Between the Strokes of Night

He took a deep breath. Halfway. When they had explored the surface as a group, the catapult would be used to launch all the others away from Whirlygig; and Peron would be alone again. Then he would make a powered ascent (with fingers crossed) to the safety of the waiting ship.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Peron could not recall the exact moment when he knew that he was going to die on Whirlygig. The knowledge had grown exponentially, over perhaps a minute, as his mind rapidly ran through every possible escape and rejected all of them as impossible. Cold certainty had finally replaced hope.

The landing had gone almost perfectly, as the six other contestants assigned to visit Whirlygig sailed in to a smooth encounter with the landing web. Wilmer, paired with Kallen, had proved the exception. He had come barrelling in too fast and too high, and only Kallen’s hefty pull on their line had brought him low enough to connect with the cables.

He seemed not at all upset by his narrow escape. “Guess you were right, Kallen,” he said cheerfully, once he was safely down. “Odd, that. I’d have bet money I had the speed accurate and you had it wrong.”

“Be thankful you weren’t first man in,” said Rosanne severely — she had seen how close Kallen had come to losing his own hold. “If Peron had done that he’d have been in big trouble. And what do you have in there? That’s probably the mass you didn’t allow for in your calculations.”

Wilmer held up a green case. “In this? Food. I didn’t know how long we’d be here. I’ve no wish to starve, even if you all don’t mind it. And if I had been first one in, Rosanne, with my trajectory I’d also have been first one out. At that speed and height I’d have missed Whirlygig altogether. There’s a moral in that: better come in too high and fast than low and slow.”

He had begun to hop gingerly from one foot to the other, testing his balance. The effective gravity on Whirlygig’s equator was not exactly zero, but it was so slight that a tumbling upward leap of hundreds of feet was trivially easy. Everyone had tried it, and soon lost interest. It took minutes for the feather-light float down back to the surface, and one experience of that was enough.

They soon began the careful trek away from Whirlygig’s equator, travelling in small groups and heading for the comforting gravity of the polar regions. Only Sy was left behind, making his own solitary and perplexing experiments in motion over the rough terrain.

Progress for everyone was slower than expected. They could fly low over the surface with little effort, using the tiny propulsive units flown in after they were all landed. But Whirlygig’s rapid rotation made Coriolis forces a real factor to reckon with, and allowing for them called for constant adjustment to the flight line. The suit computers refused to accept and track a simple north reckoning, and it was easy to stray twenty or thirty degrees off course. After they had been on the way for a couple of hours, Sy caught up and quickly passed them all. He had discovered his own prescription for estimating and compensating for Coriolis effects.

As they flew north the appearance of the land below gradually changed. The equator was all broken, massive rocks, heaped into improbable, gravity-defying arches, spires, and buttresses. A few hundred kilometers farther toward the pole the terrain began to smooth, settling down into a flatter wilderness of rugged boulders. It was not a pleasant landscape, and the temperature was cold enough to freeze mercury. But compared with some of the other worlds, Whirlygig seemed like vacation-land.

The suits had efficient recycling systems, and ample food supplies. The contestants agreed to carry on right to the pole, then rest there for a few hours before returning to the equator and leaving. According to Gilby they would find a sizeable research dome at the north pole, where they would be able to sleep in comfort and remove suits for a few hours. All scientific surveys on Whirlygig had been completed many years earlier, but the dome facilities should still be in working order.

Elissa and Peron had chosen to travel side by side, with their radios set for private conversation. The suit computers would monitor incoming messages and interrupt for anything urgent. Elissa was bubbling over with high spirits and cheerfulness.

“Lots of things to tell you,” she said. “I didn’t have a chance to talk to you yesterday, you were too busy getting ready for the landing here. But I’ve spent a lot of time making friends with one of the crew members — Tolider, the short-haired one with the pet tardy.”

“That hadn’t escaped my attention,” said Peron drily. “I saw you petting it and pretending you liked it, too. Disgusting. Why would anybody want a big, fat, hairy pet worm?”