Alan Foster - The Icerigger Trilogy

What he could see of the mangled console and the precision switches made him wonder that the little kidnapper had been able to bring them down safely at all. As for the boat tridee, it was so battered he barely recognized it.

Turning to leave the cabin, he stumbled again. Once more he was lucky and didn’t hurt himself. But he was beginning to get mad. He turned with the intention of visiting a few suitable gripes on the twisted hunk of metal that had so cleverly insinuated itself between his legs. The gripe got as far as his lips, fizzled there when he saw the obstacle wasn’t metal.

It was twisted, however.

The body was nude, lightly dusted with snow, and had begun to turn a color that did not imply a state of advanced good health. The back was facing him. He’d apparently stumbled over the head.

Kneeling, he put a hand on the back of the motionless skull. It moved freely when he touched it. Too freely. Du Kane had been right.

He experienced a sudden, sickening urge to see if the eyes were open or closed, like in the tridee shows. He could close them gently if they were open, just like the fictional heroes. However, he opted for backing away carefully, without even checking.

Brushing the snow from his knees, he averted his eyes from the half-frozen corpse. Instead he tried to imagine how this September fellow could go rambling about outside the protection of the boat without one of the special coats. Then it occurred to him that he’d have a double set of clothing.

Nothing in the cabin looked operable, useful. However, if one took the extent of his engineering knowledge into account, this observation meant nothing. He left without touching anything. Slipping and sliding, he made his way to the gaping tear which dominated the left side of the boat. Torn insulation puffed out from the double walls. Bracing himself against it, he cautiously looked out.

The snow-dusted ground lay only a half-meter down. To the right he could see where the boat had burrowed its crumpled snout in what seemed to be a hill of good, solid earth. It didn’t look like much of a hill. Probably you could walk around it. But it had been high enough and solid enough to arrest the forward slide of the boat.

From the hill, what looked like stunted evergreens stuck their bristly crowns sunward. They hardly bent at all in the stiff gale. By now he was so numb he hardly felt the wind anymore. Needles shifted their position relative to the sun. A few flakes of snow scudded lazily from one pebble to a little hollow. The trunks of the trees were thick and looked solid as duralloy.

Much of the ground to the west and north of the land was covered by a greenish down. It looked like short, very thick grass. Turning and raising his head, he looked out into the west, toward the horizon. That supplied another interesting discovery.

It looked as though it had been drawn with a pen. The line dividing earth and sky was straight, flat, and altogether too sharp to be real. Human eyes expected something slightly blurred or wavering on most inhabited planets. Not here. You could grab that line and pluck it.

Overhead, the sky was a deep cerulean blue, pure as old pewter dishes. The even oil color was unsullied, the dome of heaven smooth as a baby’s bottom. It was utterly devoid of clouds, which was just as well. A cloud in that pit of ice-blue would immediately surrender its aspect of lightness and take on the character of solid white rock. A real cloud floating overhead would be upsetting.

With the exception of their tiny blot of dirt, there was nothing else in any direction but flat, sparkling, virgin ice, lightly dusted now with snow. Another bit of taped knowledge drifted upward to the surface. Mostly shallow seas, frozen solid. They were adrift on an ocean of ice.

The glare of the unchallenged sun on that unwavering sea would have been intolerable without the goggles.

He jumped down to the ground. Mildly worried that the snow might make things awkward, he was relieved to discover it was barely a centimeter deep. Inside the boat it had piled a little, forming tiny drifts.

He walked a few paces away from the ship. Looking back toward the tail he could make out a pair of deep grooves in the ice. They ran straight toward the southern horizon. He couldn’t see under the boat, but it had obviously skidded badly on setdown. The landing struts had probably been torn away or worn down to stubs. Then the boat itself slid who knew how many meters on its belly, until it had chanced to run up against this swept-together dustpile of dirt and rock.

A few steps brought him down to where the ground vanished. Brushing away the snow, he found that he could see for a few centimeters into the ice. There the ground sloped away beneath, to unknown frozen depths. The grass, he noticed, grew right out into the ice itself. It clustered thickly, but in a very orderly fashion. There was always a little space, however small, between each blade and its neighbor.

None of this told him how big the island—for such it had to be—was. The inside of his mouth was a frozen crust. Running his tongue along it was like caressing cardboard. With thoughts of circling the island, he took a step out onto the ice.

Another facet of Tran-ky-ky promptly introduced itself. Any man trying to walk normally without special equipment would soon find himself in closer contact with the surface.

Fortunately, he didn’t slide very far on the freezing ice. But he had to crawl back on his hands and knees. By the time he’d regained solid ground his palms and knees were thoroughly numbed.

The boat’s emergency supplies were designed mainly with median range humanx-type worlds in mind. Therefore, if anything they tended to lean more toward the upper register of the thermometer in supply execution.

He didn’t believe ice skates had been included in the inventory.

As if to insure that he shouldn’t get any more comfortable than was necessary, the wind picked up and was now proceeding to cool things down a bit. The planet was clearly determined to freeze him solid and then blow away the remnant.

Tonight, when it first grew cold—the very concept of cold was taking on new meaning in Ethan’s mind—any real gust would add a chill factor that would make things very dangerous. They’d have to take care to prevent being thoroughly cubed—and not in the mathematical sense, either.

Without the relative shelter of the boat, of course, they’d probably freeze to death even with the special coats.

His vision was improving or the cold was starting to work its way into his brain. The horizon remained sharp as a paper cut on a fingertip. But now he thought he could make out what might be larger land masses far off in the distance. He couldn’t be certain.

For a moment he thought they might be imperfections in the material of the goggles. But when he moved his head, the distant objects stayed in the same places.

He turned to his right and froze. Figuratively, this time. Something else was visible off in the distance, coming around the side of the island. When he moved his head this time, though, the figure not only didn’t stay in the same place, it got larger.

As it came closer, it resolved into a fairly human figure. But there were discrepancies. The feet were bloated, distorted pads. It waved. Not having anything else to do, Ethan waved back. He stood up. If the thing weren’t human, he’d be better off meeting it in a stance more suitable for absenting oneself rapidly.

It was human, all right, although the figure was huge. The double set of clothing it wore made it seem even larger. That made Ethan think again of the coat he was wearing, designed for a much bigger man. That size man. He felt a little bit guilty.

At least September had snow goggles with him. The goggles gave him a faintly amphibious appearance. Ethan wondered if he looked as silly. Probably more so. If the man minded the intense chill he didn’t show it.