Star Trek - TOS 38 Idic Epidemic (15 page)

Kevin proved a smooth pilot. Korsal gave his son
the left-hand seat, but there were dual controls; he
could take over if they met up with something beyond Kevin’s experience.

The navigation tricorder led them across the dam
and along the river fed by mountain tributaries. Korsal was pleased at the way Kevin maintained
altitude. When he said it aloud, the boy grinned. “I
had to come up this way on the rescue mission. I’d
practiced over the dam for my license, but that was
the first time I flew the river. I took some jolts that
almost shook my teeth loose,
till
I got the hang of it.
But carrying evacuees, on the way back, I didn’t shake
them up much at all.”

“And you didn’t shake the bolts loose in the hover
er, either,” said Korsal with his engineer’s respect for
complex machinery.

Although clouds gathered on the mountain’s peak,
here on the lower slopes it was a beautiful morning.
The mountains near the city still had native plants
and small animals, but among them were pine and
movidel trees, wild roses starting to put out leaves and
buds, and wildlife from a dozen planets.

Startled deer, drinking at the water’s edge, fled at
the approach of the hoverer. A family of
sehlats,
allowed to go wild, reared up and challenged as they
sailed by.

“Here’s where we turned off before, up to the
geology camp.” Kevin pointed left along one of the
tributaries. “It’s new territory to me from here on.”

“Just keep your eyes on where you’re going,” Korsal told him. “It winds even more as we get
higher.”

There was snow on the ground and ice here and
there in the river, although Korsal saw nothing large
enough to damage a turbine. Besides, these small
pieces would melt away before they got so far.

But the higher they climbed, the more ice there was.
Some bigger pieces indicated that the screening sys
tem was indeed not working. There were clouds
overhead now, and a fine mist of rain reduced visibil
ity.

The hills on either side of the river grew steeper,
until they flew within a twisting canyon, with rapids below. Radio contact with the airfield was lost—too
much solid rock between them and the city now.

Spits of snow mixed with the rain. Wind buffeted the hoverer, and Korsal grasped his controls to help
Kevin hold it steady. Had the boy been alone, Korsal
would have expected him to turn back at this point; he
would have done so himself if they hadn’t been so
near their goal.

“We’re almost there,” he told his son. “It has to be the lowest one that’s not functioning—”

They swung around a curve, and saw it.

The safety sluice was a shambles of cracked con
crete and twisted metal supports.
“Khest!”
exclaimed
Kevin—the first time Korsal knew his son knew the
Klingonaase obscenity. Even a Vulcan, Korsal judged,
would have decided that the cause was sufficient.

Obviously the piece of ice that had crushed the
turbine had been much larger when it smashed
through here. What was left of the screening system
wouldn’t hold anything back. This had to be repaired
at once.

“Activate the cameras,” Korsal told his son. “I’ll
maneuver in as close as I dare. Get as good shots as
you can; this repair must have emergency priority.”

Korsal brought the craft in low over the smashed
safety sluice, fighting the gale until Kevin said, “Got
it!” then letting the wind lift and spin the hoverer like
a leaf tossed in a whirlwind.

“Father!” Kevin gasped, reaching for the controls.

“Let be!” Korsal ordered. “I fought that updraft all
the way down, and deliberately let it lift us again. You’ll learn those tricks, Kevin.” He leveled off at normal maneuvering height. “Now—do we go up and see if the safety sluice above this one is also damaged,
or do we go back?”

“I’ve never flown in this kind of wind and snow,” said Kevin. “I don’t know how to judge it, Father.”

“Neither do I,” Korsal admitted. “If we can manage a few more kilometers, we can see whether there’s
more ice ready to break loose. If not, and if the safety
above this one is undamaged, the repairs are not so urgent that we have to risk a party out here when winter is still brewing up storms.”

They decided to continue as far as visibility continued adequate—and flew out of the storm around the next bend. “Good,” said Korsal, eyeing the weather sensors. Walled in as they were, the sensors had little to work with; right now they proclaimed all clear ahead as far as they could reach.

The wind remained treacherous. Several times Kevin had to stop scouting for problems below in order to help Korsal fight the controls.

They swung around another curve and faced a wall of pure blizzard.

The weather sensor began whistling loudly.

“Time to go home!” said Korsal, and swung the hoverer around on its vertical axis.

“I think I had that figured out for myself!” said
Kevin.

“You were looking for a senior science project, weren’t you, Kevin?” Korsal asked.

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you try designing a system to send a warning to the dam if anything breaks through these
safety sluices?”

“If it were possible, why didn’t you design it years
ago, Father?”

“Because I never thought of it until today!”

The boy was silent as they sailed through the clear
curves of the canyon, alert to the ever-changing wind.
Then he said, thinking aloud, “It would have to withstand weather and animals, yet go
off
when
something was really wrong. That’s the problem, isn’t
it? Any system sensitive enough to sound a genuine
alert sends too many false alarms.”

“That’s the problem,” Korsal agreed.

“It has to include a computer capable of judgment
—but computers are too sensitive to cold and damp
ness.”

Smiling to himself, Korsal listened to his son reason
out the problem. By the time they got home, he would
probably have a prototype design in mind.

His smile wrenched into a snarl as they swung
around the bend that concealed the shattered safety
sluice and found that the storm had closed in behind
them.

They faced a wall of whirling snow and ice, com
pletely blocking the narrow canyon. Korsal fought the
hoverer to a standstill and stared at the deadly white
ness. “Unforgivable!” he said. “We have allowed the
enemy to surround us.”

Out of the corner of his eye he caught the sharp
movement of his son’s head as Kevin turned to look
at him. “It… it’s a storm, Father,” he said uncer
tainly. “It isn’t sentient.”

“I know—but remember what you learned on
Survival?”

“Nature is more dangerous than an acknowledged
enemy, for it so often appears one’s friend that one
never expects the moment it turns and casually kills.”
He heard the tightness in the boy’s voice. Kevin had
passed his Survival at age six—and had obviously
never given a thought to the lessons again.

I have failed as a father,
Korsal thought.
My sons do
not think like Klingons.
“Suggestions?” he prompted.

“Always assume Nature is an enemy,” Kevin re
plied. He immediately reached out to change the
setting on the weather scanner, having it search be
hind them. A faint trace indicated that the blizzard
that had caused them to retreat was pursuing them.
“We are cut off forward and rear. We cannot scan to
the sides because of the canyon walls, but our only
chance is up and out.”

Had the situation not been so grave, Korsal would
have taken pleasure at the way his son responded.

“Will the craft do it?” he asked.

“Equipment capable,” Kevin responded instantly.
“I took one up and over the dam.”

“You
what!”

“I told my instructor I had calculated that—”

“Never mind! You’d better remember
how
you did
it.”

“The wind was steady over the top of the dam,
providing lift,” Kevin explained. “I don’t know if we
can get over the canyon wall here, unless we can find
an updraft, but… that’s our only way out.”

“Alternatives?”

“Set down—but where?”

Where, indeed? Below them the river was already
spring-swollen, filling the canyon from one side to the
other. The hoverer was not watertight, and if it had
been it was never built to be a raft. The river would
simply carry them into the rapids and smash them on
the rocks.

While they held their hasty conversation, both fought the bucking controls. “Visibility deteriorat
ing,” Kevin noted.

It was not news to his father. “Let’s go, then.” He
let the craft slew left, then right, feeling for rising wind. When he found it, he rode it toward the
right-hand canyon wall. “Friend or enemy?”

“If the enemy provides an advantage,” Kevin replied, “take it and use it against him. There. Up that
rockslide! It’ll take that angle, Father.”

They rose rapidly until they reached the limit of the thrusters against the canyon floor. Now they had only
angular momentum, tilting the small craft crazily to
thrust against rocks, ice, canyon wall. Korsal applied
more power until the engines wailed in protest. The
snow closed in around them.

“Visibility zero,” Kevin reported.

The hoverer’s instruments were not meant for this
kind of flying, but they were all Korsal had to go by as
he flew “by the seat of his pants” as his Human instructor had once called it.

Tossed by the wind, they couldn’t tell whether they
were rising at all. “Altimeter on barometric!” he told
Kevin. It had been reading their distance from the
nearest surface below them. Now it registered a slow
but definite climb. “Good,” said Korsal, peering
through the flying snow.