own footprints, until they came to their starting point. They worked left, then, and found much the same situation there as well. There was no break at all in the deep and unscalable snow wall that blocked their progress.
“What now?” Leah asked, setting the suitcase down and wiping perspiration off her forehead. She had to resist an urge to pull off the heavy coat for a feeling of coolness against her skin. That body heat that now bothered her was exactly what she needed to maintain her life, she knew, and the blast of frigid air that would hit her when she stripped might very well give her the pneumonia that both of them feared.
“Two things,” he said.
“Full of ideas aren't we.”
“Don't congratulate me until you hear how unpleasant both of the possibilities are.”
“They couldn't be any more unpleasant than waiting here until we either freeze or get caught.”
“Well,” he said, wishing he could drop the rucksacks but knowing if he did he would never put them on again, “we can either turn back, climb the other side of the ravine, cross to another way down the first mountain, and make a second attempt at getting off it, then work our way back in the direction we want to go. The flaw is that we may run into the same thing — or something worse no matter where we go. And it's still snowing — which means every hour we delay getting on our way, there's another inch of snow we have to push through.”
“Sounds bad.”
“I don't like it either.”
“The second way, then.”
He frowned. “We break a way through the drift hanging over us, go. right through and on our way.”
“It looks seven or eight feet deep, anyway. We don't have a shovel, and even if we did we couldn't use it properly from a slope like this.”
“We
She grinned. “Of course! The weapons!”
“Don't get too excited, love. There's a hazard. Proteus will refuse to get more than a few feet from me, which means we'll have to be right where he's working. And since his range of fire isn't great enough to work from the bottom of the ravine or the other side, we'll have to stand about halfway up the slope while he blasts away. If there's a slide, we're going to be right in the path of it.”
They both looked at the shelf of white above them. “What if he uses the vibra-beam instead of the projectile weapon?” she asked.
“I can't direct that one. It's an automatic system at his discretion, just like the plasti-plasma tentacles. But the projectile business responds to vocal commands. It's all we have.”
“Slide or not,” she said, “we might as well try it.”
“Gun left,” he ordered the robot.
It extruded the barrel from the smooth sheen of its hull.
“Gun up,” he directed.
It complied.
Traction left. Fraction left again. Steady.”
He looked once more at the shelf of snow that was suspended overhead.
Somewhere behind, a wolf howled.
“Fire one!” he ordered.
The shell exploded in the middle of the drift, blasted snow in all directions, sent a fine white mist rolling down the ravine and across them. When the air cleared, approximately a third of the way had been torn open.
“Gun up, fraction,” he directed. “Up fraction again. Fire one!”
The shell exploded, and there was a screeching, whining rumble from above. Cracks appeared in the crusted drift. It jerked, seemed to descend, in mass, an inch or so. Then everything let loose with an horrendous roar and the entire snow shelf swept at them with the speed of a locomotive.
Davis grabbed Leah, tried to leap with her up the slope toward the avalanche, with the intention of reaching the cleared section where there was little snow left to fall. But before he could get there, the wave of cold snow and ice swept over them, pulled her from his grasp and carried her away, toward the bottom of the small valley…
VII
He managed to grasp the trunk of a thin, sturdy, yil tree — past which the rushing snow carried him — wrapped his arms around it and locked his hands together on the other side. The tree bent amazingly beneath the pressure of the small avalanche though it refused to snap. In a moment, the roar seemed to grow distant, as if he were hearing only echoes of the event, then abruptly ceased altogether. He rose, his legs shaky beneath him, and tried to get his breath and to still the fluttering of his heart. The air was so choked with mist that it was difficult to breathe, and he thought it would not be improbable for a man with an impaired lung or a cold and its subsequent stuffed nose to either drown or suffocate in seconds.
He wiped the dewy vapor from his face, squinted his eyes and tried to see through the water droplets that immediately beaded his eyelashes. There was a dense cloud of snow eddying in the air currents in the valley bottom, a couple of hundred feet below, and it effectively shielded anything down there from his vision.
Wiping his face once more, he stumbled foward, grabbing trees and shattered saplings for handholds, slipping, crashing into rock formations and yil trunks with his hips, but somehow managing not to fall. He was breathing well enough now that the vapor had begun to settle, but his heart still thumped wildly in his chest. He had recalled the dream he had had only a couple of hours before in which he had been imprisoned in a house of ice and Leah had come to release him by melting the walls down — and how she, in turn, had been led away, appropriated by the Alliance soldier without a face…
If she were dead, in this avalanche, it would be as much the Alliance's fault as if a blue suited, brass buttoned officer had come and taken her and shot her…
No. No, he had to face up to the fact that some of the blame would lie with him. He should have tied her to a tree, tied both of them firmly, to protect against the possibility of an avalanche. Never before in his life had there been another human being for which he had felt responsible. It had always been him, alone, against the world, and any cuts or wounds incurred were marks of pride to satisfy the sadistic trait in him. Now the “me” was “us” as he had been reminding himself ever since that day in the temple, in the corridors of God's mind, when the point of no return had been reached and passed at blinding speeds. And while one half of “us” was rather big and brutish and able to take care of itself, the other half was frail, light, and in need of help when the forces of the opposition were very large.
He cursed his mother and, to a lesser degree but still vehemently, his father. If they had been reasonable, open human beings instead of ego-bloated back-biters, perhaps he would have learned the concept of “us” when he should have, in his childhood. But from the very first days, when he saw that one or the other only took his side in order to goad the one who disagreed with him, he had realized it was Stauffer against them, Stauffer in the singular. Because of them and the lateness with which he had come to the discovery of love and the responsibilities it carried with it, he might very well have made a mistake in judgment that would cost him the other half of “us.” And so soon, before he had even had time to explore all the possibilities of the amplified self that now included this winged Demosian girl…
“Leah!” he shouted as he reached the edge of the wall of snow.
Silence. Except for the faint sigh of the wind.
“Leah!”
“Here,” she called half-heartily, thirty feet to the right and forty feet behind. She had been brought up against the thick base of an enormous, black-barked tree and had not suffered the ride clear to the bottom. She was struggling to get out of the imprisoning snow, but with little luck.
He started after her at a run, fell, cracked his head on a bared section of stony ground, got up a little dizzy. By the time he reached her she was half to her feet, and he had her clear of the mounds in seconds. He drew her to him, nearly crushed her, despite the padding of her survival coat. He wanted to say very many things, but there were not really words to frame them. They were emotions, formless thoughts of happiness. Instead, he kissed her
