He did not hang on a plumb line, but was blown slightly to the left. He had to fight the wind, his own weight, and the growing ache in his arms…
He found that his hands had a tendency to freeze to the cable.
His lungs burned as the bitter air scorched them. He would have been better off on one set of nostrils, but he could not close the primarys down and still operate on full capacity. And he needed everything he had
Some of the outer layers of scales were pulling loose. He did not feel any pain-chiefly because the wounds were artificial, but also because his flesh was numbed.
A moment later, he reached the ice lump. He looked up at it, saw a dark, irregular shape within. He could not guess what it might be, but he had no time for guessing games anyway. He let go with one hand, holding the other ready an inch from the cable in case one arm proved too weak to hold him. But, though his nerves screamed and his shoulder threatened to separate at its socket, he found he could manage on the single arm. Raising the other hand, he swung at the ice lump, claws extended.
The very ends of the hard nails shaved the ice. Some of it fell away and was lost in the pulsating snow sheaths.
The impact of the blow sent a tight vibration through the taut cable. The vibration coursed down the arm by which he hung, made his flesh pain even more.
He swung again.
More ice was sliced off. A major fracture appeared in the lump. He reached up, worked his claws into the crack, twisted and pried. The ice broke. Two large pieces fell away. He saw, then, what had caused the lump. A bird had struck the cable, lodged itself on long enough for ice to form to freeze it in place. Since then, the ice had continued to build over it.
He knocked off more ice, then tugged the mangled bird free, looked at it. Its eyes were frozen solid, white and unseeing. Its beak was broken and covered with frozen blood. He dropped it, grabbed the cable with both hands, and began the tricky turn-about to head back for the safety of the roof, then the cab, then the header station, and finally the shelter of the blessed FRENCH ALPINE HOTEL
Docanil the Hunter sat in a gray swivel chair before a bank of blinking lights and shuddering dials, flanked on either side by Phasersystem technicians who watched him from the corners of their eyes as one might watch an animal that seemed friendly but which one did not quite trust, despite all assurances. "How soon?" he asked the room.
"Any moment now," the chief technician said, flitting about his own console, touching various knobs and toggles and dials, turning some, just brushing others for the assurance they gave him.
"You must find all you can," Docanil said.
"Yes," the technician said. "Ah, here we are now "
Hulann, the voiceless voice said.
He woke. Though not completely. The voice murmured to him, kept him slightly hazed as it asked questions of him. He felt it probing into his overmind, looking for something. What?
Relax, it whispered.
He started to relax then sat bolt upright!
Open to us, Hulann.
"No." It was possible to close down one's contact with the Phasersystem. In the beginning, centuries upon centuries ago, the central committee had decided that if the naoli could not have privacy when they wanted it, then the Phasersystem might become a tyranny, a thing from which there was no escape. Hulann was thankful for their foresight now.
Open, Hulann. It is the wise thing.
"Go. Leave me."
Turn the boy over, Hulann.
"To die?"
Hulann" Go. Now. I am not listening."
Reluctantly, the contact faded, broke, and left him alone with himself.
Hulann sat in the dark lobby of the hotel, on the edge of the sofa where he had been sleeping. A few feet away, Leo snored lightly, drawn into a foetal position, his head tucked down between his shoulders. Hulann thought about the Phasersystem intrusion. They had, of course, been probing to find where he was. He tried to recall those first few moments of the probe to see whether he had given them what they wanted. It did not seem likely. A probe takes several minutes to be truly efficient. They couldn't have learned anything in six or eight seconds. Could they? Besides, would they have prodded him to give up the boy if they had discovered his whereabouts? Highly unlikely.
Before his thoughts could begin to stray to his family in the home system, to his children that he would never see again, he stretched out on the couch and, for the second time in less than an hour, disassociated his overmind from his organic regulating brain, slipped into the nether world pocket of death sleep
"Well?" Docanil asked the chief technician.
The man handed over the printouts of the probe. "Not much."
"You tell me."
The voice was a rasping command, given in a low but deadly key.
The technician cleared his throat. "They've headed west. They passed the Great Lakes conversion crater. The scene was clear in his mind. They got off the superway at exit K-43 and took the secondary route toward Ohio."
"Nothing more?"
"Nothing more."
"This is not much."
"Enough for a Hunter," the technician chief said.
"This is true."
Docanil left the room, went into the corridor where Banalog waited. He glanced at the traumatist as he went by, as if he did not know him and was only mildly curious. Banalog rose and followed him to the end of the hall, through a plasti-glass door into the frigid morning air. A copter was waiting, a large one with living quarters and enough supplies to last the two of them as long as the hunt required.
"You found them?" he asked Docanil when they were seated in the cockpit of the craft.
"More or less."
"Where are they?"
"West."
"That's all you know?"
"Not quite."
"What else?"
Docanil looked at the traumatist with interest. The glance made the other naoli cringe and draw away, tight against the door of the cabin.
"I was just curious," Banalog explained.
"Fight your curiosity. The rest is for me to know. It can mean nothing to you."
He started the copter and lifted it out of the ruins of Boston, into the wind and snow and bleak winter sky
Chapter Ten
POINT:
In the Nucio system, on the fourth planet circling the giant sun (the place once called Data but now called nothing at all) it was early evening. A brief but intense rain had just fallen, and the air was saturated with a fine, blue mist that settled ever so slowly on the glossy leaves of the thick forests. There were no animal sounds anywhere. Occasionally, there was a soft ululation-but that was not the cry of a beast.
Near the calm sea, where there had once been beasts, the jungle labored to turn a tangle of steel beams into dust. The metal was already eaten through in many places
A hundred feet beyond this, closer to the water's edge, a walking vine snaked a healthy green tentacle through the empty, yellow eye' socket of a long, gleaming naoli skull
Chapter Eleven
COUNTERPOINT:
In the city of Atlanta it was noon. It was a bright day, though a cloud or two drifted across the sun. In the foundry yard on the west end of town, everything was still-except for the rats scrambling about the interior of a huge storage tank at the yard's end. There were about a dozen of them, chittering and hissing at one another. This had once been the tank that temporarily housed Sara Laramie. The rats feasted
Chapter Twelve
As they neared the border of Pennsylvania and Ohio, the Hunter Docanil prepared to initiate as careful a search as possible of the oncoming terrain. He withdrew the sensory patch-ins from their slots on the console. The patches were little metal tabs whose undersides were studded with a dozen half-inch needles of the finest copper alloy, honed and sharpened to a rigid specification. There were six of them, and Docanil pressed each of them into a different set of nerve clusters on his body, having to roll back his sleeves in the process; his trousers were equipped with zippers along the legs to open them for the same purpose. When he was patched into the exterior sensory amplifiers on the copter's hide, he settled back in his chair, six wire snakes winding from him to the console, making him look like some automaton or some part of the machine and not a living creature in his own right.