As she stood up, still unsteady on her feet, the ground a couple of meters from her began to boil and seethe. She backed away. A dark bubble was pushing its way out of the quaking earth. It grew steadily until it reared to twice Darya’s height, then suddenly burst and vanished. Left behind where the bubble had emerged from the ground lay two still forms.
As Darya stepped cautiously toward them, one sat up. It said, “Stone me. I wouldn’t call that first-class travel. But I guess we weren’t promised anything more than a transit. Ben? Are you all right?”
It was Hans Rebka, shuffling on hands and knees across to the other suited figure.
Ben Blesh said, like someone in a dream, “I don’t seem to be dead. That’s a surprise. But I can’t sit up, and I can’t move my arms.”
“Let me take a look.” Hans turned to Darya, as casual as if this sort of thing happened every day. “Give me a hand, would you?”
Darya moved behind Ben as Hans lifted him, and held him in a sitting position. “Where are we, Hans?”
“Lord knows. I wonder if we’re even in the same universe as we were. First things first, though. According to my suit’s sensors, wherever we are, it has breathable air. That’s good. We can remove our suits.”
“Wouldn’t it be safer to keep them on?”
“For you and me, it might. But Ben’s has to come off.”
“Why me?” Ben was trying, and failing, to sit up without assistance. “I thought my suit was feeding me painkillers.”
“It was. It is. That’s part of the problem. The pain that we felt during the transit was all psychological, but your suit didn’t know that. It decided you were being injured worse and worse every minute, so it upped the dosage of analgesics to blot out your discomfort. That’s why you can’t move. You’ve been overdosed. Sit still. I have to get you out of there and reset the levels.”
As Hans eased Ben out of his suit, Darya knew that she could do little to help. Hans was an expert troubleshooter. She was at best an expert trouble-finder. He had opened their visors. She did the same and took her first breath of alien air. It was hot, humid, and musky.
She stared about her. Guardian of Travel, by accident or design, had dumped them out halfway down a long, smooth incline. At the bottom, a couple of kilometers away, she thought she saw the glint of water. On the other side of the river, if that’s what it was, the ground rose away to another hillside. More significant, perhaps, was another feature. Running alongside and beyond the water, straight and flat, a smooth gray ribbon suggested a stone or gravel road.
Darya swiveled her open faceplate to a position where she could read its built-in sensors. No radio signals registered on any frequency. The instruments showed eighty-five percent of a standard gravity and a slightly richer fraction of oxygen. Those accounted for the light and slightly light-headed feeling. Above her head, a greenish-yellow light filtered through continuous cloud cover. It was much stronger far off to one side. Either they had arrived not long after dawn, or soon it would be night.
She said to Hans, “Anything I can do to help?” And, when he shook his head, “Then I think I’ll walk a little way down the hill. Seems like there might be a road at the bottom. It would be nice to meet something we can learn to talk to, and find out where we are.”
“Don’t hold your breath. Not the best way of putting it, considering what we’ve just been through. But do you notice something odd about this place?”
“Hans, everything is odd.”
“All right, then, something here is odder than any place has a right to be. You’ve visited a bunch of different planets. Did you ever hear of one with plant life, and no animals?”
“Never.”
“Look around you. Not a beetle, not a bird, not a bat, not a butterfly. No little critters wriggling through the undergrowth, to escape or take a closer look at us. Where are they?”
“Maybe we’re in the wrong location for animals.”
“Could be. But this sure feels like it ought to be the right location. Warmth, water, soil, plenty of light, lots of plants—what more could an animal ask?” Hans bent again over Ben, who was now unconscious. “Damn these over-eager suits. They’re marvels compared with anything I ever saw before, but they do too good a job making sure the person inside doesn’t feel uncomfortable. I’ve got to get him out or he may never wake up. You go ahead. Take a look around. Maybe you can figure out where the animals went.”
Until Hans started talking about animals, Darya had been feeling quite good about things. Against all odds the three of them had escaped from the deadly surface and desolate center of Iceworld. They were on a planet comfortably able to support life, and the road by the river was evidence that it also supported intelligence.
Hans must be wrong. A planet didn’t need to have animals on the surface. A thriving biosphere could be maintained very well by creatures that lived below ground, feeding on the roots of plants that grew in the warmth and light above.
She was walking over a layer of sturdy greenery that crackled slightly with each step. Every forty or fifty meters a dense clump of a different growth sprang up much taller, some reaching as high as Darya’s head. She changed her path toward the water so that she could approach one of them. She closed her faceplate as she came closer. It was unlikely that she would run into anything dangerous, but there was no point in taking risks, Anything that could chew a way in through the ultra-tough material of her suit, with its instant sealing compounds and multi-layered structure, would more than earn a meal.
The growths had the shape of irregular cones with truncated tops. A green layer of overlapping scales, each about as big as Darya’s hand, formed the outer layer. She pushed one out of the way to examine the interior. It was too dark to make out details until she used the headlight on her suit. She peered in, flinched, and took a step backward. The green scale fell into its original position to cover the opening.
Darya stood frozen for a second or two, then realized that she must take another look. Maybe Hans’s words had made her imagine things that weren’t there. This time she moved the green scale aside and held the light steady. The cone-growth had a yellow axis running up its middle. Five multi-legged objects hung suspended there. Darya thought at first that they were living creatures, and she hesitated to touch one; but they did not move. Finally she found the nerve to reach out her gloved hand and pluck one away from the plant’s central bole.
It was dark brown and about the length of her forearm. And it was dead. Not just dead but mummified, so it appeared almost as it must have been in life. She turned it. Two big compound eyes sat on either side of a fanged maw. They seemed to stare accusingly at Darya.
So Hans was wrong. There were animals. She did not find comfort in that fact. She slipped the little creature into an outside pocket of her suit and continued downhill toward the stream.
The water was clear and swift-flowing over a bed of gravel and fist-sized rocks. Darya looked closely, but saw nothing living. The water moved, and that was all. She waded carefully across and kept stepping forward until she came to the gray strip.
It was a road, no doubt about that, and it had been kept in good condition. A pile of stone by the roadside about two hundred meters away was an obvious source of materials for regular maintenance.
Where did the road lead?
Darya stared to her left, then to her right. She saw no sign of buildings, but maybe a kilometer away some dark object stood on the road itself.
She turned on her suit radio. “Hans?”
“I hear you.”