Creek Fire
A story by Keith Croes
The planet was like her soul, not in its coldness but its solitude. The view out the windows resonated with something in her in a way that made her want to cry out. For herself. For everything in the universe that was forgotten and lost. She would put forth the message in a rage of self-affirmation: I am beautiful! I am a jewel! I cannot be overlooked! And for one shining instant, the driven old woman would be a flaming diamond, and the common things would be uncommon. The scales would fall from the eyes.
The place didn't even have a name. The scientists had dubbed it EU-220. And that was appropriate, she thought as they jogged along, because she knew as much about her soul -- about Pat Yardley -- as she knew about the planet's craggy terrain, which was not much. Only that it was vast, forbidding and, to her, beautiful beyond words.
And familiar somehow, even as her soul was only familiar. She had seen it but fleetingly in her 70-year scramble up the ranks of the U.S. Mapping and Exploration Service. As she swiveled around in the commander's seat of the bouncing PEV, trying to ignore the endless icy ridges outside the windows, a pastiche of conversations came rushing back, most of which seemed to be of the late-night, drunken-marathon variety -- those occasions in her life where she was called on to define her beliefs and was privileged to learn the views of those who were most important to her at the time. The nodding, sage white head and creased black face of Jesse Smith, the first human to dance a jig on a planet outside the solar system and an old general when they met, a man who talked about Jesus as if he were a close acquaintance. Natasha Fyodorev, the Russian pioneer who inspired her to make the service her career and who had developed her own wonderful, homegrown philosophies that would cause Lenin great pause. Significant among these poignant recollections was the image of her grandfather, who took her in after her parents were killed when she was ten.
The faces were many, as were the years, and ultimately, drunk or sober, her contribution to these far-wandering dialogues was always the same: I don t know what I believe, except that I believe in people and in what they can do.
For like the frozen planet with its molten core, she knew that, beneath a crust of age and comfortable authority, she had a warm, boundless love. Yet she had never married. Had never even come close. And now that gap in her experience was upon her like an animal over the ragged turf, tearing at her in longing surges, forceful enough to delay the awareness of trouble for at least a second. Even the jarring stop seemed to be a part of it. She noticed the flashing panel lights, glanced resolutely across the dimly lit cabin at her second in command, and punched an intercom button.
"Greg, what's going on?"
The engineer took a moment to respond, during which the right side of the PEV sank an additional eight degrees from the horizontal. "We broke through, Pat," the answer came finally.
"Have Dick and Bennett get out there and get back to me."
Major Sheila Morrison had been through three planets with Pat and the pair had developed a neat affinity. Pat looked at the major now and shrugged.
"Hard to believe we could break through, " she said.
"These are the tropics."
Pat took quick note of the gauges, saw that the tilt was getting no worse, and chuckled. "Right. Would you like a cup of coffee?"
"I'll get it."
The sun of EU-220 was not much brighter than the full moon of earth, poised above clouds that cut across the wide sky like fragments of frosted glass. Some kind of ancient tectonics had crunched the landscape into an ever-receding succession of sharp ridges, wicked shards in their own right, making overland transport impossible. Again, Pat was struck by the familiarity of the barren setting, a colorless gray-scale wasteland of snow and clinging lichen and jagged rock jutting like saurian spines in shades from white to black. What was it about this dreary ice planet that seemed almost to beckon her, that pitched her emotions to expectancy, to the point where she wouldn't have been surprised to hear her name come drifting down from the serrated clouds? Puzzled, she looked out the window and a shiver overtook her, deep as a sneeze.
The Astra was 100 kilometers to the south, and had unloaded the PEV onto one of the major rivers of the southern hemisphere. The PEV was traveling north, approaching the equator. Its purpose was routine: to sink a probe into the mantle and provide a host of secondary signals for seismic instruments on the Astra, which would give scientists a functional picture of the planet's makeup. There had been talk lately in the upper echelons of the service about replacing these probes with unmanned vehicles. There had always been talk in the upper echelons about replacing the probes with unmanned vehicles. They had even tried it on several expeditions that were, according to the best reports, fiascoes. But the talk continued, and Pat had learned long ago to ignore it. She did not as a rule agonize over job security.
"Thank you." She accepted the plastic cup from Sheila with both hands and took a sip, guessing it would be her last. The moisture from the steam felt good in her dry nostrils.
The intercom opened. "Front three wheels on the right are off the ice." It was Dick Adelson. She could hear the tightness in his face from the cold. "You might want to take a look."
"Be right there, Dick."
The PEV was a low-slung box with six huge studded tires on a side, grouped in two sets of three about five meters apart. With the wan sun almost directly overhead, Pat, Dick and Bennett Shields stood at a safe distance to the rear far enough off to the right to see the three front tires awash up to the wheel hubs in sluicing black water. They carried flashlights, but hardly needed them.
Pat groped through the thick fur of her hood and pressed her throat mike. "Greg, you've got a couple meters to the left here. From now on, keep it as close to the bank as possible where the ice is thickest. That goes for everybody. Understand?"
Dick and Bennett often spelled Greg at the controls of the PEV and the two nodded. Greg came over the earphones. "Gotcha, boss. Sorry."
"Okay, Greg. At my signal, we'll start the winches and you back her up slowly." Dick and Bennett had already drawn out the cables from the two winches on the back of the vehicle to stakes sunk 30 meters away into ice that gleamed like wet porcelain in the milky daylight. Pat watched the two men crunch in their spiked boots toward the PEV and mount the lowest of the metal rungs running up alongside both winches. Puffs of breath drifted skyward from their narrow hoods in the still air, prying at a memory. It went nowhere and she shook it off. "On three gentlemen. Slowly, now. One... two... three..."
The cables tautened, the winches hummed, the tire studs gripped, and Pat heard the crack at the same moment she felt a profound shudder underfoot, but the ice held and the PEV tracked up and out of the broken rut.
"Good. Get those stakes, guys, so we don't hit 'em on the way back. And let's be as expeditious as possible, please. We've got a mean window this trip." They were twenty kilometers from the drop point. With no more delays, they'd be there in an hour.
It took two. The breakthrough gnawed at her and the ice in the middle of the river took on a different, darker hue, so she had Greg slow down and keep the six left tires as close to the edge as possible. When they reached the drop point, precisely on the equator, Sheila and Dick rolled the probe canister up on the bank and set it upright. Then they all crowded into the control cabin to watch the launch, as seemed to have become the custom. Seated in her swivel chair, Pat pushed the button and a column of fire leapt to the gray sky, igniting the clouds around it and sending the package of delicate instruments screaming down a fusion needletrack in the planet's skin.
She pointed through the frost-trimmed windows at a place where the bank was low along the river. "Pull up there as far as you can, Greg, and turn her around. Try not to back out on the ice any farther than you have to."
Greg squatted and grasped the handle on the hatch that led down and forward to the driver's cabin in the blunt nose of the vehicle, then stopped. "Are we going straight back?"
Pat already had the mike in her hand, and she nodded at him wide-eyed with mock urgency. "Have to." The static in her earphones stopped as she thumbed the mike switch. "PEV 10 to Astra."
The other two men were headed for the crew cabin in the rear, but turned when Greg continued. "I've been driving a couple hours."
Pat nodded immediately. "Just turn it around, Greg." She looked over her shoulder. "Bennett, you up for a shift?"
Just then Harley Franklin's cocksure voice filled her ears. Harley had been with her for ten years and three times that many planets, and his job had always been the same: to remain with the ship and its flight crew as acting commander during PEV excursions. His friendly, professional tones had been her lifeline to sanity in a variety of madding situations. His face was among those that had been swept along that morning on her emotional tide, which seemed now only a haunting echo, something weak enough to pass off on too much coffee. She held up a hand and responded. "Astra, probe is down. PEV 10 is coming home."
Dick disappeared through the hatch to the rear and Bennett stepped forward, leaning straight-armed with hands on the back of both seats. Pat snapped the mike into its bracket and leaned toward the intercom. "Take her slow, Greg, whenever you're ready."
Sheila and Bennett studied the control panel impassively, but Pat's eyes were pulled to the window at her right. She touched the intercom. "Wait a second, Greg." Still peering out the window, she extended her left hand. "Sheila, give me the glasses, please."
The binoculars resolved the twisting black vein she had noticed at the river's center. After a moment she spoke matter-of-factly. "We've got open water out there, folks. Three meters wide at some points." She offered the glasses to Bennett. "Take these back to Dick, Bennett, or do it yourself, I don't care. Just get back there and watch through the rear portholes as we back up. Tell us if you see anything -- any cracking of that ice."
Sheila swiveled, causing Bennett to release his lingering grip on the seat back. "Maybe we ought to anchor the forward cables up on the bank."
"That's a damn good idea." She took the binoculars back from Bennett. "Look at it this way: Dick's already been out there twice today. Sorry."
Bennett's smile was as thin as the sunlight through the windows.
Greg could only get about half the length of the PEV off the ice and up on the bank, and scrambling ahead over the ripping rocks to anchor the forward cables gave Dick and Bennett about fifteen minutes of rigorous occupation. Finally they were ready and the PEV began a slow, twisting reverse, the front wheels cocked hard to the right. Sheila watched from the rear, lying on her stomach across the width of one of the men's bunks with the binoculars propped comfortably to her eyes.
The ice split in two stages. First the rear wheels went down without warning, allowing Sheila just enough time to snatch the binoculars away before her face was pressed against the blackened glass of the porthole. Clutching the metal rungs near the winches up front, Dick and Bennett both rode a heart-stopping upward rotation from the vertical to about 45 degrees, then climbed frantically to look in on Greg, whose windowed cabin jutted out between them and who would've been pale if he weren't black, then further to peer over the top of the PEV at two thick sheets of ice that folded upward like angel's wings on both sides of the vehicle. Only a small section of tread on the trailing front tires showed above the water, and the PEV appeared to rest on its belly against a remaining ledge of ice.
Inside it was quiet after a noise that reminded Sheila of the kitchen of a busy mess hall -- the hollow clanking and banging of stainless steel pots and pans the size of automobiles. The instant she pushed away from the dark porthole, having just come to the understanding that she was millimeters away from the frigid waters of the river -- how fast and how deep? she wondered -- the ice ledge beneath the PEV gave way, prime feature of stage two, and the river was at least deep enough to allow the rear of the vehicle to sink until it was almost vertical, the nose held by the stubborn cables anchored to the bank and the two front tires straddling a shelf of ice like a dog with its paws on the table.
No one had spoken a word. They waited, all of them, for Pat's voice, and when it didn't come, Sheila palmed her throat mike. "Greg, it's going to take some time for me to climb forward. Get to the control cabin and check on Pat. Dick?"
"This is Dick."
"Bennett?"
"We're okay."
"Dick, can you get in?"
"Yes, but I don't think we should. The cables appear to be the only thing keeping you up. I think you all better get out of there."
"Dick, will we be able to pull this beast out?" It was Pat's voice sounding even huskier than usual, as if it sought additional strength from somewhere and found it.
The relief in his response conflicted oddly with the words. "I don't think so, Pat. There's not enough sticking out to give us any leverage."
"On your way up, Sheila, bring as much cold-weather gear as you can. We'll have to get everything we may need. And latch onto that first aid kit in the passage behind me...I mean, under me."
"Where's it hurt, colonel?"
"I've broken my leg. Neglected to lock the swivel on my seat and/or strap myself in. Greg, you're going to have to..." The rest of her instructions were lost, but a minute later Sheila heard the yelp filter down through the PEV. As she moved carefully about the disorienting position of the rear cabins, collecting equipment stuffed tightly into blue synthetic packs, she fought against the thought of the jet sleds beneath the floor that was now a wall. But it kept surfacing: the sleds were meant to be unloaded through a rear airlock and hatch, a hatch that now pointed directly down into the unknown depths of a nameless river on a nameless planet.
Their provisions included everything necessary to spend a passably comfortable night or two on the face of any frozen hell of a planet with human-breathable atmosphere, and they even had enough bottled oxygen to survive a near-human-breathable for a few days. They took turns hauling the stuff out of the PEV after Dick and Bennett had attached four more cables that fanned out like whiskers from the PEV's nose to stakes punched by the pneumatic guns into the hard, black rock along the shore. With her snapped fibula held rigid in the sturdy field splint, Pat worked to combine the five individual tents into one puffy fluorescent-orange igloo on the gentle slope of the bank. The sun was a dull lemon low in the sky, and she wanted them to be together during a night that would be pitch. A brain-storming session was in order, and their combined body heat would help preserve their power supply.
Sheila worked with her, her hands slipping in and out of the slit in her gloves as the fastener strips came together. Neither spoke until Pat, noticing Greg's head emerging from the front hatch of the PEV, walked stiff-legged a short distance off to the side and reached in for her throat mike.
"Greg, will you please patch me into the Astra?"
His head nodded and disappeared back down the hatch, and a few moments later she heard the static of the open channel.
"PEV 10 to Astra. Harley?"
A crackling breakup and then the friendly, solid voice direct from the old audio tracks of the early space program, the same drawling delivery that seemed almost mandatory of those astronaut-cowboys in their antique fireballs. "Gotcha loud and clear, PEV 10." That's all he said. He knew. And she heard in the voice the certainty that he would make the window with or without them, leave them to die, because that's what he had to do.
"We're through the ice, Harley, despite the prelims. Give my regards to advance, willya. They've been mistaken before, but we've got real trouble here."
"So I've noticed. The PEV readings are on record, colonel. And the folks in advance are off my Christmas card list."
She smiled around
the metallic taste of fear in her mouth, and felt her own voice move toward the
facile dialect, which was as much Texan as anything. For an instant she thought
of her childhood home in
A pause. "Standard 0230, June 9. You've got 16 hours."
"We'll be there."
"You know it."
She hesitated a moment, then thought: What the hell, that's why we're here. "How's the probe doing?"
"The probe is transmitting, all normal."
The last contained a hollowness that made Pat want to say something personal to Harley, something like, "Thanks for everything, Harley," or, "You re the greatest, Harley," or, "It's been nice working with you, Harley," but panicky fingers clutched at the impulse. "PEV 10 out," she said, and she heard Greg return her to the intercom frequency. Her glance took in the PEV hanging with at least 12 meters in the water just five meters from shore. It should've looked strange, but it didn't.
An hour later the sun turned blood red, and ten minutes after that it was gone as if someone had shut them inside a deep freeze. The five sat in a circle around a lamp in the middle of the tent. It was warm enough for them to remove their coats, and they ate their processed meals amid the quiet crinkling of foil packages.
"If I wasn't driving, I'd say it was sabotage," Greg said finally.
Sheila laughed and spoke with half a mouthful. "Someone striking a blow for unmanned probes."
Pat listened as the other four went on to discuss the obvious shortcomings of advance information, much of which is gleaned from unmanned fly-bys, and each point in the conversation, each cogent observation, each oath and each vividly recalled deficiency increased her sense of responsibility like turns of a thumbscrew. It was a feeling that, in moderation, she enjoyed, but which she now feared might send her shrieking out into the blackness. At a lull she interjected, "We could make it on foot, averaging eight kilometers an hour, if we left now."
She looked up into the eyes. "I mean, it would be possible, if the cold didn't kill us. And my guess is that it would."
"So we've got ten hours till sunrise?" It was Dick who had spoken.
She nodded.
"And we have to make the Astra when?"
"We'll have about five hours after sunrise." We'll have five hours, she thought, and not a minute more. Harley will not wait a minute more.
"So we'll have to average about 25 kilometers an hour tomorrow?" It was Bennett speaking. "How will we do that?"
"That's faster than the PEV," said Greg.
Pat felt an itch deep within her, as if the bone were healing, only it wasn't the bone. She hadn't taken any drugs, and there was a throbbing, but the itch was deeper still, deeper than bone. She reached for the coat spread out behind her, shouldered first into one sleeve, then the other. There seemed to be little future in brain-storming "I've got to go to the bathroom."
Finding the handle of a flashlight, she ripped open the entry seam and limped out into the dark. Only when the paltry spot of light danced like a white ball over the snow-packed ground did she realize that she really did have to go to the bathroom. The thought, perhaps for its very ordinariness, gave her direction, purpose, and she made her way carefully to the fabric windbreak of the field latrine erected along the bank a short distance downstream. Propping her splinted leg out in front of her and lowering herself down, she tinkled, almost idly pointing the flashlight back toward the PEV. The beam fell on the supplicant front tires kneeling out of a slurry of pressing ice. The light played on the tread, the deep tread. And she remembered.
Her grandfather tossed the old tire into the back of the pickup truck and they drove the few miles to Pine Creek. He spoke the whole way, a gentle sound that made her warm. The main road was dry and black, the back road was icy white ruts down to the creek, and she wrapped the scarf around her face and was out the door. She watched him in the full moon on the bank, the white streamers of his breath puffing up toward the gleaming clouds, until the tire crackled and stank, fire licking up into billowing black smoke.
She already had her skates on. Soon he joined her, circled her, legs pumping and blades clacking. Not a word. The old man was suddenly silent, and silently he took her hands and pulled her in a long, smooth dance of whirling shadows from the creek fire, long shadows that fell almost to the middle where the water ran.
After a time they found themselves a distance upstream, and she saw his face looking ahead, more moon than fire, fixed on something. "It doesn't get this way often, Patty. Not often. Stay along the edge."
And then they left the fire behind and were alone with the moon. How far they traveled she could only guess, but it seemed that nothing existed except speed and cold and moon and the bare reaching branches of the trees. They flew through the silver, flashing, swooshing night, a new kind of winter animal with metal feet, and the creek became a tunnel with eyes that seemed to watch from another place. What must they look like? Surely there is no other sight like this in the world. Surely this is another world.
How else could she know that ice on a river is thinnest in the middle? Perhaps it was taught somewhere, but she had no doubt where she'd first learned it, drew it into the deathless gut of experience. Stay along the edge, Patty: a calculated approach to raw nature, a cold line stretching from world to world where it was impossible to bring a mate, to bring anything but the memory of an old man and a flashing tunnel of crystallized moonlight, an image of intense loneliness. Four pairs of eyes, surpassingly alert, watched her enter the tent.
"Greg, we'll need the welding gear out of the PEV and metal stock --something about 5 millimeters thick. As soon as you're out, Dick and Bennett will pull one of the front tires or set it on fire where it sits. We'll need the heat, because we'll be working outside, in shifts."
She sketched the details on a notepad. The blades would be fixed across the metal frames of their boot spikes. The fire and the strobe of the welding punched into the blackness along the river bank until the morning sky turned a weird orange. She let Greg finish the fifth pair and shook her head sadly when Sheila clutched her sleeve and pulled her aside.
"Go," she said, holding open Sheila's hood to see her face. "You have five and a half hours. And it'll take some time for you to get your feet. But you'll make it. Go."
With Pat barking instructions from the bank, they picked up the skill quickly. By the time the four reached the frozen scar where they had broken through the day before, they were flying under EU-22O's full moon of a sun, stroking a scratching southward rhythm, and Sheila noticed the flashes, milky white from the jagged bank, like diamonds mounted in the snow.
THE END
keith@croes.com