“I saw it!” Lara had finally halted, maybe fifty paces from the grid patch. “Ben, it ran right past me on an angle and merged into the green around the edge of the grid. Where the blue met the green I saw a kind of rainbow burst of light. Could you see it from where you are?”
“I saw nothing. Lara, back up and return to the Savior. At once. That’s an order!”
But Ben was not following his own instruction. He was still moving toward Lara. Under Hans’s control, the Savior crept after him.
Lara laughed. “Ben, you are overreacting. You must be receiving the readings from my suit. You can see for yourself, everything is nominal and there’s nothing to worry about.”
“That’s not your decision to make. Lara, if you don’t go back to the ship at once you’ll be in big trouble.”
“All right, Ben, I’m on my way.” Lara’s suit faceplate reflected light from the Savior as she turned. “But you are making a big deal out of nothing. We are here to explore, not to ignore anything interesting that we see.”
She was moving toward the ship, but the range-rate reading told Hans that she was in no hurry. At her speed it would take minutes to reach the Savior. Hans’s fingers itched to hit the sequence that would boost them to orbit at maximum acceleration.
He resisted the temptation, leaned back, and concentrated on the banks of readings from both Lara’s suit and the ship’s all-around sensors. As she said, everything in her immediate vicinity registered no change. However, that wasn’t true of the edge of the grid point area a hundred meters beyond her. Instead of its previous absurdly low temperature of 1.2 kelvins, one spot now failed to report any temperature reading at all. That was impossible. When energy was delivered to a place—and even the blue dust devils must contain some energy—the temperature at that point had to rise. It could not possibly go down.
Hans felt his skin crawl. “Ben, Lara. I’m seeing surface changes near the edge of the grid patch. Get back to the ship—now.”
Even as he spoke he realized his mistake. If anything could keep Ben Blesh outside, it would be a direct order to return from Hans Rebka.
Predictably, Ben said at once, “The responsibility for bringing us in is mine, Rebka, not yours. Lara, if you don’t get a move on, I’ll come and drag you back.”
Hans saw another gleam of light. It was the reflection from Lara’s faceplate. Instead of answering, she had turned her head to look behind her. She said, “This is crazy. Captain Rebka, you’re seeing things. I’m a lot closer to the grid than anyone else, and I notice no change there at all.”
While she was still speaking, one of the displays of the Savior lit so brightly that it cast a flickering blue shadow onto the controls at Hans’s fingertips. He looked, in time to see another line of fire, bigger and brighter than the first two, racing like a blue fuse across the surface. It rippled well wide of the Savior, cleared Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner, and ran on to the edge of the gridded area. Hans saw a flare of light and a semicircular arc of rainbow colors standing up from the dark plain of Iceworld.
This time the flash was so bright that neither Lara nor Ben could miss it. Lara gasped and stood rooted, at the same time as Ben began to move.
“Not that way!” Hans could hardly believe his eyes. Ben was heading toward Lara—away from the Savior—into possible danger. Hans’s survival instincts told him to boost the ship away from the surface at once, but he continued to follow Ben.
Ben shouted, “Lara! MOVE!”
It had the right effect. She jerked into motion, starting to run across the smooth plane of the surface. As Hans had predicted, real running in such a low gravity field was impossible. Lara strained toward the ship with the agonized slow-motion action of a woman fleeing in a nightmare.
Behind her, the place where the last dust devil had met the edge of the grid had come alive. A set of concentric hemispheres of blue light grew, reached a size of a few meters, and vanished. At the same time, a layer of dense blue mist emerged from the same center and rolled toward Lara.
The fog did not show on the range-rate sensor, but Hans did not need any help to compare speeds. Unless Lara could move faster there was no way that she could reach the Savior before the fog lapped around her feet and calves. Ben was in a different situation. He could turn around and make the ship before the layer of mist reached him—if only he had the sense to act immediately.
He didn’t turn. Worse than that, Hans realized that Ben was still moving toward Lara. The man was crazy. What was he hoping to do, grab hold of the blue fog and wrestle it away from her?
Ben’s hopes and intentions did not matter. He was fifty paces from Lara when the mist reached her and rippled around her lower legs.
She at once stopped running. Hans heard a gasp, a startled scream, and then nothing.
“Lara!” He, Darya, and Ben were shouting in unison.
She did not answer. She stood for a few seconds, motionless. And then Lara was screaming again, and she was shrinking. She did not move, she did not topple, she did not sway. She simply sank into the blue surface layer, slowly and steadily. To Ben, limited to the quality of image provided by his suit, it must seem as though Lara drifted down to and through the surface of Iceworld.
Hans, employing the superior sensors of the Savior, knew better. As the different sections of Lara’s body came to within a few centimeters of the glowing layer of blue, they fractured and fragmented and turned to powder. As that happened, the sensors showed her body dropping in temperature. She was ice—she was as cold as liquid air—she was liquid helium, just a few kelvins above absolute zero. Finally, the instruments could not provide values.
Lara’s disintegration formed a hypnotic sight, but the warning of a different danger forced Hans into action. The layer of blue mist had paused when it reached Lara. Now it was moving again, sweeping toward the Savior. Long before it got there it would meet Ben, who stood as silent and motionless as if the tide of blue had already drained him of life and heat.
“Ben! Into the ship.”
Ten quick steps would do it, then they could head up and away to safety. Ben was moving now, but he was like a zombie. Long before he reached the Savior, the fog would roll up to and over him. Already it was no more than thirty meters away, and what had at first been a gentle ripple forward now seemed like an irresistible advance.
Certain death for Ben and escape for Hans and Darya? Or possible death by impact for Ben and an uncertain fate for Hans and Darya? There was no time to work out the odds, but Hans refused to lose another crew member.
“Sit tight.”
That was for Darya, inexplicably trying to stand up from the seat next to him. Hans hit the controls and boosted the Savior—not away to the safety of orbit, but straight forward. The ship accelerated at four gees and scooped Ben Blesh into the maw of the airlock’s open outer door. The clang as his body hit the back of the lock sounded through the whole ship.
What Hans would have liked now was an instant switch from forward motion to upward motion, but the ship’s inertia and the laws of dynamics did not permit that. Although he could alter the direction of thrust in a fraction of a second, until that change took effect the Savior continued to move forward. Forward, toward the edge of the grid point. Forward, toward the deadly blue mist that had crumbled Lara to dust and swallowed her body, and forward toward the pulsing spheres of blue light beyond.