At that moment the explosion occurred. Right on time. And she was still alive.
It was not even frightening. It was, she thought, as it would have been in her mother’s womb if her mother had fallen. Some external event had taken place. But here in the tunnel she moved with the ground, and even the sound of the explosion was too huge and slow to be frightening.
So that part of the plan, at least, had worked. Now, if Kris could rally the patrol to the attack — If they remembered their radiation ponchos and the wind was not too unfavorable — If the Greasies did not pull themselves together fast enough to resist — If the bomb had been in the right place after all — There were too many ifs. Her place was with her troops, not here.
A sighing, slithering sound a few meters behind her caught her attention. She turned the headlamp toward it and saw that a section of the roof had collapsed into the tunnel.
Shaken loose by the nuclear blast? Maybe. More likely not. Creepies had been known to try to trap a foe by plugging tunnels before. She was terribly easy to find and follow, with the trail of blood from her knee.
It was time to get out of there. Doggedly detaching herself from the pain and from the fear that one of them was silently creeping up behind her, she resumed her crawl.
In ten meters her head struck dirt.
She turned on the light again. It was fresh dirt. The burrowers had closed both ends of the tunnel. She whirled quickly. Nothing moved behind her. She was alone.
Margie Menninger said to the wall, “The most basic human fear is of being buried alive.” She waited for a moment, as though hoping someone would answer. Then she pulled out her pistol with one hand and reached for her entrenching tool with the other. It wasn’t there. Then she remembered she had left it where they assembled the bomb.
Fingers then.
She dropped the pistol and tore at the dirt plug with her bare hands. Furiously. Then in terror. At last because there was nothing else for her to do.
From horizon to horizon, as far as Charlie could see, there was a solid undercast of clouds, and taller ones poked up all around. The storm was weakening off toward the ocean, but here, somewhere above the Greasy camp, it had been hours since he had seen the ground at all, days since he had last seen the little party of his friend ’Anny. And it was impossible to stay on station! At all levels up to ten thousand meters and more the wind was strong and solidly toward the Heat Pole, and it dragged him remorselessly away. Charlie could read the fraying of the anvil-shaped tops of the cumulonimbus; it showed that at fifteen thousand meters there was a return flow. But he and the two females of his flock who survived were worn and tired. They had lost much lift. It took them forever to reach those lofty levels.
As they labored upward a new flock came sailing down from the Pole, and Charlie led his tiny fragment to join it, eager for a new audience for his songs about the new friends from Earth, hungry to hear songs he had not heard before. It had been long and long since he had joined in a proper eisteddfod, and his soul ached for it. The new flock was small, fewer than sixty adults, but there were voices in it he had never heard, and he sang greeting toward them with joy.
White light lashed across them.
The flare caught them all by surprise. Charlie was one of the fortunate ones. He was facing away from the blast, and so he was not blinded at once. He saw the high cirrus starkly outlined, blue-white against the sullen, crimson Jemman sky, saw the shapes of the new flock picked out in brighter, sharper colors than he had ever seen. Minutes later he heard the sound, and behind him and below a new thundercloud boiled up out of the undercast.
Chorus of welcome became a dirge of pain and fear. Charlie could only reply with a lifting song. The seniors of the new flock took it up, and the swarm dropped ballast, belched swallowed hydrogen into their sacs, and rose. A few did not. They were not merely blind; they were in too great pain to respond.
Although they were far from the blast, when the winds struck, the swarm was thrown helter-skelter across the sky. Charlie had never felt such gusts before. Always in other storms there had been warning — gathering clouds and the deadly play of lightning to tell them it was time to swallow hydrogen and ride out the storm, or soar to escape above it. This time there was no warning and no escape. His feeding flaps and winglets felt as though they were being torn out at the roots. Captive of the huge sail of his surface, he was thrown through the new flock, caroming off their seniors, cannoning balloonets out of the way.
And then, without warning, he felt the familiar creeping tension of the surface of his gas sac and recognized the sweet, stinging odor of the females. Estrus, swarming time, time to breed!
The spinnerets of the females were working furiously now, spraying threadlike ova and pheronomes into the air. All around the swarm, the air was fragrant with the demand to breed. For Charlie, and for all the males, there was no question about what to do next: hive up, spray milt, soar back and forth through the stinging mist while their teats elongated, convulsed, spread their seed. The skins of their air sacs tightened, drawing the features of their tiny faces into caricatures. Behind the expressions that looked like pain was pain. The overtures to sex were no joy to Charlie. They were like being locked in an Iron Maiden with acid-tipped spikes. Only the relief that came when the semen squirted out made the pain end.
But it was wrong, wrong!
Charlie sang out his question and his fear, and the new flock sang with him. What breeding was this, with the flare coming from the enemy ground and not the sky? What was this heat that smote them like a fist, following on the thunder and the wild gales? Charlie could see that in the turbulence most of the silklings had been missed by the milt. They were all over the sky. Within his own body he could feel it was wrong. Where was the bubbling of hydrogen to replenish his sac, radiation-stung out of his body fluids? And what — what was this monstrous, bubbling cloud that was growing so fast it was drawing them all toward it?
And that was the question that answered all the others and put an end to questions forever for Charlie as the searing heat of the nuclear cloud burned out his eye patches, cracked his gas sac, touched off the hydrogen that spilled out, and ended his songs for always.
TWENTY-THREE
As NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS went, it was inconsiderable. Less than a kiloton, it would hardly have been noticed in the multi-megaton blasts that had scoured the surface of Earth. When the imploding grenades forced the bright plutonium needles out of their sheaths to mate, they were in contact for only a few microseconds before their own immense reaction drove them apart.
But by then the explosion had occurred. The needles, the shell, the walls of the tunnel around them had been vaporized to a hot gas, billions of atmospheres of pressure, irresistibly determined to escape. It escaped. Within a few thousandths of a second it had formed its pipsqueak fireball, fifty meters across, racing upward at five hundred kilometers an hour, brighter than Kung, brighter than Earth’s sun, brighter than hundreds of them put together. The fireball grew and soared, first bright red with its burden of nitric acid, then whitening and losing its brightness as it began to cool.
Even through closed eyes that stark flare was visible to the people huddled in the cave, and the shock front that swept over them shook the cave and their bodies. The noise was immense. After it, over the echoes, Kris Kristianides was shouting, “Stay down! Don’t open your eyes! Wait!” For nearly ten minutes she kept them there, and then, slowly, she peered through half-closed lids and the dark goggles and announced they could get up.