The Game of Stars and Comets (30 page)

Diskan was already half into freeze and did not hear, save as a blur of meaningless words, the demand broadcast as those in Control suddenly realized an unauthorized take-off was in progress. He was under treatment for an injured pilot as the racer made its dart, at maximum, up from Vaanchard on the guide of the red tape.

To a man in freeze, time did not exist. Measure of it began again for Diskan with a sharp, demanding clang, a noise biting at his very flesh and bones. He fought the pressure of that noise, the feeling of the necessity for responding to it. Opening his eyes wearily, he found himself facing a board of levers, switches, flashing lights. Two of those lights were an ominous red. Diskan knew nothing of piloting, but the smooth beat of the Scout ship that had taken him to Vaanchard in his father's company was lacking. There was instead a pulsation, an ebb and flow of power on a broken beat.

Another light turned red.

"Condition critical!"

Diskan's head jerked against the padded surface of the cradle. The words were mechanical and came out of the walls around him.

"Damage to the fifth part. Going on emergency for landing! Repeat: going on emergency for landing!"

Substance spun out of the wall to his left. In the air it seemed a white mist. Settling on and about his body, it thickened, became a coating of cushioning stuff, weaving him into a cocoon of protective covering. The trembling beat in the walls was even more uneven. Diskan knew that an emergency landing might well end in a crash that would erase ship and passenger on the instant of impact.

His helplessness was the worst. Simply to lie there in the covering spun by the ship to protect human life and wait for extinction was a torture. He struggled against the bonds of his padding—to no purpose. Then he yelled his need for freedom to the walls pressing in on him as his screams echoed from them.

Mercifully, black closed about Diskan then, and there was an end to waiting. He was not conscious of the fact the ship had entered planetary atmosphere, that the journey tape guided a crippled ship down to the surface of the unknown world.

The spinning ball of the planet lost the anonymity imposed by distance. Shadows of continents, spread of seas now showed on its surface, appeared waveringly on the visa-plate above Diskan's head. A dark world, a world with a certain forbidding aspect, not welcoming with lush green like Vaanchard or with brown-green like Nyborg—this was a gray-green, a slate or steel-hued world.

Orbiting, the spacer passed from night to day, to night, in a weird procession of telescoping time. There was a sun, more pallid here, and five moons shedding a wan reflected light on saw-toothed heights, which formed spiny backs of firm land above morasses of swamp and fen, where the shallow seas and land eternally thieved, one from the other.

There were eyes that witnessed the passage of the ship drawing closer to the surface of the world. And there was intelligence—of a sort—behind those eyes, assessing, wondering. Movement began over a relatively wide space—an ingathering such as was not natural, perhaps an abortive ingathering, or perhaps,
this
time—Eyes watched as the spacer, poised uneasily on its tail of flames, began the ride down via deter rockets to a small safety of rock and earth.

The descent was not clean. One tube blew. Instead of a three-fin landing, the spacer crashed, rolled. Vegetation flamed into a holocaust during that crazy spin. Death of plant or animal came in an instant. Then the broken hulk was still, lying on mud that bubbled and shifted around it, allowing it to settle into its glutinous substance.

For the second time, Diskan roused. The dying ship, in a last spasmodic effort, strove for the safety of the life it had guarded to the best of the ability its designers had devised. The cocoon of which he was the core was propelled from the pilot's seat, struck against a hatch that lifted part way and then stuck. The stench of the mud and the burned vegetation brought him to, coughing weakly.

Wisps of torn white stuff blew around his head and shoulders. The fear of being bound and helpless, which had carried over from those seconds before his last blackout, set Diskan to a convulsive effort, which scraped him through the half-open hatch, meant for the emergency escape.

He went head first into the mud, but his shoulder and side jarred brutally against stone, the pain bringing him around. Somehow he scrambled over stuff that slid and sucked at him until there was solid support under his flailing arms, and he drew himself up on an island in the midst of that instability.

Clawing the remains of the cocoon padding from his head, Diskan stared about wildly. The spacer was three quarters under the sucking mud, a flood of which was now tonguing in the hatch through which he had come. Diskan tried to gain some idea of his present surroundings.

The wind was cold, though the smoldering swamp vegetation still gave off a measure of heat. But the fire ignited by the ship was already dying. Not too far away Diskan saw white patches, which he thought might be snow, on a rising spine of rocks. He had known winter on Nyborg and winds as chill as the one now lapping about his body. But on Nyborg there had been clothing, shelter, food—

Diskan gathered up the torn stuff of the cocoon and drew it about his shoulders, shawl fashion. It made an awkward-to-handle covering, but it was a protection. The ship! There should be a survival kit in that—means of making fire, iron rations, weapons—! Diskan slewed around on his rock perch.

There was no hope of returning to the ship. The flood of mud had poured relentlessly into the open hatch; to try to return was to be trapped. Suddenly he wanted solid land, a lot of it, around and under him. And the best place for finding such a perch was the snow-streaked rocky spine.

It must have been late afternoon when the ship crashed, for though there had been no sunlight, there had been the gray of a cloud-cast day to light the scene. But by the time Diskan, exhausted, smeared with icy slime and almost hopeless, reached his goal, it was well into twilight, and he dared not try to move farther, lest a misstep plunge him into the bog into which the ship had now totally disappeared.

He crawled along the broken rock of the ridge, at last wedging himself into a crevice, where he pulled the cocoon fabric about him. The first moon was up, a round green-blue coin against the sky, and its following sister was above the horizon. But neither gave light enough for further travel over unknown territory.

There were reddish coals on the other side of the mud pool, marking the blaze. Diskan longed for a few of those precious sparks now. But there was no fuel to feed them here and no way of crossing to the burned-over land. He squirmed as far as he could into his shelter, misery eating into him.

So—one part of his mind jeered—you thought luck would change when you used your key, that you could make a better future. Well, here is that future, and in what way is it better than the past?

Diskan coughed, shivered, and chewed on that bitter thought. He had his freedom, probably freedom to die one way or another—by freezing tonight, by slipping into the mud tomorrow, by a thousand and one traps on an unknown planet. But another thought warred against the jeering voice—he
had
survived so far. And every moment he continued to live was a small victory over fate—fate or
something
that had crippled him from his birth. He had this freedom—yes—and his life, and those were two things to hold fast to this night as if they could give him warmth, shelter, and nourishment.

Diskan feared
the insidious chill as the night wore on. He crawled at intervals from the crevice to stamp his numbed feet and beat his arms across his chest. To sleep in this creeping cold was perhaps not to wake again. And each time he so emerged from his poor shelter, he strove to view by the light of those hurrying moons just what lay about him.

The rocky point rose in a series of outcrops back and up in a miniature mountain chain. As far as he could tell, the rest was bog. Twice he heard a howling from the path the rolling ship had blasted, and once a snarling, growling tumult, as if two fairly well-matched opponents struggled. Perhaps the flamed land held food that attracted scavengers. Food—Diskan's middle reacted to the thought. He had often known the bite of hunger in the past, his big frame requiring more substance than had been allowed on several work projects, but he could not remember ever feeling this empty!

Food, water, shelter, covering against the wind and the cold—and all must be found in a world where even one mouthful of an alien plant or animal could mean sudden death for an off-worlder. The rations that might have sustained him, the immunity shots meant to carry the shipwrecked through such a disaster—all were gone.

Howling again—and closer. Diskan stared out across the mud pool to that shore where the embers smoldered. There were shadows there, too many of them, and they could hide anything. How long did night last on this world? Time had no meaning when one could not measure it by any known rule.

It began to snow—first in a few flakes that filtered into his crevice to melt on his skin, then more thickly, until Diskan could not see much but a curtain of white. But with the coming of the snow, the wind died. He watched the storm dully. If this drifted, it would cover the bog and make a treacherous coat to hide the mud.

A sharp cry jerked Diskan out of a half stupor. That—that had come from the outcrops behind his refuge! He listened. The swish of the falling snow seemed deafening, as deafening as his fingers had been in his ears back on Vaanchard. Moments passed. The cry was not repeated. But Diskan knew that he had not been mistaken—he had heard a living thing give voice out there. A hunter—or the hunted? Had that been the death cry of some prey?

Panic was colder in him than the chill born of the rock walls about his shivering body. Every nerve cried, "Run!" And yet his mind fought down that fear. Here he had to face only the narrow opening to the white world; he could defend that opening with his two hands if necessary, whereas in the open he might speedily be pulled down.

Time can dull even the sharpest fear, Diskan discovered. There was no second cry. And, though he listened, there were no more sounds out of the night. Finally, before he realized it, there was a slow end to night itself.

Diskan knew it first when he was aware he could see farther. The snow was spread in a wide cover, broken by patches of dark which must mark the liquid surface of the mud. That rocky far shore lost some of its shadows and was growing clearer by the moment. Though no sun showed, day was coming.

He pulled at the tattered stuff of the cocoon. It was as white, save for a mud stain here and there, as the snow. And he thought he could knot it into a kind of cloak. His fingers were cold and twice as clumsy as usual, but he persisted until he had a crude rectangle he could pull about his shoulders, anchoring the ends under his belt. The mud through which he had wallowed on his escape from the ship had dried on skin and clothing into a harsh blue shell, which cracked and scaled as he moved but which might give him additional protection against the cold.

Most of all he needed food. Recklessly, he had scooped snow from about the crevice and sucked it so that its moisture relieved his thirst. But, as he wavered out of his crack of shelter and down to the edge of the mud pool in a very faint hope of seeing some part of the ship, he faced only a blue surface rimmed with brittle ice-coated stalks of vegetation on one side and a blackened smear on the other.

It was a small thing to catch the eye, a wisp of yellow-white from the black scar. Smoke! Diskan took a quick step forward and then paused. There might be a still-burning coal over there, but traps lay in between.

"Steady—" he told himself, and the spoken words somehow were as comforting as if they had come from lips other than his own chapped ones. "Slow—steady—"

Mud cracked and fell from his shoulders as he turned his head, tried to assess what lay to the right and how far toward the burned ground his present solid footing extended. Stiffly, forcing himself to study each step before he advanced, Diskan climbed around the rocks. The cold of the stone was searing to his hands until he halted, worried loose some strips of the cocoon material, and tied them about his palms. Meant to insulate, it served for protection, though it made his hands more bulky and threatened his holds.

He pulled to the top of one of the rocky pillars and had his first less limited view of his present surroundings. The spine became part of a larger ridge, perhaps the main body of land. Diskan could see the blackened scar of the ship's crash ahead of him. There were spots of the ominous blue mud and tangles of frozen vegetation, but there were also scattered rocks, which provided stepping stones.

"Slow—" Diskan warned himself. "To the right—that block there—that mat of brush—it ought to hold. Then that other rock—Easy now! Hand hold here—put the foot there—"

He could not have told why it was easier to move when he gave himself such orders, as if his body were apart from his mind, but it was. So he kept on talking, outlining each footstep before he took it.

The patches of white snow, he learned, marked more solid footing, but caution made him test each. And once a stone, hurled ahead, proved that caution wise, for the rock cracked through the surface and a blue earth mouth sucked it down.

He had set foot on the black crisp of the burn, felt and smelled the powdery black ashes his weight disturbed, when a cry startled him, brought his attention to the sky. A winged thing swooped and fluttered, the morning light making its coloring a vivid streak, for it was rawly red, with a long neck that turned and twisted in a serpentine fashion, a head with a sharply peaked comb or topknot. And it was big. Diskan estimated that wing spread to equal his own height.

With a second screech, it planed down—but not at him. It headed on into the heart of the burn smear. Then there came another cry, and a second red flier appeared, to settle at the same spot. Diskan hesitated. The smoke lay in that direction, but he did not like the look of those birds, if birds they were. And several of them together could offer trouble.