"Old Hendrik Hudson—drifting in an open boat among the floes. I think I really understood at last. For time had ceased to telescope for me. Time, too, had frozen. As it must in death."
But once, awakened in the night by a sudden howling that was shriller than the wind would be, he gripped his automatic, peering out, watching a ball of fire not far above the surface of the ground that vanished suddenly, as if puffed out. It did not come again. Or if it did, he was asleep, his will a victim of exhaustion and despondency.
When he awoke, the sun was high above the surrounding peaks. O'Hara broke out his emergency rations, afterward climbing from the craft to scoop up and swallow a handful of snow.
"What am I waiting for?" he wondered.
Yet he hated to leave the craft. It was his fortress, both physical and mental, his one link with the world beyond the Atomic Curtain—though a useless link now, he knew. It was futile to stay with it and, so far as he could foresee, futile to leave it. At last the very pressure of idleness drove him to action and he took his automatic, loaded it and strapped it beneath his flyer's jacket, then with his ice ax chopped down a score of small conifers and arranged them around and above his craft in a crude camouflage. He turned toward the forest that encircled the meadow and began trudging through the snow. But just beyond the first line of trees he stopped.
The snow there was trampled as if through the night a Rugby team had had a go of it, and lying there, used up, blackened with smudge, was a flambeau of sorts—a length of wood with charred brush lashed to it. O'Hara ran his finger through the soot. It left a smear of oil.
Petroleum! Life for the motors of his craft. And somewhere near—his search had purpose now.
"I don't know what the devil I really thought I'd do with fuel," said O'Hara. "Fly around in that infernal corridor, I suppose, like a bullfinch in an aviary, free as all getout until I wanted to go somewhere beyond it. The truth is, all that seemed to matter was the chance of taking off again. That's what the Patrol does to you—puts pinfeathers on your brains. I wanted that fuel. And bad."
The trail led backward through the forest, a series of lines converging as if the individuals of a herd had searched in scattered formation toward this one meadow on the top of this one mountain, yet a preponderance of feet had trampled south by east, and O'Hara followed that line, keeping his jacket open for quick access to his automatic and using his ice ax when he needed it to chop through underbrush.
"You've seen a gull walk, haven't you? He's out of his natural element and he waddles—fine enough flying, and very good in the water, but he walks—well, like a gull. That was how I felt on foot, scrabbling through that forest," said O'Hara. "Most of it was downhill work, which helped, and presently the brush thinned out and the trees got larger and fewer and I was doing a passing fair job of it, following that trail until it was well after noonday, when I leaned against a ledge of granite for a breath."