Authors: Space Pioneers
"Time for a drink, and then
111
pick out a good spot," he sighed.
The second he stopped to grope with his lips
for the little hose, he knew he was really tired.
The
water, cool from being only partly surrounded by heating coils to protect it
from the exterior cold, refreshed him but slightly. The running had left a
thick taste in his mouth.
Hansen unslung the big cylinder he had
carried on his back and set it down beside a comfortable indentation in the
rock. He then unfastened his back pack of tank and batteries. The metal-covered
connection protecting the hose and wires was long enough to permit the pack to
be set at his side.
He lowered himself to the fine sand and
leaned his back against the rock with a sigh of relief. He squirmed into a more
comfortable position.
"Wish I hadn't drunk
all that water," he growled.
He leaned the back of his neck against the
neckpiece of his suit. It was not uncomfortable except that he found himself
staring directly into the light of Earth.
"I'm getting used to it all right, if I
think that's too bright," he thought. "Bet my pupils are big as a
cat's now."
Ironically,
his feet had not started to hurt until his weight was off them. It felt as if
he were developing blisters. The coveralls he wore under the spacesuit,
moreover, had begun to chafe in a few places—around the armpits as he swung his
arms, behind his right knee, on the inside of his thighs.
He also was reminded of the sweat that had
trickled around or into his eyes, for the lids felt sore.
"I
want a different view," he grunted, picking himself up. "Facing the
other way, maybe I can rest my eyes."
Carrying his back pack, he started around the
rock,
then
prudently went back for his big oxygen
cylinder. He could think of no good reason for dragging this with him, but he
somehow felt more comfortable with it beside him.
The other face of the rock was blackly
shadowed, and he was forced to find a convenient spot by groping about. With a
sigh, he settled down, squirmed again into an easy position, and found himself
contemplating the ringwall of Kirch a few miles away. The regular sough of air
through his suit and the quiet hum of the mechanisms that were keeping him
alive were so familiar by now that he hardly noticed them. It was the cessation
of movement, not any diminishment of the normal
sounds, that
lent an impression of quiet to the scene.
He
looked at the ringwall, squinting against the sting in his eyes that caused
them to water occasionally. The left extremity was dim in the distance, but to
the right, he could clearly see the slope of the wall as it curved to meet the
plain. There was no feeling of a towering, insecurely balanced mass like that
of the mountain.
"Although
a crater at a distance does look like a mountain range," he thought.
"Not
so
close as this; it goes up too
steeply."
In a
way, it was almost like looking at the skyscrapers of a big city, like looking
at Manhattan from across the Hudson River. Except that there were no lights.
He
closed his eyes for a moment and tried to visualize the sharp peak a little to
his left atop the wall as it might look with a thousand lighted windows
gleaming white and yellow.
It was hard to do. The stark fact was that
there was only
Lunar
dimness, relieved by earthlight
but tending to be uniform in intensity without the rays of the sun. If the
silhouette of Kirch was like that of a city, the metropolis it resembled was a
dead one.
A dead city in the midst of a cold, frozen sea of lava.
A ghost city that had never
lived,
yet rose up from the gray sea over which no ship had
sailed and whispered and whined ghostly warnings. "Stay with me, Manl I am
dry and lonely. There are no people to warm me with light and sound . . . there
is none to see my massive strength and, by seeing, make it into reality . . .
stay where you are, Man!"
"But
it's
dead," thought Hansen.
"More
than dead—sterile!"
"But
you, Man, you too are dead. You are already turning cold. You will slowly
congeal . . . become solid
...
a monument
...
a symbol of the tribute brought
by folly and life to the sea of coldness and gray death—No, do not shake your
head . . . it is too late . . . my shadows are about you . . . you have no
light
...
all your prayers and wishes
will not turn on a single light. The shadows reach you . . . touch you . . .
the pain in your leg is the cold of
space .
..
you will sit there forever . . . drowned
in the gray sea of frozen lava . . . imagining lights for me in the blackness .
. . imagining life in me in the noon glare . . . but now there is no light
unless you have the force to see it . . . but you are cold . . . cold . . .
cold . . . cold . . .
The sky flared with flickering light. It
turned black while the image of light still remained in Hansen's eyes. Then a
new light, tinier and higher streaked overhead. Hansen awoke with the hairs
tingling on his neck and leaped to his feet with a hoarse shout.
"A
rocket!"
In the stillness of the radio room, the
incoming call from Bucky's rocket made Mike jump in his chair before the set.
Hastily, he turned down the volume he had kept in hope of picking up faint
calls from Plato.
When
he had answered and relayed the message by phone to the landing area, he turned
to the others in the room.
Joey
had been sleeping in the upper bunk. Louise had asked to stay and Mike had
offered his bunk for her to sit on. She had not slept, as far as he knew; but
he had turned to the radio and maintained a lengthy silence.
"Maybe
I ought to talk to her," he thought, "but what is there to say? Four
good guys; but they're awful late checking in."
But
when he looked around, they were both watching him; and he had to tell them.
"Bucky's coming
in," he said.
"Did he find
anything?" demanded Louise.
"Don't know yet," Mike told her.
"He said he took a snap of Plato coming and going and three more on the
way back."
Louise moved toward the
door.
"Thanks a lot,
Mike," she said.
Joey
slipped down from the bunk as she disappeared into the corridor.
"Never mind," advised Mike.
"With Louise and Bucky in that hole they call a darkroom, dodging the
photographer's elbows every time he breathes in, they won't have any place for
you but up on a shelf."
"I just thought
I'd—"
"We'll
get told. Now, stay with me, kid, an' make sure
I
don't go wanderin' off to have a look tool"
Hansen stood stiffly by the rock and
painfully tried his neck muscles. He searched the sky, but nothing moved among
the stars.
"Now,
did
I see something?" he asked himself slowly. "Or was I still
dreaming?"
He grimaced, and raised a
hand to the back of his head be-
fore
he remembered that he was still in his
spacesuit. His neck was stiff and sore from lying across the rigid neckpiece of
his suit, and he was chilled to the bone.
"Must have been asleep quite a
while," he thought. "Maybe I ought to turn up the heating again—or
should I just warm up as I walk?"
He
paused a moment to stare in open-mouthed amazement at the ringwall of Kirch,
rearing up three thousand feet toward the stars.
"When
am I going to do something right?" he asked. "Why couldn't I stay
where I was, facing Earth, and go to sleep dreaming I was home?"
He
went on to wish that he had not gone to sleep at all. The aches that were
irritations when he was warm from walking were now centers of agony.
He
was sure he had blisters, and the chafed places under the suit jabbed little
warnings of tenderness as he tried to move. Reaching for his battery pack, he
nearly toppled over because his right leg was asleep. Even after he recovered
and took a few steps to restore the circulation, the knee did not feel right.
"I wonder if I pulled a muscle?" he
mused. "Or is it in the suit?"
He
looked up at Earth.
India was moving into the arc of shadow,
but he could see Africa, the Mediterranean, and Europe.
When he realized he must have been out for
three or perhaps four hours, he immediately checked his oxygen. It was none too
soon. He refilled his suit tank and examined the pressure of the big cylinder.
He guessed that he could do the trick once more.
"I
wonder how long a man can live in a spacesuit?" he muttered.
"Hansen, why aren't you dead?"
Groaning with stiffness, he adjusted his
battery pack and tank and slung the cylinder atop the load. Although he seemed
as wet as ever, he sucked up a drink of water while he listened to the hiss of
his air circulator.
"Wish I wasn't so thirsty," he
said. "I'll have to watch it.
Beginning to feel lack of
food, too."
He started off, moving mincingly to favor his
sore muscles, and immediately felt the weakness brought on by hunger. It was
hard to believe that a nightmare could last so long, but he remembered that it
was almost a full day since he had eaten a sandwich in the tractor.
Gradually, as he moved along, marching away
from Kirch into the open wasteland, he began to warm up. The stiffness left his
muscles, although the chafing remained annoying. His feet felt sticky in the
thick socks, suggesting that he would have trouble. He thought they might be
bleeding.
What the hell was the matter with that knee,
he wondered.
He
thought of stopping to examine it, but the likelihood of his falling over on
his face if he bent to feel the joint deterred him. He kept on. In half an
hour, it became clear that a spring had snapped.
Not only was the knee harder to bend than it
should have been, but something began to dig through his coveralls behind the
knee.
"That's not so good," he told
himself, but there was nothing he could think of to do.
He
finally mustered the ambition to get up on his toes and bound along at a fairly
brisk pace. The miles again floated under his feet, but he found that he could
not maintain the trot the way he had earlier. Then, he had congratulated
himself on his freshness, but he had come a long way since those few hours of
immunity to fatigue.
The
end of an hour found him moving at a moderate walk. One
more,
and he stopped noticing the pace particularly. There were few landmarks about
him. He did not even strain ahead to catch a glimpse of the Kirch Mountains.
Finally,
the nagging pain behind his knee became bad enough to make him stop.
"This is damn' sillyl" he growled.
"I can't go along until that point of metal saws through a vein or
something! Must be something I can do about it."
He thought it over, but it seemed that there
simply was nothing he
could
do. The broken bit of metal was beyond his
reach; he could not even feel it through the thickness of the spacesuit and the
protective yellow chafing suit. Even if he should remove the latter by some
weird contortion, the knee joint, as an obvious trouble spot, was reinforced by
a bulge of metal. He would not be able to pinch or prod through that.
"Of course," he muttered, "I
might take it off entirely. That would make things easy right away.
A lot easier than just sitting down to wait for my air to run
out."
He shook that out of mind with a jerk of his
head, and struck out across the plain once more.
He
had come to a stretch of gently rolling rises, and he tried to get most of his
upward push from his left leg. Coming down the slopes, he hopped stiff-legged on
his right. It was not too long before this became more tiring than it was
worth.
"To
hell with itl" he growled, and grimly drove onward with a more normal gait
despite the sharp dig . . . dig . . . dig into his flesh at every stride.
Burney and Bucky again sat across the table
in the former's room. Instead of the map they had consulted earlier, they gazed
down at the new photographs. The room, as before, was crowded with others who
had edged in watch silently.
Even "M. D."
Mc-Leod, so nicknamed to distinguish him from all the doctors of philosophy and
doctors of science among the expedition, lingered with his stethoscope dangling
after giving Bucky a routine, post-flight check.
Johnny Pierce stood lankily behind Bumey's
shoulder, holding a spare magnifying glass and squinting down at the photos.
Sherman, Wohl, and Joey stood around the table with the photographers who had
developed and enlarged the pictures. Louise watched from behind Bucky, resting
her hands on his shoulders.
Burney
nodded slowly, examining the picture of the interior of Plato through his lens.
"I very much
fear," he said, tapping a forefinger on the half-