You could either keep driving, if you knew your trail, and hope you'd come out on the other side or find a landmark, or you just stopped and waited it out. The sensible thing to do, this far from any villages, would have been to bed the dogs down and wait it out, but the geologists had brought a lot of equipment and only allowed space for as much food as they felt they would need on the strict timetable they had set for themselves.
Lavelle told the company men, "We said, 'You better stop here until we can see something' but they said, 'Aw, no, we'll just be usin' our instruments.' Only problem was, their instruments broke 'cause of the cold."
The company men insisted that the instruments had been made for this climate and that it was impossible that they would break, and Lavelle had just shrugged. Thereafter she didn't know much except that the sleds had gotten separated, and the other three had been lost, drivers, dogs, geologists, equipment, food, and all. She had been driving the sled with the boy in it, so she had had room for a few more supplies. Brit had been driving the sled with the father, with Siggy running between them to keep them connected, as he had tried to do with the other sleds before they got lost back up to Moose Lake. Maybe they hit a thin patch of ice. Then, as they were coming down a pretty steep slope, the sleds overturned and both passengers were thrown out of the sleds, to roll down the hill and vanish.
"Didn't you think it was a little strange, them just vanishing like that?"
"No. What I thought was strange was that they couldn't find us. We were hollering like everything and the dogs were barking. Brit wanted to start searching, thinking maybe they were knocked unconscious, and we did look around where they should have logically been. But when we didn't find any holes or anything, Siggy said the safest thing to do for everybody was stay put, light a fire, keep warm, and make noises all the time while the whiteout lasted."
'Trying to save your own skins, huh?" asked Colonel Giancarlo, the one who had sent Charlie away.
"No, no," said a younger captain with a handsome weather-beaten face and a much pleasanter manner. "Very understandable," he said soothingly to Lavelle, who had started to bristle. "What happened then?"
Lavelle looked straight at the colonel and said, "Then the weather cleared a little and Dinah kept whimpering, so I unhitched her. She run off and pretty soon we heard her howling; then she came trotting back with the boy. He said she dug through a drift to get him but his father was hurt and could we come and help him pull his father out. He got trapped in sort of a little avalanche, but fortunately, there was a cave in the side of the hill where he was trapped. They made it to the cave, but the snow blew back against the entrance again and it was real dark. The boy said he knew we wouldn't find them there but it was shelter and he'd been afraid to leave for help for fear he wouldn't find him again. He'd called out but we didn't hear each other for the wind."
"You didn't even try to find the others?" Giancarlo snorted contemptuously.
Lavelle had started yelling then, a rare event for the gentle and mild-mannered woman. "We didn't even know where the heck we were, mister! If Odark hadn't found us, I don't know if we'd have any of us made it back alive. Siggy couldn't even walk by then, and Brit and I would never have been able to dig the father out without the dogs helping us."
All the while the conversation was going on the boy, Diego, stood out there in the cold listening to them natter on, his face closed except for the occasions when something said or done seemed to make him angry; then his dark eyes would glow like fresh-stoked embers in the snow-burned red rawness of his face.
Bunny didn't know what to make of any of it, except that she was tired of acting just smart enough to drive her snocle, but dumb enough and friendly enough so that the big shots would keep talking in front of her, continuing their interrogation as she drove them to the ill-defined area where the party had been discovered. Terce was carrying on as if he had already become part of the inquisition, and the company men didn't make a move without consulting him.
It took two days on the snocles, driving them out to where the hunting party had run across the survivors, and then, with the recent snowfall in these parts and the wind blowing drifts everywhere, they could only approximate the location. Bunny shivered. She was out of the wind here in the snocle, and the sky was clear, but outside the wind picked up veils of snow and flung them across the landscape. Behind her, the trail was already drifted over in places. The company men had sent Terce back to make camp at the halfway point with Odark and Brit. Lavelle and the boy had remained behind to "assist with inquiries," and try to help them determine what had become of the other team members.
Bunny opened the door and climbed out of the snocle, trudging over to where the men stood arguing. Diego's adrenaline seemed to have run out while the company men wrangled around him. He had been radiating tension and at times anger at the interrogation, but now he slumped against Lavelle, who put her arm around him. He looked exhausted. He really shouldn't have been out here again so soon, but his father couldn't be moved. Siggy definitely had to rest and look after his frostbite, or gangrene might get the rest of his foot. Clodagh had given him some stuff, but the company men had taken him back to SpaceBase and "accommodated" him in a separate room from the crazy man, Diego's father, until he could be moved with the others to "another facility." Bunny didn't know what that meant, but she didn't like the sound of it.
"Excuse me, folks," she said to the party, "but we better make tracks while it's daylight."
"I say when we move," Giancarlo told her. "You do realize, lady, that if I decide to, I can see to it that your license is revoked?"
"Oh, yes, sir. I know what an important man you are-how important all you people are. And that's why I'm telling you. If we don't get going now, I might lose my snocle instead of just my license, or another hunting party might have to find us. Our weather here, sir, as you may have noticed, is tricky. It has lots of-uh, different things-"
"Variables?" the captain suggested helpfully.
"Yeah. Those. Lots of variables. And right now a bad storm's making. Also, sir, that lad looks to me as if he's all done in."
"She has a point, Colonel," the captain said. "Maybe we should make for camp now that we've seen the approximate site and come back better equipped when the weather clears."
The colonel glared but waved his mitten toward the snocle.
Diego Metaxos sat by himself in the corner of the shelter while the soldiers cross-questioned Lavelle. He wished they would let her alone. She had tried to help them-in fact, he thought, she had helped him a lot. And she could help him more, if only the interrogators would go away so he could talk to her.
Dad's delirious ravings seemed incredible to those men, and Diego knew they hadn't really believed him either when he had tried to tell them about the cavern, even though he was obviously unhurt. In a way he didn't blame them. Now the whole thing seemed like a dream to him-or it would have, except that his father had emerged from the same time and place looking as if he were still trapped in a nightmare.
Diego wasn't sure exactly what he and his father had gone through. All he knew was that their experience of that time in the cave had to have been wildly different for Dad than it had been for him, because while he felt fine, something awful had happened to Dad in there. Even after the icicles had melted from his hair, it remained white, and his face was drawn and sunken, like a skull's, the skin dried and far more wrinkled than it had been. The worst part was that except for the initial babblings, he wasn't responding too much of anything, just staring straight ahead, as if he couldn't see at all. The doctors said he was in some kind of severe shock, but how could that be? He and Diego had been together, and whatever it was Diego had experienced, it hadn't been anything to produce such an effect-at least not in him.