Pray tarry you here in this grove;

to touch down. Even with the realisation a jarring vibration, of a power and intensity far beyond anything I had expected, reached my feet through the frozen crust of the ice-cap. No ordinary touchdown that, I knew, not even for a belly landing: the pilot must have overestimated his height and set his ship down with force enough to crumple the fuselage, to wreck the plane on the spot. But he hadn't. I was prone to the frozen snow again, ear pressed hard against it, and I could half hear, half feel, a kind of hissing tremor which could only have come from the fuselage, no doubt already splintered and ripped, sliding over the ice, gouging a furrowed path through it. How long this sound continued, I couldn't be suresix seconds, perhaps eight. And then, all at once, came another earth tremor, severer by far than the first, and I heard clearly, even above the gale, the sudden sharp sound of the crash, the grinding tearing scream of metal being twisted and tortured out of shape. And then, abruptly, silencea silence deep and still and ominous, and the sound of the wind in the darkness was no sound at all. Shakily, I rose to my feet. It was then I realised for the first time that I had lost my snow-maskit must have ripped off as I had rolled along the ground. I brought out my torch from under my parkait was always kept there as even a dry battery could freeze and give no light at all if the temperature fell low enoughand probed around in the darkness. But there was no sign of it, the wind could have carried it a hundred yards away by this time. A bad business, indeed, but there was no help for it. I didn't like to think what my face would be like by the time I arrived back at the cabin. Joss and Jackstraw were still trying to quieten the dogs when I rejoined them. "You all right, sir?" Joss asked. He took a step closer. "Good lord, you've lost your mask!" "I know. It doesn't matter." It did matter, for already I could feel the burning sensation in my throat and lungs every time I breathed. "Did you get a bearing on that plane?" "Roughly. Due east, I should say." "Jackstraw?" "A little north of east, I think." He stretched out his hand, pointing straight into the eye of the wind. "We'll go east." Somebody had to make the decision, somebody had to be wrong, and it might as well be me. "We'll go eastJoss, how long is that spool?" "Four hundred yards. More or less." "So. Four hundred digital cameras review sony yards, then due north. That plane is bound to have left tracks in the snow: with luck, we'll cut across them. Let's hope to heaven it did touch down less than four hundred yards from here." I took the end of the line from the spool, went to the nearest antenna pole, broke off the four-foot-long flag-like frost feathersweird growths of the crystal aggregates of rime that streamed out almost horizontally to leewardand made fast the end of the line round the pole. I really made it fastour lives depended on that line, and without it we could never find our way back to the antenna, and so eventually to the cabin, through the pitch-dark confusion of that gale-ridden arctic night. There was no possibility of retracing steps through the snow: in that intense cold, the rime-crusted snow was compacted into a frozen neve that was but one degree removed from ice, of an iron-hard consistency that would show nothing less than the crimp marks of a five-ton tractor. We started off at once, with the wind almost in our faces, but slightly to the left. I was in the lead, Jackstraw came behind with the dogs and Joss brought up the rear, unreeling the line from the homing spool against the pressure of the return winding spring. Without my mask, that blinding suffocating drift was a nightmare, a cruel refinement of contrasting torture where the burning in my throat contrasted with the pain of my freezing face for dominance in my mind. I was coughing constantly in the super-chilled air, no matter how I tried to cover mouth and nose with a gloved hand, no matter how shallowly I breathed to avoid frosting my lungs. The devil of it was, shallow breathing was impossible. We were running now, running as fast as the ice-glazed slipperiness of the surface and our bulky furs would allow, for to unprotected people exposed to these temperatures, to that murderous drift-filled gale, life or death was simply a factor of speed, of the duration of exposure. Maybe the plane had ripped open or broken in half, catapulting the survivors out on to the ice-capif there were any survivors: for them, either immediate death as the heart failed in the near impossible task of adjusting the body to an instantaneous change of over 100 F, or death by exposure within five minutes. Or maybe they were all trapped inside slowly freezing. How to get at them? How to transport them all back to the cabin? But only the first few to be taken could have any hope. And

And we 'll go in before the Queen,

stream to enclose their fire, hauled a frying sheet from the basket, and set out oil, seasonings bread, fruit, and another pot of the soft island cheese. The quick tropical night had settled upon the island, enclosing them more securely in their clearing as they finished their supper, licking the last of the juices from their fingers. Going to be nice to me? Lars asked, leering dramatically at her. Maybe Ill just stay in the islands. Killashandra surprised herself with the longing in her voice. Theres all I could possibly need just for the taking Even me? Killashandra looked up at him. Despite his light words, his voice held a curious entreaty. I would be a right foolish dolt to consider you part of the taking. She meant it, for quixotic though the man might appear, she sensed that Lars had an unshakeable integrity which she, or any other woman, would have to recognize and accept. We could stay in the islands, Carrigana, and make a go of the charter service. Lars, too, was caught in the same thrall which infected her resolve. Sailings never dull. The weather sees to that. It could be a good life, and I promise you wouldnt have to hack polly! His fingers caressed her hands. Lars She had to set the record fair. He covered her lips with his hand. No, beloved, this is not the time for life-shaping decisions. This is the time for loving. Love me again! Chapter 12 The idyll lasted another full day and into the early morning of the third, during which time Killashandra would have been quite willing to forego all the prestige of being a crystal singer to remain Larss companion. A totally impossible, improbable, and impractical ambition. But she had every intention of enjoying his companionship as long as it was physically possible. She was haunted by memories of Carrik and, as such traumas can, they colored, and augmented, her responses to Lars. It was the change in the weather which necessitated their return to society. The drop in barometric pressure woke Killashandra just before dawn. She lay, wide awake, Larss lax arms draped about her, his legs overlapping hers, wondering what had returned her so abruptly to full consciousness. Then she smelled a change in weather on the early morning breeze. It had not occurred to Killashandra fuji digital camera questions that her Ballybran symbiont would be agitated by other weather systems. And she pushed her sensitivity as far as she could, testing what the change might herald. Storm, she decided, letting symbiotic instinct make the identification. And a heavy one. In these islands a hurricane more likely than not. A worrisome phenomenon for a reasonably flat land mass. No, there were heights on what Lars had termed the Head. She smiled, for yesterday, in between other felicitous activities, he had given her quite a history and geography lesson pertinent to the island economy. This island gets its name from the shape of the land mass, he explained and drew a shape on the wet sands with a shell. They had just emerged from a morning swim. It was seen first from the exploratory probe and named long before any settlers landed here. Theres even a sort of a halo of islets off the Head. Were at the Wingtip. The settlement lies in the wing curve see and the western heights are the wings, complete with the ridge principle. This side of the island is much lower than the body side. Weve two separate viable harbors, north and south, the angels outstretched hands completing the smaller, deeper one. My fathers offices are there, as the backbone sometimes interferes with reception from the mainland. You cant see it from here because of Backbone Ridge, but theres rather an impressive old volcano topping the Head. He grinned mischievously, giving Killashandra an impression of the devilish child he must have been. Some of us less reverent souls say the Angel blew her head when she knew who got possession of the planet. Not so, of course. It happened eons before we got here. Angel was not the largest of the islands but Lars told her that shed soon see that it was the best. The southern sea was littered Lars said, with all kinds of land masses: some completely sterile, others bearing active volcanoes, and anything large enough to support polly plantations and other useful tropical vegetation did so. We were a race apart from the mainlanders, and weve remained so, Carrigana. They listen to what the Elders dish up for them, dulling their minds with all the pap thats performed. Islanders still have to have their wits about them. We may be easygoing and carefree, but were not lazy or stupid. She had discovered an unexpected pleasure in listening to Lars ramble on, recognizing that his motive was as much self-indoctrination as

But as they were riding the forrest along,

It was Jackstraw who heard it firstit was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stovecurio collectors paid fancy prices for what they The Bishop he chanc'd for to see imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusksrose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough. "Aeroplane," he announced casually. "Aeroplane!" I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. "Jackstraw, you've been hitting the methylated spirits again." "Indeed, no, Dr Mason." The blue eyes, so incongruously at