She was briefly taken aback. “Haven’t you heard?” A laugh. “I guess not. You seem to have other things on your mind when you visit us. Well, the idea is not to replace the hydrogen engine permanently. But petroleum systems are easier to build, with far fewer man-hours; mainly because of fuel storage, you know. Dad thinks he can manufacture and sell them for the rest of his lifetime. By then, there should be enough industrial plants on Rustum that it’ll be feasible to go back to a hydrogen economy. A few hundred oil-fired power plants, operating for thirty or forty years, won’t do measurable harm.”
“I see. Good. Not that I’m too surprised. Your brother was telling me yesterday about the work he does in his spare time, drilling into children how they must not repeat the old mistakes….” Again he skirted too near the thing that was uppermost in his heart. “Uh, by the way, you mentioned wanting to see more of the lowlands on your way home, if you could get a pilot who can safely take you off the mapped and beaconed route. Well, I may have found one.”
She leaned close. Her gaze filled with moonlight. “You, Dan?”
He shook his head ruefully. “No. I wish it were, but I’m afraid I’ve taken too much time off from work as is. Like Eva. However, Bill Svoboda is about due for a vacation and——”
The three of them had flown away into silence.
Eva’s yell cut like a sword. “There!”
She swung the car around so the chassis groaned and brought it to hover on autopilot, a hundred meters aloft and jets angled outward. Dan strained against the cabin canopy, flattening his nose till tears blurred vision and he noticed the pain that had brought them forth. His heart slugged.
“They’re alive,” he uttered. “They don’t seem hurt.” Mutely, his companion passed him his binoculars. He mastered the shaking of his hands and focused on the survivors below him and the scene around them.
Mountains made a rim of russet-and-buff woods, darkling palisades, around a valley shaped like a wide bowl. Save for isolated trees, it was open ground, its turquoise grass rippling and shimmering in wind. A pool near the middle threw back cloud images. That must have been what first attracted the terasaur.
They numbered some thirty adults, five meters or more of dark-green scaliness from blunt snouts to heavy tails, the barrels of their bodies so thick that they looked merely grotesque until you saw one of them break into a run and felt the earthquake shudder it made. Calves and yearlings accompanied them; further developed than Terrestrial reptiles, they cared for their young. The swathe they had grazed through the woods ran plain to see from the south. Doubtless Bill Svoboda had identified and followed it just as Eva had been doing.
A hill lifted out of the meadowland. On its grassy lower sloper the other vehicle had landed, in order to observe the herd at a respectful distance. Not that terasaur were quick to attack. Except for bulls in rut, they had no need to be aggressive. But neither had they reason to be careful of pygmies who stood in their way.
“What’s happening?” Eva breathed. “They never act like this—in summer, anyhow.”
“They’re doing it, though.” Dan’s words were as jerky as hers.
The car from Anchor was not totally beyond recognition. Tough alloys and synthetics went into any machine built for Rustum. But nothing in the crumpled, smashed, shattered, and scattered ruin was worth salvage. Fuel still oozed from one tank not altogether beaten apart. The liquid added darkness to a ground that huge feet had trampled into mud. Now and then a beast would cross that slipperiness, fall, rise besmeared and roaring to fling itself still more violently into the chaos.
The hillcrest around which the herd ramped was naked stone, thrusting several meters up like a gray cockscomb. There the three humans had scrambled for refuge. The berserk animals couldn’t follow them, though often a bull would try, thunder-bawling as he flung himself at the steeps, craned his great wattled neck and snapped his jaws loud enough for Dan to hear through all the distance and tumult. Otherwise the terasaur milled about, bellowed, fought each other with tushes, forelegs, battering tails, lurched away exhausted and bleeding till strength came back to seek a fresh enemy. Several lay dead, or dying with dreadful red slowness, in clouds of carrion bugs.
Females seemed less crazed. They hung about on the fringes of the rioting giants and from time to time galloped clamoring in circles. Terrified and forgotten, the calves huddled by the pool.
High overhead, light seeping through clouds burnished the wings of two spearfowl that waited for their own chance to feast.
“I’d guess—well, this has got to be the way it was,” Dan said. “Bill set down where you see. The herd, or some individual members, wandered close. That seemed interesting, no cause for alarm. Probably all three were well away from the car, looking for a good camera angle. Then suddenly came the charge. It was a complete surprise; and you know what speed a terasaur can put on when it wants. They had no time to reach the car and get airborne. They were lucky to make it up onto the rock, where they’ve been trapped ever since.”
“How are they, do you think?” Eva asked.
“Alive, at least. What a nightmare, clinging to those little handholds in darkness, hearing the roars and screams, feeling the rock shiver underneath them! And no air helmets. I wonder why that.”
“I daresay they figured they could dispense with apparatus for the short time they planned to be here.”
“Still, they’d’ve had the nuisance of cycling through pressure change.” Dan spoke absently, nearly his whole attention on the scene that filled the lenses. At the back of his mind flickered the thought that, if this had gone on for as many hours as evidently was the case, the herd would have wiped itself out by now had it not been handicapped by darkness.
“Well,” Eva was saying, “Ralph told me more than once how he longed to really experience the lowlands, if only for a few breaths.” Her fist struck the control panel, a soft repeated thud. “Oh, God, the barrier between us!”
“Yes. Mary remarked the same to me. Except I always had too much else to show her and try to make her see the beauty of——”
Bill Svoboda was on his feet, waving. The glasses were powerful; Dan saw how haggard, grimed, and unkempt the man was. Mary looked better. But then, he thought, she would forever. She must in fact be worse off, that bright head whirling and ready to split with pain, that breast a kettle of fire… together with hunger, thirst, weariness, terror. She kept seated on her perch, sometimes feebly waving an arm. Her brother stayed sprawled.
“Ralph’s the sickest, seems like,” Dan went on. “He must be the one most liable to pressure intoxication.”
“Let me see!” Eva ripped the binoculars from him.
“Ouch,” he said. “Can I have my fingers back, please?”
“This is no time for jokes, Dan Coffin.”
“No. I guess not. Although——” He gusted a sigh. “They are alive. No permanent harm done, I’m sure.” Relief went through him in such a wave of weakness that he must sit down.
“There will be, if we don’t get them to a proper atmosphere in… how long? A few hours?” Eva lowered the binoculars. “Well, doubtless a vehicle can arrive from High America before then, if we radio and somebody there acts promptly.”
Dan glanced up at her. Sweat glistened on her face, she breathed hard, and he had rarely seen her this pale. But her jaw was firm and she spoke on a rising note of joy.
“Huh?” he said. “What kind of vehicle would that be?”
“We’d better take a minute to think about it.” She jackknifed herself into the chair beside his. Her smile was bleak. “Ironic, hm? This colony’s had no problems of war or crime—and now, what I’d give for a fighter jet!”