CHAPTER 33

From the searing heat of hell I plunged into a cold so bitter that it felt like burning. I opened my eyes to find myself crouched against a raging wind, snow flying in my face, the ground covered with ice and heavy banks of snow.

The wind howled and roared. I could feel my face freezing as I closed my eyes to slits against the snow that pelted me like stinging darts.

Stumbling, sliding, stooping low against the biting wind, I groped toward the only protection I could find—a looming snow bank that reared up massively in this bewildering blizzard of white.

I sank down on my haunches and leaned my back against its protection. The cold was inescapable, but at least I was protected from the slashing force of the wind. Looking down through lashes already thick with ice, I saw that I was dressed in what looked like white armor, from throat to foot, although the material seemed to be plastic rather than metal. I realized that, except for my freezing head, I was protected and comfortably warm. The suit was heated. My hands were sheathed in gloves so thin and flexible that they might have been another layer of skin, but they kept my hands warm, nonetheless. Somewhere there must have been a helmet that went with this outfit, but now it was lost in the howling blizzard that was covering the world with featureless white.

I sat there, puzzled and slowly freezing, for what seemed like hours. I shifted the blood flow in my capillaries to keep my head as warm as possible, but that merely postponed the inevitable. In this sub-zero blizzard I was merely using up my body's internal store of energy to delay frostbite and eventual death. I had to find shelter.

But where? The snow blanketed everything. I could not even tell where the horizon might be; all was blurred in endless snow and ice.

And what era was this? Everything that had happened to me so far told me that I was moving backward in time toward The War. If so, I should be in an era that preceded the Neolithic. The blinding storm raging around me made me suspect that I had been sent back into the Ice Age. But my clothing told me differently. I was wearing the products of a highly sophisticated technology—minus the helmet, of course. The midsection of my armored suit was studded with plastic pouches that contained elaborate electronic equipment that I could not even begin to understand. Always before, I had been dressed in a manner appropriate to the era in which I had been placed, but this was no Ice Age hunter's furs.

Where was I? And when?

Those questions were secondary, though, to the problem of survival. One by one, I tried the various pieces of equipment from the pouches around my waist. Most of them made no sense to me at all. One looked vaguely like a telephone or communicator of some sort; it was palm-sized, with a small grill at its base and a tiny plastic oval at the top that looked suspiciously like a miniature video screen. I tapped the three pressure pads that ran across its middle, one by one. They were color-coded red, yellow, and blue. Nothing happened.

In my haste to examine the equipment I put the communicator down on the snow beside me, alongside the other gear I had pulled out of the pouches. I went on yanking them out, trying to determine what they were for, how they worked—to no avail.

Except for the last one. That one was obvious. It was shaped like a pistol and holstered at my right side. Its barrel was a crystal rod circled by metallic cooling fins. Its grip bulged slightly in my hand and felt warm to the touch; no doubt a power pack of some sort was built into it. I curled my finger around its trigger, pointed the gun straight up, and squeezed slowly. It hummed softly for a moment and then fired out a blood-red beam so bright that I had to turn my eyes away from it. For several moments the afterimage burned in my vision. I almost welcomed it, a relief from the deathly white that covered the world around me.

I tried it again, this time averting my eyes from looking directly at the beam as it lanced through the snow-filled air. The beam disappeared in the gray clouds. I got the impression that it could bore a hole through the armor I wore, or through a mountainside, for that matter.

As I slid the gun back into its holster I heard a chirping sound which quickly turned into a steady little whistle. I pulled out the gun again and checked it over; it was neither vibrating nor making the noise. For a moment or two I thought it might have been my ears, perhaps the aftereffect of firing the pistol. But then I glanced down at the various bits of equipment scattered in the snow around me. Already the freshly falling snow was covering them with white—all except the communicator, I saw.

I snatched it and brought it to my ear. Not only was it slightly warm, but the tiny electronic wail was coming from it. The red pressure pad was glowing! Someone was trying to make contact with me!

I punched those buttons and jabbered into the little device for what seemed like hours. No use. All I could get out of it was that steady shrill whistle. I got to my feet, thinking that perhaps voice or picture transmission was being blocked by the snow bank I had huddled against. No difference, except that when I turned around, the whistle changed its pitch.

Squinting against the howling wind, I slowly turned a full circle. The whistle whined up and down the scale, strongest in the direction I had been originally facing, weakest and almost inaudible when I was turned exactly away from that direction.

A directional beam, I told myself. Or, with a thrill of hope bubbling inside me, a direction finder. I knelt down to scoop up the rest of the equipment from the snow, stuffed it into the various pouches at my waist, and then headed off in the direction that the electronic signal indicated, bent almost double against the raging, icy wind.

I trudged through drifts that almost reached my armpits. Fortunately the suit I wore kept me warm and dry. The hair on my head was a brittle mass of ice and I could barely see through the icicles that closed my eyes to slits. All feeling had left my cheeks, my ears and nose. But I could still breathe, and I pushed on, hour after hour, growing hungrier and weaker with each painful, plodding step.

The storm did not let up in the slightest. If anything, it seemed to be growing in strength. But through the swirling snow I began to make out the dim gray form of a massive bulk of rock. The directional beam was leading me toward it, and as I struggled through the blinding snow, I could see that it was a looming cliff of granite, scoured clean of snow by the furious wind, jutting stubbornly up from the snow-blanketed landscape, standing jagged, raw, and dark against the gray, snowy sky.

I floundered through deep drifts, stopping only to check my communicator every few minutes, to make certain I was still following its electronic guidance. My strength was ebbing fast. The cold was seeping into me, leaching the energy of my muscles, numbing my will to press on. Each step became more difficult. My booted feet felt as if they were shod with lead and weighed a ton apiece. All I really wanted to do was to lie down and rest in the soft, comforting snow.

I remembered seeing pictures from some distant era of Eskimo sled dogs curled up happily in little holes they had dug for themselves in the snow, their bushy tails wrapped around their noses, their dark eyes peeping out from a world of white and cold. I stopped for breath and turned to look back at the trail I had broken through the deep snow. Already my tracks were being filled in, obliterated, by the howling storm. The stern gray bulk of the mountain frowned silently down at me as I stood lost in a world of white, totally alone in the universe, as far as I knew. It was time to rest, time to lie down and sleep.

Even my fingers were growing numb, despite the gloves and the suit's overburdened heating system. I let the tiny communicator slip from my fingers. It landed in the snow, its one red square glowering at me accusingly.

"You can glare all you want to," I said to it, in a voice raw with pain. Each breath I took was agony now; the air was so cold that it was burning my lungs.

"I've got to rest," I said to that red light.

It stared back at me, unblinking. The tiny electronic wail cut through the blizzard's howling.

"All right," I rasped. "I'll take ten more steps. Then, if there's no shelter in sight, I'm going to dig a hole for myself and get some sleep."

I forced myself through ten more steps. Then ten more. Then five. The granite cliff seemed as far away as ever. The storm grew in fury.

"There's no point to it," I said to the inanimate little box in my hand. "There's no point..."

A blinding red pencil-beam of light lanced past my head. I plunged down into the snow instinctively and fumbled for the gun at my hip.

The beam streaked out again, and I could hear the air around me crackle.

Friend or enemy? I asked myself, and then almost laughed at the ridiculousness of the question. The enemy was this storm, the cold, the bitter agony of the ice that surrounded me. Anyone who could fire a gun must have heat, and food.

I raised my pistol and fired it straight overhead. That eye-hurting brilliance ought to be visible for miles, even through the storm.

Peering toward the granite cliff, I saw an answering beam angling up into the clouds. I headed for it, adrenaline pumping through my aching body and my limbs flailing through the snow with every last ounce of energy in me.

I saw, up ahead, a dark cleft in the rock, the mouth of a cave. Several people were standing there, clad in the same kind of white armor that I wore. They saw me, too, and began waving frantically, encouragingly. But they did not leave the safety of their shelter.

I plunged ahead, waving my own arms foolishly over my head, yelling hoarsely to them.

"Come on, you can make it!" one of them called.

"Only a few more yards," yelled another.

I staggered toward them, wondering far in the back of my mind why they would not come out of their cave to help me through those last few yards. But that question was swamped by the joy I felt at finding others like myself in this endless desert of ice and snow.

The storm winds had sculpted the snow banks around the base of the cliff into smooth ramps of white. I slithered down one of them, sliding and slipping on the ice until I staggered into their welcoming arms.

They grabbed me, held me up, grinning and laughing happily at me. Beyond them, deeper in the cave, I saw crates of equipment and a big electric radiant-heater glowing red and warm.

"Hey!" one of them said. "He's not from our unit!" Their laughter froze and their grins disappeared as they held me in their arms.

"Just who the hell are you, anyway?"

"What unit are you with?"

"I didn't know there were any other units operating in this sector."

"Come on, buddy—who are you and what are you doing here?"

I had no real answers for them. My body sagged in their arms, every last bit of energy totally spent. My eyes closed and the world went dark.