The hut lay only a little more than a hundred yards ahead, but I was slowed by the need to clip and re-clip my belt. With nine anchor posts behind me the hut was still not in sight, but I thought I could hear faintly the idling note of the TK4*s engine. The temptation to run towards it was almost irresistible; once inside there would be the safety of the metal structure, the warmth of the heater, the speed of the machine itself. Inside I'd be safe. But the knowledge that I was not alone out there dictated caution. He might have
- probably had - the rifle, unless he'd taken the risk of returning it to Barney's office so that its absence would go unremarked. Time was one of his problems, too; he dared not be absent long enough for the absence to be noticed. If he could destroy the evidence and get back quickly, it might be difficult, even impossible to pin on him his long sequence of crimes. And if he could get rid of me, it would almost certainly be impossible. If my body, too, were lost beneath the snow, the diary would be lost with it, and the sheet from Kirton's notebook!
I went down full length in the snow and began to kitten-crawl forward, parallel with the hand line but no longer fastened to it, and pushing before me with my hands a tiny wall of snow no more than six inches high.
I saw the hut at the same second that the idling engine note became a roar and the huge diesel tractor swung into view, lights blazing, from behind the hut. I shut my eyes tight, but not quickly enough, and the powerful white beams assaulted my widened pupils, blinding me completely. Shakily I rose to my feet, sightless and disorientated by dazzle patterns, and tried desperately to gauge direction by sound alone. The roar was from my right, though it seemed now to fill the night air all round me. He must be twenty-five or thirty yards away and his maximum speed six miles an hour or so. I swung left and tried to run, but my foot caught in the slack hand line and I pitched full length. As I struggled to rise, my foot remained hooked in the line, briefly but enough to delay me, and already the massive roar of the big diesel engine seemed to be on top of me. I turned my head, squinting my eyes against the glare, and thought I discerned, among the redness in my eyes, a wide dark shape with the glare of the lights above it, and I knew then that this was not just a tractor but a bulldozer, blade down, that was hammering down on me. I made two or three lumbering strides away from it, but my foot slipped on the loose snow and I spun off balance, and by the time I'd steadied myself again, it was almost on top of me. Terrified, I turned to face it, knowing there was no way now that I could avoid that eighteen-foot blade : it would be on me before I could move aside. The half-seen black rectangle with those blinding white lights mounted high above it roared down on me, only a few feet away, and knowing suddenly there was no other way, I dived towards it, seizing desperate handholds on the top edge and lifting my feet clear of the surface and hanging there as the blade drove onwards.
He must have seen me clearly, because a second later the blade began to rise in the air as he brought in the hydraulics. 1 clung on grimly as it lifted, guessing what would happen next, but shaken by the suddenness as the hydraulics were cut and the bladecrashed down, seeking to dislodge me. An appalling drag on my arms and shoulders signalled that it was lifting again and I knew I'd never survive another drop. Already my hands were beginning to lose their hold and the blade had only swung half up. I'll never know what made me let go then deliberately, rather than be shaken off a second or two later. I slid down the blade's curve, on to the snow, and rolled frantically beneath its leading edge, praying I'd make it before the blade crashed down again.
Swivelling round, I lay flat, and along the whole length of my body felt the whump as the blade was released. I was trapped now in the ten-foot gap between the two huge tracks, still almost sight-less, but crawling fast towards the rear. If he pivoted now, it was all over. Free now of these murderous lights, blinking rapidly, I discerned dimly the rectangle of snow behind the moving bull-dozer and drove myself, almost swimming in the loose snow, towards it. The huge steel body of the machine was only inches above my head, the tracks hideously close to my moving hands. And then above me, the roar of sound changed subtly as the power was adjusted on the tracks and he began to turn the machine. I crawled with it in an overwhelming panic, swinging my body round with the machine, and somehow making forward ground in that moving, lethal tunnel of machinery. One of the tracks actually buffeted my boot as I crawled clear. But I was clear, and now I could take up a position behind the tractor, where he couldn't see me. And I stayed behind it, holding on to the rear of it and stepping carefully sideways as it swung, pivoting through a full circle, the headlights sweeping the ice while he searched for me. If only I'd had that home-made petrol bomb! But I hadn't; it was in the cab of the hovercraft and I didn't even know where the hovercraft was ! I tried to put myself in his place, at the controls of the bulldozer. He'd be wondering, surely, whether he'd got me. With luck he'd be half-convinced, more than half-convinced, that he had. He'd be hoping that nobody could vanish beneath blade and tractor and survive. But he'd need to be sure, to go on looking, to prove to himself that nobody but himself was now moving on that bleak snow surface.
Now, at last, my sight was recovering from that dreadful glare and suddenly, past the slowly turning bulldozer, I saw the hovercraft caught clearly by its knifing lights through the heavy curtain of snow. And I thought I saw something else. Not with certainty; it could have been an optical illusion; but watching carefully, I became increasingly sure. A wind was starting to blow. I turned my face into it briefly and felt its cold breath, and suddenly the snow was no longer falling vertically: caught by the air movement its downward path tilted. And now I was sure: the hovercraft itself, with only the touch of its skirts to provide friction on the loose surface, was beginning to drift on the wind. It was like a boat in so many ways, and this was one!