His flailing arm struck something hard. Fingers closed on a knurled butt. Hardly knowing what he did, he pulled Svoboda’s gun from its holster. He slapped the younger man’s temple with the barrel. Svoboda cursed, let go Coffin’s weapon and snatched after his own. Coffin hit him behind the ear with the freed pistol.
Svoboda sagged. Coffin was able to break his grasp and wriggle from beneath him. They lay close by each other, their faces buried in grass and soil. A leathery-winged animal flew low to investigate.
The guns in his hands brought Coffin alert first. He dragged himself beyond range of any sudden attack. Eventually he was able to stand again. By that time Svoboda was sitting up. The miner was white in the face. Blood matted his hair and trickled down his neck. He regarded Coffin without speaking, for so long a time that the latter thought he must be seriously hurt.
‘Are you all right?’ Coffin whispered.
His words could not have crossed through the wind, but Svoboda must have understood. ‘Yes. I think so. But you?’
‘I wasn’t hurt. Not to matter.’ The pistols sagged. Svoboda began to rise. Coffin jerked both weapons back toward him. ‘Don’t move!’
‘Have you gone out of your wits?’ Svoboda rasped.
‘No. I have to do this. I don’t expect you’ll ever pardon me. Take it to court when we get home. I’ll pay any compensation I can. But don’t you see, Danny has got to be found. And you’d end the search.’ Exhausted, Coffin broke off.
‘We never will get home this way,’ Svoboda said. ‘You’ve gone crazy. Recognize it. Give me those guns.’
‘No.’ Coffin couldn’t take his eyes off the blood in Svoboda’s hair. And the gray streaks. Svoboda was also aging. We are one flesh, you and I, Coffin wanted to say. I know your fear and loneliness and weariness, your memory of being young and your puzzlement at youth being a memory, your dimming hope of one more hope before the inescapable moment. These are mine, too. Why have we hated each other? But he couldn’t say it.
‘What do you want?’ Svoboda asked. ‘How long do we have to fumble about before you’ll agree the boy is dead?’
‘A few days,’ Coffin begged. He wanted to weep, the tears stung his eyes, but he had forgotten how. ‘I couldn’t say for sure. We’ll have to decide. Later.’
Svoboda watched him unmovingly. The thing with pterodactyl wings brayed at them: hurry up and die, will you? Finally Svoboda unhitched his canteen, washed himself and took a long drink.
‘I may as well admit I was figuring to swipe your gun tomorrow,’ he said. Wryness bent his lips upward.
‘Must I tie you before I sleep?’ Coffin groaned.
‘Can you, even? I’m stronger than you. Put your weapons aside to tie me and see what happens.’
Grimness returned. There are ways to get around that,’ Coffin said. ‘You’ll prepare slip knots under my direction, and put yourself into them. Now, march!’
Svoboda started south. Coffin followed at a safe distance. This direction was a slightly better bet than northward. Danny would have preferred the wind at the back, if he’d come this far. If that flying creature hadn’t come directly from eating him. No! Such thoughts were forbidden.
It was easier to walk along the gorge than in the forest. Soon Coffin fell into the rhythm. His consciousness withdrew from pain and thirst and hunger and the mockery of the wind. He only needed his feet, his guns, one eye for the edge of the downslope and one for Svoboda. Dimly he noticed how often he stumbled, and how a slow darkening began to creep over the sky, but none of it was real. He himself wasn’t real, he didn’t exist, he never had, nothing existed but the search.
Until his radio-locator antenna swung about and pointed.
8
By the time they had slanted across ten kilometers of canyonside, they had fallen better than one more kilometer in altitude and were not far above sea level. The ache of body had almost disappeared in the blurring of mind. They slipped and staggered, fell, rolled over, reeled back to their feet and stared foolishly at blood where some rocks had cut their skin. Once Coffin asked, ‘Is drunkenness like this?’
‘Sort of,’ answered Svoboda. He tried to steady the horizon. But the horizon was above him, a wall, its ramparts luminous, the lower courses black with approaching night. How idiotic to be underneath the horizon.
‘Why does anybody get drunk?’ Coffin clutched his head, as if to keep it from flying off.
‘I don’t.’ Svoboda heard his voice ring from wall to canyon wall, prophetic, a bell as big as the world, ‘Not often … jus’ a glow on—’ Nausea seized him. He went on his knees. Coffin held him while he retched. They continued.
In the end they came to a crag which jutted out of the grass, straight into the wind, thirty meters of gray stone like some heathen monolith. High above, where the evening light caught its wings and made them shine, a giant spear-fowl hovered. As the men went past the rock, the locator antenna swiveled backward.
Coffin stopped. ‘Can you read uh dial?’ he asked. ‘M’ eyes uh blurred.’
Svoboda squinted close. It was as if he saw the intensity meter through running water. Each time he tried to see where the needle was, it rippled. Sometimes the dial was close, infinitely close, a white planet with Mystery written on its face. Then it receded to infinite distances. A fever hum came out of it and filled the universe, whose walls crumbled, letting the galaxies spill forth into nothingness.
Svoboda persisted. He lay in wait, cat at a mousehole. Eventually as he had foreseen, the meter stopped rippling for a second. He pounced. The reading was at maximum. Danny was here.
Svoboda ran around the pinnacle, calling. The base had a circumference of about seventy meters, buried in talus heaps. When he found Coffin again, he could only sit down, gasp, and point toward the top.
‘He’s up there?’ Coffin repeated the question stupidly for a long while. ‘He’s up there? He’s up there?’
Svoboda got out some stimpills. They had already taken so many that their hearts made their ribs tremble. These last nearly tore them apart. But their heads cleared somewhat. They could talk coherently, even think a little. They shouted and fired their guns. Nothing responded except the wind. The spearfowl made circles in heaven.
Coffin raised his binoculars. After a minute, wordless, he handed them to Svoboda and stood slump-backed. They brought the top of the spire close, and served as night glasses in this failing light. A litter of twigs, grass, and boughs extended over the upper edge.
‘A nest,’ Svoboda said. Horror touched him and would not let go.
‘Must belong to that bird yonder,’ said Coffin in a drained voice. ‘We must have scared the bird off as we approached.’
‘Well—’
Svoboda couldn’t go on. Coffin astonished him by speaking it: ‘The bird got Danny, or found him dead somewhere in this area. His bones are in that nest.’
His face was a blur in the gloom, but Svoboda saw the hand he extended. ‘Jan,’ he said, his tone begun to crack, ‘I’m sorry I pulled a gun on you. I’m sorry for everything.’
‘That’s okay.’ Svoboda took the hand. They didn’t release each other for a while.
‘Well,’ said Coffin finally, ‘we can’t do more. Perhaps when O’Malley gets back from Iskandria he can take an aircar and see if there’s anything left for burial.’
‘I’m afraid there won’t be, if the big spearfowl clean out their nests periodically the way the highland species does.’
‘No matter. Not really. For Teresa’s sake, I wish we could have buried him. But God will still raise him up on the last day.’ There was no comfort in the words. Coffin turned. ‘We’d better see if we can get to the canyon brink before dark. We mustn’t stay long at this altitude. I’m getting intoxicated again.’
Svoboda saw how he stooped and stumbled, and never understood what made him say, ‘No, wait.’
‘Eh?’ Coffin asked like an old man.
‘We’ve come this far. Let’s not leave the job unfinished. This rock should be climbable.�
�
Coffin shook his head. ‘I can’t. I’m not able. I can hardly keep my feet.’
Svoboda dumped his pack on the ground and squatted beside it. ‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘I am younger – have a smidgin of energy left. I can get there and back in half an hour or less. That still leaves time for us to reach the canyon top before it’s quite dark at that level. Those clouds diffuse sunlight so much that dusk lasts for hours.’
‘No, Jan. You mustn’t. Judith—’
‘Where’s that obscenity rope?’
‘Jan, wait till tomorrow, at least.’ Coffin seized him by the shoulders. ‘We’ll come back here tomorrow.’
‘I told you, by tomorrow there may be nothing left. We’d never know for sure. Here, strap this flashlight on my wrist. Where are those soles?’
Svoboda had mounted several meters before he really started wondering why. Surely this made no sense! In the deepening twilight he could scarcely see the roughnesses over which he climbed, except where the flashbeam fell. Descent would be easy enough: he’d drive an explosive piton, hang a rope from it, and slide. He could even lower a bundle of that which lay in the nest. But the ascent was dangerous. He hadn’t seen from below just how eroded the crag was. Uneven, it offered foot- and hand-holds everywhere – but rotten rock, that kept breaking under his fingers. This was the only possible face to climb, in fact, Everywhere else, whole sections had crumbled and fallen, to make shard piles at the base and leave scars up which a moonfly could hardly go. If a few tons of stone loosened under his weight, ten or twenty meters aloft, that was the end of Jan Svoboda.
Why? To recover some bones? They didn’t need him. Judith and the children did. His children, not someone else’s foundling.
A knob came loose in his hand. He released it and heard it go bouncing down. Blackness lay under his boots. While he crept higher, night had gulped the bottom of the crag, drowned Coffin, submerged the grasses and boulders; now it rose swiftly toward him. Was the top of the rock already in darkness? Or was that due to the vertigo which began to seize him? He looked at the stone, centimeters from his nose. It rippled. His head buzzed. He kept climbing because it was easier to drag himself onward than to think.
Until he came to a freshly made break. For twice a man’s height above him, the crag turned lighter in hue and vertical. There were only two or three meters to go beyond that, but the top might as well have been on Raksh. Svoboda had exactly two pitons. They wouldn’t let him span the gap.
He clung to his place. A gust of wind hooted in his ear and yanked at him. Finally his nerves steadied enough that he could open his eyes. I did my best. The thought was such a liberation that he understood why Coffin had drawn a gun and why he himself, Jan Svoboda, would have done likewise had his own son been lost. But here was the end. He took a piton from his belt, chose a spot with care – he didn’t want to start another rockslide – and pressed the button.
In this air, the detonation was a thunderclap. Except for his spikes, he would have fallen. He wrung the dizziness out of his brain and made the rope’s end fast to the iron. A fireman’s slide back to earth, a few minutes’ rest, and then the long march toward a pressure so low that he dared sleep.
O God, how he could sleep! Thirty hours would hardly be a wink.
‘Father—’
Svoboda jerked. No9 he gibbered. I can’t be that far gone. I mustn’t be. I didn’t imagine it. I only imagined I imagined it.
‘Father! Father?’
Danny looked over the brim of the nest.
Against the violet sky, where nothing lived but the bird of prey, his face showed startlingly white. The flashbeam revealed him thin and scratched and filthy, one eye black, blood clotted under the nose, and only rags remained of his shirt. Yet Danny Coffin looked out and cried for his father.
Svoboda shouted.
Danny began to weep. He sought to crawl down. Svoboda forced him back with curses. ‘Crazy damn idiot, can’t you see that scar, you’d fall and break your stupid neck! What happened, in hell’s name? How’d you get there?’
The crying spell didn’t last long. Danny hadn’t many tears left. When he began to speak, he soon stopped snuffling and hiccoughing. Toward the end, his parched little voice was more clear than Svoboda’s, and the answers he gave made more sense than the questions he was asked.
He had ventured into the Cleft in the runaway mood the adults had guessed. It evaporated in the course of descending through the clouds. When he reached the waterfall, cold, wet, and hungry, with night coming on, he had been quite prepared to turn back and take his punishment. But the two spearfowl attacked him. He fled down the ledge. A providential combination of fog and wind and rapidly gathering darkness kept the birds from pursuing him, once he had dodged their first clumsy rushes. But he dared not return. They might be waiting for him at the head of the trail – or so he thought in his panic. He continued in the other direction, groping on hands and knees till he collapsed, waking and continuing, until after some fraction of eternity he emerged in the woods. Dawn found him completely lost and famished. Some fruits and berries which looked different from the poison kinds at home attracted him. When he didn’t get ill from them, he resolved to live off that sort exclusively till his foster father came. But this meant that he must keep moving, looking for more. He slept in trees or thornbrakes, drank from streams.
The eventual difficulty of finding water drove him into this gorge, toward the river. A big animal with tusks had seen him and given chase. He scurried to this rock and went up. Yes, it had broken under his feet; he grabbed a crack in time to save himself. The slide had frightened away the animal but left him trapped. Exhausted, he went to sleep. He must have slept right through the shouting and shooting below. The nearby crack of the piton charge had woken him.
‘No, Mr. Svoboda, my head don’t hurt, ‘cep’ where I hit it. I’m awful thirsty, but I’m not sick or nothing. Please, can you get me down to my father?’
As if in a dream Svoboda remembered someone remarking, somewhere, sometime, that Danny appeared to have an unusual carbon-dioxide tolerance. He must have, to get this far. To survive for an Earthly week under such conditions. He’d made a perfectly natural initial mistake, but once in the forest, he had kept Ids head as well as any adult. Better than most. Yes, absolutely better, thought Svoboda in his own drugged stupor. Danny’s brain had stayed clear.
Danny’s luck had held, too. The spearfowl was absent when he climbed into its nest and fell asleep. It didn’t return from hunting till the men were so close that it wasn’t about to land without inspecting these strange new animals. If they left, or if it decided they were harmless, it would come down.
And kill the boy.
‘Please, Mr. Svoboda! My father’s waiting’! I know he is! Please, I’m so awful thirsty, can’t you help me?’
Svoboda stood on a tiny jut of rock, clinging to his rope. For a moment he hefted the extra piton. If he could throw that up, to be driven into the stone with a line attached – No. He couldn’t make any such cast from here, where it was impossible to swing his arm properly. Still less could he throw the piton, or a lasso, or anything, from the ground. A crossbow or catapult? No, where would he find materials to make one in appreciably less time than it would take to hike back to the settlement for help? Useable cord didn’t grow ready-made in the woods.
The spearfowl soared closer.
Defeat rose in Svoboda’s throat like vomit. He told the knowledge over and over, a kind of litany to the malevolent God who had arranged matters in precisely this way. Sure, I can lie in wait till the bird comes near enough to shoot. But what then? We still can’t reach the kid. Even if we started straight back home and traveled the whole night without stopping – which is not physically possible – and brought an aircraft which the winds didn’t smash against a mountainside – even if we did, it would take fifty hours or more. The kid’s dehydrated already. Listen to that mummy voice.
Which is best, to let the spearfowl get him, or to let h
im die of thirst?
‘Please, please! I’m sorry I ran away. I won’t do it any more. Where’s my father?’ Danny’s words trailed off in a dry rattle. He slumped at the edge of the nest. The wind tossed his hair and the tatters of his shirt like wild flags.
Through the querning in his skull, Svoboda heard a scrabble below him. He heard Coffin call, ‘Danny, Danny,’ and thought crazily the name was Absalom. Coffin couldn’t make it up. He hadn’t the strength. Svoboda couldn’t go further. Danny couldn’t climb down. Only the spearfowl was able to move. Impatient, it was nearing the crag in long spirals at whose lowest point the beak and the steel-gray feathers could be seen and the whistling heard in its pinions. Even through the wind, Svoboda could hear that whistle.
It came to him what he must do. Perhaps there was a better answer, an easy means of rescue, but his brain was too fogged to discover it. Danny lay still. By now, with the flashbeam off him, he was a black hump on the blackly silhouetted crag. Svoboda’s free hand closed on the gun Coffin had returned. The butt felt heavy even before he had drawn. A snap shot, one merciful bullet into that hump. No more would be needed. The search would be at an end. Svoboda could go down the rope.
The ground was completely black under his feet. ‘Danny,’ Coffin called once more. The rubble at the pinnacle base clattered as he slid back. ‘Jan, what can we do?’
Svoboda snicked the safety catch free but didn’t draw his gun yet. He faced the wind, hoping the poison smoke would be blown out of his head, but the wind scorned him with dust in his eyes. He heard the spearfowl swoop closer still. Once it cried, a clear bugling that echoed from rocks which the night had overflowed. When he looked, he saw the great wings were still high enough in the canyon that they shone.
Why should the spearfowl not have him? he thought wildly. Why shouldn’t it have us all? It belongs here, its strong and beautiful, we’re the monsters from outer space, trying to take its home away. Come on down, vulture-beaked God. I’ll give him to you.
An answer struck.
Orbit Unlimited Page 16
