"Escape From The Crater"

Escape From The Crater

by Carl L. Biemiller

Published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York.

Toby Lee met him halfway back to the Adam. She had been running, a fact which dropped a gannet, making an inland recon flight, two hundred feet for a closer look, a dip, which, in turn, broke up an observant loon with its usual hysterical laughter. No land is sick where there are birds, thought Kim.

“It’s the cryo,” she said, her words heavy from her hurry. “That explosion brought him out of sedation, and I just had time to wind him in bunk straps. He’s raving, and Tuk and Genright are holding him down to give him another shot. Come on.”

The lake was quiet. It held the blue of sky in its distant waters, but closer to the shore in the clear shallows there was a hint of gray, of the oh-so-faint milkiness which spoke of snows and glaciers and icy origins. There were Kirl on some of the rocks near the Adam, but none out in the lake. A scant mile away, and magnified by the crystal-clear air, a cylinder of what looked like dappled rock made a faint wake as Tube Steak churned off on one of his lonesome forays.

Toby had brought the inflatable dinghy and they paddled it to where Adam hung on its buoy and went aboard, popping down the hatch like sand crabs vanishing into a beach hole.

Adam’s work area was peaceful. Tuktu was seated at the con table, bringing his reports up to date. Genright was flat out on a bunk, leafing through his Bible.

“He’s all right,” they said in chorus as Kim walked over to the cryo’s bunk and stared down at him.

“Toby said the bang of Gen’s bon-bon set him off.”

“I gave him just a touch of drug,” said Genright. “Maybe enough to keep him asleep for twenty minutes, then we’ll see if he’s rational or whether he’s not going to make the change.”

“Let’s use the twenty minutes,” snapped Kim. “I want him in that suit or uniform we took off him and as smart looking as we can make him. And we are going to get out of this zip-suit gear and into Service greens with insignia and all the trimmings. Trim up this hull too. It looks like some old Rover’s bottom igloo. All it needs are some weeds and a sea-turtle pet crawling around.”

“It’s home to me,” said Genright.

“It’s a work base to me. So more motion and less mouth.”

“Yes, sir,” mused Tuktu in a soft mutter.

Toby Lee said nothing at all. But the zipper on the front of her beat-up old static-free suit hissed viciously as she turned to the compact locker which held her clothing.

Ten minutes later they looked ready to stand war-room inspection. They were neat in deep-emerald, waist-length tunics, the wave-enclosed patches of the Service at their shoulders and rank chevrons at the cuffs of full sleeves. The green trousers of the men and Toby’s knee-length skirt were pressed, and their dark, half-boots of polished sharkskin reflected a hundred glints of light. A thin white-silver bar shaped into a miniature line of flying fish marked their Rover status on their left breast pockets. Adam’s interior was tidy and as impersonal as a laboratory.

We are going to do this more often, thought Kim, if only to remind us of who and what we are.

“Tuktu, Genright, you think you could control the cryo without restraints? I’d like him to stand erect,” said Kim.

“He’s strong, Kim, but I think we can manage,” answered Genright.

“If he’s too strong, I’ll put a stun gun on him,” said Kim quietly. “Okay, we wait. And, I must say,” he added, “for the first time in a long while we look like a Service team. Thank you.”

The cryo was dressed as they found him, in trousers of lightweight khaki, a matching shirt-blouse, with twin gold, leaf-shaped medallions on its shoulders, that was open at the neck in a gap of pointed collar. His socks were a knit ribbing of some dark-brown vegetable fiber, and the stout shoes, which covered most of them were of soft animal leather and laced to hold them firmly upon his feet with strands of rawhide. The soles of the shoes were thick and rippled, as if scored to give their user a better grip upon a walking surface. And the shoes were very new.

“He’s a fine-looking man,” said Toby Lee.

The cryo stirred as she spoke, sat upright, swung his legs to the deck and stood tall, his blue eyes now gray and unfocused, as if he stared inwardly at some terrible dream. He screamed as Tuktu and Genright gripped his upper arms and held him firmly. He screamed again, and the muscles bunched at his neck as though ready to explode into violent action. The throat-tearing cry filled the Adam and shuddered off the bulkheads.

Kim took a full step forward and swung his arm in a full arc. The flat of his hand rocked the cryo’s head in one splatting slap.

Sometime, he thought, a leader has to be something different from what he is, and only hope that whatever it is he’s being at the time is what he ought to be to get the job done.

“Attention! You’ll stand at attention. That’s a uniform you wear. You’ll honor it, not disgrace it. Do you understand? Attention!”

The words were chill and measured. They came hard and as unhurried as granite. Yet somehow they blazed with an icy passion, which froze as they burned away the panic which charged the cryo. They were the core of command.

And they shocked the hydronauts as they revealed an unguessed Kim they suddenly did not know. Even Toby Lee seemed stunned. Genright and Tuktu, glimpsing Kim’s eyes as they bored into the cryo’s, saw their cat-green flare yellow-gold.

The cryo shrugged off their hands and stiffened, his shoulders braced.

“Yes sir,” he said in a clipped controlled voice.

“Your name?”

“Bruce Bell, Major, Vulcan Unit, Alaskan Command, United States Army, Thermal Exploration, Distribution and Construction.”

“Stand easy, Major Bell,” said Kim warmly. “You are among friends.”

The cryo’s shoulders slacked and shuddered. But he did not lose control. And he seemed to find some assurance in the trim, neatly uniformed appearance of the hydronauts.

“May I ask who you are, sir?” He seemed more embarrassed than alarmed, and annoyed at himself for it. “And where I am?”

“Ah, ha,” breathed Genright.

“Ah, ha,” we both win,” said Tuktu.

“Enough,” snapped Kim.

“Sir?”

“I am Sea Warden Kim Rockwell, Second Class, holding Rover Command in the Service of the World Marine Council. These are my crew: Wardens Toby Lee, Genright Selsor, and Tuktu Barnes. We serve the World Council of Cities.”

“I do not know the organization. You are a military unit?”

“In a sense,” said Toby Lee, her voice brisk but pleasant. “Let us say that we are an exploratory group under orders and on active duty in this area at present.”

“And I am aboard a submarine, wherever this area is?”

“A research vessel, sir,” said Tuktu evenly.

The cryo’s pale-blue eyes turned slate-gray. His lips compressed into a thin line. The fabric across his shoulders tightened as muscles bunched beneath it.

“You struck me, Warden,” he said coldly. “Am I a prisoner? An enemy?”

“And I am prepared to do so again if you should forget the training your uniform implies,” said Kim impersonally. “As to your other questions, you are a guest, a rescued person. There is no reason to consider you an enemy as yet.”

The cryo’s eves became twin pools of pained puzzlement.

“Easy, sir,” said Genright softly.

“I seem to have had a terrible dream,” said the cryo heavily. “Worse, I seem to still have it.”

There was a fleeting awareness of Genright’s words concerning future shock and madness in revived cryos fluttering through Kim’s mind. With it came the pang of conflict between kindness and command.

Kim was brutally direct.

“Major Bell, you did not dream and you are not dreaming. You died. You are now alive…”

“I wouldn’t want to die and come back to life with you around to scare me dead again,” whispered Genright. “Tact. That’s what it is. Pure tact.”

“I could tell you that you had a dream. That would be like standing you in a corner and telling you to think of anything but the sea monster that was about to eat you. The fact is that you are alive and well now.”

“You had a bad experience,” said Tuktu soberly.

Kim was relentless.

“You died from it,” he said. “I’m not telling you to forget it. I’m ordering you to live with it and get busy about today and tomorrow. The only thing dead about you now is the world you once lived in, and that’s gone.

“Which reminds me.”

His face was expressionless as a scoured rock.

“Do you remember what year you died in?”

There was an outraged gasp from Toby Lee.

“Kim, stop it. Stop it!”

And suddenly Major Bruce Bell laughed, a warm, genial, utterly appreciative laugh—and relaxed.

“No,” he said. “No. He read me exactly right. The year was, as I recall, 1999, and six months away from the new century. Why?”

Kim grinned.

“You might as well know that the clock didn’t stop when you did. Some time has passed, subjective time, that is. You didn’t get any older physically.”

“How much time, Warden?”

“Would you believe centuries?” asked Genright tentatively.

“How many?”

“Well, you can’t tick ‘em off with just four fingers and a thumb,” said Tuktu informatively.

Major Bell shook his head.

“I think I’ll sit down a minute.”

“No you won’t. You’re going topside right now for a look around. There’s a chance this countryside may be more familiar to you than you expect. Besides, we’ve all got a lot of work to do, and making you…ah…”

“Useful,” snapped Toby.

“…is only part of it,” continued Kim.

“I think rank has set in, that plans have been made and orders will follow, and all since a little bitty while ago,” said Genright.

“You are correct, Warden Selsor,” Kim said absently.

The air was sweet as it came somewhere southwest from the sea to gather scent from the forested slopes of the mountains and the folded valleys choked with ripened grasses, summer aspens and alders, and thorny brakes of devil’s club. The scrub conifers gave it body, and the patches of tundra and muskeg, which acknowledged the season with a thousand frost-released pools, added a rich, vegetable musk.

The mountains, which cupped the lake, were scalloped against the open sky, changing costume and color with each shadow draped upon them by the sauntering puffs of cloud.

There were sea birds out of place in the parlors of pines, a mere wingover or two from their homier shores. There were land birds, strange to the hydronauts, busy about nestings and fledgling care, filling the long days with hurry, instinctively knowing that they were short in number. And there were birds strung motionless across the sky, parked like feathered vehicles on lazy air currents and gentle thermals. Once, above them, a small V of great white birds beating north hailed them with a clear trumpet song of swan music.

Fish splashes punctuated the lake surface, ending narrative lines, which were read by kingfishers.

The cryo soaked it all up like a homesick sponge returning to some family reef and seemed to swell with new energy. The faint crinkle of puzzled pain left the corners of his eyes, and their frosty gray deepened to a cornflower blue.

“I can’t enjoy it if you’re all going to stare at me,” he said cheerfully. He threw his arms above his head like a child. “But it’s wonderful! Wonderful, and I love it!”

Kim felt oddly choked.

“But do you know it? Have you seen this country before? Is it familiar?”

Major Bell’s gaze grew sharp and speculative. He nodded toward the northeast where a picket fence of coned peaks wore plumes of steam. “But I think I know those fellows or their brothers. I did business with them, and here or very close to here… If this is Alaska, it smells like an area I knew as Katmai, government country called the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes…not sure.”

“You were found near here,” said Kim.

“Archival maps. We’ve got ‘em. Let’s get ‘em,” said Tuktu.

“Somebody else has them too, and while the Major is loving everything, we’ll all make a formal visit.”

“Moses?” asked Genright.

“The King of the Kirl?” echoed Tuktu.

“Dip us a raft,” snapped Kim.

“You feel up to this?”

“Ma’am,” smiled Major Bruce Bell, “I’ve been ordered not to sit down, and somehow I don’t want to.”

Genright, teetering in the algin-gel dinghy, overheard him, and smiled his biggest, brownest, sea-candy smile. “When you get where you’re going, you will. I promise you.”

Chapter One	Chapter Two	Chapter Three	Chapter Five	Chapter Six
Chapter Seven	Chapter Eight	Chapter Nine	Chapter Ten	Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve	Chapter Thirteen	Chapter Fourteen	Chapter Fifteen

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