“What is it?” he asked. Suddenly, it seemed as if they must have been mad to stop and sleep.
“Wolves,” she said.
He relaxed a little. Wolves might be cunning and powerful, but not so cunning and not so powerful as a man with a gun or a vibra-beam weapon working as a soldier of the Alliance. He moved over to where she sat, looked through the opening. Not more than six feet away, a great gray-brown wolf, much like those that Proteus had fought off the day before, sprawled in the thick carpet of snow, great red blotches of blood staining the purity around it. Its mouth was open, its tongue lolled to the side.
“I didn't want to wake you,” she said. “I thought this might be equipped with a built-in silencer. It wasn't.”
“I didn't know you could use a gun,” he said.
“Everyone was a soldier in the last days of the war.”
“I guess so.”
“There are others,” she said quietly, staring intently at the clumps of brush that pushed through the snow.
“Where?”
“They scattered when I shot. But they're not too far away. You can be sure of that.”
“Proteus—”
“I discovered something unsettling about your Proteus,” she interrupted, looking behind at the grav-plated weapons system which floated above the earth in absolute silence.
“What?”
“He's your protection robot, not mine. The wolves kept coming closer. He kept scanning them, very attentively, but I realized that he was not going to shoot any of them unless they went for you. If they attacked me, it was perfectly all right.”
He nodded, a quiver of horror running through him as he contemplated the serious oversight in their preparations he had made. He had been thinking of Proteus as their guardian, not as his own private soldier, for he had been extending the new concept of “us” everywhere the old concept of “me” had prevailed. But Proteus would be oblivious of emotional developments such as that and would stand blithely by and watch her perish if her own life was not imperiled by the same enemy and at the precise same instant as Davis's own.
The cataracted eyes of the spherical defender stared out into the winter wasteland: white viewing white.
“From now on,” he said, “well tie the plastic down so that there's only a single entrance instead of two. If I hadn't been so tired this morning, I would have done that. Then I'll sleep near the open side, with Proteus near the entrance.” He pushed up the sleeve of his coat and the sleeves of the two sweaters which he wore beneath it. “We've been asleep for about five hours. It's getting on toward the end of the morning. If we're going to make use of the daylight to walk, we'd better get started.”
They drank more water and ate some chocolate, then carefully folded the blanket to unalign its heat emanators so that they could cool, packed things away, took down the plastic sheet that formed their shelter and stowed that. In fifteen minutes, they were ready to move out, with Leah carrying the suitcase and Davis toting both rucksacks. They set out down the mountainside with a great deal more ease than they had managed in their sleepiness and exhaustion the first time, five or six hours ago.
The terrible winds had died, though there were now and then gusts that startled them and unbalanced them, toppling them into snowbanks. The snow was still falling, rather heavily but in less than a blizzard pace. They could see some distance ahead, and the way looked uniformly easy down this ravine and up the other side, at least. There were drifts of snow as high as their waists in some spots, though these could most always be circumvented if they took time and patience to find their way. Everywhere, the white stuff was up to mid-calf on Davis and up to the girl's knees, which slowed and tired them and made them wonder whether they would be able to make the sort of time necessary to stay well ahead of the Alliance forces that must — at dawn— have struck out on their trail.
When they reached the bottom of the depression and started up the opposite slope, they found that going down through the waves of the drifts had been far easier than pushing upwards through them. They were required, now, to fight the angle of the earth, the treacherous and unseen footing beneath winter's blanket, and the stiff resistance of more than a foot of fine, tightly packed snow. Near the top, they were presented with yet another obstacle: an overhanging drift that crowned the last twenty feet of their path and made reaching the top of the second mountain difficult if not impossible. At Davis's suggestion, they worked to the right, moving horizontally now, searching for a break in the overhang through which they might struggle to achieve the blessed levelness of the summit. But they found, three hundred yards along, that the ravine dropped into a sheer cliff where there was no toehold and that the overhanging drift continued beyond even this. They were forced to backtrack, following their own footprints, until they came to their starting point. They worked left, then, and found much the same situation there as well. There was no break at all in the deep and unscalable snow wall that blocked their progress.
“What now?” Leah asked, setting the suitcase down and wiping perspiration off her forehead. She had to resist an urge to pull off the heavy coat for a feeling of coolness against her skin. That body heat that now bothered her was exactly what she needed to maintain her life, she knew, and the blast of frigid air that would hit her when she stripped might very well give her the pneumonia that both of them feared.
“Two things,” he said.
“Full of ideas aren't we.”
“Don't congratulate me until you hear how unpleasant both of the possibilities are.”
“They couldn't be any more unpleasant than waiting here until we either freeze or get caught.”
“Well,” he said, wishing he could drop the rucksacks but knowing if he did he would never put them on again, “we can either turn back, climb the other side of the ravine, cross to another way down the first mountain, and make a second attempt at getting off it, then work our way back in the direction we want to go. The flaw is that we may run into the same thing — or something worse no matter where we go. And it's still snowing — which means every hour we delay getting on our way, there's another inch of snow we have to push through.”
“Sounds bad.”
“I don't like it either.”
“The second way, then.”
He frowned. “We break a way through the drift hanging over us, go. right through and on our way.”
“It looks seven or eight feet deep, anyway. We don't have a shovel, and even if we did we couldn't use it properly from a slope like this.”
“We do have Proteus,” he said.
She grinned. “Of course! The weapons!”
“Don't get too excited, love. There's a hazard. Proteus will refuse to get more than a few feet from me, which means we'll have to be right where he's working. And since his range of fire isn't great enough to work from the bottom of the ravine or the other side, we'll have to stand about halfway up the slope while he blasts away. If there's a slide, we're going to be right in the path of it.”
They both looked at the shelf of white above them. “What if he uses the vibra-beam instead of the projectile weapon?” she asked.
“I can't direct that one. It's an automatic system at his discretion, just like the plasti-plasma tentacles. But the projectile business responds to vocal commands. It's all we have.”