Moon Zero Two (13 page)

I balanced Wally’s pistol in my hand, got the weight and feel of it, and waited. Around the snag of rock I could see our three Mends advancing on the Bug.

I could have shot one of them down right away. Maybe two, leaving only one to deal with. But my finger wouldn’t squeeze. Not yet. I waited.

And a voice in my ears said: “Come on out of there, both of you. Or we’ll drill it like a sieve.”

I flicked the mike switch and said: “I surrender. I haven’t got a gun. But the girl’s hurt. You’ll have to help me.”

Clem looked at me, puzzled.

“Okay,” came the reply. “Just stay right there, and we’ll come on in.”

They came on in, all right. They marched up to the Bug, and when they were a few feet away they leveled their guns again and poured shots into it. It had a tough hide, but it wasn’t proof against that sort of treatment at that range. Holes were torn in its sides. They’d have been torn in Clem and myself if we’d been where we were supposed to be.

Well, that was it. Now I knew what kind of bastards we were dealing with. I knew the rules.

I took careful aim and shot the green man. He went down.

The other two dived behind the Bug.

I pushed Clem well back into the shelter of the rock. Chips flew suddenly, silently in front of us. There were puffs of vapor from behind the Bug, and a scouring of fire through the ground a few inches away. All in eerie, deadly, deathly silence.

Clem tugged at my arm. I glanced back. She nodded toward a crevice in the face of the cliff.

We edged toward it I urged her in, then faced back the
way we had come. There was a flicker of color as one of the men sprinted from behind the Bug to a nearby rock.

More splinters flew into the air not six inches from us.

I plugged the telephone lead in again and said: “Keep down. A piece of flying rock can bust your suit as bad as any rocket blast.”

Leaning out, I waited for another sign. The red suit appeared suddenly, bright in the darkness between the Bug and the cliff. I fired; but a scorching blast showered dust around my helmet, and I missed and dodged back.

I checked the charges left in the magazine. Only six. Through the telephone I said: “Any more ammunition in that belt?”

Clem bent over it in the weird, uncertain light. “No. Nothing.”

I backed away. If I only had six more shots, I wasn’t going to take any chances. Clem huddled into the crevice. Then she disappeared as though sucked in by the rock. I heard her gasp.

“Bill, this cave... no, it isn’t. It
isn’t
!”

I backed away, keeping a reasonable distance so that she wouldn’t tug the telephone line out. “Isn’t what?” I grunted.

“It’s not a cave. It’s a shaft. Wally must’ve dug it.”

I ducked in close to her, and suddenly she snapped on the light of her torch. It picked out an unmistakable sawtooth pattern of tool-marks on the shaft walls.

“Put that light out!” I snapped.

The light went off, but I could feel her groping about, and a moment later she leaned cautiously toward the light, balancing a piece of rock on her palm.

“Do you know what that is?”

I was still watching the ground outside, waiting for the first sign of movement. I spared her only a glance, and said:

“Piece of rock.”

“With a vein of nickel. A good rich vein. Wally did find something.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know something about mining by now,” she said touchily. She weighed the hunk of rock, shot through with a leaden glow, in her hand and brooded over it. “Was this why they murdered him?”

“Did they?”

“Well, they’re trying to murder
us
, aren’t they? Or is this just an old Moon ceremony of welcome?”

“You’re probably right,” I conceded. “But let’s sort this problem out first.”

As though to emphasize this, a shot hissed silently across a spur nearby. Then there was a second, and I saw from the angle of the scour that it came from above. I edged out, then dodged back. Several heavy chunks of hillside came down where I’d been standing.

I gave Clem a gentle tug, and began to ease along the base of the cliff. After a few steps I felt a faint plop against my chest, and realized that I had pulled the telephone lead out

No time to stop now. Clem should be following and keeping quiet anyway.

I reached an outcrop like an elephant’s foot. As I was about to clamber over it, Clem cannoned into me from behind. I half turned to swear at her, even if she couldn’t hear, when she stabbed the telephone plug back into place.

“Bill... behind you!”

I looked back. The bulldozer Bug was shambling toward us. As we tried to plunge over the spur into cover, shots sprayed past us. I crouched, staggered to one side, and for a moment was staring up at the jagged silhouette of a ridge against the sky—and the silhouette of the man who had hoped to smash down on us from above.

I fired.

He toppled gently, and somersaulted in a slow curve, out from die hillside. It was the man in the yellow suit.

As he hit the ground, a sharp rock sliced into his suit, and it crumpled. A wisp of vapor puffed out, and that was it.

The Bug was coming on at us, its scoop jutting forward like a battering ram. I went one way, Clem went another, and the telephone lead parted again. I fired, but the shot was deflected by the scoop. Not enough shots to play that sort of game—and it wasn’t a game I stood much chance of winning anyway.

I wondered where Clem was, but there was no time to check on her. The Bug was weaving clumsily but purposefully from side to side, herding me back toward the cave.

If I made a run for it, before I was trapped...

But where? If I dashed across the boulder-strewn plain, I’d be a perfect target from the side windows of the Bug. I was safer in the cave, if I could wedge myself far back in it, beyond the reach of the Bug.

I clawed my way back around the cave mouth, and stopped for breath.

The Bug lowered its scoop and tore rocks and shale up from the ground, pushing them forward in a moving wall.

A few gouges of the scoop like that, and I could be walled in. Like some holy man of old. And I wasn’t feeling holy.

The Bug backed away a few feet, then charged again, shoving an even higher mound of clashing rocks at me.

Then it stalled.

I didn’t think. I just flung myself up the wall, grabbed hold of the scoop and then, as the engine stuttered into life again, was carried back with it. I hooked an arm over it and tried to swing myself over so that I’d be able to get a shot through the front window. I caught the flash of the red Moon suit inside, then I was skied up in the air. The driver began to manipulate the scoop in a frenzy, flailing it up and down and from side to side, trying to pitch me off or smash me to the ground at the bottom.

I clung on, every bone in my body jarred by the swoop and crash of the scoop. There was no sound outside—but in my head there was a pounding and throbbing that couldn’t go on for long. My fingers slipped. I grabbed another hold, praying I wouldn’t slice the suit open against the harsh rim of the scoop.

The Bug scuttled backward a long way. I wondered if this was going to be a last charge—a canter, to ram me against the rock face. It shivered, then began to lumber forward again. Abruptly the airlock at the back opened, and the man in red flung himself out, turning with his gun in his hand. He was hoping to be fast enough to shoot me off the scoop.

He wasn’t.

I jumped from the top of the scoop before he could fire. I sailed over the roof of the Bug slowly, turning like a dolphin as I swung toward him. In mid-air I fired.

There was an explosion of vapor from his airbottles. He
staggered, regained his balance, tried to aim. Then he dropped his pistol and started clawing at his helmet.

All right, I’d tried to kill him. But not this way. When you saw a man in throes of that kind, you dropped everything and went to his rescue. Or you tried.

I stumbled back toward the cave. Clem was cowering back against the wall. I grabbed the telephone lead and. made contact again.

“Give me that full airbottle!”

Clem looked wildly around, then humped the bottle out. I heaved it up and sprang toward the writhing man on the ground. I tried to steady him while I clipped the new bottle into place. Then I turned it on.

He thrashed over once more. His face stared up imploringly from within his helmet. He took a deep breath—I could see him, and I waited for it to calm him—but then his face contorted even more, he drew his lips hideously back from his teeth, and with one final convulsion he died.

Clem came and stood beside me.

I got to my feet. I was baffled. And then I wasn’t baffled any more. I switched on the radio—there were no enemies to hear us any more—and said:

“This one was your brother’s, wasn’t it?”

I touched the airbottle with my foot. Clem stooped to look at it, and nodded.

“Well, he was murdered all right,” I said. “Whatever’s in here, it isn’t air.”

She winced.

And now, how did we get out of here? Our Moonbug was a writeoff. It was a long walk back to Farside Five.

Then I realized that the Bugdozer was still scrabbling aimlessly at the hillside, its wheels spuming as it chewed bits of rock and tried to climb the sheer slope.

It wasn’t meant as normal transport. Too cumbersome, too slow. But it would have to do.

Then Clem said: “Those men... those three. They must have had a Moonbug to get here, mustn’t they? They must have left it somewhere.”

“Somewhere.”

There was a lot of open space all around us. And if there was a Bug squatting out there someplace, there might be another man in it.

This one was going to have to do.

I hauled myself aboard the bucketing, mindlessly champing Bugdozer, and stopped it. Then I examined it

It wasn’t so good. The temperature was down, and the pressure was low. Our friend in the red suit hadn’t gone through the airlock drill when he chucked himself out of the back, and a lot of air had been wasted. The generator and conditioner were still in working order, but the supply level was down.

So was the temperature—worse than I’d thought. There were icicles on the control panel. I checked the batteries. More gloom. Someone had put an explosive slug through them, and wrecked half of them. That someone could only have been me.

I beckoned Clem inside, secured the airlock, and went through the usual procedure.

She made a move to slide up her faceplate.

“Leave it on!” I yelled. “You’ll get frostbite.” I explained what had happened, and added: “We’ve got power for about a hundred and fifty miles, but not the heating and cooling as well.”

“We’ll have to stay in our suits all the way?”

“Their charges won’t last more than a few hours,” I said, “and we can’t recharge them off the batteries.”

While we talked I was backing the Bugdozer away from the cliff and swinging it around.

All at once it dawned on Clem. “A hundred and fifty miles? But it’s two hundred back to Farside Five, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“Then—”

“We’re going to have to try a shortcut,” I said.

This thing was built to go over mountains. Or even through mountains, if they weren’t too hefty. It was going to have to live up to the manufacturer’s specifications, or there’d be trouble. Trouble for Clementine Taplin and William Kemp.

One failure, and we wouldn’t get back to make a fuss about the guarantee. We’d just go to join Wally and a lot of others in that Moonmine in the sky.

I headed the Bugdozer out into the freezing, airless night

Clem pored over the crumpled map. Once or twice I
suspected that some of the paths she discovered were in fact just creases in the map. But as long as we kept moving across that sequence of ridges, we stood a chance. A bit of star navigation, a hint from the map, and a bit of guesswork... it added up to a chance.

But even a highly sophisticated computer couldn’t have predicted the rocks that would get in our way, the boulders, the sliding shale, the gullies that opened up in front of us. The scoop was at work half the time, tossing rubble to one side or the other, gouging its way through a defile just too narrow for us to get through without a lot of smashing and tearing.

We teetered along a cliff edge, and rumbled down into the treacherous darkness of an unknown valley.

Clem ventured: “What happens when the heating in our suits runs down—do we just freeze?”

I had my eyes on the route ahead. As she spoke, I glanced at her, and beyond her head I saw a halo of light. It was the answer to her question. I pointed.

A tall pinnacle reared up, a dizzy spire way above us. The top was scorched by an intense white light. Below, there was impenetrable blackness.

“The sun,” whispered Clem.

“It’ll be down to our level in a few hours.”

“Oh, good.” She sighed with relief. Then she said: “But... you said it got above boiling point.”

“It will. About the time”—I checked the panel clock— “the air-conditioning in our suits runs out.”

I wasn’t being very reassuring. But out here in the wilderness, at a time like this, there wasn’t any point in lying.

We scuffled on.

We negotiated a tricky mountain ledge. Rocks and dust crashed down around the headlights and I had to stop. With decent air and wind and weather, that stuff would have been brought down years ago. Here, it just waited for someone to come along and give it a shiver. When I thought the avalanche was over I edged the scoop forward and tipped the rubble off the track.

Light intensified along the highest cathedral-like spires. We chipped, shoveled, blustered, and rumbled on. Twenty miles, thirty miles, forty. Then a stretch of flat ground—a bonus. I picked up speed.

Clem rustled her fingers over the map. Rustled... in silence. Her movements and my own seemed remote, unreal, meaningless. Maybe in the end that’s just what they would prove to be.

She said: “There looks like a canyon—I suppose you’d call it a crevasse—just..

Our front wheels tipped forward abruptly. I stamped on the brakes. Dust slid away from beneath us, and the Bugdozer rocked slightly from side to side before settling. “I told you there was,” said Clem.