Andre Norton (ed) (8 page)

"I
think I'm getting over it some," he congratulated himself. He looked up at
the sound in the corridor, thinking that Joey had made good time to Burney's
compartment and back. He raised an eyebrow as Louise entered.

"I just saw Joey go by," she
announced hastily. "Did some news come in?"

"Tractor One reported—just routine.
What are you doing, picketing this
dive?"

"I—I just happened to be passing the
Junction, and I saw the paper in Joey's hand." "Uh-huh," grunted
Mike.

What the members of the expedition had come
to call the "Junction" was an intermediate dome equipped with the
main airlock. The other buildings connected with it through safety doors so as
to localize any danger or air loss in the event of a rupture in one of the
domes. It was, in effect, the front hall of the whole Base.

And
if
you stand there long enough,
thought Mike,
everyone
you know on Luna will pass by, and you'll find out everything that's going on.

"Where is number Two now?" demanded
Louise quietly.

Scared,
thought
Mike, noting the over-controlled tenseness of her voice.

"I
don't know for sure," he answered, not looking at her. "It's time
they were inside Plato, and we can't expect to hear them from in there."

Louise walked jerkily to
the bunk and sat on the foot of the lower section. She crossed her legs. Seeing
the nervous manner in which she twitched her foot, Mike turned to his radio.

After
a moment, she spoke again, and his shoulders quivered at the agonized harshness
of her tone.

"Don't
string me along, Mikel I want to knowl
You
were worried
about them hours ago, weren't you?"

Mike licked his lips.

"That don't mean
anything," he muttered.

"The
others backtracked to report, didn't they? To call in, I mean. Something
happened to number
Two
, didn't it?"

"Now, take it easy, Louise!" Mike
squirmed in his
chair,
then forced himself to sit
still. It was not the sort of furniture that would stand much squirming.
"Burney kinda considered that as a possibility, but in the end they
decided things were probably okay."

"Then why did they
have Bucky in here?" she demanded.

"Just in case they thought it worth the
trouble of scouting the Plato region.
Nothing special."

Louise
bounced up from the bunk. She stood beside it, stiff, with her little fists
clenched tightly at her sides.

"They wouldn't let this long a time go
by without calling in and you know it!" she declared. "Even if they
did, there ought to be a tractor on the way to check."

"You might have a
point there," admitted Mike.

"It could always be
called back."

"It's probably been thought of,"
said Mike. "Look, Louise, why don't you calm down and let the worryin' get
done by the people supposed to do it?"

She
did not look at him. The darkness of her eyes surprised him, and he realized
how she had paled beneath her tan.

"I
can't help it," she said. "It's my fault, in a way. He only came
along because I got so excited about the expedition I couldn't stay down on
Earth. He didn't want to come, and now he's out there-"

Mike rose and shoved his chair aside with his
foot. He thought the girl was going to faint. Watching her narrowly, he reached
out to put his hand on her arm.

He sighed with relief as he heard Joey
whistling outside. Louise straightened and moved away from his hand as the
younger operator entered.

"Why
don't you go see Burney?" suggested Mike. "He'll explain how he
figures the odds; or if you want to argue, it's more sense to do it with him
than me. I got nothing to do with it."

The girl pulled herself
together with a visible effort.

"I know, Mike. Thanks
for listening, anyway."

"Joey, go along with
her to Burney's quarters!"

"That's
all right," said Louise. "I can find my way further than that."

They watched her leave.

Once
more, Joey took the chair before the set and the pair of them sat in glum
silence. The ventilation system came to life in one of its efforts to
homogenize the Base atmosphere, and its sigh partly drowned out the hiss of the
radio.

"You know something,
Joey?" grunted Mike.

"What?"

"I got a feelin' we're not gonna see
those guys again." "Hope you're wrong," said Joey. "It's
awful tough digging around here, after the first few inches."

Hansen trotted along steadily with the four
thousand foot mountain rising in a sheer sweep out of the lava "sea"
over to his right. There were three distinct peaks, he knew, but they ran in a
line away from him so that the whole thing appeared one towering mass to him.
Most of it, from his position, was black with the deepness of
Lunar
shadows, although he was gradually reaching a location
where he could see the splashes of earthlight on the tortured rocks.

"Pretty
soon I'll be out in the real flat, with nothing but a scattering of little
craters to steer by," he reflected. "If I don't want to stop, how had
I better head?"

Just
in case the problem should arise, he began to estimate the direction he should
take and the sort of ground he would find.

The first thing would be to bear slightly
left until he picked up the trail of the tractor once more. Then he could
expect a region of fairly frequent craterlets, leading up to Kirch,
a
modest but respectable seven miles in diameter. If he
passed to the right of Kirch, he would be kept from wandering aimlessly out
into the
Mare
Imbrium
by a
range of vein mountains. He might go farther astray by passing Kirch to the
left, but there the going would probably be easier.

"Then
what?" he murmured, trying to recall the map and the journey in the
tractor.

There
was another open area, he seemed to remember, and then the forty-mile string of
peaks called the Kirch Mountains, bordered on the right by an even longer
ridge of
vein mountains
which might once have been
part of the range.

And
then, another thirty miles or so would bring him to the ringwall of Archimedes!

Hansen shook his head.

"That would be going a
little too far," he muttered.

His
voice sounded husky to his own ears, and he paused to suck up a few swallows of
water through the hose. He must have been half-hypnotized by the steady
streaming of the gray surface under his feet, for he suddenly realized that he
had gone considerably beyond the triple peak.

Without
his steady forward speed, he found it difficult for a moment to stand erect. He
braced against the movement of the big tank on his back, and turned around to
look back.

He
stared at the dark, earthlit ground over which he had been trotting. With the
looming mountain in the foreground, and the upthrust ringwalls of smaller
craterlets here and there above the level, aseptic frigidity of the plain, it
was a scene of complete desolation. It was more naked of life or any kind of
softness than any desert on Earth; yet to Hansen, it did not really seem like a
desert. There was some further overtone plucking at the fringe of his
consciousness.

Then it came to him.

"It's
like an
oceanT
he exclaimed
. "
There's something about it that's
like
..
.
like
a cold, gray, winter sea smashing in on a rocky coast!"

There was the same monstrous, chilling power,
the same effect upon the beholder that here was a massive, half-sentient entity
against whose callous strength and cruelty nothing human could stand. It was a
thing
to observe from a safe distance, to cower from lest it somehow become
aware of the puny structure of bone, blood, and flesh spying upon it. Then
there would be no escape, no withstanding the crushing force of its malice. But
he was on no safe cliff. He was down
in
the
sea.

He
looked around. Gray everywhere, mottled with inky shadows. Gray ash underfoot,
gray-and-black lumps thrusting up from the surface like colossal vertebrae,
gray distance in all directions.

"Been
going for hours," he thought, "and there's no sign, really, that I'll
ever get anywhere! I might as well be in the middle of the far side of
Pluto!"

The
huge mountain towered behind him, like a hulking beast from some alien world
stalking the only object in
all its
frozen world that
dared to move. Hansen suddenly could not bear to have his back turned to it. He
faced it and edged clumsily away. The helmet that reduced his field of vision
was his prison. If that black-shadowed mass of rock chose to topple over, it
would easily reach him, and more. He would be ground under countless tons of
weight, mangled and frozen in one instant—

Hansen whirled about and
bolted.

On his first stride, he caught the toe of his
right foot in the sand and sprawled forward with flailing arms. He plowed into
the ground, throwing up spurts of sand like a speedboat tossing spray.

Somehow, he was up immediately, running in
long, wobbling, forty-foot bounds. His eyes bulged and the breath rasped
between his hps as he strove desperately to keep his balance.

It was like running in a dream, the nightmare
come true. More than once, until he adapted to the pace, he found himself
churning two or three steps at the zenith of his trajectory, too impatient to
wait for the touch of boot on sand. There was sudden, dynamic power in his
tiring muscles. All his joints felt loose.

His
chest began to labor and he stumbled slightly. With a quick spasm, he blew his
lungs and sucked in a deeper breath. After a few repetitions, he felt a trifle
easier. In a minute he began to get his second wind. All this came like a
half-perceived process of instinct, while he concentrated narrowly upon
speeding ahead.

He
flew up a slight grade and took off in a soaring leap to the next crest of an
undulating stretch of pale yellow ash. The next thing he knew, he was rushing
upon a long shadow that barred his path.

A
hasty glance each way warned him there was no use trying to skirt it, for the
shadow or hole or whatever it was ran for hundreds of yards right and left.
Hansen stamped hard at the near edge and kicked off for at least sixty feet.
Something seemed to snap in his right knee, but he came down all right and kept
running, well clear of the shadow.

How
long he ran, dodging this way and that to avoid hills and shadows obstructing
his path, he did not know. In the end, the tiny motors of his suit fell behind
the rate at which he consumed oxygen and gave off carbon dioxide and copious
moisture.

When he began to feel like an underwater
swimmer reaching his limit with writhing chest, Hansen gave up. He stopped.

That felt worse. He moved on at a gentle
walk, accomplishing it mostly by motion from the ankles down. Amid the stifling
warmth and stickiness inside his spacesuit, it was borne in upon him how badly
he had lost his head.

He looked back, panting. Where was the
mountain? Then, following the trail of isolated scars on the surface beyond
where they faded into the gray distance, he saw a small knob of gray against
the star-dotted black of the horizon.

"I
guess . . . I've . . . really been traveling!" he panted. "Twenty
minutes or half an hour—wonder how fast I went to put a mountain out of
sight?
Of course
...
I was well past when I started."

That reminded him of his bolt, and he closed
his eyes in a paroxysm of shame.

The
sweat beading his forehead began to trickle down his cheekbones or nose. Now
and then, a drop rolled into his eye, despite efforts to shake his head inside
the confines of the helmet. It stung, but he was too blown to get excited over
that.