Winners!

by Poul Anderson

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Please, no.”

  Scobie climbed stiffly erect and flicked his main radio switch. “Mark, do you receive?”

  “Colin!” Danzig chattered. “Thank God! I was going out of my head from worry.”

  “You’re not off that hook, my friend. We just finished a ten-hour snooze.”

  “What? How far did you get first?”

  “To about forty meters’ elevation. The going looks tougher ahead than in back. I’m afraid we won’t make it.”

  “Don’t say that, Colin,” Danzig begged.

  “My fault,” Broberg declared. She stood rigid, fists doubled, her features a mask. Her tone was steely. “He was worn out, had to have a nap. I offered to wake him, but fell asleep myself.”

  “Not your fault, Jean,” Scobie began.

  She interrupted: “Yes. Mine. Perhaps I can make it good. Take my fuel cell. I’ll still have deprived you of my help, of course, but you might survive and reach the boat anyway.”

  He seized her hands. They did not unclench. “If you imagine I could do that—”

  “If you don’t, we’re both finished,” she said unbendingly. “I’d rather go out with a clear conscience.”

  “And what about my conscience?” he shouted. Checking himself, he wet his lips and said fast: “Besides, you’re not to blame. Sleep slugged you. If I’d been thinking. I’d have realized it was bound to do so, and contacted Mark. The fact that you didn’t either shows how far gone you were yourself. And . . . you’ve got Tom and the kids waiting for you. Take my cell.” He paused. “And my blessing.”

  “Shall Ricia forsake her true knight?”

  “Wait, hold on, listen,” Danzig called. “Look, this is terrible, but—oh, hell, excuse me, but I’ve got to remind you that dramatics only clutter the action. From what descriptions you’ve sent. I don’t see how either of you can possibly proceed solo. Together, you might yet. At least you’re rested—sore in the muscles, no doubt, but clearer in the head. The climb before you may prove easier than you think. Try!” Scobie and Broberg regarded each other for a whole minute. A thawing went through her, and warmed him. Finally they smiled and embraced. “Yeah, right,” he growled. “We’re off. But first a bite to eat. I’m plain, old-fashioned hungry. Aren’t you?” She nodded.

  “That’s the spirit,” Danzig encouraged them. “Uh, may I make another suggestion? I am just a spectator, which is pretty hellish but does give me an overall view. Drop that game of yours.” Scobie and Broberg tautened.

  “It’s the real culprit,” Danzig pleaded. “Weariness alone wouldn’t have clouded your judgment. You’d never have cut me off, and—But weariness and shock and grief did lower your defenses to the point where the damned game took you over. You weren’t yourselves when you fell asleep. You were those dreamworld characters. They had no reason not to cork off!”

  Broberg shook her head violently. “Mark,” said Scobie, “you are correct about being a spectator. That means there are some things you don’t understand. Why subject yourself to the torture of listening in, hour after hour? We’ll call you back from time to time, naturally. Take care.” He broke the circuit.

  “He’s wrong,” Broberg insisted.

  Scobie shrugged. “Right or wrong, what difference? We won’t pass out again in the time we have left. The game didn’t handicap us as we traveled. In fact, it helped, by making the situation feel less gruesome.”

  “Aye. Let us break our fast and set forth anew on our pilgrimage.”

  The struggle grew stiffer. “Belike the White Witch has cast a spell on this road,” says Ricia.

  “She shall not daunt us,” vows Kendrick.

  “No, never while we fare side by side, you and I, noblest of men.”

  A slide overcame them and swept them back a dozen meters. They lodged against a crag. After the flow had passed by, they lifted their bruised bodies and limped in search of a different approach. The place where the geologist’s hammer lay was no longer accessible.

  “What shattered the bridge?” asks Ricia.

  “A giant,” answers Kendrick. “I saw him as I fell into the river. He lunged at me, and we fought in the shallows until he fled. He bore away my sword in his thigh.”

  “You have your spear that Wayland forged,” Ricia says, “and always you have my heart.”

  They stopped on the last small outcrop they uncovered. It proved to be not a shelf but a pinnacle of water ice. Around it glittered sand-ice, again quiescent. Ahead was a slope thirty meters in length, and then the rim, and stars.

  The distance might as well have been thirty light-years. Whoever tried to cross would immediately sink to an unknown depth.

  There was no point in crawling back down the bared side of the pinnacle. Broberg had clung to it for an hour while she chipped niches to climb by with her knife. Scobie’s condition had not allowed him to help. If they sought to return, they could easily slip, fall, and be engulfed. If they avoided that, they would never find a new path. Less than two hours’ worth of energy was left in their fuel cells. Attempting to push onward while swapping Garcilaso’s back and forth would be an exercise in futility.

  They settled themselves, legs dangling over the abyss, and held hands.

  “I do not think the ores can burst the iron door of this tower, “Kendrick says, “but they will besiege us until we starve to death.”

  “You never yielded up your hope ere now, my knight,” replies Ricia, and kisses his temple. “Shall we search about? These walls are unutterably ancient. Who knows what relics of wizardry lie forgotten within? A pair of phoenix-feather cloaks, that will bear us laughing through the sky to our home—?”

  “I fear not, my darling. Our weird is upon us.” Kendrick touches the spear that leans agleam against the battlement. “Sad and gray will the world be without you. We can but meet our doom bravely.”

  “Happily, since we are together.” Ricia’s gamin smile breaks forth. “I did notice that a certain room holds a bed. Shall we try it?”

  Kendrick frowns. “Rather should we seek to set our minds and souls in order.”

  She tugs his elbow. “Later, yes. Besides—who knows?—when we dust off the blanket, we may find it is a Tamkappe that will take us invisible through the enemy.”

  “You dream.”

  Fear stirs behind her eyes. “What if I do?” Her words tremble. “I can dream us free if you will help.”

  Scobie’s fist smote the ice. “No!” he croaked. “I’ll die in the world that is.”

  Ricia shrinks from him. He sees terror invade her. “You, you rave, beloved,” she stammers.

  He twisted about and caught her by the arms. “Don’t you want to remember Tom and your boys?”

  “Who—?”

  Kendrick slumps. “I don’t know. I have forgotten too.”

  She leans against him, there on the windy height. A hawk circles above. “The residuum of an evil enchantment, surely. Oh, my heart, my life, cast it from you! Help me find the means to save us.”

  Yet her entreaty is uneven, and through it speaks dread.

  Kendrick straightens. He lays hand on Wayland’s spear, and it is as though strength flows thence, into him. “A spell in truth,” he says. His tone gathers force. “I will not abide in its darkness, nor suffer it to blind and deafen you, my lady.” His gaze takes hold of hers, which cannot break away. “There is but a single road to our freedom. It goes through the gates of death.”

  She waits, mute and shuddering. “Whatever we do, we must die, Ricia. Let us fare hence as our own folk.”

  “I—no—I won’t—I will—”

  “You see before you the means of your deliverance. It is sharp, I am strong, you will feel no pain.”

  She bares her bosom. “Then quickly, Kendrick, before I am lost!”

  He drives the weapon home. “I love you,” he says. She sinks at his feet. “I follow you, my darling,” he says, withdrawing the steel, bracing the shaft against stone, and lunging forward. He falls be
side her. “Now we are free.”

  “That was . . . a nightmare.” Broberg sounded barely awake.

  Scobie’s voice shook. “Necessary, I think, for both of us.” He gazed straight before him, letting Saturn fill his eyes with dazzle. “Else we’d have stayed . . . insane? Maybe not, by definition. But we’d not have been in reality either.”

  “It would have been easier,” she mumbled. “We’d never have known we were dying.”

  “Would you have preferred that?”

  Broberg shivered. The slackness in her countenance gave place to the same tension that was in his. “Oh, no,” she said, quite softly but in the manner of full consciousness. “No, you were right, of course. Thank you for your courage.”

  “You’ve always had as much guts as anybody. Jean. You just have more imagination than me.” Scobie’s hand chopped empty space in a gesture of dismissal. “Okay, we should call poor Mark and let him know. But first—” His words lost the cadence he had laid on them. “First—”

  Her glove clasped his. “What, Colin?”

  “Let’s decide about that third unit—Luis’s,” he said with difficulty, still confronting the great ringed planet. “Your decision, actually, though we can discuss the matter if you want. I will not hog it for the sake of a few more hours. Nor will I share it; that would be a nasty way for us both to go out. However, I suggest you use it.”

  “To sit beside your frozen corpse?” she replied. “No. I wouldn’t even feel the warmth, not in my bones—”

  She turned toward him so fast that she nearly fell off the pinnacle. He caught her. “Warmth!” she screamed, shrill as the cry of a hawk on the wing. “Colin, we’ll take our bones home!”

  “In point of fact,” said Danzig, “I’ve climbed onto the hull. That’s high enough for me to see over those ridges and needles. I’ve got a view of the entire horizon.”

  “Good,” grunted Scobie. “Be prepared to survey a complete circle quick. This depends on a lot of factors we can’t predict. The beacon will certainly not be anything like as big as what you had arranged. It may be thin and short-lived. And. of course, it may rise too low for sighting at your distance.” He cleared his throat. “In that case, we two have bought the farm. But we’ll have made a hell of a try, which feels great by itself.”

  He hefted the fuel cell. Garcilaso’s gift. A piece of heavy wire, insulation stripped off, joined the prongs. Without a regulator, the unit poured its maximum power through the short circuit. Already the strand glowed.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to do it. Colin?” Broberg asked. “Your rib—”

  He made a lopsided grin. “I’m nonetheless better designed by nature for throwing things,” he said. “Allow me that much male arrogance. The bright idea was yours.”

  “It should have been obvious from the first,” she said. “I think it would have been, if we weren’t bewildered in our dream.”

  “M-m, often the simple answers are the hardest to find. Besides, we had to get this far or it wouldn’t have worked, and the game helped mightily . . . Are you set, Mark? Heave ho!”

  Scobie cast the cell as if it were a baseball, hard and far through the Iapetan gravity field. Spinning, its incandescent wire wove a sorcerous web across vision. It landed somewhere beyond the rim. on the glacier’s back.

  Frozen gases vaporized, whirled aloft, briefly recondensed before they were lost. A geyser stood white against the stars.

  “I see you!” Danzig yelped. “I see your beacon. I’ve got my bearing. I’ll be on my way! With rope and extra energy units and everything!”

  Scobie sagged to the ground and clutched at his left side. Broberg knelt and held him, as if either of them could lay hand on his pain. No large matter. He would not hurt much longer.

  “How high would you guess the plume goes?” Danzig inquired, calmer.

  “About a hundred meters.” Broberg replied after study.

  “Oh, damn, these gloves do make it awkward punching the calculator. . . . Well, to judge by what I observe of it. I’m between ten and fifteen klicks off. Give me an hour or a tad more to get there and find your exact location. Okay?”

  Broberg checked gauges. “Yes, by a hair. We’ll turn our thermostats down and sit very quietly to reduce oxygen demand. We’ll get cold, but we’ll survive.”

  “I may be quicker,” Danzig said. “That was a worst-case estimate. All right. I’m off. No more conversation till we meet. I won’t take any foolish chances, but I will need my wind for making speed.”

  Faintly, those who waited heard him breathe, heard his hastening footfalls. The geyser died.

  They sat, arms around waists, and regarded the glory which encompassed them. After a silence, the man said: “Well, I suppose this means the end of the game. For everybody.”

  “It must certainly be brought under strict control,” the woman answered. “I wonder, though, if they will abandon it altogether—out here.”

  “If they must, they can.”

  “Yes. We did, you and I, didn’t we?”

  They turned face to face, beneath that star-beswarmed, Saturn-ruled sky. Nothing tempered the sunlight that revealed them to each other, she a middle-aged wife, he a man ordinary except for his aloneness. They would never play again. They could not.

  A puzzled compassion was in her smile. “Dear friend—” she began.

  His uplifted palm warded her from further speech. “Best we don’t talk unless it’s essential,” he said. “That’ll save a little oxygen, and we can stay a little warmer. Shall we try to sleep?”

  Her eyes widened and darkened. “I dare not,” she confessed. “Not till enough time has gone past. Now, I might dream.”

  The End

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