Dream thief

23

… SPENCE STUMBLED DOGGEDLY ACROSS a rocky, alien landscape. Over his shoulder Deimos, a beautiful, serene blue-white globe, rose full in the black sky. Spence winced in pain as needlelike shards of tiny cinders sliced the flesh from his knees. Blood bubbled from the minute tear in his surface suit.

He shivered and wrapped his arms across his chest for warmth. Staring down at his feet he saw that he stood on a barren ledge of rock, red in the glow of the rising sun. Around him lay diamonds glittering with an icy glare. With a shock he realized that they were his tears, frozen where they had fallen upon the bare rock. He raised his hands, replaced his helmet once more, and continued walking.

How long he walked or how far he did not know. High overhead white wisps of clouds like tattered veils raced through a black sky, blown on the winds of the coming storm to disappear beyond the rim of the horizon. He heard the howl of the wind as it roared through the emptiness above. He wanted to run, to see where the fragile white clouds went. But as he stirred himself, a heaviness sapped his strength. His legs would not obey. He leaned into it, felt himself pushed back as by a great hand, and realized it was the wind. Each step dragged more slowly than the last. He looked around him and saw red sand beginning to run in hissing snakes around him, blown on the gusting wind.

He crawled to the top of a nearby dune and toppled over the other side into the wind shadow. He felt himself sliding down and down. He struggled to rise to his feet as the dry red sand sucked at his limbs. The sand rattled down on him from the crest of the dune as the wind whipped it into a stinging fury. He sank back, too cold and tired to move. The sand pelted down on him in a steady rain, burying him beneath a fine red blanket.

He screamed and his voice rang hollow in his ears. He looked and saw that he was trapped in a great glass bubble-the bubble of his helmet, now beginning to frost over on the inside from the warmth of his breath.

The sand seemed to fall out of the black sky, burying him alive. He felt the gritty sting as it pelted against his surface suit. He heard faintly the dry, bristling hiss as it struck his helmet.

He screamed again and heard the awesome ring of silence and knew that his cries could not be heard beyond his helmet. His teeth chattered with the cold which dragged him down into a lazy stupor. He was drifting to sleep. Sleep, his last great enemy, had conquered him. …

SPENCE CAME TO SLOWLY, by degrees, his senses slug gish as if he had been drugged. A bright light filled his eyes so that he squinted to keep it out. When it did not go away he opened his eyes and looked around.

At first it did not occur to him where he was or in what condition. He heard his own even breathing filling his ears with a steady rhythm, and knew he wore his surface suit and helmet. But his body was stiff and frozen into a fixed position. He tried to raise one arm and found that it came free with difficulty. He raised the other arm and pushed himself gradually into a sitting position.

With a jolt he realized where he was: Mars! He had wandered out onto the surface alone. His dream had been real! His stumbling trek across the Martian landscape was no nightmare; it had happened. What is more he remembered it, though he remembered it as a dream.

Before that, however, only blankness and unknowing: another blackout.

Spence rose to his feet, scooping sand away from him. He crawled to the top of the dune and looked out over the red desert, fighting down the panic he felt rising within him. Nothing could be seen of the installation, not a glimmer in any direction.

The winds had calmed, but away toward the south-at least he considered it a southerly direction-the sky bore a distinct brownish-red smudge as if a prairie fire burned out of control just beyond the horizon. Overhead the sky was tinged with a pinkish cast which meant it was approaching noon, or just passing it.

Here was a problem. Clearly he could not sit by and wait for a search party to find him, and he could not walk in every direction at once. He glanced at his suit's chronometer on his right forearm and set it on elapsed time mode, figuring that at best he had only seven hours before the temperature dropped and he began to freeze.

He decided to start walking toward the mountain peak he saw rising into the clear air, so close it looked as if he could touch it with an outstretched hand. He remembered the holomap and the fact that Olympus Mons, the tallest peak on Mars, stood some thirty kilometers distant from the installation. If he could reach it there was a chance he could see the installation from its slopes. It would be a race, for it meant traveling fifty or sixty kilometers in seven hours-eight hours at the most. To even have a chance at making it back to the base in time he would have to travel at a pace of seven or eight kilometers an hour.

Without wasting another second, he turned himself toward the mountain and began marching off in long, ground-eating strides.

He walked for hours, it seemed to him, and the great flattened cone of Olympus Mons did not seem perceptively changed. Periodically he had stopped to look around him lest he miss some sign of a search party, or some indication that he might be moving nearer to his goal.

On one of these reconnoitering stops he became aware of the fact that the brown smudge on the horizon to the south had grown considerably. It nearly filled the southern quadrant, towering several kilometers into the sky by his best estimation. As he stood gauging the size of the disturbance he felt the horror of realization creep over him-the Simoom! The storm was sweeping in on wings of awesome fury, racing toward him.

Spence began to trot in an awkward, bouncing gait, doubling his pace. He had to reach the mountain before the Simoom struck. It was his only chance. …

THE FIRST GUSTS of wind pummeled Spence like angry fists. Around his legs the sand sang away like steam escaping from a pipe. The force of the coming storm impelled him on, lifting his steps and blowing him forward. He lurched ahead drunkenly, exhausted, sweating inside his surface suit. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth in thirst. He stared at the dull brown overcast which crept over the sky like a discolored shade. The sun burned through with a throbbing white glare as he dragged himself on.

He walked mechanically now, not attending to his steps, not caring whether he reached the mountain or not. He despaired of ever seeing the installation through the thick clouds of red dust whipped up by the Simoom's winds. Spence walked now to keep from thinking of the grisly end waiting for him just a few hours away.

On and on he walked and the wind howled around him, filling the sky with dust and blotting out the land. Tiny projectilesgrit, sand, and shards of rock-threw themselves into him, slicing at him. He could feel their sting through his surface suit and knew that it was only a matter of time before the steady blast tore the suit away from his body, stripped it off like a second skin to leave him naked in a deadly rain.

Packer's grim forecast echoed in his ears: "You'd be erased in seconds." Spence rehearsed the torturous details of such a death: flesh stripped molecule by molecule from his bones and then the bones themselves battered to pieces and scattered still warm over the surface of the planet to be ground into powder.

The scene held a grisly fascination for him, though he knew that it would likely be his own fate. It was that or death by freezing. Those were his choices.

The sun was lowering in the sky and already the wind whistling around him held a chill. Soon the temperature would plummet and he would stop moving as his body heat evaporated. This at least seemed preferable to the other death.

He stumbled blindly now. The dust obscured everything beyond the plastic perimeter of his visor. The rattle of tiny missiles filled his helmet like the crackle of static and his thoughts turned toward those who would mourn his death: his father would take it hard, of course; and his sister. Adjani would feel badly, but it was difficult for Spence to imagine the brown genius actually grieving over him.

Ari, of all he could name, alone embodied the sole regret of his heart. She alone he cared for. And he would never see her again-never see those bright blue eyes, never see her golden hair shining in the sunlight, or feel the cool touch of her long fingers as she brushed his face-the awful certainty of their separation saddened and frightened him more than death itself.

He hoped that in some small way he would leave a void in her life which would never be filled by another, that she would remember him fondly and weep when she heard the sad news of his death itself.

He remembered the words she had said the night before he left. He could hear her voice speaking to him once more: Be very careful, Spencer… I will pray for you every day.

Prayer cannot help me, thought Spence, then reflected that probably very little else would help either. At least prayer would not hurt. The idea seemed somehow appropriate to him now, and proper. He wished that he had the right words to say so that his first, and likely last, prayer would not be the feeble simpering of a dying agnostic.

He felt a rush of emotion. and the tears brimmed up in his eyes to roll down his cheeks inside the helmet. He could not brush them away.

With the tears came the words, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry…" which he repeated over and over again. "Forgive me," he whispered. "Help me."

That was the prayer he prayed, though why he was sorry, and for what he should be forgiven, his heart alone knew.

Scarcely had the words crossed his lips when he felt himself slammed to the ground by a blast of cold wind with the force of a rocket thruster and the scream of a beast in agony.

He lay unmoving as pebbles and small stones tumbled over him. He could not raise his head much inside his helmet, but with the cold sweeping over him he knew he must keep moving to remain warm. Snakelike, on his belly, he inched forward.

He had not gone far when he felt the wind lessen. He pushed himself to his knees and stood. He tottered a few more steps and the wind hit him again, this time tumbling him forward and rolling him in a ball.

He felt himself rolling and rolling, as if all support had been yanked out from under him and he would go on forever. But he did not stop rolling, and it was then that the wind no longer assailed him. He had fallen headlong into an arroyo-one of the small canals which creased the surface of the planet. Here he was out of the wind and safe from the blast of windblown projectiles.

He could see only slightly better than before; thick clouds of dust filled the arroyo, rolling in on the wind. Spence put his head down and scuttled forward over the rocky terrain of the dry river bottom. Darkness increased rapidly and he could feel the cold increasing its hold with the setting of the sun.

Gradually he became aware of the downward slope to his path. The arroyo deepened and, from what he could see when the dust clouds parted, widened as it grew into a rift canal.

He walked woodenly on with no other thought than to keep walking until he dropped from hypothermia. He knew that death would follow quickly and he would not feel it. That at least was preferable to being blasted into particles by the wind.

The grade descended rapidly and then flattened out completely. Spence stopped and at the same instant the billowing clouds of red dust parted. In the last glimmering light of day he saw before him a sight which made his mind reel. His knees buckled as he made to draw away.

He had wandered to the very edge of the rift. He now stood on the brink of a canyon stretching out before him hundreds of kilometers and carved deep into the crust of the planet. Another step would have sent him plunging to his death.

His reaction to this new danger was purely physical. In his mind the prospect of falling to his doom held less significance for him than it might have at another time. He was simply too exhausted, and too benumbed by the cold to care anymore; a fact, he noted, that indicated hypothermia was already beginning to affect him.

It would not be long now.

So this is what it is like to die, he thought. To feel the life force slipping away and to be acutely aware of it. He wondered if he would find the release others talked about, if he would meet his mother among the ranks of souls who had passed into the great beyond-or whether those, like so many other things, were simply the superstitions of a fading age.

He had no particular thought about the moment. He noticed how the shadows deepened to violet on the canyon walls and how the depths of the canyon were already sinking into darkness as black as any pit. Simoom wind above him shrieked like all the demons of hell released to vent their fury on the desolated land.

There came a rumble beneath his feet, a vibration of the rock shelf on which he stood. He turned to look behind him and his eye caught a glimpse of a churning mass moving down the rim of the rift toward him.

A rock outcropping, eroded by the wind, had broken free and started an avalanche that was now sweeping down the side of the canyon toward him. Spence had time only to throw himself to the ground before he was swept away in the sliding jumble of rocks and dirt.

The rock slide carried him tumbling far down into the canyon. Miraculously, the grinding, twirling, thundering mass did not crush him outright. When the slide stopped he lay panting on the topmost layer. Rocks and pebbles continued to pelt his body, but he had neither strength nor will to move.

The cruel Martian night closed its fist around him and he knew no more.

…. ….

..TSO.. …. ….