Beastchild

Chapter Nine

Hulann pushed the access door up and away to his right. Instantly, the booming storm winds rushed down the hole he had made, swept by him, made Leo, who was standing at the foot of the rungs, shiver and hold himself with his arms to contain his heat. Hulann went up two more steps until he could see above the roof of the cab. He inspected the suspension bracket for damage, though he was not certain he would recognize any if he saw it. As the cold bit at him and the wind decided to take off the flat flaps of his ears, he tried to think of some way to avoid crawling onto the roof — and decided there was none. He climbed the rest of the way out, staying on his hands and knees to offer as little resistance as possible to the wind.

He edged his way over the icy roof toward the suspension bracket, grabbed hold of it with both arms when he reached it. He was breathing heavily, and he felt as if he had traveled a dozen miles instead of eight or nine feet.

He looked back the way they had come, at the endless length of swinging cable. Nothing wrong behind them. He turned, looked forward the dozen feet to the header station. There it was. Two feet before the car wheels, there was a lump of dark-cored ice a little more than four inches thick, perhaps half a foot long. The wheels had come up against that, repeatedly, and had been forced back.

It was a minor miracle that they had not been bumped off the cable to crash on the rocky slopes below.

Below.

He looked down, over the edge of the cab, then quickly looked back up. The distance down had seemed frightening from inside the cabin. Unenclosed as he now was, it was perfectly terrifying. He realized, with little surprise, that he was never meant to be a rebel. He was never designed, emotionally, to be on the run, to take risks, to be an outlaw. How had he gotten into this? Guilt, yes. He hadn't wanted to turn the boy in to be slaughtered. But that all seemed so petty now. He was willing to turn a hundred boys in if necessary. Just so he would not have to do what he was beginning to understand he must do if they were to survive.

"What is it?" Leo called.

Hulann turned. The boy had climbed the rungs and had poked his head out of the hole in the roof. His yellow hair seemed almost white now, fluttering above him, sweeping down now and then to blot out his features.

"Ice on the cable. A huge chunk of it. I don't know what caused it. Very unnatural."

"We'll have to go back," Leo said.

"No."

"What?"

The car began swaying slightly more than usual as a stronger gust of wind caught it broadside.

"We can't go back," Hulann said. "I might have tried climbing half the mountain before. Not now. We both got battered around in the cab. We've lost more strength. I'm afraid I'm getting too cold. I have no feeling in my feet at all. We have to get there by cableway or not at all."

"But we'll be thrown loose trying to cross the ice."

"I'm going to break it loose."

The boy, even with his face distorted in the cold, looked incredulous. "How close to the car is it?"

"A couple of feet."

"Can you stand on the roof?"

"I don't think so," he said.

"You mean you plan on — " — "hanging on the cable," Hulann finished.

"You'll fall. You're scared of heights even inside the cab."

"You have any better ideas?"

"Let me," the boy said.

For answer, Hulann stood, gripping the cable, and held it as he walked gingerly along the roof toward the edge.

"Hulann!"

He did not answer.

It was not that he was heroic or that he indulged in acts of foolish courage. At this moment, it was abject fear which drove him, not courage of any stripe. If he did not break that ice, they would die. They would have to go back to the boarding station at the middle of the mountain and make their way up the slopes to the top. Though the storm had not increased in strength, it seemed to have gained thirty miles an hour in velocity, for he could not withstand its battering as well as before. And the wearier they became, the more fierce the storm would seem — until they would collapse in it, go to sleep, and die. There was no sense in sending the boy out on the cable to do the job, for he would surely be blown loose, fall, and shatter upon the rocks. And then there would be no point in going on. It would be as good to die.

He left the roof, holding to the cable with both hands, the muscles of his brawny arms corded and thumping under the strain.

He did not hang on a plumb line, but was blown slightly to the left. He had to fight the wind, his own weight, and the growing ache in his arms…

He found that his hands had a tendency to freeze to the cable.

His lungs burned as the bitter air scorched them. He would have been better off on one set of nostrils, but he could not close the primarys down and still operate on full capacity. And he needed everything he had.

Some of the outer layers of scales were pulling loose. He did not feel any pain — chiefly because the wounds were artificial, but also because his flesh was numbed.

A moment later, he reached the ice lump. He looked up at it, saw a dark, irregular shape within. He could not guess what it might be, but he had no time for guessing games anyway. He let go with one hand, holding the other ready an inch from the cable in case one arm proved too weak to hold him. But, though his nerves screamed and his shoulder threatened to separate at its socket, he found he could manage on the single arm. Raising the other hand, he swung at the ice lump, claws extended.

The very ends of the hard nails shaved the ice. Some of it fell away and was lost in the pulsating snow sheaths.

The impact of the blow sent a tight vibration through the taut cable. The vibration coursed down the arm by which he hung, made his flesh pain even more.

He swung again.

More ice was sliced off. A major fracture appeared in the lump. He reached up, worked his claws into the crack, twisted and pried. The ice broke. Two large pieces fell away. He saw, then, what had caused the lump. A bird had struck the cable, lodged itself on long enough for ice to form to freeze it in place. Since then, the ice had continued to build over it.

He knocked off more ice, then tugged the mangled bird free, looked at it. Its eyes were frozen solid, white and unseeing. Its beak was broken and covered with frozen blood. He dropped it, grabbed the cable with both hands, and began the tricky turn — about to head back for the safety of the roof, then the cab, then the header station, and finally the shelter of the blessed FRENCH ALPINE HOTEL.

Docanil the Hunter sat in a gray swivel chair before a bank of blinking lights and shuddering dials, flanked on either side by Phasersystem technicians who watched him from the corners of their eyes as one might watch an animal that seemed friendly but which one did not quite trust, despite all assurances. "How soon?" he asked the room.

"Any moment now," the chief technician said, flitting about his own console, touching various knobs and toggles and dials, turning some, just brushing others for the assurance they gave him.

"You must find all you can," Docanil said.

"Yes," the technician said. "Ah, here we are now…"

Hulann, the voiceless voice said.

He woke. Though not completely. The voice murmured to him, kept him slightly hazed as it asked questions of him. He felt it probing into his overmind, looking for something. What?

Relax, it whispered.

He started to relax… … then sat bolt upright!

Open to us, Hulann.

"No." It was possible to close down one's contact with the Phasersystem. In the beginning, centuries upon centuries ago, the central committee had decided that if the naoli could not have privacy when they wanted it, then the Phasersystem might become a tyranny, a thing from which there was no escape. Hulann was thankful for their foresight now.

Open, Hulann. It is the wise thing.

"Go. Leave me."

Turn the boy over, Hulann.

"To die?"

Hulann" Go. Now. I am not listening."

Reluctantly, the contact faded, broke, and left him alone with himself.

Hulann sat in the dark lobby of the hotel, on the edge of the sofa where he had been sleeping. A few feet away, Leo snored lightly, drawn into a foetal position, his head tucked down between his shoulders. Hulann thought about the Phasersystem intrusion. They had, of course, been probing to find where he was. He tried to recall those first few moments of the probe to see whether he had given them what they wanted. It did not seem likely. A probe takes several minutes to be truly efficient. They couldn't have learned anything in six or eight seconds. Could they? Besides, would they have prodded him to give up the boy if they had discovered his whereabouts? Highly unlikely.

Before his thoughts could begin to stray to his family in the home system, to his children that he would never see again, he stretched out on the couch and, for the second time in less than an hour, disassociated his overmind from his organic regulating brain, slipped into the nether world pocket of death sleep.

"Well?" Docanil asked the chief technician.

The man handed over the printouts of the probe. "Not much."

"You tell me."

The voice was a rasping command, given in a low but deadly key.

The technician cleared his throat. "They've headed west. They passed the Great Lakes conversion crater. The scene was clear in his mind. They got off the superway at exit K-43 and took the secondary route toward Ohio."

"Nothing more?"

"Nothing more."

"This is not much."

"Enough for a Hunter," the technician chief said.

"This is true."

Docanil left the room, went into the corridor where Banalog waited. He glanced at the traumatist as he went by, as if he did not know him and was only mildly curious. Banalog rose and followed him to the end of the hall, through a plasti-glass door into the frigid morning air. A copter was waiting, a large one with living quarters and enough supplies to last the two of them as long as the hunt required.

"You found them?" he asked Docanil when they were seated in the cockpit of the craft.

"More or less."

"Where are they?"

"West."

"That's all you know?"

"Not quite."

"What else?"

Docanil looked at the traumatist with interest. The glance made the other naoli cringe and draw away, tight against the door of the cabin.

"I was just curious," Banalog explained.

"Fight your curiosity. The rest is for me to know. It can mean nothing to you."

He started the copter and lifted it out of the ruins of Boston, into the wind and snow and bleak winter sky.