Wang Kulichenko pulled the collar of his uniform coat up closer around his
ears and pulled the helmet and face-mask down a bit. It was only early
October, but here in the tundra country the wind had a tendency to be
chill and biting in the morning, even at this time of year. Within a week
or so, he'd have to start using the power pack on his horse to
electrically warm his protective clothing and the horse's wrappings, but
there was no necessity of that yet. He smiled a little as he always did
when he thought of his grandfather's remarks about such "new-fangled
nonsense".
"Your ancestors, son of my son," he would say, "conquered the tundra and
lived upon it for thousands of years without the need of such womanish
things. Are there no men anymore? Are there none who can face nature alone
and unafraid without the aid of artifices that bring softness?"
But Wang Kulichenko noticed--though, out of politeness, he never pointed
it out--that the old man never failed to take advantage of the electric
warmth of the house when the short days came and the snow blew across the
country like fine white sand. And he never complained about the lights or
the television or the hot water, except to grumble occasionally that they
were a little old and out of date and that the mail-order catalog showed
that better models were available in Vladivostok.
And Wang would remind the old man, very gently, that a paper-forest ranger
made only so much money, and that there would have to be more saving
before such things could be bought. He did not--_ever_--remind the old man
that he, Wang, was stretching a point to keep his grandfather on the
payroll as an assistant.
Wang Kulichenko patted his horse's rump and urged her softly to step up
her pace just a bit. He had a certain amount of territory to cover, and,
although he wanted to be careful in his checking, he also wanted to get
home early.
Around him, the neatly-planted forest of paper-trees spread knotty, alien
branches, trying to catch the rays of the winter-waning sun. Whenever Wang
thought of his grandfather's remarks about his ancestors, he always
wondered, as a corollary, what those same ancestors would have thought
about a forest growing up here, where no forest like this one had ever
grown before.
They were called paper-trees because the bulk of their pulp was used to
make paper (they were of no use whatever as lumber), but they weren't
trees, really, and the organic chemicals that were leached from them
during the pulping process were of far more value than the paper pulp.
They were mutations of a smaller plant that had been found in the
temperate regions of Mars and purposely changed genetically to grow on the
Siberian tundra, where the conditions were similar to, but superior to,
their natural habitat. They looked as though someone had managed to cross
breed the Joshua tree with the cypress and then persuaded the result to
grow grass instead of leaves.
In the distance, Wang heard the whining of the wind and he automatically
pulled his coat a little tighter, even though he noticed no increase in
the wind velocity around him.
Then, as the whine became louder, he realized that it was not the wind.
He turned his head toward the noise and looked up. For a long minute, he
watched the sky as the sound gained volume, but he could see nothing at
first. Then he caught a glimpse of motion. A dot that was hard to
distinguish against the cloud-mottled gray sky.
What was it? An air transport in trouble? There were two trans-polar
routes that passed within a few hundred miles of here, but no air
transport he had ever seen had made a noise like that. Normally, they were
so high as to be both invisible and inaudible. Must be trouble of some
sort.
He reached down to the saddle pack without taking his eyes off the moving
speck and took out the radiophone. He held it to his ear and thumbed the
call button insistently.
_Grandfather_, he thought with growing irritation as the seconds passed,
_wake up! Come on, old dozer, rouse yourself from your dreams!_
At the same time, he checked his wrist compass and estimated the direction
of flight of the dot and its direction from him. He'd at least be able to
give the airline authorities some information if the ship fell. He wished
there were some way to triangulate its height and so on, but he had no
need for that kind of thing, so he hadn't the equipment.
"Yes? Yes?" came a testy, dry voice through the earphone.
Quickly, Wang gave his grandfather all the information he had on the
flying thing. By now, the whine had become a shrill roar, and the thing in
the air had become a silver-pink fish shape.
"I think it's coming down very close to here," Wang concluded. "You call
the authorities and let them know that one of the aircraft is in trouble.
I'll see if I can be of any help here. I'll call you back later."
"As you say," the old man said hurriedly. He cut off.
* * * * *
Wang was beginning to realize that the thing was a spaceship, not an
airship. By this time, he could see the thing more clearly. He had never
actually seen a spacecraft, but he'd seen enough of them on television to
know what they looked like. This one didn't look like a standard type at
all, and it didn't behave like one, but it looked even less like an
airship, and he knew enough to know that he didn't necessarily know every
type of spaceship ever built.
In shape, it resembled the old rocket-propelled jobs that had been first
used for space exploration a century before, rather than looking like the
fat ovoids that he was used to. But there were no signs of rocket
exhausts, and yet the ship was very obviously slowing, so it must have an
inertia drive.
It was coming in much lower now, on a line north of him, headed almost due
east. He urged the mare forward, in order to try to keep up with the
craft, although it was obviously going several hundred miles per
hour--hardly a horse's pace.