Authors: Robert E. Vardeman
“Neat arrangement. I assume you have the solar distillation equipment in the aircar.”
“Of course. I’m no greenhorn. Without that still, you couldn’t carry enough water into the deep erg. And be damn sure your catheter is in place. If that slips out, you clean up the mess.”
Heuser wiggled uncomfortably at the mention of the plumbing inside the suit. “You don’t miss a bet. Everything gets distilled, huh?”
“Everything,” Richards said solemnly.
“Let’s get moving. I’m not too fond of this little town,” Nightwind said. He wanted to get into the desert. Careful observation and a few discreet bribes had convinced him Slayton, Dhal, and Steorra were planning on going into the desert, too. That they didn’t have a guide bothered him. He had no reason to feel responsible for the woman — quite the contrary, from the evidence — but he hated to see anyone duped by the likes of Slayton and Dhal.
“If you think this is dreary, wait till you see the sand!” Richards smirked. “You tourists always complain about how primitive it is in town, but take my word for it, it’ll look like a Spican pleasure palace by the time we get back.”
“I doubt that,” muttered Heuser, under his breath.
“Into the aircar, greenhorns, and the old timer will show you all the sights. All the way to Devil’s Fang and back…” His voice trailed off as he mentioned the destination of this excursion into the arid wilderness.
The three piled into the small aircar. Nightwind watched as Richards ran down the checklist, carefully noting the desert rat’s every move. He wanted to be sure he could operate the machine if anything happened later. With trigger-happy killers like Slayton and Dhal interested in them, anything could occur where there were no witnesses.
Richards cocked his head slightly, listening. He peeled away the nose filters of his desert suit and pulled down the hood to check the pitch and whine of the aircar’s gyroscopic stabilizer. He adjusted a dial on the control panel, saying, “Got to have those babies right on synch, or we’ll wobble all over the planet.”
Coughing, mouth full of grit, he said, “Heuser, take a good look at this. And remember it when we get out in the desert.”
Richards spat. The gobbet of spittle arched in the air through the open door of the aircar and seemed to vanish.
Nightwind said quietly, “The humidity on Rhyl never gets much above zero, does it?”
“Nope,” Richards cheerfully agreed. “Everytime you spit, it evaporates before it hits the ground. Now let’s get the force bubble up and be on our way. The gyros seem to be on the money.”
A silvered globe of pure energy sprang into being just outside the polarized glasteel dome of the aircar. The three inside were suddenly trapped in a dark, confined world. No light from the harsh sun penetrated the barrier of pure energy.
Heuser stirred and moved to another seat. He said, “I don’t know about you gents, but the light is a bit dim for me.”
“But you can still see?” asked Nightwind. He was momentarily blinded. The sudden change from bright sunlight to absolute darkness didn’t give his eyes a chance to adjust to the dim light from the control panel indicators.
“Sure, no problems.”
“You can see? How?” asked Richards.
“I’m like a rattlesnake, Earth variety. I see heat. Everything is a dull red, but I can move around okay. Are you going to turn on the lights?”
“Yeah.” Richards slowly turned up the lighting until a dull yellow glow permeated the inside of the force field-shielded vehicle. “I keep the level low since it’s easier on my eyes after all the time in the sun,” he explained.
Nightwind snorted. “You wear polarizers in the sun, and there’s nothing wrong with your vision. Cut the act you put on for the tourists. We’re already sold and don’t need your sales pitch on how rough it is in the desert.”
Richards laughed. “I think I could like you, Nightwind. Really. You got me pegged down the line. This is all hype for the real tourists. Gives them a big thrill when they get back to their squishy worlds where the water stands out in plain sight. There’s something obscene about lakes. All that water open to the air. Wouldn’t last…”
“Wouldn’t last five minutes, yeah, we know,” said Heuser. “So how can you run this thing blind? Don’t you have to see where you’re going? That glasteel dome’s tough and not going to easily get frosty from sandblasting.”
Richards gunned the small atomic engine and began following the dictates of the small on-board computer. He punched in a set of coordinates, then leaned back in his seat.
“I got a lot of money wrapped up in this rig. If you were standard tourists, I’d run you around Rhylston, go a few klicks out into the boondocks, then come trotting back. But you want to do a little rock climbing in one of the worst hell holes on this godforsaken ball of scorching sand. I figured you didn’t care about the scenery, such as it is. So I keep up the force dome and save the glasteel.”
“It does pit after a while, Heuser,” Nightwind said. “I figure the life of even glasteel is less than a year on this planet. Not only the sand but the temperature extremes would wreck it. The glass component will start to crystallize into a distinct lattice due to thermal cycling: seventy centigrade in the heat of the day, minus forty at night. With the constant shear of the wind, I figure a year’s about all an unprotected dome would last.”
“You hit it, Nightwind. The force dome keeps out the sand by blasting it into oblivion before the sand can work inside. Matter against pure energy. You can guess the pure energy wins, though not without a struggle.”
“Couldn’t we at least look out? Once?” asked Heuser.
“Tourist,” snorted Richards. But he flipped a few switches, brought the aircar to a stop and twisted the intensity dial for the force field to zero.
Even Nightwind had to gasp in awe. The panorama stretching in front of him was totally unlike anything he had ever witnessed before. He had been prepared for an ocean, an ocean with its water replaced by ochre sand. He was surprised.
The desert collided with the horizon in an indistinct line muddled by suspended dust. The dunes were high hills slashed by sandy striations left by the wind. They appeared as if some reptilian monster had recently crawled along their ridges. And everywhere was motion. The wind was tireless. Small motes of sand danced and jumped centimeters in front of Nightwind’s face, smashing mindlessly into the clear glasteel dome over the aircar. But in the distance were towering columns of sand, mighty vortices that made earthly tornadoes seem tame in comparison.
“Sort of gets you, don’t it?” Richards said. Nightwind couldn’t help noticing the catch in the man’s voice. He was as impressed as his two wet-world wards. “Those dust devils, the tornadoes over yonder, probably go up fifteen kilometers into the air. Wind’s whirling around at better than three hundred kilometers an hour. Get trapped inside one of those things and it’s a tossup whether you get the flesh stripped off your bones entering the column or get blown apart once inside.”
“Blown apart?” Heuser said, his eyes never leaving the hauntingly beautiful and immensely deadly landscape.
“Vacuum inside. A hard vacuum. Why do you think all that dust gets sucked straight up into the sky?” Richards was silent for a moment, then continued, “Looks dead out there, doesn’t it?”
Nightwind knew this was some sort of test Richards was putting them through. A proper answer would clinch his support in their odd search for a treasure of unknown value or composition in a place where it could be buried under thousands of kilos of dust by now.
The gaunt man said slowly, “Not too dead, not unless those scrubby bushes are dead.” He had sighted a plant less than ten centimeters in diameter. It was a silvery ball on a landscape which should have overpowered it.
“That’s a chameleon bush. Silver during the day to reflect as much of the sunlight as it can, then turns black at night to absorb whatever heat is left.”
“Mind if I go look at it?” asked Nightwind.
“Nope. You’re the ones paying me a fortune each day we’re out. Plant’s not dangerous or anything like that.”
Nightwind quickly pulled up the hood of his desert suit and flattened the breathing mask across his nose and mouth. He settled the polarizing goggles across his eyes and nodded. As the tiny portal through the glasteel dome opened, he piled out. The quick snapping noise told him Richards wasn’t taking any chances of stray sand working into the cabin of the aircar.
The man tramped through the sand to the chameleon plant. He saw it was globular — the perfect shape for maximum volume with a minimum of surface area. The “leaves” were circular and overlapping like fish scales. By pinching one of them back, he was able to discover the plant’s secret. The inside of the leaf was black. At sunset, the plant simply reversed all its leaves, the silvered side turning inward as the black came out. Inside the mass of leaves was a slightly damp core. The plant managed to tenaciously guard the precious water stolen from a chary planet. Satisfied with the cursory examination, Nightwind started back in the direction of the hovering aircar.
He stopped for a moment. The aircar poised less than ten centimeters over the surface, held aloft by magnetic repulsion. The trim vehicle was streamlined wherever possible with the bubble containing the men and controls in the front, a cargo compartment immediately aft and the powerful atomic engine and magnetic generators in the stern. More than half of the nine-meter-long craft was engine. The outer surface was pitted from innumerable sandstorms of herculean intensity. Nightwind couldn’t help musing at the relative calmness of the wind after seeing the damage already wrought to the gleaming exterior of the aircar. The gale force wind had died down to a mere forty kilometers an hour, and the dust was settling back to the dunes. For Rhyl, it was a dead calm.
The relative clarity made the aircar in the distance stand out like a firefly dropped on brown velvet. Nightwind adjusted his polarizing goggles, wincing at the sting of sand cutting into his skin. A few particles had worked between his goggles and forehead. He quickly twisted the lenses up to five-power magnification. The following aircar snapped into a shimmery focus.
The heat haze over the distance between them prevented Nightwind from clearly seeing the other aircar. But there was no doubt in his mind who the occupants safely hidden behind the force screen were. If he hadn’t bothered to take a look at the local flora, the chances were excellent he wouldn’t have detected his pursuers.
He readjusted his goggles and signaled Richards to let him back into the aircar. The door irised open, and he scrambled in bringing a cloud of sand with him.
Heuser coughed and said, “Damnit, Rod, did you really want half this crummy desert for a souvenir?” The pile of sand around Nightwind’s feet lent credibility to the cyborg’s claim.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Richards. He began digging under the control panel and came out with a snakelike probe. When he touched a button on the end of the rod, it began to writhe as if possessed with a life of its own. The probe whipped back and forth caressing Nightwind’s desert suit, touching the floor and magically devouring every grain of sand in sight.
“Thanks,” said Nightwind, stripping the goggles and face filter off. He let Richards work the sand-sucker over his head to rid him of the grit in his hair. It seemed that, no matter how tight the fit, some sand worked its way next to his skin. He was certain he would be a raw hunk of meat before returning from this jaunt into the desert.
“Let’s get moving now that you two have rubbernecked enough. This weather’s too precious to waste sitting around on our duffs.” Richards twisted the dial of the force field to max, then punched in the commands to the computer to get them on their way once more.
They traveled in silence for over an hour. Then, even through the damping field of the force screen, the whine of the wind made itself heard. The aircar began to shake and shimmy back and forth like prey caught in the jaws of some gigantic predator. The smell of ozone assailed Nightwind’s nostrils, and he quickly checked the indicators on the control panel. A tiny red light was flashing balefully over the force field indicator.
Richards noticed his interest and said, “It’s about time to go to ground for the night. The power plant’s not able to give enough juice to both keep us running along and hold the force field. Wind’s really tuggin’ at us, too. Gyros can’t handle it.”
Heuser said, his voice weak, “I’m getting seasick from the rocking. Can’t you do anything?”
“Yeah,” said Richards. “Make you clean up the mess if you do get sick. Can’t waste
any
moisture out here.” As if taking pity on his client, he killed the drive and the aircar sank to the ground. The red light ceased its flashing. “Turnin’ up the power on the force barrier. Won’t be able to continue till this little blow passes over.”
Nightwind was content. In the wind, it wouldn’t be possible to track them, not even with electronic gear. The static produced by the wind would drown out any communication. He couldn’t see the proper indicator but he knew the potential gradient outside must be tremendous.
As if reading his mind, Richards asked, “Want to see something really spectacular? Not many sights like it around. But look quick because I can’t lower the force field for long.”
The field began to flicker on and off like a stroboscope. But through the momentary lapses of the field, Nightwind saw the most vivid lightning storm he could remember. Purple and green and blinding white spears of gigavolt lightning duelled in the skies overhead.
Richards hastily snapped the force field back on. “Sorry can’t let you look at it longer, but I don’t want to let the glasteel dome get frosted up on me.”
“But that was lightning!” exclaimed Heuser. “Where’s the rain?”
“It’s caused by the dust, not rain,” explained Nightwind. In spite of himself, he had to admit the sight was breathtaking. Seldom were electrical daggers of that intensity generated even on worlds wracked constantly by rain storms.
“That’s usual out here. The dust particles sort of bump against each other and generate an electrostatic field. Couldn’t radio out for love nor money right now. Too much electricity zinging around out there. Nothing alive ever goes out in weather like this. Leastways, it doesn’t stay alive for long if it does.”