Hour after hour the thin snake of footprints, two pinpoints of
color at its head, wound its way westward across the wilderness
amid steadily lengthening shadows. He marched as if in a trance,
beyond feeling pain, beyond feeling exhaustion-beyond feeling
anything. The skyline never seemed to change; soon he could no
longer look at it. Instead, he began picking out the next prominent
boulder or crag, and counting off the paces until they reached it.
“Two hundred and thirteen less to go.” And then he repeated it over
again. . . and again. . . and again. The rocks marched by in slow,
endless, indifferent procession. Every step became a separate
triumph of will-a deliberate, conscious effort to drive one foot
yet one more pace beyond the last. When he faltered, Koriel was
there to catch his arm; when he fell, Koriel was always there to
haul him up. Koriel never tired.
At last they stopped. They were standing in a gorge perhaps a
quarter mile wide, below one of the lines of low, broken cliffs
that flanked it on either side. He collapsed on the nearest
boulder. Koriel stood a few paces ahead surveying the landscape.
The line of crags immediately above them was interrupted by a
notch, which marked the point where a steep and narrow cleft
tumbled down to break into the wall of the main gorge. From the
bottom of the cleft, a mound of accumulated rubble and rock debris
led down about fifty feet to blend with the floor of the gorge not
far from where they stood. Koriel stretched out an arm to point up
beyond the cleft.
“Gorda will be roughly that way,” he said without turning. “Our
best way would be up and onto that ridge. If we stay on the flat
and go around the long way, it’ll be too far. What d’you say?” The
other stared up in mute despair. The rockfall, funneling up toward
the mouth of the cleft, looked like a mountain. In the distance
beyond towered the ridge, jagged and white in the glare of the sun.
It was impossible.
Koriel allowed his doubts no time to take root. Somehow-slipping,
sliding, stumbling, and falling-they reached the entrance to the
cleft. Beyond it, the walls narrowed and curved around to the left,
cutting off the view of the gorge below from where they had come.
They climbed higher. Around them, sheets of raw reflected sunlight
and bottomless pits of shadow met in knife-edges across rocks
shattered at a thousand crazy angles. His brain ceased to ex
tract the concepts of shape and form from the insane geometry of
white and black that kaleidoscoped across his retina. The patterns
grew and shrank and merged and whirled in a frenzy of visual
cacophony.
His face crashed against his visor as his helmet thudded into the
dust. Koriel hoisted him to his feet.
“You can do it. We’ll see Gorda from the ridge. It’ll be all
downhill from there. . . .”
But the figure in red sank slowly to its knees and folded over. The
head inside the helmet shook weakly from side to side. As Koriel
watched, the conscious part of his mind at last accepted the
inescapable logic that the parts beneath consciousness already
knew. He took a deep breath and looked about him.
Not far below, they had passed a hole, about five feet across, cut
into the base of one of the rock walls. It looked like the remnant
of some forgotten excavation-maybe a preliminary digging left by a
mining survey. The giant stooped, and grasping the harness that
secured the backpack to the now insensible figure at his feet,
dragged the body back down the slope to the hole. It was about ten
feet deep inside. Working quickly, Koriel arranged a lamp to
reflect a low light off the walls and roof. Then he removed the
rations from his companion’s pack, laid the figure back against the
rear wall as comfortably as he could, and placed the food
containers within easy reach. Just as he was finishing, the eyes
behind the visor ifickered open.
“You’ll be fine here for a while.” The usual gruffness was gone