What made it worse was the nastiness all around Sandy’s position. “Control yourself, Wimp!” snapped Demmy. “Wooof! Augh!” moaned Helen, and Polly, at the controls, cried, “Confound you, Sandy, why can’t you use a bag or something?” Then she didn’t have time for any more comments, because the lander was in the garbage belt. The preprogrammed approach certainly missed most of the largest objects, but there was no possible approach that could have been sure of missing them all. So when the radio locator identified a smaller one on a collision course it activated the side thrusters and they lurched away; when they could not lurch far enough to avoid contact entirely the magnetic repellers slowed the impact down.
Even so, everyone in the lander could hear muffled thumps and thuds as slowed and tiny but still worrisome lumps of things hit the outside wall of the lander. Fainter, sharper sounds were even tinier objects splattering themselves into plasma against the foil outer skin, and the plasma thumping harmlessly against the lander skin. Polly shouted in anger as a vagrant hawkbee flitted before her face. “Get that thing out of my way! How am I supposed to fly this heap with bugs flying into my eyes?”
But the hawkbee was thrown away from her face as the lander jolted away from another object; and then the ship was in its final glide path to the only flat meadow the radio-reflection screen displayed. Even through his misery Sandy could hear Polly’s agitated hissing. That should have been the easiest part of the landing. Their velocity was way down, and the automatic feedback controls were supposed to be smoothing out all the vagrant downdrafts and microbursts near the ground. Only they weren’t. “For a pissant little planet,” Polly snarled, “this place of yours sure has some bad weather!” The shaking of the spaceplane proved her point. Ground speed was down to sixty or seventy miles an hour, but the winds outside were gusting a lot more than that. They threw the craft around like a toy.
Polly’s landing was more like a controlled crash, but the lander was built to take punishment. As they touched down the forward thrusters went on to stop them, hurling them all against their restraining nets. They stopped the roll in a couple of hundred yards, well before they were near the line of bending, flailing trees.
“We’re down,” Polly announced.
It didn’t feel that way. Even stopped, the plane was still jiggling uneasily in the wind. Polly belched worriedly a few times as she thumbed the viewscreens on. Two of them flashed together on the bulkhead over the controls. One showed the landing site as simulated from space, the other the actual scene outside the ship. The simulated scene was glacially, whitely static. The actual one was full of horizontally driven rain and tossing evergreens.
The six-pointed star that marked their position was in the same place on both screens, winking rapidly to show that the landing was where it had been planned to be. “Why are we having a storm?” Obie called fearfully. “Did you land in the wrong place?”
“It’s the right place,” Polly muttered in irritated wonder. “But where’s all this ‘snow’?”
A couple of hours later Sandy was in his parka and mukluks, standing in the doorway of the lander. Sentimentally he touched the pocket where he had his mother’s picture, but Polly was in no mood for sentiment. “Go on, Wimp!” she snapped, giving him a nudge.
He went. He managed to catch at the ladder-stick as he went out and climbed down easily enough. The fall was only ten or twelve feet, but even in this weak Earth gravity it could have done real harm if he had missed. He trudged around the back of the ship, catching a faint wind-driven whiff of alcohol from the jets. He oriented himself toward the place where the nearest road should be and began trudging through 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 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 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.