“I need some air.”
The controller brought one of his screens to life. “You are who,
please?”
“Hunt. Dr. V. Hunt.”
“ID?”
“730289 C/EX4.”
The controller logged the details, then checked the time and keyed
it in.
“Report in by radio in one hour’s time if you’re not back. Keep a
receiver channel open permanently on 24.328 megahertz.”
“Will do,” Hunt acknowledged. “Good night.”
“Night.”
The controller watched Hunt disappear toward the floor below,
shrugged to himself, and automatically scanned the displays in
front of him. It was going to be a quiet night.
In the surface access anteroom on the ground level, Hunt selected a
suit from the row of lockers along the right hand wall. A few
minutes later, suited up and with his helmet secured, he walked to
the airlock, keyed his name and ID code into the terminal by the
gate, and waited a couple of seconds for the inner door to slide
open.
He emerged into the swirling silver mist and turned right to follow
the line of the looming black metal cliff of the control building.
The crunch of his boots in the powder ice sounded faint and far
away, through the thin vapors. Where the wall ended he continued
walking slowly in a straight line, out into the open area and
toward the edge of the base. Phantom shapes of steel emerged and
disappeared in the silent shadows around him. The gloom ahead grew
darker as islands of diffuse light passed by on either side. The
ice began sloping upward. Irregular patches of naked, upthrusting
rock became more frequent. He walked on as if in a trance.
Pictures from the past rolled by before his mind’s eye: a boy,
reading books, shut away in the upstairs bedroom of a London slum .
. . a youth, pedaling a bicycle each morning through the narrow
streets of Cambridge. The people he had been were no more real than
the people he would become. All through his life he had been moving
on, never standing still, always in the process of changing from
something he had been to something he would be. And beyond every
new world, another beckoned. And always the faces around him were
unfamiliar ones-they drifted into his life like the transient
shadows of the rocks that now moved toward him from the mists
ahead. Like the rocks, for a while the people seemed to exist and
take on form and substance, before slipping by to dissolve into the
shrouds of the past behind him, as if they
had never been. Forsyth-Scott, Felix Borlan, and Rob Gray had
already ceased to exist. Would Caidwell, Danchekker, and the rest
soon fade away to join them? And what new figures would materialize
out of the unknown worlds lying hidden behind the veils of time
ahead?
He realized with some surprise that the mists around him were
getting brighter again; also, he could suddenly see farther. He was
climbing upward across an immense ice field, now smooth and devoid
of rocks. The light was an eerie glow, permeating evenly through
mists on every side as if the fog itself were luminous. He climbed
higher. With every step the horizon of his vision broadened
further, and the luminosity drained from the surrounding mist to
concentrate itself in a single patch that second by second grew
brighter above his head. And then he was looking out over the top
of the fog bank. It was just a pocket, trapped in the depression of
the vast basin in which the base had been built; it had no doubt
been sited there to shorten the length of the shaft needed to reach
the Ganymean ship. The slope above him finished in a long, rounded
ridge not fifty feet beyond where he stood. He changed direction
slightly to take the steeper incline that led directly to the
summit of the ridge. The last tenuous wisps of whiteness fell away.
At the top, the night was clear as crystal. He was standing on a
beach of ice that shelved down from his feet into a lake of cotton
wool. On the opposite shore of the lake rose the summits of the
rock buttresses and ice cliffs that stood beyond the base. For