Caltraps of Time (24 page)

Now they’re all gone: Maggy to milk that cow with the calf they found, with the old bucket; Johnny to hunt; Jane to look for berries. Parked me out on the cobbles. My innards must be busted, keep passing blood, can’t keep anything down. I thought we’d make it, after Maggy and me lasting through the Virus, but it was too good to last. I hope you’re all right somewhere, Denise; I hope nothing happened to you ...Just a drag I am, lying here ... Those bloody rats in the ruin, I can hear them, they won’t get me either. Here goes. Bit of window glass here. Left wrist. Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh! Done it! Done it! Goodbye, Maggy. Aaah.

<>

~ * ~

Mouth of Hell

When the expedition reached the plateau, driving by short stages from the northern foothills, they found it devoid of human life, a silent plain variegated by little flowers and garish patches of moss and lichen. Kettass, the leader, called a halt, and surveyed the landscape while the tractors were overhauled. The sun shone brightly out of a clear sky not far to the south, for the quasi-arctic ecology was one of height, not latitude. Mosquitoes hovered low down over tussocks below wind-level, beetles and flies crawled over the flowers. Beyond a quarter-metre above the ground, however, a bitter wind from the north flowed steadily. The distance was clear but it was difficult to interpret what one saw, and the treeless waste held no clues to size. Ground undulations were few. There were no signs of permafrost beneath. After a time a fox could be made out trekking southward some way off. Some larger tracks, not hooved, showed by the edge of a bog pool. If one wandered far from the vehicles and men, the silence was broken only by the thin sound of the wind where it combed a grass mound, the zizz and skrittle of insects, the distant yipe of fox or other hunting animal, and the secretive giggle of seeping water. Here and there on the north side of a mound or clump traces of rime showed, and a few of the pool edges were lightly frozen.

Returning to the main body, Kettass ordered the midday meal to be prepared. He thought about the situation. The wind was a trouble: it was steady and merciless and evidently below freezing point. One could bake at one’s south side and freeze, literally, on one’s north side. As the hour wore on, the wind increased and became, if anything, colder as the sun grew hotter. But a fringe of dark grey cloud began to climb along the southern horizon, like a ragged curtain seen from upside down, climbed and spread, until its outer streamers menaced the sun. Kettass got the party going again, and the little group of tractors trundled carefully, picking their way towards the clouds.

After two hours, ‘Afpeng spotted a herd of greydeer and the party stopped. A long stalk by ‘Afpeng, Laafif and Niizmek secured three carcasses which were strapped to the vehicles, and the party moved on. The clouds continued to grow and by evening covered half the sky, to the south, the icy wind from the north meanwhile growing in strength. A camp was made, using the tractors as weather walls to supplement the canvas. The deer were cured and their flesh preserved, against a time of shortage of food.

During a wakeful night the wind blew steadily on, slackening only towards dawn. The night was clear and freezing hard. In the morning the sky was cloudless and the whole plateau covered with white frost.

‘What direction now, chief?’ asked Mehhtumm over breakfast.

‘Press on south, simply.’

In two hours the frost was gone. The beetles came out from their hiding places, the sun beat down, the ground was warm, but the wind blew fiercer than ever and as cold. Far ahead, cumulus heads rose fully formed from the horizon, and soon towering thunderclouds covered the southern sky. A screen of false cirrus spread and became a grey pall, shutting off the sun. The wind grew and turned gusty at times.

‘Have you noticed the ground?’ said Mehhtumm in Kettass’ ear some hours later.

‘The slope? Yes.’ And the chief halted the convoy. It was just as though someone had tilted the world slightly. They were pointing down a gentle slope, nearly uniform, which spread east and west as far as eye could see. Behind to the north, the same slope. The change had been too gradual to notice before. Kettass had the troop deploy into a broad arrow with his vehicle in the lead and centre.

In the next two hours the tilt became more and more pronounced. Pools had become moist watercourse-beds. Kettass’ altimeter showed that they were down halfway to sea-level. Yet the vegetation was hardly changed. The mosses were richer, the ground almost hot, but the icy gale hurtled at their backs as if to push them down the hillside, a hillside that stretched mile after mile to either horizon. They were shut in north and south by the tilt of the ground, now visibly a curve round which they could not see. ‘Ossnaal’s face was a grey-green, and Kettass wondered why one who could be so cool on a rock face should be so easily affected by this landscape. Not that ‘Afpeng looked too good, and no one was happy.

‘Where’s it going to end, eh?’ muttered Laafif.

The thundercloud had become a vast wall of dark vapour, lit by frequent flashes. An almost continuous rumbling came from the south, and their sets crackled. Kettass ordered the vehicles to run level with his own. The slope was now a clear threat to progress.

An hour later Kettass stopped the vehicles again. The slope was dangerously steep. Although it was barely noon the light was poor, under the pall of cloud which now arched over most of the sky. Plants were more lush but more isolated, so that much rock and gravel could be seen. The biting wind rushed on.

‘Looks as though we’ll need our climbing suckers after all,’ suggested Mehhtumm. Pripand and Ghuddup were muttering together beside Vehicle 5 and looking darkly about them. ‘Ossnaal’s face was white and everyone looked anxious.

‘If only a handy hollow or ledge would appear, then we could park the tractors,’ went on Mehhtumm. Kettass said nothing. He was considering the altimeter.

‘Must be
below
sea-level,’ he said at last, ‘yet no trees, nothing but this arctic wind, keeping vegetation down, I suppose, and no sign of a bottom.’ Then: ‘Immobilize here, everybody. Keep two vehicle-lengths apart. Cast out grapnels as best you can. Pull out the packs and climbing equipment, just in case. Pitch tents, but well east of the vehicle line, and choose vegetation areas: the gravel may be in the track of floods. Same thing with the stores. After all that’s done, a meal.’

Before the meal was ready the gale was suddenly full of soft hail, which turned to cold rain. The afternoon was punctuated by showers of this sort. The grapnels saved two vehicles from rolling off in a shallow spate.

Kettass held a council of war. ‘Seems to me,’ growled Niizmek, ‘there’s no bottom in front of us. We could send one or two ahead to report, and camp here till we know more.’

‘What do you say, ‘Afpeng?’

‘Strike twenty kilometres east or west, in case there’s a spur or a chimney?’

“Ossnaal?’

‘I think ... I don’t ... It’s a waste of time trying east or west. You can see there’s nothing however far you go. It’s go on or turn back.’

‘You can’t take the lot of us,’ Laafif snapped; ‘you can’t get enough stores down with us, without tractors. If the ground isn’t reached soon and this slope steepens, we’ve had it. Only two or three men can get down, and then only for a few kilometres’ travel.’

Ghuddup and Pripand, mechanics, said nothing.

‘I think,’ now put in Mehhtumm, ‘we might send a patrol party first tomorrow, to go up to half a day down, return by twilight, and report. Then you can decide, eh, chief?’

‘Probably best, but I’ll sleep on it,’ said Kettass.

Few slept that night. The wind was moist, the ground cooled off, the thunder ceased after midnight but the storm of wind roared on. Next morning again a clear sky, apart from some tumbling clouds low down on the southern horizon (which, owing to the slope, was not very far off). It was chilly but not freezing. Kettass chose a party of three after a breakfast at first light among the long dark purple shadows cast across the tilted ground by vehicles and tents. Mehhtumm was to lead; for the other two Kettass asked for volunteers. To his surprise ‘Ossnaal and Ghuddup spoke up. ‘If we’re not able to use the tractors I’ll be at a loose end. Pripand can keep an eye on them. I like climbing, if we get any,’ said Ghuddup. ‘Ossnaal assured Kettass he was fit; ‘I want to find out what we are really coming to.’

The trio set off almost at once; besides iron rations and water, ropes, karabiners and the newly devised suckers, they carried oxygen. ‘You don’t know how deep this basin is going to go, and what air you’ll encounter,’ Kettass pointed out.

At first they were in communication with the main party, but at about five kilometres reception grew too faint, partly from the crackling that came with the morning’s cumulonimbus. Before this Mehhtumm reported that the air pressure suggested they were 2,000 metres below mean sea-level, that the slope was over 50º from the horizontal, that the surface was rock and sand, interspersed with unusual and highly coloured lichen, that there were numerous small torrents east and west of them, and that mist and cloud had appeared, hovering off the edge not far below. After that, silence ... until a hysterical signal, eventually identified as Mehhtumm’s, in the deep evening twilight.

~ * ~

Soon after they lost radio contact with the camp, Mehhtumm, ‘Ossnaal and Ghuddup paused to stare at the cloud formations. Swags of dirty grey, like dust under beds, floated in the air level with their eyes and a kilometre or so south. Lightning from the formless curtain behind turned them into smoky silhouettes. The cumuloid heads above had largely vanished in the general mass of thundercloud. The tilted horizon terminated in a great roll of clear-edged cloud like a monstrous eel, which extended indefinitely east and west. The ground air, at any rate, was here free of the gale, but the rush of wind could be heard between the thunder. The atmosphere was damp and extremely warm. The rock surface was hot. What looked like dark, richly coloured polyps and sea-anemones thrust and hung obscenely here and there from crannies. The scene was picked out now and again by shafts of roasting sunlight funnelling down brassily above an occasional cauliflower top or through a chasm in the cloud-curtain. Progress even with suckers was slow. Mehhtumm got them roped together.

An hour later the slope was 70º, with a few ledges bearing thorn bushes, dwarf pines, and peculiar succulents. The torrents had become thin waterfalls, many floating outwards into spray. A scorching breeze was wafting up from below. Two parallel lines of the roller cloud now stretched above them, and the storm seemed far above that. The smooth, brittle rock would take no pitons.

A curious patternless pattern of dull pink, cloudy lemon yellow and Wedgwood blue could just be discerned through the foggy air between their feet. It conveyed nothing, and the steepening curvature of their perch had no visible relation to it. Altimeters were now impossible to interpret, but they must clearly be several kilometres below sea-level. Crawling sensations possessed their bodies, as though they had been turned to soda-water, as Ghuddup remarked, and their ears thrummed.

Mehhtumm and Ghuddup ate part of their iron rations and swallowed some water, but ‘Ossnaal, whose face was a bluish pink, could only manage the water. They took occasional pulls of oxygen, without noticeably improving their sensations.

Two hours later found them clinging to a nearly vertical rock face which continued indefinitely east, west and below. The patternless pattern below their feet was the same, no nearer visibly and no clearer. The waterfalls had turned to fine tepid rain. The air behind them, so far as it could be seen (Mehhtumm used a hand mirror) was a mass of dark grey vapour, with much turbulence, through which coppery gleams of hot sunlight came rarely. The traces of sky above were very pale. The naked rock was blisteringly hot, even through sucker-gloves, but carried a curious purple and orange pattern of staining, perhaps organic. The crawling sensation had become a riot of turbulence in their flesh. Their ears were roaring. Something stabbed in their chests at intervals. Their sense of touch was disturbed and difficult. It was lucky they had suckers. Yet with all this, an enormous elation possessed Mehhtumm, an almost childish sense of adventure. ‘Ossnaal was murmuring continuously to himself. Ghuddup was chuckling and apostrophizing the ‘Paisley patterns’ of the abyss.

Half an hour later ‘Ossnaal gave a shrill cry which could be heard in the others’ earphones, and went into some sort of fit. Fortunately his suckers held.

‘We must get him up somehow. Can we move him foot by foot?’ shouted Mehhtumm. He felt curiously carefree and regarded the crisis as an interesting abstract problem.

‘I’m not going up!’ snarled Ghuddup.

‘You can’t go down and you can’t stay here. Our only chance is to try and get him up bit by bit. Maybe he’ll come to or faint, and we can manage him that way.’

‘I’m not losing our only chance of seeing what’s below,’ snarled Ghuddup again. ‘The hell with ‘Ossnaal, and the hell with you too. You’re yellow, that’s what you are, a yellow skunk, a yellow Paisley skunk!’

Mehhtumm, in a dream, saw Ghuddup, who occupied a central position, saw quickly with a knife through the ropes on his either side. The long ends flailed down. ‘Ossnaal’s twitching body hung from three suckers of his four. Ghuddup spidered nimbly down and was soon virtually out of sight, but his muttered obscenities could be heard in Mehhtumm’s radio. Mehhtumm tried to collect his thoughts, still dreamlike. Finally he arrived at the conclusion that he must go for help, as he could certainly not manoeuvre the sick man by himself, and together they would probably perish uselessly. He pushed ‘Ossnaal’s left hand hard against the rock to fasten the sucker, tested the other three and shifted one. There was nothing to belay to. Extracting a luminous-dye marker from a pocket, he splashed the dye vividly over ‘Ossnaal’s suit and around him. He waited close to ‘Ossnaal for two minutes, trying to rouse him by shouting his name. Finally the man quietened, and muttered something in response to Mehhtumm’s shouts of ‘Hang on; don’t move!’