by John Shirley
“No one to stop you now, Jackie,” said Soniat. “We checked these fools hard. You’re in the clear.”
Alone. All alone on the pale green ice, beneath the unwavering stars of a stranger world, Zajac skated, exhilarated, cheered and warmed by his own skill and luck and daring. A little over a mile to the goal, according to the rough estimate he could make from his faceplate map. Then would come the final dramatic thrill of deking the Stinger goalie out of position, the silent man-on-man confrontation and the slamming home of the puck, the flash of the neoprene stick and the clean flight of the puck into the corner of the net. He pictured the goalie lying sprawled vainly across the ice, and Zajac celebrating all alone, all alone until Gill and Soniat joined him for the cross-country journey back into position for the next face-off. . . .
All alone. It was the time of the game that Václav Zajac loved the best. He luxuriated in the feeling of solitude, of purposeful activity, of being the focus of energy in the dynamic effort. He leaned forward and skated with long, powerful strides. He looked around him to the close horizon: there was nothing to see, no other people, no physical features of dramatic interest. The photo amps in his helmet showed him just smooth glass underfoot and velvet sky above, the gliding orange puck and the diamond chip stars. This was exaltation. Perhaps this had always been the utter joy of the sport, since the days when Indians skated on frozen lakes with the ribs of elks bound to their feet. When Zajac had been a small boy he had played shinny, battling a small rubber ball across the frozen river of his native Moravia. He had learned the game, learned the techniques, subjected himself to the necessary conditioning, accepted the demands and rewards, at an early age. Now, separated from those games by many years and uncountable miles, he was still getting the same intoxicating sensation as he ripped the puck away from the other team and set out alone toward the goal. He was inexorable. He was overpowering. He was alone.
He skated with his head up, his knees slightly bent. He kept the puck ahead of him, moving it forward with little taps, first to the left, then to the right. The feeling of pure speed was like a passionate embrace. He wanted it to go on and on, never to end, and it wouldn’t end, not until he climaxed the overwhelming surge down the ice with the conquering drive into the goal. Even then the excitement would linger, fading a little of course, but the giddy arousal would remain, spoiled only by the arrival of his teammates and their chattering congratulations. That always ruined it a little for Zajac, but it never destroyed the experience completely. The race was always his, and he lived for it alone. Now, on the home ice of Niflhel, he exulted.
“Let’s go!” said Brickman, who was miles behind, completely out of the action, who had nothing to do but skate about somewhat bored and watch Zajac’s green dot streak toward the goal on his faceplate.
“Okay, Jackie, okay!” said the coach.
Zajac grimaced and changed the channel. He listened to the soft, lilting, excruciating music for a while.
He was thinking about the move he was going to use on the Stinger goalie. His mind wasn’t on his skating, on the immediate condition of the playing field. He didn’t see the frozen ripple, the small raised scar on the glacial floor. He didn’t know it was there until his skate hit it with a numbing shock. There was a raw grinding feeling, and then Zajac was flying flat in space, falling. He landed heavily on his left side, his left arm pinned under him. There was a noiseless push of liberated gases; it was as jarring as a blow to the jaw in a beer-soaked brawl. Then everything was still. Everything was very quiet. Everything waited. Zajac was stunned and probably dying, but he didn’t know it yet. He was caught in a billion-year-old trap, and he hadn’t even heard it spring shut. He would have to learn the rules one by one, the hard way, and if he was going to survive he had no time to lose.
“Oh, hell,” he said. He took a deep breath.
No one answered. No one wondered what had happened.
“I guess I’m all right,” he said.
No one asked him what he meant.
“Coach?” he said.
The black coldness waited.
“I fell pretty hard out here but I’m okay. I can feel the puck. I’m lying right on top of it. Give me a minute to catch my breath.” He felt warm. Actually, as he calmed down a little, he felt hot. His suit wasn’t cooling him off enough. He wondered what was wrong. He tried to sit up, to take a quick inventory of his monitoring systems. He learned with an ice-cold shiver of fear that his helmet was frozen fast to the rock-solid ice. He nearly dislocated a shoulder trying to raise his head.
Zajac was afraid. He had never before felt this particular kind of fear, this awareness of the nearness of death. It was so close, the end of his life, that he could not see how he could avert it. He knew he couldn’t deke death with a good feint in one direction, then go skating off free and clear in another. It would take more than that. He didn’t know what it would take, and that thought terrified him. He needed help, and that thought mortified him. But his terror was greater.
“Coach?” he called. He waited in vain for a reply. He switched channels. “Maxie? Pete?” There wasn’t even the sound of static. He went back and forth through the five channels: there were four channels of utter, terminal silence, but channel three was coming through clearly. The damned music, sweet strings and a binging triangle playing a sprightly march. It was a paralyzing insult added to his calamity.
“Hey, coach!” Zajac screamed. His voice sounded raw and harsh to himself, and the effect was ominous. He was in trouble, that was definite, but he was ashamed that he was losing control so quickly. He forced himself to calm down, to think. He carefully appraised his situation.
Evidently he wasn’t receiving his teammates’ communications. That didn’t mean, though, that they weren’t receiving his. “Coach, Maxie, Pete, if anybody can hear me, I had a tumble and I’m frozen onto the ground. My helmet and my shoulder. I landed on a couple of the trade-off buttons and they melted the ice, and then I got caught in it. I can’t hear a thing. I can’t hear you, and I can’t see where you are. My faceplate map isn’t functioning. I don’t know what to do. You’re going to have to come get me, because I can’t move. I only have one arm free, and the trade-off buttons are going to be overworked, trying to compensate for the coldness of the ground. So hurry.” He stopped talking. He felt a little foolish, not knowing if anyone could hear him.
What next? He didn’t know. The climate control would be raising the temperature of his suit as the internal heat bled away. Eventually the heating unit would fail, and then it wouldn’t be long before Zajac, suit and all, would be lifeless solid human ice. He didn’t know how much longer the suit’s unit could function.
As he waited, an unpleasant thought returned again and again: his only hope was that he’d be found and rescued in time. The prime concern, therefore, was that if the others weren’t receiving his calls, and if neither his suit nor the puck were sending out signals, they would never stumble across him in time. And stumble across him is what they’d do—eventually. If they ever found him at all, they’d trip across his marble-stiff corpse in the dark.
There was no way of judging how quickly the time passed. The sun—the dim, distant star that barely held Niflhel in its weak grasp—cast no shadows on the enemy ice. Zajac couldn’t see that sun from his sprawled position, so he wouldn’t be able to observe it as it cut its way through the strange constellations. He doubted if he’d be alive long enough to notice much stellar movement in any case. There was nothing else within sight that could help him in any way. There was nothing else at all but ice, endless ice, murderous ice.
Zajac waited and studied himself closely for any sign of panic. The notion that at the end, as he began to feel the sting of death creeping along his rigid limbs, he might lose control of his mind was more repellent to him than the threat of death. He feared madness more. Though his suffering would be limited by the mercilessness of the environment, he swore that he would choose an immediate end by his own hand rather than descend muttering and
weeping into insanity. It occurred to him that his promise was one he might not want to keep at that final instant, or even be able to remember.
There were many things to regret while he waited between life and death. He thought about his joyless childhood, about the unkindness he had often shown others, about the broken vows and broken dreams, about all the things of a lifetime that are without meaning and are given importance only by an ultimate realization that they can now never be corrected. Zajac felt contempt for his own remorse, because he knew how shallow he was. Even as the tears slipped from his eyes, he laughed skeptically. “You don’t mean a word of it, Jackie,” he whispered. “Try to die like a man.” Whatever that meant. . . .
This gelid vista would be the last thing he would see: a jagged horizon, low ridges of pallid green shining in his suit’s lamplight, ice of a color he had seen sometimes in a young woman’s eyes, a sky as black and empty and devoid of hope as Hell—and wasn’t Hell described just like this? A lake of ice, rather than pits of flame? And Lucifer frozen in the middle of it, immobile and bitter? The comparison made Zajac laugh aloud, and it was not a healthy laughter, with just the faintest tinge of hysteria. It brought his wandering thought to a sudden focus. His experiment with fancy ended abruptly.
Was there anything that he could do to release the helmet from the tenacious ice? His hockey stick lay on the rough surface not far from his outstretched right hand, within reach. Zajac didn’t believe he could use it to chip the helmet free; the neoprene was tough, but not as hard as the ice. Still, he reached out and grasped the end of the blade, then drew the stick near. He would never be able to use it to pry the helmet loose, either. The stick would snap like a dry bone.
If he were to live, to free himself from the frozen tomb, he needed an audacious idea. In order to find the key, he needed all the coolness of thought on which he prided himself. And, he admitted, he might need all the crazy reasoning of desperation, as well. In the same way that he might have proceeded to fix a leaking faucet at home, he took it by the numbers.
How could he get free? By removing himself from the ice, of course. How could that be done? By getting rid of the ice, by breaking it or melting it. Could he break it? He had already decided the answer to that was no.
That left melting.
What could melt the ice? Under these circumstances, only the heat inside his suit. The warmth from the trade-off buttons was melting the ice in that immediate area, leaving a bowl-like depression under his left side, but his helmet was too far away and there was no way of delivering the heat from between his shoulders to the necessary point.
Was there another way of transferring heat from inside his suit to the place where the helmet was welded to the ground?
Zajac didn’t have an immediate answer. More accurately, at first he didn’t want to examine the only solution that did present itself.
“Well,” he murmured after a moment, “there is a way.” He had a flickering, half-formed notion.
It was unpleasant. It was very unpleasant.
The idea grew, and Zajac realized that there was every reason to believe it would work. But the more clearly he understood what had to be done, the more grotesque and awful it seemed. Yet it was a choice between sacrifice and certain death. Rational thought demanded—
Zajac pressed the button in the handle of his hockey stick. The dileucithane tape that wound around the blade immediately lost its adhesiveness. With his free hand he removed the relaxed tape from the stick. Now it was ready to be used again, and he was careful not to foul it in tangles because he would never be able to untwist it, and that would be the end of him. He transferred an end of the tape to his left hand and clumsily wrapped the length of it around and around his right arm, just above the tape that sealed his right gauntlet to his sleeve. He pulled the tape as tight as he could, so tight that he knew he was shutting off the circulation in his arm.
It occurred to Zajac that if he managed to save himself and then stay alive until he could be rescued, he might look back on this nightmare and realize that there had always been a simple and easy way to solve the crisis. If there were he couldn’t see it now, and as he became more frantic he cared less about what he would think in the future. The terrible present overshadowed all that. Maybe he would curse himself for a fool. Maybe his teammates would be shocked by the means he had selected to save himself, when there was some other obvious method he had overlooked. Zajac’s mouth was very dry, and there was a loud buzzing in his head that distracted his attention. He was near emotional collapse, and he put the thought of hypothetical painless answers in the back of his mind. He had not been able to find one, and so he was compelled to follow the path he had chosen.
His right hand tingled with a myriad sharp pinpricks. He closed his eyes tight and tried to calm his agonized thoughts. The pain in his hand became a throbbing that he couldn’t ignore. Needles of pain stabbed up his arm from his fingertips to his shoulder. It was time to act, but the process of summoning courage and strength was more difficult than he had imagined. “Come on, Jackie,” he whispered, “just do it. Do it or you’ll die right here.”
His left thumb found the button on his right gauntlet. He pressed it, giving as he did an odd, high-pitched cry. The tape on the gauntlet went dead. He unwrapped it quickly and flung it away. He ripped the gauntlet off with his left hand and shrieked as the unbearable cold attacked his exposed hand. He grabbed at the back of his helmet, twisting as much as he could so that he could reach the frozen bond. The remaining warmth in his freezing hand turned the ice to thin and poison gas. He rolled over, and his helmet was free. He sobbed loudly and rose to his knees. His right hand remained on the ice where he had rested.
Zajac got to his feet, staggered, stumbled, fell again to his knees. He felt dreamlike, a little dazed. He felt no pain; that meant that he was in shock. He was alive, but he didn’t know for how long. The ragged end of his forearm was exposed beyond the tourniquet of tape, and the killing cold would soon crawl through his veins like serpent’s venom. He was very cold. He looked back to where he had lain prisoner. His right hand, his strong hand, was blanched white as new snow in the glare of his lamp. The thumb had snapped off. The light flashed from a gold ring on the fourth finger. Zajac’s eyes opened wide and he stared, sickened. He clutched his ruined arm to his chest. Suddenly, like a vast and overpowering expulsion of evil, he vomited inside his helmet.
With an effort he got to his feet again, a bit unsteady on his skates. Freeing the helmet had been only part of the problem, although he hadn’t wanted to think about the rest until now. He was faced with the difficulty of staying alive until he could find the other players. Evidently they couldn’t find him, or they would already have come to his aid. His uniform suit wasn’t transmitting its signal. The puck, though, ought not to have been affected. He remembered, however, that he had been on top of it the entire time. It was likely that its position had just reappeared on the faceplate maps of both the Condors and the Stingers. If Zajac were lucky, they’d all be sprinting toward him that very instant, and they’d be there to call for help in a few minutes.
If he weren’t lucky, of course, the puck was as lost as he, and therefore he’d have to find his own salvation. He grimaced. That was the way it had always been, the way he had always preferred. He was too lightheaded from shock and loss of blood to recall how only a short time before he had rejected that delusion.
In the single-mindedness of his condition, Zajac decided to head for the Stinger goal, the nearest place where he could be certain of finding another person. He tried to find traces of his passage across the ice before his accident, to get an idea of the direction of the goal. The ice was so hard that his tracks were almost invisible, but he caught them in the oblique beam of his lamp. He saw the small wrinkle of ice that had caused his fall, and he mouthed a vicious Slovak curse. He picked a place on the horizon, a tiny landmark of three sharp spires of ice, and skated weakly toward it. He estimated that the goal should be only a bit
more than a half mile beyond it.
His right arm, from the shoulder to the torn end, felt paradoxically warm. The rest of the body was colder than before, and he shook with chills. He tried not to think about the loss of his hand, but the image of it lying abandoned on the ice kept occurring to him, and he had to fight down new sickness again and again.
After fifty yards he realized that he was carrying his hockey stick. “Stupid,” he said to himself. He dropped it to the ground, and then came to a halt. “What I ought to have is the damn puck.” The puck may or may not have been transmitting. If it were, it would give the others his position. It was worth taking along. He bent down and picked up his stick, then turned and went back for the puck. It took him several minutes to find it; he spent the whole time muttering angrily. When he located the puck he started off again toward the Stinger goal, holding his stick left-handed, stick-handling the puck across the ice. He was too confused to realize that he could simply have carried the puck in his left hand, that he didn’t need to obey the rules of hockey: for Václav Zajac, that game ought to have been over. But his thoughts were sluggish and wrapped in a kind of muffling peace. At intervals a great, sharp, piercing pain broke through the fog, the first tentative bits of the massive anguish to come. Clumsily, holding the hockey stick in the crook of his right elbow and guiding it with his left hand, Zajac maneuvered the puck toward the indifferent horizon.
Zajac wandered in the dream delirium that accompanies serious bodily trauma. He patted the puck along, directing all of his attention to that small chore, forgetting for the moment what had happened to him and where he was going. The only thing that seemed to matter was nudging that neoprene puck forward in a straight line. At one point he assembled his senses enough to ask himself why this task was so vital. He had no ready response. It had something to do with the game. He recalled the game well enough, and the team and the station. He tried to imagine what everyone was doing back aboard the station. He wondered if they were following his progress, if they were excited or concerned or completely bored. The game must mean very little to the others aboard the station, he realized. To them it was only a pattern of glowing points of color on a two-dimensional map. How involved could they be with that? The action was rapid, as the orange dot sped toward one end of the rectangle or the other. But there was no indication that these points of light even presented living players. As far as the people on the station knew, the hockey team may never actually have been delivered to the surface of Niflhel. The games might really be played at a keyboard console in another room.
