Collected Short Fiction, page 468
He gave McGee a turn at the instrument, but those minute, puzzling figures failed to come back. In less than an hour the rock’s rapid rotation had drowned the ship once more in ink-black shadow.
“Here!” McGee’s soft, breathless voice was muffled in the black hood. “It’s Anders, coming in to land. All the lights are out again, but you can see the ship against the rock. He must be trying a surprise approach on the blind side of the enemy.”
Rick mastered his impatience until at last McGee stepped aside. He found the cruiser dropping across the field, a black silhouette against that dark-hued, sullen landscape. Then its shadow came across the rim of the airless rock, sharp and black as the ship itself.
The cruiser dropped lower. Ship and shadow raced together as it approached the glaring surface. Then Rick caught a gasping breath and tried not to shudder to the icy chill of fear. Because the ship and the shadow came together—and vanished!
VII.
Little Rob McGee made a shocked protest. “You’re mistaken, Rick—you must be mistaken! Perhaps it’s some trick of the lenses. We’re two hundred kilometers away, remember, and the cruiser’s painted to make it hard to see. Six thousand tons of fighting steel can’t just disappear.”
“But that’s what happened,” Rick insisted. “I know it was something more than just illusion. Because the ship was clear and black against the glare of the rock. I’m certain . . . anyhow, almost certain—”
His voice trailed into a vague abyss of uneasy wonderment. All the sanity-jolting riddles about this contradictory planetoid were condensing into a sinister threat. Rick Drake didn’t like to say so, but he was afraid.
Anders had believed that he was attacking a nest of asterite pirates or rebels. If he had been altogether wrong, then who was the enemy? The subtle wrongness of that unintelligible voice suggested something no more than pseudohuman.
And what had caused the cruiser to vanish? Did the crew of that disabled vessel possess some unknown weapon, efficient enough to annihilate a modern fighting ship without even a flash of light?
Rick looked at Rob McGee. He seemed gray and ill, with a wet glisten of nervous perspiration on his face. Better not to speak to him about semihuman contraterrene monsters and their problematic weapons.
“Maybe I was wrong.” Rick tried not to seem alarmed. “Maybe it dropped into some shadow, or slipped back out to space. Will you try the photophone and see if Anders answers?”
Rick tried the photophone but Anders didn’t answer.
Rick kept his aching eyes against the periscope. He couldn’t find the cruiser’s lights. The rock turned again and black shadows flowed. But the cruiser didn’t come to view.
“Here’s that yellow hollow,” he whispered at last. “The hollow where the wreck was—just coming out of the shadow.” His breath exhaled slowly. “And it’s gone, too!”
“They must have got it repaired,” McGee suggested. “It wasn’t so badly damaged as we first thought. They took off from the night side—they wouldn’t want to risk being caught on the ground again.”
“Probably.” Rick nodded, somehow not quite convinced.
The rock plunged on toward the limits of the system. They followed, hanging two hundred kilometers behind it, a bare four seconds. McGee called into the photophone until his throat was dry, but the only answer was the eternal voiceless whisper of the stars.
Rick stared into the periscope until his burning eyes saw double. Twice he thought he glimpsed some tiny figure moving. It might have been a man in dirigible armor—or only a trick of his tortured vision.
That night was an age of anxious strain. Little McGee went down to the galley to brew his tea. Unwillingly, Rick left the periscope to gulp a hurried snack. Exhaustion forced them each to sleep a few hours while the other watched.
Next day had no ending. The rock slowly turned ahead, but its darkly mottled face showed nothing new. The vanished ships didn’t come back. McGee called Anders on the photophone, but only the stars replied.
It was April 1st—1:04, Mandate time—that Rick decided to attempt a landing. They both had slept a little more, but McGee’s squinted eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion. He looked pale and ill, and Rick knew that he wasn’t anxious to invade the military sphere that Anders had declared. But he stood to the controls without a word to bring them down.
No challenge met them.
“Dead as any seetee rock,” whispered Rob McGee. They were circling again, three kilometers aloft. His voice was tight and dry. “We had better make a test.”
And Rick took his heavy, antiquated space pistol—the only sort of weapon that an asterite could get license to carry under the Mandate. He put on his stiff dirigible armor and went out through the air lock. Clinging to the safety rail he stared down through his face plate.
His mind knew the size and the distance of the rock, dark-mottled and yet dazzling against the black of space. Because he lacked McGee’s perception, however, it seemed to him at one moment a bright pebble that he could take in his glove, and the next a mighty planet of incredible mountains.
He pointed McGee’s old revolver at a broad patch of blue ground and squeezed the trigger. It jerked in his hand and belched expanding smoke, but made no sound. He counted three seconds, waiting uneasily for the bullet to explode like a ton of tritonite.
But there was no explosion. He emptied the cylinder, peppering the tiny plain. There was no flash of annihilated matter. He went back aboard and mounted the ladder like a silver-armored giant.
“O.K., Cap’n Rob,” he said through the open face plate. “Not even a spark.”
“It was seetee,” insisted McGee, still uneasy.
“But not any more.” Rick was eager now. “Set her down—there’s a little valley at the south pole where we’ll be hidden in the shadow if Anders comes back again—or the ship he fought.”
McGee nodded mutely. As if heavy with misgivings, he turned slowly back to the periscope and the controls below it. But Rick’s voice quickened with a half-suppressed excitement.
“That blue ground is interesting—especially where it’s near outcropping iron. According to what the old professors used to say, that was Nature’s way of forming carbon crystals—if carbon happened to be present. I’m going to try the finder—”
McGee didn’t answer. The black hood covered his face and Rick supposed that his silence was due to the mistrust of the old hard-rock man for academic theories and for all such modern gadgets as the paragravity finder.
Rick himself sensed nothing unusual. Shut in padded walls of lead and steel, there was nothing he could see. He felt the tug bump and sway on the ground gear, and lurched a little to the added weight as McGee snapped on the peegee anchor.
“We’re down,” said McGee.
It was a choking whisper. He stumbled back out of the hood, and Rick saw that his face was a wet gray mask. His hands came up to his temples in a gesture of pain. Rick caught him as he fell.
“What . . . what is it, Cap’n Rob?”
But he was unconscious. Rick carried him down to his tiny cabin where his few belongings were all arranged in a fussy order and laid him on the narrow berth. Breath and pulse were slow and his skin felt damp and cold.
Rick had taken one semester of spatial medicine, back at Panama City; but that, like his prospecting, was academic and untried. Obviously, McGee was suffering from something more serious and unusual than a simple attack of spaceman’s colic, but he had no idea what to do.
McGee’s faint whisper relieved him vastly:
“I’m O.K., Rick.” The sick, perspiring face tried to grin. “Didn’t mean to fold up on you. Go ahead and find your diamond mine.”
“You’re pretty sick.” Rick was disturbed and incoherent. “I mean I think we ought to do something. What do you think’s the matter?”
“My head,” whispered McGee. “When we landed it split wide open. I don’t know why—except everything is spinning and confused and terribly wrong.” He drew a long, ragged breath. “The worst part—I don’t know what time it is.”
Rick looked automatically at the dial on the back of his armored wrist before he dimly realized what that simple statement must mean for Rob McGee. Nothing was wrong with the little chronometer.
“It’s one forty—” He caught his breath. “Oh, I see . . . maybe we should take off again.”
“No, I’m not that bad.” McGee managed to sit up in protest though he was tense and white. “Get me a couple of aspirins—and go out and try your finder.”
Rick yielded, for that glimpse of blue clay and outcropping iron had set a kind of fever in him. Men had made a few flawed imperfect diamonds in long centuries of effort. But no man could wait the million years or so that it took to form a perfect tuning crystal—and a handful of them would be enough to buy achievement of his father’s old dream.
“I’ll hurry.” He found aspirins. McGee gulped them and lay weakly back on the pillow. He seemed barely conscious. Yet, as Rick hastily hooked up the peegee finder on the table in the adjoining wardroom he could feel the stubborn skepticism beneath that gray mask of suffering.
The finder made use of the same selective characteristic of the paragravity field that separated the power isotope from uranium. Rick connected the compact batteries, adjusted the vernier knobs. Under its glass bell the sensitive needle spun uncertainly until he found the exact frequency of crystalline carbon. Then it dipped to point confidently downward.
Rick restrained a whoop of joy. He read the bearings, moved the finder to the other end of the wardroom to get a second reading, and started to plot a triangulation. His eager face abruptly fell.
“I’d better take it outside,” he told McGee with a sheepish grin. “The thing has discovered the tuning diamond in our main drive unit.”
“Go ahead.” McGee’s voice seemed a little stronger. “I’m feeling better now.”
Rick went out through the air lock again. It took both his armored hands to operate the finder and he drove the flying armor with his teeth on the padded helmet stick. A tiny spaceship, of steel and lead and sealing plastic, with its own peegee drive, the suit lifted him toward the nearest Sun-struck peak.
He hovered in its icy shadow to survey the stark landscape beyond. The small hot Sun struck every point with blistering fire and the glare killed all the stars. Every shadow was a pool of darkness, utterly black as the sky. The whole rock was desolate, riven, terrible with every mark of planet-bursting cataclysm—yet, to Rick, it was smiling with incredible promise.
For he saw masses of hard blue clay, streaked with ocher and sullen red. He saw the dark scars of volcanic fire and a black outcrop of living iron. Yes, this must once have been a natural crucible.
This was diamond ground!
His hands stiff and awkward in the armored gloves, he set up the finder again. The little needle spun uncertainly and refused to come to rest. Cold with disappointment, he remembered the dusty voice of his old professor of spatial petrology:
“All those things are merely indications. Sometimes there was no free carbon present. Sometimes the temperature and the pressure were not exactly right, through the ages that it takes, and all you get is graphite.”
But he went on, stubbornly. He kept cautiously to the night side of the rock, but its quick rotation brought the whole surface to him. He must have stopped to try the finder a hundred times before the needle came to rest.
Then it pointed at a gray-black wall of living iron, splotched and stained with reddish oxides. He took a dozen readings and plotted them with anxious haste. The point of intersection lay nearly two meters beyond the face of the cliff.
With the stub of a fluorescent pencil he marked the place to set the drill. His fingers trembled so that he could hardly write, but he scrawled a blue-glowing notice:
Mining Claim
Richard Drake and Rob McGee
April 1, 2191
He soared eagerly back to tell Rob McGee and couldn’t find the Good-by Jane. It was gone from the hollow at the pole! For a moment he felt terribly bewildered and afraid. Even the shape of the hollow had changed. He was caught in a new trap of the enigmatic rock.
He was sick and utterly lost. But that was impossible, he told himself grimly; no fool could lose himself on a world not two kilometers through. He looked resolutely away at the stars, and suddenly his orientation shifted again. He had come to the north pole of the rock instead of the south.
A stupid blunder. He steered the armor south again and passed the shallow yellow hollow where the crippled ship had been with its unknown crew, and found the Good-by Jane safe in the pit of darkness where he had left it.
Gratefully he dropped toward the open lock. But still he couldn’t shake off an uncomfortable turned-around feeling. The rock seemed to be rotating in the wrong direction now. He thought that he had begun to sense something of the wrongness about it that made McGee so ill—and he wondered uneasily if he could find the claim again.
McGee was still unable to leave his berth though he insisted that he felt a little better. He listened silently to Rick’s breathless story, but Rick could see that he was still skeptical about the peegee finder.
“Of course, it may be graphite,” Rick admitted. “That draws the needle, too, on the same setting, only not so strongly. It would take something like a ton of graphite to cause that much deflection, but only a few kilograms of diamonds. And this is diamond ground.”
He hesitated.
“I marked the claim, Cap’n Rob. With only the battery drill it would take me about a day to cut through two meters of iron. If you aren’t able to wait I’ll take you home to Obania and come back and—”
“Nonsense!” McGee sat up in a jerky effort to discount his illness. “This rock is flying out of the System, remember—and we have only nine days left to pay the taxes on Freedonia. If you think you’ve got diamonds, mine ’em while you can. I’m not going to die.”
Rick took time to brew him a pot of tea—which he wasn’t able to drink, though he said it wasn’t bad. And Rick himself gulped down a soapy yellow bar of a food-formula, trade-named Ambrosia, supposed to digest without giving the eater spaceman’s colic.
He unpacked the drill. With a mass of nearly two tons it was still portable here. There were two sets of batteries. He set one to charging on the ship’s generator and hooked the other to the oxyhydrogen cutter-head. Towing the machine like an ant with some disproportionate burden, he set out to look for the claim.
At first he couldn’t find it. So long as he took his direction from the brilliant stars he couldn’t shake off the uneasy sense of being lost. But as soon as he ventured upon the day side of the rock its glare put out the guiding stars, and his orientation shifted, and he recognized the blue plain ahead.
Just beyond the line of shadow he found his claim notice shining blue on the black iron cliff. He towed the drill into place beside his mark and welded the bedplate to the iron, and set the oxyhydrogen head to cut a forty-centimeter core.
By the time the flames bit into the stubborn iron the brief night was almost gone. Afraid of being seen from space, he found a loose boulder whose sluggish mass must have been a hundred tons, and towed it laboriously to a place where its shadow would hide the drill.
Then he had only to watch the machine. When he quit moving about, a flood of tiredness came over him. In spite of his ravening impatience it was hard to keep awake. Yet he dared not sleep, lest the jet get out of adjustment and let molten iron freeze the drill.
In six hours he cut a little more than a meter. The batteries were exhausted. He towed them back to the ship and set them to charging, and brought back the other set—this time, careful to watch landmarks, he got back without difficulty.
He had planned to take out a core extending half a meter beyond the point indicated by the finder. The diamonds, he hoped, would be embedded in the iron; and they would remain when it was dissolved away with acid. Just before the gauge showed two meters, however, the core broke loose.
It wasn’t necessary to use the section head. He cut the jets and removed the core. The end of it was dark and irregular and he saw no gleam of diamond. Disappointment came over him, a wave of slow, cold sickness.
Stiff and awkward, he stooped to let his helmet light shine into the bore. He could see something black and dusty. The natural crucible held carbon, no doubt; but some factor had been wrong. It was only a pocket of worthless graphite.
He groped mechanically for a long cleaning tool and reached to scrape out its ladle full of that brittle dusty stuff. He stirred it with a stiff metal finger—and the breath went out of him.
For the black matrix powdered away from hard smooth faces. Dark empty crystals drank the rays of space and filled with rich fluorescent splendor. Rick turned cold and he could hardly breathe again.
Diamonds! He rubbed them out of the dark, brittle matrix where they must have grown through unguessed aeons. None was very large. A few were flawed. Others, cubes and a few with more than eight faces, were valuable only as gems. But fully half of them, he estimated, were perfect octahedral timing crystals—diamonds too precious for jewels!
Careful not to lose them through sudden movement—for the rock’s gravity was too slight to hold them safely in his palm—he dropped them into a stout little ore sack. Men had tried, since Moissan’s time, but only the iron heart of a living world could shape such stones as these.
Suddenly, Rick wasn’t awkward any longer. Careful and deliberate, he reached again with the long steel spoon for another handful of black powder that shattered into incredible fire. He filled the first little bag and tied it securely to his belt and found another.
Diamonds by the sack! The cavity was larger than his helmet. It filled three small bags. Allowing for the bulk of the worthless matrix and the flawed and misshaped stones, he thought there must be three or four kilograms of perfect terraformer crystals, worth eight thousand dollars a gram.
