room rather than in his body.
He tried to look for the clock but could not locate it. Red second hand strutting, couldn't find it. He heard himself groaning, but almost as close to him he could hear heavy, labored breathing…, boots. He flinched.
The fog cleared enough for him to see through a gauzy spider s web just in front of his eyes. He feared for his sight. Boots, Serov's boots, bloodstained; blood on the bent trouser knee, Serovs hands clasped together, already showing the blue of bruising, caused by uniform buttons, by Priabin's teeth, which ached and seemed loose… like his whole head as he moved it fractionally to look up into Serov's face. Serov leaned forward, staring intently at him, his mouth wet and hanging open as he dragged in air; hands. Not clasped — the spider's web clearing a little more, thank God — but the bruised one holding the other gently, almost kindly; that one was white, unmarked. Priabin made a precise inventory of Serov's hands. It seemed like a test he must pass. Short fingernails, colored not with dirt but blood — the difference between the two hands?
Serov must have, must have, must have — broken his arm or wrist or something when he jumped — yes, yes! The memory from a few minutes before struck him with the force of some epochal discovery of science or philosophy, thrilling him. He remembered seeing Serov's left arm in a sling when they brought him into this room.
'Colonel, sir?' someone murmured. He hardly caught the words. The pain seemed to have been increased like the volume of a radio just at the moment he fully remembered about Serov's arm and his vision finally cleared. His body shrieked with pain. He grunted, dribbling blood. It tasted of salt. He moved his thick tongue around his teeth; loose? He prodded each tooth with his tongue, escaping the pain that cried and rushed through the rest of him, by narrowing his awareness. Left side, upper, lower… right side, lower, upper… front, the incisors, one by one. Priabin became absorbed in the examination of his teeth.
Until dragged to his feet. Every part of him protested against the movement. They held him in front of Serov, and his body winced and hunched into itself at the suggestion of further pain.
'Sit him on a chair!' Serov's voice seemed to roar. His bruised hand waved toward Priabin, who tried to duck. Serov laughed.
Priabin felt his body dumped onto a chair, the chair prevented from tipping backward by someone's hand. The angles and edges o* the chair created fresh areas of suffering. His consciousness slowly returned to his slumped body. He looked up. Serov, clearly 111 focus, was watching him, his bruised hand cradling his other elbow gently.
The clock. The second hand. Ten-ten. Where was he?
He looked slowly, cautiously around him. Three GRU uniforms, anonymously filled — no, one of the faces belonged to the lieutenant who had brought him back. And Serov. Screens, too. A computer console and a large- scale map projection. A glass wall to the room, tinted and almost opaque. The dull glow of numerous lights coming through it. Rows of what might have been spectators dimly to be perceived. Mission control?
'Where's he gone, Priabin?' he heard Serov ask, and was irritated by the intrusion. His body seemed to be gradually swallowing his bruises and the rushes of pain in a general ache. He held his ribs. Pain, but no tearing sensation when he breathed. Not broken, then.
'Who?' he replied automatically. His voice was thick. He gingerly took out a handkerchief and spat into it. Like consumption; bright blood in the saliva. 'Who?' he repeated.
'You know who.' Serov's voice seemed tired, as if the real purpose of their encounter was already accomplished. 'The American. Where is he?'
Priabin carefully shook his head. Pain lurched like a solid mass from temple to temple.
'No idea.'
'Why didn't you go, too?'
'No idea.' Priabin dabbed his swollen lips with the handkerchief and then inspected the daubs of blood. Wiped his bruised, numb chin. 'Stupid, wasn't it?'
Serov sat forward on his chair, growling like an animal. 'What's the matter with you, Priabin? Where are you, for Christ's sake?'
Priabin shrugged, wincing against the pain the tiny gesture evoked. 'Nowhere,' he murmured. Almost anesthetized. Strange, his whole body seemed to be going warmly numb* as if he were falling luxuriously asleep in a soft bed. 'Nowhere…'
Move him over to the console,' Serov snapped, rising from his chair. It tipped over onto its side. 'Let him look at the map. It ^ght j0g his memory. Come on, Priabin, do some of our work for ^ Tell us where you think he is. While you still can.'
As Priabin was lifted and shunted across the room still seated, he Saw on one of the screens a glowing image of the launch pad. The erector cage starkly lit, the flank of the giant G-type booster stages splashed white and coldly blue. It didn't matter where Gant was, after all. It didn't matter a bit.
The flashlight beam sufficed for his narrowed consciousness. He made no search for the main switch, no move to use the shrouded inspection lamps whose cables curled like dead black snakes across the littered, dusty concrete floor of the hangar. Touching upon, sliding across, illuminating only parts and sections of angles, surfaces, planes, the light was enough. He was afraid of greater light, not because the windows were open to the sky and his presence would be betrayed, but because he feared to see the whole expanse of the place at once. Some kind of hope proffered itself always just out of range of the flashlight's beam.
Gant moved slowly, cautiously around the airframe. His inspection had taken him perhaps fifteen minutes, a period of deliberate delay. The flashlight had picked out the little peaks of hopelessness as it settled on the skeletal airframe, the dismembered engine, the discarded flaps. Yet he had remained with the Polish-built Antonov biplane, fearing to move farther back into the darkness, back toward—
— metal blades, leading edges of wings, struts, flaps, the flank of a second fuselage. He was deeply afraid of inspecting the second biplane. It might prove even more skeletal and useless than this first one. So he waited for the tide of defeat to ebb. He knew it would. It was just a matter of time. His father snickered cruelly at the back of his mind, and Charley's voices rushed in the darkness like the scurrying of rats. As long as he encountered no new and greater blow, his sense of survival would reemerge.
Gant flicked the flashlight's beam at his watch. Ten-thirty. He poised himself, breathing quickly and deeply to calm himself. Flicked the beam out in front of him, washing it weakly over the propeller blades, then engine cowling;
Clear, clear!
Moonlight.
The darkness had held for almost half an hour, and he had been grateful for that. Now that the clouds had released the moon once more and faint, sheening light grew in a row of pale squares along one side of the building, he was as startled as if the main light switch had been thrown. The second Antonov An-2 was ghostly in the moonlight, unreal. He moved toward it with a reluctant lurch.
Stopped. Turned back, searching along the fuselage of the first airframe. Pulled the shrouded inspection lamp, and its trailing lead with him, heading back toward the second Antonov. The noise of the shroud as he slid it across the lamp tinkled in the chill, dead air. He switched off his flashlight, its beam beginning to fail now, and turned on the lamp. Its diffused glow glided along the Antonov s side.
Engine. Fourteen hundred horsepower, turboprop. Entire, intact. He moved along the fuselage. Ducked down, thrusting the lamp in front of him, then stared into the main cabin. It was the agricultural variant, just like the other biplane. Two crop-dusting airplanes wintering in this hangar, undergoing their major servicing before the spring. The metal of the chemical tank gleamed in the darkness of the cabin. He moved on.
The open inspection panel and the gap of darkness behind it made him shiver, as if newly aware of the cold. It had been too good to be true, too good. The battery was missing. His fist banged the tail of the Antonov, hard. A hollow, booming noise, as if the whole airframe was empty.
'Shit,' he breathed, 'shit, shit.' Over and over; its ordinariness recovered him, as if the expletive could only be applied to what was remediable. Find the battery, it has to be here, refit the battery after you find it. But that was sufficiently far into the future to open the perspective of his awareness, and he clamped down on the idea. His fathers snickering ceased in his head; it was the scurry of a rat somewhere in the hangar.
