He found himself staring into an unmoving blood-red eye not quite the size of a dinner plate. A vicious little inkblot of a pupil swam in its center.
He was too shocked to faint. But he was frozen speechless to the spot. Cold had nothing to do with it.
The horrible moaning came again, faster now, excited. The eye moved. Something hit the door like a two-ton truck. The hinges bent in alarmingly and he stumbled backward a few steps. A triangular pattern appeared in the tough glassite.
Dimly he heard someone screaming. It might have been Colette, it might have been Walther. Or maybe both. He was hit from the side and shoved out of the way. September. The big man had a look through the bent door at whatever was outside and it made even him flinch away. He shoved the beamer through the gap, pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The door was struck again and September was jolted back, cursing at the startling rate of three curses per step. They’d been carefully hoarding a dead beamer.
A loud, nervous rasping came from both sides of the dangerously bent door, a monstrous scratching and pawing. The door took another blow. This time the top, hinge snapped off like plastic and the upper half of the metal was folded inward. Ethan was lying on his back and had a fine view through the new opening.
What he saw was a big rectangular head. Two horrible red eyes, like wild lanterns, stared straight at him. A mouth not quite as big as an earth-mover filled with what looked like a couple of thousand long, needle-like teeth gaped open. The teeth grew in all directions, like a jumble of jackstraws.
It either saw him or scented him. The huge skull plunged downward. It pushed, and jammed halfway into the fresh opening. He could have reached up and touched one of those gnarled fangs. It was close enough for him to smell its breath—cloves and old lemon.
Metal groaned in protest as the thing twisted and pushed against the doubled door like a starving dog, moaning wantonly. Off to one side he saw September edging right up next to the door. He jumped across, threw something in the monster’s searchlight eyes, and ducked just as the steam-shovel head snapped at him. The teeth clashed like a gong just above flying white hair.
It blinked, and there was the most awful bellowing scream imaginable. The head disappeared with astounding speed. As it thrashed about in the ruined hull it shook the entire boat. Ethan was hard-pressed to keep from being tumbled into the fire.
Then, all at once, it was quiet again.
September was trying to force the strained door back into place. The weakened bracing gave a little, but a gaping hole remained. He picked up a large chunk of torn couch padding and stuffed it into the gap, jamming it down into the cracks on either side. It stayed.
“Somebody open some coffee. None of us are going back to sleep right away anyhow, I think.” September shoved a great fist down into the padding. “I could use a mug. Woe that it’s but the juice of the brown bean and not something stronger.”
“Lord!” panted Williams. It was the first time Ethan had seen the schoolteacher excited about anything. But only a robot could sit through what they’d just experienced without missing a heartbeat or two. “What was it?”
Surprisingly, Ethan found himself answering, after the first choke on his coffee.
“The section on fauna comes back to me now. That was a nocturnal carnivore. The natives consider it quite dangerous…”
“Do tell,” commented September. He was still wrestling with the padding and the door. “No single critter has a right to that many teeth… Damn this wind!”
“It’s called a Droom,” Ethan added, turning. Then he noticed that Colette was still sitting close to her father… and damned if she wasn’t shivering a little. She looked frightened, too. Of course she would be—anyone would be—but it was so unlike her.
She noticed his gaze. Defiantly, she sat straight and let the old man’s arms slip away. He didn’t protest. She tried to turn that overwhelming glare on him but it wasn’t there this time, and she looked away awkwardly.
“I suppose you think I was frightened of that thing.”
“Well, that’s okay,” began Ethan. “Nothing to be ash—”
“Well I wasn’t!” she shouted. Then she grew quiet again. “It’s just… I’m not afraid of anything real, anything tangible. But since I was small, I’ve… I’ve always been afraid of the dark.”
“It’s her mother, you see—” du Kane started to explain, but she cut him off.
“Be quiet, father… and get some sleep. I’ve got thinking to do.”
Ethan rolled over and stared at a place on the floor that sent the firelight back into his eyes. He thought, too.
The wind had dropped some but still blew steadily from the west. The sun had been up for a couple of hours already, though Ethan thought anything that put out so little decent heat unworthy of the name. He took his own good time getting up. After all, there was no great hurry. His first appointment wasn’t for half a day, yet.
In an attempt to conserve their rapidly dwindling supply of wood, the fire had been allowed to pass on to wherever it is dead fires go. Williams was industriously arranging twigs, needles, and dried lichen-substitute for the evening blaze. The du Kanes were devouring a breakfast of hot cereal without either making a demand for eggs Benedict. Colette, he noticed, was apparently on her third helping. He sighed for lost dreams.
He got off his elbows, sat up, and trapped knees to chest.
“Morning, schoolteacher. Where’s our beastmaster?”
“Gone outside again. His tolerance for this weather is absolutely amazing, don’t you think?” He reached across the ready pyre, tossed a cylindrical package back at Ethan. “He told me he doesn’t sleep much. Wastes time.”
“Huh.” Ethan grunted, started to tear at the top of the package. At the last moment he noticed that the red arrow on its side was pointing down. Hastily he reversed the container. Sighing at his own clumsiness, he gripped the tab again and tugged.
Off came the top, activating the tiny heating element in the packaging. Sixty seconds later he was sipping the hot soup he’d almost dumped into his lap.
After finishing most of the pack, he stood up. Either he was adapting to the temperature or his nerve endings had become so numb that he was divorced now from such mundane concerns as knowing when he was frozen.
Why, it was a perfectly lovely day! Couldn’t be more than, oh, fourteen or fifteen below.
He downed another swallow of the soup, which was already barely lukewarm.
“I’m going out,” he announced to no one in particular, “for a breath of fresh air. It’s getting positively tropic in here.”
“If that’s an attempt at humor,” Colette began, pausing with spoon in mid-flight, “I never…”
But Ethan was already dogging the crumpled door shut behind him.
He flipped down his snow goggles and peered along the center aisle of the boat. He found September examining the edges of the big gap on the port side of the vessel. It was indeed larger than it had been yesterday.
Wishing he could shrink himself and go swimming in the cup of soup, he strolled over. The self-heating liquid was struggling manfully. But it was badly overmatched in this super-arctic climate. He gulped down the last.
“Good morn, Skua.” He had to move closer and repeat himself before the other looked over at him.
“Hmmm? Oh, I suppose it is, since we’re all still about to see it, young feller-me-lad. What do you think of that, eh?” He stepped away from the wall and pointed.
Ethan didn’t have to look closely, nor ask for explanation, to see what his companion was studying. The wind hadn’t made those deep, curved gouges in the duralloy. There were six of them, spaced in groups of three. Others were visible high up on the plating.