“You’re a fine girl, Eva,” Dan said.
“Thanks,” she answered low. “However, it’s another girl on your mind, isn’t it?”
“And Ralph. And Bill.”
“Mainly her. Right?”
Brought up in his stepfather’s tradition that a man should not reveal his private feelings to the world, Dan had to struggle for a moment before he could nod and say: “Yes.”
“Well, she is beautiful.” Eva spoke without tone. “And a very charming, gracious person. But a wife for you?”
“We… haven’t discussed that… yet.”
“You’ve been giving it some mighty serious thought. And so has she.”
His heart stumbled. “I don’t know about her.”
“I do. The way her look dwells on you, the voice she speaks in when you are there—it’s obvious.” Eva bit her lip. “Is either of you in earnest, though? Truly?”
He thought of long talks, of hikes and horseback rides across her father’s lands, of dances in Wolfe Hall and afterward walking her home under frosty stars and hasty Sohrab and the bronze light of Raksh upon a clangorous river. There had been kisses, no more; there had been words like, “Hey, you know, I like you,” no more. Yet he had felt that when he came to dinner, her parents (and Ralph, her brother, who shared her blond good looks and sunny temperament) were studying him with a certain amiable intensity.
She herself? “I’m not sure,” he sighed. “They’ve got such a… a different style on High America.”
Eva nodded. “It might not count as a decent-sized village on earth,” she said, “but Anchor is where most of the population on Rustum centers, and where the industry and wealth and culture are. The alpine hinterland may be sparsely settled, but essentially it’s been tamed. People have leisure for fine manners. They may even be overcultivating that kind of thing, as a reaction against the early hardships. Meanwhile, we’re the raw frontier folk.”
“You’re hinting at a social gap? No, the Lochabers aren’t snobs. Nor are we yokels. We’re scientists, carrying out research that is both interesting and necessary.”
“Granted. I don’t want to exaggerate. Still, it was getting to know those friends of yours—a sort of overnight intimacy that never quite happens in their own safe environment—that drove home to me the fact that there is a difference.”
He could not kiss Mary at Moondance. A glassite bulb sealed off her head, maintaining an air pressure that was normal for her. The same pressure was kept in the station’s one small guesthouse; but it took discouragingly long to go through its decompression chamber when one’s own lungs were full of lowland atmosphere. Anyway, she shared it with her brother.
But there were rich compensations. At last he could show her something of his world, that overwhelmingly greatest part of the planet she had known only from reading, pictures, a few stereotyped tours, and his words. During five magical days, she and Ralph could wander with him and Eva through the templelike vastness, intricacy, and serenity of the woods, or go ahorseback on a laughing breakneck hunt, or see how biological engineering joined slowly with hard work and patience to make the soil bear fruit for man, or….
Rakshlight glimmered on the curve of her helmet and the long fair tresses within. It made a rocking bridge across the waters, which lapped against the boat louder and more chucklingly clear than ever waves did in the highlands. Wind had died, though coolness still breathed through the summer air, and the sail stood ghostly. That didn’t matter. Neither he nor she were in any hurry to return.
She asked him: “Where does the name Moondance come from?”
“Well,” he said, “the lake’s big enough to show tides when Raksh is as close as now; and then the reflections gleam and flash around the way you see.”
She caught his hand. “I was thinking,” she murmured, “it ought to be Moon-Dan’s. Yours. To me it always will be. What you’re doing is so great.”
“Oh, really,” he stammered. “I’m just a servant. I mean, the scientists give me instrument packages to plant and collect, experiments and observations to carry out, and I follow orders. That’s all.”
“That is not all, as you perfectly well know. You’re the one who has to cope and improvise and invent, in the face of unending surprises. Without your kind of people we’d forever be prisoners on a few narrow mountaintops. How I wish I could be one of you!”
“Me too,” he blurted.
Was she suddenly as half-frightened as he? She was quick to ask: “Where did Ralph and Eva go?”
He retreated likewise into the casual: “I’m not sure. Wherever, I’d guess their flit will pass over the Cyrus Valley. She’s mighty taken by your car. She’s been faunching to try it out under rough conditions. The updrafts there——”
Her tone grew anxious. “Is that safe?”
“Sure, yes. Eva’s an expert pilot, qualified to fly any vehicle at any air density. This model of yours can’t handle much unlike the H-17, can it? It’s only a modification.” Because there was around him the splendor of his country, he had to add: “You know, Mary, what worries me is not how well the craft performs, but what its engine may signify. I’ve read books about what fossil fuels did to the environment on Earth, and here you’re re-introducing the petroleum burner.”
She was briefly taken aback. “Haven’t you heard?” A laugh. “I guess not. You seem to have other things on your mind when you visit us. Well, the idea is not to replace the hydrogen engine permanently. But petroleum systems are easier to build, with far fewer man-hours; mainly because of fuel storage, you know. Dad thinks he can manufacture and sell them for the rest of his lifetime. By then, there should be enough industrial plants on Rustum that it’ll be feasible to go back to a hydrogen economy. A few hundred oil-fired power plants, operating for thirty or forty years, won’t do measurable harm.”
“I see. Good. Not that I’m too surprised. Your brother was telling me yesterday about the work he does in his spare time, drilling into children how they must not repeat the old mistakes….” Again he skirted too near the thing that was uppermost in his heart. “Uh, by the way, you mentioned wanting to see more of the lowlands on your way home, if you could get a pilot who can safely take you off the mapped and beaconed route. Well, I may have found one.”
She leaned close. Her gaze filled with moonlight. “You, Dan?”
He shook his head ruefully. “No. I wish it were, but I’m afraid I’ve taken too much time off from work as is. Like Eva. However, Bill Svoboda is about due for a vacation and——”
The three of them had flown away into silence.
Eva’s yell cut like a sword. “There!”
She swung the car around so the chassis groaned and brought it to hover on autopilot, a hundred meters aloft and jets angled outward. Dan strained against the cabin canopy, flattening his nose till tears blurred vision and he noticed the pain that had brought them forth. His heart slugged.
“They’re alive,” he uttered. “They don’t seem hurt.” Mutely, his companion passed him his binoculars. He mastered the shaking of his hands and focused on the survivors below him and the scene around them.
Mountains made a rim of russet-and-buff woods, darkling palisades, around a valley shaped like a wide bowl. Save for isolated trees, it was open ground, its turquoise grass rippling and shimmering in wind. A pool near the middle threw back cloud images. That must have been what first attracted the terasaur.
They numbered some thirty adults, five meters or more of dark-green scaliness from blunt snouts to heavy tails, the barrels of their bodies so thick that they looked merely grotesque until you saw one of them break into a run and felt the earthquake shudder it made. Calves and yearlings accompanied them; further developed than Terrestrial reptiles, they cared for their young. The swathe they had grazed through the woods ran plain to see from the south. Doubtless Bill Svoboda had identified and followed it just as Eva had been doing.
A hill lifted out of the meadowland. On its grassy lower sloper the other vehic
le had landed, in order to observe the herd at a respectful distance. Not that terasaur were quick to attack. Except for bulls in rut, they had no need to be aggressive. But neither had they reason to be careful of pygmies who stood in their way.
“What’s happening?” Eva breathed. “They never act like this—in summer, anyhow.”
“They’re doing it, though.” Dan’s words were as jerky as hers.
The car from Anchor was not totally beyond recognition. Tough alloys and synthetics went into any machine built for Rustum. But nothing in the crumpled, smashed, shattered, and scattered ruin was worth salvage. Fuel still oozed from one tank not altogether beaten apart. The liquid added darkness to a ground that huge feet had trampled into mud. Now and then a beast would cross that slipperiness, fall, rise besmeared and roaring to fling itself still more violently into the chaos.
The hillcrest around which the herd ramped was naked stone, thrusting several meters up like a gray cockscomb. There the three humans had scrambled for refuge. The berserk animals couldn’t follow them, though often a bull would try, thunder-bawling as he flung himself at the steeps, craned his great wattled neck and snapped his jaws loud enough for Dan to hear through all the distance and tumult. Otherwise the terasaur milled about, bellowed, fought each other with tushes, forelegs, battering tails, lurched away exhausted and bleeding till strength came back to seek a fresh enemy. Several lay dead, or dying with dreadful red slowness, in clouds of carrion bugs.
Females seemed less crazed. They hung about on the fringes of the rioting giants and from time to time galloped clamoring in circles. Terrified and forgotten, the calves huddled by the pool.
High overhead, light seeping through clouds burnished the wings of two spearfowl that waited for their own chance to feast.
“I’d guess—well, this has got to be the way it was,” Dan said. “Bill set down where you see. The herd, or some individual members, wandered close. That seemed interesting, no cause for alarm. Probably all three were well away from the car, looking for a good camera angle. Then suddenly came the charge. It was a complete surprise; and you know what speed a terasaur can put on when it wants. They had no time to reach the car and get airborne. They were lucky to make it up onto the rock, where they’ve been trapped ever since.”
“How are they, do you think?” Eva asked.
“Alive, at least. What a nightmare, clinging to those little handholds in darkness, hearing the roars and screams, feeling the rock shiver underneath them! And no air helmets. I wonder why that.”
“I daresay they figured they could dispense with apparatus for the short time they planned to be here.”
“Still, they’d’ve had the nuisance of cycling through pressure change.” Dan spoke absently, nearly his whole attention on the scene that filled the lenses. At the back of his mind flickered the thought that, if this had gone on for as many hours as evidently was the case, the herd would have wiped itself out by now had it not been handicapped by darkness.
“Well,” Eva was saying, “Ralph told me more than once how he longed to really experience the lowlands, if only for a few breaths.” Her fist struck the control panel, a soft repeated thud. “Oh, God, the barrier between us!”
“Yes. Mary remarked the same to me. Except I always had too much else to show her and try to make her see the beauty of——”
Bill Svoboda was on his feet, waving. The glasses were powerful; Dan saw how haggard, grimed, and unkempt the man was. Mary looked better. But then, he thought, she would forever. She must in fact be worse off, that bright head whirling and ready to split with pain, that breast a kettle of fire… together with hunger, thirst, weariness, terror. She kept seated on her perch, sometimes feebly waving an arm. Her brother stayed sprawled.
“Ralph’s the sickest, seems like,” Dan went on. “He must be the one most liable to pressure intoxication.”
“Let me see!” Eva ripped the binoculars from him.
“Ouch,” he said. “Can I have my fingers back, please?”
“This is no time for jokes, Dan Coffin.”
“No. I guess not. Although——” He gusted a sigh. “They are alive. No permanent harm done, I’m sure.” Relief went through him in such a wave of weakness that he must sit down.
“There will be, if we don’t get them to a proper atmosphere in… how long? A few hours?” Eva lowered the binoculars. “Well, doubtless a vehicle can arrive from High America before then, if we radio and somebody there acts promptly.”
Dan glanced up at her. Sweat glistened on her face, she breathed hard, and he had rarely seen her this pale. But her jaw was firm and she spoke on a rising note of joy.
“Huh?” he said. “What kind of vehicle would that be?”
“We’d better take a minute to think about it.” She jackknifed herself into the chair beside his. Her smile was bleak. “Ironic, hm? This colony’s had no problems of war or crime—and now, what I’d give for a fighter jet!”
“I don’t understand—No, wait. You mean to kill the terasaur?”
“What else? A laser cannon fired from above… Aw, no use daydreaming about military apparatus that doesn’t exist on Rustum. What do you think about dropping a lot of fulgurite sticks? Bill’s dad can supply them from his iron mine.” She grimaced and lifted a hand. “I know. A cruel method of slaughter. Most of the beasts’ll be disabled only. Well, though, suppose as soon as our friends have been taken off, suppose a couple of agile men go afoot and put the creatures out of their misery with some such tool as a shaped-charge drill gun.”
Shocked, he exclaimed: “You’d destroy the entire herd?”
“I’m afraid we must,” she sighed. “After all, it’s gone crazy.”
“Why has it? We’ve got to find that out, Eva. Otherwise somebody else’ll get caught by the same thing, and might not survive.”
She nodded.
“I doubt if we can learn the cause from a lot of mangled dead meat,” he told her.
“We can arrange experiments on other herds, later.”
“To what effect? Look at the damage here. We could wipe out the terasaur in this entire region. They aren’t common; nothing so big can be. But it appears they’re mighty damn important to the ecology. Have you seen Joe de Smet’s paper on how they control firebrush? That’s a single item. It’d be strange if there aren’t more that we haven’t discovered yet.” Dan gulped. “Besides, they’re, oh, wonderful,” he said through the tumult below. “I’ve seen them pass by in dawn mists, more silent than sunrise….”
Eva regarded him unbelievingly, until she whispered: “Are you serious? Would you risk Mary Lochaber’s life, and two more, to save a few animals?”
“Oh, no. Of course not.”
“Then what do you propose?”
“Isn’t it obvious? We carry field gear, including a winch and plenty of rope. Lower a line, make them fast, and we’ll crank them right up into this car.”
She sat for an instant, examining his idea with a fair-mindedness he well knew, before the red head shook. “No,” she said. “We can’t hover close, or our jet turbulence may knock them right off that precarious perch. Then we’d have to drop the line from our present altitude. This is a windy day; the hill’s causing updrafts. I don’t expect the end of a rope could come anywhere near—unless we weight it. But then we’ve made a pendulum for the wind to toss around, and very possibly to brain someone or knock him loose. See what tiny slanty spaces they’ve got to cling to, and think how weakened they are by now.”
“Right,” he answered, “except for one factor. That weight isn’t going to be any unmanageable lump. It’s going to be me.”
She nearly screamed. One hand flew to her opened mouth. “Dan, no! Please!”
Lowland air need not move fast to have a mighty thrust. And the topography here made for more flaws, gusts, and whirlings than was common. To control the winch, Eva had to leave the car on autopilot, which meant it lurched about worse than when hovering under her skilled hands. Dan swung, spun, was y
anked savagely up and let drop again, scythed through dizzy arcs, like the clapper of a bell tolled by a lunatic.
The winds thundered and shrilled. Through his skull beat the brawl of jets aimed to slant past him, groundward. Below him the terasaur bellowed and trampled a drumfire out of the earth. Knotted around his waist, the line wouldn’t let him fall, but with every motion it dug bruisingly into his belly muscles. He grasped it above his head, to exert some control, and the shivers along it tore at his palms and thrummed in his shoulders. An animal rankness boiled up from the herd, into his nostrils and lungs. He didn’t know if that or the gyring made him giddy.
Here came the rock!
Two meters above, he swept through a quarter circle. “Lower away!” he cried futilely. His partner understood, however, and let out some extra rope. His boots reached for solidity. All at once the car stumbled in an air pocket. He fell, snapped to a halt, and saw the cliff face rush toward him. He was about to be dashed against it.
He heaved himself around the cord till he stretched horizontally outward. The curve of his passage whistled him centimeters above bone-shattering impact. He caught a glimpse of Bill Svoboda, wildly staring, and folded his legs in bare time to keep from striking the man.
Then he was past, and swarming up the rope. On the return arc, the soles of his boots made contact with the stone. He let them brake by friction. It rattled his teeth, but it practically stopped his swinging. The next touch, on the next sway of the pendulum bob—which was himself—came slow and easy. He got his footing and stood among his friends.
Immediately, Eva released more rope. Hanging loosely now, it couldn’t haul him back if the car should suddenly rise. He sank to the rock and spent a minute sweating, panting, and shuddering.
He noticed Bill crouched at his side. “Are you all right?” the other man babbled. “Lord, what a thing! You might’ve been killed! Why’d you do it? We could’ve held out till—”
New America Page 5
