Hal Clement - Cycle of Fire

“We are not going to that village yet. The Teachers wanted to get a more complete report on the situation, which could only be obtained from you, and they also want to see your companion Kruger. You said that he knew more than was in the books, so they feel that it is more important to get him to the Ice Ramparts, particularly if he suffers from heat.”

Dar Lang Ahn admitted the force of this reasoning, although a lifetime of habit prevented his being completely easy on the subject of his lost cargo. Kruger applauded the decision; every time he heard the word which he had decided must mean “ice,” he felt homesick. A Turkish bath is all right now and then, but he had been in one for the best part of a terrestrial year.

There was no difficulty with the launching. Each glider in turn was anchored at the proper distance, the cable hooked to its nose, and a light, non-stretching line run up to the bracket, through a pulley, and back to a capstan. The latter was wound up until the stretching portion of the line reached the bracket, then the first line was detached and stowed and the glider was released. As it lunged forward over the bracket the hook disengaged from its nose and fell free, leaving the performance to be repeated with the next glider.

The only variation was with the last aircraft, which was the one used by Dar Lang Ahn and Kruger. In this case the detachable hook was fastened to the bracket instead of the craft, the capstan was installed on a support in the cockpit, and the glider was anchored by a slip knot that could be released by the pilot from his station. As a result the cable rode into the air along with them and was wound up by Kruger when they were safely airborne. Not until after this was finished did Dar comment on the consequences which would have ensued had the hook fouled in the launching bracket.

“But don’t you have some means of releasing this end of the cable if that happens?” asked Kruger.

“It’s been tried but usually the pilot doesn’t react fast enough to get any good out of it. You don’t know it’s fouled until the cable jerks your nose down and breaks you out of your safety belt.” Kruger gulped and was silent.

The flight was interesting but relatively uneventful. It was slow, of course, by Kruger’s standards; Dar could scarcely ever head straight toward an objective. He had to coast from one rising air current to the next and Kruger was by no means always sure just how he found his up-drafts. Dar, of course, could not always explain his knowledge; it had taken him a lifetime of about forty terrestrial years to pick it up and he could hardly impart it all in one flight.

One thing was certain: Dar Lang Ahn could have walked away with any sailplane prize ever offered on Earth without even realizing that he had been in a competition. The mere fact that the present flight covered over fifteen hundred miles was not the principal reason for this; rather it was the fact that he should take such a flight as a matter of course, with no more concern about the possibility of failure than a man considers when he starts to drive from Honolulu to New York. As the hours passed with no sign of the further shore Kruger began gradually to appreciate some of this.

When the coast finally did appear it was totally different in nature from the one they had left. That had been relatively flat, except for occasional volcanic cones; this was rugged. There were ranges of mountains produced quite obviously by both thrusting and block faulting — apparently young mountains, as geologists class such things. Steep cliffs, thousands of tiny streams rich in waterfalls and rapids, sharp, bare peaks — all told the same story. The air currents were incredibly complex and Dar used them with a skill bordering on the supernatural. The other gliders had long since disappeared; their lower wing loadings had enabled them to make “jumps” from updraft to updraft which Dar had not been willing to risk.

With the coast in sight Dar had begun to work to the left, and crossed it on a long slant. Usually they were too high for any animals to be seen or even the details of the forests that clothed the lower slopes of the mountains, but sometimes the glider would drift along the leeward side of a valley to make use of the air currents being forced up the next ridge, and Kruger could see that the trees were different. One reason was fairly evident: the temperature was lower, as Kruger could easily feel. At the highest altitudes reached by the glider he had felt comfortable at the start of the flight, now the comfort point was much closer to the ground.

This grew worse as the hours passed. Kruger was not sure how far they traveled but realized that it must be hundreds of miles. He was tired, hungry, and thirsty. Dar seemed indifferent to all these ills, as well as to the cold which was beginning to make his human companion almost regret the jungle. They had spoken little for many hours but each time Kruger thought of asking how much longer the flight was to last he was stopped by his reluctance to appear complaining. Eventually it was Dar who spoke.

“We may not make it before dark,” he said suddenly. “I’ll have to land soon, and go on when the sun comes up again.” Kruger looked in surprise at the blue star, whose motions he had long since ceased to notice particularly. Dar was right, it seemed. Arren was almost on the horizon behind them and a little to the glider’s right; it was very slowly going down. Kruger tried to use this fact to form an idea of his location on the planet — it must mean something, since he had seen the blue sun in the sky constantly for over six terrestrial months. One point seemed clear: Theer would not rise this year. They had crossed to the “dark side” of Abyormen. An ice cap suddenly seemed a reasonable feature of the landscape.

Nevertheless, judging by the angle at which the star was setting it should not go very far below the horizon, Kruger decided. He put this point to Dar.

“It will not actually get too dark to see, will it?” he asked.

“No, but we do not habitually fly when neither sun is in the sky,” was the answer. “Vertical air currents are much rarer and harder to identify from any distance. However, I will do my best to get to the Ramparts before the sun goes down; I have no great appetite for sitting on a hilltop for fifteen or twenty hours.” Kruger concurred heartily in this wish.

It was hard to tell just what the star was doing, since their altitude varied so widely and rapidly, but that it was setting there could be no doubt. His attention was so concentrated on the vanishing star that he failed to note the landscape below as he might otherwise have done, and the ice cap was in sight for some time before he noticed it. After that he noticed little else.

A great river flowing under their course toward the now distant sea was the first warning that caught his eye. Following it upstream he saw that it rose at the foot of a gigantic wall that gleamed pinkly in the nearly level rays of Alcyone. It took him several seconds to realized that the wall was the foot of a glacier. The river continued inland, but it was a river of ice. The mountains actually were higher toward the center of the continent, but to Kruger’s view now they seemed to shrink, for their bases were buried in what looked like the accumulated snows of centuries. As far as the eye could reach from the highest point of the glider’s flight the field of ice spread on. Most of it was held motionless by the great hills that strove to pierce it from beneath, but near the edge the glaciers oozed free and tried to make their way to the ocean. The ice was certainly a thousand feet or more thick here at the edge of the cap; Kruger wondered what it could be further inland.

But the sight of the ice cap meant that they could not be far from their goal; Dar would not have come so close to a fruitful source of downdrafts unless he had to. The pilot admitted this when Kruger asked him. “We should make it, all right. About two more climbs, if I can find good enough updrafts, and we can coast the rest of the way.” The boy forbore to interrupt him any more and watched the landscape in fascination as forest gave way to patches of snow and ice, and soil to black and gray rock streaked with white.