“They must . . . come to us.” The giant wheezed out the words. His face was pink and he was having trouble getting enough air, but he was smiling.
“If you say so,” I said.
“Your small weapon strikes a man’s blow,” he said, instead of commenting on my stupidity.
“What are they made of? They took my rounds like two-inch flint steel.”
“They are no easy adversaries,” he said. “Yet we killed nine.” He looked across at where the dog stood panting, facing the enemy. “Woola slew five. They learn caution—” He broke off, looking down at me, at my leg. He went to one knee, touched a tear in my suit I hadn’t noticed. That shook me, seeing the ripped edge of the material. Not even a needler could penetrate the stuff—but one of those barbs had.
“The hide is unbroken,” he said. “Luck was with you this day, Carl Patton. The touch of the barb is death.”
Something moved behind him and I yelled and fired and a scorpion came plunging down on the spot where he’d been standing an instant before. I fell and rolled, came around, put one in the eye just as Johnny Thunder’s club slammed home in the same spot. I got to my feet and the rest of them were moving off, back down the slope.
“You damned fool!” I yelled at the giant. Rage broke my voice. “Why don’t you watch yourself?”
“I am in your debt, Carl Patton,” was all he said.
“Debt, hell! Nobody owes me anything—and that goes both ways!”
He didn’t answer that, just looked down at me, smiling a little, like you would at an excited child. I took a couple of deep breaths of warmed and fortified tank air and felt better—but not much.
“Will you tell me your true name, small warrior?” the giant said.
I felt ice form in my chest.
“What do you mean?” I stalled.
“We have fought side by side. It is fitting that we exchange the secret names our mothers gave us at birth.”
“Oh, magic, eh? Juju. The secret word of power. Skip it, big fellow. Johnny Thunder is good enough for me.”
“As you will . . . Carl Patton.” He went to see to the dog then, and I checked to see how badly my suit was damaged. There was a partial power loss in the leg servos and the heat was affected, too. That wasn’t good. There were still a lot of miles to walk out of the giant before the job was done.
When we hit the trail half an hour later I was still wondering why I had moved so fast to save the life of the man I’d come here to kill.
21
We halted for sleep three hours later. It was almost full dark when we turned in, curled up in pits trampled in the snow. Johnny Thunder said the scorpions wouldn’t be back until they’d eaten their dead, but I sweated inside my insulated longjohns as the last of the light faded to a pitch black like the inside of an unmarked grave. Then I must have dozed off, because I woke with bluewhite light in my face. The inner moon, Cronus, had risen over the ridge, a cratered disk ten degrees wide, almost full, looking close enough to jump up and bang my head on, if I’d felt like jumping. I didn’t.
We made good time in the moonlight, considering the slope of the glacier’s skirt we were climbing. At forty-five thousand feet, we topped the barrier and looked down the far side and across a shadowed valley to the next ridge, twenty miles away, silver-white against the stars.
“Perhaps on the other side we will find them,” the giant said. His voice had lost some of its timbre. His face looked frostbitten, pounded numb by the sub-zero wind. Woola crouched behind him, looking shrunken and old.
“Sure,” I said. “Or maybe beyond the next one, or the one after that.”
“Beyond these ridges lie the Towers of Nandi. If your friends have fallen there, their sleep will be long—and ours as well.”
It was two marches to the next ridge. By then the moon was high enough to illuminate the whole panorama from the crest. There was nothing in sight but ice. We camped in the lee of the crest, then went on. The suit was giving me trouble, unbalanced as it was, and the toes of my right foot were feeling the frost.
Sometime, about mid-afternoon, I noticed we’d veered off our route as if to skirt a mesa-like rock formation ahead. I registered a gripe about the extra mileage and proposed to get back to the direct route.
“Go if you will, Carl Patton. Perhaps I have not been fair to you, thus to indulge my personal taboo.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I yelled at him. I was too beat to be diplomatic. He ignored the bad manners and turned to look at the mesa.
“Yonder rises Hel,” he said. “I would prefer not to know the fate of my sisters and their young.”
I did a ‘shucks, fella, I didn’t mean . . .’ number, and we went on, following his detour. An hour or two later, Woola, scouting ahead, halted and began skirting something that looked like a low mound of snow. Then she whined and her ears and tail drooped. She turned and came back to put up a paw for Johnny Thunder to take while he patted the big shaggy head. He went forward to look at what she’d found and I trailed along, wondering what it was that could make the old war-dog wilt like a whipped puppy. The giant had knelt to brush away snow, and when I came around him I saw the face, as beautiful as any ancient image of a love goddess, and on the same heroic scale; a young face, almost smiling, with a lock of red-gold hair across the noble ice-pale forehead. All of a sudden I was all out of wisecracks. Here was a beauty that wars could have been fought over, dead and frozen these hundred years. Too bad I didn’t have the magic spell that would waken her.
“Adainn was the youngest,” the giant said. “Only a girl, barely of marriageable age. Now she is the bride of the ice, lying in his cold embrace.”
“Good looking dolly,” I said, and all of a sudden I felt a sense of loss that almost blacked me out. I heard myself saying “No, no! NO!” and struggling against Johnny’s big arm, barring my way, while Woola rose from her haunches, and took a position standing protectively over the corpse. After a while I was sitting in the snow, with water running out of my eyes and freezing, and big Johnny saying:
“Be none ashamed, Carl. Any man must love her when he sees her, be he large or small.”
I told him he was nuts, and got up and arranged my load, not looking at her somehow, for some reason, and then Johnny covered her face again, and said, “Fare thee well, my little sister. Now we must tend the living,” and we went on. Johnny was more silent than usual all day, and in spite of the hot concentrates I sucked on the sly as I hiked, and the synthetic pep the hypospray metered into an artery, I was starting to feel it now. But not as badly as Big Johnny. He had a gaunt, starved look, and he hiked as though he had anvils tied to his feet. He was still feeding himself and the dog meager rations, and forcing an equal share on me. When he wasn’t looking I stuffed what I couldn’t eat in the disposal and watched him starve. But he was tough; he starved slowly, grudgingly, fighting for every inch.
He never complained. He could have gotten up and started back any time, with no apologies. He’d already made a better try than anyone could expect, even of a giant. As for me, all I had to do was picture that fat bank account, and all the big juicy steaks and big soft beds with beautiful women in them and the hand-tooled cars and the penthouse with a view all that cash was going to buy for me. As long as I kept my mind on that, the pain seemed remote and unimportant. Baird Ulrik could take it, all right. And after all, Big Boy was only human, like Woola and me, and as long as he could get up and go on one more time, so could I: I almost felt sorry for the big mutt, who went on just because she couldn’t imagine anything else to do, much less a fancy doghouse with plenty of bones but I stifled that. It was no time to be sentimental. At least, Big Johnny was no longer asking me those strangely embarrassing questions of his. The big dope couldn’t even imagine treachery and betrayal. And to hell with that, too.