Andre Norton (ed) (7 page)

"It's her
science," said Joey. "She wants to see the stars better."

"We
got enough astronomers now. She's a smart girl, all right— can't take that away
from her. But if she was
my
woman,
she
wouldn'ta come up herel"

"If
she was mine," countered Joey, "I wouldn'ta taken a second-rate job
just to follow her up here eitherl But you're dreaming about the past,
Boss."

"Uh-unh,"
grunted Mike, plugging in the speaker again.
"I just believe in equal rights for men. How'd you like to be married to a
dame like that and have to trail her to a place where
there's
three women to forty-eight men?"

"Ask
me how I'd like to be married to a dame like that period!" Joey invited
him.

Mike
adjusted the shade on the light so as to shadow half the room. He straightened
the blanket where the three visitors had sat, appropriated the one from the
upper bunk to cover himself, and lay down.

"Your watch," he announced coldly.
"Wake me up if anything comes in!"

The rope lacing of the canvas creaked as he
settled himself; then Joey was left with only the quiet hiss of the radio. He
leaned back in the folding chair and relaxed.

Hansen paused and turned to survey the ground
he had covered in the past half hour. The hiss of his air-circulator and the
whine of the tiny motors within his suit were a comfort in the face of his
bleak surroundings.

He
had found himself trotting along at such an easy pace that he had kept going
past Mt. Pico. Now he wondered if he ought to stop.

"Might
as well go on," he muttered. "Now that I've picked up the tractor
trail from Archimedes, I can hardly be missed by the relief crew."

He
eyed the twin tracks in the gray sand. Flanked by
his own
wide-spaced footprints, they stretched away into the dim distance. As a sign
that man had passed, they did little but accentuate the coldness of the scene.

"Maybe
I'll stop at the big triple peak," Hansen planned. "That's about
thirty-five or forty
miles .
..
they
ought to be along by then if
they started right away."

Careful
not to admit to himself that relief might be slow in starting from Archimedes,
he took a last look at Pico. Rearing starkly upward, it projected a lonely,
menacing grandeur, like a lurking iceberg or an ancient monument half-buried in
the creeping sands of a desert. In the fight of the nearly full Earth, it was
a pattern of gray angles and inky black patches—not a hospitable sight.

"Come
on, come onl" Hansen reproved himself. "Let's get moving! You want
to turn into a monument too?"

He had stopped just before reaching Pico to
replenish his suit tank from the big cylinder, and still felt good at having
managed the valves without the mishap he had feared. He did not feel like a man
who had traveled seventy miles.

"Why,
on Earth," he thought, "that would be a good three-day march! I feel
it a little, but not to the point of being tired."

He
looked up at Earth as he started out again. The cloudy eastern coast of North
America had moved around out of sight in the narrow dark portion. Hansen
guessed that he had been on the move for at least four or five hours.

"I'd
like to see their faces when they meet me way out here," he chuckled.

It
occurred to him that he might be more tired than he thought, and as he went on
he tried to save himself by holding his pace to a brisk walk. He found that if
he got up on his toes a bit, he could still
bound
along that way.

The gray sand flowed under his feet, relieved
occasionally by a stretch of yellowish ground. Hansen kept his eyes on his path
and avoided the empty waste. When he did glance into the distance, he felt a
twinge of loneliness. It was like the wide plains-land of the western United
States, but grimly
bare
of anything so living as a
wheat field.

He
tried to remember as he moved along where it was that they had driven the
tractor up a mountain ridge. He decided that he would rather avoid the climb,
and kept an eye open for the chain of
vein mountain
beyond Pico.

"It ought to be faster to go around the
end of them," he thought. "I can always pick up the tracks
again."

When
he finally sighted the rise ahead, he bore to his right. He remembered from the
maps he had studied that the mountains curved somewhat toward another isolated
peak, and he watched for that. As far as he knew, it had no name, but although
only half the height of Pico, it was an unmistakable landmark.

The mountains on his left gradually dwindled
into ragged hills and sank beneath the layer of lava. Hansen turned toward the
last outcroppings as the triple mountain he sought came into sight. He climbed
onto a broad rock and started to sit down.

The
end of the big cylinder slung across his back clanged on the back of his
helmet. Hansen lost his balance and tumbled over the side of the rock. Under
his groping hands, the heat-tortured surface of it flaked away, and he bounced
once on the ground before sprawling full length.

"Damn!"
he grunted. "When'll I learn to watch my balance with this load?"

He picked himself up and unslung the tank.
Then, allowing for the normal bulk of his back pack of tank and batteries, he
backed against the outcropping until he was resting at a comfortable angle.

"Maybe I ought to relax a few
minutes," he told himself. "Give the air-circulator time to filter
out some of the sweat. Then, too, I don't want to get tired and miss them when
they come along."

He
idly scanned the arc between the peak toward which he was heading and Mt. Pico,
still easily visible off to his right. The northern part of the
Mare Imbrium
drew his gaze coaxingly into the distance
until he felt an insane desire to thrust his head forward. It almost seemed
that if he could get beyond the double glass of his insulated faceplate, if he
could escape from the restraint of his helmet, he might perceive his bleak
surroundings with a better, more real sense of proportion.

There
was nothing out there, of course, he forced himself to realize. Except for
shadows of craterlets that looked like low mountains, there was nothing to see
for fifty miles, and nothing even then more noteworthy than a couple of minor
craters.

"Then
what are you looking for?" Hansen snapped. "You want it to get on
your nerves? And quit talking to yourself I"

He
suppressed, however, the sudden urge to spring up and break into a run.
Instead, he hitched around to stare along the ridge at whose end he sat.

He was far enough south to be able to see the
side lit by earth-light. The ridge climbed higher the further it went, like the
back of some sea monster rising from placid waters. Several miles away, a spur
seemed to project out to the south; and Hansen thought he could remember a
mile-wide crater on the maps.

He was a bit more comfortable inside his suit
by now. He shifted his position to expedite the drying of the coveralls he wore
under the spacesuit. Then he raised his arms and tried to clasp his hands
behind his neck, but found that his garb was not that flexible.

"Shouldn't kick, I guess," he
thought. "Without plenty of springs in the joints, I wouldn't be able to
bend anything, considering the pressure difference."

He spent a minute admiring the construction
of the suit that alone stood between him and instant extinction. That led him
to think of the marvelous mechanism of the vacuum tractor that had carried him
so comfortably—though he had not appreciated it at the time—across the
Lunar
plain. That, logically, recalled the men who had come
with him and now were buried beneath one of Plato's many landslips.

"Talk about borrowed time!" he
thought. "I wonder how long I'll stay
lucky?
Any
little thing might do it—"

He
had already taken three or four tumbles, or was it more? On any one of them,
had he rolled the wrong way perhaps, he might have cracked that faceplate on a
projecting rock. It was made as tough as possible, true, but if he even cracked
the outer pane, the insulating sheet of air would spurt out to leave him with a
slow leak. The inner plate would lose heat and cloud up from his breath, so
that he would end up without even knowing where he was dying.

Or
if he had slid over a surface jagged enough to tear through his yellow chafing
suit, and then to rip the tough material of the inner suit—

A puncture here would be a
real blowout!

He
reminded himself to be careful about stepping into shadows, especially if they
were more or less straight-edged. He did not remember encountering on the way
out any of the canyon-like rills that ran like long cracks straight through all
other surface features of Luna—except occasional small craters slammed into the
rock after the rill had been formed—but there was always the chance that he
might step into some other kind of a hole.

Fortunately,
the earthlight shone into his face, so that he should be able to tell a shadow
resulting from some elevation ahead of him.

"I'm
getting the jitters squatting here," Hansen thought. "It won't do any
harm to move on a little way.
At least out past that
mountain, where I'll have a good view towards Archimedes."

He
arose and slung the big cylinder over his back again, jiggling on the toes of
his boots to jockey it into place. With one last look over his shoulder
at
the trail of his footprints splotched in
the ashy sand, he started off.

He
was surprised to discover that the rest had stiffened him slightly, but that
soon worked out. As soon as he was warmed up, he moved out in a brisk walk
which on Luna sent him bounding along with fifteen-foot strides. Swinging his
arms to keep his balance, he concentrated upon the footing ahead of him. Once more
he was alone with the hissing and humming of his suit and the sound of his own
breathing, undisturbed by either memory or anticipation.

Mike Ramirez stirred on his bunk with the
change of the quiet hissing of the radio. Something more than the occasional
crackle or creak of Joey's chair or football in the corridor brought him up
with eyes still half-closed. To his sleep-drugged mind, it seemed that nothing
had existed until a second ago, when a faint, dreamlike voice had started to
speak.

He
started to push back his blanket—Joey's blanket—and said, "Joey! You got a
call!"

". . .
to
Archimedes Base. Hello Base!
Over."

"I hear him!"
snarled Joey. "Go back to sleep!"

He pushed his switch and the rushing noise
that had partly muffled the weak voice gave way before the surge of his own
transmitter.

"Archimedes Base to Tractor One!"
Joey answered, and Mike leaned back on one
elbow and sighed.

He did
not listen while Joey took the message, but swung his feet to the floor and sat
up. Wiggling his toes uncomfortably, he wished he had taken off his shoes; but
he had expected to lie down only half an hour or so. Until the call came in, he
had been sound asleep.

Joey acknowledged the message and turned to
Mike after dropping his pencil.

"The
Serenitatis
bunch," he said. "They left two of
them at
Linné
to take photos and poke around while the
other pair brought the tractor back through between the Apeninness and Caucasus
to call in."

"Everything
okay?"

"Yeah, they're on the way back already,
but they say
Linné
didn't look as if it was ever a volcano after
all."

"Very true if interesting," said
Mike. "Okay, take it to Burney. I'll bend an ear a while."

He
tossed the blanket back onto the upper bunk and walked over to the chair. He
stretched, and sat down as Joey's footsteps departed down the corridor.

He
sat there, staring moodily at the softly lighted dials of the radio, wishing he
had a cigarette. That was one habit he had had to cut off short when joining
the expedition.