Page 11 of Caveman Alien's Heat
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Fire.”
“Inside?”
“No.” He jerks his chin toward the hatch. “In the crack.”
It takes me a second to understand. “You mean… beside the saucer?”
He nods again. “The ice holds the ship upright. If the ice melts, the ship will fall down.” He tilts one hand to demonstrate. “Then we can try to fly again.”
I stare at him. “That’s actually… a really good idea.” Then I glance toward the curved wall of alien metal and feel my stomach tighten. “Or a really bad one.”
Nator’ax raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“This saucer maybe not like fire,” I say slowly. “It can fly in the air. And in space. But lighting fire beside it might still be… too heat.”
“Too hot? You think it may melt like the fat of a Big when put over a fire?” He shrugs in the calm way of someone who has probably set fire to a lot of things in his life. “We freeze if we do nothing.”
It’s a convincing argument. “Maybe,” I admit. “We do need heat.”
So we gather the wood and climb out, then drop to the ice from the hatch.
The cold hits my cheeks, and my arms immediately get goosebumps of the unpleasant kind. Yeah, we’ll need a fire.
The glacier crevice is already turning blue with evening light. High above us, the sky is fading toward purple.
Nator’ax kneels beside the saucer’s hull and begins arranging the sticks between the not-quite-metal of the saucer and the ice wall. He builds the little pile carefully, wedging thicker pieces beneath thinner ones.
“You’ve done this before,” I say.
“Many times.”
“On glaciers?”
“What isgleshers?”
“This,” I tell him, and look around as I hug myself. “Much ice. Ground is ice.” I stomp my foot to illustrate.
“Ah.” He finishes stacking the wood and sits back on his heels.
Then we both stare at it.
“How you start fire?” I ask.
“Usually we have embers from a previous fire. If not, rubbing two sticks together usually works.”
“Ah,” I say, falling into his economical speech pattern. “Maybe it not works now.”
He grunts thoughtfully, then nods toward the saucer. “I saw tools in there. Iron.”
“I get them,” I offer, wanting to be useful. Then I look up at the hatch. It’s too high up for me to reach easily. “Hm…”
Nator’ax calmly grabs me, lifts me, and then gives me a boost with one hand until I’m sitting on the hatch opening with my legs dangling inside the saucer, my butt tingling where his massive hand pushed me. “Um. Thanks.”
I get the blades, then realize that I’ll need help to get out, too.
Nator’ax has already seen the need, so he climbs up from the outside, leans in, and grabs my hand to pull me up and out. I land on the ice with moderate grace.
