Caltraps of Time (25 page)

Mehhtumm began clambering upward, marking the rocks with the dye-splasher. Half a minute afterwards a sound and a movement beneath caught his attention, and he looked down in time to see the body of ‘Ossnaal plummeting into the abyss. An invisible Ghuddup was still muttering in Mehhtumm’s radio, and it was half an hour before his voice faded.

The rest of the upward journey was a nightmare, and took Mehhtumm far longer than he expected. After about three hours his head began to clear as his body reverted to normal, and the full realization of what had happened came to him. The first terrible doubts of his own action flooded in. There was nothing to be done now but to make as good speed as he could to the camp.

He had been calling for an hour before he was heard on their radios. Kettass sent Laafif and ‘Afpeng to collect him. They managed to rendezvous by radio, and brought him back, weeping like a child, in darkness.

‘Sounds like some sort of gas narcosis to me,’ Kettass said later to a recovered Mehhtumm.

‘Yes, could even be nitrogen narcosis; except for ‘Ossnaal. There could have been something else wrong with him — would you think?’

‘I should never have let him go. He looked peculiar for some time ... We shall have to write off Ghuddup as well, poor fellow, if we can’t trace him in the morning.’

Next day in the early sunlight Mehhtumm, Laafif and Kettass went down unroped and marked with dye. The oxygen apparatus of each was adjusted to give them a continuous supply as a high percentage of their inspiration total. They followed Mehhtumm’s markings. It was agreed that the first man to notice any specially alarming symptoms, or to have any detected by the others, was to climb up at once, but that till then they would keep close together, and that the remaining two must come up together as soon as either began to succumb. What happened was that Laafif, becoming confused despite the oxygen about 100 metres above the fatal spot, started to ascend. Mehhtumm passed the spot and, despite a persistent impression that he had become a waterfall, silently climbed on down, passing Kettass rapidly. He was 400 metres below, muttering to himself and glaring about him, when he and Kettass heard something between a sob and a laugh in their radios, and Laafif s body passed them, a few feet out, turning over and over. It became a speck above the carpet of coiling vapour which had replaced yesterday’s colour pattern. The cries were still sounding in their radios minutes later when reception faded.

Kettass, dimly retaining a hold on sanity, eventually persuaded Mehhtumm to return, convincing himself and the other through a swirl of sensations that it would be no use searching for yesterday’s madman over several thousand vertical metres of rock. Mehhtumm said later that at that depth he had kept on seeing little images of Ghuddup, brandishing a yellow knife, hovering around him.

They got back in the late afternoon, and next day a silent expedition set off for home, one man per vehicle.

~ * ~

It took five years for authority to build two suitable VTOL craft capable of flying and taking off efficiently in both normal and high-pressure air, and fully pressurized within. Mehhtumm was dead, killed in a climbing accident on Mogharitse, but Kettass secured a passage as film-taker and world radio-commentator on one craft, and Niizmek on the other. The broadcasts were relayed from a ground station set up on the plateau, which picked them up, or rather down, from the ionized reflecting layer of the atmosphere, since the basin depth would cut off direct craft-to-layer-to-receiver broadcasting; even so, only about a quarter of the material came through.

The two craft landed in summer on the plateau near the 15º
slant zone. Flight between about 11 a.m. and midnight was considered meteorologically impossible owing to the severe up-currents and the electrical disturbances. They took off at 7 a.m. just before dawn, using powerful searchlights. Kettass’ craft, piloted by an impassive veteran of thirty named Levaan, was to sink down past the rock wall near the original descent. The other craft sped west looking for a change in the geography. The two were in continuous communication through the pilots’ radios (on a different wavelength).

Levaan tried his radar on the invisible floor of the basin. ‘You won’t believe this — we have forty-three kilometres beneath us.’

Kettass was speechless.

‘There’s a secondary echo at thirty-seven km or so — could be the cloud layer below. Let me try the lidar.’ He aimed the unwieldy laser gun downwards. ‘Yes, that’ll be the cloud layer all right. And that blip over there, that’s the roller cloud, or rather an incipient roll — I don’t think there’s anything visible to the eye.’

‘The — the ground echo: what does that make it in depth?’

‘Given our altitude above MSL that makes the basin floor over forty-one km below sea, and nearly forty-two beneath the bevel of the plateau.’

They began to descend. All trace of the event of five years ago was lost. The craft sank nine or ten kilometres, as indicated through the vertical radar. Kettass informed the world that the tinted rock was continuing and took a few film sequences. The sun poured across over the impossible vertical face. At fifteen kilometres down the colours had broken up into isolated dots and patches. The empty parts of the sky had turned a milky white and now began to change to brazen yellow. There was still no visible sign of a bottom, none of the patternless pattern described by Mehhtumm, but the fog below was brilliant in sunlight, yellow sunlight. Even in the air-conditioned cabin it was exceptionally hot wherever the sun struck.

‘Perspective makes the wall appear to curve in above us and below us,’ Kettass was saying to his microphone. The view was indeed rather like that seen by a midge dancing a few inches in front of a wall made of barrel staves curving towards him, except that the midge would have been no thicker than a fine hair. The sky met the cliff line dizzyingly far overhead. No less than three parallel lines of black roller-cloud (very slender) were now silhouetted against the yellow sky, while a fourth roll was indicated by an Indian file of fishlike silhouettes alongside them. Not very far beyond hung the shaggy charcoal bases of the first cumuloids, behind which the brassy sun beat down. Black ghosts of the clouds grew and gestured, many kilometres high, on the cliff wall. At times Kettass had the illusion that the craft was flying banked sideways, and that the cliff wall was the horizontal floor of the world.

Descent began to be very bumpy. The other craft reported no change at fifty kilometres west. At thirty-six km down the open sky was now a blood-orange hue. The fog, which had become exceedingly turbulent, was close below, and after cautious exploration Levaan found a hole through which pink, green and indigo masses could be dimly seen, crawling in the quivering air currents. At thirty-eight km down, battling against strong updraughts, they sighted far below a vast vista of dully red-hot lava, cold greenish lava, and what looked like violet mud, in apparently kilometres-wide slabs and pools, lapping right up against the thirty-to-forty-km-high vertical wall on one side, and ending in pitch darkness many kilometres southward. Occasional flashes of forked lightning played near the cliff base. Besides the distortions of the air currents, the whole floor was in slow motion, spreading, rocking, welling, bubbling.

Levaan broke in on Kettass’ commentary to say he dared not stay longer, as the updraughts were becoming too violent and the fabric was groaning. The other craft had just sighted the end of the basin and wished to make its own commentary. Risking a breakup in the turbulence near the roller cloud level, Levaan’s craft rose to pass it, and swung back to rendezvous. Niizmek and his pilot Fehos had sighted a step-like formation closing in the western end.

Next morning the two craft switched roles. Fehos and Niizmek descended into the pit, some way out from the wall, while Levaan’s craft flew east to find how the basin ended on that side. But Fehos’ transpex imploded at thirty-nine km down with a crack heard on the radios of the world, and the craft, a squashed insect, plunged into the magma. After that Levaan would not fly his craft below twenty-five kilometres.

They established that the cliff line stretched 163 km east to west, or rather slightly north of east to slightly south of west, and that the western end, later known as the Terraces, consisted of a series of nearly vertical cliffs of from 2,000 metres to 3,000 metres high each, separated by sloping shelves and screes several km across. The eastern end, the Staircase or Jacob’s Ladder, proved to be a rather similar formation like a file or grid whose ridges or bars were 500-metre-high 30°-lean overhangs (over the basin) of hard rock, alternating with boulder-and-gravel-filled hollows of soft rock, the whole system being tilted down southwards at an angle of 35º. The southern edge was a vertical wall like the northern, nearly parallel to it, but peak-bordered, higher by several thousand metres, 146 km long, and some 200 km away. After a few months press and radio exhausted their superlatives and wisecracks (‘Nature’s Mohole’ was the type) and took up Slingo, a new parachute waltzing craze sweeping the world.

~ * ~

Thirty years later Kettass, a hale septuagenarian, was taken down the Terraces’ pressurized cable railway by his son-in-law, daughter and three grandchildren, and, looking through the triple transpex wall, gazed in silence upon the oozing magma from 700 metres’ range. He did not live to travel the tourist rocket route built five deaths and eighty-three strikes later down Jacob’s Ladder, but two of his granddaughters took their families down the North Wall lift. That was the year Lebhass and Tollhirn made their fatal glider attempt. By this time, three other deaths and 456 strikes later, heat mills, for the most part automatically controlled and inspected, were converting a considerable fraction of the thermal energy in the basin to supply two continents with light, heat and power. A quarter of the northern plateau was given over to their plant, another quarter contained a sanatorium and reserve for hardy tourists, and the other half was a game reserve and ecological study area, but the jagged mountains of the south, scoured by their own murderous southerly winds, resisted general exploitation.

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~ * ~

Lost Ground

‘Eat up your bacon now, May,’ said Miriel. ‘Daddy’s ready to run you up — don’t keep him waiting.’ May, humming irrepressibly to herself, picked up her fork and began toying with the crisp fragments. ‘May!’ said Miriel sharply again. The ten-year-old’s brown curls tossed, but she fell to. Philip, his dark eyes scanning the faces of his mother and sister with the air of an anxious dog, spooned in his porridge. He was only in his third year. Roydon, shifting about a little in his chair, was hidden behind the paper, uneasily aware of its sour biscuity odour in the sun. STRIKE DUE TO LAST BITTER SPELL? read one of the headlines, LATE RAGE-STORMS STALL OHIO said another. Roydon frowned, inserted a tiny earphone into one ear and switched on the minitape recorder which he had set to the last forecast.

‘A system of depressions and associated troughs will follow one another in quick succession over Scotland and the north,’ it said. ‘Insecure, rather sad feeling today and tomorrow, followed by short-lived griefs, some heavy, some stormy, with cheerful intervals. By midweek the griefs will be dying out, rather sooner in the south. Drives weak to moderate, veering creative to instinctive. Temperament chillier than normal for the rest of the week, but serene; however, some early-morning fear in the latter half of the week is expected to form in low-lying areas, dispersing slowly each day.’

Roydon snapped off the recorder and removed his earphone. ‘Better give May a slow pep-pill before she goes. The forecast’s a bit gloomy; I shouldn’t be surprised if there were griefs on and off this afternoon too.’

‘OK. Here you are, May; swallow that with your tea,’ said Miriel. ‘And you might as well have one yourself, darling. I can give Phil a quick quarter-dose if he goes out to play.’

‘Oh
need
I, Mummy?’ from May. ‘The school’s OK, and they always pass the stuff round at break.’

‘Yes, May — I think Miss Weatherbridge is a bit careless about these things; she has a lot of other things to think about, after all.’

‘Oh, all right!’

Roydon dumped a singing May from his little city-car, the green one. The pep-pill was already lifting his spirits, protected as they were by the car-aerosol. He had to check himself from chanting rowdily and dodging about in the workwards traffic. ‘I should have waited till lunchtime and had a quick one,’ he thought. ‘Miriel coddles me — and I take it from her.’ The vision of her brown oval face old-fashionedly curtained in the straight fall of soft dark hair hovered between him and the traffic for an instant. After eleven years it was still a mystery and an enchantment to him. He opened the draught and let the sadness seep in for a little. A few of the schoolchildren waiting to cross at the next school were in tears. ‘Feckless parents,’ he thought. They would be all right after a minute in the air-conditioned school.

In the studio office all was bustle and confusion. Panset, the chief, was in and out constantly. Mood-weather bothered him comparatively little, except that in periods of unusually warm temperament he usually had to take a tranquillizer outside. The pep aerosols were functioning nicely all over the building. The night’s programme of current affairs was beginning to take shape, but must rest in a half-cooked state till late that afternoon, when Roydon would leave it in the hands and mouths of the studio people. He rang up Miriel at lunchtime to say he might be later than usual, the way things were running.