The Fury Out of Time (31 page)

“We agree. As you pointed out, the worst that can happen is that we’ll die far from home. We can die waiting, or we can die searching, and we prefer to search. You will help us?”

“As much as I can,” Karvel said.

“You have thoughts as to this equipment we would need?”

“A few thoughts. There must be a portable shelter for The Sleep. Perhaps the shelter could also serve as tubs for drinking. You must be able to carry a reserve of food and water, and you won’t feel really safe until we’ve found a sure way to turn a stampede—which won’t be easy. We’ll work on it. We’ll start tomorrow.”

As the sun went down the Hras filed into the cabin, and Hras Drawa followed them. They formed a circle and quickly slipped into their deathlike slumber. Karvel made a slow circuit of the abatis, checking every post carefully, and then he went back to sit by the cabin door.

A small, ugly-looking lizard popped out of the ground nearby, glowered suspiciously at Karvel, and retreated. As the light faded it became bolder. Karvel stretched out his right foot and scratched its back, at the same time relieving the itch in his nonexistent toe. The lizard scurried into its hole, returned again, finally submitted to the scratching.

The Hras plan seemed wholly futile to Karvel. It amounted to nothing less than a lifetime of searching and not finding. Hras Drawa’s grim optimism surprised him. Karvel’s thoughts were an open book to the telepathic Hras. Surely they were aware of the tremendous odds against them.

But they were obviously an ethical race, and probably they were equally idealistic. They would fight the Good Fight, and damn the odds. He admired them, but he also pitied them.

The moon rose, full and splendid. Karvel had hardly noticed it in recent nights, confined as he had been to the forest barricades. He gazed at it nostalgically. A short time ago he had been there—a short time ago that was a couple of hundred million years into the future. The future was behind him, the past was the present, and Bowden Karvel was a derelict without purpose or destination.

He leaped up suddenly, wrenched open the dilating door, and dove through.

“Hras Drawa!” he shouted.

The sleeping Hras did not stir.

Karvel shook Hras Drawa impatiently, shouted again, and finally delivered a parting kick before he turned away disgustedly. His dash into the cabin had frightened the lizard. He sat down on the log and scratched his right foot on the edge of his left shoe while he contemplated the moon.

Chapter 5

Dawn came at last, and with it the first tentative stirrings of the Hras. The shallow shafts of light from the firing slots had not yet chased the darkness from corners and from behind the thick braces when Karvel returned to the cabin. Hras Drawa, grasping drunkenly for complete consciousness, received Karvel’s question with astonishment “The moon? You wish to go to the moon?” The other Hras halted their efforts to shake themselves awake, and sounded a wheezing chorus. “The moon?”

Karvel was already beginning to suspect that his brilliant idea would fade to absurdity in the light of day, but he said stubbornly, “You said there wasn’t enough fuel to get away from the Earth. Is there enough to go to the moon?”

“No.” The answer was immediate, emphatic, and unarguable.

“It’s a good thing I wasn’t able to wake you up. Still— what about the fuel in the U.O.? If the rate of consumption decreases with the distance, there should be more than half a tank left. Would you have enough fuel if you used that?”

“I do not know. It would have to be calculated with care. Why do you wish to go to the moon?”

“I know where the mines are located. Where they will be located, I mean.”

“What kind of mines?”

“That I don’t know. By the time I got there they were exhausted. But the moon had been a very important source of minerals.”

“Uranium?” Hras Drawa asked, after a long pause.

“ ‘Wrought of Mother Earth, fired with the strength of Luna.’ I don’t know if that referred to men, or spaceships, or whatever, but it was quoted to me as a legend. I didn’t think to investigate at the time, but last night the thought struck me that ‘fired’ could refer to fuel, which would mean that man reached the stars with uranium found on the moon. There must have been an enormous deposit there if the source was important enough to be remembered long after the uranium was exhausted.”

“It is a possible interpretation,” Hras Drawa wheezed ruminatively. “And you know where these uranium deposits are located?”

“Just a moment—I don’t even
know
that they are
uranium
deposits. I can pinpoint several important mines, and give you a general idea as to the locations of quite a few more, and because of the legend I think it certain that one or more of them are uranium mines—will be uranium mines. I’m not claiming that all of them are, and I don’t
know
that any of them are.”

The other Hras seemed to have lost interest. They left the cabin, and after a meditative silence Hras Drawa followed them, and sat down by the door.

“Even if there is enough fuel to take us to the moon, there will not be enough to take us away again. There will not be enough to change our location once we land. Either we find uranium—or we remain there.”

“It would be a gamble,” Karvel admitted. “I’m well aware of that.”

“I have paid very little attention to your moon, but I feel that an expedition there would encounter difficulties much more severe than those you have just experienced. There are no dinosaurs, but neither is there an atmosphere. There would be no food, no water, no air to breathe. How far apart are these mines?”

“A considerable distance, I’m afraid. If we landed at the wrong one, we’d be stuck there. I agree. The terrain would be hopelessly rugged, the temperature extremes impossible, and we’d have to carry all of our air and food and water with us. We couldn’t go trekking about from mine to mine hoping to find the right one.”

“And yet—you favor this idea?”

“I sat here all night considering the odds. Against finding uranium here on Earth, several thousand to one at best. Against finding it on the moon, twenty or thirty to one at worst. I don’t
favor
the idea—I have no right to gamble with your lives. I only think that you should consider it. The decision must be yours.”

“Thank you. We will consider it.”

“While you’re considering it, consider this: The Earth is a living planet. It is constantly changing. I haven’t the vaguest idea where I am, or how to go about finding minerals or anything else. The moon is dead. What we would find there now is almost exactly what I saw in the remote future—damn that paradox!—with the exception of the few trivial changes made by man. You can land your ship on top of a major mining site, and after that it’s only a matter of odds. One chance in twenty or thirty. Think about it.”

“You would accompany us to your moon?”

“Of course. How else could I show you where to land?”

“To us this gamble looks attractive. Your odds indicate that we would fail here on Earth. If we fail on your moon we should only die sooner, and we die on a strange world in either case. For yourself it is different. Why should you share this gamble with us?”

“No special reason. Just say I have a weakness for gambling.”

“That does not say enough.” Hras Drawa got to his feet and stood there for a moment, looking at Karvel or at the far horizon, depending on which of his vision spots were in focus. “We shall take the U.O. fuel and measure its weight carefully. If it is sufficient to take us to the moon, we shall talk again of this gamble.”

Karvel walked with the Hras as far as the edge of the swamp, shrugging off their protests. He had reached the conclusion that an armed human was reasonably safe in this world of dinosaurs, as long as he bathed with care and avoided ambushes near water. He felt confident that he could maneuver a tyrannosaur dizzy, if necessary, and certain that if he remained in the open he wouldn’t need to let one get close enough to put him to the test.

It seemed to him that the great dinosaurs were vastly overrated beasts. He recalled reading touching descriptions of the mammals’ diminutive ancestors—of which he had seen no traces at all—hiding in terror while waiting for the dinosaurs to become extinct. Karvel doubted that the mammals were waiting for anything. Because they evolved from reptilian ancestors they were merely late in arriving on the scene. It was only an accident of Earth’s evolution that the dinosaurs died out before man arrived, and thus spared him the task of finishing them off. Tyrannosaurus’s bloodthirsty lunges were effective against the placid herbivores, but Tyrannosaurus could be lord of all it surveyed only as long as it surveyed nothing with the intelligence to fight back.

Before returning to the cabin Karvel stopped at the stream to fill his canteen. He had to scoop a hole to make the trickle of water deep enough to dip the canteen into, and he made a mental note to ask the Hras for some kind of container to store water in. If it did not rain soon he would have to bring his water from the swamp.

The Hras did not come again that day, nor the next. Karvel shot a small dinosaur under the mistaken assumption that its steaks would be more tender, and cut thin slices for an experiment in drying meat. He sat on the log by the cabin, scratching the lizard’s back and feeding it tidbits while he waved insects away from a crudely fashioned meat rack and waited for a steak to cook. “Robinson Crusoe Karvel,” he told himself. “And what a shock I’d have if I found a strange human footprint!”

It should have been a relaxing interlude, but it was not. “What does it matter to me,” he asked himself, “whether these distinctively unhuman beings find uranium or not?”

Somehow it mattered. It mattered very much.

The Hras sent a delegation. One of its members was a pale Hras Klaa, and Karvel inquired as to the health of the exploration party, reminisced about their adventures, and offered small talk concerning neighboring dinosaurs. The Hras maintained an aloof formality, and, when Karvel gave them an opportunity, informed him that Hras Drawa invited him to the ship.

He had already formulated his own plans. He unpacked all of the emergency rations from the U.O. and passed them to the Hras to carry. If he returned from the moon he could bring them back; if he did not return he could at least enjoy a balanced diet while their air lasted.

He also removed all of the controls from the U.O. A lucky archaeologist might chance to excavate it in some future time when it could be supplied with fuel, and in Karvel’s opinion human history already owned more time paradoxes than it could cope with.

He left the cabin without a backward glance. Its view had quickly grown monotonous, and he was not overly fond of his reptilian neighbors—though there were already signs that the dinosaurs were leaving. One species still wallowed thickly in the swamp, the weirdly-shaped heads plumbing the muck for food, but the others had exhausted the meager food supply of the plain and were moving on.

They crossed the swamp without difficulty and found Hras Drawa waiting on the ship’s ramp with a reception committee.

“We have obtained a. . .a
photograph
of your moon,” Hras Drawa said, and offered it to Karvel.

Karvel was too startled to accept it. It was a hollow hemisphere some three feet in diameter, and its surface was a perfect relief map, with every elevation precise and crisply formed, and every crater of pinpoint size or larger clearly shown. Karvel ran his hand over it and exclaimed, “I thought the moon couldn’t be photographed when it’s full!”

“Why is that?” Hras Drawa asked.

“No shadows.”

“That is the best time to. . .to
photograph.
Shadows would obscure many of the surface features. Are you able to locate the mines that you mentioned?”

“Of course. Easily.”

So realistic was the reproduction that he could imagine himself descending over it in the Overseer’s Shuttle. He touched the jagged ring of Plato, ran a finger over the queer-looking crater-with-the-eye, and then pointed confidently at the widening bay where the slash of the Alpine Valley debouched onto the Mare Imbrium.

“There. One of the mines was located there, perhaps the most important one, and it was—will be—the site of the most important base on this side of the moon.”

“And. . .the others?”

“Let’s see. One about here, a rather small one, in this mountain wilderness southeast of Tycho. One just out of sight around the western rim, straight west of Kepler. Here. And another between this alleged Sea of Tranquillity and this small sea whose name I can’t recall. And another. . .”

They watched silently as his finger touched the hemisphere’s serrated surface. Here, and here, and approximately here. He stepped back while the Hras silently studied the map.

“It is as we expected,” Hras Drawa announced. “They are much too far apart.”

“I remember a few on the other side, which of course you can’t photograph from here. But don’t forget this—the ones I’ve mentioned are only the mines important enough to justify the establishment of elaborate permanent bases. There may have been many lesser mining sites that were worked and abandoned.”