Book 1 - Shadowline Read Online Free PDF Page B

retarded growth.
    Frog wakened still unsure what he would do. The deepest route
controls that he himself had set on previous penetrations ran only
a thousand kilometers up the Shadowline.
    That first quarter of the way would be the easy part. The
markers would guide his computers and leave him free to work or
loaf for the four full days needed to reach the last transponder.
Then he would have to go on manual and begin breaking new ground,
planting markers to guide his return. He would have to stop to
sleep. He would use up time backing down to experiment with various
routes. Three thousand kilometers might take forever.
    They took him thirty-one days and a few hours. During that time
Frog committed every sin known to the tractor hog but that of
getting himself killed. And Death was back there in the shadows,
grinning, playing a little waiting game, keeping him wondering when
the meathook would lash out and yank him off the stage of life.
    Frog knew he was not going to make it back.
    No rig, not even the Corporation’s newest, had been
designed to stay out this long. His antique could not survive
another four thousand clicks of punishment.
    Even if he had perfect mechanical luck he would come up short on
oxygen. His systems were not renewing properly.
    He had paused when his tanks had dropped to half, and had
thought hard. And then he had gone on, betting his life that he
could get far enough back to be rescued with proof of his
accomplishment.
    Frog was a poker player. He made the big bets without batting an
eye.
    He celebrated success by breaking his own most inflexible rule.
He shed his hotsuit.
    A man out of suit stood zero chance of surviving even minor
tractor damage. But he had been trapped in that damned thing,
smelling himself, for what seemed half a lifetime. He had to get
out or start screaming.
    He reveled in the perilous, delicious freedom. He even wasted
water scouring himself and the suit’s interior. Then he went
to work on the case of beer some damn fool part of him had
compelled him to stash in his tool locker.
    Halfway through the case he commed Blake and crowed his victory.
He gave the boys at the shade station several choruses of his
finest shower-rattlers. They did not have much to say. He fell
asleep before he could finish the case.
    Sanity returned with his awakening.
    “Goddamn, you stupid old man. What the hell you doing,
hey? Nine kinds of fool in one, that what you are.” He
scrambled into his suit. “Oh, Frog, Frog. You don’t got
to prove you crazy. Man, they already know.”
    He settled into his control couch. It was time to resume his
daily argument, via the transponder-markers, with the controller at
the Blake outstation. “Sumbitch,” he muttered.
“Bastard going to eat crow today. Made a liar of him, you
did, Frog.”
    Was anybody else listening? Anybody in Edgeward? It seemed
likely. The whole town would know by now. The old man had finally
gone and proved that he was as crazy as they always thought.
    It would be a big vicarious adventure for them, especially while
he was clawing his way back with his telemetry reporting his
sinking oxygen levels. How much would get bet on his making it? How
much more would be put down the other way?
    “Yeah,” he murmured. “They be watching.”
That made him feel taller, handsomer, richer, more macho. For once
he was a little more than the town character.
    But Moira . . . His spirits sank. The poor
girl would be going through hell.
    He did not open comm right away. Instead, he stared at displays
for which he had had no time the night before. He had become
trapped in a spider’s web of fantasy come true.
    From the root of the Shadowline hither he had seen little but
ebony cliffs on his left and flaming Brightside on his right. Every
kilometer had been exactly like the last and next. He had not found
the El Dorado they had all believed in back in the old days, when
they had all been entrepreneur prospectors racing one another to
the better