The Long Winter by Raymond Z. Gallun

Author:Raymond Z. Gallun [Gallun, Raymond Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi Short Story
Publisher: Astounding Science Fiction
Published: 1940-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Viborg lifted his masked face from the snow. Brushing his goggles he looked around, searching for the blur of the beacon light, that would guide him back to the shelter and the spaceship. But he saw nothing but inky, impenetrable blackness, alive with the din of the tempest. Mortal terror seized him, and he stumbled automatically to his feet, mumbling. Promptly the gale knocked him flat; but he scrambled to his knees again.

What had happened? Why had the beacon light gone out? There had been an explosion, yes; but it could never have been powerful enough to wreck the mechanism of the generators, or of the windmill that drove them. As for the electric cable that had snapped with contraction of cold to produce the blast—that could have nothing to do with the present circumstance, for the beacon light worked on a different circuit.

Jan Viborg could find no answer to the question. He was whimpering like a child, for in this hideous, impenetrable blackness, he could not tell one direction from another, and the cold was biting more forcefully through the joints of his armor, numbing his arms and legs and fingers, and making him feel sick and faint.

He fought for control. After all, the instrument tripod was only seventy-five feet away—a mere nothing, ordinarily—and the shelter was along the guide rail from there, the same insignificant distance beyond. Jan took out his small flashlight, and bending close to the snow, searched for marks he had made coming here. But he knew beforehand that those marks would already be obliterated by the driving, drifting white. As for the flashlight, that was useless to reveal anything in the streaking tempest, beyond a few inches distance.

Viborg gave a terrified sob. Wildly he looked above, for stars to guide him. There were none— of course. Being composed largely of hydrogen, a light gas, the pressure of the Uranian atmosphere was no greater than that of Earth. But it was deep and blurred. Starlight could never have penetrated it. Certainly not now.

He tried to rely, then, on his sense of direction; but that was impossible, too, in the dense, all-pervading gloom; and his fall, when the wind had knocked him down, had confused him completely. But he had to make an attempt of some kind. He crawled in one direction for what he believed was the distance to the instrument tripod. But he found nothing but frozen methane. He crept back, then, trying to reach his original position, but he sank and clawed in the powdery white, and was thus further confused, so that he did not know whether he was moving in a straight line or not. He listened for some sound—any sound—that would give him a clue. But no human shout or cry, had there been such, could have penetrated the muffled scream of the gale, vibrating through his helmet.

He thought of circling—of spiraling round and round in an ever widening radius—according to the well-known scheme of relocating lost objects. He began to do so, creeping and clawing through the snow.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.