"Leo!"
There was no answer.
"Leo!"
Silence.
He wrenched at the door, frantic. The guilt that had begun to lose its edge in him now flowered larger than ever. If the boy were dead, then he had killed the boy. Surely. Yes. Because he had been driving; because he had not been careful; because he was a naoli, and naoli had set up the conditions which had made their flight necessary in the first place.
But the door held, jammed, locked by bent and intermingled parts. It rattled slightly in its mounts, nothing more.
He fought it until he was exhausted. Then he called the boy's name some more.
The boy did not answer.
He tried listening for the sound of breathing from within, but he was defeated by the breath of the storm, which was greater, louder, more dynamic.
When more work at the door would not help, he leaned back and inspected the shuttlecraft for a breach that might give him entrance. He saw, then, that the wrap-around windscreen had been shattered. There were only a few splinters of glass sticking in the edges of the frame. He broke these out with the flat of his palm, then braced against the rocks and the hood, worked himself inside the car.
Leo had crawled-or had been tossed-into the luggage space behind the seats. It had been, in the plummeting, disintegrating car, the safest place to be. Hulann lifted his own suitcase off the boy's legs, rolled him over onto his back.
"Leo," he said softly. Then louder. Then he shouted it, slapping the small face.
The boy's face was very white. His lips were slightly blue. Hulann used the sensitive patches of his fingertips to test for skin temperature and found it dismayingly low for a human. He remembered then how little tolerance these people had to changes of temperature. Two hours exposed like this could do great damage to one of their frail systems.
He rummaged through his suitcase, brought out the powerful personal heat unit and thumbed the controls on the smooth, gray object that looked like nothing so much as a water-washed stone. Immediately, there was a burst of warmth that even he appreciated. He placed the device next to the boy and waited.
In a few minutes, the snow that had blown in melted and ran away, down the slanting floor to collect in the corners. The blueness left the boy's face; Hulann deemed it proper to inject a stimulant now. From the sparse medicinals in the case, he filled a hypo with serum and slid the needle into the visible vein in the boy's wrist, being careful to do as little damage as possible with the naoli-broad point.
Eventually, Leo stirred, kicking as if in a nightmare, Hulann quieted him by stroking his forehead. Ten minutes after these first signs, he opened his eyes. They were bloodshot.
"Hello," he said to Hulann. "Cold."
"It's getting warmer."
The boy moved closer to the heat unit.
"Are you all right?"
"Cold."
"Aside from that. Broken bones? Cuts?"
"I don't think so."
Hulann leaned against the back of the passenger's seat as he sat on what should have been the wall of the car. He breathed a sigh, realized his primary nostrils were still closed, and opened them. The warm air was good inside his chest.
In time, Leo sat up, held his head in his hands, began to massage his temples.
"We have to get out of here," Hulann said. "They'll be after us soon. We can't waste any time. Also, the heat source is going to give out if we have to keep it on full power. We'll have to find someplace to shelter and regain our strength and perspective."
"Where?"
"Up the mountain. There's no sense in going down. We don't know if there's anything down there. But there's a road at the top. If we get back on that, follow the guardrails, we should come to a building sooner or later."
Leo shook his head with doubt. "How far up?"
"Not far," Hulann lied.
"I'm still cold. And tired. And hungry too." 'We'll use the heat unit," Hulann said. "We'll have just a little to eat before we go out." You'll just have to fight the weariness. We must make time. The Hunter will surely be sent out soon."
"Hunter?"
"One of my kind. Yet not of my kind. He hunts."
Leo saw the terror in Hulann's eyes and stopped arguing. Maybe there were two kinds of naoli. The kind men had fought, Hulann's kind. Hulann was friendly. The other kind hunted. Maybe that explained the war. Yet Hulann had given him the impression that there was one Hunter-no more than a few. So that did not explain the war. That was still a mystery.
Hulann withdrew some doughy material which he compared with wheat bread-though Leo thought the taste altogether different, and inferior. He did not say so. The naoli seemed proud of the quality of the food he had been able to bring and considered these things minor naoli delicacies. To argue otherwise would only be to insult him.
They also had the eggs of certain fish suspended in a sour honey-gel. This, Leo thought, was indeed something special. He would have eaten much more if Hulann had not pointed out the danger of requiring too much heat for digestion and thereby forfeiting that needed to keep from freezing to death. Also, it might be wise to begin rationing.
When they finished and were as warm as they could get, Hulann closed the case, shoved it through the window. It slid down the hood, caught in among the rocks of the column on that side. He went out next, back into the maelstorm, and pulled Leo through the broken windscreen. They scrambled down until they were on the ground. Hulann fetched the case. He had Leo hold the heat unit, though the boy protested that Hulann was the naked one. He promised he would take turns with the unit now and then, and stay within a few feet of the boy in order to benefit by what it broadcast.
They turned and faced up the slope. Though daylight was now upon the land, visibility had not increased much. He could see an extra thirty feet, no more. The sky was low and threatened to stay that way for many hours to come. Hulann was thankful. At least, in the gloom and the walls of dancing flakes, Leo would not be able to see how far the top of the mountain really was
"I'll break a way," he said to Leo. "Stay close, in my steps. Crawl when I crawl, walk when I walk. Okay?"
"I can take orders," the boy said haughtily.
Hulann laughed, slapped him on the shoulder, then turned and took the first step of the trek back to the highway and simultaneously heard the first word of the Phasersystem alert
Banalog stiffened in his chair when he heard the beginning of the Phasersystem alarm. The last traces of the sweet-drugs had left him an hour earlier, though he had decided to wait as long as possible before giving the alarm that would wake the Hunter and send him stalking Hulann and the boy. At first, he thought this alert had nothing to do with Hulann. It was being given by a woman named Fiala, an archaeologist and moderately well-known essayist in certain technical circles. When he ascertained, after the first few words, that she too was now tied and gagged by Hulann, he waited no longer. He added his voice to hers.
Moments after they had finished, there were naoli in his office to untie him, to take the gag from his mouth. One of them was a military officer named Zenolan, an extremely large person, a foot taller than Banalog, a super lizard with a head half again as large as a head should be. He took the empty hypo with the traces of sweet-drugs in it from the hands of one of the other naoli.
"Sweet-drugs?" he asked Banalog unnecessarily.
"Yes."
"When?"
"Last evening," Banalog lied.
"Why was he here?"
"A session under the machines."
Zenolan looked at the equipment hanging in the recessed section of the office ceiling. "A session? At night?"
"Early evening,'' Banalog said. "And it was because he had forgotten his appointment for this afternoon. Or so he said. I contacted him to get him in after hours. He was reluctant even then. Tried to make excuses. I wouldn't have any of it." He looked at Zenolan to see what effect the story was having.