Write about a week in December without using the words
'December, snow, or holiday.'
Approx. 2,621 words
With a Cold Wind Blowing
©2004 by W. E. Lopez
“Can’t anyone do anything about that
goddam draft?” George Altman shouted.
“It’s twenty below in here and I’m freezing my ass off!”
“We’ve stuffed it with all the available
tent material from the hold, George, but that’s hardly an adequate repair. I suspect one of the reason’s you’re feeling
it so much is due to loss of blood.”
Eileen Coleman leaned toward her co-pilot and inspected the tourniquet
on his leg. “It doesn’t appear to be
flowing now, but you have to remember to loosen it every thirty minutes or you
may lose your leg.”
“What?” he shouted. Outside the crippled landing craft, the wind
was howling and screeching, blowing at least eighty miles per hour, making it
all but impossible to hear during the strongest gusts.
“I said loosen the tourniquet every
half-hour!” she shouted over the blowing gale.
“Any luck with the emergency transmitter, Cora?”
Cora Benoza, the communications engineer,
was hunched over a computer terminal, futilely trying to reprogram the software
while wearing thick gloves. “All systems
check OK, Eileen, but the crash must have wreaked havoc with the hard drive. The computer is supposed to begin
transmitting automatically in the event of trouble…”
“Which it hasn’t!” Floyd Collins yelled.
“…obviously,” Cora finished. “All the circuits seem to be fine, but we
have to send someone outside to activate the transmitter manually.”
“Which we can’t since the ship is nearly
on her back and the access panel is buried in all that white stuff,” Norman
Calhoun said.
“A little… (Screech! The wind howling
through the jagged opening in the hull screamed loudly)… “shouldn’t stop
us. We can always dig down to the access
panel. You’ve got plenty of muscles,
“You don’t need to remind me I’m not a
mental giant like you, skipper, but I’m not so stupid as to go outside without
a safety line wrapped around me.”
Floyd and Norman were construction
men. George Altman, in addition to his
duties as co-pilot, was a surveyor and construction boss. Their job was to unload the mini-dozer and loader
from the landing craft and set up a Class 2 landing field so the convoy ship 200
miles overhead could begin landing the colonists and more construction
equipment and personnel using the shuttle boats.
“No dice, skipper,” Cora shouted over the
wind. “I’ve reprogrammed the operating
system for manual initiation, but there has to be a damaged relay
somewhere. The main, alternate, and
emergency transmitters simply aren’t getting power.”
“I’m sure you’ve tried everything,
Cora.” Eileen was extremely concerned
about the inability to transmit. It was
bad enough Icarus was over the
horizon sixty minutes out of every ninety, but they had crash landed at least
twelve hundred miles closer to the pole than they had intended to. Icarus had
been on the far side of the planet when they went down, and without com, they
would have a great deal of difficulty locating the crash site.
“Norman, you and Floyd fasten a line
between you and another to the air lock, then get out there and get to that
access panel.” Eileen felt like
apologizing for sending the two crewmen into the arctic winds, but it was her
duty as captain of the landing craft and both men knew it.
“Come on, Floyd,” Calhoun said. “I grew up in
The two men had already unfastened their
seat belts so they could block the gaping hole in the side of the landing craft
and preserve what little warmth was available.
With Calhoun in the lead, they headed aft to locate safety ropes and
exit the mangled ship through the cargo hatch.
Cora Benoza gave up reprogramming the
computer and sat with her arms folded in front of her, trying to conserve as
much body heat as possible. Her exhaled
breath formed large plumes of frosted air in front of her face.
“What happened, Eileen? What caused the crash?”
“It beats me, Cora. We were sixty miles up when the vertical
stabilizer simply disintegrated. It’s
impossible for us to have hit anything, not even giant hail gets that high. It must have been a structural failure and
the heat caused by atmospheric friction, combined with the sudden stress on the
control surfaces, just caused it to carry away.”
“You did a great job getting us safely
down, Eileen. I’ve never heard of a
pilot making a landing you can walk away from without a tail fin.”
“Save your pat on the back until we can
walk away from this one, Cora. It will
be a mighty long walk if we want to get out of this (Screech, howl, moan) and
ice and into a warmer zone.”
Eileen stood on tip-toe and surveyed what
she could see through the quartz viewing ports.
Owing to the canted deck of the control room, the starboard port gave an
excellent view of the frozen landscape four feet beneath the landing
craft. The portside view port was angled
at least 30 degrees above the horizon and she could see nothing there. Directly ahead, she had an unobstructed view
of an ice field strewn with boulders, ice ridges, and fissures far off to her
horizon. She judged they had been
extremely lucky to get the ship down without disappearing into one of those
fissures or smashing into an ice ridge.
Forty minutes later, Calhoun and Collins
returned to the control room. “No can
do, skipper,” Calhoun said. “We dug in
from the side, but there is solid rock less than twelve inches beneath the
hull. The impact, skidding and weight of
the ship has compressed the (Screech, howl, moan) into
solid ice. We don’t have the equipment
to dig through solid rock, we can’t use explosives, and we can’t lift the ship. We’re goners!” he said glumly.
“Get some hot coffee from the galley,
Floyd, and then get some rest. The sun
is dropping now and it’s down to minus 40 outside the ship. We’ll give it another go in the morning and
try to work up a plan.”
“What if there is no morning, skipper?”
Calhoun asked. “What if we’re just
beginning winter? I’ve read that back on
Earth, some places have six months of darkness during winter.”
“I didn’t study the local weather in the
polar latitudes,
“I don’t mean to be stubborn, Captain,
but what if the sun doesn’t come up like you figure?”
“Then we’ll work in the dark, what else?”
*
* *
The sun did come up in the morning and
the five crew members scraped together a hot meal while discussing their rescue
status or work they could perform themselves to get out of this frozen
wasteland.
“Can you rig some way to get the dozer
and loader outside, Collins?”
“Not the way this deck is canted,
skipper. Even if we had the materials to
build an A-frame and hoist the equipment from the hatch and lower it to the
ground, we don’t have anything powerful enough to lift a ton and a half of dead
weight.”
“Sure you do,” George Altman said. “With this gimpy leg, I can’t help you other
than by supervising, but the dozer has a hundred meters of three-eighths cable
on a winch. If you build an A-frame and
anchor the cable outside, you can get the dozer out and then use it to unload
the mini-loader.”
“Hmm, I guess we could make that work,
George. But then what do we do? We still can’t dig through solid rock to get
at the transmitter access panel, and I doubt we can travel far enough south to
a more salubrious climate.” Floyd was
being sarcastic, but they all appreciated the mild attempt at humor.
“If nothing else,” Eileen Collins said,
“it will give us something to do and the exercise will help keep us warm. If the alternative is to sit here and freeze
to death, I would prefer to attempt the impossible. We can’t be sure it can’t be done until we
try.”
They began immediately after
breakfast. With Altman bossing the work,
Floyd and Norman began preparing the mini-dozer to be unloaded. Eileen and Cora pitched in and located 20-foot
lengths of three inch pipe intended to be used for the colony to sink one or
more wells, assuming running water could not be found nearby. George did engineering calculations with an
old fashioned slide rule, and sketched the A-frame he wanted Floyd to construct
using five lengths of pipe. The pipe was
moved outside where Floyd worked in the below zero wind to cut and then weld
the improvised support. When the sun
went down again the crew gathered for another meal.
“How’s your leg, George?” Eileen Coleman
asked.
“It hurts like hell, skipper, but if we
can’t get ourselves out of this mess, I don’t think I’ll have to worry about
losing it. We won’t last more than a few
days before we all freeze to death.”
“You let me worry about that,
George. I’ve been giving that some
thought too. If we can get outside the
ship, we can use the torch to cut ‘er open and scavenge at least one of the
radios, then we can get a message to the Icarus.”
“Okay, so we get a message off, what good
will that do us? The landing craft is
the only vessel we have with skids on it; the two shuttles require a hard
packed surface to land on. That’s why we
were sent down first, to prepare the way.”
“Captain Haller will find a way to send a
boat down from the Icarus,
George. He can’t afford to lose five of
his crew before the mission has even begun, not to mention what little
construction equipment we have. Our job
is to be here and be alive when we’re rescued.”
“I’m strongly in favor of that, Cora
Benoza echoed.” Exhausted, but with good
food warming them, the five crew members had a restful night’s sleep and began
the arduous task of unloading the mini-dozer shortly after breakfast.
Winching the iron monster over the lip of
the cargo hatch and lowering it to the surface was much easier than Altman had
estimated. Unloading the mini-loader was
no problem at all. When they had the
equipment on the hard packed ice, Eileen directed them to begin constructing a
snow shelter where they could stay out of the ever present wind and maintain
some degree of warmth while they jury rigged the radio equipment. This planet’s period of rotation was only 22
hours, and after 10 hours of heavy construction work, the crew again hit their
bunks fully exhausted.
“You think it’s Christmas yet… on Earth I
mean?” Cora Benoza whispered to Eileen in the darkened cabin.
“Search me, Cora. I never quite figured out that ‘slippage’
stuff the astrogator tried to explain.
It could be mid-winter or mid-summer back on Earth for all I know. If I need to know the exact date, I ask
Commander Woody and he puts it through the computer and gives me an
answer. Why? You forget to mail your Christmas cards or
something?”
“Umm, no, just wondering. G’night, Eileen.”
*
* *
On their fourth morning, the temperature was still
well below freezing, but the sky was clear and the wind blew no more than
thirty miles an hour. The crew was in
decidedly good spirits as they ate reconstituted Denver Omelets for breakfast,
and thick slices of toast with orange marmalade on the side. The supply of coffee was hot and seemingly
never ending. The only thing they
dreaded was going outside into the cold again, but they all knew the chore could
not be avoided.
There was a pounding on the hull and a voice shouted,
“Hey in there! Can anyone hear me?”
As one, they ran for the cargo hatch opened it and
peered over the lip. “Who’s that? Who’s there?
How did you find us?”
“Ron Stabler,” one of four men called through the
wind. “Are you all right?”
“We have one injured, but I think he’ll be all
right. The rest of us are cold as hell,
but you can come on up and have a hot cup of coffee. I guess you guys are pretty cold too!”
Floyd and Norman placed the cargo ladder over the
side of the hatch and the four rescuers swarmed aboard, each eagerly accepting
a cup of hot coffee as they struggled to remain balanced on the steeply sloping
deck.
“How’d you find us?” George Altman asked.
“How’d you get down with no landing field?” Norman
Calhoun asked.
“Finding you was not the biggest problem,” Stabler
told them. “The ship’s cartographer was
taking routine photos for map making when the image analysis computer pointed
you out as a questionable terrain feature.
Well, I should think so! With
closer analysis, we recognized you right away but couldn’t figure out why you
landed so far north!”
Cora said, “The skipper saved our lives when the
vertical stabilizer failed while we were still sixty miles high, but she
managed to keep control of the ship…”
“If you can call that control,” Eileen said.
“… and put us down here without killing anyone.”
“I wonder how the skipper knew,” Ron Stabler
remarked.
“Knew what?” Eileen asked.
“Knew that you were still alive.”
“He may not have, but he had to find out,” Eileen
said.
“Yeah, I guess that’s why he was in such a hurry to
have us put a boat down after we located you but we still had no radio
contact.”
“But, how did you get a boat down without a landing
field?” Floyd Collins asked.
“Well, it wasn’t my idea, but the skipper told us to
try it. About six miles east of here,
there’s a lake at least forty miles across; frozen, of course. The skipper said we could safely make a belly
landing there with minimal damage to the boat, and then trek over here on
foot. He is damned anxious to get you
all back. He said it’s too damned much
paperwork to report the loss of a landing craft and five members of his crew.”
“I must have missed spotting that lake during all the
excitement of trying to land the ship,” Eileen said.
“You didn’t miss a thing, skipper,” George Altman
said. “I was all right before the crash,
and I couldn’t see anything either. The
clouds were just too thick!”
“Oh, by the way, Lieutenant Coleman, the skipper sent
this to you.” He passed Eileen a buff
colored envelope roughly six inches by nine.
Inside, Eileen found the shoulder boards of a full Lieutenant and a
Christmas card. “He told me to wish you
a Merry Christmas, ma’am.”
“You mean…?”
“Yes, ma’am, yesterday was Christmas Day back on
Earth. The Captain says your orders were
published on Earth three years ago, but it’s taken this long for the radio
signal to reach us and he didn’t see why you should have to wait any
longer. I guess that means you have a
cart load of back pay coming to you, doesn’t it?”
“If I had it all in front of me now, Stabler, I think
I’d build a roaring fire so we could all get warm!”