'Just a thousand feet.' Komatsu's grin grew wider. 'About the same as ten at home. You fall slow here, kid. With air resistance, your terminal velocity is about fifteen feet a second. From any height, you never fall faster. Watch me.'
He peeled off his yellow suit, moved to the rim in a lazy, one legged dance, floated over it. Max leaned out to watch him drifting slowly down, arms spread like wings to guide him. He was a long time in the air, and his body had dwindled to a far dark speck before he broke the blue mirror of the pool.
Waiting, Max shifted his cramped hands on the rope. The clouds looked darker and lower. The desert of ice and the desert of ashes made no sense. Atlas had begun to seem a harder riddle than ever.
Komatsu came back at last, gliding up that long rope. His scarred body was already dry, and one leg seemed enough for him, here on Atlas. Still grinning, he waved toward the jumping place.
'Next?'
'No!' Max couldn't help shivering. 'Not . . . not now!'
'Later, if you please. But do it, kid. For your own good. Enson never learned to dive. That's why he never got back when he was blown away.'
'Later.' Max felt miserable. 'I'll try . . . later.'
Komatsu had been nice about it, maybe too nice. He took Max around the camp to explain their duties. Weather instruments and automatic Cameras and radiation meters were scattered across the ridge. Hand-ropes led down to more experiments on the ashes and the ice.
'What are we finding out ?' Fighting his dread of the dive, Max came back to that monstrous riddle. 'What is Atlas ?'
‘Ask the orbiter.' Komatsu nodded toward the dark sky. 'All we do is report the instrument readings, which never make much sense. If you want to believe the seismographs, there's half a mile of ice or rock or radioactive dust spread over a thin shell of something else, maybe matter in some new state, with nothing underneath.'
The tornado hadn't dropped him anywhere. It left him high; he was afraid to guess how high. The mountain ridge had become a fine dark line far beneath, dividing rust-red desertand dull blue ice. He was alone in the eerie sky of Atlas!'
Komatsu waved at a yellow wind-sock.
'Just watch that, kid. We get the worst weather in the Universe. Hot winds off the desert. Blizzards off the ice. Tornados two hundred miles tall. When the big winds hit, better hang on. Enson didn’t.'
He said no more about the dive. On watch with him. Max hammered pitons into the ice to anchor the ropes to a new seismic station. On watch with Marutiak, he put on heavy radiation armour and strung new rope across the desert to reach and test a low cone of grey-glowing dust. Atlas still kept its big secret.
Suddenly, now. Max was breathing again. The bellow of the twisting winds had died, long ago. He knew he had been unconscious, and he wondered where the storm had dropped him. He felt surprised to be alive.
The stiff shelter fabric was still rolled around him, but not quite so tightly. Cramped and numb at first, he squirmed and wriggled, twisted and crawled, until he could look out. What he saw jolted him cruelly.
The tornado hadn't dropped him anywhere. It had left him high; he was afraid to guess how high. The mountain ridge had become a fine dark line far beneath, dividing rust-red desert and dull blue ice. He was alone in the eerie sky of Atlas.
'Spaceman . . .' Only a hoarse whisper came when he tried to speak into the voice-pack. He shut his eyes against the, terrible emptiness under him, and tried again. ‘Spaceman Mayfield to Orbiter.'
'Orbiter recording.' Dr Krim's duplicated voice boomed instantly into that high silence, human and anxious. 'We had lost contact. Please report.'
'You won’t believe it. A tornado has thrown me into the sky'.
'Atlas is always surprising. Just tell us what you see.'
'Not much. The ice—flat and dark and endless. The desert—just as endless. And there—the storm!'
The funnel was a thick reddish snake writhing out of a boiling cloud, dragging across the red-and-grey desert. Still watching it, he began to feel cold air rushing up around him. He looked for the fabric scrap the wind had wrapped about him and found it high above, already left behind.
'I . . . I'm falling!' Terror gripped his throat. 'A hundred miles . . . it's a hundred miles down !'
'We're very lucky, if you can see anything from that elevation.' The copied voice turned happy. 'Evidently the storm has lifted the clouds. You have a rare chance to see what Atlas is.'
The wind of his fall felt colder on his face, and fear of it froze him. His teeth chattered. But he tried to remember his training, tried to remember Komatsu's polite brown grin, tried to fight that terror.
Moving hands and arms against the rush of air, he learned to guide himself. A naked human aircraft, he tipped himself into a slow spiral above the bare flatness of ice and ash-like dust. At last, as the storm moved on, he found something it had hidden.
'A city I' he shouted into the voice-pack. 'The ridge where we camped leads into it like a road. Wait! I think it is a road—two miles wide! The buildings—they must have been as high as I am now. Great queer shapes. All ruined. Broken. Falling. Black with fire—or maybe time. Because the city's old. Old ... old and dead I'
He stopped to stare at its desolate wonder.
'Go on ! Describe what you see.'
But that blackened, shattered city was too huge and old and strange for any words of his. Dr Krim's bearded face had come into his shaken mind, and now he recalled the human linguist reciting Robert Frost. Two haunting lines came back:
Some say the world will end in fire.
Some say in ice.
Atlas, he thought, had somehow ended in both.
‘Mayfield !' the pack kept booming. Tell what else you see.'
'Nothing.' His first excitement had begun to die. 'I’m too far off, and the clouds are sinking again. The tower-tops are already hazy. Sorry I can’t see more.'
The pack went dead, thumped on again.
'Mayfield, what you've seen may be the final clue we needed.' The copied voice had a sudden human heartiness. 'Congratulations! The survey director says your report confirms his best theory. Atlas is an artificial object, designed and built by high intelligence.'
'Who could build a world . . . ?' The notion jarred him. 'A world the size of Atlas ?'
We don't know yet.' The voice drummed fast. 'But natural planets are not efficient as dwellings for life They catch too little sunlight. They expose too little surface for unit of mass. The director thinks that Atlas is the matter from a system of planets, rebuilt into a hollow shell, maybe only a mile or so thick. The job took engineering know-how we can barely begin to imagine. But it gave the builders a million times more living space.'
'They aren't living now.' Max looked at the dull clouds rolling back to cover that lost, gigantic city. 'I think ... I know they're dead.'
'The director believes their energy ran out. The ice you see covers most of Atlas. The ash-like stuff is probably waste from the old nuclear power plants. We can't be sure, till we make more landings.'
The pack thumped off and on.
'The shuttle will be returning at once, to rescue survivors. If you're at the camp, you'll be picked up.'
'I'll be there—if I can find the camp.'
The voice from the disk was still Dr Krim's, but somehow not quite human. 'If you fail. Spaceman Mayfield, the director wants you to know that you have earned our gratitude.'
The pack went off again, and he banked his shivering body into a slow circle above dark ice and dull dust. He couldn't find the camp. When he looked again for that dead city, it was gone. The rising wind grew colder. His face felt leather-stiff, and tears began to blur his vision. His spread arms grew numb and clumsy. He had trouble controlling his glide.
Yet one spark of triumph glowed in his mind. Even if he died here, Atlas hadn't really been too tough to crack. Even its huge size had turned out to be a sham. It was hollow, just a sort of cosmic bubble.
He nursed that warming thought, to keep himself alive. The glide down too
k a long time. Shreds of cloud began to form beneath him, hiding ice and dust. His last hopes began to freeze. He wanted to quit trying ...
But then, beside that endless ridge that ones. had been a road, he saw a small, bright glint. He dived toward it, into the freezing wind that came off the ice. The ancient road grew wider, wider, until at last he made out the web of yellow ropes—and two tiny spider-figures, waving at him.
From a hundred miles up, he dived into the clear blue pool. To his numb skin, it felt almost warm. He paddled stiffly to the edge, hauled at the guide-rope with both clumsy hands, slid up it toward the camp.
The pack thumped on again. The tornado had caught Komatsu and Marutiak out on the ice, Krim's voice said. With the guide-ropes blown away, they'd had trouble getting back. But they were safe now, and the shuttle would be picking all three of them up.
'Nice dive, kid !' Komatsu was waiting with Marutiak at the top, and their happy hands helped him over the rim. 'You're OK.'
The Best of Jack Williamson Page 39
