And instinctively, impelled by horror alone, Tracy’s hands flew to her breast, finding my star-shaped talisman there and unconsciously pressing that sigil of the Elder Gods to her heart. Instantly the Wind-Walker withdrew from her mind, recoiling and shrivelling before that abhorred symbol of the power of Good as a feather before a candle’s flame. And Tracy did not know why, suddenly, the magnet pull on her mind was at an end, leaving her stumbling, numb, almost completely drained of strength. She only knew that beyond the semi-opaque window those eyes blazed more hideously yet, and that the plane now shook like a toy in the fist of a demented giant as Ithaqua’s rage brought on a massive trembling.
She moved away from the window on unsteady legs and gradually the shaking of the plane subsided. For a spell she moved dazedly about the aircraft, listening to the maddeningly slow beatings of our hearts and doing what she could to improve our comfort until, feeling hunger stir, she turned herself again to making coffee and preparing something to eat. And as she was about that task, the temperature began to drop in the aircraft, plunging in the space of only a minute or so from its previously frozen chill into sub-zero temperatures. A sheet of deep white stretched itself over the windows of the nose and fuselage, completely obscuring once more the horror sailing on the winds of the void outside. Icy fingers spread over the metal walls, rubber floor coverings, equipment and motionless men.
It was no natural cold, but an awful condition brought about through the will of Ithaqua. As such it could not affect Tracy, unknowingly protected as she was by the star-shaped symbol of Eld that she wore about her neck, instead it speeded her to the task of throwing extra blankets over our all but inanimate forms where they lay about the floor, to insulate us as much as possible from the incredibly cold.
Having done what she could for us and astonished and frightened that she herself should feel nothing of the effects of the plummeting temperature, Tracy turned once more to her coffee, only to discover that though the electricity still freely flowed, nevertheless the water had frozen solid in the kettle. Only then, briefly, did she think of giving in, bursting into tears and crying unashamedly as she tried once more, futilely, to shake me awake.
The depth of frost thickened in the interior of the plane, blanketing it in white crystals that glittered in the glow from colored panel lights. Finally, completely exhausted of physical strength and drained of emotion, Tracy lay down beside me and crept under the parka that covered me, hugging my cold form to her. And one by one the glass instruments of the pilot’s oontrol panel cracked and splintered as the temperature fell still lower.
II
World of the Winds
(Recorded through the Medium of Juanita Alvarez)
When Tracy next awakened it was to find her body a mass of bruises and aching bones. The interior of the plane was in complete disorder but—miracle of miracles!—her three “corpses” were all stirring, and we were groaning almost with one voice. I can vouch for that last. I most certainly was groaning! My entire body felt swollen and inflamed.
We had obviously been tossed down hard. The door was hanging open on snapped safety bolts; one of the windows had been shattered outward, I guessed by a box of ammunition flying against it: the broken box and a number of ammunition belts were strewn across the narrow deck. Snow was hissing softly in through the open door and broken window, settling in small drifts on the tilted floor. The nose of the plane was down, tail up, at an angle of between fifteen and twenty degrees. I remember thinking as I climbed stiffly, painfully to my feet that I ought to feel terribly cold, so high up in the mountains of the far North … .
Then it was a matter of fighting Tracy off. She was hysterical with relief, going from me to Whitey, then to Jimmy, finally back to me, crying and kissing us and babbling out her story, which I gradually began to take in. It took me a few moments to get oriented. I seemed to be more or less whole—nothing broken at any rate, despite the multiple aches and pains—and Whitey seemed fine, too, just a little shaken up. But Jimmy had a nasty bump on his head and he hadn’t quite managed to get to his feet yet.
Since it was plain we weren’t about to die or stiffen up on her again, Tracy soon calmed down enough to make coffee. She was shivering like a leaf in a gale, which I believed was probably just as much the result of shaken nerves as physical coldness. I managed to get the door shut and fixed up a blanket over the broken window. That would keep some of the cold out, at least. Even though I didn’t feel any real discomfort myself, there was no telling what shock might do to the others. One glance out of the door as I closed it had been sufficient to confirm at least part of Tracy’s story; we certainly weren’t down in any mountains. Outside, under lowering clouds, a vast white plain stretched away, with strangely shaped hummocks of snow dotting it at intervals. In the distance I could just make out what looked like—but then the snow blew up like an opaque white curtain. It was a relief, though, to note that if Tracy’s story should prove to be one hundred percent fact and not fifty percent fancy, fever or nightmare, then at least there was no sign of the Wind-Walker for the moment. Wherever he had gone, I hoped he would stay there.
But why wasn’t I cold? Already the blanket at the open window had frozen stiff as a board, and Tracy was still shivering as if she would shake herself to pieces. I noticed that like myself, Whitey and Jimmy didn’t seem uncomfortable, and immediately something began tugging at the back of my memory, something I had read of Ithaqua. The Wind-Walker was able to bring about alterations in the body temperatures of those he contaminated. Were we then contaminated? I suspected that my sister was not.
Breaking into my thoughts, Tracy passed me a steaming cup of coffee. Her hands were white and they shook. I looked at the cup for a moment, then passed it right back. “You drink it, Tracy. I think you need it more than I do.”
I shrugged out of my outsize parka and wrapped it around her shoulders over the one she wore already, zipping it up the front. Then I moved past Jimmy, on his feet now, and opened up the first-aid cabinet. The kit inside was all tumbled about but I found a clinical thermometer and put it under my tongue. I also found Whitey’s star-stone.
I lifted the thing out of the debris of bandages and bottles, turning to the other three. “Who does this belong—” I started to mumble around the thermometer—then dropped the star-stone. It was hot as hell! A tiny puff of steam or smoke rose up from my stinging fingers; the skin of my palm was cracked where I had held the five-pointed star.
“That’s mine,” Whitey said, sipping his coffee and starting to look a lot more human. He was frowning, plainly wondering why I had dropped the star-stone. “What’s up?”
Tracy hurried over and took hold of my damaged hand, staring in astonishment at the redly blistering flesh, then at me, finally stooping to pick up the star-stone. I started to stop her until I saw that she plainly couldn’t feel the things heat. But was it really hot?
I took the thermometer out of my mouth and squinted at it. The scale started at 35° Centigrade, its lowest point—useful if someone were suffering from extreme hypothermia or exposure—but the mercury wasn’t showing at that level. It had shrunk back into a silver blob at the frozen end of the scale. I was dead, or should be!
I knew then that Whitey and Jimmy would be the same. Wherever we were, well, it could get as cold as it damn well wanted to; we weren’t going to freeze to death. But Tracy was something else again.
Obviously the star-stone she wore had saved her from this effect of close proximity to the Wind-Walker, but it had also left her as vulnerable to normal low temperatures as she had been before, as any normal person always is. Now I could see why Ithaqua had placed this weird stricture upon us, why Whitey, Jimmy and I had suffered this incredible change. This way Ithaqua wouldn’t have to worry about our threatening him with our star-stones. We wouldn’t be able to touch the damned things.
I looked at the others and saw a little of the panic hidden in their eyes, the grim fears hiding behind the white masks of their faces.
The telepathic impressions I was getting were nervous, disorganized, bordering on the hysterical. Things needed sorting out right now, before matters got worse.
“Tracy,” I said, “you’d better put that second stone around your neck along with the other. We can hardly afford to lose them, and you’re the only one who can handle them.” I brought out my metal security box from where it was stowed beneath a seat and unlocked it, taking out a duplicate copy of my complete file on Project Wind-Walker.
“You’d better read this, too,” I said, passing her the heavy file of papers and documents. “Then you’ll know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
While I was busy dealing with Tracy’s education, Whitey took a small electric heater from among the items in his personal kit, a tiny Japanese model with its own adapter. He plugged it into a battery-fed outlet. In a matter of only a minute or so warm air began to pour from the grill, driven by a hidden fan. Whitey directed the stream of warmth at Tracy where she sat turning the pages of my file and sipping her coffee.
“All right,” I said to the two men, inclining my head toward the back of the fuselage. We moved into a rather cramped huddle.
“Boys,” I started, “I think we’re in a pretty bad mess, and I admit that I’m mainly to blame. Things happened a lot too fast for me; but that’s no excuse, or at best a lame one. Up to now this has been a pretty messed-up job. And again, well, I suppose the fault is mine; I know it’s mine. So if you’re starting to feel that it’s high time we voted in a new chief, then—”
“You’re joking, Hank!” Whitey’s naturally mournful voice cut me off in mid-sentence, his eyebrows seeming to droop from the center where they met over his nose as he frowned.
“No way,” Jimmy agreed with Whitey, shaking his head, dark eyes bright in his bronze face. “You got us into this, you get us out.”
They were both smiling now, albeit lopsidedly. Whitey continued, “I’m a hunchman, Hank, and it’s my bet that you’ll boss this show no matter what anyone else decides. Anyway, we’re all equally to blame for what’s happened.”
“All right.” I told them, relieved that they were still with me, “but that’s something else we need to decide; just exactly what has happened. I don’t know if you were listening to Tracy while she was going on about all she saw, her experiences since the Big Fellow grabbed us?”
“I was listening,” Whitey answered, his eyebrows drooping again.
Jimmy nodded grimly. “Sounded to me like Tracy believes we’re no longer on Earth.”
“Yes, that’s what it sounded like,” I agreed. “But we’ll talk about that in a minute. First I want to clear up this thing with the star-stones.”
“Confession,” Jimmy sheepishly offered. “I forgot to bring mine.”
“I wouldn’t feel too bad about it,” I told him. “I forgot mine, too. If it weren’t for Tracy we’d only have the one—Whitey’s. And I have a feeling that we didn’t simply ‘forget’ them, either. No, it wasn’t bravado but something else. The Wind-Walker is telepathic; if anyone knows that I do. If I’m right, then it’s an even bet he’s known about us all along, probably right from the moment Peaslee decided we should have a go at him. I think he’s been applying subtle telepathic pressures that have gone completely undetected. I can show you evidence for what I say. Here’s Whitey, a strong-willed man. He brings along his stone but then doesn’t wear it. Then I conveniently ‘forget’ my stone. You, Jimmy, and poor Dick—you don’t bother with your stones at all! Oh, yes, I guess we can be truly thankful for Tracy. She’s thrown one hell of a monkeywrench right in Ithaqua’s works.”
“And my star-stone really burned you?” Whitey asked, confirming more than questioning the fact.
“Would you like to go and ask Tracy to let you have it back?” I said. “Perhaps wear it round your neck?” I showed him my blistered hand.
“I’ll take your word for it. But how?”
Here Jimmy cut in. “I think I know. When Ithaqua grabbed the plane we were unprotected, all of us except Tracy. I must have read everything you ever put together, Hank, on Ithaqua. Don’t know of a single case where he was involved when there wasn’t some mention of this tremendous drop in body temperature. He—he changes people!”
“Right,” I put in. “He brings them under his influence, subtly alters them, imbues them, I believe, with something of his own aura, which he radiates as intense cold.”
Jimmy chewed his lip. “Isn’t that a whole lot of guesswork, Hank?”
“Not really,” I answered. “The star-stone burned me, didn’t it? Just like I was Ithaqua myself, or one of his minions.”
“Are you saying that we are—his?”
“Not necessarily. You’ve read the case histories. There was that woman, Lucille Bridgeman. She certainly didn’t knuckle under to him, and she suffered the same fate. In fact I think we may soon be glad we’re immune to the cold. Wherever we are, it seems a pretty grim place. We should be all right, but we’ll have to look after Tracy. She’s more than just my sister; she’s the only one who can handle the star-stones. As long as she can do that we’re ‘untouchable’—I hope.”
“Maybe,” Whitey interrupted, “maybe we have to be immune to the cold simply to live here.”
“I know what you mean. You think that Ithaqua has acclimatized us, right?”
“Something like that, yes,” he answered.
“Which brings us back to an earlier question,” Jimmy put in. “Just where is this place? Where the hell are we?”
“That’s something that will have to wait, for now,” I told him. “There are other things we have to do. We ought to take inventory, see what we’ve got that we can use, decide what should be done immediately, and work out plans to cover as many eventualities as we can think of. That last should be a good one for you, Whitey, although at the moment it’s the least important of the lot. Survival is the main thing, but we won’t know until the snow clears just exactly what our position is. Or how to improve it.”
“Obviously we can’t stay in the plane,” Jimmy said. “Not for any great length of time But if we are going to move on, we’ll need to take as much of our kit with us as we can carry.”
“The door will lift right off its hinges,” Whitey said. “It ought to make a good sledge.”
“And of course we have our guns,” Jimmy butted in. “There’s a rifle in Dick’s kit, and a couple of pistols. He was looking after the weapons side of it, but now—” He let it tail off, his eyes straying to the nose of the plane where a frozen shape lay wrapped in blankets.
“Yes,” I nodded, “and we’ll need to take care of Dick, too.”
Whitey added, “If we’re going to leave the plane anyway, I think perhaps Dick would be just as happy if he stayed right here. Captain of his ship, so to speak.”
I nodded. “Maybe you’re right. Right now I suggest we see what we can pack away. We’ll carry the weapons openly, of course. Jimmy, you can start—”
“Hank!” Tracy suddenly shouted, her voice somehow managing to rise hysterically in the space of that single exclamation.
I half-leaped, half-skidded down the frosted floor of the tilted fuselage to where she stood at a window. She had cleared the frost from one corner of the glass. Outside the snow had stopped. The great plain with its strange snow hummocks stood out stark against a dull gray sky. In the distance a pyramidal structure stood up from the snow. At its apex--a shape. And that shape was unmistakable.
“Ithaqua!” I heard myself say, the name hissing off my tongue.
The two men joined me as Tracy moved shakily away from the window, her hand to her throat. Clearing the frost from a larger area of the glass, I asked, “How far, do you think?”
“Mile and a half, two miles,” Jimmy answered, producing a pair of binoculars. He put them to his eyes. “God, look at that—horror!”
I took the binoculars from him, put them to my eyes, and the distant scene sprang up large as life. Indeed, the Wind-Walker was larger than life; a f
antastic, towering shape, black as a starless night, with gaping eyes that glowered and burned in his awful face. He straddled the apex of the pyramid on massive legs, gesticulating with his threatening arms.
Gesticulating, threatening what? Whom?
I increased the magnification of the binoculars and followed the outline of the pyramid down to its base. People, a crowd of them, on their knees, heads down in supplication—worshippers.
Their faces were indistinct, blurred, but I could see that they were a squat, dark people, most of them. Of Eskimo or Mongol origins, perhaps.
At the front of this prone assembly stood two men, whites, long-haired and dressed in black robes. Priests or spokesmen. Managing to get the magnification just right at last, I focused upon the nearer of the two. European, at a guess; his gaunt face seemed full of fanatic fervor. I turned my attention to the pyramid, Ithaqua’s “altar.” I judged the thing to be all of eighty, maybe ninety feet in height.
“That pyramid is like a damned junk-pile!” I gasped. “A heap of scrap sheathed in ice. Near the base there’s what looks like a small airplane. Yes, I can see the cockpit clearly, and part of one wing. Halfway up there’s some sort of tracked vehicle, and a bit higher something that looks like the gondola of a balloon. And, by God, I believe there’s a heavy-duty truck in there as well! Other stuff, too, things I can’t quite identify. All encased in ice, frozen solid.”
I went on to describe the worshippers at the base of the conglomerate cone, then did a slow sweep of the plain in its immediate vicinity. “There are totems. Huge carved totems circling the pyramid; Eskimo, I’m sure of it, and crowned with effigies of Ithaqua. These are his worshippers, all right, and this is their place of worship.”