Polly’s landing was more like a controlled crash, but the lander was built to take punishment. As they touched down the forward thrusters went on to stop them, hurling them all against their restraining nets. They stopped the roll in a couple of hundred yards, well before they were near the line of bending, flailing trees.
“We’re down,” Polly announced.
It didn’t feel that way. Even stopped, the plane was still jiggling uneasily in the wind. Polly belched worriedly a few times as she thumbed the viewscreens on. Two of them flashed together on the bulkhead over the controls. One showed the landing site as simulated from space, the other the actual scene outside the ship. The simulated scene was glacially, whitely static. The actual one was full of horizontally driven rain and tossing evergreens.
The six-pointed star that marked their position was in the same place on both screens, winking rapidly to show that the landing was where it had been planned to be. “Why are we having a storm?” Obie called fearfully. “Did you land in the wrong place?”
“It’s the right place,” Polly muttered in irritated wonder. “But where’s all this ‘snow’?”
A couple of hours later Sandy was in his parka and mukluks, standing in the doorway of the lander. Sentimentally he touched the pocket where he had his mother’s picture, but Polly was in no mood for sentiment. “Go on, Wimp!” she snapped, giving him a nudge.
He went. He managed to catch at the ladder-stick as he went out and climbed down easily enough. The fall was only ten or twelve feet, but even in this weak Earth gravity it could have done real harm if he had missed. He trudged around the back of the ship, catching a faint wind-driven whiff of alcohol from the jets. He oriented himself toward the place where the nearest road should be and began trudging through the mud and the driving rain.
It was not at all the way it was supposed to be.
Something was seriously wrong with the mission planning. This was certainly the part of Earth called “Alaska”; the navigation screens had proved it. Then why didn’t it look that way? Alaska, along with all the rest of the planet, had been thoroughly studied by the Hakh’hli on their first time around. Alaska was known to be cold—at least, mostly cold during all but a brief period in the summer, and then it was only at relatively low altitudes that it could ever be called anything else. The planners had definitely assured them of “snow”; if there was such a thing (and a thousand television programs had testified there was), it might be somewhere on the Earth, but it definitely was not here.
What was here was mud, and a temperature high enough to make Sandy sweat unbearably inside his furs, and an intense, scary, blinding storm.
A storm like this could not be an everyday event, Sandy told himself. Half a dozen times, as he struggled in what he hoped was the direction of the road, he had to detour around uprooted trees—big bastards of trees, a hundred feet from root to crown, and with huge clumps of ruptured earth around their roots still being melted away by the drenching downpour. And the craters left by the uprooted trees were all fresh.
Sandy slapped wearily at one of the flying things that seemed to find their way inside his parka to bite him—were they “mosquitos”?—and resented his fate. The whole thing was definitely worrying.
Worse than that, it was unjust. Nothing in Sandy’s training had prepared him for this. He had heard of “weather.” There had been lectures about it, and the taped old TV news shows were full of talk about it, with maps of isobars and lows and cold fronts. But hearing about it and being out in it were not at all the same. Neither Sandy nor any of the 22,000 Hakh’hli in the interstellar ship had ever had any personal experience with such a thing.
It was not the kind of personal experience Sandy enjoyed. How were you supposed to find your way in this “weather” condition? It had looked easy enough in the shipboard briefings; there were the mountains and the pass between them, and the road he was looking for went straight through the pass. But how could you tell where the mountains were when the rain and clouds cut off everything a hundred feet overhead? And, of course, the ship was already out of sight behind him. He stopped and painfully pulled the radio out from its place in an inside pocket. “This is Sandy,” he said into it. “Fix me, will you?”
Tanya’s voice responded at once. “You’re way off,” she said crossly. “Turn three-twelfths to the left. And what’s taking you so long? You should be almost at the road by now.”
“I thought I was,” Sandy said bitterly, thumbing the set off. He was going to need help from the radio again, he was quite sure, so he slung it by its strap over a shoulder instead of putting it back inside. Sweating and muttering to himself, he moved on through the drenching rain, with slippery mud underfoot and wind-tossed branches lashing him across the face.
It was not at all the way he had expected to return to the Earth.
If it was bad while there was still daylight, it got far worse as darkness fell. The sun had set. The last wan sky glow had disappeared. There was no light of any kind. Total darkness! Another new experience, and a nasty one.
That was when Lysander slipped on a slick mud bank and rolled into a clump of wet, stabbing undergrowth.
That wasn’t the worst of it. When he stood up and tried for a radio fix he discovered the little ravine had had a rivulet at its bottom. The radio was soaked, and it didn’t work any more.
And neither, he discovered from the sudden silence of the storm, did his hearing aid. He batted it a few times against the knee of his sweaty fur pants, but it still didn’t work. Furious, he jammed it in a pocket and looked around.
The lander’s screens had ranged the highway through the pass at no more than two miles away. In five hours of up and down and zigzag detours Sandy had surely walked farther than that. So it was certain that he had drifted from his proper route again.
It came upon Sandy Washington that he was lost.
It wasn’t a useful realization. There wasn’t anything he could do about it. He couldn’t go back to the ship, because he no longer had any way of knowing which way the ship was. He could have gone forward, all right—it was what he desperately wanted—but he no longer had any idea of which direction “forward” was, either.
He also remembered, rather late, that Alaska was known to have wild animals, some of which—they were called “wolves” and “grizzly bears”—would not be pleasant to meet.
He stared around, beginning to be not only angry but afraid.
And that was when he realized that there, off to the right, was a place where the darkness was not quite solid. It wasn’t anything you could call a light. It certainly wasn’t bright, and it was a dull scarlet in color. But it was something different from the darkness around him.
He almost didn’t see the building until he was within touching distance of it. The light outside it was a crimson disk, flowing like the coals of an old fire, over the door. As he moved along the wall he bumped painfully over some metal thing with wheels—could it be a car? He knew what cars were, but did cars draw things with rows of jagged metal spikes? The pain made him blink, but he limped on.
The door opened to a push.
Inside the building three of the same dimly glowing red disks, spaced along a low ceiling, showed him a narrow aisle with stall doors opening off it. The animal reek, the faint shuffling sounds of movement, and the sounds of breathing and munching told Sandy he was not alone in the building.
Even in the gloom, Sandy recognized what sort of living things he was sharing the building with. The huge, patient eyes, the nubby little horns, the slow perpetual motion of the jaws—he had seen them in the old films often enough. They were cows.
One major worry went away. Cows, he was sure, did not eat human beings.
Soaked and exhausted, Sandy pulled off the parka and mukluks. The presence of a building implied the presence of human beings not far away. What he should do, he knew, was find them, make contact, and get on with his mission.
Sandy didn’t do that. Weariness got in the way. He let himself sink into a stack of some sort of dried vegetation. He thought he should at least stay awake so that he could greet whoever “owned” these cows when he came by . . . but as he was thinking, exhaustion won out, and he was asleep.