At the top, they found the controls were frozen solid, jammed with drifted snow. They used the smooth gray heat source to melt this, freeing the levers. They studied the board until they were relatively certain of what they were doing; then Hulann depressed what appeared to be the proper device. There was a grumbling somewhat louder than the storm, a deep, angry sound like gods are said to make. Slowly, it grew louder. Louder still. Until it was the sustained cough of an avalanche bearing down on them.
Then the yellow bee car rolled into view, and they saw the source of the artificial thunder: the cables were sheathed in ice from disuse, and the advancing car was cracking this away as it pressed toward its summoners. Long, translucent chunks fell down toward the white earth. The bee pulled next to the boarding platform, stopped slightly beyond it, swaying in the wind, the door only half aligned with the platform.
They were forced to chip at the ice sealing the seam of the sliding portal. When that broke away, they opened the cablecar, jumped from the platform into the shiny interior. Hulann was fascinated with the dozen passenger seats, all bright black plastic leather studded with chrome — though surely the interior of a naoli spacecraft was quite a deal more spectacular than this simple cabin.
Leo called from the far end of the cabin-fifteen feet away. He was standing by a console, much like the one on the platform outside. Hulann went to him, looked down.
"We're in luck," the boy said, pointing to the topmost toggle on the board. Beside the toggle was a label telling where the cab would take you if you chose to flip this one. THE FRENCH ALPINE, it announced.
"What's that?"
"A hotel," Leo said. "I've heard of it. I didn't know we were close to it, though. It'll be a good place to rest."
Hulann reached forward and set the toggle.
The bee jolted and began humming as it moved back the cable toward the top of the mountain.
They looked through the window in front of them, holding onto the safety bar that ran around all sides of the cabin, except where there were seats. The snow spat at them, coursed around them as they moved into the heart of it, gaining speed. It was very strange to be plummeting up, to be speedballing without the touch of wind. Hulann held tight to the safety bar, inspecting the magnificent view, seeing: — the gray snake of the cable stretching into the snow haze; — the rimed land stretching to all sides, losing its contour under the coverlet of winter, losing character and sex, like a sleeping giant concealed by cotton; — the great dark pines that bristled like whiskers out of the cold foam; — an onrushing pylon, steel arms spread to receive them, then jolting past them, making them sway so all these other things danced delightfully beneath them; — a flock of dark birds, moving by the mountain, flying level with them, knifing the storm with soft feathers; — his and Leo's breath fogging the glass so that the boy had to reach out a hand and clear the port
Hulann's tail snapped, then wound around his left thigh, tight.
"What's the matter?" the boy asked.
"Nothing."
"You look upset."
Hulann grimaced, his reptilian features taking on a pained look. "We're awfully high," he said in a thin voice.
"High? But it's only a hundred feet down!"
Hulann looked mournfully at the cable sliding past above them. "A hundred feet is enough if that should break."
"You've been in a shuttlecraft without even a cable."
"The highest they go is fifteen feet."
"Your starships, then. You can't get any higher than that."
"And you can't fall, either. There's no gravity out there."
Leo was laughing now, bending over the waist-high safety bar and giggling deep down in his throat. When he looked up again, his small face was red, and his eyes were watery. "This is something else!" he said. "You're afraid of heights. Naoli aren't supposed to be afraid of anything. Do you know that? Naoli are vicious fighters, hard, ruthless opponents. Nowhere does it say they are permitted to fear anything."
"Well-" Hulann said weakly.
"We're almost there," Leo said. "Just steel yourself for another minute or two, and it'll all be over."
Indeed, the bulk of the receiving station loomed out of the storm ahead. It was a gaily painted Swiss-styled header with a scalloped shelter roof over the entrance trough and large windows divided into dozens of small panes by criss-crossing spines of polished pine. As they glided up the cable, it seemed as if the header was moving to meet them, as if they were the stationary object.
A dozen feet from the header station, the yellow bee jolted, leaped up and down on its connections, bouncing the two occupants severely. There was a crunching sound, much like that the ice had been making on the last few hundred feet of unbroken trail-though this noise was nastier and somehow frightening. The car seemed to stop, then lurch ahead. Then, very definitely, it slipped back. There was a second jolt, worse than the first, which knocked Hulann's feet out from under him and made him fall in against the wall and the safety bar to which he still clung.
"What is it?" he asked the boy.
"I don't know."
The car tried to move ahead toward the looming header station, thumped again, slipped back, began swaying wildly. It was a combination of ferris wheel, roller coaster, out-of-control shuttlecraft, a dizzying, horrifying explosion of movement, sound and swirling light. Hulann felt his second stomach reject its refined contents, tasted the product of his first stomach in his throat. It required all the effort he could muster to avoid vomiting.
Leo lost his hold on the safety bar, went rolling across the front of the cabin, slammed hard against the far wall. Hulann thought he heard the boy squeal in pain, but the rattling of the bee and the singing of the tortured cable drowned it out.
The car moved forward again, leaped again, was tossed backwards a few feet on the cable.
The cabin swung like a pendulum. Leo rolled away, arms and legs akimbo, came up sharply against the edge of the guidance console, only a few feet from Hulann.
The alien could see the bright blood trickling from the broken corner of the boy's mouth. Leo reached for something which might give him a handhold, scrabbled ungloved fingers over smooth, cold metal. The car swung violently, ripping him back across the bottom of the bee.
The arcs of the pendulum were high and distant now, the swings so long and wild that they made Hulann feel giddy like a child on an amusement ride. But he was not amused.
Leo pulled himself into a tight ball to protect his more vulnerable regions, rebounded from the far wall without much damage, bounced back and came up against the housing of the guidance system again. There was a bruise along his left jaw, already brown-blue and growing darker.
Hulann held to the safety railing with one hand, reached out and clutched the boy's coat with the other, slid his six claws into the layers of fabric to hook it securely. The cabin tilted again, but Leo did not go rolling back. Painstakingly, Hulann began to use his great but not well-cared-for muscles to reel the boy in. When he had brought him against his own heaving chest, he pulled himself erect with one hand, then drew Leo up with the claws that were hooked in the boy's clothing. Leo seized the rail once more, held it so tightly that his ungloved knuckles were bleached white.
"We have to stop it!" he shouted to Hulann. His small face was lined like the weathered visage of an old man. "It'll jump the cable any minute now!"