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he himself had set on previous penetrations ran only a thousand kilometers up
the Shadowline.
That first quarter of the way would be the easy part. The markers would guide
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his computers and leave him free to work or loaf for the four full days needed
to reach the last transponder. Then he would have to go on manual and begin
breaking new ground, planting markers to guide his return. He would have to
stop to sleep. He would use up time backing down to experiment with various
routes. Three thousand kilometers might take forever.
They took him thirty-one days and a few hours. During that time Frog
committed every sin known to the tractor hog but that of getting himself
killed. And Death was back there in the shadows, grinning, playing a little
waiting game, keeping him wondering when the meathook would lash out and yank
him off the stage of life.
Frog knew he was not going to make it back.
No rig, not even the Corporation s newest, had been designed to stay out this
long. His antique could not survive another four thousand clicks of
punishment.
Even if he had perfect mechanical luck he would come up short on oxygen. His
systems were not renewing properly.
He had paused when his tanks had dropped to half, and had thought hard. And
then he had gone on, betting his life that he could get far enough back to be
rescued with proof of his accomplishment.
Frog was a poker player. He made the big bets without batting an eye.
He celebrated success by breaking his own most inflexible rule. He shed his
hotsuit.
A man out of suit stood zero chance of surviving even minor tractor damage.
But he had been trapped in that damned thing, smelling himself, for what
seemed half a lifetime. He had to get out or start screaming.
He reveled in the perilous, delicious freedom. He even wasted water scouring
himself and the suit s interior. Then he went to work on the case of beer some
damn fool part of him had compelled him to stash in his tool locker.
Halfway through the case he commed Blake and crowed his victory. He gave the
boys at the shade station several choruses of his finest shower-rattlers. They
did not have much to say. He fell asleep before he could finish the case.
Sanity returned with his awakening.
 Goddamn, you stupid old man. What the hell you doing, hey? Nine kinds of
fool in one, that what you are. He scrambled into his suit.  Oh, Frog, Frog.
You don t got to prove you crazy. Man, they already know.
He settled into his control couch. It was time to resume his daily argument,
via the transponder-markers, with the controller at the Blake outstation.
 Sumbitch, he muttered.  Bastard going to eat crow today. Made a liar of him,
you did, Frog.
Was anybody else listening? Anybody in Edgeward? It seemed likely. The whole
town would know by now. The old man had finally gone and proved that he was as
crazy as they always thought.
It would be a big vicarious adventure for them, especially while he was
clawing his way back with his telemetry reporting his sinking oxygen levels.
How much would get bet on his making it? How much more would be put down the
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other way?
 Yeah, he murmured.  They be watching. That made him feel taller,
handsomer, richer, more macho. For once he was a little more than the town
character.
But Moira . . . His spirits sank. The poor girl would be going through hell.
He did not open comm right away. Instead, he stared at displays for which he
had had no time the night before. He had become trapped in a spider s web of
fantasy come true.
From the root of the Shadowline hither he had seen little but ebony cliffs on
his left and flaming Brightside on his right. Every kilometer had been exactly
like the last and next. He had not found the El Dorado they had all believed
in back in the old days, when they had all been entrepreneur prospectors
racing one another to the better deposits. After the first thousand virgin
kilometers he had stopped watching for the mother lode.
Even here the immediate perception remained the same, except that the contour
lines of the rift spread out till they became lost in those of the hell plain
beyond the Shadowline s end. But there was one eye-catcher on his main
display, a yellowness that grew more intense as the eye moved to examine the
feedback on the territory ahead.
Near his equipment s reliable sensory limits it became a flaming intense
orange.
Yellow. Radioactivity. Shading to orange meant there was so much of it that
it was generating heat. He glared at the big screen. He was over the edge of
the stain, taking an exposure through the floor of his rig.
He started pounding on his computer terminal, demanding answers.
The idiot box had had hours to play with the data. It had a hypothesis ready.
 What the hell? Frog did not like it.  Try again.
The machine refused. It knew it was right.
The computer said there was a thin place in the planetary mantle here. A
finger of magma reached toward the surface. Convection currents from the deep [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]