Except for shock waves through solids, everything had happened in the absolute silence of space.

  Heartbeat by heartbeat, Scobie crawled back to his senses. He found himself held down, immobilized, in darkness and pain. His armor had saved, was still saving his life; he had been stunned but escaped a real concussion. Yet every breath hurt abominably. A rib or two on the left side seemed broken; a monstrous impact must have dented metal. And he was buried under more weight than he could move.

  “Hello,” he coughed. “Does anybody read me?” The single reply was the throb of his blood. If his radio still worked—which it should, being built into the suit—the mass around him screened him off.

  It also sucked heat at an unknown but appalling rate. He felt no cold because the electrical system drew energy from his fuel cell as fast as needed to keep him warm and to recycle his air chemically. As a normal thing, when he lost heat through the slow process of radiation—and, a trifle, through kerofoam-lined bootsoles—the latter demand was much the greater. Now conduction was at work on every square centimeter. He had a spare unit in the equipment on his back, but no means of getting at it.

  Unless—He barked forth a chuckle. Straining, he felt the stuff that entombed him yield the least bit under the pressure of arms and legs. And his helmet rang slightly with noise, a rustle, a gurgle. This wasn’t water ice that imprisoned him, but stuff with a much lower freezing point. He was melting it, subliming it, making room for himself.

  If he lay passive, he would sink, while frozenness above slid down to keep him in his grave. He might evoke superb new formations, but he would not see them. Instead, he must use the small capability given him to work his way upward, scrabble, get a purchase on matter that was not yet aflow, burrow to the stars.

  He began.

  Agony soon racked him, breath rasped in and out of lungs aflame, strength drained away and trembling took its place, he could not tell whether he ascended or slipped back. Blind, half suffocated, Scobie made mole-claws of his hands and dug.

  It was too much to endure. He fled from it—

  His strong enchantments failing, the Elf King brought down his towers of fear in wreck. If the spirit of Alvarlan returned to its body, the wizard would brood upon things he had seen, and understand what they meant, and such knowledge would give mortals a terrible power against Faerie. Waking from sleep, the King scryed Kendrick about to release that fetch. There was no time to do more than break the spell which upheld the Dance Hall. It was largely built of mist and starshine, but enough blocks quarried from the cold side of Ginnungagap were in it that when they crashed they should kill the knight. Ricia would perish too, and in his quicksilver intellect the King regretted that. Nevertheless he spoke the necessary word.

  He did not comprehend how much abuse flesh and bone can bear. Sir Kendrick fights his way clear of the ruins, to seek and save his lady. While he does, he heartens himself with thoughts of adventures past and future—

  —and suddenly the blindness broke apart and Saturn stood lambent within rings.

  Scobie belly-flopped onto the surface and lay shuddering.

  He must rise, no matter how his injuries screamed, lest he melt himself a new burial place. He lurched to his feet and glared around.

  Little but outcroppings and scars was left of the sculpture. For the most part, the crater had become a smooth-sided whiteness under heaven. Scarcity of shadows made distances hard to gauge, but Scobie guessed the new depth as about seventy-five meters. And empty, empty.

  “Mark, do you hear?” he cried.

  “That you, Colin?” rang in his earpieces. “Name of mercy, what’s happened? I heard you call out, and saw a cloud rise and sink…then nothing for more than an hour. Are you okay?”

  “I am, sort of. I don’t see Jean or Luis. A landslide took us by surprise and buried us. Hold on while I search.”

  When he stood upright, Scobie’s ribs hurt less. He could move about rather handily if he took care. The two types of standard analgesic in his kit were alike useless, one too weak to give noticeable relief, one so strong that it would turn him sluggish. Casting to and fro, he soon found what he expected, a concavity in the tumbled snowlike material, slightly aboil.

  Also a standard part of his gear was a trenching tool. Scobie set pain aside and dug. A helmet appeared. Broberg’s head was within it. She too had been tunneling out.

  “Jean!”—“Kendrick!” She crept free and they embraced, suit to suit. “Oh, Colin.”

  “How are you?” rattled from him.

  “Alive,” she answered. “No serious harm done, I think. A lot to be said for low gravity…You? Luis?” Blood was clotted in a streak beneath her nose, and a bruise on her forehead was turning purple, but she stood firmly and spoke clearly.

  “I’m functional. Haven’t found Luis yet. Help me look. First, though, we’d better check out our equipment.”

  She hugged arms around chest, as if that would do any good here. “I’m chilled,” she admitted.

  Scobie pointed at a telltale. “No wonder. Your fuel cell’s down to its last couple of ergs. Mine isn’t in a lot better shape. Let’s change.”

  They didn’t waste time removing their backpacks, but reached into each other’s. Tossing the spent units to the ground, where vapors and holes immediately appeared and then froze, they plugged the fresh ones into their suits. “Turn your thermostat down,” Scobie advised. “We won’t find shelter soon. Physical activity will help us keep warm.”

  “And require faster air recycling,” Broberg reminded.

  “Yeah. But for the moment, at least, we can conserve the energy in the cells. Okay, next let’s check for strains, potential leaks, any kind of damage or loss. Hurry. Luis is still down underneath.”

  Inspection was a routine made automatic by years of drill. While her fingers searched across the man’s spacesuit, Broberg let her eyes wander. “The Dance Hall is gone,” Ricia murmurs. “I think the King smashed it to prevent our escape.”

  “Me too. If he finds out we’re alive, and seeking for Alvarlan’s soul—Hey, wait! None of that!”

  Danzig’s voice quavered. “How’re you doing?”

  “We’re in fair shape, seems like,” Scobie replied. “My corselet took a beating but didn’t split or anything. Now to find Luis…Jean, suppose you spiral right, I left, across the crater floor.”

  It took a while, for the seething which marked Garcilaso’s burial was minuscule. Scobie started to dig. Broberg watched how he moved, heard how he breathed, and said, “Give me that tool. Just where are you bunged up, anyway?”

  He admitted his condition and stepped back. Crusty chunks flew from her toil. She progressed fast, since whatever kind of ice lay at this point was, luckily, friable, and under Iapetan gravity she could cut a hole with almost vertical sides.

  “I’ll make myself useful,” Scobie said, “namely, find us a way out.”

  When he started up the nearest slope, it shivered. All at once he was borne back in a tide that made rustly noises through his armor, while a fog of dry white motes blinded him. Painfully, he scratched himself free at the bottom and tried elsewhere. In the end he could report to Danzig: “I’m afraid there is no easy route. When the rim collapsed where we stood, it did more than produce a shock which wrecked the delicate formations throughout the crater. It let tons of stuff pour down from the surface—a particular sort of ice that, under local conditions, is like fine sand. The walls are covered by it. Most places, it lies meters deep over more stable material. We’d slide faster than we could climb, where the layer is thin; where it’s thick, we’d sink.”

  Danzig sighed. “I guess I get to take a nice, healthy hike.”

  “I assume you’ve called for help.”

  “Of course. They’ll have two boats here in about a hundred hours. The best they can manage. You knew that already.”

  “Uh-huh. And our fuel cells are good for perhaps fifty hours.”

  “Oh, well, not to worry about that. I’ll bring extras and toss them to you, if you’re stuck till the rescue party arrives. M-m-m…maybe I’d better rig a slingshot or something first.”

  “You might have a problem locating us. This isn’t a true crater, it’s a glorified pothole, the lip of it flush with the top of the glacier. The landmark we guided ourselves by, that fancy ridge, is gone.”

  “No big deal. I’ve got a bearing on you from the directional antenna, remember. A magnetic compass may be no use here, but I can keep myself oriented by the heavens. Saturn scarcely moves in this sky, and the sun and the stars don’t move fast.”

  “Damn! You’re right. I wasn’t thinking. Got Luis on my mind, if nothing else.” Scobie looked across bleakness toward Broberg. Perforce she was taking a short rest, stoop-shouldered above her excavation. His earpieces brought him the harsh sound in her windpipe.

  He must maintain what strength was left him, against later need. He sipped from his water nipple, pushed a bite of food through his chow-lock, pretended an appetite. “I may as well try reconstructing what happened,” he said. “Okay, Mark, you were right, we got crazy reckless. The game—Eight years was too long to play the game, in an environment that gave us too few reminders of reality. But who could have foreseen it? My God, warn Chronos! I happen to know that one of the Titan teams started playing an expedition to the merfolk under the Crimson Ocean—on account of the red mists—deliberately, like us, before they set off…”

  Scobie gulped. “Well,” he slogged on, “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know exactly what went wrong here. But plain to see, the configuration was only metastable. On Earth, too, avalanches can be fatally easy to touch off. I’d guess at a methane layer underneath the surface. It turned a little slushy when temperatures rose after dawn, but that didn’t matter in low gravity and vacuum…till we came along. Heat, vibration—Anyhow, the stratum slid out from under us, which triggered a general collapse. Does that guess seem reasonable?”

  “Yes, to an amateur like me,” Danzig said. “I admire how you can stay academic under these circumstances.”

  “I’m being practical,” Scobie retorted. “Luis may need medical attention earlier than those boats can come for him. If so, how do we get him to ours?”

  Danzig’s voice turned stark. “Any ideas?”

  “I’m fumbling my way toward that. Look, the bowl still has the same basic form. The whole shebang didn’t cave in. That implies hard material, water ice and actual rock. In fact, I see a few remaining promontories, jutting out above the sandlike stuff. As for what it is—maybe an ammonia-carbon dioxide combination, maybe more exotic—that’ll be for you to discover later. Right now…my geological instruments should help me trace where the solid masses are least deeply covered. We all carry trenching tools, of course. We can try to shovel a path clear, along a zigzag of least effort. Sure, that may well often bring more garbage slipping down on us from above, but that in turn may expedite our progress. Where the uncovered shelves are too steep or slippery to climb, we can chip footholds. Slow and tough work; and we may run into a bluff higher than we can jump, or something like that.”

  “I can help,” Danzig proposed. “While I waited to hear from you, I inventoried our stock of spare cable, cord, equipment I can cannibalize for wire, clothes and bedding I can cut into strips, whatever might be knotted together to make a rope. We won’t need much tensile strength. Well, I estimate I can get about forty meters. According to your description, that’s about half the slope length of that trap you’re in. If you can climb halfway up while I trek there, I can haul you the rest of the way.”

  “Thanks,” Scobie said, “although—”

  “Luis!” shrieked in his helmet. “Colin, come fast, help me, this is dreadful!”

  Regardless of pain, except for a curse or two, Scobie sped to Broberg’s aid.

  Garcilaso was not quite unconscious. In that lay much of the horror. They heard him mumble, “—Hell, the King threw my soul into Hell, I can’t find my way out, I’m lost, if only Hell weren’t so cold—” They could not see his face; the inside of his helmet was crusted with frost. Deeper and longer buried than the others, badly hurt in addition, he would have died shortly after his fuel cell was exhausted. Broberg had uncovered him barely in time, if that.

  Crouched in the shaft she had dug, she rolled him over onto his belly. His limbs flopped about and he babbled, “A demon attacks me, I’m blind here but I feel the wind of its wings,” in a blurred monotone. She unplugged the energy unit and tossed it aloft, saying, “We should return this to the ship if we can.” Not uncommonly do trivial details serve as crutches.

  Above, Scobie gave the object a morbid stare. It didn’t even retain the warmth to make a little vapor, like his and hers, but lay quite inert. Its case was a metal box, thirty centimeters by fifteen by six, featureless except for two plug-in prongs on one of the broad sides. Controls built into the spacesuit circuits allowed you to start and stop the chemical reactions within and regulate their rate manually; but as a rule you left that chore to your thermostat and aerostat. Now those reactions had run their course. Until it was recharged, the cell was merely a lump.

  Scobie leaned over to watch Broberg, some ten meters below him. She had extracted the reserve unit from Garcilaso’s gear, inserted it properly at the small of his back, and secured it by clips on the bottom of his packframe. “Let’s have your contribution, Colin,” she said. Scobie dropped the meter of heavy-gauge insulated wire which was standard issue on extravehicular missions, in case you needed to make a special electrical connection or a repair. She joined it by Western Union splices to the two she already had, made a loop at the end and, awkwardly reaching over her left shoulder, secured the opposite end by a hitch to the top of her packframe. The triple strand hobbled above her like an antenna.

  Stooping, she gathered Garcilaso in her arms. The Iapetan weight of him and his apparatus was under ten kilos, of her and hers about the same. Theoretically she could jump straight out of the hole with her burden. In practice, her spacesuit was too hampering; constant-volume joints allowed considerable freedom of movement, but not as much as bare skin, especially when circum-Saturnian temperatures required extra insulation. Besides, if she could have reached the top, she could not have stayed. Soft ice would have crumbled beneath her fingers and she would have tumbled back down.

  “Here goes,” she said. “This had better be right the first time, Colin. I don’t think Luis can take much jouncing.”

  “Kendrick, Ricia, where are you?” Garcilaso moaned. “Are you in Hell too?”

  Scobie dug heels into the ground near the edge and crouched ready. The loop in the wire rose to view. His right hand grabbed hold. He threw himself backward, lest he slide forward, and felt the mass he had captured slam to a halt. Anguish exploded in his rib cage. Somehow he dragged his burden to safety before he fainted.

  He came out of that in a minute. “I’m okay,” he rasped at the anxious voices of Broberg and Danzig. “Only lemme rest a while.”

  The physicist nodded and knelt to minister to the pilot. She stripped his packframe in order that he might lie flat on it, head and legs supported by the packs themselves. That would prevent significant heat loss by convection and cut loss by conduction. Still, his fuel cell would be drained faster than if he were on his feet, and first it had a terrible energy deficit to make up.

  “The ice is clearing away inside his helmet,” she reported. “Merciful Mary, the blood! Seems to be from the scalp, though; it isn’t running any more. His occiput must have been slammed against the vitryl. We ought to wear padded caps in these rigs. Yes, I know accidents like this haven’t happened before, but—” She unclipped the flashlight at her waist, stooped, and shone it downward. “His eyes are open. The pupils—yes, a severe concussion, and likely a skull fracture, which may be hemorrhaging into the brain. I’m surprised he isn’t vomiting. Did the cold prevent that? Will he start soon? He could choke on his own vomit, in there where nobody can lay a hand on him.”

  Scobie’s pain had subsided to a bearable intensity. He rose, went over to look, whistled, and said, “I judge he’s doomed unless we get him to the boat and give him proper care almighty soon. Which isn’t possible.”

  “Oh, Luis.” Tears ran silently down Broberg’s cheeks.

  “You think he can’t last till I bring my rope and we carry him back?” Danzig asked.

  “’Fraid not,” Scobie replied. “I’ve taken paramedical courses, and in fact I’ve seen a case like this before. How come you know the symptoms, Jean?”

  “I read a lot,” she said dully.

  “They weep, the dead children weep,” Garcilaso muttered.

  Danzig sighed. “Okay, then. I’ll fly over to you.”

  “Huh?” burst from Scobie, and from Broberg: “Have you also gone insane?”

  “No, listen,” Danzig said fast. “I’m no skilled pilot, but I have the same basic training in this type of craft that everybody does who might ride in one. It’s expendable; the rescue vessels can bring us back. There’d be no significant gain if I landed close to the glacier—I’d still have to make that rope and so forth—and we know from what happened to the probe that there would be a real hazard. Better I make straight for your crater.”

  “Coming down on a surface that the jets will vaporize out from under you?” Scobie snorted. “I bet Luis would consider that a hairy stunt. You, my friend, would crack up.”

  “Nu?” They could almost see the shrug. “A crash from low altitude, in this gravity, shouldn’t do more than rattle my teeth. The blast will cut a hole clear to bedrock. True, then surrounding ice will collapse in around the hull and trap it. You may need to dig to reach the airlock, though I suspect thermal radiation from the cabin will keep the upper parts of the structure free. Even if the craft topples and strikes sidewise—in which case, it’ll sink down into a deflating cushion—even if it did that on bare rock, it shouldn’t be seriously damaged. It’s designed to withstand heavier impacts.” Danzig hesitated. “Of course, could be this would endanger you. I’m confident I won’t fry you with the jets, assuming I descend near the middle and you’re as far offside as you can get. Maybe, though, maybe I’d cause a…an ice quake that’ll kill you. No sense in losing two more lives.”