Chapter 6 - Puga

The Man’s center of balance shifted right. He threw his left hand out to catch himself on the floor. He felt a burn-blister pop as the hand slid across the insulation; as momentum curled his body forward on the spinner track. He kept his right hand on the oar handle.

With a shove, The Man pushed himself back to a sitting position. He paused for only a moment to find rhythm in the rocking of the shell. He wiped the grimy floor feathers from the bleeding, popped blister. Then he grabbed one of the spare bandannas swaying on the sooty wall beside him. The Man squeezed the cloth between his hand and the wooden handle, and hauled once more upon the oar.

The Man wanted not for distractions this night. Keeping balance on the spinner seat kept him occupied. He forced his body through the regular motion; heel press, leg press, swing back, pull with the arms; then reverse. Only now, The Man fought a gradual roll of his torso left and right. He fought to keep his center of balance over the seat.

Tonight, the shell rocked constantly.

As The Man swayed right on the backswing he came close to the outer window. He looked outside.

Beyond the glass, there raged a Puga.

It was a mighty storm, the worst The Man had known. Snow and hail and Wind flew in perverse abundance. The air seemed torn between states of matter. Shrieking updrafts of Wind brought rain from far, far below. The water crystallized into tiny diamond bullets. The bullets shot up, past The Man’s window. The Hail slammed the bottom of the ship, a constant vibration ran through the whole ovoid.

There would have been a constant metal droning to accompany the vibration, had not the sound of hail on glass drowned out all else.

The sky sang. It sang with the voice of avalanches, earthquakes, and glaciers. It sang one long, continuous, reverberating note; a bass drum which is struck and forgets to stop; a clap of thunder that rolls on and on and on, forever. The ice bullets exacted this constant din from the sky. Then they exploded.

A crystallized haze of misty snow-ice then fell, unbelievably, back through the updraft and the bullet hail. The Man guessed that the shattering made the tiny flakes somehow less aerodynamic. Or, that the sky imparted some chemical change or rebounding energy to the striking hail. Whatever the cause, The Man found his shell caught in a blinding swirl of up-flying hail and down-falling snow. Occasionally the Wind - when it wasn’t rocking his shell like a clock pendulum - threw all this frozen water sideways, blasting against the window glass.

One such blow struck the window. The Man’s body leaned macabrely toward the wave of snow.

He came forward to the spinner cache, breathed deep, and pulled hard. On The Man’s face, in his eyes and under the brown beard covering his cheeks, a smile flickered.

Yes, this certainly was the worst storm The Man had known.

None of the snow seemed to stick on either window or sky. The stars lit the flying crystal-ice brightly, and the air seemed full of a twinkling green haze.

The air tossed his shell up and right. The glasses of sky and window nearly touched. The Man saw the stars up close for a fraction of a moment.

Then his shell dropped. The tracks, which had become loose as it rose the sky, went taut. The shell groaned and juddered. The Man slammed hard into his spinner seat. His knuckles on the oar rapped painfully on the flywheel casing.

The Man’s smile vanished. He shifted his weight to his left as the shell’s momentum carried it through the swing.

Between pulling and fighting for balance, The Man searched the sky. He’d only begun pulling toward the seacover for a few moments before the Puga came. Now he searched for the seacover’s edge. He watched for any looming darkness on the horizon, which might show a blockage in the striation.

The Man searched in vain. The stars lit his immediate surroundings, but the ice storm enveloped the view beyond fifty meters. The Man felt as if his shell were isolated in an airy pocket of violence.

The Man lost track of his pulse in the clamor. He pulled harder and breathed deeper. Each great tug on the oar felt like a counter-blow, a way of striking against the storm.

The painting caught The Man’s eye. She Crawled in Stars with Elder Bugs moved in perfect harmony with the shell. The Man’s shifting made it seem like the long beetle-neck of the artwork writhed on the canvas. The pale child’s face swung in a melancholy, hypnotic rhythm.

The storm seemed to break suddenly. It was only a pause - The Man fresh hail waves coming on through the window. For a moment, however, the deafening glass thunder abated.

The Man caught flashes of other sounds. They were soft as silence in contrast to the squall.

He heard his Phaen in the corridor. The raptor bird was proving its verbosity. It made a new sound The Man had not heard, like three roosters crowing in unison. The raptor’s talons clattered as it ran a back and forth course of the shell corridor. Probably it was tearing up the insulation.

He heard the whine of the flywheel as he pulled. Just barely he heard the electric hum of the shell heart. The Man wondered how long his furnace would burn. He wondered if the Wind would toss the burning logs against the stones so fiercely as to douse the flame. Probably it would.

The Man heard another rare noise. It was a sharp, staccato clicking. He darted his eyes to the wall, left of his painting.

The Man had bolted a small device to the wall. It was a wood-paneled box with two knobs and a dial-screen on the front. It was a dosimeter. Inside it were a tube, some wiring, and a metal clicker. The Man did not understand what lay inside the tube. He only knew it detected radiation. The wires and clicker and dial told the dosage strength.

The dosimeter clicked slowly.

The Man knew the Wind carried radiation, of course. All Winds and snows and rain did. But the shell and its lacquer coating should have shielded him. The Man glanced at the window. He wondered if the radiation came through the glass.

Then The Man considered the hail against his ship. He thought he understood. The storm was chipping away the frosty ice covering the metal. It had probably started chipping away the coat of protective lacquer too.

The Wind brought its hail toward the shell again. The Man strained his ears to hear the dosimeter. Its clicks were slow, for now. But The Man didn’t know the Wind’s radioactive level, or how much protection the shell would offer if the hail stripped the lacquer armor. Would the dosimeter suddenly sound out with that continued, killing buzz?

Then the Wind returned. It seemed to strike his ship with hate. The shell had never come to a full stop in the lull. Now it swayed anew. The Man swayed against it. The growl of the sky resumed. The sounds of Phaen, Furnace, and dosimeter were muffled.

The Man pulled. The sail was furled, at least. No amount of Wind pressing against the aerodynamic front of the shell would stop the forward drive of his furnace and spinner. The Wind might roll and sway his shell sideways all it wished. The pitch and surge, however; the forward and backward angling and moving; went almost unnoticed by The Man.

Another portside blow struck.

The Man marveled at the strength in the storm. His ballast should have countered the motion. The heavy stones and bricks of iron stuffed in the hold, beneath the electric heart chamber, had lessened the blows in every other storm. Now the shell of ultra-light metal seemed to roll emptily along, tossed by the raging Puga.

The true crisis began with a leading moment; as if thoughts of the ballast had summoned the first measure in a new choral stage of the storm. The Man felt himself suddenly weightless. The Puga - one mighty, sundering force of Wind - threw the ship sideways. It swung up and to the right on its tracks. The Man glimpsed the sky glass rushing at him through the window.

An enormous gong reverberated through the air as the metal side of his ship crashed against the sky. The sound broke above even the constant hail thunder. It echoed painfully in The Man’s ears. The shell itself bounced harmlessly off the glass; as The Man’s window fell away, he saw not a crack or scoring mark upon the sky’s surface.

The crisis moment came when the shell dropped. For a fraction of a second The Man worried that the metal itself might have cracked. Then the shell hit the bottom of its arc. The tracks snapped taut.

As he slammed down in the spinner seat, The Man heard another thunder piercing noise, like a metal crowbar striking against cement. A disorganized clamor came after the strike sound. It pounded against the shell over The Man’s head, then ran down the side at his back, past the window. This second noise was like shingles slipping from an upper dormer and clattering down the roof of a home.

In the wake of the event, The Man didn’t immediately understand. He thought he’d been struck by a falling patch of ice. After a moment, he grasped what had occurred.

One of the four tracks had snapped.

When the weight of the shell and all it carried came down on the four loops, one of those loops had broken. The whole track - all those interwoven plates of metal - had fallen back atop his shell. It had slid down the side and, The Man guessed, slid entirely from the axle to fall into the storm below. No updraft would bring the lost track back.

The shell swayed in the Puga. The Man had stopped pulling in the shock of the moment. He held the sides of the spinner seat to keep his balance. The bandanna fell from his left hand, a bloody rag, and still more blood trickled down his fingers from his blister.

The Man knew he’d been lucky. Only one track had snapped. From his shell’s consistent backward and forward stability, he guessed it had been one of the middle two. He knew for certain that it had been only one track. If two tracks snapped, the other two would surely break as well. Two tracks, he thought, couldn’t bear the whole shell weight.

The Man hunched down and held tight as another great blow rocked him. By the ambient starlight he saw the shadow of the Phaen stumble past the corridor. The shell fell down with another judder that shook The Man’s teeth.

The ballast was doing nothing to abate this Puga. It was useless weight of stone and iron - worse than useless, actually. The heavy load was extra force, working to snap the three remaining tracks with every sudden drop.

The Man thought for a moment longer. Then he pulled himself forward on the spinner, untied his boots from the heel plate, and stood.

---

The studs in The Man’s boots rang against the uninsulated floor as he dropped from the last step of the curving stair. He stepped into the hold at the bottom of the shell. As another Puga blow rocked the space, he jerked a mitted palm out to catch himself on a wooden support beam.

The beams ran the length of the room, with waist-high boards running between them for partitioning off cargo. The walls down here were unsullied by soot, their rough metal surfaces shone in the electric yellow light of his crank lantern. The light made shadows with the skeletal scaffold of wood. The shadows undulated as The Man’s lantern swayed in the storm.

The shell swung back in reverse. From above, The Phaen made a maddened, scrabbling noise along the corridor floor. The Man stepped into the middle of the room. He brought his lantern in a swinging ark over the compartments made by the boards.

The hold wasn’t half full. Two layers of bricks only, stone and iron, lay on the floor of each compartment. In a normal storm they kept the shell stable.

The Man had detached the dosimeter box from the wall and brought it with him. It clicked now, faster than in the spinning room. That meant the hail chipping away the underside lacquer was the cause.

The Man took a rope he’d brought and tied himself to one of the wooden support posts. He hooked the dosimeter box to a nail in the same post. The box swayed and smacked against the post, but stayed in place. Using the boards for balance, The Man stepped toward the stern side of the hold.

A small portal door lay at the hold’s back, where the floor curved into the wall. The Man checked to make sure his harness rope was tight - that he wouldn’t suddenly be tossed out. Then he grabbed the wheel-handle atop the door. It took a heavy shove, then suddenly the wheel spun free. The Man heard the suctioning sound of air. The sound grew to a gale as he pulled the hatch up and open.

The Puga knifed its pellets of hail through the opening. The air surged up with it, and The Man fell back.

The cold was enormous. It cut right through the leather and feather lining of The Man’s coat. The pellets rattled off the ceiling and clattered across the metal floor like diamonds spilled from a sack.

The noise was tremendous. It suppressed the sound of The Man’s breath within his muffling hood. He backpedaled from the opening with his mitts clutching the compartment boards. He returned to the dosimeter and held it still against the wooden pole. He squinted through the goggles at the dial glass.

The needle oscillated. It had jumped to the right now that the hatch was sprung, just as The Man had feared. The Man let the dosimeter go and walked back along the boards. He slammed the hatch. The noise level diminished after the metal bang. The Man pressed down on the wheel-handle and spun the seal tight.

Pieces of hail lay unmelting across the metal floor. With the door closed, the constant drone on the exterior seemed comparatively quiet.

The Man stood, thinking. He hooked his arms around a scaffold post. The heel of one cleated boot ground against the floor.

Another blow from the Wind struck his shell. The Man felt himself lifted again. He winced as the tracks went taut.

The shell remained fixed to the sky. He’d survived another jerk from the storm.

The Man had dropped the lever to disengage the driving system, while leaving the axles unclenched. The shell could move forward and backward with no resistance. Perhaps he might not need to drop the ballast?

The Man and his lantern swayed in the storm.

An idea struck. The Man returned to the door, set the lantern on a hook, and untied the coarse rope from his waist. He stumbled and fought the Wind for balance as he ascended the steps.

The Man passed the wooden door leading to the heart chamber. The stairwell became dark as The Man reached the upper landing. He hurried through a curtain into the main corridor. Little light from the study and spinning room windows made its way to the corridor. The Man could see, but only just.

The Man saw his Phaen. It paused beside the study room entrance. He saw its beak open and its tongue warble, but couldn’t hear its crow of fear over the hail rattle. The Man also saw the results of its terrified rushing. It had clawed up the flooring of grimy feathers; they now lay loosely on the metal, as though freshly laid. The smaller downy feathers float in the rocking air, so that the corridor seemed polluted with huge flakes of dirty snow.

The Man marched down the hall. The Phaen closed its beak and quivered as he neared. It shrank - as much as the huge raptor could - down and to the side. As The Man got closer the bird squawked and ducked its head, fearing a blow.

The Man ignored the Phaen. He plunged into his study.

Through the viewing glass The Man caught a glimpse of the Puga. The starlight glinted over a mad, bright field of crystallized water, flying upward to smack against the sky, or dropping down in a haze of sparkling flakes. Were it not for the Wind, The Man might have thought he were submerged beneath water, sailing through a lake filled with motes of sediment.

The storm had tossed The Man’s belongings. His wooden crest had slipped from behind the floor chest and lay tangled in the threads of the hammock. Two journals he’d forgotten to stuff into a drawer - his own and a reference - had fallen from the desk. Fortunately, most of his stuff lay inside containers or was bolted to the wall.

The outside stars and raging storm reflected in miniature off the glass-fronted cabinet on the room’s right side. The Man stepped quickly to it. He pulled the locking pin. He brought an arm up to stop his coilspear from falling; some books from the bottom shelf did slide out and drum on the floor.

The Man set the spear back. From the shelf beside it, he retrieved the lead-lined armor.

It took The Man a moment to fix the plated suit over his body. The feather-lined coat and pants made the fit tight and awkward. The rocking shell threw him off balance when he tried to stuff his feet down the leg-holes. The lead armor-fabric was like plastic, and seemed rigid from disuse and cold.

At last The Man slipped himself in. He had to leave his boots - they wouldn’t fit inside the lead-plastic shoes. He’d also cut the leather strap attaching his mitts to the coat; he donned them over the lead-armor gloves instead. He pulled his goggled hood up and pulled the lead-helm over it, but the view through two sets of glass was dingy. He pushed his hood back and pulled the helm on. The Man wasn’t dexterous enough to tie the fastenings at the armor’s back, so he left them undone.

Putting on the suit seemed to take hours. All the time, every sudden jerk of his shell in the storm made The Man pause. When he’d finally donned the protective armor he wasted no time. With the Puga howling, he ran back to the corridor.

The Phaen had pressed its pale beak through the curtain. It had watched as The Man equipped himself. As The Man emerged in his suit it squawked and retreated. Its backward shuffle was awkward and slow. The Man shoved it aside with his hip. The floor slipped sideways in the Wind at that moment, and The Phaen stumbled and fell.

The Man did not fall. He used the gritty walls to steady himself. He ignored the sting in his hand with the burst blister. Armored, he made his way back toward the cargo hold.

The Man had another thought, just before he turned toward the dark curving stair. He moved a little further down the hall and stepped into the furnace chamber. Blackness enfolded him. With the furnace door shut, there was no light.

The Man moved from memory. He reached out with his hands until he felt the curve of the melted-ice barrel. He reached blindly down its side until he felt the brim of a metal bucket through the thick leather and lead-armor gloves. He dunked the bucket into the barrel - using it to break a crust of ice first - and filled it with cool water.

The Man found his way back to the curtain and moved to the passage down. He had to walk with care not to spill. Even so, the rocking shell made water slosh across the stairs.

The Man emerged into the long hold. The crank lantern he’d left swaying on the scaffold nail had lost much of its charge. The undulating shadows were at once deeper and less distinguished. The Man could just barely see the dark contours of the boards and the posts.

Gripping the base of the water pail with one hand, The Man held the brim with the other. He waited for a pause in the shifting of the floor. None came. When The Man judged it was at its most level position, he tossed the water.

He aimed to splash it across the hold floor in a long smear, starting at the bow and ending at the stern hatch. He was mostly successful. Fifteen odd liters of water cascaded over the metal surface. The undulating motion of the shell spread it further, so that The Man could see the floor would soon have full coverage.

He retied the harness rope about his waist and walked back to the hatch. He saw that, already, the water on the cold metal floor had changed to slick ice. When he spun the wheel-lock of the hatch open with a squeal and lifted the door, the hail and frigid air resumed its assault. The hail scattered over a floor made into an oblong rink of ice.

The Man made his way back to the far end. He nearly slipped on the ice twice. He only stayed upright by gripping hard on the board through his gloves. He missed his boots’ cleats.

The Man stopped for a moment to check the dosimeter again. The needle had hopped alive once more. Along with deafening hail and Wind, a dangerous dose of radiation slunk through the open hatch.

The Man wasted no more time. He bent over the nearest wall of boards. He grabbed one of the iron blocks from the base of the compartment. He hefted it up over the waist high compartment wall. He turned, and tossed the brick towards the open hatch. The Man nearly slipped on the ice beneath him, but caught himself on the boards.

The iron brick came up far short of the hatch door at the far end. It hit the ice, however, and slid across the floor. The iron block reached the hatched and tumbled out through the pellets of hail that were flying in.

The Man’s plan had essentially worked. He grabbed the harness and tightened it around the top board of the compartment using a chain shortening of the rope. He braced the side of his foot against the bottom board and found he could keep relatively stable this way, despite the swaying floor.

Then The Man got to work. Brick by brick, he hefted iron and stone from the compartment and lobbed them onto the floor. Each one hit with a bang. Some cracked the ice where they struck. Many bricks did not fall out right away. They lost momentum on the pellets of hail, or simply came up short of the lip. This didn’t stop The Man; his next thrown brick would often send both careening over the edge.

The Man was soon glad he’d coated the floor with ice to remove the ballast. He’d not finished removing the first compartment’s bricks before he started sweating. He felt it trickle down his spine and the backs of his legs. It pooled in the plastic armor. Soon his socks were wet. His uninsulated toes lost feeling against the frozen floor.

The lantern died. The Man toiled on in the dark. He moved from compartment to compartment, shortening his rope around the board of each one. He left a layer of ballast in the bottom of each compartment, only removing the top layer of stone and iron.

The Man lost track of time. He worked. His fingers and his toes numbed despite his wriggling of them. He lost grip in his fingers, and so picked the bricks up between his palms. His throws became feebler. He worked. First he did the port side, then starboard, down the row of compartments toward the hatch. When The Man drew close to the opening, the Wind cut sharply against him with every gust of the Puga. He worked. He tried not to think of the radiation blasting over him; tried to ignore the bullets of ice smacking against him at every swell; tried to counter the increasingly violent swing of his shell on the glass sky.

Eventually The Man became unable to lift the blocks, even between his palms. He had no strength left. His feet were foreign weights at the ends of his numb legs. He dropped the brick he was trying to hoist. He tried to undo the shortening knot attaching him to the compartments boards, but couldn’t feel with his fingers. He was stuck.

The Man stuffed one hand under an armpit and rubbed up and down against his side. All the time he fought just to stay upright. The friction gradually warmed his hand. When he sensed the returning blood in his fingers by a sharp, needling pain, he quickly undid the knot fastening him to the board.

He turned for the opening. He slipped and fell hard on the rubble of hail as he tried to move toward it. He belly-crawled, as he always did outside the ship, toward the hole through which The Wind and hail screamed. The harness kept him from sliding out completely.

At last The Man reached the hatch. He grabbed the metal lid with the hand which was going numb once more, and slammed it shut. He climbed atop and pushed the locking-wheel shut by its spokes.

Again, the comparatively quiet hum was almost deafening.

The Man crawl-slid toward the stairs. He knew he had to reach the furnace now. He had to steal its heat for his fingers and toes. He could only hope he’d dumped enough ballast, hope that the three remaining tracks held when the ship slammed back from the sky. He’d certainly dropped enough to let the storm toss him with greater violence. Now every wave of portside Wind was a prelude to a wild shift in the floor.

He crawled toward the stairway leading up, warming one hand by rubbing it beneath a pit. At the stairs he used this warm hand - screaming with cold pain - to undo the harness.

The Man crawled up the metal steps. The Jagged edges bumped against his shins and arms, but he hardly felt the blows. He passed the wooden heart chamber door again. He continued climbing.

The Man crawled under the plastic curtain leading into the long corridor. It was still dark except for ambient starlight filtering in from the windowed rooms. At the far end he saw the Phaen. It had stopped running up and down the hall, apparently trying to stabilize itself on the floor. It raised its head as he crawled into the room. Its blue eyes glinted in the dark.

The loose insulation feathers still fell like dirty snowflakes.

The Man turned toward the furnace room. He crawled fully into the corridor, and crawled toward the promise of heat. He hoped the fire had not been doused.

The Puga struck his shell suddenly, full-on broadside, with a heavy current. The shell flew into the air and must have smacked the sky as before; The Man again heard the reverberating gong. This time, however, he had no spinner seat to land into. This time, his stamina was drained.

The Man felt himself press into the floor hard as the shell was lifted. When it struck the glass and rebounded, he went temporarily weightless, and drifted up to impact the ceiling.

When the shell came down the cables went taut. But, all three held.

The Man did not know this good fortune. He came down hard upon the floor. The insulation did little to pad the impact. He hit the metal flat with his head and stomach. The air blasted from his lungs to fog the glass face of the lead helmet, which cracked as his forehead struck it.

The Man’s vision went dim, then black. He knew no more.

The Puga raged on.

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