“But don’t you have some means of releasing this end of the cable if that happens?” asked Kruger.
“It’s been tried but usually the pilot doesn’t react fast enough to get any good out of it. You don’t know it’s fouled until the cable jerks your nose down and breaks you out of your safety belt.” Kruger gulped and was silent.
The flight was interesting but relatively uneventful. It was slow, of course, by Kruger’s standards; Dar could scarcely ever head straight toward an objective. He had to coast from one rising air current to the next and Kruger was by no means always sure just how he found his up-drafts. Dar, of course, could not always explain his knowledge; it had taken him a lifetime of about forty terrestrial years to pick it up and he could hardly impart it all in one flight.
One thing was certain: Dar Lang Ahn could have walked away with any sailplane prize ever offered on Earth without even realizing that he had been in a competition. The mere fact that the present flight covered over fifteen hundred miles was not the principal reason for this; rather it was the fact that he should take such a flight as a matter of course, with no more concern about the possibility of failure than a man considers when he starts to drive from Honolulu to New York. As the hours passed with no sign of the further shore Kruger began gradually to appreciate some of this.
When the coast finally did appear it was totally different in nature from the one they had left. That had been relatively flat, except for occasional volcanic cones; this was rugged. There were ranges of mountains produced quite obviously by both thrusting and block faulting — apparently young mountains, as geologists class such things. Steep cliffs, thousands of tiny streams rich in waterfalls and rapids, sharp, bare peaks — all told the same story. The air currents were incredibly complex and Dar used them with a skill bordering on the supernatural. The other gliders had long since disappeared; their lower wing loadings had enabled them to make “jumps” from updraft to updraft which Dar had not been willing to risk.
With the coast in sight Dar had begun to work to the left, and crossed it on a long slant. Usually they were too high for any animals to be seen or even the details of the forests that clothed the lower slopes of the mountains, but sometimes the glider would drift along the leeward side of a valley to make use of the air currents being forced up the next ridge, and Kruger could see that the trees were different. One reason was fairly evident: the temperature was lower, as Kruger could easily feel. At the highest altitudes reached by the glider he had felt comfortable at the start of the flight, now the comfort point was much closer to the ground.
This grew worse as the hours passed. Kruger was not sure how far they traveled but realized that it must be hundreds of miles. He was tired, hungry, and thirsty. Dar seemed indifferent to all these ills, as well as to the cold which was beginning to make his human companion almost regret the jungle. They had spoken little for many hours but each time Kruger thought of asking how much longer the flight was to last he was stopped by his reluctance to appear complaining. Eventually it was Dar who spoke.
“We may not make it before dark,” he said suddenly. “I’ll have to land soon, and go on when the sun comes up again.” Kruger looked in surprise at the blue star, whose motions he had long since ceased to notice particularly. Dar was right, it seemed. Arren was almost on the horizon behind them and a little to the glider’s right; it was very slowly going down. Kruger tried to use this fact to form an idea of his location on the planet — it must mean something, since he had seen the blue sun in the sky constantly for over six terrestrial months. One point seemed clear: Theer would not rise this year. They had crossed to the “dark side” of Abyormen. An ice cap suddenly seemed a reasonable feature of the landscape.
Nevertheless, judging by the angle at which the star was setting it should not go very far below the horizon, Kruger decided. He put this point to Dar.
“It will not actually get too dark to see, will it?” he asked.
“No, but we do not habitually fly when neither sun is in the sky,” was the answer. “Vertical air currents are much rarer and harder to identify from any distance. However, I will do my best to get to the Ramparts before the sun goes down; I have no great appetite for sitting on a hilltop for fifteen or twenty hours.” Kruger concurred heartily in this wish.
It was hard to tell just what the star was doing, since their altitude varied so widely and rapidly, but that it was setting there could be no doubt. His attention was so concentrated on the vanishing star that he failed to note the landscape below as he might otherwise have done, and the ice cap was in sight for some time before he noticed it. After that he noticed little else.
A great river flowing under their course toward the now distant sea was the first warning that caught his eye. Following it upstream he saw that it rose at the foot of a gigantic wall that gleamed pinkly in the nearly level rays of Alcyone. It took him several seconds to realized that the wall was the foot of a glacier. The river continued inland, but it was a river of ice. The mountains actually were higher toward the center of the continent, but to Kruger’s view now they seemed to shrink, for their bases were buried in what looked like the accumulated snows of centuries. As far as the eye could reach from the highest point of the glider’s flight the field of ice spread on. Most of it was held motionless by the great hills that strove to pierce it from beneath, but near the edge the glaciers oozed free and tried to make their way to the ocean. The ice was certainly a thousand feet or more thick here at the edge of the cap; Kruger wondered what it could be further inland.
But the sight of the ice cap meant that they could not be far from their goal; Dar would not have come so close to a fruitful source of downdrafts unless he had to. The pilot admitted this when Kruger asked him. “We should make it, all right. About two more climbs, if I can find good enough updrafts, and we can coast the rest of the way.” The boy forbore to interrupt him any more and watched the landscape in fascination as forest gave way to patches of snow and ice, and soil to black and gray rock streaked with white.
Eventually the pilot pointed, and following his finger the boy saw what could only be their landing place. It was a level platform, apparently a natural terrace, far up the side of one of the mountains. The valley below was filled with ice, part of a glacier which remained solid for fully a dozen more miles after flowing beneath this point. The terrace was simply an entryway; the mouths of several huge tunnels which seemed to lead deep into the mountain were visible opening onto it. Several winged shapes lying near the tunnel mouths left no doubt of the nature of the place.
To Kruger it seemed as though they could glide to it from their present position, but Dar Lang Ahn knew only too well the fierce downdrafts present along the edge of the terrace when the sun was not shining on the mountain face, and took his last opportunity to climb. For two or three minutes as he circled, the glider was in the last rays of Alcyone and must have been visible to the watchers on the terrace below.
Then the star vanished behind a peak and the terrace swelled under the aircraft’s nose. Dar brought the machine across the level space with five hundred feet to spare, made two tight slipping turns within its confines to get rid of the excess altitude, and settled like a feather in front of one of the tunnel openings. Kruger, half-frozen from the last climb, stumbled thankfully out of the machine and gratefully accepted the water jug which one of the waiting natives immediately presented him.