“What now?” Leah asked, setting the suitcase down and wiping perspiration off her forehead. She had to resist an urge to pull off the heavy coat for a feeling of coolness against her skin. That body heat that now bothered her was exactly what she needed to maintain her life, she knew, and the blast of frigid air that would hit her when she stripped might very well give her the pneumonia that both of them feared.
“Two things,” he said.
“Full of ideas aren’t we.”
“Don’t congratulate me until you hear how unpleasant both of the possibilities are.”
“They couldn’t be any more unpleasant than waiting here until we either freeze or get caught.”
“Well,” he said, wishing he could drop the rucksacks but knowing if he did he would never put them on again, “we can either turn back, climb the other side of the ravine, cross to another way down the first mountain, and make a second attempt at getting off it, then work our way back in the direction we want to go. The flaw is that we may run into the same thing—or something worse no matter where we go. And it’s still snowing—which means every hour we delay getting on our way, there’s another inch of snow we have to push through.”
“Sounds bad.”
“I don’t like it either.”
“The second way, then.”
He frowned. “We break a way through the drift hanging over us, go. right through and on our way.”
“It looks seven or eight feet deep, anyway. We don’t have a shovel, and even if we did we couldn’t use it properly from a slope like this.”
“We do have Proteus,” he said.
She grinned. “Of course! The weapons!”
“Don’t get too excited, love. There’s a hazard. Proteus will refuse to get more than a few feet from me, which means we’ll have to be right where he’s working. And since his range of fire isn’t great enough to work from the bottom of the ravine or the other side, we’ll have to stand about halfway up the slope while he blasts away. If there’s a slide, we’re going to be right in the path of it.”
They both looked at the shelf of white above them. “What if he uses the vibra-beam instead of the projectile weapon?” she asked.
“I can’t direct that one. It’s an automatic system at his discretion, just like the plasti-plasma tentacles. But the projectile business responds to vocal commands. It’s all we have.”
“Slide or not,” she said, “we might as well try it.”
“Gun left,” he ordered the robot.
It extruded the barrel from the smooth sheen of its hull.
“Gun up,” he directed.
It complied.
Traction left. Fraction left again. Steady.”
He looked once more at the shelf of snow that was suspended overhead.
Somewhere behind, a wolf howled.
“Fire one!” he ordered.
The shell exploded in the middle of the drift, blasted snow in all directions, sent a fine white mist rolling down the ravine and across them. When the air cleared, approximately a third of the way had been torn open.
“Gun up, fraction,” he directed. “Up fraction again. Fire one!”
The shell exploded, and there was a screeching, whining rumble from above. Cracks appeared in the crusted drift. It jerked, seemed to descend, in mass, an inch or so. Then everything let loose with an horrendous roar and the entire snow shelf swept at them with the speed of a locomotive.
Davis grabbed Leah, tried to leap with her up the slope toward the avalanche, with the intention of reaching the cleared section where there was little snow left to fall. But before he could get there, the wave of cold snow and ice swept over them, pulled her from his grasp and carried her away, toward the bottom of the small valley . . .
VII
HE MANAGED to grasp the trunk of a thin, sturdy, yil tree —past which the rushing snow carried him—wrapped his arms around it and locked his hands together on the other side. The tree bent amazingly beneath the pressure of the small avalanche though it refused to snap. In a moment, the roar seemed to grow distant, as if he were hearing only echoes of the event, then abruptly ceased altogether. He rose, his legs shaky beneath him, and tried to get his breath and to still the fluttering of his heart. The air was so choked with mist that it was difficult to breathe, and he thought it would not be improbable for a man with an impaired lung or a cold and its subsequent stuffed nose to either drown or suffocate in seconds.