The Fury Out of Time (32 page)

“In choosing a landing place, we can consider only those mines known to you. Which do you recommend?”

Karvel did not answer immediately. Then he said slowly, “I feel certain that there’s uranium on the moon, but I have no reason at all to say that you’d be more likely to find it in one place than another.”

“You called this the most important mine,” Hras Drawa persisted. “Do you think we should land there?”

“Your guess is probably as good as mine, and might even be better. But—yes. I think so. It was the largest base, and I’m sure I heard it referred to as the most important mine. And at the stage of human technology at which the base was built, uranium was by far the most important mineral.”

“Thank you.”

“What about the fuel situation?”

“If we achieve a high initial acceleration and precise-enough navigation to drive—coast—most of the way, we might have enough fuel left for the landing.”

“A near thing, in other words. Risky.”

“Risky, yes.”

“A gamble trying to get there, and then another gamble on the landing place. That alters the odds.”

“Then you think we should not attempt this?”

“I wouldn’t presume to make the decision for you. If I were in your place, and there was only myself to consider, I think I’d go. If I were the head of an expedition, I’d take a vote—and perhaps leave behind anyone who preferred life here to a gamble with death on the moon.”

“None of us has that preference,” Hras Drawa said. “We have decided to go.”

“When?”

“Today. Before darkness. The exact time is already calculated, and we have been storing air and water. The air requires much time because we cannot spare the fuel to operate our machines, but we will be ready at the chosen hour. We wish now only to give you our thanks and our farewell.”

“Nonsense,” Karvel said. “If you’re going, then I’m going with you.”

The onlookers stirred uneasily. Hras Drawa wheezed several times, and explosively demanded, “Why? You have shown us where to land. What further help could you give to us?”

Karvel did not answer.

“We cannot permit it,” Hras Drawa said. “We have wrenched you out of your own time, and you have already risked your life for us. There is no good reason for you to share in this gamble.”

“The best of reasons. It’s my idea, so I’m going to see you through it—or as far through it as we’re able to go. Do you think I’d be in your way?”

“No—”

“Then there’s no good reason why I shouldn’t come along.”

“You have firmly decided. Very well. You will be welcome, but we do not understand why you wish to come.”

Karvel smiled wistfully. “Call it another mountain that I’m compelled to climb.”

It was possibly Karvel’s last meal on Earth, and he wanted to consummate it with more ceremony than would be entailed in the opening of a military field ration. He asked the Hras to support him in the dangerous venture of catching a fish, and he baked it well and ate it slowly, savoring the sights and sounds and smells about him. Even the foul decay of the swamp had a vitality that he would recall nostalgically when entrapped in the alien atmosphere of the spaceship.

It was late afternoon when they came for him. Hesitantly they asked if he were ready to go, as though they fully expected him to change his mind. Karvel entered the ship without a backward glance and took his place on the hammock in the same cylindrical room he had occupied before. He would have given much to be able to watch this take-off from the control room, but he did not ask. They might have felt obliged to consent, and a control room on a touchy, fuel-conserving take-off was no place for spectators.

There was a rumble and a lurch. Karvel’s hammock shifted smoothly as the ship rose to the vertical, and then gravity tore at him. For a few crushing seconds he fought the illusion that he was again in the throes of the U.O.’s pressure, and then the rumble ceased, the acceleration eased, and he was able to breathe freely. He lay panting on the hammock, and waited for his stomach to catch up with him.

Suddenly he realized that he was weightless. He caught himself drifting away from the hammock, and learned for the first time the purpose of the three indentations on either side. They were for hanging onto. Karvel hooked a finger into one of them and turned to watch the open diaphragm of the door.

The minutes passed tediously, and no Hras appeared. Puzzled, Karvel launched himself with a floating leap and looked out into the dim red light of the deserted corridor. He drifted through the door and propelled himself forward with a firm push. He reached the distant end, explored another corridor in increasing perplexity, and finally turned back.

Near his own quarters he noticed a dilating door that had not been completely closed. He glanced through it and was able to make out the figure of a Hras seated doglike on a hammock, clinging firmly with four of its six limbs but otherwise comatose.

A queasy sensation of panic smote him—the same sensation he’d had the first night out with the expedition, but of paralyzing intensity. The Hras had taken off just in time to get the ship safely on course before The Sleep, and Karvel was undoubtedly the only conscious individual aboard. If anything happened. . .

He banished his misgivings and returned to his quarters. The Hras were veteran space travelers. In spite of The Sleep they had reached Earth from a far galaxy, and they should be capable of planning a trip to the moon. Nothing could happen while the ship was coasting through space, and the Hras would be awake in time for the moon landing.

If they weren’t there was nothing that Karvel could do about it. He wouldn’t know how to cope with an emergency, and he knew that he couldn’t arouse the Hras. He floated back to his hammock and tried to sleep.

He was still trying when the first Hras appeared. Karvel had passed the red-hued alien night in tense vigilance, and he greeted the red-hued alien dawn with the acute discomfort of exhaustion blended with the nausea of weightlessness.

“Landing soon,” the Hras said, and disappeared.

Karvel tensed himself on his hammock, and a short time later the engines caught with a jar that slammed him into it The Hras had waited for the last possible moment, when they had to brake their descent or crash, and the sudden, crushing change from no gravity to full deceleration was far worse than the pressure he had suffered on the take-off.

Just as abruptly the pressure stopped. The engines were silent, and
up
and
down
had meaning again. Karvel dropped to the floor and looked into the corridor.

Hras Klaa came bustling past, almost inarticulate with excitement. “We’re sending out the first party. Would you like to watch?”

“Watch?” Karvel exclaimed. “I’d like to go along!”

“There is no clothing to fit you.”

“Clothing? You mean a space suit. Yes, I suppose I’d better have one of those if I go outside.”

“Ours would not fit you.”

“True. I couldn’t begin to get into one of them. Where do I go to watch?”

In a bulge at the top of the ship they found a group of Hras surrounded by a circular vision screen. Karvel looked dazedly this way and that, from the jagged, sun-flooded mountain peaks to bleak Mare Imbrium’s shallow horizon, and back again. The Hras silently contemplated all of it with their circular vision.

The ship lay where Karvel had placed his finger on the map, its nose pointing into the valley. “Perfect!” Karvel exclaimed. “How did we do on fuel?”

“There is a little left,” Hras Drawa said. “Not enough to leave this place, but enough to operate some of our machines when—if—we find the uranium.”

A group of space-suited Hras came into view, their gleaming suits grotesquely magnifying their grotesqueness. The air tank was a bulging sausage that encircled them in the region of their breathing rings; the vision ring was a lesser bulge. The six slender limbs terminated in large disks, making them look like many-armed tennis players.

They marched straight for the base of the mountains, picked their way over chunks of rock that had eroded from the heights, and moved out of sight down the valley. Those in the observation room waited tensely, and Karvel watched the Hras rather than the viewing screen. They were mentally in contact with the search party, and the instant a uranium detector produced the smallest flicker they would know about it.

They remained silent.

The search party came into view again, returning from the opposite side of the valley. As it approached the ship the Hras abruptly left the room, leaving Karvel alone with Hras Drawa.

“Nothing?” Karvel asked.

Hras Drawa wheezed a lingering sigh. “No. Nothing at all.”

Chapter 6

They tried, of course. They laid out search patterns with geometrical precision, pacing off squares, and halving them, and halving the halves, until it seemed to Karvel that no square inch of the valley had not been tested with one of the damnably inert detectors. They ranged far out into Mare Imbrium and far up the valley. They scaled the mountains as high as they could climb, and Karvel watched apprehensively as the small figures edged their way upward, clinging to what was, from his vantage point, the sheer face of a cliff.

All of the Hras searched. Karvel had never found out exactly how many there were of them, but he counted more than a hundred at a time on the viewing screen, pathetic figures that painstakingly plodded back and forth in small groups, intent on the precious crystals that they carried cupped in their flexible disks. They remained out for their entire waking periods, and when they returned to the ship for The Sleep Hras Drawa had always the same comment “No. Nothing at all.”

“Is there any chance that something could be wrong with the detectors?” Karvel asked. “The explosion, perhaps—”

“All have been tested,” Hras Drawa said.

“How did you test them?”

“With uranium. The fuel.”

“Oh,” Karvel said, feeling absolutely like a fool.

The line of the sunset moved relentlessly up the valley and left them in darkness. The glowing Earth reached its first quarter and began to soften the jagged landscape with earthlight. Aboard the ship there was no longer even a pretense that their gamble had not failed.

Hras Drawa summoned Karvel, and tersely outlined a plan to extend the search. They would be able to equip two small teams of explorers. One would proceed north along the edge of the
mare;
the other would go south. They could carry enough air for four Earth-days, two days out and two returning. Later there would be other parties, but unfortunately their extreme range could never be farther than two days of traveling. Did Karvel have any suggestions?

“You might work out a system of caching supplies,” Karvel said. “You’d start with a larger team, but half of the members would leave their extra air at the one-day limit and turn back. When the others returned they would have that air waiting for them. It would increase their range slightly. If a stock were built up there, then some of it could be moved to the two-day limit, and so on. It would be possible, with careful planning, to build the range up to a week or more. A similar system was used by polar explorers on Earth.”

“We will consider that,” Hras Drawa said. “For a beginning, though, we shall limit ourselves to the two days. We do not know what problems we will encounter. You do not think such a short exploration worthwhile?”

“Of course. It’s the only thing to do, since there isn’t any uranium around here. I was just thinking that we’re right back where we were on Earth, except that the conditions are infinitely more difficult.”

“At least there are no dinosaurs,” Hras Drawa wheezed. “And no crocodiles.”

Karvel turned away.

“You must not feel badly about us,” Hras Drawa said. “We knew when we determined to come that we were much more likely to fail than to succeed. We do not regret our gamble, but we are sorry that you insisted on coming with us.”

They did not regret their gamble, but the atmosphere in the ship, before the Hras collapsed in sleep, was downright funereal.

The two expeditions left as soon as the Hras awakened again. Karvel watched them out of sight—twenty Hras in each group, the same mystical number that had taken part in the Earth expedition. Through some trick of optics in the spaceship viewing screen the squat, bulging figures labored endlessly on the edge of the horizon before they finally vanished.

Later, pacing the dim corridors in edgy impatience, Karvel chanced upon Hras Klaa. “I want to go exploring,” he announced. “I want to walk up the valley, and climb a mountain or two, and leave my footprints in moon dust Couldn’t you rig up some kind of a suit for me?”

Hras Klaa reacted with a rare enthusiasm, perhaps because the Hras had nothing better to do. A committee of space-suit tailors was assembled. Never had Karvel been measured so meticulously, and never had he received a worse fit. His head posed almost insurmountable problems for them, because they insisted on viewing him not as a human but as a misshapen Hras. The suit that they constructed looked like a cylinder with limbs haphazardly attached. He entered it by squirming in through the top, and he had to squat down slightly in order to see through the misplaced vision ring. The flexible limbs would not bend properly at the knees and elbows, leaving him both stiff-legged and stiff-armed.