Authors: Space Pioneers
lit
heap of material at the foot of the
ringwall, "that there is only one conclusion. That is a new slide, is it
not?"
"It
is," said Dr. Sherman, gesturing slightly with an older photograph of the
region.
"And
it is quite clear that they reached the crater," Bumey continued.
"These are excellent pictures, and the trail of the tractor treads shows
very definitely."
"How
about this one, Dr. Bumey?" asked Bucky, pushing across another
photo.
It
showed the region around Mt. Pico, and had been enlarged until tracks of the
tractor could be clearly seen. Bumey frowned when he looked at it.
"To be perfectly frank," he
murmured, "I do not know what to make of it. Those marks accompanying the
trail
could
be footprints, I suppose, as has been suggested. But why
...
or how?"
"A man running could make
marks
that far apart in this gravity," said Bucky.
"I know Johnny estimates those little dots are twenty and thirty feet
apart, but it's possible."
"It
is also possible that they are nothing of the sort. You notice that they leave
the trail after a time."
Louise spoke up.
"That at least rules out one
interpretation," she said. "They certainly aren't footprints made by
someone on the surface on the way
to
Plato.
Anybody walking beside the tractor would have left a trail starting and ending
at the tread tracks."
There
was silence. Some of the men looked at her with
pity,
others stared very hard at the photographs on the table.
Bumey prodded another picture with his
finger.
"Bucky
took this where the tracks passed Kirch," he reminded them. "There
are none of these so-called footprints there. I regret to point out the
obvious conclusion—"
"But
can't you do something to make sure?" Louise burst out. "You aren't
just going to leave them out there! You couldn't!"
"Of course not," said Burney,
biting his lip uncomfortably. "As soon as the
Serenitatis
crew get
a few hours' rest, I shall send them out to
recover
...
ah
...
to check. But the time element has
already become such that—
Well
, my dear, there is
simply no use in rushing things. Either there is no need, or it is already too
late."
There
was not much doubt as to which possibility seemed the more likely. The meeting
began to break up in unhappy silence.
Hansen trudged along with his chin on the
neckpiece of the suit. Every so often, when he lurched in the shifting sand,
his forehead bumped against the faceplate of his helmet.
"And
that's not so easy to do," he thought foolishly.
'Takes
a supple neck to accomplish it."
He
concentrated for perhaps a hundred paces, and slowly arrived at the corollary.
"Takes a pretty soft and supple head to get out here in the first
place.
Shoulda stood at home in bed.
Should've stayed on Plato and
tried to build some kind of a marker. Basell send out somebody . . . wonder if
that was a rocket I saw? Maybe I'd be dead . . . but I'm gonna be dead anyway.
Why don't I just sit down and wait? At least, it won't hurt any more. And, I'll
be easy."
No arguments to the contrary occurred to him,
but some deep impulse refused to let him quit.
He
had to pause again; his stops for rest were becoming frequent. He did not sit
down.
Never get up again, he
realized.
He planted his feet wide apart and stood
there, panting and letting his hands hang limply at his sides. His face felt
stiff as he bared his teeth against the throb of the cut behind his knee. By
now, he was so used to the wetness of the leg that he could not be sure the
blood trickled down any faster.
He
saw that he was standing on ground lighter than usual, and tinted pale yellow.
Remembering passing several such areas, he slowly realized that they must be
rays from Aristillus, traces of vaporized minerals blown out across the
surrounding territory when the crater had been formed. It meant, for what it
might be worth, that he was getting near Archimedes. Some of the rays of
Aristillus reached the larger crater.
He gritted his teeth and took the first step
forward. A glance to his right assured him that the jagged peaks of the Kirch
Mountains were where they should be. Once, as he walked along half awake, he
had discovered himself turning away on a course that would have sent him circling
back into the
Mare Imbrium.
"Sea of Showers," he thought.
"I wish there were some. I wish
I
even
had a glass of water to pour over my head.
Just a glass of
water to rinse out these eyes.
I wouldn't even care about a shave."
He
began to notice his footsteps, besides the hiss of the air-circulator and the
laboring of the suit's motors. Through his boots, they had a distant, swishing
sound that insidiously lowered his puffed eyelids little by little. His head
bumped against the faceplate again.
Hansen jerked upright with a start. Clumsily,
he turned to look back. His tracks were long, dragging gashes in the sandy
surface.
"Hell! Going to sleep again," he
croaked.
With
the effort of speaking aloud—it was getting difficult to think clearly otherwise—the
corner of his lower lip cracked. He opened his dry mouth, making a face at the
morning-after taste, and gently touched the tip of his tongue to the spot. It
stung.
No
harm in taking a little water, he decided, though he knew it would offer only a
fleeting relief. But he needed that.
He turned his head to the left and got the
thin rubber tube between his teeth. The cracked lip stung as he sucked on the
tube.
The water was cool. His tired eyes closed
with the sheer pleasure of the sensation. On the third swallow, it stopped
flowing. "Oh, no/" Hansen groaned.
He drew harder on the hose and eked out
another mouthful. That was all. The tank was empty. It was supposed to be
partly replenished by moisture removed from the air in the suit, but he had
apparently reached the limit. The suit was not designed to be worn for twenty
hours. It was a wonder that nothing had yet broken down.
He held the last mouthful without swallowing,
letting it roll slowly about his mouth.
"Come on!" he thought. "That's
all there is. What are you waiting for?"
He knew it was silly to feel angry at this
latest pinprick. His growing rage was a sign of exhaustion, and some part of
his mind recognized that fact; but he deliberately let his temper go . . . and
drew extra strength from it.
The swallow of water gradually slipped down
as he surged forward. With the stiff right knee, he staggered once and came so
near falling flat that he skidded on all fours under him again.
"Dammit!"
he raged. "What are they doing at Base? Waiting for a weather report?
Anybody with an ounce of brain would know by now things went sour!"
He lurched down a gentle
slope and charged the next rise.
"I'll show them!" he grunted.
"I don't need them, if they're too chicken to come out for me. I'll get
there
...
I don't know how I'll get
up the goddamned wall . . . but I'll get
to
it!
I'll get there!"
Mike sat before his radio and looked at the
other three in the room.
Pierce looked thoughtful, Joey was frankly
excited, and Louise Hansen paced nervously back and forth.
"The
crew from Tractor
One
say they saw no tracks of any
kind," he said, "but that doesn't prove a thing. They
came
no-wheres near the line between Plato and
Archimedes."
"Then
you think we're justified in not waiting for the same crew?" asked Louise.
"Sure," said Mike. "I don't
like to sound like I'm egging you on to something I wouldn't do myself,
but—"
"Of
course, Mike, of course," interrupted Johnny. "One of you has to stay
on the radio, or we couldn't call back. We could get Bucky to take Joey's
place, I guess, but why wake him up?"
"He did his share," Joey put in
quickly.
Mike looked from face to face.
"Well, Joey can say I gave him
permission," he said. T don't know what you will say, but it'd be better
if you got going and figured that out on the way back."
The shadowed ringwall loomed up before the
yellow speck on the plain. Just enough earthlight reached this face to show
where the seven-mile-wide outer slope was terraced by gentle inclines. Several
of these led upward toward the pass used by the scouting expedition. Against
the black sky, Hansen could not see the radio tower that had been erected, but
he was no longer interested in that. He had jettisoned his radio batteries
back on the plane to be rid of their weight as he tackled the long slope leading
to Archimedes.
"There you are . . . there you
arel" he mumbled.
"Eureka, eureka!
Damn near
three hundred miles . . . maybe more the way I came. That's navigating, ain't
it?"
The ringwall stood
passively before him.
"Well, ain't it?"
snarled Hansen thickly. "All right, here we go!"
He
lurched forward. Despite having abandoned every bit of excess gear—the empty
oxygen cylinder lay back beside the last craterlet he had passed—he could walk
no faster than if he had been on Earth. It probably meant that on Earth he
would have long since collapsed, but he was beyond thinking of that.
He
found he could not climb the first seven-foot ledge he came to, and had to walk
along it to a lower spot.
"No
time, no time," he muttered against the delay. "You're on your last
tankful now
...
in fact, well into
it. You get up there . . . now
...
or
not ever."
He found a long lateral slope and followed it
up several hundred yards. He was cold and sluggish, and it seemed that his
heating batteries were close to exhausted.
The
ache across his back seemed normal. Even the dull misery of his legs, chafed,
cut, rubbed raw, and the sogginess of his bleeding feet had come to be merely
part of his general limpness.
He
found himself finishing the last few yards of the slope on hands and knees.
"Funny," he
croaked. "Don' remember fallin'."
He
reached out for an outcropping of rock to pull himself up. The broken spring
twisted in the mangled spot on the back of his thigh as he tried to rise.
Getting both hands on the rock, he inched upward little by little.
It
took him all of five minutes before he was on his feet again. At first, he
thought he was dreaming again. The rock seemed to move under him.
Then he saw, peering blearily upward, that it
was part of an old landslide. One slip on his part now might set it off again,
and send him crashing down to the bottom of the ringwall again. Hansen groaned
and stepped away as carefully as he could.
He
was faced by a forty-five degree slope. If he could negotiate it for about
thirty feet, he would reach another ramp. He looked down, and wondered if it
would be easier to slide down to a lower terrace which would eventually lead
higher than his present position.
"No time," he said dazedly.
He began to scrabble his way up the incline,
not one too difficult to climb on Luna. The sun-powdered rock flaked off
beneath his hands, elbows, knees, and feet. He slid back about as fast as he
climbed.
With a sob, he lunged for a projection the
size of a man's head and got one mitten on it. The rock cracked off and he slid
to the foot of the incline.
"Oh,
God!
It's
too
much!"
His face twisted up and he expected to feel
tears running down his face. Apparently, however, he was too dried out for
that.
He sat there dully, staring at the lower ramp
and trying to tell himself he could always try that. He knew better.
"This is the end of the line," he
told himself. "Last stop . . . you're done."
Even his conscience did not
twitch at his surrender. He only wished he could see Earth and look at North
America again where it was centered on the globe once more. It was too much
effort to turn around.
"Wonder
if they'll find me," he mumbled. "Dunno if I want to get buried or
not. . ."
Something moved to his
left.
A light.
"I'm seeing
things," he muttered. "Not long now."
But
the light swung up and down, it lit the slope below him, and it kept moving.
Nothing looked like that
but a tractor.
But
it would pass a hundred yards below him. The driver would have his eyes glued
to the ground ahead, watching for holes or cracks.
Hansen started to laugh and
managed to catch himself.
"The
chance after the last chancel" he thought he said aloud, although his lips
barely moved.
The effort of pulling himself to his knees
brought out sweat he did not know he had left.
He
waited for the tractor to reach a point below him. Waited . . . lifting the
head-sized rock in both hands.
The tiny weight tired him, and he lowered the
stone to his knees. The tractor lumbered along, heading down the slope into the
plain.
Hansen swayed where he knelt, but
concentrated everything upon estimating the distance.
With
a grunt, he raised the rock and thrust it away from his chest, outward over the
slope on which he sprawled with the motion.
He raised himself on his elbows and looked to
see what happened. The tractor had slid to an abrupt halt.
Dimly, he could see the shattered pieces of
his missile bouncing in and out of patches of earthlight below the vehicle.
The driver could not have missed it crossing his path.
"Gotta get up . . . up!" Hansen
thought desperately.
He
did not realize that his air was turning foul, but the simple feat of getting
his feet under him left his heart pounding wildly.
He planted his feet somehow until the light
swept up the slope as those in the tractor searched for a possible slide.
Brightness filled his helmet. He was dazzled,
and felt himself falling.
"Paul, try to
help!"
"Paul, can't you get some grip when I
shove you in? I can't keep you from sliding out the airlock. Paul!" The
voice was young and desperate.
When the other man backed away, parting the
contact of their helmets, Hansen saw the features of Joey, the radio operator,
through the other faceplate.
He stirred feebly.
"That's
it, Paul," said the faraway voice as Joey bent to lift him again.
"Just a little bit of help till I get you inside the airlock."
Something clanged, leaving
him in blackness.
The next thing he knew, he was gulping in
sobbing breaths of fresh, oxygen-rich air. His head ached, but he felt better.
Someone
was mopping his sweaty face with a wet handkerchief. The handkerchief dripped,
and the drops were salty.
He
could not see Louise, because she held his head cradled against her breast, but
Joey was looking at him wide-eyed over the back of another seat.
"How
long ago did you start?" asked someone else, and Hansen saw that Johnny
Pierce was driving.
"Right
after we got to Plato," said Hansen. "Everything but
me
and a tank of oxygen went down in a slide."
"Musta been nearly twenty-four hours
ago!" exclaimed Joey.
"Gol-darn!"
said Pierce primly. "Three hundred miles, give or take a few!"
"You ain't human, Paul!" said Joey.
"Do
you want your suit off now?" asked Louise. "We could only get your
helmet loose in this space."
Without seeing her face, he could tell that
she had been crying.
"Just leave it on," said Hansen.
"Wait till we're in, and I can go right from the suit to a bath."