Earthbound (Winston Science Fiction Book 1) (12 page)

“Beefsteak?” Pete grinned wryly. “what’s that?”

“No like beef? Well, walrus steak good instead —”

“Never mind,” Mr. Fairchild groaned. “Bring it all, anything you think is good. How soon can we have all of it?”

“What you want again, please?”

“Fuel, enough to fill our tanks and then enough to fill them again. Food for many months. Everything you don’t need here we’ll take. And clothing — complete winter outfits for five.”

“What about the crews of the spaceships that’ll be coming in?” Ganymede Gus demanded.

“Don’t worry about them. They’ll have their spacesuits, and that’s probably the best outfit you can wear down here, anyway. Now,” Mr. Fairchild turned back to the Indian, “when can you have that?”

“Soon. Very soon. Two week all right?”

“Two weeks? That’s ridiculous!”

Smiling, the Indian shrugged. “We are on, what you say, vacation. No work ten day, two week.”

“Please! I’ll pay you well.”

The Indian nodded. “Wage terrible. You pay, we work. Two hour fine?”

“Fine,” said Mr. Fairchild wearily.

Once more,, Gus threw the door open into the teeth of the storm. Muttering cheerfully among themselves, the three Indians pushed their way out into the blizzard. Gus pulled the door in against the wind, slammed it, said, “Beautiful place, Ushuaia! And the spacemen think they have it rough.”

“Wait till you see Antarctica,” Mr. Fairchild predicted.

Two hours later, the Indians returned, pulling a long sled across the snow. With it they stopped a few feet from the ship, and after Gus had opened the door, they slowly set about transferring the supplies within the cabin. It was a long process, and by the time they finished, Pete was shivering with the cold,

Mr. Fairchild began checking over the items. “Five hoods,, five fur coats, knee length, five pairs of fur leggings, five pairs of boots and snowshoes — ah! the boots are interlined with fur — fur mittens, a sort of fur vest you wear under the coat, I guess, and — will you look at this food!”

Wrapped in paper, frozen with the cold, pale gray strips of dried and smoked meat were heaped about in profusion. A large sack of coffee beans had been included, and thoughtfully, some hard biscuits and cans of frozen orange juice.

“There sure is enough of it!” Gus exclaimed. “I guess it will last, provided we do. . . .”

Sam Smith had been quiet throughout the length of their journey. Pete guessed that he did not relish the idea of going south — all the way south. . . . Now the huge-muscled man grumbled, “What about water? We’ll need water.”

Gus began to laugh. Soon he was laughing so hard that he had to hold his hands to his sides. “Water!” he roared. “He says we’ll need water.”

“What Gus means,” Mr. Fairchild explained patiently, “is that the Antarctic continent is covered with hundreds of feet of ice and snow. Perfectly clean, Sam; probably the cleanest water supply in the world. All we’ll have to do is melt it.”

“I got another question,” Sam insisted. “Don’t tell me we’ll have to live in these fur things all the time? It’s so cold down there from what I hear, we’ll still freeze.”

“Don’t you worry about it, Sam,- said Mr. Fairchild. “As I’ve indicated, a base is waiting for us. When the explorers visited Antarctica back in the fifties and sixties, they left underground camps. Well, not underground, really, but under ice. They hewed the camp sites out of the ice itself, reinforcing their below-level vaults with wooden beams. If we’re lucky, we might even find some food stored there.

“Further, an advanced party of our associates has already brought in radar equipment, although I imagine that by now they’ve left. We know the latitude and longitude, however, and there’ll be markers.”

“Well. . . .” Plainly, Sam was still doubtful.

The Indians had finished their work, and now the leader prodded Mr. Fairchild’s shoulder. “You pay friends, they be happy and go.”

“Of course.”

“But no pay me, kid. Pay me later. I no like work here — no work to do. Wage low like mad. You take me with you, pay later. South cold and bad. I help make it good.”

Mr. Fairchild stroked his clean-shaven chin thoughtfully. “Why not? Why not? Yes, I suppose he could be of some help. Very well, you’ll come with us.”

The Indian grinned happily. “I ready right now. You call me Ushuaia Joe.”

“All right, Joe. Give this money to your friends and tell them to make tracks,” Ganymede Gus said as Mr. Fairchild counted out the bills. “We’ll need plenty of room for our take-off.”

Pocketing their money, the two other Indians departed, and as he closed the door, Pete could see them hustling their sled away through the snow.

‘Ushuaia Joe said, “Big wind and snow bad for takeoff.” He grunted. “Even worse for fly south.”

“Leave that to us,” Mr. Fairchild told him. “We’ll climb to forty thousand feet and leave that storm far below us.”

And then Ganymede Gus was at the controls and they all fastened their safety belts. Its jets belching flame and fury, the plane rocketed skyward. It gained altitude rapidly, and when Pete looked down through the window, Ushuaia and its airfield was lost under a swirling blanket of wind-driven snow.

Moments later, they had climbed above the storm altogether. Below them, the snow looked like a solid wall of white, and above, the aurora clashed and darted in silent thunder, piercing the skies with the mysterious fire that gave Tierra del Fuego its name.

Then they were heading south, ever south, with nothing to see but the impenetrable white barrier beneath them and an occasional flash from the aurora. There was nothing to say. They sat silently while time fled by, their ship roaring on above the fierce, cold winter at the bottom of the world.

Hours later, Gus said, “I think we’ve arrived!” And soon after that Pete could feel the pressure mounting in his cars as the ship was brought down.

“Thirty thousand feet!” Gus cried. Then — “Twenty!”

Suddenly, the storm was all about them, blinding, spinning the plane this way and that, throwing them about helplessly in its cabin.

“Ten thousand feet!” Gus called. I can’t see anything. Air speed, four hundred miles per hour.”

“Slow us down!” cried Mr. Fairchild. “You can’t land at that speed.”

“I’m trying.”

“Bad,” said Ushuaia Joe.

“Five thousand feet!”

“What speed?”

“Two hundred, but the wind’s got us. . .”

“Cut your jets, man! Cut your jets!” Pete cried. “It’s the only chance. Cut your jets and turn us into the wind to slow us. Then switch them on again.”

Gus obeyed, and the droning of the engine stopped. The pressurized cabin effectively sealed off all sounds of the storm, and they tumbled along through ghostly white silence.

Gus was amazed. “The wind got us, and it’s carrying us up again. Sixty-five hundred feet —”

“What’s your speed?”

“Uh — one-forty!”

“Still no good,” Pete told him. “We’ve got snow-runners around the wheels, but we’ll skid and crash at that speed.”

“One-ten!”

“That’s better, but better check your radar. Maybe the ground isn’t flat below us —”

“Hey, get us out of this,” Sam Smith wailed, and Clarence Roth was mumbling to himself off in a comer of the cabin.

After a time, Gus said, “Radar’s bad. Crags and peaks and outcroppings of ice below us. But we’re going down — into the wind, which makes our ground speed only forty-eight miles per hour. Elevation, three thousand feet.”

“Put on your jets!” Pete yelled.

From the front of the ship, there was a coughing sound, once, and then again.

“They won’t kick over!” Gus cried. “They won’t. . .”

“They’ve got to!” Pete fought his way forward as the plane was rocked and buffeted by the winds.

“Elevation, two thousand, ground speed the same as before. We’re going to crash!”

Chapter 12 — The Last Frontier

Except for Pete, no one seemed ready for any decisive action, except, of all people, Ushuaia Joe. As Pete made his way forward, he found Sam and Clarence Roth in his way, jostling each other about in frightened confusion. Pete had no time to fight his way through, and he looked ahead of him helplessly to the controls.

But somehow, Ushuaia Joe was at his side. Using his arms as flails, the Indian of Tierra del Fuego swept the two men aside, and Pete flung himself down the length of the cabin. Joe was there again, heaving Ganymede Gus bodily from the pilot chair.

Pete sat down — with only seconds left to act.

He kicked at the jet pedal, heard the motors cough in protest. Frozen? If they were frozen. . . .

He kicked again. The engines sputtered, coughed, kicked over! Pete pulled the stick all the way back, saw the angry little pips flashing on the radar screen. They’d skimmed something, a jagged cliff of ice, probably, by not more than fifty feet.

Landing by radar can be a ticklish business. You can’t see anything, which is the reason why you use radar in the first place. Instead, radar sends out its light-fast energy to substitute for your eyes. The beam hits something and bounces back, and you know that something’s been hit at such-and-such a distance.

And with that as a guide, you try to bring down a big jet plane through an Antarctic blizzard.

Pete began to sweat. His first impulse was to look through the pilot window to try to see something other than the swirling storm. But he fought it down, and forced his eyes to remain on the radar screen with its little pips. He played the controls delicately with his fingers.

Down there? No! Radar warning — something high and uneven. There? No, the same. But according to the directional computer, latitude and longitude were right on the nose. The base should be directly below, and near it a long stretch of flat ice. There! Flat and long enough. Now bring her around slowly, into the wind. Don’t nose down, for you won’t get another chance. Closer, closer
—

Something touched. The plane bumped, bounced rocked from side to side. Pete cut the jets and they were gliding across the ice like a silent ghost. Something threw Pete forward and his bead struck the control panel sharply. He felt himself falling, and someone, possibly Ushuaia Joe, eased him to the floor just before he blacked out.

“You feeling better?” Ganymede Gus’s voice sounded fuzzy around the edges.

“I’ve got a headache,” Pete mumbled, trying to sit up. He couldn’t make it.

“Well, just relax a while. You brought us down safely, and that’s enough till you feel better. Near as I can figure it, sonny, we plowed into a snow bank. No damage, thanks to you.

“You see,” Mr. Fairchild said smugly, “I knew we would need Peter with us.”

Ushuaia Joe then soaked a rag in some of the water left aboard ship, and bathed Pete’s head with it. Strength flowed back quickly after that. Before long Pete was on his feet again.

“All right,” said Mr. Fairchild, “the sooner we find our base the better I’ll like it. Let’s get into our furs.”

Sam Smith spread out the heap of fur garments, and everyone donned them. Their boots were spiked for travel over ice. They strapped their snowshoes to their backs, and also piled their food and supplies on their backs. Each one bundled into a shapeless mass, they headed for the door.

Gus opened it, hopped outside and fastened it back against the hull while the blizzard whipped in at them. One by one, they stepped out on the ice of Antarctica.

“You can’t see much through this storm!” Gus roared over the keening wail of the wind.

Mr. Fairchild shook his fur-hooded head. “We don’t have to. They set a pole over the base, painted it with a mildly radioactive substance. We should see its glow.”

They looked in all directions, holding on to one another with mittened hands. If a man got separated from the rest by as much as twenty yards in this blizzard, he might be lost forever. Pete had never felt such cold. It knifed in almost at once, numbing in its intensity. It stung, it blinded, it brought tears and froze them before they could roll down their cheeks.

Ushuaia Joe’s sharp eyes caught the glow first. “Light,” he said. “That way.” He pointed.

And then they all saw it, faintly — the smallest suggestion of a glow cutting through the frozen gloom. “That should be it!” Mr. Fairchild yelled triumphantly, stalking out over the ice.

They followed him in single file, still gripping hands tightly. It was late winter, and a vague twilight suffused the air and the wind-driven snow. The sun had worked its way close to the horizon, but it would not rise for several weeks. Thus Pete knew they could expect some twenty hours of total darkness for each four of half-light.

The glow grew brighter.

It took shape in the dusky light, became a long needle of metal pointing up at the heavy sky. They reached it, circled it excitedly.

They dumped their packs of equipment on the ice. Sam Smith and Clarence Roth each hefted a pickax; Joe and Gus dug into their supplies and came up with shovels.

The pickaxes swung up and then down, cracking and splintering the ice with every blow, and the shovels scooped away the debris. Soon Pete relieved a panting and thoroughly exhausted Ganymede Gus. Moments later, Sam and Clarence rested over their handles, too tired to continue. But a tireless Ushuaia Joe took Sam’s pickax from him and continued to hack away at the stubborn ice while Pete wielded his shovel.

“I strike wood!” Joe called, after what seemed an endless time to Pete.

After that, the Indian had to be careful. A trapdoor of thick wood was buried under the ice, and he did not want to damage it with his pickax. He probed around it carefully while Pete scraped and chopped at the ice with the edge of his shovel.

Finally, the door was exposed, black and somber against the ice. Pete found a ring on one side, pulled at it experimentally. Nothing happened.

“Icebound.” Mr. Fairchild’s teeth chattered as he spoke. Activity had warmed Pete, however, had even brought a warming perspiration to his skin. But that could be dangerous — once it started to freeze.

He tugged again at the metal ring, heard something scrape, felt it give a little; but the trapdoor held fast. Ushuaia Joe joined him, and together they pulled.