“Down, boy!” I said, in what I hoped was a resonant tone of command. He halted, hauled in the tongue, let it out again, then lowered his hind quarters gingerly, like an old lady settling into her favorite rocker. He sat there and looked at me with his head cocked, and I looked back. And while we were doing that, the giant arrived.
11
He came up silently along an aisle among the big trees, and was within fifty feet of me before I saw him, big as he was.
And big he was.
It’s easy to talk about a man twelve feet high; that’s about twice normal, after all. Just a big man, and let’s make a joke about his shoe size.
But twice the height is four times the area of sky he blanks off as he looms over you; eight times the bulk of solid bone and muscle. Sixteen hundred pounds of man, at Earth-normal G. Here he weighed no more than half a ton, but even at that, each leg was holding up five hundred pounds. They were thick, muscle-corded legs that matched the arms and the chest and the neck that was like a section of hundred-year oak supporting the big head. But massive as he was, there was no distortion of proportion. Photographed without a midget in the picture for scale, he would have looked like any other Mr. Universe contender, straight-boned, clean-limbed, every muscle defined, but nothing out of scale. His hair was black, curly, growing in a rough-cut mane, but no rougher than any other man that lives a long way from a barber. He had a close-trimmed beard, thick, black eyebrows over wide-set, pale blue eyes. His skin was weather-burned the color of well-used cowhide. His features were regular enough to be called handsome, if you admire the Jove-Poseidon style. I saw all this as he came striding up to me, dressed in leather, as light on his feet as the dog was heavy. He stopped beside the pooch, patted its head carelessly with a hand the size of first base, looking down at me, and for a ghostly instant I was a child again, looking at the Brobdingnagian world of adults. Thoughts flashed in my mind, phantom images of a world of warmth and love and security and other illusions long forgotten. I pushed those away and remembered that I was Baird Ulrik, professional, out on a job, in a world that had no place for fantasies.
“You’re the man they call Johnny Thunder,” I said.
He let that pass. Maybe he smiled a little.
“I’m Patton,” I told him. “Carl Patton. I bailed out of a ship.” I pointed to the sky.
He nodded, “I know,” he said. His voice was deep, resonant as a pipe organ; he had a lot of chest for it to bounce around in. “I heard your ship fall.” He looked me over, didn’t see any compound fractures. “I’m glad you came safely to ground. I hope Woola did not frighten you.” His Standard sounded old-fashioned and a little stilted, with a trace of a strange accent. My trained poker face must have slipped a couple of feet at what he said, because he smiled. His teeth were square and porcelain white.
“Why should he?” I said without squeaking. “I’ve seen my three-year-old niece pat a Great Dane on the knee. That was as high as she could reach.”
“Come back with me to my house. I have food, a fire.”
I pulled myself together and went into my act: “I’ve got to get to my cargo pod. There are . . . passengers aboard it.”
His face asked questions.
“They’re alive—so far,” I said. “I have a machine that tells me the pod landed safely, on her chutes. The cannisters are shock-mounted, so if the locator gear survived, so did they. But the equipment might not have. If it was smashed, they’ll die.”
“This is a strange thing, Carl Patton,” he said after I had explained, “to freeze a living man.”
“They wouldn’t be living long, if they weren’t in low-O,” I told him. “Third-degree burns over their whole bodies. Probably internals, too. At the med center they can put ’em in viv tanks and regrow their hides. When they wake up, they’ll be as good as new.” I gave him a significant look, full of do-or-die determination. “If I get there in time, that is. If they come out of it out there . . .” I let the sentence die off without putting words to the kind of death that would be. I made a thing out of looking at the show dials on my wrist. “The pod is down somewhere in that direction.” I pointed away up-slope, to the north. “I don’t know how far.” I shot a look at him to see how that last datum went over. The less I gave away, the better. But he sounded a little more sophisticated than my researches had led me to expect. A slip now could queer everything. “Maybe a hundred miles, maybe more.”
He thought that one over, looking down at me. His eyes were friendly enough, but in a remote way, like a candle burning in the window of a stranger’s house.
“That is bad country, where they have fallen,” he said. “The Towers of Nandi are high. You would die on the way there.”
I knew it was tough country; I’d picked the spot with care. I gave him my manly, straight-from-the-shoulder look.
“There are ten men out there, my responsibility. I’ve got to do what I can.”
His eyes came back to mine. For the first time, a little fire seemed to flicker alight behind them.
“First you must rest and eat.”
I wanted to say more, to set the hook; but just then the world started a slow spin under me. I took a step to catch my balance and a luminous sleet was filling the air, and then the whole thing tilted sideways and I slid off and down into the black place that always waited. . . .
12
I woke up looking at a dancing pattern of orange light on a ceiling of polished red and black wood twenty feet overhead. The light was coming from a fire big enough to roast an ox in, blazing away on a hearth built of rocks the size of tombstones. I was lying on a bed not as large as a handball court, and the air was full of the odor of soup. I crawled to the edge and managed the four-foot jump to the floor. My legs felt like overcooked pasta. My ribs ached—probably from a long ride over the giant’s shoulder.
He looked across at me from the big table. “You were tired,” he said. “And you have many bruises.”
I looked down. I was wearing my underwear, nothing else.
“My suit!” I barked, and the words came out thick, not just from weakness. I was picturing sixty grand worth of equipment and a multi-million credit deal tossed into the reclaimer—or the fire—and a clean set of overalls laid out to replace them.
“There,” my host nodded toward the end of the bed. I grabbed, checked. Everything looked OK. But I didn’t like it; and I didn’t like the idea of being helpless, tended by a man I had business with later.
“You have rested,” the big man said. “Now eat.”
I sat at the table on a pile of blankets and dipped into a dishpanful of thick broth made of savory red and green vegetables and chunks of tender white meat. There was a bread that was tough and chewy, with a flavor of nuts, and a rough purple wine that went down better than the finest vintage at Arondo’s, on Plaisir 4. Afterward, the giant unfolded a chart and pointed to a patch of high relief like coarse-troweled stucco.
“If the pod is there,” he said, “it will be difficult. But perhaps it fell here.” He indicated a smoother stretch to the south and east of the badlands.
I went through the motions of checking the azimuth on the indicator; the heading I gave him was only about three degrees off true. At 113.8 miles—the position the R&D showed for the pod—we would miss the target by about ten miles.
The big man laid off our line of march on his map. It fell along the edge of what was called the Towers of Nandi.
“Perhaps,” he said. He wasn’t a man given to wasting words.
“How much daylight is left?” I asked him.
“Fifty hours, a little less.” That meant I’d been out for nearly six hours. I didn’t like that, either. Time was money, and my schedule was tight.
“Have you talked to anyone?” I looked at the big, not quite modern screen at the side of the room. It was a standard Y-band model with a half-millionth L lag. That meant a four-hour turn-around time to the Ring 8 Station.