‘Good place to check on the rest of the team,’ opined Richard, clearly thinking fast still. John nodded and brought his walkie-talkie to his chilled lips. His eyes narrowly inspected the strange airborne stratum so crushingly close above them as he began to call the teams in, hampered by the bright, thick gloves he wore.
He began with Tom Snell’s because he was still waiting to hear details of the shape of their discovery. He soon got through, but heard more than he had bargained for.
‘Hello, Tom, this is John, over.’
‘Hello, John. Glad to hear from you; we’ve been trying to raise you for an hour or more.’
‘Any news?’
‘Quite a bit. Our readings seem to be in the shape of an arrowhead pointing into the centre of the berg.’
‘An arrowhead?’
‘Correct. An arrowhead about twenty metres at the base and about the same from base to apex. Pointing to the centre of the berg, about five kilometres to the north of Psyche’s current anchorage. But there’s more. My other teams have registered a whole series of readings. None high. All small. But lots of them. They seem to be in a series of circles all round the arrowhead. As near as we can judge.’
‘Do the circles reach out to the cliff overlooking Psyche?’
‘No. We’ve been all along that section of the coast but it’s clear.’
Thank God, thought John as he clumsily thumbed Colin’s wavelength and began to check on the conditions overlooking Kraken on the opposite side of the berg. They too were blessedly clear. Steve Bottom’s report made John’s usually open countenance fold into a frown again, however. The square, reliable first officer and his team were in a valley parallel to John’s valley, shorewards and a little ahead. They were concerned about the quality of the ice. They had come across two crevasses already, their narrow mouths betrayed by slow whirlpools of sinking sand. And they had come upon a series of caves which reached back into the increasingly precipitous cliff faces on either hand. Beware, Steve warned. The ice which had borne the brunt of the harmattan was honeycombed, perishing and dangerous.
‘Right,’ said John decisively as he switched his walkie-talkie to GENERAL RECEIVE and hung it back on his belt. ‘It’s time to get moving again.’
‘Right-oh,’ said Richard cheerfully and stepped over the edge of the slope. He made no attempt whatsoever to go down carefully or in a controlled manner; he simply stepped out over the void as though he half expected the air to support him. He came down hard upon his right heel, for the slope fell away steeply into the throat of the high-sided little valley. This high, near the watershed, the sand had all washed away, so his heel came down onto hard ice and it skidded down the hill.
Richard pitched forward as his left leg collapsed at the knee. His weight went over his centre of gravity and the whole of his long body followed that injudiciously placed heel down the slope into the valley below. He was fortunate to topple onto his side so that at least he had the chance of pulling his legs together and in the end he went down riding on his backside, like a child too poor to afford a toboggan.
Had John not been adjusting his walkie-talkie he might have been able to catch his friend, but as things were, the wild leap to grab the rapidly vanishing left arm did nothing more than take John over the edge to join Richard in his wild, incredibly dangerous ride. But where Richard was lucky enough to gain some kind of control over his breathtaking downward slide, John simply went head over heels to land spread-eagled on his belly; and then he slid even more quickly downwards.
At first the wild career was an overwhelming mass of mostly painful sensation shot through with a piercing bitterness in the instant that John realised all his fears about Richard had been fulfilled and the pair of them would be lucky not to be crippled or killed here. He found that he was screaming at the top of his voice and was unsure whether the sound was the result of the bitter realisation or the shocking agony in his elbows and knees. His chin came in violent contact with granite-hard ice. His mouth snapped closed and instantly flooded with blood from a bitten tongue. He saw flashes of light all round the edge of his vision, then a wave of porridgy slush slapped him in the face and he saw nothing clearly for some time. His world shrunk to an internal mindscape of half imagined sensation as he slithered precipitously downwards through flashing lights like stars exploding above the curve of a barren planet; through a freezing, Plutonian sea of blood which sloshed chokingly down his gullet to be joined by bitter tasting sand whenever he tried to part his lips to breathe. The sounds of his overwhelming experience were, perhaps, the only things which truly came from outside, washing in through his ears like the blood washing down his throat — equally progenitive. It was as though he was being born anew, pushed back into an environment all liquid and sanguine, where everything was tearing, bitter and painful and he had yet to achieve that first, regenerating, lung-filling primal scream.
But before he could come back to earth or to life, the wild ride was halted. Had he tried to imagine, high on that icy saddle, what it was like to slide down the length of the valley below, he might have supposed the precipitous journey would have culminated in a slow, spinning slide out over the plain at the bottom into which the valley opened. No such luck. The only luck involved, in fact, was that it was his stocky legs and back which hit first, not his all too breakable arms and head. He was on his side when the valley’s most perpendicular wall gathered him to itself and the sensation which was added to all the others was that of being dragged viciously across corrugated iron. First his heels, then his calves; the back of his thighs, his backside; then, punishingly, his kidneys and ribs.
He rolled onto his stomach and came to a stop. He raised his head slowly and spat. He had no idea what he might be spitting at because his eyes were still closed. He emptied his mouth of blood and sand, then continued to hawk and spit, trying unsuccessfully to clear his throat. His mouth hurt even more fiercely than his body and he found himself moving his tongue gingerly, trying to judge how much of it he had bitten off. Once he had established that, his slowly awakening reason suggested, he might try to move his arms and legs, just to see whether he still could.
‘PHEW!’ came an explosive exclamation so close behind him that he established that his whole body could still move by jumping nearly out of his skin. ‘That was quite a ride!’ the exuberant voice continued, oozing childlike excitement.
John rolled over onto his side and opened his eyes. He found that he was looking up the hill along a long brown tongue of mud which was creeping disorientatingly down towards him, like lava, still bearing the signs of his wild ride. Stiffly, he pushed himself to a sitting position and leaned back against the sheer, corrugated wall that had stopped him. From this position he could see across the mouth of the valley to the overhanging crest of ice opposite, where the foot of the slope ended, not in a gentle hillock reaching down to flat ice, but in a concave, overhanging cliff face fanged with icicles like a big surf just about to break.
Maybe fifteen metres away, out towards the middle of the valley and further down the slope, sat Richard Mariner, unutterably filthy and obviously ecstatic. As John looked at him, the big man cast a speculative glance back over his shoulder, clearly calculating his chances of getting back up to the watershed for another ride. John folded his left leg in until his boot heel touched his bottom and tried to pull himself to his feet, but his boots simply skidded out from under him, so he rolled over onto all fours, ready to push himself up.