But I had no intention of dying. Aside from all the usual reasons-and I'd say my survival instinct is as strong as anybody's-I didn't want to give them the satisfaction. I sure as hell wasn't going to give up without a fight. I tapped my wrist and said, "I need a cab, or an ambulance or patrol car; this is an emergency."
My voice was a croak. The gag had soaked up all the moisture in my mouth, and the dry air in the cab was making it hard to recover.
My transceiver did nothing. No beep. If it had heard my command and tried to obey, it hadn't been able to get an acknowledgment from anyone.
I swallowed, got my mouth working a little better, and tried again.
"I said, cab, please!" This time it came out clear and angry.
The transceiver buzzed, an ugly, negative sound. It had tried. It hadn't gotten through. Nobody was in range.
I was hot, I realized, hot and tired-my little doze on the way east hadn't really left me well rested. I was scared bad, too. My wrist was shaking as I looked at the skin covering the transceiver, and sweat shone in a thin film.
And I hadn't done anything yet, hadn't gone anywhere. I'd only been awake for a few minutes.
I looked up, then wished I hadn't; that blue-white sky was one huge glare.
I looked down again and around at what I could see.
There was nothing else in the cab I could use. The transmitters might not be smashed like the motherboard and the power plant, but I had no juice for them; I didn't have any way to rig an adapter for my body current, and that probably wouldn't have been enough anyway. It apparently wasn't enough for my wrist transceiver.
Hell, I was probably below the broadcast horizon for the city anyway. I'd have a better chance of contacting ships in space. Except that most ships don't come over the dayside anywhere below high orbit, and they wouldn't be listening on ground-use frequencies.
I was stranded. Barring miracles, my only way out was to walk back to the nightside.
I wasn't too picky about just where on the nightside. Anywhere would do; most of the nightside is at least borderline habitable, and the bad spots are mostly pretty far back from the terminator. I didn't think I'd be lucky enough to hit Nightside City right off, but if I reached the twilight zone and then turned and kept walking along the terminator, I thought I ought to hit either the city or a working mine camp, and miners could get me to the city.
First, though, I had to get to the terminator, and I had no idea how far that might be. The sun didn't seem very high in the sky, and the shadows were long-but Epimetheus is a good-sized planet, as I've said before. Great-circle circumference is 28,500 kilometers, more or less.
With Nightside City on the terminator, that put it roughly seven thousand kilometers from the noon pole. I wasn't that far, obviously, but looking in the general direction of the sun-I couldn't look right at it, of course-I could easily have been one or two thousand kilometers east of the terminator.
That's one hell of a long walk.
But what choice did I have?
Waiting wasn't going to do me any good, either. A journey of a thousand kilometers begins with a single step, right? It was time to stop dawdling and take that first step.
With no power available I had to kick open the sprung door to get out, and the instant my foot knocked it loose the wind, which I had already thought was screaming, became an ear-wracking shriek. It filled the little cab with a whirlwind, whipping dust into rising coils; the core access panel flapped clumsily, in a broken rhythm like an old blues riff.
I'd forgotten about that. I'd forgotten the wind.
In Nightside City, the wind isn't that bad. It's always there, and it can eat at your nerves and snatch at your clothes and carry things away if you don't hold them down, but it's not that bad. Generally speaking, top speed is maybe sixty, seventy kilometers an hour.
But that's because the city's in a crater, and the crater walls block the real winds. The lowest wind speed ever recorded on the surface of Epimetheus, excluding craters and the four poles, is a hundred kilometers per hour. It peaks at a hundred and fifty.
And it never stops. Never. Never lets up at all.
It's because of the slow rotation and the generally smooth surface. With the mantle still semiliquid, or at least pretty soft, and the continental plates as small as they are, Epimetheus doesn't have a lot of big mountains; they sink back in or get eroded away almost as fast as they form. The only reason the city's crater is stable is that it's smack in the middle for a plate, where it's balanced and doesn't tip. Whatever made the crater wasn't going fast enough to punch right through the crust. It's a fluke. It's a temporary fluke, too, because the wall is wearing away-but that takes time. It'll happen, though. All the active wind and water and even the steady spray of celestial debris help keep the surface level, wearing away any mountains or craters that do form.
Anyway, ignoring the flukes, most of the planet's smooth and flat, with nothing to stop the wind.
As for how the winds got started, that's where the slow rotation comes in. At the noon pole, which is over an ocean and has been for as long as humans have been on the planet, the sun heats the air, and it rises, carrying water vapor, and it blows away nightward at high altitude. The air cools along the way and drops the water as rain in the rainbelt, starting about two hundred kilometers past the terminator onto the nightside. At the midnight pole all that cool air drops down to the slushcap and blows back day-ward along the ground, back toward the noon pole.
It's one huge convection current, that's all. One great big convection current that covers the entire planet. And in the millions of years since the planet's rotation slowed enough for there to be a noon pole and a midnight pole, it's worked up to be a pretty good speed.
What this really means is that the entire atmosphere of Epimetheus is one big windstorm, one that's been going on for millions of years and will go on for millions more.
That added a nice little final touch to my position; I had to walk a thousand kilometers or more head-on into that wind, that hundred-kilometer-an-hour wind.
But I didn't have any choice, so I took a look around the cab, picked up the discarded gag, decided there wasn't anything else of any possible use, and then I slid out the door onto the hard gray sand and I started walking into that wind, head down, jacket pulled up around my neck, with the sun hot on my back and the skin on my hands already red with sunburn, almost starting to blister. I wrapped the gag, which was a strip of porous fabric I couldn't identify, across my mouth to make breathing easier.
The wind almost lifted me from the ground with every step; it was a constant pressure fighting me. I turned first one shoulder forward, then the other, to cut into the wind, and that helped a little. If I stopped moving and stayed upright, I knew it would blow me back east like an empty wrapper down an alley, probably at twice the speed I made by walking.
I wished I was heavier, but I wasn't, and I wasn't going to get any heavier.
About a kilometer from the cab my grip on the gag slipped, and the wind snatched the cloth away and sent it sailing eastward. I turned for a second to watch it go, but I never considered trying to retrieve it; it was moving faster than I ever could, and in the wrong direction.
I turned westward again and marched on, making do without it.
At least I always knew which way to go; face to the wind, walking up my own shadow, away from the sun.
That shadow-that was something of a new experience, too, having a shadow stretched out before me, that moved when I moved, but that always kept the same shape. I'd seen plenty of shadows and cast my share, but when I walked in front of a light in the city my shadow would shorten, then lengthen, as I walked past. Eta Cass B cast shadows, of course, but they were faint things, just darker patches in the red darkness of the city streets. Eta Cass A wasn't so gentle; that shadow before me was hard-edged and sharp, black against the glowing sands.