Winners!

by Poul Anderson

  “You might have a problem locating us. This isn’t a true crater, it’s a glorified pothole, the lip of it flush with the top of the glacier. The landmark we guided ourselves by, that fancy ridge, is gone.”

  “No big deal. I’ve got a bearing on you from the directional antenna, remember. A magnetic compass may be no use here, but I can keep myself oriented by the heavens. Saturn scarcely moves in this sky, and the sun and the stars don’t move fast.”

  “Damn! You’re right. I wasn’t thinking. Got Luis on my mind, if nothing else.” Scobie looked across the bleakness toward Broberg. Perforce she was taking a short rest, stoop-shouldered above her excavation. His earpieces brought him the harsh sound in her windpipe.

  He must maintain what strength was left him. against later need. He sipped from his water nipple, pushed a bite of food through his chowlock, pretended an appetite. “I may as well try reconstructing what happened,” he said. “Okay, Mark, you were right, we got crazy reckless. The game—Eight years was too long to play the game, in an environment that gave us too few reminders of reality. But who could have foreseen it? My God, warn Chronos! I happen to know that one of the Titan teams started playing an expedition to the merfolk under the Crimson Ocean—on account of the red mists—deliberately, like us, before they set off . . .

  Scobie gulped, “Well,” he slogged on. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know exactly what went wrong here. But plain to see, the configuration was only metastable. On Earth, too, avalanches can be fatally easy to touch off. I’d guess at a methane layer underneath the surface. It turned a little slushy when temperatures rose after dawn, but that didn’t matter in low gravity and vacuum—till we came along. Heat, vibration—Anyhow, the stratum slid out from under us, which triggered a general collapse. Does that guess seem reasonable?”

  “Yes, to an amateur like me,” Danzig said. “I admire how you can stay academic under these circumstances.”

  “I’m being practical,” Scobie retorted. “Luis may need medical attention earlier than those boats can come for him. If so, how do we get him to ours?”

  Danzig’s voice turned stark. “Any ideas?”

  “I’m fumbling my way toward that. Look, the bowl still has the same basic form. The whole shebang didn’t cave in. That implies hard material, water ice and actual rock. In fact, I see a few remaining promontories, jutting out above the sandlike stuff. As for what it is—maybe an ammonia-carbon dioxide combination, maybe more exotic—that’ll be for you to discover later. Right now . . . my geological instruments should help me trace where the solid masses are least deeply covered. We all have trenching tools, so we can try to shovel a path clear, along The Saturn Game a zigzag of least effort. That may bring more garbage slipping down on us from above, but that in turn may expedite our progress. Where the uncovered shelves are too steep or slippery to climb, we can chip footholds. Slow and tough work; and we may run into a bluff higher than we can jump, or something like that.”

  “I can help,” Danzig proposed. “While I waited to hear from you, I inventoried our stock of spare cable, cord, equipment I can cannibalize for wire, clothes and bedding I can cut into strips—whatever might be knotted together to make a rope. We won’t need much tensile strength. Well, I estimate I can get about forty meters. According to your description, that’s about half the slope length of that trap you’re in. If you can climb halfway up while I trek there, I can haul you the rest of the way.”

  “Thanks, Mark,” Scobie said, “although—”

  “Luis!” shrieked in his helmet. “Colin, come fast, help me, this is dreadful!”

  Regardless of the pain, except for a curse or two, Scobie sped to Broberg’s aid.

  Garcilaso was not quite unconscious. In that lay much of the horror. They heard him mumble, “—Hell, the King threw my soul into Hell. I can’t find my way out. I’m lost. If only Hell weren’t so cold—” They could not see his face; the inside of his helmet was crusted with frost. Deeper and longer buried than the others, badly hurt in addition, he would have died shortly after his fuel cell was exhausted. Broberg had uncovered him barely in time, if that.

  Crouched in the shaft she had dug, she rolled him over onto his belly. His limbs flopped about and he babbled, “A demon attacks me. I’m blind here but I feel the wind of its wings,” in a blurred monotone. She unplugged the energy unit and tossed it aloft, saying, “We should return this to the ship if we can.”

  Above, Scobie gave the object a morbid stare. It didn’t even retain the warmth to make a little vapor, like his and hers, but lay quite inert. Its case was a metal box, thirty centimeters by fifteen by six, featureless except for two plug-in prongs on one of the broad sides. Controls built into the spacesuit circuits allowed you to start and stop the chemical reactions within and regulate their rate manually; but as a rule you left that chore to your thermostat and aerostat. Now those reactions had run their course. Until it was recharged, the cell was merely a lump.

  Scobie leaned over to watch Broberg, some ten meters below him. She had extracted the reserve unit from Garcilaso’s gear, inserted it properly at the small of his back, and secured it by clips on the bottom of his packframe. “Let’s have your contribution, Colin,” she said. Scobie dropped the meter of heavy-gauge insulated wire which was standard issue on extravehicular missions, in case you needed to make a special electrical connection or a repair. She joined it by Western Union splices to the two she already had, made a loop at the end and, awkwardly reaching over her left shoulder, secured the opposite end by a hitch to the top of her packframe. The triple strand bobbed above her like an antenna.

  Stooping, she gathered Garcilaso in her arms. The Iapetan weight of him and his apparatus was under ten kilos, of her and hers about the same. Theoretically she could jump straight out of the hole with her burden. In practice, her spacesuit was too hampering; constant-volume joints allowed considerable freedom of movement, but not as much as bare skin, especially when circum-Saturnian temperatures required extra insulation. Besides, if she could have reached the top, she could not have stayed. Soft ice would have crumbled beneath her fingers and she would have tumbled back down.

  “Here goes,” she said. “This had better be right the first time, Colin. I don’t think Luis can take much jouncing.”

  “Kendrick, Ricia, where are you?” Garcilaso moaned. “Are you in Hell too?”

  Scobie dug his heels into the ground near the edge and crouched ready. The loop in the wire rose to view. His right hand grabbed hold. He threw himself backward, lest he slide forward, and felt the mass he had captured slam to a halt. Anguish exploded in his rib cage. Somehow he dragged his burden to safety before he fainted.

  He came out of that in a minute. “I’m okay,” he rasped at the anxious voices of Broberg and Danzig. “Only let me rest a while.”

  The physicist nodded and knelt to minister to the pilot. She stripped his packframe in order that he might lie flat on it, head and legs supported by the packs themselves. That would prevent significant heat loss by convection and cut loss by conduction. Still, his fuel cell would be drained faster than if he were on his feet, and first it had a terrible energy deficit to make up.

  “The ice is clearing away inside his helmet,” she reported. “Merciful Mary, the blood! Seems to be from the scalp, though: it isn’t running any more. His occiput must have been slammed against the vitryl. We ought to wear padded caps in these rigs. Yes, I know accidents like this haven’t happened before, but—” She unclipped the flashlight at her waist, stooped, and shone it downward. “His eyes are open. The pupils—yes, a severe concussion, and likely a skull fracture, which may be hemorrhaging into the brain. I’m surprised he isn’t vomiting. Did the cold prevent that? Will he start soon? He could choke on his own vomit, in there where nobody can lay a hand on him.”

  Scobie’s pain had subsided to a bearable intensity. He rose, went over to look, whistled, and said, “I judge he’s doomed unless we get him to the boat and give him proper care soon. Which i
sn’t possible.”

  “Oh, Luis.” Tears ran silently down Broberg’s cheeks.

  “You think he can’t last till I bring my rope and we carry him back?” Danzig asked.

  “ ‘Fraidnot,” Scobie replied. “I’ve taken paramedical courses, and in fact I’ve seen a case like this before. How come you know the symptoms, Jean?”

  “I read a lot,” she said dully.

  “They weep, the dead children weep,” Garcilaso muttered.

  Danzig sighed. “Okay, then. I’ll fly over to you.”

  “Huh?” burst from Scobie, and from The Saturn Game

  Broberg: “Have you also gone insane?”

  “No, listen,” Danzig said fast. “I’m no skilled pilot, but I have the same basic training in this type of craft that everybody does who might ride in one. It’s expendable; the rescue vessels can bring us back. There’d be no significant gain if I landed close to the glacier—I’d still have to make that rope and so forth—and we know from what happened to the probe that there would be a real hazard. Better I make straight for your crater.”

  “Coming down on a surface that the jets will vaporize out from under you?” Scobie snorted. “I bet Luis would consider that a hairy stunt. You, my friend, would crack up.”

  “Nu?” They could almost see the shrug. “A crash from low altitude, in this gravity, shouldn’t do more than rattle my teeth. The blast will cut a hole clear to bedrock. True, the surrounding ice will collapse in around the hull and trap it. You may need to dig to reach the airlock, though I suspect thermal radiation from the cabin will keep the upper parts of the structure free. Even if the craft topples and strikes sidewise—in which case, it’ll sink down into a deflating cushion—even if it did that on bare rock, it shouldn’t be seriously damaged. It’s designed to withstand heavier impacts.” Danzig hesitated. “Of course, could be this would endanger you. I’m confident I won’t fry you with the jets, assuming I descend near the middle and you’re as far offside as you can get. Maybe, though, maybe I’d cause a . . . an ice quake that’ll kill you. No sense in losing two more lives.”

  “Or three, Mark,” Broberg said low. “In spite of your brave words, you could come to grief yourself.”

  “Oh, well, I’m an oldish man. I’m fond of living, yes, but you guys have a whole lot more years due you. Look, suppose the worst, suppose I don’t just make a messy landing but wreck the boat utterly. Then Luis dies, but he would anyway. You two, however, would have access to the stores aboard, including those extra fuel cells. I’m willing to run what I consider to be a small risk of my own neck, for the sake of giving Luis a chance at survival.”

  “Um-m-m,” went Scobie, deep in his throat. A hand strayed in search of his chin, while his gaze roved around the glimmer of the bowl.

  “I repeat,” Danzig proceeded, “if you think this might jeopardize you in any way, we scrub it. No heroics, please. Luis would surely agree, better three people safe and one dead than four stuck with a high probability of death.”

  “Let me think.” Scobie was mute for minutes before he said: “No, I don’t believe we’d get in too much trouble here. As I remarked earlier, the vicinity has had its avalanche and must be in a reasonably stable configuration. True, ice will volatilize. In the case of deposits with low boiling points, that could happen explosively and cause tremors. But the vapor will carry heat away so fast that only material in your immediate area should change state. I daresay that the fine-grained stuff will get shaken down the slopes, but it’s got too low a density to do serious harm; for the most part, it should simply act like a brief snowstorm. The floor will make adjustments, of course, which may be rather violent. However, we can be above it—do you see that shelf of rock over yonder, Jean, at jumping height? It has to be part of a buried hill; solid. That’s our place to wait . . . Okay, Mark, it’s go as far as we’re concerned. I can’t be absolutely certain, but who ever is about anything? It seems like a good bet.”

  “What are we overlooking?” Broberg wondered. She glanced down at Luis, who lay at her feet. “While we considered all the possibilities, Luis might die. Yes, fly if you want to, Mark, and God bless you.”

  But when she and Scobie had brought Garcilaso to the ledge, she gestured from Saturn to Polaris and: “I will sing a spell, I will cast what small magic is mine, in aid of the Dragon Lord, that he may deliver Alvarlan’s soul from Hell,” says Ricia.

  IV

  No reasonable person will blame any interplanetary explorer for miscalculations about the actual environment, especially when some decision has to be made, in haste and under stress. Occasional errors are inevitable. If we knew exactly what to expect thoughout the Solar System, we would have no reason to explore it.

  —Minamoto

  The boat lifted. Cosmic dust smoked away from its jets. A hundred and fifty meters aloft, thrust lessened and it stood still on a pillar of fire.

  Within the cabin was little noise, a low hiss and a bone-deep but nearly inaudible rumble. Sweat studded Danzig’s features, clung glistening to his beard stubble, soaked his coverall and made it reek. He was about to undertake a maneuver as difficult as a rendezvous, and without guidance.

  Gingerly, he advanced a vernier. A side jet woke. The boat lurched toward a nosedive. Danzig’s hands jerked across the console. He must adjust the forces that held his vessel on high and those that pushed it horizontally, to get a resultant that would carry him eastward at a slow, steady pace. The vectors would change instant by instant, as they do when a human walks. The control computer, linked to the sensors, handled much of the balancing act, but not the crucial part. He must tell it what he wanted it to do.

  His handling was inexpert. He had realized it would be. More altitude would have given him more margin for error, but deprived him of cues that his eyes found on the terrain beneath and the horizon ahead. Besides, when he reached the glacier he would perforce fly low to find his goal. He would be too busy for the precise celestial navigation he could have practiced afoot.

  Seeking to correct his error, he overcompensated. and the boat pitched in a different direction. He punched for “hold steady” and the computer took over. Motionless again, he took a minute to catch his breath, regain his nerve, rehearse in his mind. Biting his lip, he tried afresh. This time he did not quite approach disaster. Jets aflicker, the boat staggered drunkenly over the moonscape.

  The ice cliff loomed nearer and nearer. He saw its fragile loveliness and regretted that he must cut a swathe of ruin. Yet what did any natural wonder mean unless a conscious mind was there to know it? He passed the lowest slope. It vanished in billows of steam.

  Onward. Beyond the boiling, right and left and ahead, the Faerie architecture crumbled. He crossed the palisade. Now he was a bare fifty meters above the surface, and the clouds reached vengefully close before they disappeared into vacuum. He squinted through the port and made the scanner sweep a magnified overview across its screen, a search for his destination.

  A white volcano erupted. The outburst engulfed him. Suddenly he was flying blind. Shocks belled through the hull when upflung stones hit. Frost sheathed the craft; the scanner screen went as blank as the ports. Danzig should have ordered ascent, but he was inexperienced. A human in danger has less of an instinct to jump than to run. He tried to scuttle sideways. Without exterior vision to aid him, he sent the vessel tumbling end over end. By the time he saw his mistake, less than a second, it was too late. He was out of control. The computer might have retrieved the situation after a while, but the glacier was too close. The boat crashed.

  “Hello, Mark?” Scobie cried. “Mark, do you read me? Where are you, for Christ’s sake?”

  Silence replied. He gave Broberg a look which lingered. “Everything seemed to be in order,” he said, “till we heard a shout, and a lot of racket, and nothing. He should’ve reached us by now. Instead, he’s run into trouble. I hope it wasn’t lethal.”

  “What can we do?” she asked as redundantly. They needed talk, any talk, for Garcilaso
lay beside them and his delirious voice was dwindling fast.

  “If we don’t get fresh fuel cells within the next forty or fifty hours, we’ll be at the end of our particular trail. The boat should be someplace near. We’ll have to get out of this hole under our own power, seems like. Wait here with Luis and I’ll scratch around for a possible route.”

  Scobie started downward. Broberg crouched by the pilot.

  “—alone forever in the dark—” she heard.

  “No, Alvarlan.” She embraced him. Most likely he could not feel that, but she could. “Alvarlan, hearken to me. This is Ricia. I hear in my mind how your spirit calls. Let me help. Let me lead you back to the light.”

  “Have a care,” advised Scobie. “We’re too damn close to rehypnotizing ourselves as it is.”

  “But I might, I just might get through to Luis and . . . comfort him.

  . . . Alvarlan. Kendrick and I escaped. He’s seeking a way home for us. I’m seeking you. Alvarlan, here is my hand, come take it.”

  On the crater floor, Scobie shook his head, clicked his tongue, and unlimbered his equipment. Binoculars would help him locate the most promising areas. Devices that ranged from a metal rod to a portable geosonar would give him a more exact idea of what sort of footing lay buried under what depth of unclimbable sand-ice. Admittedly the scope of such probes was very limited. He did not have time to shovel tons of material aside in order that he could mount higher and test further. He would simply have to get some preliminary results, make an educated guess at which path up the side of the bowl would prove negotiable, and trust he was right.

  He shut Broberg and Garcilaso out of his consciousness as much as he was able, and commenced work.

  An hour later, he was ignoring pain while clearing a strip across a layer of rock. He thought a berg of good, hard frozen water lay ahead, but wanted to make sure.

  “Jean! Colin! Do you read?”