Thunderhead

35

It was twilight half an hour later when the admiral, peering through the obscuring haze of blown snow, saw the snow-drifted shapes huddled in the shadow of an overhang. Fifty feet lower, the general settled the sled in to a precarious landing on a narrow shelf. It was a ten-minute climb back to their objective.

Vice Admiral Carnaby pulled himself up the last yard, looked across the icy ledge at the figure in the faded blue polyon cold-suit. He saw the weathered and lined face, glazed with ice; the closed eyes, the gnarled and bloody hands, the great wound in the side.

The general came up beside him, stared silently, then went forward.

“I’m sorry, Admiral,” he said a moment later. “He’s dead. Frozen. Both of them.”

The admiral came up, knelt at Carnaby’s side.

“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” he said. “Sorry…”

“I don’t understand,” the general said. “He could have stayed up above, in the station. He’d have been all right there. What in the world was he doing down here?”

“What he always did,” Admiral Carnaby said. “His duty.”