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the mud and the driving rain.
It was not at all the way it was supposed to be.
Something was seriously wrong with the mission planning. This was certainly the part of Earth called
 Alaska ; the navigation screens had proved it. Then why didn t it look that way? Alaska, along with all
the rest of the planet, had been thoroughly studied by the Hakh hli on their first time around. Alaska was
known to be cold at least, mostly cold during all but a brief period in the summer, and then it was only
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at relatively low altitudes that it could ever be called anything else. The planners had definitely assured
them of  snow ; if there was such a thing (and a thousand television programs had testified there was), it
might be somewhere on the Earth, but it definitely was not here.
What was here was mud, and a temperature high enough to make Sandy sweat unbearably inside his
furs, and an intense, scary, blinding storm.
A storm like this could not be an everyday event, Sandy told himself. Half a dozen times, as he struggled
in what he hoped was the direction of the road, he had to detour around uprooted trees big bastards of
trees, a hundred feet from root to crown, and with huge clumps of ruptured earth around their roots still
being melted away by the drenching downpour. And the craters left by the uprooted trees were all fresh.
Sandy slapped wearily at one of the flying things that seemed to find their way inside his parka to bite
him were they  mosquitos ? and resented his fate. The whole thing was definitely worrying.
Worse than that, it was unjust. Nothing in Sandy s training had prepared him for this. He had heard of
 weather. There had been lectures about it, and the taped old TV news shows were full of talk about it,
with maps of isobars and lows and cold fronts. But hearing about it and being out in it were not at all the
same. Neither Sandy nor any of the 22,000 Hakh hli in the interstellar ship had ever had any personal
experience with such a thing.
It was not the kind of personal experience Sandy enjoyed. How were you supposed to find your way in
this  weather condition? It had looked easy enough in the shipboard briefings; there were the mountains
and the pass between them, and the road he was looking for went straight through the pass. But how
could you tell where the mountains were when the rain and clouds cut off everything a hundred feet
overhead? And, of course, the ship was already out of sight behind him. He stopped and painfully pulled
the radio out from its place in an inside pocket.  This is Sandy, he said into it.  Fix me, will you?
Tanya s voice responded at once.  You re way off, she said crossly.  Turn three-twelfths to the left.
And what s taking you so long? You should be almost at the road by now.
 I thought I was, Sandy said bitterly, thumbing the set off. He was going to need help from the radio
again, he was quite sure, so he slung it by its strap over a shoulder instead of putting it back inside.
Sweating and muttering to himself, he moved on through the drenching rain, with slippery mud underfoot
and wind-tossed branches lashing him across the face.
It was not at all the way he had expected to return to the Earth.
If it was bad while there was still daylight, it got far worse as darkness fell. The sun had set. The last wan
sky glow had disappeared. There was no light of any kind. Total darkness! Another new experience, and
a nasty one.
That was when Lysander slipped on a slick mud bank and rolled into a clump of wet, stabbing
undergrowth.
That wasn t the worst of it. When he stood up and tried for a radio fix he discovered the little ravine had
had a rivulet at its bottom. The radio was soaked, and it didn t work any more.
And neither, he discovered from the sudden silence of the storm, did his hearing aid. He batted it a few
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times against the knee of his sweaty fur pants, but it still didn t work. Furious, he jammed it in a pocket
and looked around.
The lander s screens had ranged the highway through the pass at no more than two miles away. In five
hours of up and down and zigzag detours Sandy had surely walked farther than that. So it was certain
that he had drifted from his proper route again.
It came upon Sandy Washington that he was lost.
It wasn t a useful realization. There wasn t anything he could do about it. He couldn t go back to the
ship, because he no longer had any way of knowing which way the ship was. He could have gone
forward, all right it was what he desperately wanted but he no longer had any idea of which direction
 forward was, either.
He also remembered, rather late, that Alaska was known to have wild animals, some of which they
were called  wolves and  grizzly bears  would not be pleasant to meet.
He stared around, beginning to be not only angry but afraid.
And that was when he realized that there, off to the right, was a place where the darkness was not quite
solid. It wasn t anything you could call a light. It certainly wasn t bright, and it was a dull scarlet in color.
But it was something different from the darkness around him.
He almost didn t see the building until he was within touching distance of it. The light outside it was a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]