“Mac!” I was glad that Jan couldn’t hear my voice crack with panic.
“I’m here, Jeanie. I’m all right.” He sounded as though he was out on a picnic. “My own fault, I could see it was breaking away when Sven was on it. I should have looked for another path instead of following him like a sheep.”
“Can you get back?”
There was a silence, probably thirty seconds. In my nerved-up state it seemed like an hour. I could hear Mac’s breath, faster and louder over the radio.
“I’m not sure,” he said at last. “It’s a mess down here, and the slope’s too steep to climb straight up. Damned gravel, I slide right back down with it. It may take me a little while. You three had better keep going and I’ll catch up later. Time’s too short for you to hang around waiting.”
“Forget it. Hold right there, I’m coming back after you.” I leaned to set my helmet next to Jan’s. “Jan, can you hear me?”
“Yes. But speak louder.” Her voice was faint, as though she was many meters away.
“I want you and Sven to stand right here and don’t move — not for anything. Mac’s stuck, and I have to help him. I’ll be just a few minutes.”
That was meant to be reassuring, but then I wondered what would happen if I was too optimistic about how long it would take me. “Give me twenty minutes, and if we’re not back then, you’ll have to get to the pod on your own. It’s straight in front as you’re facing now, about a hundred meters away. If you go in a straight line for fifty paces then clear your faceplates, you should be able to see it.”
I knew she must have questions, but there was no time to answer them. Mac’s tone suggested it would be completely fatal to be on Vandell’s surface, unprotected, when the next big wave of seismic activity hit us.
I knew exactly where Mac had gone, but I had a hard time seeing him. The rock slide had carried with it a mixture of small and large fragments, from gravel and pebbles to substantial boulders. His struggles to climb the slope had only managed to embed him deeper in loose materials. Now his suit was three-quarters hidden. His efforts also seemed to have carried him backwards, so with a thirty degree gradient facing him I didn’t think he’d ever be able to get out alone. And further down the slope lay a broad fissure in the surface, of indeterminate depth.
He was facing my way, and he had seen me too. “Jeanie, don’t come any closer. You’ll slither right down here, the same as I did. There’s nothing firm past the ledge you’re standing on.”
“Don’t worry. This is as far as I’m coming.” I backed up a step, nearer to a huge rock that must have weighed many tons, and turned my head so the chest of Mac’s suit sat on the crosshairs at the exact center of my display. “Don’t move a muscle now. I’m going to use the Walton, and we don’t have time for second tries.”
I lifted the crosshairs just a little to allow for the effects of gravity, then intoned the Walton release sequence. The ejection solenoid fired, and the thin filament with its terminal electromagnet shot out from the chest panel on my suit and flashed down towards McAndrew. The laser at the tip measured the distance of the target, and the magnet went on a fraction of a second before contact. Mac and I were joined by a hair-thin bond. I braced myself behind the big rock. “Ready? I’m going to haul you in.”
“Aye, I’m ready. But why didn’t I think of using the Walton? Damnation, I didn’t need to get you back here, I could have done it for myself.”
I began to reel in the line, slowly so that Mac could help by freeing himself from the stones and gravel. The Izaak Walton has been used for many years, ever since the first big space construction jobs pointed out the need for a way to move around in vacuum without wasting a suit’s reaction mass. If all you want is a little linear momentum, the argument went, why not take it from the massive structures around you? That’s all that the Waltons do. I’d used them hundreds of times in free fall, shooting the line out to a girder where I wanted to be, connecting, then reeling myself over there. So had Mac, and that’s why he was disgusted with himself. But it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever heard of a Walton being used on a planetary surface.
“I don’t think you could have done it, Mac,” I said. “This big rock’s the only solid one you could see from down there, and it doesn’t look as though it has a high metal content. You’d have nothing for the magnet to grab hold of up here.”
“Maybe.” He snorted. “But I should have had the sense to try. I’m a witless oaf.”
What that made me, I dreaded to think. I went on steadily hauling in the line until he had scrabbled his way up to stand by my side, then switched off the field. The line and magnet automatically ran into their storage reel in my suit, and we carefully turned and headed back to the other two.
They were just where I had left them. They stood, helmets touching, like a frozen and forlorn tableau in Vandell’s broken wilderness. It was more than fifteen minutes since I gone back to Mac, and I could imagine their uneasy thoughts. I leaned my helmet to touch both theirs.
“All present and safe. Let’s go.”
Jan gave my arm a great squeeze. We formed our chain again, and crabbed the rest of the way to the pod. It wasn’t quite as easy as it had looked, or as I suggested to Jan, but in less than fifteen minutes we were opening the outer hatch and bundling Sven and Jan into it.
The lock was only big enough for two at a time. They were out of their useless suits by the time that McAndrew and I could join them inside. Jan looked pale and shaky, ten years older than her seventeen years. Sven Wicklund was as blond and dreamy-looking as ever, still impossibly young in appearance. Like McAndrew, his own internal preoccupations partly shielded him from unpleasant realities — even now he was brandishing a piece of paper covered with squiggles at us. But Jan and Sven had both held together, keeping their composure well when death must have seemed certain. It occurred to me that if you wanted to find a rite of passage to adulthood, you wouldn’t find a tougher one than Jan had been through.
“Just look at this,” Sven said as soon as we were out of the hatch. “I’ve been plotting the cycles—”
“How long before it hits?” I interrupted.
“Four minutes. But—”
“Get into working suits, both of you.” I was already at the controls. “I’m taking us up as soon as I can, but if we’re too late I can’t guarantee that the pod hull will survive. You know what happened to yours.”
The ascent presented no problem of navigation — I had plenty of fuel, and I intended to go straight up with maximum lift. There would be time to worry about rendezvous with Merganser and Hoatzin when we were safely away from Vandell.
I believe in being careful, even on the simplest takeoff, so all my concentration was on the control sequences. I could hear Jan, McAndrew and Wicklund babbling to each other in the background, until I told them to get off my suit frequency and let me think. Vandell was still a complete mystery world to me, but if the others had answers, those, like the problem of ship rendezvous, could wait until we were off the surface.
Wicklund’s predictions for the timing of the next wave of violence proved to be unnecessary. I could see it coming directly, in the values provided by the pod’s field instruments. Every gauge reading in front of me was creeping up in unison as we lifted off; ionization levels, surface vibrations, dust density, electric and magnetic fields — readouts flickered rapidly higher, and needles turned steadily across their dials like the hands of an old-fashioned clock.
Something big was on its way. We lifted into a sky ripped by great lightning flashes, burning their way through the clouds of charged dust particles. The ascent we made was rapid. Within a few seconds we had reached three kilometers. And then, as I was beginning to relax a little and think that we had been just in time, the readings in front of me went mad. External field strengths flickered up so fast in value that the figures were unreadable, then warning lights came on. I heard the screech of a fatal overload in my suit’s radio, and saw the displays in front of me blank out one after another. The computer, after a brief mad flurry of a binary dump across the control screen, went totally dead. Suddenly I was flying blind and deaf. All the electronic tools that every pilot relied on were now totally disabled.