A Day for Damnation

NINETEEN

I WAS awakened by Lizard's voice. My throat felt filled with cotton. I tried to clear it and couldn't.

"-no, we're still buried. It's darker in here than the inside of a bear."

I opened my eyes. She was talking on the radio again. I tried to take a breath. My chest hurt.

"-no, I can't tell how deep. I think the sun's coming up though. There's a faint glow in the turret and at the top of the windshield, but I'm not sure that means anything. The stuff is translucent. And when it piles up in drifts it doesn't get very dense, so it passes a lot of light. We could be under ten meters of it and not know."

I'd heard this conversation before. Lizard and I had covered the same material all last night before we'd finally collapsed into separate makeshift bunks.

I pulled myself painfully into a,sitting position. I was stiff. I was sore all over. Everything hurt. My lungs were the worst. Every breath was an effort. I wanted to cough, but I knew I didn't dare. If I started I'd never stop. I knew I had to keep my breathing shallow and my movements to a minimum. The pressure to cough was incredible.

But-first things first. I had to check on Duke. He was still asleep.

He looked bad. Most of his hair was burned away. Parts of his scalp were peeling and blistered. The skin looked dead. He looked so bad I didn't want to look at him. I didn't want to know what he looked like under the medi-blanket. I felt queasy.

This wasn't Duke any more. This was burned meat. It didn't look like it would ever be Duke again. A thought crossed my mind-maybe he'd be better off if he died. I shoved it away. And prayed that God hadn't heard me. I didn't mean it, God, I said silently. I really didn't.

I punched the console for display. The medi-kit was continually monitoring his body functions and the level of sedative in his bloodstream was automatically maintained. It was probably dangerous to keep him out for this long-but what else could we do? They were reading the same information at Oakland. They knew what our circumstance was. If there was anything else to do, they would call us-or they'd reprogram the medi-kit directly. But for the moment, all we could do was wait.

And I hated waiting.

It made me feel useless.

Duke was starting to smell bad. Very very bad. The screen said his legs were infected. This couldn't go on much longer.

The chopper had a tiny lavatory at the very rear of the cabin. I stepped into it and threw up. And then I started coughing. It hurt like hell.

By the time I rejoined Lizard at the front of the ship, she was off the radio. She had turned her chair around to face the rear again and had just cracked open a new ration-kit.

"G'morning," she grinned. "Want some lobster?" She waved a stick of something gray at me. It looked unhealthy.

"No thanks," I said. I collapsed into my own chair. My chest ached.

"How about some prime rib instead?" She held up a sickly green-looking bar.

"Please-I've already thrown up once this morning. That stuff is not fit for human consumption."

"It depends on the wine you serve with it," she said over a mouthful. She held up a can of beer to show me.

I looked over at her. "When we get out of this," I said, "I will buy you the biggest fucking lobster in Arizona. And the best bottle of wine I can afford. Until then, I don't want to hear about food. "

"You're on," she said. "With any luck, that'll be tonight."

"Really?"

She nodded. "Weather scan shows the cloud has dissipatedor spread out too thin to register on the scope. There were strong winds last night. The main body of the cloud passed us by around three in the ayem. Oakland says the last of it is still breaking up over Sacramento. They got a couple inches of cotton candy-but nothing like we got. There's also a chance of rain-with all these dust particles in the air, it's a very good chance. Weather service is adjusting their model now-but I'm betting that it rains before they can bring the new simulation up and running."

"Mp," I said.

Assuming that the puffball clouds hadn't left a permanent pink haze in the air, we still had to address the real problem. The chopper was buried in this crap. How were we going to get out of the ship? If we were under more than two meters of dust, we might as well forget it.

And that suggested another problem. Just how extensive were these drifts anyway? I already knew from experience that we wouldn't be able to move very far through them. No, it was too unlikely that we could get to clear ground-they were going to have to pick us up here.

And then there was the problem of Duke.

I sucked at a water bulb and looked at Lizard. She was lost in thought as well.

She caught me looking at her. "Yes?"

"How are we going to get Duke out of here?"

"You've gotten that far with it, huh?"

"Uh, I haven't gotten anywhere. I just figure that Duke is the hard part of the problem. If we can handle that, the rest takes care of itself."

She said, "I think we're going to have to wait for outside assistance. Right now, the best solution I can come up with is a Sikorsky Skyhook. It could just pull us out-if we could get the grapples in place."

I said, "If any part of the parafoil is accessible, they can hook onto that, can't they? They could use that harness."

"Hey! That's not bad-"

"Thanks."

"-except it won't work." She explained, "It's not your fault. The problem is the Sikorsky. No chopper can rescue us. It'll stir up too much dust. It'll ruin its own engines. They'll come down right on top of us."

"I wonder if this stuff could be washed away? My great-grandmother once tried to teach me a rain dance. You said there's a chance of rain. I'll call it down here."

She smiled sourly, "That'll turn this stuff into mud-and then it'll harden into concrete."

"But it's just-cake flour!"

"You ever try to eat a stale bagel?"

I threw up my hands in despair. "I concede the point."

"Got any other ideas?" she asked.

"Well, we know we can burn it away...." I said it unenthusiastically.

"Now that's a thought," Lizard replied brightly. "You and Duke have already proven the dust is flammable. And this chopper is tiled. It'll make a wonderful oven." She grinned at me. "Do you like brick-oven cooking?"

"No thanks." I picked up the flashlight, switched it on, and swiveled forward. I stared at the pink barrier on the opposite side of the windshield. "I wonder what they do on the planet Chtorr?"

"They probably don't fly in cotton candy weather."

"Yeah, they probably have candy warnings."

"I can imagine the forecasts," Lizard said. "Tomorrow will be mostly fair with scattered high candy and a twenty percent chance of lemonade."

"Not lemonade," I corrected. "Wrong color. More likely strawberry soda."

"And instead of snow, they get syrup? Sounds like a good way to get your wicket sticky?"

"Actually," I mused, "that might not be so far from the truth. Everything is edible to something else. We're just another kind of snack to the worms. Maybe their own planet is one great big smorgasbord to them. It's all point of view. Maybe this is the season of candy."

"Well, we could sure use a couple of worms with sweet tooths along about now," Lizard said.

"Uh-I'm not so sure they're not already here," I replied very slowly.

"Huh?"

"Turn your seat around and look. I think something's moving out there."