Fiction Complete, page 65
“That could end up giving me a beautiful limp,” he thought. “With fourteen pounds inside, and no air at all outside, it’d be tough to bend a joint without some mechanical help.”
By now, he could see light-streaks along the ringwall, and knew that he was rounding it. The lighting gradually increased as he continued, until when he began to move out into the open plain some time later, the walls were mostly gray with earth-light. Kirch had a “new” appearance, as craters went. Its floor was not lava-filled, nor its ringwall seemingly as long exposed to thermal erosion, so that the probability was that it had been formed after the “sea” around it.
Hansen began to keep an eye out for a suitable place to sit down. Presently, he located a rock the size of an auto.
“Time for a drink, and then I’ll pick out a good spot.” he sighed.
The second he stopped to grope with his lips for the little hose, he knew he was really tired.
The water, cool from being only partly surrounded by heating coils to protect it from the exterior cold, refreshed him but slightly. The running had left a thick taste in his mouth.
Hansen unslung the big cylinder he had carried on his back and set it down beside a comfortable indentation in the rock. He then unfastened his back pack of tank and batteries. The metal-covered connection protecting the hose and wires was long enough to permit the pack to be set at his side.
He lowered himself to the fine sand and leaned his back against the rock with a sigh of relief. He squirmed into a more comfortable position.
“Wish I hadn’t drunk all that water,” he growled.
He leaned the back of his neck against the neckpiece of his suit. It was not uncomfortable except that he found himself staring directly into the light of Earth.
“I’m getting used to it all right, if I think that’s too bright,” he thought. “Bet my pupils are big as a cat’s now.”
Ironically, his feet had not started to hurt until his weight was off them. It felt as if he were developing blisters. The coveralls he wore under the spacesuit, moreover, had begun to chafe in a few places—around the armpits as he swung his arms, behind his right knee, on the inside of his thighs.
He also was reminded of the sweat that had trickled around or into his eyes, for the lids felt sore.
“I want a different view,” he grunted, picking himself up. “Facing the other way, maybe I can rest my eyes.”
Carrying his back pack, he started around the rock, then prudently went back for his big oxygen cylinder. He could think of no good reason for dragging this with him, but he somehow felt more comfortable with it beside him.
The other face of the rock was blackly shadowed, and he was forced to find a convenient spot by groping about. With a sigh, he settled down, squirmed again into an easy position, and found himself contemplating the ringwall of Kirch a few miles away. The regular sough of air through his suit and the quiet hum of the mechanisms that were keeping him alive were so familiar by now that he hardly noticed them. It was the cessation of movement, not any diminishment of the normal sounds, that lent an impression of quiet to the scene.
He looked at the ringwall, squinting against the sting in his eyes that caused them to water occasionally. The left extremity was dim in the distance, but to the right, he could clearly see the slope of the wall as it curved to meet the plain. There was no feeling of a towering, insecurely balanced mass like that of the mountain.
“Although a crater at a distance does look like a mountain range,” he thought. “Not so close as this; it goes up too steeply.”
In a way, it was almost like looking at the skyscrapers of a big city, like looking at Manhattan from across the Hudson River. Except that there were no lights.
He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to visualize the sharp peak a little to his left atop the wall as it might look with a thousand lighted windows gleaming white and yellow.
It was hard to do. The stark fact was that there was only Lunar dimness, relieved by earthlight but tending to be uniform in intensity without the rays of the sun. If the silhouette of Kirch was like that of a city, the metropolis it resembled was a dead one.
A dead city in the midst of a cold, frozen sea of lava. A ghost city that had never lived, yet rose up from the gray sea over which no ship had sailed and whispered and whined ghostly warnings. “Stay with me, Man! I am dry and lonely. There are no people to warm me with light and sound . . . there is none to see my massive strength and, by seeing, make it into reality . . . stay where you are, Man!”
“But it’s dead,” thought Hansen. “More than dead—sterile!”
“But you, Man, you too are dead. You are already turning cold. You will slowly congeal . . . become solid . . . a monument . . . a symbol of the tribute brought by folly and life to the sea of coldness and gray death—No, do not shake your head . . . it is too late . . . my shadows are about you . . . you have no light . . . all your prayers and wishes will not turn on a single light. The shadows reach you . . . touch you . . . the pain in your leg is the cold of space . . . you will sit there forever . . . drowned in the gray sea of frozen lava . . . imagining lights for me in the blackness . . . imagining life in me in the noon glare . . . but now there is no light unless you have the force to see it . . . but you are cold . . . cold . . . cold . . . cold . . .
The sky flared with flickering light. It turned black while the image of light still remained in Hansen’s eyes. Then a new light, tinier and higher streaked overhead. Hansen awoke with the hairs tingling on his neck and leaped to his feet with a hoarse shout.
“A rocket!”
In the stillness of the radio room, the incoming call from Bucky’s rocket made Mike jump in his chair before the set. Hastily, he turned down the volume he had kept in hope of picking up faint calls from Plato.
When he had answered and relayed the message by phone to the landing area, he turned to the others in the room.
Joey had been sleeping in the upper bunk. Louise had asked to stay and Mike had offered his bunk for her to sit on. She had not slept, as far as he knew; but he had turned to the radio and maintained a lengthy silence.
“Maybe I ought to talk to her,” he thought, “but what is there to say? Four good guys; but they’re awful late checking in.”
But when he looked around, they were both watching him; and he had to tell them.
“Bucky’s coming in,” he said.
“Did he find anything?” demanded Louise.
“Don’t know yet,” Mike told her. “He said he took a snap of Plato coming and going and three more on the way back.”
Louise moved toward the door.
“Thanks a lot, Mike,” she said.
Joey slipped down from the bunk as she disappeared into the corridor.
“Never mind,” advised Mike. “With Louise and Bucky in that hole they call a darkroom, dodging the photographer’s elbows every time he breaths in, they won’t have any place for you but up on a shelf.”
“I just thought I’d—”
“We’ll get told. Now, stay with me, kid, an’ make sure I don’t go wanderin’ off to have a look too!”
Hansen stood stiffly by the rock and painfully tried his neck muscles. He searched the sky, but nothing moved among the stars.
“Now, did I see something?” he asked himself slowly. “Or was I still dreaming?”
He grimaced, and raised a hand to the back of his head before he remembered that he was still in his spacesuit. His neck was stiff and sore from lying across the rigid neckpiece of his suit, and he was chilled to the bone.
“Must have been asleep quite a while,” he thought. “Maybe I ought to turn up the heating again—or should I just warm up as I walk?”
He paused a moment to stare in open-mouthed amazement at the ringwall of Kirch, rearing up three thousand feet toward the stars.
“When am I going to do something right?” he asked. “Why couldn’t I stay where I was, facing Earth, and go to sleep dreaming I was home?”
He went on to wish that he had not gone to sleep at all. The aches that were irritations when he was warm from walking were now centers of agony.
He was sure he had blisters, and the chafed places under the suit jabbed little warnings of tenderness as he tried to move. Reaching for his battery pack, he nearly toppled over because his right leg was asleep. Even after he recovered and took a few steps to restore the circulation, the knee did not feel right.
“I wonder if I pulled a muscle?” he mused. “Or is it in the suit?”
He looked up at Earth. India was moving into the arc of shadow, but he could see Africa, the Mediterranean, and Europe.
When he realized he must have been out for three or perhaps four hours, he immediately checked his oxygen. It was none too soon. He refilled his suit tank and examined the pressure of the big cylinder. He guessed that he could do the trick once more.
“I wonder how long a man can live in a spacesuit?” he muttered. “Hansen, why aren’t you dead?”
Groaning with stiffness, he adjusted his battery pack and tank and slung the cylinder atop the load. Although he seemed as wet as ever, he sucked up a drink of water while he listened to the hiss of his air circulator.
“Wish I wasn’t so thirsty,” he said. “I’ll have to watch it. Beginning to feel lack of food, too.”
He started off, moving mincingly to favor his sore muscles, and immediately felt the weakness brought on by hunger. It was hard to believe that a nightmare could last so long, but he remembered that it was almost a full day since he had eaten a sandwich in the tractor.
Gradually, as he moved along, marching away from Kirch into the open wasteland, he began to warm up. The stiffness left his muscles, although the chafing remained annoying. His feet felt sticky in the thick socks, suggesting that he would have trouble. He thought they might be bleeding.
What the hell was the matter with that knee, he wondered.
He thought of stopping to examine it, but the likelihood of his falling over on his face if he bent to feel the joint deterred him. He kept on. In half an hour, it became clear that a spring had snapped.
Not only was the knee harder to bend that it should have been, but something began to dig through his coveralls behind the knee.
“That’s not so good,” he told himself, but there was nothing he could think of to do.
He finally mustered the ambition to get up on his toes and bound along at a fairly brisk pace. The miles again floated under his feet, but he found that he could not maintain the trot the way he had earlier. Then, he had congratulated himself on his freshness, but he had come a long way since those few hours of immunity to fatigue.
The end of an hour found him moving at a moderate walk. One more, and he stopped noticing the pace particularly. There were few landmarks about him. He did not even strain ahead to catch a glimpse of the Kirch Mountains.
Finally, the nagging pain behind his knee became bad enough to make him stop.
“This is damn’ silly!” he growled. “I can’t go along until that point of metal saws through a vein or something! Must be something I can do about it.”
He thought it over, but it seemed that there simply was nothing he could do. The broken bit of metal was beyond his reach; he could not even feel it through the thickness of the spacesuit and the protective yellow chafing suit. Even if he should remove the latter by some weird contortion, the knee joint, as an obvious trouble spot, was reinforced by a bulge of metal. He would not be able to pinch or prod through that.
“Of course,” he muttered, “I might take it off entirely. That would make things easy right away.’ A lot easier than just sitting down to wait for my air to run out.”
He shook that out of mind with a jerk of his head, and struck out across the plain once more.
He had come to a stretch of gently rolling rises, and he tried to get most of his upward push from his left leg. Coming down the slopes, he hopped stiff-legged on his right. It was not too long before this became more tiring than it was worth.
“To hell with it!” he growled, and grimly drove onward with a more normal gait despite the sharp dig . . . dig . . . dig into his flesh at every stride.
Burney and Bucky again sat across the table in the former’s room. Instead of the map they had consulted earlier, they gazed down at the new photographs. The room, as before, was crowded with others who had edged in watch silently. Even “M. D.” McLeod, so nicknamed to distinguish him from all the doctors of philosophy and doctors of science among the expedition, lingered with his stethoscope dangling after giving Bucky a routine, post-flight check.
Johnny Pierce stood lankily behind Burney’s shoulder, holding a spare magnifying glass and squinting down at the photos. Sherman, Wohl, and Joey stood around the table with the photographers who had developed and enlarged the pictures. Louise watched from behind Bucky, resting her hands on his shoulders.
Burney nodded slowly, examining the picture of the interior of Plato through his lens.
“I very much fear,” he said, tapping a forefinger on the half-lit heap of material at the foot of the ringwall, “that there is only one conclusion. That is a new slide, is it not?”
“It is,” said Dr. Sherman, gesturing slightly with an older photograph of the region.
“And it is quite clear that they reached the crater,” Burney continued. “These are excellent pictures, and the trail of the tractor treads shows very definitely.”
“How about this one, Dr. Burney?” asked Bucky, pushing across another photo.
It showed the region around Mt. Pico, and had been enlarged until tracks of the tractor could be clearly seen. Burney frowned when he looked at it.
“To be perfectly frank,” he murmured, “I do not know what to make of it. Those marks accompanying the trail could be footprints, I suppose, as has been suggested. But why . . . or how?”
“A man running could make marks that far apart in this gravity,” said Bucky. “I know Johnny estimates those little dots are twenty and thirty feet apart, but it’s possible.”
“It is also possible that they are nothing of the sort. You notice that they leave the trail after a time.”
Louise spoke up.
“That at least rules out one interpretation,” she said. “They certainly aren’t footprints made by someone on the surface on the way to Plato. Anybody walking beside the tractor would have left a trail starting and ending at the tread tracks.”
There was silence. Some of the men looked at her with pity, others stared very hard at the photographs on the table.
Burney prodded another picture with his finger.
“Bucky took this where the tracks passed Kirch,” he reminded them. “There are none of these so-called footprints there. I regret to point out the obvious conclusion—
“But can’t you do something to make sure?” Louise burst out. “You aren’t just going to leave them out there! You couldn’t!”
“Of course not,” said Burney, biting his lip uncomfortably. “As soon as the Serenitatis crew get a few hours, rest, I shall send them out to recover . . . ah . . . to check. But the time element has already become such that—Well, my dear, there is simply no use in rushing things. Either there is no need, or it is already too late.”
There was not much doubt as to which possibility seemed the more likely. The meeting began to break up in unhappy silence.
Hansen trudged along with his chin on the neckpiece of the suit. Every so often, when he lurched in the shifting sand, his forehead bumped against the faceplate of his helmet.
“And that’s not so easy to do,” he thought foolishly. “Takes a supple neck to accomplish it.” He concentrated for perhaps a hundred paces, and slowly arrived at the corollary.
“Takes a pretty soft and supple head to get out here in the first place. Shoulda stood at home in bed. Should’ve stayed on Plato and tried to build some kind of a marker. Base’ll send out somebody . . . wonder if that was a rocket I saw? Maybe I’d be dead . . . but I’m gonna be dead anyway. Why don’t I just sit down and wait? At least, it won’t hurt any more. And, I’ll be easy.”
No arguments to the contrary occurred to him, but some deep impulse refused to let him quit.
He had to pause again; his stops for rest were becoming frequent. He did not sit down.
Never get up again, he realized.
He planted his feet wide apart and stood there, panting and letting his hands hang limply at his sides. His face felt stiff as he bared his teeth against the throb of the cut behind his knee. By now, he was so used to the wetness of the leg that he could not be sure the blood trickled down any faster.
He saw that he was standing on ground lighter than usual, and tinted pale yellow. Remembering passing several such areas, he slowly realized that they must be rays from Aristillus, traces of vaporized minerals blown out across the surrounding territory when the crater had been formed. It meant, for what it might be worth, that he was getting near Archimedes. Some of the rays of Aristillus reached the larger crater.
He gritted his teeth and took the first step forward. A glance to his right assured him that the jagged peaks of the Kirch Mountains were where they should be. Once, as he walked along half awake, he had discovered himself turning away on a course that would have sent him circling back into the Mare Imbrium.
“Sea of Showers,” he thought. “I wish there were some. I wish I even had a glass of water to pour over my head. Just a glass of water to rinse out these eyes. I wouldn’t even care about a shave.”
He began to notice his footsteps, besides the hiss of the air-circulator and the laboring of the suit’s motors. Through his boots, they had a distant, swishing sound that insidiously lowered his puffed eyelids little by little. His head bumped against the faceplate again.
Hansen jerked upright with a start. Clumsily, he turned to look back. His tracks were long, dragging gashes in the sandy surface.
