“I can do it, though,” Saxtorph decided. He pointed at the screen. “See, a reasonably clear area about 500 meters off.”
Laurinda nodded. With the boat falling free again, the white hair rippled around her delicate features, Saxtorph applied retrothrust. For thrumming minutes he backed toward his goal. Sweat studded his face and darkened his tunic under the arms. Smell like a billy goat, I do, he thought fleetingly. When we come home, I'm going to spend a week in a Japanese hot bath. Dorcas can bring me sushi. She prefers showers, cold— He gave himself entirely back to his work. Contact shivered. The deck tilted. Saxtorph adjusted the jacks to level Shep. When he cut the engine, silence fell like a thunderclap. He drew a long breath, unharnessed, and rose. “I can suit up faster if you help me,” he told the Crashlander.
“Of course,” she replied. “Not that I have much experience.” Never mind modesty. It had been impossible to maintain without occasional failures, by four people crammed inside this little hull. Laurinda had blushed all over, charmingly, when she happened to emerge from the shower cubicle as Saxtorph and Ryan came by. The quartermaster had only a pair of shorts on, which didn't hide the gallant reflex. Yet nobody ever did or said anything improper, and the girl overcame her shyness. Now a part of Saxtorph enjoyed the touch of her spidery fingers, but most of him stayed focused on the business at hand.
“Forgive me for repeating what you've heard a dozen times,” he said. “You are new to this kind of IRON situation, and could forget the necessity of abiding by orders. Your job is to bring this boat back to Dorcas and Kam. That's it. Nothing else whatsoever. When I tell you to, you throw the main switch, and the program we've put in the autopilot will take over. I'd've automated that bit also, except rigging it would've taken time we can ill afford, and anyway, we do want some flexibility, some judgment in the control loop.” Sternly: “If anything goes wrong for me, or you think anything has, whether or not I've called in, you go. The three of you must have Shep. The tug is fast but clumsy, impossible to make planetfall with, and only barely provisioned. Your duty is to Shep. Understood?”
“Yes,” she said mutedly, her gaze on the task she was doing. “Besides, we have to have the boat to rescue Juan and Carita.”
A sigh wrenched from Saxtorph. “I told you—” After Dorcas' flight, too few energy boxes remained to lift either of them into orbit. Shep could hover on her drive at low altitude while they flitted up, but she wasn't built for planetary rescue work, the thrusters weren't heavily enough shielded externally, at such a boost their radiation would be lethal. Neither meek nor defiant, Laurinda replied, “I know. But after we've taken Rover to the right distance, why can't she wait, ready to flee, till the boat comes back from Prima?”
“Because the boat never would.”
“The kzinti can land safely.”
“More or less safely. They don't like to, remember. Sure, I can tell you how they do it. Obvious. They put detachable footpads on their jacks. The stickum may or may not be able to grab hold of, say, fluorosilicone, but if it does, it'll take a while to cut its way through. When the boat's ready to leave, she sheds those footpads.”
“Of course. I've been racking my brain to comprehend why we can't do the same for Shep.”
The pain in her voice and in himself brought anger into his. “God damn it, we're spacers, not sorcerers! Groundsiders think a spacecraft is a hunk of metal you can cobble anything onto, like a car. She isn't. She's about as complex and interconnected as your body is. A few milligrams of blood clot or of the wrong chemical will bring your body to a permanent halt. A spacecraft's equally vulnerable. I am not going to tinker with ours, light-years from any proper workshop. I am not. That's final!” Her face bent downward from his. He beard her breath quiver. “I'm sorry, dear,” he added, softly once more. “I'm sorrier than you believe, maybe sorrier than you can imagine. Those are my crewfolk down and doomed. Oh, if we had time to plan and experiment and carefully test, sure, I'd try it. What should the footpads be made of? What size? How closely machined? How — detached-explosive bolts, maybe? We'd have to wire those and — Laurinda, we won't have the time. If I lift Rover off within the next hour or two, we can pick up Dorcas and Kam, boost, and fly dark. If we're lucky, the kzin warboats won't detect us. But our margin is razor thin. We don't have the days or weeks your idea needs. Fido's people don't either; their own time has gotten short. I'm sorry, dear.”
She looked up. He saw tears in the ruby eyes, down the snowy cheeks. But she spoke still more quietly than he, with the briefest of little smiles. “No harm in asking, was there? I understand. You've told me what I was trying to deny I knew. You are a good man, Robert.”
“Aw,” he mumbled, and reached to rumple her hair.
The suiting completed, he took her hands between his gloves for a moment, secured a toolpack between his shoulders where the drive unit usually was, and cycled out.
The land gloomed silent around him. Nearing the horizon, the red sun looked bigger than it was. So did the planet, low to the southeast, waxing close to half phase. He could make out a dust storm as a deeper-brown blot on the fulvous crescent. Away from either luminous body, stars were visible-and yonder brilliancy must be Quarta. How joyously they had sailed past it.
Saxtorph started for his ship, in long low-gravity bounds. He didn't want to fly. The kzinti might have planted a boobytrap, such as an automatic gun that would lock on, track, and fire if you didn't radio the password. Afoot, he was less of a target.
The ground lightened as he advanced, for the yellow dust lay thicker. No, he saw, it was not actually dust in the sense of small solid particles, but more like spatters or films of liquid. Evidently it didn't cling to things, like that horrible stuff on Prima. A ghostly rain from space, it would slip from higher to lower places; in the course of gigayears, even cosmic rays would give some slight stirring to help it along downhill. It might be fairly deep near the ship, where its surface was like a blot. He'd better approach with care. Maybe it would prove necessary to fetch a drive unit and flit across.
Saxtorph's feet went out from under him. He fell slowly, landed on his butt. With an oath he started to get up. His soles wouldn't grip, his hands skidded on slickness. He sprawled over onto his back. And he was gliding down the slope of the valley floor, gliding down toward the amber-colored blot.
He flailed, kicked up dust, but couldn't stop. The damned ground had no friction, none. He passed a boulder and managed to throw an arm around. For an instant he was checked, then it rolled and began to descend with him.
“Laurinda! I have a problem,” he managed to say into his radio. “Sit tight. Watch close. If this turns out to be serious, obey your orders.” He reached the blot. It gave way. He sank into its depths.
He had hoped it was a layer of just a few centimeters, but it closed over his head and still he sank. A pit where the stuff had collected from the heights maybe the kzinti, taking due care, had dumped some extra in, gathered across a wide area — yes, this was very likely their boobytrap, and if they had ghosts, Hraou-Captain's must be yowling laughter. Odd how that name came back to him as he tumbled.
Bottom. He lay in blindness, fighting to curb his breath and heartbeat. How far down? Three meters, four? Enough to bury him for the next several billion years, unless— “Hello, Shep. Laurinda, do you read me? Do you read me?”
His earphones hummed. The wavelength he was using should have expanded its front from the top of the pit, but the material around him must be screening it. Silence outside his suit was as thick as the blackness. Let's see if he could climb out. The side wasn't vertical. The stuff resisted his movements less than water would. He felt arms and legs scrabble to no avail. He could feel irregularities in the stone but he could not get a purchase on any. Well, could he swim? He tried. No. He couldn't rise off the bottom. Too high a mean density compared to the medium; and it didn't allow him even as much traction as water, it yielded to every motion, he might as well have tried to swim in air.