WE (19 page)

That's Thorsten
, he had heard one of them say. Who had it been? He remembered it as May's voice. Did May really believe that Thorsten lay out here?

Paul did not believe it.

‘We'll see,' he said. And he began to pick at the controls.

Down in the station he had studied the crawler plans carefully. It was equipped with all the main instruments available on a utility – arm camera for close inspections, deicer, grips and a bore. He switched the display to the arm camera and inspected the rubble of which the cairn was made.

The shapes were small and mostly regular. They must have been waste containers and debris left over from the construction, carted up here by patient utilities to make this pile. That had been nine years ago. The layer of frost on them was far thinner than on the landscape. Even so, it was enough to have fused them together in a single lump. He had been expecting that.

He selected the de-icer and guided it forward, pulling back the camera at the same time to watch what he was doing. The nozzle hovered centimetres from one of the boulders. He pressed
Activate
.

The de-icer was loaded with nitrogen, heated within the crawler to a few degrees below zero Celsius. The frost melted instantly under the blast of gas. A puff of fine granules flew silently in all directions – that was the nitrogen, rebounding from its target and freezing even as it flew. On the display the battery indicator was falling faster:
63 … 62 … 61
. Paul kept the blast of gas aimed on one irregular piece, which might have been a lump of old foam covered in ice.

And it split. A piece rolled gently down the side of the cairn. Around it, the other fragments stayed where they were, still frozen into place.

Paul shifted his target.

‘Munro!' It was Vandamme's voice, urgent and upset. ‘What are you doing? Leave him alone!'

He frowned and looked at the controls in front of him. Down in the station they must have tuned their screens to his. They could see everything he could. They could see him violating their shrine. He looked for a way of blocking them out, but he did not know how.

On the other hand, they could do nothing to stop him. Not now.

He moved the de-icer to another piece. ‘Paul – that's Thorsten's grave! Please leave him alone!'

‘He's not there, May.' It was a shrine but it was also a lie. Soon he would prove that.

‘Paul, I don't understand. What do you mean?'

‘There has to be someone else! In the station. If he's in the station, he can't be here.'

‘Paul, I can't hear you. I can't hear what you are saying! But if you can hear me, please, please leave him alone!'

He could hear her perfectly clearly. What was the matter?

‘I said there has to be someone else!'

No answer. On the screen, rubble fell from the side of the cairn in a long, silent cascade. Fragments bounced lazily outwards and disappeared from view. The pylon was leaning drunkenly. At its foot he glimpsed some sort of wrapping.

He clenched his teeth. Could he be wrong, after all?

But if Lewis had been acting alone, he would have to have buried something. The others would have seen him doing it. There would have to have been something that was ‘Thorsten' to lay at the foot of the pylon.

In his ear, Lewis spoke.

‘Paul, can you hear me?'

Paul ignored him. He activated the grip and brought it in to prise a lump free. More lumps tumbled, hiding whatever
it had been from view. The pylon tipped and fell lazily to the surface.

‘Paul – you are breaking up. What is your battery reading?'

Paul checked it.

‘Fifty-four per cent.'

There was a pause.

‘Paul, your signals aren't reaching us. Maybe your power is faulty. Maybe the indicator is wrong. You must come back now.'

(A last, desperate effort, Lewis! But how calm you keep your voice.)

‘Paul! You understand – if you run out of power up there, there's nothing we can do. Nothing.'

‘I won't run out of power.'

Although it was getting close. He had used half of what he had. He still had the journey back to come. And the cairn was being awkward. The lumps of material kept getting in the way – falling and lying where he didn't want them to. It was incredibly slow and clumsy, to pick them up one at a time, swing the grip arm and drop them somewhere to one side. He could see the wrapping. It looked like a standard vacuum coating sealed around a long, indistinct object that might have been the body of a man. He had nothing to cut the wrapping with. For a moment he thought he was going
to have to pick it up in the grips and carry the thing all the way back down to the station. But he hunted along the length of it with the camera, and at one end – it might have been the head – he found a flap where the coating had been sealed together. He brought the grip arm over.

‘Please,' whispered Erin Vandamme.

He almost stopped then. He almost stopped for her, because of the pity and distress in her voice. He gritted his teeth. Remorselessly, the arm took hold of the flap in the vacuum coating.

‘Paul! Stop!'

He lifted the arm, dragging the wrapped object with it. It came all of a piece and for a moment he knew a fierce rush of triumph. Then he realized that even if it was a human body it would be frozen absolutely stiff and would not bend at the waist or anywhere.

‘Paul!' May, still pleading. But it was too late. The coating was tearing even before he was ready for it. Slowly, silently, it ripped away like a mask. A voice – either May or Vandamme – cried aloud in Paul's ear.

And his screen was filled with a face.

A dead face in a shroud of vacuum coating, diminishing as it fell to its bed of frozen debris.

Drifting away, drifting down to the ground …

The scalp was nearly bald, the brow wrinkled, the skin
white. The eyes were open. They ignored Paul, sitting sheltered in his crawler. Frozen in that hellish place, they stared at the empty sky. Around the mouth the lips curled back to show the teeth, in a fierce, desperate grimace, as if the man still looked down the long tunnel of death and saw no end.

Thorsten Bondevik, who had died nine years ago.

The body touched the rubble. For an instant the face seemed to rise back towards the camera, so that Paul's heart lurched and he thought the dead man was actually lifting his head as he lay.

And then it burst into a fountain of crystals.

‘Damn!' whispered Paul. ‘Oh damn!'

The little shimmering cloud cleared slowly, drifting to rest upon the shoulders and mutilated head. The body of the dead man had shattered to icy rubble within its protective sheeting. Where the face had been there was only an indistinct pile of crystals and torn fabric. Brittle in the extreme cold, without even the light pressure of its protective bag, there had been nothing to hold it together any more.

‘Sorry,' Paul groaned.

Then he said: ‘Sorry, Van. I was wrong.'

‘She's gone, Paul,' said Lewis harshly. ‘They both have. They went when you smashed him to pieces.'

Paul swore.

In the little cabin of the crawler, high in the hellish wastes of that world so far from Earth, he put his head in his hands.

‘Paul?' said Lewis at last. ‘Paul!'

‘Yes?'

‘Are you coming back now? Or are you going to stay out there with him?'

Paul looked at the screen. The camera had wandered a little. It showed a view of scattered rubble, the end of the fallen pylon and the dead man's feet.

‘Paul!'

‘I'm coming.'

‘Thank God for that much. What's your power reading?'

Paul looked at it.

‘Thirty-eight per cent,' he said hollowly.

‘That's what I was afraid of,' said Lewis grimly.

Paul looked at the screen again. ‘I can't just leave him like this.'

‘For God's sake! Yes, you can! Get yourself back here
now
!'

Obstinately Paul jabbed at the controls. The grip arm was still holding the flap of coating, like an old man who had taken out a handkerchief and then forgotten what he had in his fingers. He swung it slowly over the corpse and released it. It fell across the dead man's broken waist. He lowered the arm and dragged the thing clumsily over the remains of
the head. He felt he should do better than that, even though nothing he could do would ever make up for what he had already done.

But there was no time. Even as he watched the screen, his battery display dropped again. He must go.

Tune the screen to the main viewer. Fold and lock limbs. Unlock and withdraw legs.

Joystick, and pedals.

Power: 36%.

He turned the crawler. He knew that even this manoeuvre was a waste of energy, and yet he did not dare attempt the narrow cliff track in reverse. He pointed the crawler downhill and nudged it forward. He felt it tilt its nose downwards. The way was steep. It seemed much steeper than he remembered it coming up.

And there was nothing to draw him on now. There was no hunt, because there was no quarry. He had been wrong, wrong all the time. The man lay dead on the horrible waste behind him. There was only the taste of failure.

‘Paul?'

‘Yes.'

‘Take it steadily. If you rush it on that path you'll tip yourself.'

‘I know.'

‘I'm sending a crawler up to lead you in.'

Paul knew he should say
Thank you
. But shame made the words stick and he did not speak them.

Down, now. The narrow, gloomy path that wasn't a path, just a ledge-like crack down the face of the cliff. He could feel his body wanting to fall slowly forward with the slope, held into place only by his seat straps. Ice glowed in his lights just metres ahead of his vehicle. Beyond that was darkness. To his left was the drop. To his right was the ice wall.

He concentrated fiercely on the path, nudging his crawler again and again into the cliff until he could feel and hear the ice scraping along the hubs of his wheels. He was aware from time to time of the shapes of the station below him, glimpsed in the middle distance: a huge mound of frosted curves, unnatural in this jagged landscape, mounted by all kinds of slender structures. He was aware of the flash of a secondary mirror, directing captured sunlight up into its tertiary. But he did not dare look. Nor did he look at the floor of the cavern, gleaming with flows of freezing liquids. He crept on downwards. It was slow. It seemed far slower than his outward journey. The crawler rolled sickeningly and its outer wheels spun and slipped on the edge. Again he nudged it in towards the cliff wall. He felt the inner wheels scrape. Had the path got narrower since he had come up? Had some of it fallen away under his wheels as he climbed?

Power: 25%
.

His teeth were set, his lips bared like those of the corpse he had smashed on the clifftop. And still the way led downwards. And still the canyon floor was no nearer. Time to pray, he thought.

Time to pray, but he knew no prayers. Dimly he remembered the voice of Erin Vandamme chanting about waters and green pastures. But that was wrong. Worse, here, than it had been even in the station. He remembered there had been words in her prayer about paths and about the shadow of death.
For You are with me
, she had written. But there was no one with him. Not here. There couldn't be. Maybe back in the station she was praying for him. She had said she didn't stop praying until whoever went out came back. But there was no one with him here.

And more likely she was weeping in her room – weeping over what he had done.

Lights on the path ahead of him!

Gone. But now there they were again. Lights! Two little beady lights, about a hundred metres off. Not the miraculous glow of some angel but the headlights of one of the little utility crawlers, hurrying up the fissure towards him.

‘Paul?'

‘Yes?'

‘I've got you on my screen. Can you see me?'

Lewis didn't mean
me
. He meant
the crawler I have sent out to you
. But, yes, suddenly it was like having company on the road.

‘Yes I can.'

He could see its body now, gleaming yellow behind its lights. It had stopped. He braked too. The two crawlers sat on the ledge looking at each other, like insects that had met in a crack in a wall.

‘Right,' said Lewis's voice. ‘What's your power reading?'

Paul had not been looking at the power. Very determinedly, he had not been looking at it. Now he did.

‘Twelve.'

‘Twelve! You're sure?'

‘Yes.'

‘God!' Lewis broke off. Then he said: ‘I'm afraid …'

In the silence, Paul heard the coming of his own death.

‘Paul?'

His throat was dry. ‘Yes?'

‘You'll have to depressurize the cabin.'

‘I'll freeze!'

‘Not at once. The only conduction will be through the wheels. The suit should keep you safe.'

The suit should keep you safe
. Lewis was telling him to let the terrible cold into the crawler, to rely only on his suit, in order to lighten the demand on his power pack. And neither

of them knew how long he could safely do it for. And neither of them knew how much power it would save.

Some, surely.

Fingers trembling, he punched the controls. He watched the figures tumble.

‘Done,' he said.

‘How do you feel?'

Stupid question! ‘
Shit! Like shit!
'

‘Follow me, then.'

He did not turn the utility crawler on that narrow ledge. He simply backed it. Paul saw its lights receding and followed them. They were a help. They let him anticipate what the path was going to do: how it was going to twist or narrow, before his own lights picked it out. Anticipation. That was the key. The brain could work so much faster if it could anticipate what was coming. Work faster, go faster.