assess the ramp more closely. “We’ll take a quick breather and then start on down.” Terran didn’t even answer, instead wandering over to Keller.
“What the hell is he on about?” he muttered, not really expecting an answer.
Keller looked at him and sighed. “Take a glass and fill it only half way to the top with water. Upon seeing this, an optimistic man might say that the glass is half full. A pessimistic man would see the glass as half empty. The captain just chooses to see things from a positive point of view, that’s all”.
“There’s nothing positive about this situation,” Terran grumbled and walked off. Keller just shrugged.
When Jurac returned to the sled, Keller was sitting up with the thermal unit on his lap and a flask of water thawing on it. “The water was frozen, Skipper, I thought you’d want a drink so I started thawing some out.” Jurac knelt down and patted him on the shoulder.
Jurac drove the tent pole into the snow several feet back from the edge and wound the rope around it several times, handing it to Terran. “You ready?” he asked. The other man just nodded. As Terran slowly let the rope out, Jurac started guiding the sled down the incline, handling it over the smaller ice outcroppings and steering it as best he could around the larger, insurmountable ones. He had to be careful, his feet kept knocking loose snow and ice away and he slipped several times, grabbing onto the sled on each occasion. Keller did his best to be of assistance, pointing out the sharp spikes of ice, places to tread, grabbing hold of Jurac each time he slipped. It was slow going but eventually the rope ran out and Jurac secured the sled with another pole while Terran came carefully down to join them.
They repeated the process three times before they were down. On their second time Terran's passage down to them started a small avalanche, bouncing ice chunks off Jurac and the sled. On the last leg the pole pulled free suddenly, sending the sled on a bumpy, hair-raising ten meter speed ride with Jurac clinging onto the side for life and limb, until it fetched up against a large ice spire. Half of their supplies went spilling out everywhere and Keller almost followed them. Aside from that incident, the group made it to the bottom largely intact and after a short rest they started back along the glacial cliff base, heading out onto the snowfields to avoid the avalanches of falling ice.
It was mid morning on the third day, a daily cycle on this planet being thirty-six hours, give or take, when Jurac halted them for a rest. They were still on the snowfields and yesterday the blizzard had started again and didn’t look to be having any inclination towards easing up. Visibility was reduced to a gusty white meter and a half.
Exhausted, Jurac sank down beside Keller on the sled. He was pale and gaunt, dark circles ringed his eyes and stubble covered his chin. It hurt Keller deep inside every time he saw his captain and friend, and the toll it was taking on him. Terran, not looking much better, sank down beside him. The journey was taking much longer than any of them had imagined, so they’d started rationing the food and this was adding to their fatigue.
As soon as Jurac had called for a stop, Keller had set about getting the thermal unit ready to thaw out the water and ration bars as usual. This time, however, Jurac noticed Keller staring at the little machine in concentration, shaking it a couple of times then pressing the buttons again. Finally he turned a pained, frightened look on Jurac. “The thermal unit, it’s broken,” he said.
“Perhaps the battery is run down,” Jurac replied.
Keller shook his head inside his helmet. “I replaced it at our last stop, it’s brand new. It must be the cold affecting the unit”.
“It’s more likely that the cold is killing our batteries,” Terran spoke up. “The same thing will happen to our suit batteries.”
“What do we do now?” Keller asked.
Quietly, after a minute's silence Jurac said, “We push on. Hopefully we can fix the unit or figure something else out when we make camp tonight.” He tiredly got to his feet and with Terran following picked up the rope and began to pull the sled along once more.
It was beginning to get dark again when Jurac finally halted; deciding to call it quits for the day and set up camp. No one had spoken for the last three hours and even before that it had been only Terran's intermittent whining, so Jurac didn’t register the silence as anything to be concerned about. He tiredly dropped the rope and headed back to the sled. “We’ll set up here, continue in the morning,” he huffed.
As he approached the sled he immediately saw something was wrong. Keller wasn’t sitting up as usual, busying himself with readying the tent and other supplies, doing his limited best to be helpful. Instead he was just lying there, motionless.
“Keller?” Jurac called and quickened his pace. Terran turned at the nervous, worried tone of Jurac’s voice. Keller didn’t answer. As he got close enough to see clearly he noticed the faceplate on Keller’s helmet was open.
“Keller!” he shouted this time, running the last few steps and falling down beside the prone man. “Oh Jesus, no, Keller?”
Keller’s face was blue, his eyes mercifully were closed. Breathing heavily over his suit com, Terran slammed down beside Jurac. “Christ, his suit heater is off!” He looked at Jurac, eyes wide and a little wild. Jurac didn’t have to feel for a pulse or look at the suit’s bio readouts. One touch of Keller's cheek, which was hard and unyielding, confirmed the obvious. He must have been dead for the last hour or so.
“Why would he do it?” Terran mumbled.
Maybe because he was sick of your whining, Jurac thought maliciously. He didn’t say anything though, just shook his head sadly.
“Captain, look,” Terran said, pointing. There was something written on the sleeve of Keller’s suit. Jurac read it. ‘Use my suit to keep the batteries and food warm, good bye Captain and good luck’.
A couple of tears wound their way down Jurac’s cheeks and he couldn’t wipe them away through his faceplate. “You didn’t have to do this,” he whispered thickly. “We would have worked something out.” He gazed down at his dead friend’s face with a sorrow more painful than anything this cursed planet could throw at him.
Several minutes passed in total silence save for the constant howling of the wind before Terran finally spoke up. “Well, at least we’ll make better time now, have a better chance of coming out of this mess alive.”
Jurac cut his gaze to him, eyes colder than the surrounding mountain peaks. “Well what do you know? You can say something positive when you try!” he snarled, then got up and grabbed the tent, stalking off to set it up, acutely and painfully aware that deep down he too was a little relieved.
It had been five days since the loss of Keller when Jurac glanced up ahead of them and caught sight of something strange through the shifting snow. The blizzard had been with them the entire time, winding down now and then but never fully stopping as it had on that first morning.
They had taken Keller out of his suit and laid him to rest in a shallow snow grave the pair had scooped out with their gloved hands. Jurac would have liked to have left a marker of some kind but they’d had nothing to use, and it probably would have just blown away anyhow. Jurac had spoken a few words over the body and the next morning they'd headed off again with Keller’s suit full of batteries, food and water. The heaters kept it all warm.
Jurac squinted and wiped at his helmet visor. What was that? Something dark and angular was standing up out of the snow plain, with a uniform symmetry about it. Whatever it was, it lay slightly off their course to the right. Nevertheless, having had nothing except whiteness to look at for the past five days, curiosity got the better of him and he veered toward it. It wouldn’t be much of a detour anyway.
The huge grey tail fin rose up out of the snow, towering thirty meters above their heads and canted slightly to one side. Buried deep beneath them in the snow was the hull of another spacecraft, a large one by the size of the protruding fin. Judging by the damage they could see, the ship must have come do
wn quite some time ago and most likely under conditions similar to their own. The tail fin was fractured in places and several plates had popped free revealing the internal structure, now rusty and snowed up. Whatever the registration numbers were, they had long since worn away.
“I wonder how long it’s been here?” Terran mused.
“Who knows? I can’t even tell what sort of ship it is,” Jurac shrugged.
“Maybe if we survive this we can ID her, get salvage even?” Terran said.
“Doubt it, with no visible markings and all the ships that go missing each year. We’ll let them know about her though.”
“Hmm, should we try to get in?”
“No, I wouldn’t even know where to start digging. Let’s just keep going.”
Terran nodded and they headed off again, away from the metal monolith.
For the next four days the pair slogged through the snow and ever-present storm. Several times during their stops they modified the sled, reducing its size as their supplies dwindled. Now, as they approached the foot of another glacier that Terran said they must get up onto in order to continue, they were dragging no more than a large-ish toboggan. On this were Keller’s suit and its contents, the tent and the rope. Everything else, including the useless thermal unit, had been discarded.
Remarkably the navigational locator continued to function faultlessly, leading them ever on towards their destination. This was despite Terran’s constant tempting of the gods with pessimistic predictions as to the little machine’s life expectancy. So far the locator, much like Jurac, had ignored Terran’s melancholy attitude.
The foot of the glacier leading up to the relay station was much the same as the foot of the one their ship had come down on, as in it ended in a cliff of ice. Luckily there were more boulders and debris scattered at the base of this one, creating a large haphazard pile that reached about half way up. At least they wouldn’t have to climb as far.
They camped at the base of the cliff that night even though when they arrived there was still several hours of daylight left. Jurac reckoned that they should get a full night's rest before they attempted the climb.
During the evening meal in the tent Terran lifted both their spirits when, after consulting the locator, he announced they were over three-quarters of the way there. This brought a spate of conversation and the pair talked happily enough until falling asleep. Up until then, aside from several hours of surmising as to the fate of the other spaceship and its crew, the two men had marched in silence punctuated by Terran’s occasional muttered complaints.
Next morning over breakfast the previous night’s enthusiasm had vanished, replaced by the knowledge of how much distance was still to be covered. Wearily the pair struck camp and started up the debris pile.
By the time they had reached the very top of the cliff it was almost dark again and both men were exhausted. Jurac was glad they had waited. The lower part of the ascent up the debris took them until late afternoon and Jurac was fretting over the climb to come and the approaching night. Manhandling even the smaller sled over some of the obstacles was a feat of engineering to say the least, and Jurac shuddered to think of how they’d have managed had Keller still been with them.
Upon reaching the top of the boulder pile they traversed along until they found a suitable place to climb up. This, luckily enough, turned out to be a narrow chimney with plenty of good, firm looking holds. Terran made the expected comments about the difficulty of climbing in suits and gloves along with the likelihood of the holds giving way. As usual Jurac ignored him, idly commenting that they’d made it this far hadn’t they, and as far as he was concerned the glass was still half full.
Jurac assessed the cliff face and outlined a plan. He would tie the rope around his waist and climb up first; once up, he would pull up the suit full of supplies, the sled and the tent. This done, Terran could then tie the rope around himself and climb up as well.
Terran didn’t argue at this and Jurac, seeing the man’s skeletal look and sunken eyes, could understand why. He doubted he himself looked much better, what with exhaustion constantly dogging the pair like a tenacious cold.
Once he’d started up though, Jurac wondered that he had been so concerned about it. The climb, though tiring, was the easiest part of the whole exercise. He reached the top and pulled up the equipment in three separate lots, the rope being just long enough. Shortly afterwards he was joined by Terran, jubilant at having his morbid predictions once again proved baseless. On the euphoria of having surmounted yet another seemingly impossible obstacle, the pair walked for a further two hours before making camp.
“Do you think there will be people at the relay station?” Terran asked in the dark of the tent as they lay listening to the wind outside.
“I doubt it. More likely we’ll find an automated setup that’s checked once a year or so.”
“There had better be some supplies there,” Terran said, thinking about the meager amount that remained in Keller’s suit.
“There will be, these stations double as emergency shelters for stranded spacefarers such as ourselves.”
After a pause Terran asked, “How can you be so positive all the time? Hell, through this whole thing you’ve gone along thinking nothing will go wrong. Admittedly we’ve lucked out big time but that’s all it is - luck. We’re bucking the odds here so badly but you just take it all in your stride. Don’t you ever consider the worst case scenario?”
“Yes, of course I do. The worst case scenario is we die full stop. In order to prevent that I believe a more optimistic attitude must prevail. We have everything to gain and nothing left to lose, so why bother wasting energy and thought on the negative aspects of a situation when there are so many of them they’re practically uncountable?”
“Do you think we’ll make it?”
“I hope so.”
There was a long silence; eventually Terran spoke quietly. “I haven’t spoken to my family for four years, haven’t seen them in over six, not since I left for the rim service. It never used to bother me before but suddenly, now, I want to see and speak to them very badly." At that he fell silent and rolled on his side doing his best to get comfortable in a full suit and, due to the lack of the thermal unit, helmet. A task even the positive natured Jurac was willing to admit was impossible.
With the locator’s muffled beeps to lead them, the pair slogged their way up the glacier, once again hugging the right hand ridge base in the hope of avoiding a fall into a crevasse. The constant uphill grind, against the wind and snow this time, together with their already exhausted and debilitated state, made for slow going. The glacier seemed to wind forever into a white blowing screen of nothingness. Occasional periods of still air showed them the sheer expanse of the frozen ice river they traversed, fifty times bigger than any on Earth.
On the morning of the fifth day on the glacier, with the pair of them now experiencing the fine tremors of severe fatigue and borderline malnutrition, they ate the last of their emergency rations.
“Well, that’s it,” Terran stated matter of factly. Jurac just nodded. “We’d better make it to the station today, or at least tomorrow, or we won’t get there at all.” Terran continued. Again Jurac didn’t answer but just nodded.
Terran frowned at the continued silence. “Don’t tell me we have a few pessimistic thoughts creeping into that incredibly positive mind of yours?” he muttered.
Jurac looked at him, too tired to rise to the occasion. “No, just tired ones,” he sighed.
The pair gathered up the remainder of their supplies, now just a container of thawed water and a few unspent batteries in Keller’s suit along with the tent, rope and a small flat piece of metal that was all that remained of the sled.
They struck off, the going slower than ever. This morning’s meal, the smallest yet, had done nothing to assuage their hunger or relieve their exhaustion. Around midday the wind dropped to a friendly gale and the blizzard dropped
to almost nothing. Jurac was trudging along head down, following Terran who was taking his turn to break trail, so he didn’t see when his friend stopped dead and thus ran smack into him.
“Huh, what?”
“Look up there, I think I can see something maybe.”
Jurac looked to where Terran was pointing but couldn’t see anything unusual. “I don’t see anything,” he said, but was unable to stop hope from rising inside him.
“Up on that ridge, don’t you see it?”
Jurac looked again, squinted, went to rub his eyes and banged his hand on his faceplate. “Doesn’t that thing tell us how close we are?” He’d only asked that question a hundred times since setting out on their journey.
“No,” Terran also spoke as if he had answered that question a hundred times. “It’s a real bottom of the line model, it only tells us how far we’ve traveled from our point of origin. Though, by my own calculations we should be within ten klicks.”
Jurac looked again, excitement beginning to ebb, and then through the lightly falling snow he caught a glimpse of something. Something irregular, man-made, way up on the spine of a ridge that ran down to the glacier. It was a parabolic dish, hazy and small in the distance.
“My God, that’s it!” He turned to Terran excitedly. “That’s it, we’ve made it!”
Terran was smiling broadly as he dropped the locator and both men embraced, slapping each other on the back. They stood there just looking for a further five minutes before pushing off on the final leg of their ordeal.
It was further away than it looked and the day had reached late afternoon before the pair had drawn close enough to discern any details. What he could see went a long way toward confirming Jurac’s suspicions. The installation was obviously very old. The huge parabolic dish sitting atop a squat, two-storey concrete building was in a bad state of disrepair. Angled slightly up towards the sky on its scaffold-like support, its center and sides were dotted with the scars of rust and corrosion. Many of the dish's panels had been blown free by the forceful wind, leaving large holes in its surface. The edges of the dish were rough and worn, the lowest part of the rim adorned with an inverted forest of long, sharp ice stalactites, as was most of the dish’s underside superstructure. Drawing closer yet, Jurac knew this wasn’t a manned station. It probably hadn’t been for centuries.
If there was a landing pad here it was long covered by snow, Jurac thought as the pair approached a group of single storey block-like concrete buildings that surrounded the central one supporting the dish. There were no windows and as far as he could see, only one door leading
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