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would have torn all the way through his chest and blown away the rib cage. Thanks, Katrina.
A voice said: "Fifty hours."
He tried to stand up, but fell on his face. He tried to climb to his knees, but pitched forward on his
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face. There was not much strength left to him. In time with the measured passing of an eternity, he
crawled to the TDV on his belly.
Arthur Saltus struggled for an hour to climb the side of the vehicle. His awareness was slipping
away in a sea of nauseous fantasy: he had the hallucinatory notion that someone pulled off his heavy
boots--that someone removed the heavy winter garments and tried to take off his clothing. When at last
he fell head first through the vehicle's open hatch, he had the fever-fantasy that someone out there had
helped him over the side.
A voice said: "Push the kickbar."
He lay on his stomach on the webbing facing in the wrong direction, and remembered that the
engineers wouldn't recover the vehicle until the end of fifty hours. They had done that when William failed
to return. Something was under him, hurting him, putting a hard new pressure on a rib cage already
painfully sore. Saltus pulled the lump from beneath him and found a tape recorder. He pushed it toward
the kickbar but it fell inches short of the goal. The hallucination slammed shut the hatch cover.
He said thickly: "Chaney . . . the bandits have burned the treasure house . . ."
The tape recorder was thrown at the kickbar.
The time was forty minutes after two in the morning, 24 November 2000. His fiftieth birthday was
long past.
Brian Chaney
2000-plus
The meek, the terrible meek,
the fierce agonizing meek,
Are about to enter into their inheritance.
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-- Charles Rann Kennedy
FIFTEEN
Chaney was apprehensive.
The red light blinked out. He reached up to unlock the hatch and throw it open. The green light
went dark. Chaney grasped the two handrails and pulled up to a sitting position, with his head and
shoulders protruding through the hatchway. He hoped he was alone in the room--the vehicle was in
darkness. The air was sharply cold and smelled of ozone. He struggled out of the hatch and climbed over
the side. Saltus had warned him the stool was gone so he slid cautiously to the floor, and clung to the
polywater tank for a moment of orientation. The blackness around him was complete: he saw nothing,
heard nothing but the hoarse sound of his own breathing.
Brian Chaney reached up to slam shut the hatch but then stopped himself--the TDV was his only
lifeline to home base and it was wiser to keep that hatch open and waiting. He stretched out his hand to
grope for the locker; he remembered its approximate location, and took a few hesitant steps in the
darkness until he bumped into it. His suit hung in a dusty paper sheath, prepared by a dry cleaner now
many years behind him, and his shoes were on the bottom beneath the suit. An automatic pistol--put
there at the insistence of Arthur Saltus--now was an ungainly lump in the pocket of his jacket.
The weapon underscored his apprehension.
Chaney didn't bother to check his watch: it lacked an illuminated dial and there was nothing to be
seen on the wall. He quit the darkened room.
He moved slowly down the corridor in a black eerie silence to the shelter; dust stirrea up by his
feet made him want to sneeze. The shelter door was found by touch and pushed open but the overhead
lights failed in their automatic response. Chaney felt for the manual switch beside the door, flicked it, but
stayed in darkness: the electric power was out and the lecturing engineer was a liar. He listened intently to
the unseen room. He had no matches or lighter--the penalty paid by a non-smoker when light or fire was
needed--and stood there for a moment of indecision, trying to recall where the smaller items were stored.
He thought they were in metal lockers along the far wall, near the racks of heavy clothing.
Chaney shuffled across the floor, wishing he had that cocksure engineer here with him.
His feet collided with an empty carton, startling him, and he kicked it out of the way. It struck
another object before it came to rest: Saltus had complained of sloppy housekeeping, and Katrina had
written a memo. After a period of cautious groping the ungainly bulge in his jacket pocket struck the
leading edge of the bench, and he put forth both hands to explore the working surface. A radio--plugged
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in and wired to the antenna--a lantern, a few small empty boxes, a large one, a number of metal objects
his fingers could not finmediately identify, and a second lantern. Chaney barely hesitated over the objects
and continued his probe. His roving fingers found a box of matches; the fuel tanks of both lanterns jostled
with reassuring sounds. He lit the two lanterns and turned to look at the room. Chaney didn't like to think
of himself as a coward but his hand rested in the gun pocket as he turned and peered into the gloom.
The raider had returned to pilfer the stores.
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