Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [89]
Adam was already stripping off his furs. ‘These coats are OK, for short trips, but we’ll be outside for at least an hour.
We’ll need these environment suits.’ He was wearing the same sort of one-piece underwear she had been put in.
Tegan was glad to see that the male version was equally tight. His suit had been patched up in half a dozen places.
The Doctor was saying something: ‘The material is made up of hundreds of thin layers. The suit has microweave heat elements and warmth gets trapped in the air between them. A bit like double-glazing. Spacesuits aren’t much thicker than this these days.’ Despite his enthusiasm, he wasn’t changing out of his overcoat Instead he was helping Tegan to find gloves that fitted her. The gloves he handed across looked like the ones surgeons use.
‘Shouldn’t it be tighter at the wrists?’ Tegan suggested.
‘To keep the cold out?’
‘You’d cut off the circulation to your extremities doing that.’ Adam had finished dressing. He looked faintly ridiculous, and it took a moment for Tegan to realize why: the skin-tight ivory-white outfit he was wearing made him look like a ballet-dancer. He was a slight figure, teenage thin. She looked down at herself. She looked no less ridiculous, but at least she had a better figure.
Quint came in, followed by a sled which was propelling itself. Patience lay on it, covered by a translucent white sheet. The thin plastic rose and fell regularly. There was a control box crudely welded to one corner. The casing was half-melted, as though it had been in a fire at some time in its long history.
‘It saves us having to carry her’ Tegan observed.
‘There are supplies on the sled too Including your clothes, Tegan.’ The final item of the ensemble was the mask. It fitted tightly over her face, reaching the back of the ears, and it felt like a cross between a fencing mask and a hardhat. There weren’t any airholes, but she could breathe.
‘Porous?’ she asked. The Doctor’s expression of pleasant surprise was enough to confirm her guess had been right.
The door in front of the ground open. Quint passed each of them a small backpack. His was already strapped over his broad shoulders – the harness had been customized for him. When Tegan pulled hers on she judged that it weighed about ten pounds. ‘These are emergency supplies. There’s nothing that will show up on sensors. The cave mouth is fifty metres straight ahead.’
Outside, the wind had died down a little. The Doctor and Adam were already stepping down the ramp. Tegan followed the sled down, with Quint bringing up the rear.
The Shark Person wasn’t wearing a mask. Tegan was surprised how familiar he looked now, a mere hour or so after she’d screamed at the sight of him. When she got home would it be difficult to get used to the everyday things? It would take a couple of days, she was sure, to get used to living in a world where televisions only played flat images, telephones had rotary dials and earpieces and everyone she met was human.
As Quint reached the ground, the ramp was already lifting up. Around them were columns of ice, tinged with blue and carved smooth by the winds. The horizon was a little closer than it ought to be – or rather, than it would have been on Earth. Tegan realized that although the snow came over her ankles, she could barely feel the cold. She flexed her fingers, The Doctor watched her, smiling.
‘It’s quieter here than the waystation,’ she said. It was a young Asian man. His eyes were staring, pleading with her.
‘We’re not in the mountains any more. There are no avalanches or glaciers here on the ice plains. Everything’s nice and–’
Something the size of a house hurtled overhead. A second after that, a smaller aircraft flew over.
They were travelling so fast that it took a second or two for the roar of their engines to catch up with them. When it did, the noise was enough to bowl