That night, lying back of a barrier he’d built up out of snow blocks against the wind, he asked me a question.
“What is it like, Carl Patton, to travel across the space between the worlds?”
“Solitary confinement,” I told him.
“You do not love your solitude?”
“What does that matter? I do my job.”
“What do you love, Carl Patton?”
“Wine, women, and song,” I said. “And you can even skip the song, in a pinch.”
“A woman waits for you?”
“Women,” I corrected. “But they’re not waiting.”
“Your loves seem few, Carl Patton. What then do you hate?”
“Fools,” I said.
“Is it fools who have driven you here?”
“Me? Nobody drives me anywhere. I go where I like.”
“Then it is freedom you strive for. Have you found it here on my world, Carl Patton?” His face was a gaunt mask like a weathered carving, but his voice was laughing at me.
“You know you’re going to die out here, don’t you?” I hadn’t intended to say that. But I did; and my tone was savage to my own ears.
He looked at me, the way he always did before he spoke, as if he were trying to read a message written on my face.
“A man must die,” he said.
“You don’t have to be here,” I said. “You could break it off now, go back, forget the whole thing.”
“As could you, Carl Patton.”
“Me quit?” I snapped. “No thanks. My job’s not done.”
He nodded. “A man must do what he sets out to do. Else is he no more than a snowflake driven before the wind.”
“You think this is a game?” I barked. “A contest? Do or die, or maybe both, and may the best man win?”
“With whom would I contest, Carl Patton? Are we not comrades of the trail?”
“We’re strangers,” I said. “You don’t know me and I don’t know you. And you can skip trying to figure out my reasons for what I do.”
“You set out to save the lives of the helpless, because it was your duty.”
“It’s not yours! You don’t have to break yourself on these mountains! You can leave this ice factory, live the rest of your days as a hero of the masses, have everything you’d ever want—”
“What I want, no man can give me.”
“I suppose you hate us,” I said. “The strangers that came here and brought a disease that killed your world.”
“Who can hate a natural force?”
“All right—what do you hate?”
For a minute I thought he wasn’t going to answer. “I hate the coward within me,” he said. “The voice that whispers counsels of surrender. But if I fled, and saved this flesh, what spirit would then live on to light it?”
“You want to run—then run!” I almost yelled. “You’re going to lose this race, big man! Quit while you can!”
“I will go on—while I can. If I am lucky, the flesh will die before the spirit.”
“Spirit, hell! You’re a suicidal maniac!”
“Then am I in good company, Carl Patton.”
I let him take that one.
22
We passed the hundred-mile mark the next march. We crossed another ridge, higher than the last. The cold was sub-arctic, the wind a flaying knife. The moon set, and after a couple of eternities, dawn came. My locator told me when we passed within ten miles of the pod. All its systems were still going. The power cells were good for a hundred years. If I slipped up at my end, the frozen miners might wake up to a new century; but they’d wake up.
Johnny Thunder was a pitiful sight now. His hands were split and bloody, his hollow cheeks and bloodless lips cracked and peeling from frostbite, the hide stretched tight over his bones. He moved slowly, heavily, wrapped in his furs. But he moved. I ranged out ahead, keeping the pressure on. The dog was in even worse shape than her master. She trailed far behind on the up-slopes, spent most of each break catching up. Little by little, in spite of my heckling, the breaks got longer, the marches shorter. The big man knew how to pace himself, in spite of my gadfly presence. He meant to hang on, and make it. So much for my plans. It was late afternoon again when we reached the high pass that the big man said led into the badlands he called the Towers of Nandi. I came up the last stretch of trail between sheer ice walls and looked out over a vista of ice peaks sharp as broken bottles, packed together like shark’s teeth, rising up and up in successive ranks that reached as far as the eye could see.
I turned to urge the giant to waste some more strength hurrying to close the gap, but he beat me to it. He was pointing, shouting something I couldn’t hear for a low rumble that had started up. I looked up, and the whole side of the mountain was coming down at me.
23
The floor was cold. It was the tiled floor of the creche locker room, and I was ten years old, and lying on my face, held there by the weight of a kid called Soup, age fourteen, with the physique of an ape and an IQ to match.
When he’d first pushed me back against the wall, knocked aside my punches, and thrown me to the floor, I had cried, called for help to the ring of eager-eyed spectators, most of whom had more than once felt the weight of Soup’s knobby knuckles. None of them moved. When he’d bounced my head on the floor and called to me to say uncle, I opened my mouth to say it, and then spat in his face instead. What little restraint Soup had left him then. Now his red-bristled forearm was locked under my jaw, and his knee was in the small of my back, and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Soup was a boy who didn’t know his own strength, who would stretch his growing muscles with all the force he could muster—caught up and carried away in the thrill of the discovery of his own animal power—would bend my back until my spine snapped, and I’d be dead, dead, dead forevermore, at the hands of a moron.
Unless I saved myself. I was smarter than Soup—smarter than any of them. Man had conquered the animals with his mind—and Soup was an animal. He couldn’t—couldn’t kill me. Not if I used my brain, instead of wasting my strength against an animal body twice the size of my own.
I stepped outside my body and looked at myself, saw how he knelt on me, gripping his own wrist, balancing with one outflung foot. I saw how, by twisting to my right side, I could slide out from under the knee; and then, with a sudden movement . . .
His knee slipped off-center as I moved under him. With all the power in me, I drew up, doubling my body; unbalanced, he started to topple to his right, still gripping me. I threw myself back against him, which brought my head under his chin. I reached back, took a double handful of coarse red hair, and ripped with all my strength.
He screamed, and his grip was gone. I twisted like an eel as he grabbed for my hands, still tangled in his hair; I lunged and buried my teeth in his thick ear. He howled and tried to tear away, and I felt the cartilage break, tasted salty blood. He ripped my hands away, taking hair and a patch of scalp with them. I saw his face, contorted like a demon-mask as he sprawled away from me, still grasping my wrists. I brought my knee up into his crotch, and saw his face turn to green clay. I jumped to my feet; he writhed, coiled, making an ugly choking sound. I took aim and kicked him hard in the mouth. I landed two more carefully placed kicks, with my full weight behind them, before the rudimentary judgement of the audience awoke and they pulled me away. . . .
There was movement near me. I heard the rasp of something hard and rough against another hardness. Light appeared. I drew a breath, and saw the white-bearded face of an ancient man looking down at me from far above, from the top of a deep well. . . .
“You still live, Carl Patton.” The giant’s voice seemed to echo from a long way off. I saw his big hands come down, straining at a quarter-ton slab of ice, saw him lift it slowly, toss it aside. There was snow in his hair, ice droplets in his beard. His breath was frost.
“Get out of here.” I forced the words out past the broken glass in my chest. “Before the rest comes down.”