"It's not a bad way to go," Thor said softly.
Alex looked up. Thor knew. He had the most experience with the Ice, and he knew.
"You get sleepier and sleepier. Then you don't wake up," Thor said. "They say it's even easier if you don't fight it."
"And do you give up?"
Thor shrugged. "I probably won't. But I won't last much longer than you do."
The glacier at night was as dark as the leeside of Freedom Station. But Freedom Station could turn on the spotlights for EVA work. Alex didn't think any of the rescue party had realized how dark it would be. They hadn't expected to still be on the Ice come nightfall; so he couldn't blame them for not brining any flashlights. They had only the two that Sherrine's grandfather kept in the kits strapped to each sledge, and a small trouble light salvaged from Piranha. They didn't make much light; but, with them and with ropes tying everyone together, Bruce could hope that no one would get lost in the dark. If only there were some way to turn on the spotlights.
Spotlights. By God!
"Something interesting?" Thor asked.
"Damn right, if I can raise the ship. You don't need the Sun to get heat from the sky."
"Onk?"
"You'll see. I hope. Aim the antenna for me, due south. Big Momma. Big Momma, Big Momma, this is Piranha. Priority One. Mayday."
Sherrine looked around with a frown.
"Alex--"
"Shut up, Gordon! Big Momma, Big Momma, this is Piranha. Mayday."
Captain Lee Arteria relaxed in a chair well to the side of the meeting room, the better to watch the proceedings. One should always have a clear field of fire, just in case. Several of the other attendees threw repeated glances in that direction. Arteria, returning their gazes, could almost read their minds. Slim and fine-featured, pointed chin; short-cropped red hair; noncommittal first name, and a grip like a Junkyard dog. Gay man or butch woman? They couldn't tell. It made them uneasy.
Arteria parted her lips in a thin faint smile. They were bothered less by the thought that she might be skew than by not knowing the direction of skew. They liked to put people in categories, even unorthodox categories. It was more comfortable than dealing with individuals and their idiosyncrasies. Deny them that and you put them at a disadvantage. Arteria liked to leave it like that. It was always sound tactics to leave your opponents at a disadvantage.
"Can we take it then," said Ike Redden, "that the subjects have died on the Ice?" Redden represented the INS on the Special Task Force. He was also the chair. Inter-service wrangling and high-level compromise had left the Immigration and Naturalization Service in nominal charge of the search. The space stations had declared their independence almost a generation ago; so their residents were, ipsofacto, aliens. And illegal immigration was, according to counsel, the most impeccable grounds for apprehension of the stranded astronauts. Still, Arteria was sure that all the task force members were looking for ways to bend the mission to their own advantages.
The State Police captain shook his head. "I don't see how they could have gotten off the Ice before nightfall without being apprehended."
Arteria could think of three or four ways. She kept her peace. The others were paid to do the thinking.
"There was no one aboard the spacecraft when we found it." Air Force was reluctant to mention finding the craft; no doubt because it had taken so long to do so. Never mind that the shuttle was painted a reflective silver; that it blended into the surrounding ice; that it had apparently been deliberately buried. The failure to achieve instant results was always ammunition for one's opponents. "We assume that the astronauts wandered out onto the Ice and froze. We've done IR scans of the immediate area and found no trace of them. So their bodies must have cooled to ambient. We may never find them."
"They are not dead."
Captain Arteria sighed quietly. Staff meetings were always tedious, especially to the worker bees; but even tedium was better than listening to Shirley Johnson. Redden sucked on his lips and exchanged glances with the State Police and Air Force representatives. "Why do you say that, Johnson?" he asked.
"Ice is a crystal, and crystals focus the life power. Yes, yes, I know people have frozen on the Ice in spite of that; but all sickness comes from negative thinking. One must be open to the life-affirming powers of the crystal."
"The aliens are technophiles, pointed out Jheri Moorkith, the Green representative, and therefore life-denying. However, I agree that they have escaped. Why else would the techno-scientific elite in their artificial worlds have beamed their death rays at the search teams?"
"There were tracks in the snow," State Police admitted, "weren't there, Captain Arteria?"
"There certainly were." Arteria's voice was a husky contralto. No sexual clues there, either. Nor clues of any sort. Arteria intended to participate as little as possible in the conference. The Angels weren't any threat to the United States, and tracking them down was using resources better employed for something else.
"The tracks came to the spaceship from the south. We lost them on the hard ice," State Police continued. "But they were headed toward the interior. There's no chance of finding tracks at night, but come morning we'll start a search pattern around the projected route. The tracks looked like dogsleds, though.
Air Force spoke up. "One of our IR searches turned up a bogey to the east, on the Minnesota Glacier; but close overflight positively identified it as an Eskimo band. Those dogsled tracks are probably another band that saw the ship come down and mushed over to investigate."
State Police: "There have been a number of Eskimo sightings around here over the last few months. There was a fight over poaching out by Anamoose. The white folks chased them off."
"Eskimos," said Moorkith, rubbing his chin. "Good. Native Americans live close to nature. They respect the other lifeforms with which we share this fragile planet. I'm sure they will help us locate the polluting technocrats."
The Angels had help, thought Arteria. Someone came up from the south and took them away to the east. Probably not Eskimos, if they came from the south. That should be obvious, even to this crowd. So. If not Eskimos, who? Given the timing involved, it had to have been impromptu. And, if they had been caught--
People who would risk anything to rescue spacemen, instantly, knowing the government would be searching, too. People who could head straight for the spacecraft without aerial spotters. People who could call down power beams from the stations.
People who thought they could improvise a rescue on the Ice on the spur of the moment and pull it off without getting caught.
Fanac! It had to be fanac.
And if you could think like a fan again, Arteria thought, you might figure out where they'd show up next. She smiled wolfishly.
The response was faint, almost lost in the hiss of static. "Da, we readink, Piranha. Chto khochesh? What want?"
"Thank God. Big Momma, it's cold here. We're going to freeze, all of us. We need heat. Can you give us a microwave spotlight? Have SUNSAT lock one of its projectors onto our transponder frequency and track us across the ice."
"Skazhite. One moment." Alex waited while Big Momma conferred--probably with the Peace Station chief and the SUNSAT engineer. Sherrine asked him what he was doing and he told her. She and Thor exchanged glances.