Leontopodium Alpinium
                          Copyright Thomas Harlan 1997
Nilson slid down the granite slab, ice sputtering away from his boots. At the
bottom, he came hard against a tree rooted in the crevice and huffed as it struck
him. His hands, bleeding still from the glass, caught on the bark. Wind whistled in
the emptiness under him. Below, the grinding churn of broken ice rolling over in
the stream echoed up. He wiped frozen sweat from his eyes. The night was black.
He could see nothing save in the brief glow of lightning spiking through the clouds
above.

Inside the heavy parka, he sweated, and felt chills. Blood seeped from his fingers
and froze on the inside of his remaining glove. He pushed his night goggles back
into place on his nose. The boulders of the ravine sprang into a slight yellow-green
focus. Panting, his breath white in the frigid air, he swung his legs over the lip of
ancient stone. There was nothing below, fifteen feet of grooved rock and then
boulders and stones wrapped in frost-rime at the edge of the stream.

Arms aching, extended, he dropped onto the stones. His right foot struck square
on another sloping boulder, and he rolled down on it, and then, unable to stop,
down onto lesser stones, with a crash, into the stream itself. Pitch-black water
surged around him. He cried out at the talons of cold that slid into his foot and leg
through rents in the padded trousers. His heart hammered, but still he crawled out,
pulling his numb legs over stones, feeling the ridges of rock slash the pants to
ribbons.
Under an overhang screened with thick brush, now leafless in deep winter, he
crawled and curled up. His hands were numb, and his skin felt hot and flushed. He
drew a tab out of his breast-pocket and popped it. Heat burned in his throat and
on his lips. In the cold, it was a torture, like fire. The side of his mouth began to
twitch uncontrollably. Soon the back of his neck and his upper arms were
shivering.

But heat spilled out of his stomach and warmed his legs. His hands steadied and
he pulled the thin silver sheet of a battle blanket out of the big pouch in the back of
his parka. The knife grip, rubber, knurled, was tight in his hand as he sliced the
material into long strips and wrapped it around his tattered climbing pants.

A subsonic buzz set his teeth on edge and he slid quickly to the back of the little
cave. In his goggled sight, a black shape hissed across the narrow strip of sky that
he could see. A muted red glow of the aft engines all that betrayed it.



Nilson had smelled the sharp tang of spilled nutrient fluid first, even as his thumb
had turned the unlocking ring on the door to his rooms, and he had backed away.
Unbidden tears had blinded him for a moment. The bags of groceries in his arms,
he kept, and quickly walked out of the little garden courtyard. Even in the
afternoon it was lightly dusted with snow, the limbs and boughs cold and white in
the late winter. He paused at the edge of the tunnel into the parking garage and put
the groceries down in the alcove where the residents stored mukluks and
galoshes.

For a moment, he turned the slim black shape of the magnetic conversion unit over
in his hands. He wondered if his purchase had drawn them to him, like Tarlen's