following the course of the river Oxus toward the Aral Sea. Below him, the emptiness of the Kara Kum; the huge, decayed, toothless jaws of the valley carved by the Oxus opened on either side of him. Dunes and the diamond- sparkling sky stretched away in every direction. Far to the north, too far to concern him, thin cloud hung like the gray smoke from a cigarette.
However precisely and carefully he described the landscape to himself — with whatever assumed detachment — he knew he was unraveling like wool in a cat's claws. Panic had approached, and he was conscious of forcing a mental door shut against its increasing pressure. Soon — perhaps even before the fuel ran out — he would not be able to control it.
The Mil had drifted closer to the single main road running parallel with the river, between it and the railway line. Occasional headlights, and once the smoke and blaring light of a locomotive glanced across his vision. On the moving-map display, the desert appeared to stretch infinitely away beyond the river, road, and railway tracks. He had deluded himself, pretending that a solution lurked unformed at the back of his mind. He had run because there was nothing else he could do. He had, he admitted, run in the wrong direction. Mac's shape spread on the ground came back to him vividly, as did the sense of having abandoned the body.
Lumped, broken country stretched away to the north. To the south lay a plateau of ugly gray rock and sand. The Hind, with Gant imprisoned within it, hugged the ground on the last of its fuel. He had disappeared successfully into the landscape after crossing the border. His whereabouts were unknown. They would remain that way.
Fuel gauges on Empty. All of them. Wool in a cat's eager claws; unraveling…
The road was less than a mile away now. Unconsciously, he was drifting toward it, as if it were a solution. It wasn't. Straggling closer than the road was the gleam of the river.
Think,
His mind was empty, except for the seeping of panic, and the urge to survive, like the noise of a rat scrabbling at the cage; frantic and desperate. His arms quivered with the effort of holding the Hind's course and height. Its shadow drifted over the broad, straggling, gray river. Was there something at the edge of his mind? He couldn't think, he was too hot, his mind too jumpy and unfocused. He needed to be clearheaded. The Hind glided now, as if grace were to be its last skill. The water seemed shallow and muddy, more like a creek than the force that had formed the landscape around him. The dim glow from some encampment stained the night farther to the south, beyond the road and railway. His whole body leaped in anticipation, even as he dismissed it. They would have no fuel, and they would kill him for his clothes before they stripped the helicopter naked. Ignore it, ignore—
The campfire glowed like a promise. Deliberately, he slowed the helicopter to a crawling speed above its shadow. His arms ached with tension, and fear. His brow and the back of his overalls were Wet with perspiration. Not here, not in this lost place, he heard his thoughts repeating. Another mile, another ten, fifty… please.
He was at the hover, sand drifting off the side of a nearby dune, hanging like some vague curtain. The Hind was in a hollow, surrounded by low dunes. Not in this place — keep going, keep going, not in this God-forsaken place.
His resolve snapped in his head like an old dry stick. His body quivered. He could hear his teeth chattering. He could not clear his head.
The undercarriage bumped, then settled. He released the controls. Dust whirled around the cockpit. He switched off the engines, and the rotors whined down through the scale and slowed with a sense of finality. He cursed the weakness that had made him land even as he opened the pilot s door and jumped to the ground, coughing immediately because of the sand and dust.
He groaned aloud. As soon as he had walked away from the settling dust, he breathed deeply, again and again. He looked behind him. The Hind was already cold and lifeless, and the suggestion of its immobility was like a great, icy wave breaking against him. He was shivering, though he hardly noticed the small, biting wind. His hands clenched and unclenched in futility.
His father returned, then. Machines — his fathers only use to people, and only then when he was sober. The memory was a supreme mockery now. His father could repair any machine: irons, refrigerators, lawnmowers, sprinklers, cars — anything you wanted fixed *. until he had been beaten by a machine in the end, when Gant had switched off the life support. His father seemed to be watching him now — not gloating for once, just detached and judging.
Painfully, slowly, he climbed the shivering, rattling sand of the dune. Immediately, the glow of the campfire — no! The flash of a vehicle's headlights miles away along the road. No suffused glow of a town or village or barracks. He rubbed his hands through his hair, the presence of the silent helicopter pressing against the back of his head like a migraine.
Machine, machine… His father watched. Think, t-h-i-n-k…
He stared at the empty road. Heard the thin wind and shivered in it. Heard the oily sliding of the river and the silence of the helicopter. Empty country, empty road. He was breathing rapidly and deeply, despite the ache of the icy air in his lungs. The beginnings of a terminal attack. Empty road, empty… something, something, Christ! Empty road — its very emptiness was the clue, the answer, empty — stretching away like, like—
Roads home. Roads at home. Slow rise and fell of seemingly endless roads, empty most of the day.
A gravel road in Iowa, and — an old biplane sagging down out of an empty morning sky onto the road and taxiing toward — the gas station. An airplane — his Saturday job, to serve at the gas station where hardly anyone called, and where he spent his time reading magazines about air aces and dogfights. The biplane might have jumped from the pages of one of the magazines — that first airplane, the first one he'd ever sat in. It had just rolled slowly up to the gas pumps, and the pilot had looked down, grinned, and said,
And filled the airplane s tank from the pump.
Gant whirled around and stared in utter shock at the Hind resting in the hollow. Turned back to the empty road. Looked again at the helicopter, his panic becoming urgent again, but eager now, not final.
There had been something in his memory, he hadn't merely panicked — a single-engined, prop-driven biplane, flown by an ex-air force pilot disgruntled with postwar America. An itinerant crop sprayer, taxiing with complete arrogance on a road in Iowa to fill his fuel tank at a gas station.
Gant ran stumblingly down the dune, sand flying and slithering. Urgency possessed him, as if the engines of the Hind were still running and he were using fuel by his very movements. He clambered into the cockpit and flicked on the moving-map display. He summoned the largest-scale maps, hearing his breathing hoarse and loud in the confined space, hearing the humming excitement in his ears, his heart pounding. He searched the map feverishly for signs of human habitation. Road, railway, river, all heading toward the Aral Sea — along the road, follow the road…
North, east, and west the land opened up, becoming ever more empty. Damn the emptiness of this place.
Desert shading into green on the maps as he ran them again. Temperate. Soil, not desert sand. Trees, crops — people. Northwest, where the river turned like an enormous python up toward the Aral Sea, its vast, eroded valley like a huge skin it had already shed. Green — people…
Engine-start.
The Hind jumped like a flea into the night, out of the hollow. The cockpit was solidly around him, no longer a fragile eggshell. He saw the road, the river, as if for the first time.
Along that road. Main road. Gas.
He tried to grin. The gauges had registered Empty for miles already. How much?
He did grin. The machine wasn't going to beat him. He would survive.
'We're gonna make it — I promise, Mac.' And then he remembered that the gunner s cockpit was empty and Mac was dead and already hundreds of miles behind him. His voice Med.
In its greed, which now reflected his own, the Hind hurried through the empty landscape. As he flicked over the crest of a dune, the river gleamed to starboard, and the road was a pale trail to port.
Suddenly, he began to fear once more that the machine would win.
Hie urgent bleeping of the radio woke Priabin. Ridiculous, he realized in the moment of waking; he'd fallen asleep in his car while it was parked outside his office building. The lights, he saw fuzzily, were still on in his office. He scrabbled at the dashboard, reaching for the radio mike, half expecting the dog to bang its paws on the back of his seat and lick his ear and neck. But the dog was with Katya. He clenched the mike, flicked the switch, and
