“We’ll be okay, Dad,” he said, as much to reassure himself as his father, but even to his own ears his voice sounded no louder than a whisper compared to the wind.
They crawled toward the piece of shadow looming under the side of the hill amid all the white. Snow drifted and blew in front of it.
His father took a laser pistol from his pocket. “Wild … animals,” he said, and they crawled into the opening.
They huddled inside, listening to the wind howl outside. Diego’s dad looked bad to him; he seemed to have doubled his age in just a few minutes. His black hair was iced over, and the thick black eyebrows that normally made his dark eyes seem so penetrating were dead white with encrusted snow and ice. His expression was not so much scared as dazed, and the blood from the cut was running again, pretty freely. Diego’s own face was wet, too, as was the ruff on his parka. Then he realized that was because it was warmer here in the mouth of the cave.
“Dad, let’s go on back in. It’s warm in here. Come on, let’s keep out of the cold till the storm’s over.”
He felt more like his father’s father than his son then, and that was as scary as being stuck out in the blizzard. But Dad nodded a little stiffly and followed him.
The passage sloped sharply downward for a time, and it was very narrow. Dad had to squeeze sideways and kneel to get through one part, but it had grown so warm that Diego took off his hat, mittens, and muffler and stuffed them in his pocket and unfastened his parka. About this time he began to hear the humming from inside the cave, as if it housed some huge machine. For all he knew, maybe it did. The company had made this planet, hadn’t they? At least that’s what they claimed, though Diego privately thought it was pretty weird to create such a physically inhospitable place.
The path bent sharply to the right, then to the left, and seemed to stop. Diego groped toward the wall in front of him, his hands touching strange indentations, like grooves swirling in some sort of design.
With his touch, the wall gave way and a soft, eerie light from within sent a shaft to meet them. Diego pressed forward into the room, where flame-colored liquid bubbled up in a central pool and the walls glowed with phosphorescence, where roots and rock formations twined and curled into strange designs in the elongated, rough shapes of animals and men, and where the humming was so loud, so perfect, so beautiful that after a while Diego thought he must be hearing the voices of the angels he had once read about-and they were telling him things. He listened so closely that he could not hear his father screaming.
Chapter 4
Yana awoke the next morning at the cat’s insistence. It stood by her head and, every time she tried to go back to sleep, poked its nose in her face. She seriously considered throwing it across the room, but then decided that both it and she needed something to eat. She could hardly inflict corporal punishment for a reasonable demand.
She had a collapsible pot in her survival kit and still had the water left in the thermos jug Bunny had loaned her. She set water on to heat and retrieved one of the fish from the hook outside her door, but from there on she had no idea what to do with it.
There were still some food pellets in her personal baggage, so she gulped down a green one and a pink one and set the fish on the stove to thaw. When it had well and truly stunk up the cabin, she gave it to the cat, who danced with delight.
“Don’t tell Seamus,” she said to the cat. “I think he meant for me to cook it, but between you and me, I never learned how to cook a meal, just get the basic pills I need down my gullet.”
The cat looked up through slit eyes, purring and growling over the fish at the same time, its expression clearly saying, “Your loss is my gain.”