playing along the stem of his medulla oblongata, and unhappy intestinal maneuvers seem distressingly close to occurring. But there is work to do here, tests to be carried out, things to investigate, and Huw focuses on that with beneficial effect.
He says, speaking as much to his listeners aboard the
Marcus has fled right in the middle of Huw’s windy hypothesizing, and is running now — not lurching, not staggering, but
“Shit,” Huw mutters, and sets out after him.
Marcus is heading up the sloping side of the basin in which they have landed. He moves with lunatic fastidiousness around the borders of the elliptical groves of yellow-headed bushes, running in figure-eight patterns past them, up one and down the next, as he ascends the shallow rise. Huw ponderously gives pursuit. Marcus is young, long-limbed, and slender; Huw is fifteen years older and constructed in quite the opposite way, and high- speed running has never been one of his pastimes. Running seems to intensify the disagreeable quality of this place too: each pounding step sends a jolt of electric despair up the side of Huw’s leg on a direct route to his brain. He has never experienced such raggedness of spirit before. It is a great temptation to give over the chase and drop down in a fetal crouch and sob like a baby.
But Huw runs onward anyway. He knows that he needs to get a grip on Marcus, since Marcus seems incapable of getting a grip on himself, and put him back on board the probe before he does some real harm to himself as he sprints around this desert.
Marcus is moving, though, as if he plans to cover half a continent or so before pausing for breath, and Huw very quickly finds himself winded and dizzy, with a savage stitch in his side and a sensation of growing lameness in his left leg. And the terror quotient has begun to rise again, back to the levels he was experiencing right after leaving the probe. He can force himself to run, or he can fight off the demonic psychic radiation of this place, but it seems that he can’t do both at once.
He pulls up short, midway up the slope, gasping in hoarse noisy spasms and close to tears for the first time in his adult life. Marcus has vanished over the rim of the basin, losing himself among the black corona of fiercely fanged lunar-looking rocks that forms its upper boundary.
Giovanna, bless her, comes jogging up next to him as he stands there swaying and quivering.
“Did you see which way he went?” she asks.
Huw, pulling himself together with one more huge expenditure of effort, points toward the rim above them. “Somewhere up there. Into that tangle of pointy formations.”
She nods. “And are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m absolutely wonderful. Let’s go up there and find him.”
They hold hands as they scramble up the rise. There is, once again, some benefit conferred by actual physical contact, even through their heavy gloves. Huw sets a slower pace than before: he is getting troublesome messages from his chest now that indicate it would be a smart idea not to try to do any more running for the time being. The slope of the basin is not quite as shallow as it had seemed from the landing site. And the ground is rough, very rough, unexpected little sandy pits everywhere and nasty tangles of flat, wiry vines and a tiresome number of sharp, loose rocks in just the places where you would prefer to place your foot.
But eventually they get to the top. On the far side there is a fairly steep descent to a sprawling valley pockmarked with more of the yellow bushes, which grow in the same elliptical grove. Here, too, each grove is bizarrely set with mathematical precision at identical distances from all of its neighbors. Some tall, ugly, sparse- leaved trees are visible beyond them, and in the hazy region farther out there seems to be a completely flat savannah that runs clear to the horizon.
At first there is no sign of Marcus.
Then Giovanna sucks in her breath sharply and points. Huw follows the line of her arm down the hill. Marcus. Yes.
Marcus is lying about a hundred meters downslope from them, facedown, his arms wrapped around a flat- faced rectangular boulder as though he is hugging it. From the angle that Marcus’s head makes against his shoulders, Huw knows that the news is not going to be good, but all the same he feels obliged to get himself down to him just as fast as his aching legs and overtaxed heart will permit. The anxiety that he feels now is of an entirely different quality from the one with which this planet has been filling his mind for the past couple of hours.
He kneels at Marcus’s side. Marcus is not, Huw sees now, actually hugging the boulder; he is simply sprawled loosely against it with his arms splayed out over it and his cheek pressed to the flat surface of the rock that he must have hit when he tripped and fell. There is a deep cut, virtually an indentation, along one side of his head. A trickle of blood is coming from the corner of Marcus’s mouth, and another from one of his nostrils. His lips are parted and slack. His eyes are open, but not functioning. He is not breathing. His neck, Huw assumes, is broken.
Huw is hard pressed to remember the last time he saw a dead person. Twenty years ago, perhaps; thirty, even. Death is not a common event in Huw’s world, certainly not death at Marcus’s age. There are occasional unfortunate accidents, yes, few and far between, but in general death is not considered a normal option for people less than a century old. The idiotic, meaningless death of this young man on this alien world strikes Huw with massive impact. Above and beyond the special things that Planet A has been doing to his mind since the moment of landing, completely separate from all of that, Huw feels a pure hot shaft of grief and shock and utter despondency run through the core of his soul. He sags for a moment, and has to steady himself against this unexpected weakness. This planet is teaching him things about the limits of his resilience, which he once had thought was boundless.
“What can we do?” Giovanna asks. “Is there something in the medical kit that will—”
Huw laughs. It is such a harsh laugh that she flinches from him, and he feels almost like apologizing, but doesn’t. “What we have to do,” he says, as gently as he can, “is pick him up and carry him back to the ship, I suppose. That’s all. The other option, the practical thing to do, would be to leave him right here, with a cairn to mark the place, but we really can’t do that, you know. Not without permission. The one thing we can’t do is bring him back to life, Giovanna.”
The year-captain cuts in once more, wanting to know what’s going on.
“We have a casualty here,” Huw says somberly. He is furious with himself, though he knows that none of this is his fault. “There’s something about this goddamned place that drives you crazy. Marcus panicked and bolted and ran. Up the hill, down the other side. And tripped and fell headlong against a rock and broke his stupid neck.”
Silence, for a moment, at the other end.
“Are you saying that he’s dead, Huw?” the year-captain finally asks.
“I’m saying that, yes.”
“Do you want to talk to Leon?”
“About what?” Huw asks savagely. “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Marcus is really dead and he’s going to stay that way. He can’t be fixed, not by me, not by Leon if I bring him back up there, not by Jesus Christ himself. Believe me.” There’s Jesus Christ again, Huw thinks. The old myths keep surfacing. Something about this planet makes you want to invoke divine aid, it would seem. “Or Zeus, for that matter,” Huw says, still angry, angry at the year-captain, at Marcus, at himself, at the universe.
Once again the year-captain is slow to respond.
“I think what we have here is an uninhabitable planet,” Huw says, as the silence from above stretches intolerably. “That’s not a final conclusion but it looks pretty overwhelming. There’s something very peculiar here, some kind of a psychic field, that starts operating on you the moment you make surface contact with the planet,
