Resurgence

“I’ll do it—though I’ll tell you right now, the idea of this lot clutterin’ up the inside of my ship don’t exactly thrill me. I’ll call from the pinnace. It has better transmission equipment than the suits, an’ there are channels that Kallik will be sure to have open. Take me a few minutes.”

He moved to the multiple overlapping leaf layers that formed the wall of the cone-house. As he pulled the inner layer aside, Hans Rebka was somehow standing next to him.

Nenda paused with his hand on the side of the leaf. He said, softly enough so that Rebka alone could hear, “I don’t remember anybody invitin’ you.”

“I invited myself.” Rebka motioned Nenda to continue beyond the inner layer. When they were standing in the narrow space between the leaves, he went on, “Look, I know what I think of you, and I can guess that you don’t think any better of me. But we are both realists. Like it or not, Julian Graves is in charge of this expedition and the others will do what he says.”

“Yeah. Old numb-nuts, the Ethical Councilor. He never met an alien he didn’t like, even when it was tryin’ to kill him.”

“I don’t think anyone but you and me realizes how much danger we could be in—maybe Atvar H’sial, because the two of you seem to be on the same wavelength. Anyway, I’ve got an itch inside that I can’t scratch, and it feels like trouble.”

“Yeah. But we don’t know when an’ how.” Nenda whistled through his teeth. “All right. I hate to say this, but I’ll go along. We work together, ’til we’re out of this crappy place an’ home in the Orion Arm. Then it’s back to business as usual.”

“Some business there I can do without. I was twelve hours away from execution when an inter-clade councilor arrived to take me to Miranda. Now I feel like I’m waiting to be executed on Marglot.” Rebka pushed his way through the remaining leaves until he was outside the cone-house. There he paused until Louis Nenda joined him. Rebka went on, “Seems like our worries are justified. What do you make of this?”

The two men stared at the ground, then looked up to the clouded sky. Here at the Hot Pole, perpetually warmed by the hot gas-giant around which Marglot orbited, an impossible event was taking place.

All around, large flakes of white drifted down.

It was snowing.

* * *

“Want to go back an’ tell ’em the news?” Nenda jerked his head toward the cone-house.

“I think you should make your call to the Have-It-All first. Let’s see what else we can learn.”

“Yeah. Graves will start cluckin’ an’ gibberin’ if we go inside, but there’s not a damn thing he can do.”

They began to walk side by side across the snow-covered ground. Hans guessed that it must have started at least an hour ago. A faint glow of dawn was touching the eastern horizon, and by its light the outline of the pinnace was visible ahead. An outline only, because already it stood covered with a thin layer of snow. Cone-houses, scattered all the way to the horizon, formed steep-sided pyramids of white.

Their suits kept the men warm, but Hans confirmed from his monitor the large and sudden drop in temperature. Snow was sticking to everything, which meant that the air and ground could not be much below freezing.

Make that, much below freezing yet. It was not over. The suit record showed a continuing decrease of a few degrees an hour.

They had reached the pinnace, and Nenda slid one door open. He cursed as blown snow and snow from the roof fell on him and on the pilot’s seat. “Claudius was right. We should have stayed on Pleasureworld.” He waited until Hans Rebka had moved across to the passenger seat, then scrambled in after him. “If we had any sense, we’d take off now, and to hell with it. I know, I know, we can’t—but Atvar H’sial would understand if we did.”

He went to work at the communications console. “Hope this funny weather don’t mess up signals.”

“Are you sure they’ll be listening?”

“You kiddin’? I’ve seen better, but this will do.”

A grainy image of Kallik had appeared on the pinnace’s central display.

“Master Nenda! And Captain Rebka also!” The Hymenopt was hopping up and down in excitement. “We had been wondering and worrying.”

“Worryin’ why?”

“Marglot is changing. During our first orbits, one hemisphere was warm and one was ice-coated. Now we see clouds everywhere—snow clouds, from their appearance—and there is evidence of tremendous winds blowing between the cold and warm sides.”

“No need to worry about us. We’re near the Hot Pole—or what used to be the Hot Pole. It’s snowin’ here, too.”

“Just as predicted, from what Archimedes discovered.”

“Archimedes? He don’t have the brain to predict anythin’. Is there some way he could see what was happenin’ down here, even through the cloud layer.”

“Not at all. As observations of Marglot became less relevant because of clouds, J’merlia and I assigned to him a different task. We suggested that he use the aft chamber to study the planet M-2, and see what might be learned there.”