.

  CHAPTER 22

  Carbo stared, goggle-eyed. The water was sliding back, slipping away from the land, revealing more and more of the beach, brownish-dark, flat, glistening. Like an ebbing tide filmed in stop-motion, the edge of the sea retreated farther and farther from the normal high-water mark, until human eyes could no longer see it in the eternal gloom of Altair VI's murky atmosphere.

  He heard the wolfcat growl, as if it was just as terrified of what it saw as the humans were.

  Carbo shivered.

  No. It was the ground that was shivering.

  "Tsunami!" someone shouted.

  "Earthquake and tidal wave! We've got to get out of here!"

  But Carbo's feet could not move. He was rooted to the ground where he stood.

  "Get back to the shuttle!" he heard someone shout. "We don't have a moment to lose!" Then he realized that it was his own voice barking out the command.

  He broke his paralysis and began heading toward the shuttle. The other men, running clumsily in their heavy armored suits, all did the same. Carbo peered out into the darkness, wishing he could see what was happening out there in the ocean. All that he could make out was the suddenly-bare beach where the sea had retreated. It frightened him to his core.

  Crown could see the ocean clearly. It had slid away from the beach, as if knowing something terrible was approaching.

  With a grinding roar, the ground under Crown's paws shook. Trees began cracking and toppling along the crest of the hills. A boulder up there broke loose and tumbled toward the beach to smash into one of the alien buildings and demolish it.

  The apes stood frozen at their tasks for endless moments, then, with a single scream of purest terror wailing in unison from their throats, they threw up their hands and ran pell-mell down the beach on their hind legs. The wolfcats roared, raced back and forth, turned in circles—and then they too dashed down the beach, heading away from the camp as fast as they could run.

  They're out of control!

  Disconnect these kids before they go into shock.

  The ground bucked and heaved. Great fissures tore through the hillsides. Entire hills collapsed like balloons suddenly bursting, spilling thousands of tons of rock and soil down onto the beach.

  The humans were clustered at the hatch of their rocket shuttle, clambering up the ladder. But a new tremor opened a fissure alongside the craft. Its left landing gear slipped into the crack in the ground and the wing smashed against the snow-covered sand, crumpling like aluminum foil.

  Crown stood frozen, not knowing whether to try to escape along the beach or go up the crest of the hills. The ground was shaking badly now, rattling every bone in his giant body. Through the haze of steam that was seeping out of the newly opened fissures, Crown could see that the beach was going to be a place of death.

  Don't disconnect Jeff! He's still in contact. He's holding steady.

  Lord, he's the only one.

  Far out along the horizon Crown saw a huge wave of water, like the gray wall of a fortress, rear itself against the eternal clouds of the sky. It was moving toward the beach, speeding toward land, growing taller and taller, mounting, looming, dwarfing everything before it as it rushed closer and closer.

  In seconds it would hit the beach, Crown knew. And when it did, it would destroy everything there.

  The shuttle suddenly lurched, throwing the men on its boarding ladder into a muddled heap on the snow-packed beach.

  "What happened?"

  "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

  "My arm. Goddammit. I think it's broken "

  Carbo had been thrown down onto the seat of his pants by the tremor. He sat there, his head spinning, his legs sprawled out ludicrously before him, and saw that the bogey wheels of the spacecraft's landing gear had fallen into the fissure. The wing was bent and dented; fuel was dripping out of a tear in its titanium skin.

  It's going to catch fire, Carbo thought. We could all get killed if it explodes.

  And then he realized, It doesn't matter. We can't fly out of here now. We're going to be killed when the tidal wave hits.

  All of this had taken only a second or two. The other men of the landing party were still muttering, grumbling, sorting themselves out. They didn't seem to realize how badly damaged the shuttle was. Slowly, painfully, Carbo got to his feet. What do I say to them? he asked himself. How can I tell them that we're all dead men?

  The others were mostly on their feet now, several of them huddled around one of the men, who seemed to be injured. Carbo couldn't tell who was who, behind the heavily tinted visors of their helmets.

  "Ohmygod, look at the shuttle's wing!"

  "It's smashed!"

  "For God's sake, get inside to the radio, tell them to get the other bird down here quick! We'll be trapped here if they don't!"

  "They're not gonna risk the other shuttle."

  "But we . . ."

  Carbo turned away from them and looked out along the beach. Most of the buildings had withstood the earthquake; it hadn't been such a major tremor—just enough to kill them all.

  Then the gray mountain of the wolfcat slinked into his field of view. The huge beast got between Carbo and the other men.

  "What do you want, animate? A morsel of Earth-man before the tidal wave comes and wipes us all out?"

  The wolfcat nudged Carbo with its shoulder, nearly knocking him
off his feet.

  "Hey, now wait." Carbo reached for the stun gun at his hip, fumbled with the holster. "I don't want . . ."

  But the wolfcat suddenly grabbed at Carbo with both its forepaws. Its huge fanged mouth opened wide, gaping like the jaws of hell. All Carbo could see was teeth the size of butcher knives.

  "Help . . ." he gasped as the wolfcat lifted him off his feet and closed those fangs on his body. Carbo blacked out.

  Crown knew that he could not save all the humans, but this one man could be saved—if he could get him to the crest of the hills before the tsunami struck the beach.

  There was no time to waste. Crown tried to show the human what he needed to do, but the alien two-legged creature simply stood dumbly, unable to communicate, unable to understand. As gently as he could, Crown seized the human in his forepaws and then clutched him with his teeth, hoping that the human's frail suit would not rip open. Crown needed all six legs to climb the steaming, fissure-rent hillside.

  He loped off from the beach, and heard some of the humans shouting faintly behind him. The man in his jaws had gone limp. The ground had stopped shaking, but behind him Crown knew, the tsunami was approaching with the swift mercilessness of death itself.

  He reached the slope of the hills and started up toward the crest. Trees had toppled up there. A crack yawned in front of him, steaming. Crown leaped across it. Rocks and boulders were strewn everywhere and the ground itself seemed new, raw, soft and slippery. The entire hillside was threatening to slide loose, slipping down toward that all-swallowing wall of gray, foaming water.

  Crown scrambled and scrabbled, knowing that he could move much faster without the inert weight of the man in his jaws. But he held onto the human and worked desperately to climb higher. Now he could smell the salt tang of the sea air and the terrible low rumbling sound that meant the end of the world. He clawed his way past the rocks and dirt slides and the tumbled boles of broken trees.

  He reached the crest of the hill and turned around to look down at the beach. Gently he deposited the human on the warm, raw-looking soil.

  Carbo inhaled a deep breath of life-giving oxygen and realized that he was still alive. The beast hadn't devoured him after all. It stood looming over him. They seemed to be off the beach; he could see the trunks of trees leaning at odd angles above them.

  Slowly he rolled over onto his belly, wondering if he had the strength to get to his feet. Through his helmet he heard—almost felt—a low growling sound, like the wind at the end of the world, like the inexorable grinding of the mill of the gods. He stared down toward the beach, straining his eyes in the inky darkness of this hell-world, and felt his breath stop. A wall of water was blotting out the sky, rushing up onto the beach, straight toward the struggling knot of humans and their crippled rocket shuttle.

  And then the world exploded. The sound was overpowering. The fury of the tsunami smashed onto the beach and Carbo felt himself suddenly lifted by some giant's hand and thrown upward, tossed like a leaf in a hurricane. Trees, rocks, strange shapes he'd never seen before; the sky tilted upward, sideways, and then he was slammed flat onto the hard unyielding ground.

  It was over.

  Carbo lay on the hilltop, a few dozen meters from where he had been seconds ago. Everything was dripping water: the drunkenly-tilted trees, the bare claws of stripped shrubbery, the rocks. The ground itself seemed soaked, soggy as a sponge.

  And he was alive. Bruised, frightened so badly that he could hardly control the shaking of his hands, his heart beating wildly . . . but he was alive.

  The mountainous shape of the wolfcat loomed over him, gray and dripping wet. It bent its massive head toward him and sniffed at him like a dragon snorting.

  Carbo laughed giddily. "You look as miserable as I feel," he said. The animal's mane was plastered with mud. Water flicked from its twitching tail.

  Groggy, every part of his body aching, Carbo struggled to his feet and looked out toward the beach. There was nothing he could see in the darkness. He reached for the infrared booster scope in his belt pack and lifted it up to his visor.

  Nothing. The camp was gone. There was no sign that human beings had ever been there. The beach was scoured clean of everything: the buildings, the shelters, the equipment, the rocket shuttle, the men and women—Altair VI had scrubbed them all away, cleansed itself of the intruding alien presence.

  Carbo sank to his knees. Tears filled his eyes. Higgins, Petrocelli, all the others were dead. He wanted to die too, to collapse right here on this soggy, spongy mass of branches and wet soil, and give up his life. He had surely killed them all.

  Instead, he lifted the booster scope again and searched the area carefully. The sea was calm now, quietly lapping up onto the sand as if nothing had ever disturbed its eternal rhythm. The beach itself was cleared of snow; it glistened gold and smooth in the afternoon sunshine. Carbo could see specks of broken machinery, seaweed, boulders, tree branches littering the beach. Something bobbed in the surf that might have been the helmet from a suit.

  Turning toward the giant wolfcat, Carbo muttered, "I suppose they'll send the other shuttle down now to pick me up. It might have been better if you had left me on the beach to die with the others."

  The wolfcat gazed at him silently, then opened its huge mouth in a gigantic yawn and stretched languidly. It shook its immense body like an oversized cocker spaniel. Carbo was drenched by the spray.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Village was officially in mourning for fourteen days over the fourteen men and women killed in the tidal wave. No work was done by any of the students. A single mass funeral was held in the Tabernacle, with empty coffins representing the dead.

  Jeff found it strange, disconcerting, to eat with his friends in the cafeteria and not see Petrocelli. The burly convert had turned from antagonist to grudging friend, and Jeff missed his sharp-tongued wit at their table.

  Was there something I could have done to save him? Jeff asked himself a thousand times. He had no answer.

  He had instinctively helped Dr. Carbo. He could not have done more. No matter how hard he thought about it, he saw no way in which he could have saved any of the others.

  Still, the dormitory dome was silent and oppressively gloomy. The students had little to do. No work except routine housekeeping and life support functions was being done. But there were special prayer meetings every day, and more worship services each evening. To Jeff, they were almost unbearably morbid.

  He found himself at one of the viewing ports, along his favorite greenpath, late one afternoon, staring out at the dazzling brilliance of the planet below them.

  "There you are."

  He turned and saw Laura picking her way through the flowering shrubbery to join him.

  "I thought I'd find you here," she said.

  "Hello, Laura."

  She looked out at the cloud-covered face of Altair VI. "Thinking about Crown?"

  With a half-guilty grin, he admitted. "Yeah. He's been on his own for more than a week. I wonder if he's found his own family."

  "You think he's migrated south to look for them?"

  "Sure."

  "It's a big world down there," she said.

  "It's his world. He'll find them."

  "I hope so." Laura turned to face him. "Jeff, I'm getting to think that you're right. We shouldn't be ruining their world. We shouldn't be killing them off."

  He smiled with relieved pleasure. "You've been in contact with those creatures often enough to start feeling for them, haven't you?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Well . . . that tidal wave gave them all a reprieve."

  "But it's only a reprieve," said Laura. "We'll all be back at work in another few days. The colony ship will take up orbit with us in another two weeks."

  "Right."

  "What can we do?"

  "If I knew, I'd tell you," Jeff said. "I've been racking my brains over this for months now. I don't see any way out of it."

  She started to reply, hes
itated, and fell silent.

  "One thing I do know, though," Jeff went on. "I'd love to get in contact with Crown again, just to see what he's doing, how he's making out."

  "The contact lab is closed."

  "Officially," he agreed. "But this wouldn't be work, it'd be . . . observation. I wonder if Amanda would let me . . .

  "Us," Laura said firmly. "We'll both ask her."

  On the fifteenth day after the tsunami disaster, Bishop Foy called a meeting of all the science department heads.

  Frank Carbo lay in his warm, enveloping waterbed that morning, staring up at the viewing port set into his ceiling, looking out at the eternal night of space. He had been picked up by the rocket shuttle a few hours after the earthquake had subsided. The wolfcat had led him back to the beach; then, as the rocket shuttle announced its presence with a sonic boom, the animal had turned away and headed down the beach, southward.

  They had kept Carbo in the infirmary for five days while the physicians tended his bruises and the psychologists probed his guilt-ridden mind. He knew what they wanted to hear and told them quite matter-of-factly that he understood that it was not his fault that the others had died. He knew that they examined him while he was asleep, also, and easily found that the guilt was deeply imbedded in him.

  "It's something I'll have to live with," he told them. "There's nothing that any of us can do about it."

  He waited for them to suggest a neuro-electronic probe that would blank out the guilt feelings, but they had the tact not to mention it.

  Now he lay on his waterbed, luxuriating in its physical comfort, on the morning that everyone in the Village was supposed to get back to work.

  Work. It was bad enough to be saddled with the responsibility for scouring an entire planet clean of its native life forms. It was something entirely different to send human beings, friends and associates, to their deaths.

  Carbo forced himself to sit up, grunting with the effort. "The planet fights back," he muttered to himself. "Maybe we're not so powerful after all. It scoured itself clean—of us."