Time Travel Omnibus, page 494
The wind turned again and drove the smoke back into the Pass sufficiently for Chandrill to see several yards. He ran across the ice away from the sled which was using up its kinetic energy in a slow spin, dragging a train of rigging and spars. When he was well clear he took his skates from his belt and clamped them to his boots, then the darkness raged over everything again. Chandrill bent forward into the wind and thrust off moving with short quick strokes.
An indefinite time went by during which he passed two deserted sleds, wondering all the time where he was trying to go and why. It took him some time to realise that he was looking for Sinoon.
The dark curtain lifted just in time to prevent him running straight into the main mass of the wreckage. He turned to the right and headed towards the southern end of the Pass faintly visible through the twilight. By reckless leaping of scattered timbers he managed to reach the first slopes before the smoke closed down. There were runner tracks along the edge of the ice here and Chandrill followed them.
The sled marks were heavy and he realised that all the sleds at the rear of the lines had come this way, probably being poled along most of the way, in the hope of finding a way through to the other side. Something ahead was flaming intermittently with a fierce white light, and as he came nearer the light source Chandrill found that it was getting warmer. The way ahead became too crowded with close packed sleds and he moved up on to the slope feeling as though he was moving helplessly through a hazy flickering dream.
He climbed until he had crossed over a shoulder of the hill and had a view of the Pass below him. A mile ahead, at the narrowest point, something that could hardly be seen for the swirling clouds of dust and soot was flaming and glaring, shooting weird beams of light in all directions when the movements of the smoke let them through. The floor of the Pass leading up to the light was obscured but Chandrill glimpsed men moving and he heard their shouts on the wind.
Far up in the mass of sleds he caught a flash of the near white timbers and sails of the Royal Sled of his own tribe. He took off his skates and began to run down the slope.
He fought his way through a stream of men and women who wanted to get away from the unknown thing ahead. When he reached the sled, a mass of motionless darkness against swirling greyness, he found Sinoon curled on the ground close to the bottom of the forward ladder. There was no sign of any of the others about. She was motionless except for a slight trembling. The furs she wore had been transformed by mud and water into a mass of sticky spikes.
Chandrill did not try to find out what had happened to her. He lifted her in his arms and looked into the white face with its myopic seeking eyes. “You want me to take you out of this?” he asked. Sinoon nodded and let her head fall against his shoulder. Chandrill turned and climbed back up the hill, sliding in the mud. At the top of the shoulder he could go no further. He set Sinoon on the ground in the lee of a rock and dropped down beside her.
For a moment he felt good that he had brought her up out of the smoke and chaos to where they could rest then he remembered that it made no difference. They were dead anyway.
Alone he might have had a chance to cross to the other side of the mountains, but not with Sinoon. There was nothing to do now but sit and wait until it got dark. Until they were dead. Down below them in the Pass the sounds were dying out but Chandrill no longer cared. For most of the tribes the trek was over and perhaps they were luckier than those who had got through the Pass. For them there was nothing but another circuit of the world ahead with nothing to do but think about how, when they again reached the Pass, there would be no way through . . .
“Sinoon! Sinoon!” The shout, faint as it was coming up the slope, startled Chandrill. He had forgotten Minnatose.
He shot a glance at Sinoon, who rested with her eyes closed and did not seem to have heard it, then got to his feet and looked down the slope. Minnatose was weaving up the hill following the tracks in the snow and, all at once, there was nothing else in the world save Chandrill and his cousin and the wavering line of footprints joining them together.
“Don’t come any further,” he shouted causing Minnatose to raise his head and see him. Minnatose stared up the hill at him for long seconds and then he shouted something.
Just one word, “You,” and he started up the hill again, and Chandrill knew what it was for. The way in which Minnatose stared up the slope, stumbling unseeingly over rocks and brush, made it obvious.
He felt for the whipstick and got it out of its sling. It was a length of springy steel an eighth of an inch in diameter which had a handle at one end. Keeping his eyes fixed on Minnatose he groped in his pouch and brought out a needle-pointed piece of steel about six inches long which he fitted over the end of the rod.
“I’ve warned you,” he shouted, drawing his arm back, but the words had no visible effect. Chandrill had not expected them to, he had just felt it necessary to give the other man every chance. Minnatose came on up the hill, his eyes blank.
Ignoring the sick feeling in his stomach Chandrill brought his arm down hard. He heard the steel head go whistling down the slope and Minnatose went down sideways with it buried in the bulge of his thigh. Chandrill automatically groped for another head, the finisher, then checked his hand—he would not be able to make another throw. Not at a man anyway.
Minnatose began to get some control over the noises he was making and sat up holding his leg with both hands. He had on his face the hurt, indignant look of the bully who has been hit and is now convinced that he must bully harder than ever to teach the offender a much needed lesson. Chandrill turned and pulled Sinoon to her feet.
“Come on, Sin,” he whispered, “we’ll have to keep moving,” He reckoned that it would take Minnatose at the most twenty minutes to recover and stop his leg bleeding and then he would be coming after him. With a sudden flash of insight Chandrill realised that there was nothing else in life for Minnatose but to kill the one that had been, as he saw it, the cause of the end of his world. It was logical. One man had stripped him of everything; of the past and the future—even life, but a fine piece of irony was there. By virtue of having deprived him of so much that man had provided him with one remaining, shining, all-important goal. Revenge.
Chandrill knew that better than he knew anything and he was running because, although he had the normal man’s disbelieving indifference to the idea of simply dying, he was horribly afraid of the intimate reality of being killed. He wanted to die in his own way.
South of the Pass, along the bottom slopes of the mountain continent, things had not changed at all because nobody had ever travelled that far away from the tribal route. The wind blew from the north having carried the sleds round the world, tried to squeeze its massive invisible self through the Pass and swung along the line of the hills. Since the instant in which the Pass had been destroyed the only evidence that there was still time was in the green sky which had grown several shades darker as the long night slid ponderously across the ice sea from the east.
Chandrill’s foot went blindly over the edge of a crevice and he threw himself back, bearing down on Sinoon for support. Her knees buckled under his weight and they fell awkwardly onto the stiff coating of snow that had fallen ages ago before the last water had become permanently frozen.
From where he lay, too tired to get up now that he was down, Chandrill stared dully at the fresh clean greyness of newly split rocks and, underneath them, the snow-scattered brownness of upthrown soil. It took the facts a long time to penetrate, then he sat up and looked down into the crevice.
The first thing he knew was that this was not a natural formation at all. It was a long shallow gouge in the surface of the hill. One end of it pointed out across the silent horizon of ice and the other on up the slope. The top of it was not visible because a few hundred yards above him the hill he was on reached its highest point then fell away again on the other side. Miles beyond the low ridge thus formed the actual mountains rose distantly.
Sinoon had gone to sleep lying against him, in the position in which she had fallen, with the ease of a tired child. She was a child, Chandrill thought not for the first time. He got to his feet and pulled Sinoon up beside him.
“Come on, Sin,” he whispered. “Up this way.” She walked with him blindly, dragging her feet and leaning on him.
At the top of the slope the green-white lumpy ground dropped away from them in a long gentle fall into some rough land covered with stunted trees and briar clumps. Almost at his feet the furrow started in the hard snow, narrow at first then broadening out as it went down the hill until at the bottom it was thirty feet wide. Near the broad end the gouge was kinked round a sled-sized rock and, lying outside the trail of violence altogether, was the thing that had caused it.
It was a shining silver egg that had been split open almost vertically from the end nearest Chandrill practically the whole way through to the other end. Inside the egg was a tangled mass of crumpled metalwork and massed interlacing wires.
Chandrill knew with an instinctive judgement, that held good even for things as far outside his sphere of knowledge as this, that he was looking at the ultimate development of the sled. A machine that moved through the sky—like a meteor.
The picture of a mother ship roaming between the stars came to him suddenly. He could almost see the great machine approaching his own tiny sun, the unforeseen accident which sent it winging down, too fast for a landing on his own world, the panic aboard as the mountains appeared ahead right across the horizon, the futile efforts to bring the ship round to go through the one gap in the barrier and the spectacular failure which had snuffed out his race. Chandrill felt his mind reel with the very bigness of the concept.
This glittering shattered thing must have been the flier’s equivalent of his own ice yacht. Chandrill knew then why he had been so uplifted when he had seen the light in the sky. Something, some half-memory inherited, had whispered that here was the way out for the tribes.
He walked down the slope keeping inside the track of the egg and peered into it hoping to see and at the same time afraid of seeing the creature that might be inside. He was unable to see more than a few feet into the interior because of the masses of plates and equipment that blocked his vision and a dense grey-white gas that lingered far inside the hull. At the open end of the egg was a squat machine, heavily flanged and moulded to one half of the hull which Chandrill took to be the floor.
He clambered along the upthrown earth and rock that formed a motionless sculptured wave around the egg to the front, the end that he would have expected to have received the most of the damage. There the smooth line of the hull was surprisingly unbroken. He worked his way right round to the rear of the egg and reached the windward side of the gash in the hull where he caught a wisp of the cloudy whiteness from inside. It reeked of ammonia and something else . . .
“Wake up, Chan! Wake up! Please. Wake up . . .” The voice in Chandrill’s ears grew louder and more insistent and at last he had to relinquish sleep and return to the ice and the cold green sky. Sinoon was bending over him and the sight of the scared, tear-streaked mask that was her face brought him back to reality.
“What’s the matter?” Chandrill sat up. The inside of his mouth was parched.
“He’s here,” she said, pulling at his arms. “It’s Minnatose. He’s on the other side of the hill. I’m afraid. Get up.” She shook him violently, overflowing with nervous panic. Chandrill wondered what Minnatose had done to change her former admiration to this. He got to his feet unsteadily and blinked as it came to him that if he had received a larger dose of the gas he would not have come out of it at all.
They ran from the silent egg towards one of the larger clumps of briars and dropped down behind it. Lying down, Chandrill saw through the stalks that the ground was so heavily scattered with rock and earth that they had left no trail to their hiding place. Just at that moment Minnatose appeared on the skyline.
Chandrill’s hope that he would not need a weapon faded out for Minnatose was carrying one of the long, heavy knives used for cutting down bread canes. He was standing stock still at the top of the hill staring down the slope at the gleaming machine. His thigh was clumsily bandaged. Minnatose started walking down the hill.
Chandrill felt Sinoon begin to tremble and a sudden flood of guilt and responsibility sent him looking around for something that he could use for fighting. There were lots of stone splinters nearby but nothing that looked nearly heavy enough, and he sent his gaze further out. About thirty yards from him he saw something rather peculiar lying in the lee of the huge rock. It was an almost perfectly round piece of metal about a foot in diameter. It looked very heavy and Chandrill wondered if he could reach it before Minnatose could stop him.
“Keep quiet and lie still,” he whispered to Sinoon. He pressed his stomach up from the ground and poised, ready to spring forward with all the strength he could muster.
It was in that moment of supreme concentration on it that the round object moved, It rolled over revealing that, on the side which had been turned away from Chandrill, it was partly made of transparent stuff through which could be seen a swirling gaseous movement reminiscent of the gas in the egg.
The shock of the event, coming just at that vulnerable instant, drove the air from his lungs and brought with it a flood of reactive weakness. He dropped back onto the ground beside Sinoon. She was staring at him, slowly getting more afraid as his own fear leaked through to her by way of his eyes.
Chandrill examined the object and realised that he had not seen it properly the first time. A trick of matching colours had prevented him from seeing that the object was not a complete, separate entity.
It was, in fact, the helmetted head of something sprawled on the ground.
Something wearing a white one piece garment that completely covered its body. The realisation in some way relieved Chandrill for the idea of an alien creature lying there in the snow was more acceptable to his mind than the one of a curious looking sphere which could move of its own accord. He watched the alien for a full minute in which it made no further move, then he decided that it must be nearly dead.
“Try and get this, Sin,” he whispered. “It’s difficult to grasp but try to get it anyway.” He told her his theory about the egg and about the alien in white lying nearby, then snapped, “Don’t move or make a noise!”
She lay very still for a long time then said, “Where is it?”
Chandrill turned round to face the alien and pointed to it. The alien was lying in the same place and in the same position except for one thing. The helmet was now lifted a few inches clear of the ground and the transparent window was facing directly towards where Chandrill and Sinoon lay.
Long cold seconds rolled over Chandrill as he realised that the alien had seen them and that he did not know what to do about it. On his left was the ruined space craft with Minnatose out of sight now on the far side of it. On his right was the silent, sentient alien in white, perhaps dying perhaps ready to spring into ferocious and deadly action. There was no way for Chandrill to tell.
The wind rolling in from the dark ice and down the line of the hills was loud and then quiet in his ears. The green sky seemed to be pressing down on everything, holding it still.
Quite suddenly over a distance of thirty yards, the alien seemed to reach out an invisible hand which passed through Chandrill’s skull and took hold of his brain. The sensation paralysed him. Then the alien spoke. As Chandrill felt it, the process was not so much one of speaking as of writing the words directly onto the surface of his brain with the finger of an invisible hand.
Being, it said, I can feel the fear in you and your companion and I can feel the blind kill-longing in the other one which is near my ship. I have an aversion for these things and will not tolerate them near me. You shall explain your circumstances to me so that I may decide what to do. Prepare your report and project it to me thus . . .
Chandrill received a wordless description of how to gather his thoughts, poise and launch them from his mind. He was not sure that he could do it and he knew that unless the instructions were constantly reiterated in the same way he would forget them in ten minutes. As well as that he received a faint disturbing inkling of just how far the alien would go to preserve its peace of mind.
Wondering just why he felt it SO important to get everything just right he began to prepare his explanation. He tried to compress the history of the tribes into one compact, cohesive mass. He thought of the dark futility of the eternal trek round the world and of the original aims of the Philosophy Sled, and its failure. He sketched in his own life, the struggles with the others to make them accept his beliefs, the struggles with himself to act on them. Chandrill thought of the recent events; the light in the sky, the destruction of the Pass and the flight from the cousin who needed to kill him . . .
He fixed his eyes on the dark window with its sluggish movement of mist inside then, praying that he could do it right, launched his message. The alien made a hoarse pain sound and clapped what might have been two arms, made shapeless with the white covering, over its helmet. From the far side of the sky-craft came the sound of a stone as though dislodged by a sudden movement.
Before Chandrill had time to wonder what had happened the words began forming inside his head. Such strength, they said, I did not expect such strength. A mistake on my part. I have very little time—the being you call Minnatose, the one with the dark shadow over his mind, has seen me and is coming. Listen. Inside my ship there are millions of books on microfilm. I see that your knowledge of optics is sufficient for you to develop a way to read them. There are aids to deciphering also. There is yet a chance for your people because the engine of the ship is not destroyed and has manual controls . . .
