White Death

by Robert Sheckley

  He thought I was exaggerating when I told him that the Arabs had driven into the heart of the most terrible desert in the world. But I was stating no more than the bare truth, and I tried to make Dain understand this.

  The road across the desert runs along the southern edge of the Dasht-i-Kavir, where it merges into the Dasht-i-Lut. In ancient times the road was a caravan trail, but one which men avoided when possible. It was the shortest route from the Persian Gulf to High Tartary; but not one man out of ten survived the blizzards, quicksands, avalanches, and the like.

  It was demonstrably the most terrible desert in the world. The Sahara and the Gobi are dotted with oases; but the vast wastes of Central Iran have no watering-spot except at Tabbas. There are animals and plants in other deserts; but nothing can live in the salt deserts of Iran, not even a lizard or a sandflea. Weeds and cactus die, buzzards faint of sunstroke, and even scorpions expire on the superheated volcanic rocks.

  That was the desert I did not want to cross.

  Dain didn’t-argue with me; but he pointed out that five Arabs had set out to cross the Dasht-i-Kavir in a jeep, and that appeared to be a regular trip with them.

  “Crossing the Dasht-i-Kavir can never be a regular trip,” I said. “It is true, some vehicles do make the crossing nowadays. But they are especially equipped, as we are not. And even then, not all of them reach the other side.”

  Hansen had been consulting his map, and now he looked up and stated his opinion. “The road to Tabbas isn’t even a road in some places. And beyond Tabbas, the country becomes even worse. If the truck should break down anywhere on the route, we are dead men. Mr. Dain, the trip is not reasonable.”

  “I see,” Dain said, and stared at us both for a few seconds. Then he told me to order enough diesel oil, water, and provisions for a trip across the desert to Yezd. I did as he directed. Hansen stared open-mouthed as the supplies were loaded onto his truck. Then he gave an incoherent shout and seized one of the loaders by the arm.

  Dain stepped forward and pushed Hansen out of the way. Hansen asked, “What do you think you are doing?”

  “I’m loading your truck,” Dain said.

  Hansen swore with deep feeling in a language that must have been Swedish. Then he said, “I demand that you stop. I am not going to Tabbas.”

  “I know,” Dain said. “I’m borrowing your truck.”

  Hansen’s reply was inadequate to express his rage. He began by cursing, and he ended up by spluttering accusations of open robbery.

  Dain said, “I’m not stealing anything, Mr. Hansen. I am in pursuit of a group of criminals, and your truck is the only suitable transportation within fifty miles. You and your company will be fully compensated for any loss of time, as well as for any damage that might occur to the truck.”

  Hansen gave a snort of disbelief. “Criminals! What have these miserable criminals done to justify this suicidal pursuit?”

  “They are carrying several million dollars’ worth of pure heroin,” Dain said.

  “Destined for the United States?”

  “Yes.”

  “But how will they smuggle it in?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Dain said.

  “I see,” Hansen said. “I thought it was some foolishness with spies. … Well, have you ever driven a large diesel truck before?”

  “No,” Dain said. “As a matter of fact, I was hoping you’d show me how the gears work.”

  Hansen burst into laughter. “Show you the gears! And who will show you how to handle the rig on steep curves? Do you know how to change filters? Do you even know how to change a tire on a truck like this?”

  “I’ll find out,” Dain said.

  “You’ll kill yourself.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I know so,” Hansen said. “You’ll smash up the truck and your death will be on my hands. My company will ask me why I let you go alone. They’ll become very law-abiding after your death. I’m sorry, Mr. Dain, I cannot permit a novice to drive my truck.”

  “You have no choice,” Dain said.

  “Oh, shut up!” Hansen said crossly. “I’m telling you that I’ll drive the thing for you. You CIA men may know all about invisible ink, but you’re helpless in front of a piece of machinery.”

  Dain thanked him, and Hansen turned away quickly and checked his tires. It was just as I had thought. Hansen’s air of practical common sense was no more than a mask he wore to the world; at heart he was filled with European romanticism. For a minute he had tried to act in a rational manner; but I knew that nothing in the world would have kept him from joining Dain and careering over the desert after a pack of desperadoes.

  Turning to me, Dain said, “Achmed, thank you for all your help. As soon as I can, I’ll send you your pay.”

  “Thank you,” I said bitterly. I watched while Hansen tied down the extra fuel cans. He had to work hard to keep a disapproving scowl on his face.

  The truck was ready at last, and Dain and Hansen got into the cab. Hansen started the engine and slid into gear. Then I stepped around, opened the door, and got in.

  “Glad you changed your mind,” Dain said.

  “Like Mr. Hansen,” I replied, “I am also unwilling to be a party to murder. You wouldn’t last a day in the desert without an experienced man along. Besides, I want to make sure of my wages, and the bonus.”

  We left the town and picked up speed on the flat gravel rim of the Dasht-i-Kavir. Civilization fell away behind us, and the blasted landscape of the desert opened ahead. I told myself that I was a fool, and my companions were madmen. Then I decided to think no more about it. I had proved myself every, bit as mad as Dain and Hansen. There was nothing to do now but wait and see what the fruits of this folly would be.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  We drove along a plain of gravel flanked by marching granite hills on either side. The sun beat down with maniacal fury, turning the cab into a cage of red-hot iron. I was unable to rest an arm on the window edge, or even to lean against the side of the door. The air stirred up by our passage brought no refreshment. It was heated and stale, like the draft of a blast furnace. And to compound our miseries, the truck’s engine added its steady increase of warmth, baking our feet and legs to a turn. I felt like a skewered lark slowly being turned over a charcoal fire. I couldn’t even sweat, for the air was as dry as sandpaper.

  After three hours of this torture, we halted to check the tires and stretch our legs. There was no shade on that wide, devastated plain except for the knife-edged shadow cast by our truck. We rested in it for a few minutes, then set out again.

  All attempts at conversation had been given up, since talk made our throats hurt. Each of us sat in the middle of his own misery, watching the plain unroll. Nothing moved in the dead-white sky above, and no creature moved on the ground. Only the truck was in motion, and far ahead the low gray mountains seemed to twist and shimmer in the rising waves of heat. The truck and the mountains were the only moving things in this antechamber of hell.

  By sunset we had covered a third of the distance to Tabbas. We stopped for the night, for it was too dangerous to continue after dark. Bad country lay ahead of us; first mountains, then swamp, then sand and gravel desert, and then more mountains. Nor could we discount the possibility that the Arabs had somehow discovered that they were being pursued, and were already selecting the best site for an ambush.

  We made a quick meal and lay down in the twilight. The relief from the sun was delicious, and I fell asleep at once. But within an hour I was awake. After sunset, a biting cold wind had sprung up and the temperature had plummeted. Shaking and half sick from fatigue, I wrapped myself in two blankets. The wind cut through them like a knife, and sent a continual stream of sand and granite dust into my face. I faced downwind like a horse in a storm, and the wind crept up my pants legs and tried to freeze my buttocks. Cursing, I curled up like a dog and managed to get a few hours of fitful sleep.

  Then it was dawn. The wind died awa
y and there was half an hour of blessed relief. But the sun came up, huge and white against a white sky, and soon the desert changed back into a devil’s cauldron. We packed and set out once again.

  Within an hour we were in the mountains. Our road was no road at all; it was nothing more than the crude indication of where a road might someday be. Completely impassable during the flash floods of winter, it followed the path of dry river beds and natural ledges. An occasional boulder had been blasted away, and a few goat paths had been dynamited. This constituted the great desert route across Iran from Jumin to Yezd, for which the builders had been paid millions. I only hoped they had been forced to drive over their creation.

  Hansen roared up the river beds as if they had been concrete highways. He seemed determined to prove the suicidal nature of our journey, and to show us that nobody but himself could handle a large truck over such treacherous ground. Driving, he resembled a skewered frog, his arms and legs flailing as he twisted the wheel, shifted up or down, applied the accelerator, and stamped down hard on the brakes. I swear that there was a dervish-like light in his eyes as he performed these rites of the machine.

  Dain and I were forced to clutch at the roof, sides, and each other to stay upright as the truck swung around curves like a galloping pony. Before our horrified eyes, a high river bed would open onto a curving ledge. Far below us we would see the corrugated surface of the desert waiting to receive us. Hansen would rush on at full throttle; then the accursed ledge would narrow, we would scrape the mountain on one side, while our wheels would scream along the crumbling edge of the other side. In a moment, we must go over; but then the ledge would widen again, twist malevolently, and descend suddenly into another river bed. And Hansen would race on with a satisfied grin on his face, crooning a song of praise to his clever truck. To me this was proof positive of the madness that had brought him on this venture.

  We kept up our incredible speed all morning, and it seemed certain that we must overtake the Arabs’ jeep at any moment. But there was no sign of it on the straightaways, although we sometimes saw fresh tire marks or a slick of oil. By noon we were on the desert floor again, and we stopped to eat and stretch our creaking bones. Then I drove the truck for two hours across gravel, until we came into more mountains.

  Hansen took over, and attacked the route with renewed vigor. If possible, the ledges and watercourses were narrower than before; Hansen charged into them like a maddened bull. The roar of the engine and the scream of the tires filled my ears; but then I heard a deeper sound and leaned out the window to investigate.

  What I saw froze my blood. High above us near the top of the mountain, a gigantic boulder seemed to hang suspended in the air. It turned slowly, lazily, struck the mountainside and leaped into the air, struck again, and dislodged a mass of loose sliding rock.

  “Avalanche!” I shrieked.

  The main fall of rock was slightly in front of us, reaching down with long dusty fingers. It seemed to me that we just might escape with our lives if Hansen was prompt at the brakes.

  But Hansen had other plans. He had taken one upward look at the slide, tightened his grip on the wheel, and jammed the accelerator to the floor.

  His strategy might have been excusable on a real road; but in the mountains of the Dasht-i-Kavir it was suicidal. For now the avalanche rained pebbles on our roof, while ahead the narrow road vanished in a dense cloud of dust.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A second later we entered the dust cloud, and our doom seemed certain. Pebbles and loose shale sounded like an army of riveters on our roof, and above us we could hear the deep, growling thunder of the main fall. Was the avalanche upon us, or was it ahead or behind? Its location didn’t matter, for we were unlikely to live long enough to be buried by it. Our first concern was the road, that narrow winding mountain trail with its knife-edge drop to the left. At our present speed of forty or fifty miles an hour, it seemed that we would drive blindly over the edge at any moment.

  But here Hansen surprised me. “Pull in your fingers!” he shouted, in a tone of misplaced joviality. Then he cut the steering wheel to the right. The fender scraped hard against the sheer mountain face, and I thought that Hansen had lost his mind. But then I saw that the maneuver was deliberate. Like a man sharpening a knife, Hansen held the fender against the cliff. With a series of delicate maneuvers, he brought the entire right side of the truck into contact. The metal screamed in high-pitched fury, drowning out the sound of the avalanche. The entire truck trembled and bucked; an outcropping of rock clipped off a headlight and a mirror; half the fender sheered away, and the right front wheel seemed to be shaking itself loose. Hansen ignored all this; he was lost in the concentration which his maneuver demanded.

  He kept up his speed and turned the wheel gently in and out, maintaining contact with the cliff. The truck rushed blindly through a vast cloud of dust, with a precipice to the left, and with the wail of tortured metal on the right as the only guide to safety. Dain and I were on the floor by this time, and not a second too soon. Fragments of rock were flying in our window like shrapnel, and one outcropping of rock the size of a man’s head smashed through the windshield like a cannonball.

  Then suddenly our wild ride was over and we emerged into dusty sunshine. Hansen slowed down, and Dain and I untangled ourselves. We remembered the avalanche, and craned our necks to find it. It was far behind us, a great slide of rock that completely blocked the road.

  “Look up there,” Dain said to me. I looked, and saw men on the mountaintop, four or five men, and a jeep. I heard a popping noise, and thought it was the jeep’s engine backfiring. Then bullets rang along the side of the truck, and I knew they were firing at us with automatic weapons, at extreme range.

  Hansen needed no instruction. He speeded up at once. The tiny figures on the mountain stopped firing and ran to their jeep. Dain and I saw at once what had happened.

  Either the Arabs had discovered they were being followed, or they had doubled back as a safety precaution. They had taken their agile jeep up a slope of the mountain, selected their spot, and planted a charge of dynamite. When we appeared below, they set off the explosive, thinking to bury us in an avalanche, or at least to block the road ahead.

  But they had made their plans without taking Hansen’s foolhardiness into consideration. Now we were past their ambush. With a little luck we would soon be past them, blocking the only road across the desert, forcing them to advance at our pace.

  The advantages and difficulties of such a position were not fully clear to us yet; but we didn’t dare let the Arabs get ahead of us, at least not until we were out of the mountains. Dain urged Hansen to put on all possible speed, and Hansen complied with insane willingness.

  The Arabs had swung their jeep around. They were racing along the mountain edge, toward a slope they could descend to the road. They were a thousand feet above us, moving downward on an intersecting angle. Their faster vehicle was pulling ahead, even though Hansen had the accelerator to the floor.

  They continued to gain, and their jeep bounded across the steep incline like a hare. Hansen gritted his teeth and pounded the steering wheel with his fist, urging the truck to make a greater effort. Dain had taken out a rifle and was trying to steady it on the violently shaking window sill. The Arabs were holding on for their lives as their jeep took the slope in a series of impossible leaps.

  They were well in front of us; but now they had to lock their brakes to keep from plunging over the edge when they reached the road. The jeep slid, and the driver swerved back and forth across the slope in an effort to reduce his speed. They managed to reach the road ahead of us, but only by flying the last twenty feet or so. The jeep landed squarely, and promptly blew out the two front tires. The driver was just able to hold the road; he swerved back from the edge at the last moment and clawed to a stop against the cliff’s edge.

  A moment later we were on top of them. The Arabs scrambled into the ditch, and Hansen was forced to the outer edge of the road in orde
r to pass their jeep. I swear that I felt one of our wheels spinning with nothing but air under it; and then we were past them and back on the road.

  Hansen drove on for about five hundred yards, then stopped. His hands were trembling, and his complexion had faded to a dirty grayish-yellow. He got out and walked around the truck, kicking the tires and muttering to himself. He stared at the damage for a long time, frowning deeply, as though he were trying to remember when it had happened. In truth, the appearance of the truck was scarcely credible. Fifteen minutes ago it had been a gleaming modern vehicle; now it looked ready for the scrap heap. The windshield was smashed, and the right front fender and headlight had been torn off. Most of the paint was gone from the right side, and the surface had been deeply dented along its entire length. There was a stitching of bullet holes across the rear, and one boulder from the avalanche had put a sharp dip in the middle of the tank, giving it the look of a Bactrian camel.

  We held a council of war to estimate our situation and decide upon our best course of action. Hansen declared that the truck was still serviceable, and that the tires had held up better than he had expected. But he also said that there was no way of telling how much longer the truck would continue without a breakdown. He said this in an aggrieved tone, as if Dain and I had been the careless driver who had damaged his beautiful vehicle. Poor Hansen was eternally unable to decide whether he was a gentleman adventurer or a responsible citizen.

  The Arabs were temporarily immobilized. But as soon as they had repaired their tires, they would come after us. They had greater speed and agility, and greater firepower. We could probably restrain them as long as we were in mountainous country; but after that, it was any man’s guess. For now, in order to prevent them from running close up and shooting the truck’s rear tires, we would have to post a guard on the roof.