by Peter Tonkin
The surface of the ice was dirty and dull, covered in a thick overlay of wet sand which the runoff was beginning to carve into channels and fans with glistening, crystalline floors. It was a strange, restless environment and it put John forcefully in mind of the strange geodes which he had seen in jewellers’ shops all over the world. He had often thought of buying Asha one of those rocky coconuts which contained not white flesh but breathtaking crystals, but he had never had quite enough money in the right place at the right time. Now when he looked around him he felt as though he was walking on the dirty, rocky shell of one which was being slowly worn away to reveal the glittering jewelled interior. All around was the sound of running water and the slither of sliding sand as the fans of streams overlapped and whole slopes of dirt unexpectedly slipped down to reveal dazzling white scars. It was like watching a thaw in negative, with the brightnesses of frosty winter being uncovered as the surface melted.
John found it disturbing. It made it difficult for him to concentrate, and he needed to keep a close eye not only on the read-out of his Geiger counter but also on the massive form of his companion. Richard’s every movement seemed to be informed with care and concentration, but John could not forget that his old friend still did not really know who either of them was. It was like walking along a dangerous roadside with a young child: he could never quite be positive that Richard would behave in a sensible, adult manner. Each time he glanced down or looked away, John feared that Richard might have done something stupid in the instant he was out of observation. Quite simply, he was beginning to regret bringing his friend with him at all; he should have followed the advice he knew Asha would have given him and left Richard safely in bed on Titan.
As the sides of the gully they were following got steeper, so the depth of the sand-clotted runoff through which they were wading deepened and John’s glum thoughts were lightened by a glimmer of relief that he had insisted that they all wear full foul-weather gear and high boots. Richard, slightly ahead, sloshed on like a fluorescent yellow giant, in a world of his own. A turbaned giant -perhaps a genie - with his head bound in a simple bandage. Both men had hoods folded back on their shoulders. It was cold here, but not so cold that they needed their hoods up. John waved his Geiger counter from side to side, glancing down to see the needle staying solidly in the safe green. The constant visual checks were necessary because of the noise; the machine would have had to register a nuclear holocaust before the auditory signal managed to cut through the ceaseless, thunderous, hissing sloshing babble washing around them.
Such was the power of the sound that John did not at first hear the buzzing of his walkie-talkie. Richard did, however. The way in which the two-way radios functioned had been explained to him on the flight over here. ‘Someone wants to talk to you,’ he bellowed, gesturing.
John jerked the machine up to his ear. ‘Higgins,’ he yelled.
‘Tom Snell here. We’ve got a reading.’
The chill against which John was so carefully protected suddenly seemed to be inside him. In a column between his heart and his bladder, he froze solid. ‘They’ve got a reading,’ he yelled at Richard and was unaccountably relieved when his friend nodded wisely as though he understood the implications of that simple statement. ‘Tell me about it,’ he ordered Tom Snell.
‘Easier said than done, I’m afraid,’ came the distant voice of the engineer. ‘We’re on a broad reach of open country. Pancake flat as far as the eye can see. And we have a reading with nothing to show for it.’
‘You can’t see anything at all?’
‘Ice covered with sand. It’s not even rolling. I can see both my other teams on either hand and then the hills you’re in on the far eastern horizon. But it’s like Blackpool beach here for God knows how many square kilometres. Except that there’s no pier and no tower; nothing at all, in fact.’
Richard had come back to stand beside John, crouching slightly so that he could hear what was being said.
‘It’s under them,’ he suddenly announced. ‘If there’s nothing to see nearby on the surface then it’s buried in the ice under their feet.’
John found himself nodding in silent agreement. ‘Did you hear that, Tom?’
‘Yes. It’s what we figured too. The only logical explanation. Was that Captain Mariner?’
‘Yes, it was. How strong is the reading?’
‘Nice to hear him firing on all cylinders again. The reading isn’t all that strong here. Well under danger level. . .’
‘But they don’t know how deep it’s buried,’ murmured Richard.
‘... but we don’t know how deep the thing’s buried. You think we should dig?’
‘Negative. Certainly not. Mark it on your map. Make some kind of notation as to shape and size of the signal; it might be important.’
‘Yes, we hadn’t thought of that. We’d rather assumed it was going to be one point of emission, but you’re right. We’ll set to what?’
‘Nought point five millisieverts,’ said John.
‘OK. We’ll set to nought point five and trace the shape of the signal at that.’
‘If it is one point of emission, they’ll just get a circle,’ murmured Richard.
John nodded again. “That’s it, Tom,’ he said. ‘I’ll warn Colin Ross. You keep in touch with me.’
‘Will do. Over and out.’
John lowered the walkie-talkie from his ear and looked speculatively up at Richard. ‘You seem to have a good grasp of this.’ There was almost accusation in his tone. ‘Are things coming back to you?’
‘Nothing you didn’t explain in the helicopter,’ answered Richard. ‘Nothing at all before I woke up in the sickbay.’ For the first time, he sounded worried about his loss of memory. ‘It will all come back, won’t it?’
‘Sure to. Soon.’
Their eyes met and John tried to force all the sincerity at his disposal into his. In spite of Richard’s brightness and his impressive grasp of the rudiments of radioactivity, John still felt that he had probably overstepped the mark by bringing him along. Whether or not Richard read this in his eyes, the tall man puffed out his cheeks and turned away. Then he was sloshing on up the dirty valley floor and John was following just behind him, looking down and dialling in Colin Ross’s wavelength.
And so the day wore on. Morning became noon and afternoon. John realised that in spite of all the meticulously organised preparations, he had omitted to bring any food. He also regretted the decision not to bring skis or ski poles - both of which were available - because they were no use on sand. They would have been very useful on the slopes of soft ice which were so rapidly washing themselves clean, however, and as the afternoon wore on, John’s legs began to regret that particular decision, poignantly. The apparent weakness of the walkie-talkies bothered him too; as the slopes above the valley sides gathered around them, so the range of his radio seemed to diminish. The outer teams faltered into incomprehensibility and soon only Colin and Steve Bollom were clearly audible; the military contingent was out of contact altogether, which, under the circumstances, was increasingly worrying.
The head of the valley they had been in when Tom Snell first reported his discovery sloped up to a watershed and then gave on to a high saddle which in turn fell away into another valley. It plunged southward between two parallel ranges of low hills, one running to the east of them and another to the west. High on the saddle, at the very point of the watershed, they paused. Here they had something of a vista to north and to south. Looking back along the track they had followed, they could see how much of the valley was now uncovered. A slow river of sludge, up which they had just waded, seemed to be running sluggishly away onto the outthrust of the plain upon which the helicopter had originally dropped them. Ahead of them, a precipitous valley seemed equally deep in filth, equally beautifully framed. The brightness reflecting off the clean ice slopes seemed to multiply itself from gallery to gallery, emphasising the dull depths of the slowly-moving sand sludge.
The b
rightness of the slopes was by no means a pure white, however; it was variously champagne, straw and gold. The light of the afternoon sun was still filtered through streams of sand which were being whipped northwards by the high wind. High in terms of speed if not of altitude; the steady thrust of the harmattan was still in excess of sixty knots but the lower edge of the sand was little more than two hundred metres above their heads, and it still gave the impression of being a feverishly active gallery of rock, as though they were moving through some strange kind of lucent cave whose walls glowed with phantom light mysteriously forbidden to the roof and floor.
‘Good place to check on the rest of the team,’ opined Richard, clearly thinking fast still. John nodded and brought his walkie-talkie to his chilled lips. His eyes narrowly inspected the strange airborne stratum so crushingly close above them as he began to call the teams in, hampered by the bright, thick gloves he wore.
He began with Tom Snell’s because he was still waiting to hear details of the shape of their discovery. He soon got through, but heard more than he had bargained for.
‘Hello, Tom, this is John, over.’
‘Hello, John. Glad to hear from you; we’ve been trying to raise you for an hour or more.’
‘Any news?’
‘Quite a bit. Our readings seem to be in the shape of an arrowhead pointing into the centre of the berg.’
‘An arrowhead?’
‘Correct. An arrowhead about twenty metres at the base and about the same from base to apex. Pointing to the centre of the berg, about five kilometres to the north of Psyche’s current anchorage. But there’s more. My other teams have registered a whole series of readings. None high. All small. But lots of them. They seem to be in a series of circles all round the arrowhead. As near as we can judge.’
‘Do the circles reach out to the cliff overlooking Psyche?’
‘No. We’ve been all along that section of the coast but it’s clear.’
Thank God, thought John as he clumsily thumbed Colin’s wavelength and began to check on the conditions overlooking Kraken on the opposite side of the berg. They too were blessedly clear. Steve Bottom’s report made John’s usually open countenance fold into a frown again, however. The square, reliable first officer and his team were in a valley parallel to John’s valley, shorewards and a little ahead. They were concerned about the quality of the ice. They had come across two crevasses already, their narrow mouths betrayed by slow whirlpools of sinking sand. And they had come upon a series of caves which reached back into the increasingly precipitous cliff faces on either hand. Beware, Steve warned. The ice which had borne the brunt of the harmattan was honeycombed, perishing and dangerous.
‘Right,’ said John decisively as he switched his walkie-talkie to GENERAL RECEIVE and hung it back on his belt. ‘It’s time to get moving again.’
‘Right-oh,’ said Richard cheerfully and stepped over the edge of the slope. He made no attempt whatsoever to go down carefully or in a controlled manner; he simply stepped out over the void as though he half expected the air to support him. He came down hard upon his right heel, for the slope fell away steeply into the throat of the high-sided little valley. This high, near the watershed, the sand had all washed away, so his heel came down onto hard ice and it skidded down the hill.
Richard pitched forward as his left leg collapsed at the knee. His weight went over his centre of gravity and the whole of his long body followed that injudiciously placed heel down the slope into the valley below. He was fortunate to topple onto his side so that at least he had the chance of pulling his legs together and in the end he went down riding on his backside, like a child too poor to afford a toboggan.
Had John not been adjusting his walkie-talkie he might have been able to catch his friend, but as things were, the wild leap to grab the rapidly vanishing left arm did nothing more than take John over the edge to join Richard in his wild, incredibly dangerous ride. But where Richard was lucky enough to gain some kind of control over his breathtaking downward slide, John simply went head over heels to land spread-eagled on his belly; and then he slid even more quickly downwards.
At first the wild career was an overwhelming mass of mostly painful sensation shot through with a piercing bitterness in the instant that John realised all his fears about Richard had been fulfilled and the pair of them would be lucky not to be crippled or killed here. He found that he was screaming at the top of his voice and was unsure whether the sound was the result of the bitter realisation or the shocking agony in his elbows and knees. His chin came in violent contact with granite-hard ice. His mouth snapped closed and instantly flooded with blood from a bitten tongue. He saw flashes of light all round the edge of his vision, then a wave of porridgy slush slapped him in the face and he saw nothing clearly for some time. His world shrunk to an internal mindscape of half imagined sensation as he slithered precipitously downwards through flashing lights like stars exploding above the curve of a barren planet; through a freezing, Plutonian sea of blood which sloshed chokingly down his gullet to be joined by bitter tasting sand whenever he tried to part his lips to breathe. The sounds of his overwhelming experience were, perhaps, the only things which truly came from outside, washing in through his ears like the blood washing down his throat - equally progenitive. It was as though he was being born anew, pushed back into an environment all liquid and sanguine, where everything was tearing, bitter and painful and he had yet to achieve that first, regenerating, lung-filling primal scream.
But before he could come back to earth or to life, the wild ride was halted. Had he tried to imagine, high on that icy saddle, what it was like to slide down the length of the valley below, he might have supposed the precipitous journey would have culminated in a slow, spinning slide out over the plain at the bottom into which the valley opened. No such luck. The only luck involved, in fact, was that it was his stocky legs and back which hit first, not his all too breakable arms and head. He was on his side when the valley’s most perpendicular wall gathered him to itself and the sensation which was added to all the others was that of being dragged viciously across corrugated iron. First his heels, then his calves; the back of his thighs, his backside; then, punishingly, his kidneys and ribs.
He rolled onto his stomach and came to a stop. He raised his head slowly and spat. He had no idea what he might be spitting at because his eyes were still closed. He emptied his mouth of blood and sand, then continued to hawk and spit, trying unsuccessfully to clear his throat. His mouth hurt even more fiercely than his body and he found himself moving his tongue gingerly, trying to judge how much of it he had bitten off. Once he had established that, his slowly awakening reason suggested, he might try to move his arms and legs, just to see whether he still could.
‘PHEW!’ came an explosive exclamation so close behind him that he established that his whole body could still move by jumping nearly out of his skin. ‘That was quite a ride!’ the exuberant voice continued, oozing childlike excitement.
John rolled over onto his side and opened his eyes. He found that he was looking up the hill along a long brown tongue of mud which was creeping disorientatingly down towards him, like lava, still bearing the signs of his wild ride. Stiffly, he pushed himself to a sitting position and leaned back against the sheer, corrugated wall that had stopped him. From this position he could see across the mouth of the valley to the overhanging crest of ice opposite, where the foot of the slope ended, not in a gentle hillock reaching down to flat ice, but in a concave, overhanging cliff face fanged with icicles like a big surf just about to break.
Maybe fifteen metres away, out towards the middle of the valley and further down the slope, sat Richard Mariner, unutterably filthy and obviously ecstatic. As John looked at him, the big man cast a speculative glance back over his shoulder, clearly calculating his chances of getting back up to the watershed for another ride. John folded his left leg in until his boot heel touched his bottom and tried to pull himself to his feet, but his boots simply skidded out from under
him, so he rolled over onto all fours, ready to push himself up.
This simple act brought him face to face with the ice cliff he had been leaning back against. Like the far jaw of the valley mouth, it was a breaking wave with a steep overhang supported by stalactites of ice, huge columns too massive to be called more icicles, which had been large enough to stand against the hot breath of the harmattan. Behind them rose a wall apparently of glass into which, as Steve Bollom had warned, there reached a honeycomb of caves. And, like a real honeycomb, some of the cave mouths were sealed. Those nearest John, for example, were sealed with thick greenish panes of ice.
Against the inside of the nearest glass-clear pane, staring out from the mouth of a sealed cave with scarcely sane intensity straight into John’s eyes was the face of a man. The ice was thick enough to bear the man’s weight as he knelt there, leaning forward, clawing against the inner surface as though trying wildly to break out. It was thick enough to bear his weight but clear enough to hide nothing of what was pressed against it. The face was absolutely white where it was covered with skin but some of it, like the claw hands pressing palm out beside it, had been flensed down to red muscle and white bone.
