I could hear a throbbing sound.
The snow wasn’t soft, for some reason. I put out my hand and swept some of it away and felt rock underneath. I suppose it hadn’t been snowing for long: there was no retrograde amnesia that I could detect, and I remembered there’d been only a light haze when I’d jettisoned the canopy and ejected; the weather had been coming in from the south-east and I’d flown into it just before leaving the aircraft.
The throbbing was duplicated and I listened to it. Sometimes it went right out of synch and I didn’t understand.
Time.
I moved enough to look around and that meant holding my breath again and then respirating slow and deep, slow and deep, drawing in enough oxygen to stay conscious. I could see the crags now, outlines by the snow, jutting against the white background in a faint pattern of shadows, rising above and behind me.
Time. You’ve been -
Moved again and sat up and waited till the worst of it died away. I didn’t know how long it took. The throbbing was much louder and I listened to it and got the message and turned my wrist: 01:17.
Total memory came back like shoving a cassette in the slot and I started moving again and much faster now. There wasn’t any data for the periods of unconsciousness but that didn’t matter: what mattered was whether they’d had time to put these helicopters into the air since the explosion.
They were quite loud now and the last thing I remember thinking about consciously was the time factor: they’d had something like thirty-five minutes from the moment when I’d ejected to the precise present and that was ample to get these things airborne. The logical thought process stopped just here because the snow was still light and they could move very slowly within a few feet of the ground and they’d see that bloody parachute if I didn’t do something about it very fast. I didn’t think I’d broken anything but the left side was heavily bruised from hip to shoulder and when I got up I just fell down again and had to lie there dragging a lot of breath in before I could crawl along the lines towards the canopy.
The light kept going on and off and the sound of the helicopters faded in and out because I suppose I was partially blacked out by the pain but the head was clear enough and I knew Slingshot was going to blow if I didn’t get that spread of silk under some sort of cover: they were probably looking for the plane but they might conceivably have seen me eject on their radar screens and it’s much easier to see a parachute if you’re looking for one.
Their noise was heavy in the sky. Under me the rocks were slippery:
the pressure of my hands and knees compacted the snow into ice and I couldn’t make any headway until I learned to keep the pressure directly downward as I went on crawling with the lines on my right side; that was the side where the rocks sloped away to the edge of a shelf and I didn’t know how big the drop was. Any drop would be too big if I went over because there wasn’t time to flake out and start all over again when I came to: by the closeness of their sound I didn’t need to know how many seconds I’d got left to do this job; I knew it had to be done in the fastest time the organism could manage.
The snow slipped under my hands. Even though I tried to keep the pressure downward the snow slipped sometimes and my head swung and the light flickered again and the noise softened away. The primitive brain was moving its creature along and there was no need to do anything about that: it was pushing me at a speed that was just this side of losing consciousness; but the term consciousness was relative because I wasn’t capable of working anything out: there must have been choices and alternatives for me but I didn’t think of any; I just kept crawling through the haze and over the ice towards the indeterminate point in the distance where I could start pulling at the canopy.
Think.
I can’t think. Haze, rocks, the fall of the soft flakes, the enormous drumming in the sky. Those are my thoughts.
But there were vague periods of cerebration when the pain seemed less:
perhaps I ought to be crawling away from the canopy instead of towards it because they were going to see it at any second, now and then they’d see me too. If I turned round and moved in the other direction I could find a cleft in the rocks, some kind of shelter.
Think snow.
Yes, it’s snowing. And they’re coming.
The whole sky thundered with them now and my skull was filled with the noise and I stopped crawling and looked upward and saw one of them, a darkness moving through the whiteness not far above the rocks ahead of me where the parachute canopy was lying. I kneeled there swaying as the air came in sudden gusts, whirling the snow against me and past me in a small blizzard, blinding me.
Think camouflage.
Kneeled with my head hanging. Basic thought process: too late, they must have seen it, so forth.
The sky hammered and the snow came blowing, darting against my face and sticking there. When I opened my eyes and looked down I couldn’t see my hands because the snow had covered them, and the whole thing came together and I got the point, camouflage, yes, the stuff was covering that canopy too. Started shuffling along the other way, fast as I could, the thing was to get as far as possible from this area because they’d be searching along a narrow band in the direction of the Finback’s final flight, and they’d see me even if they didn’t see the canopy or the seat or the lines under the cover of snow.
There was another one coming. It was somewhere ahead of me again but I knew I was facing the opposite direction now so it was no good going that way. My hands slipped as I turned round and I got terribly annoyed and stood up and went forward with my shoulders leaning against the haze and no real sense of tilting over until the rock came up and I made a half-roll to the right and finished on my hand and knees again you bastards will you go away you bastards with the whole sky swinging and the sound of them booming in my head, the last of the thoughts drowned out by the force of it, only a flicker of awareness now, the awareness that I was some kind of animal dodging and scrambling on the mountainside as the eagles came in for the kill.
Period of total unconsciousness.
Better, quite a lot better when I surfaced and looked around me. It could have been hours since I fell but it was obviously minutes because another one was coming in and I picked myself up and staggered across the rocks trying to get away from it but it was no go: the thing was heading straight towards me and it wouldn’t matter which way I went because I couldn’t go far enough to get out of sight. The visibility was about a hundred yards and I could make out a group of boulders, immense blobs in the haze, their outlines rounded by the juggernaut descent they’d made from higher in the range.
I would have to reach them.
Various objections: too far, too little time, so forth. Ignore.
The thing above me was so loud now that I couldn’t understand why it was still invisible: there was just the wasteland of white, with the earth meeting the sky at no particular level, white upon white, and somewhere in it the relentless hammering din of that machine getting closer, louder, while I stood there for another second trying to see it before I moved again, lurching over the rocks with the body leading the mind, the feet finding their purchase by reflex alone and the hands spread against the haze to push it away and let me see as I ran on, let me see the boulders.
The sky had become a storm.
Run.