Anderson, Poul - Trader of The Stars by Anderson Poul

Author:Anderson, Poul
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

VI

Two more days-twenty kilometers?They could not have done that much were they not crossing a flat space, a plateau on the lap of Lochan.

It was dreary country, treeless, rock-strewn, sparsely covered with low yellowish scrub. Many streams ran down toward the Morh, their tinkle the only sound except for an endless whittering wind; but the banks held no more life than the dusty stretches beyond. Alone the ranges that hemmed in the world on three sides, and the splendid upward leap of the snowcone ahead, redeemed this landscape.

The first evening they camped in sight of a crater. Its vitrified walls gleamed reddish black, like clotted blood, in the last sunlight. Vadász pointed and remarked, "I thought this region is barren because runoff from above leached the soil. Now I find otherwise."

"How so?"Heim asked, incurious in his fatigue.

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"Why, yonder is plain to see as bombwork. There must have been an industrial center here once, that was destroyed in the war."

"And you'd let the same happen to Earth!" Bragdon's accusation was the first word he had spoken in more than a day.

Heim sighed. "How often must I explain?" he said, more to Jocelyn than to the Peaceman. "Earth has space defenses. She can't be attacked-unless we drift on from crisis to crisis till matters get so bad that both sides have to build fleets "big enough to take the losses in breaking through. All I want is to head off that day by settling with Alerion now. Unfortunately, Alerion isn't interested in a reasonable settlement.

We've got to prove to them that they haven't any alternative."

"Womwardment does not account wor the inwertility here," said Uthg-a-K'thaq. "The war was three or wour Earth centuries ago. Radioactiwity disawweared long since. Something else has kewt nature 'rom recowering."

"Oh, to hell with it," Jocelyn moaned. "Let me sleep."

Heim lay down too. He thought with a dull unease that they should set a watch-but no, everyone was exhausted ... Unconsciousness took him.

The next day they saw two metallic shapes at a distance. There was no question of detouring for a closer look, and in any event they had something else to occupy what small part of their minds could be spared from the ever more painful onward march. The end of the plateau was coming into sight. Between the edge and the mountain's next upward slope was an escarpment. Right and left stretched those obsidian cliffs, sheer, polished, not high but unscalable in this gravity without equipment the party didn't have. To go around them-at whatever unseen point they stopped-would take days; and the survival drugs could not last for such a journey.

Only in the center of view was the line broken. A bank of vapor roiled from the foot of the scarp for several kilometers up the mountainside above. Like an immense curtain it hid the terrain; plumes blew off the top, blizzard color against the deep sky, and a roaring grew louder as the walkers neared.

"That has to be Thundersmoke," Vadász said.

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