“Proteus—”
“I discovered something unsettling about your Proteus,” she interrupted, looking behind at the grav-plated weapons system which floated above the earth in absolute silence.
“What?”
“He’s your protection robot, not mine. The wolves kept coming closer. He kept scanning them, very attentively, but I realized that he was not going to shoot any of them unless they went for you. If they attacked me, it was perfectly all right.”
He nodded, a quiver of horror running through him as he contemplated the serious oversight in their preparations he had made. He had been thinking of Proteus as their guardian, not as his own private soldier, for he had been extending the new concept of “us” everywhere the old concept of “me” had prevailed. But Proteus would be oblivious of emotional developments such as that and would stand blithely by and watch her perish if her own life was not imperiled by the same enemy and at the precise same instant as Davis’s own.
The cataracted eyes of the spherical defender stared out into the winter wasteland: white viewing white.
“From now on,” he said, “well tie the plastic down so that there’s only a single entrance instead of two. If I hadn’t been so tired this morning, I would have done that. Then I’ll sleep near the open side, with Proteus near the entrance.” He pushed up the sleeve of his coat and the sleeves of the two sweaters which he wore beneath it. “We’ve been asleep for about five hours. It’s getting on toward the end of the morning. If we’re going to make use of the daylight to walk, we’d better get started.”
They drank more water and ate some chocolate, then carefully folded the blanket to unalign its heat emanators so that they could cool, packed things away, took down the plastic sheet that formed their shelter and stowed that. In fifteen minutes, they were ready to move out, with Leah carrying the suitcase and Davis toting both rucksacks. They set out down the mountainside with a great deal more ease than they had managed in their sleepiness and exhaustion the first time, five or six hours ago.
The terrible winds had died, though there were now and then gusts that startled them and unbalanced them, toppling them into snowbanks. The snow was still falling, rather heavily but in less than a blizzard pace. They could see some distance ahead, and the way looked uniformly easy down this ravine and up the other side, at least. There were drifts of snow as high as their waists in some spots, though these could most always be circumvented if they took time and patience to find their way. Everywhere, the white stuff was up to mid-calf on Davis and up to the girl’s knees, which slowed and tired them and made them wonder whether they would be able to make the sort of time necessary to stay well ahead of the Alliance forces that must—at dawn— have struck out on their trail.
When they reached the bottom of the depression and started up the opposite slope, they found that going down through the waves of the drifts had been far easier than pushing upwards through them. They were required, now, to fight the angle of the earth, the treacherous and unseen footing beneath winter’s blanket, and the stiff resistance of more than a foot of fine, tightly packed snow. Near the top, they were presented with yet another obstacle: an overhanging drift that crowned the last twenty feet of their path and made reaching the top of the second mountain difficult if not impossible. At Davis’s suggestion, they worked to the right, moving horizontally now, searching for a break in the overhang through which they might struggle to achieve the blessed levelness of the summit. But they found, three hundred yards along, that the ravine dropped into a sheer cliff where there was no toehold and that the overhanging drift continued beyond even this. They were forced to backtrack, following their own footprints, until they came to their starting point. They worked left, then, and found much the same situation there as well. There was no break at all in the deep and unscalable snow wall that blocked their progress.