But this was not the sort of reentry foreseen by the mission controllers.
Karg’s air had begun to stink of his own terror. Frantically he forced the purifiers into emergency mode, squandering capacity supposed to last a moonlong in the interests of preserving his sanity. Then the clouds parted, and he saw what lay below.
He hung about two padlonglaqs above a valley full of early snow, patched here and there with rocky crags but not a hint of vegetation. It was his first view of such a landscape, for he had spent all his life in coastal regions where winter was short and mild, but he knew he must be coming down in the desolate highlands of Prutaj.
Was there any hope that the wind might bear him clear of this continent where the achievements of Slah were regarded with contempt? Noting how rapidly the bitter frost of fall cut his lift, he concluded not, and chill struck his pith, as cruel as though he were not insulated from the outer air.
Striving to reassure himself, he said aloud, “The folk of Prutaj aren’t savages! Even in their remotest towns people must have heard about my flight, officials may be willing to help me get back home—”
A horrifying lurch. More of the bladders had burst, or maybe a securing rope had given way. A vast blank snow-slope filled the groundward port. He could not help but close his eye.
The cylinder had been swinging pendulum-fashion beneath the remaining gas-globes. Loss of the topmost batch dropped it swiftly towards a blade-keen ridge of still-bare rock, against whose lee a deep soft drift had piled. A chance gust caught it; swerving, it missed the ridge, but touched the snow. Drag sufficed to outdo the wind, and it crunched through the overlying glaze of ice. Absorbed, accepted, it sank in, and the last gas-globes burst with soft reports.
But the driver-fuel did not explode.
In a little while Karg was able to believe that it was too cold to be a threat any longer. That, though, was not the end of the danger he was in. His hauq, and the other creatures which shared the cylinder, had been as carefully adapted to outer space as its actual structure. They were supposed to absorb heat—not too much, but precisely enough—from the naked sun, store it, and survive on it while orbiting through the planet’s shadow. As soon as the mandibles of the ice closed on them they began to fail. That portion of the hauq’s bulk which kept the exit sealed shrank away, and the sheer cold that entered made him cringe.
Also, but for the sighing of the wind and creaks from the chilling cylinder, there was total silence.
He sought in vain for any hint of folk-smell. Even a waft of smoke would have been welcome, for he knew that in lands like these some people managed to survive by using fire—another wasteful Prutaj habit. He detected none. Moreover, now that the pressure inside and out had equalized, he had normal weather-sense again, and it warned of storms.
He wanted to flee—flee anywhere—but he was aware how foolish it would be to venture across unknown territory rendered trackless by the snow. No, he must stay here. If all else failed, he could eat not only his intended rations but some of the on-hauq secondary plants. He might well last two moonlongs before being rescued … at least, so he was able to pretend for a while.
By dawn the overcast had blown away, and the next bright was clear and sunny. But though he searched the sky avidly for a floater or soarer that might catch sight of his crashed spacecraft, he saw none, and the air remained intensely cold. Shortly before sunset the clouds returned, and this time they heralded another fall of snow.
As Karg retreated for shelter inside the cylinder, he found he could no longer avoid thinking about the risk of freezing to death before he starved.
Next bright he was already too stiff to venture out. Little by little he began to curse himself, and the mission controllers, and his empty dreams of being one day remembered alongside Gveest and Jing.