He didn’t answer; he lifted another slab, and my arms were free. I tried to help, but that just made more snow spill down around my shoulders. He put his big impossible hands under my arms and lifted, dragged me up and out of my grave. I lay on my back and he sprawled beside me. The dog Woola crawled up to him, making anxious noises. Little streamers of snow were coming down from above, being whipped away by the wind. A mass of ice the size of a carrier tender hung cantilevered a few hundred feet above.
“Run, you damned fool!” I yelled. It came out as a whisper. He got to his knees, slowly. He scooped me up, rose to his feet. Ice fragments clattered down from above. He took a step forward, toward the badlands.
“Go back,” I managed. “You’ll be trapped on the far side!”
He halted, as more ice rattled down. “Alone, Carl Patton . . . would you turn back?”
“No,” I said. “But there’s no reason . . . now . . . for you to die. . . .”
“Then we will go on.” He took another step, and staggered as a pebble of ice the size of a basketball struck him a glancing blow on the shoulder. The dog snarled at his side. It was coming down around us like rice at a wedding now. He went on, staggering like a drunk, climbing up over the final drift. There was a boom like a cannon-shot from above; air whistled past us, moving out. He made three more paces and went down, dropped me, knelt over me like a shaggy tent. I heard him grunt as the ice fragments struck him. Somewhere behind us there was a smash like a breaking dam. The air was full of snow, blinding, choking. The light faded. . . .
24
The dead were crying. It was a sad, lost sound, full of mournful surprise that life had been so short and so full of mistakes. I understood how they felt. Why shouldn’t I? I was one of them.
But corpses didn’t have headaches, as well as I could remember. Or cold feet, or weights that crushed them against sharp rocks. Not unless the stories about where the bad ones went were true. I opened my eyes to take a look at Hell, and saw the hound. She whined again, and I got my head around and saw an arm bigger than my leg. The weight I felt was what was left of Johnny Thunder, sprawled across me, under a blanket of broken ice.
It took me half an hour to work my way free. The suit was what had saved me, of course, with its automatic defensive armor. I was bruised, and a rib or two were broken, but there was nothing I couldn’t live with until I got back to base and my six million credits.
Because the job was done. The giant didn’t move while I was digging out, didn’t stir when I thumbed up his eyelid. He still had some pulse, but it wouldn’t last long. He had been bleeding from the ice wounds on his face and hands, but the blood had frozen. What the pounding hadn’t finished, the cold would. And even if he came around, the wall of ice behind him closed the pass like a vault door. When the sob sisters arrived to check on their oversized pet they’d find him here, just as I would describe him, the noble victim of the weather and the piece of bad luck that had made us miss our target by a tragic ten miles, after that long, long hike. They’d have a good syndicated cry over how he’d given his all, and then close the book on another footnote to history. It had worked out just the way I’d planned. Not that I got any big kick out of my cleverness once again. It was routine, just a matter of analyzing the data.
“So long, Johnny Thunder,” I said. “‘You were a lot of man.”
The dog lifted her head and whined. I made soothing sounds and switched the lift-unit built into my suit to maximum assist and headed for the pod, fifteen miles away, in that direction. I heard Woola’s tail flopping as she wagged goodbye. Too bad; but there was no way I could help a mutt as big as a shire horse.
25
The twenty-foot-long cargo unit was nestled in a drift of hard-packed snow, in a little hollow among barren rock peaks, not showing a scratch. I wasn’t surprised; the auto gear I had installed could have soft-landed a china shop without cracking a teacup. I had contracted to deliver my load intact, and it was a point of pride with me to fulfill the letter of a deal. I was so busy congratulating myself on that that I was fifty feet from it before I noticed that the snow had been disturbed around the pod: trampled, maybe, then brushed out to conceal the tracks. By then it was too late to become invisible; if there was anybody around, he had already seen me. I stopped ten feet from the entry hatch and went through the motions of collapsing in a pitiful little heap, all tuckered out from my exertions, meanwhile looking around, over, and under the pod. I didn’t see anything.
I lay where I was long enough for anybody who wanted to to make his entrance. No takers. That left the play up to me. I made a production out of getting my feet under me and staggering to the entry hatch. The scratches there told me that part of the story. The port mechanism was still intact. It opened on command and I crawled into the lock. Inside, everything looked normal. The icebox seal was tight, the dials said the cooler units were operating perfectly, not that they had a whole lot to do in this natural freezer of a world. I almost let it go at that, but not quite. I don’t know why, except that a lifetime of painful lessons had taught me to take nothing for granted. It took me half an hour to get the covers off the reefer controls. When I did, I saw it right away: a solenoid hung in the half-open position. It was the kind of minor malfunction you might expect after a hard landing—but not if you knew what I knew. It had been jimmied, the support bent a fractional millimeter out of line, Just enough to jam the action—and incidentally to actuate the heating cycle that would thaw the ten men inside the cold room in ten hours flat. I freed it, heard gas hiss into the lines, then cracked the vault door and checked visually. The inside gauge read +3º absolute. The temperature hadn’t had time to start rising yet; the ten long boxes and their contents were still intact. That meant the tampering had been done recently. I was still mulling over the implications of that deduction when I heard the crunch of feet on the ice outside the open lock.
26
Illini looked older than he had when I had seen him last, back in the plush bureaucratic setting of League Central. His monkey face behind the cold mask looked pinched and bloodless; his long nose was pink with cold, his jaw a scruffy, unshaven blue. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. He stepped up through the hatch and a second man followed him. They looked around. Their glance took in the marks in the frost crust around the reefer, and held on the open panel.
“Everything all right here?” the little man asked me. He made it casual, as if we’d just happened to meet on the street.
“Almost,” I said. “A little trouble with a solenoid. Nothing serious.”
Illini nodded as if that was par for the course. His eyes flickered over me. “Outside, you seemed to be in difficulty,” he said. “I see you’ve made a quick recovery.”
“It must have been psychosomatic,” I said. “Getting inside took my mind off it.”
“I take it the subject is dead?”
“Hell, no,” I said. “He’s alive and well in Phoenix, Arizona. How did you find the pod, Illini?”
“I was lucky enough to persuade the black marketeer who supplied your homing equipment to sell me its twin, tuned to the same code.” He looked mildly amused. “Don’t be too distressed, Ulrik. There are very few secrets from an unlimited budget.”
“One is enough,” I said, “played right. But you haven’t said why.”
“The scheme you worked out was clever,” he said. “Somewhat over-devious, perhaps—but clever. Up to a point. It was apparent from the special equipment installed in the pod that you had some idea of your cargo surviving the affair.”
“So?”
“You wanted to present the public with a tidy image to treasure, Ulrik. Well and good. But the death of a freak in a misguided attempt to rescue men who were never in danger would smack of the comic. People might be dissatisfied. They might begin investigating the circumstances which allowed their pet to waste himself. But if it appears he might have saved the men—then the public will accept his martyrdom.”