Andre Norton (ed) (5 page)

From time to time he glowered at Molop who
sat in a corner and held his peace.

Beneker
was bothered, irritable and had the fidgets. This was no time to bait him even
though innocently.

Dith
came in saying, "Formel is still offbeat with the jittering jilips. But
everything else is all right.
Clean and shipshape from
landing-thumpers to astrodome.
She's ready to lift any time you
say."

"Then
I'll say very soon," responded Beneker. "I have reached a decision
about this planet. It is no good. It is a dead loss. We would be wise to forget
it and seek something better elsewhere."

"Yes, Commodore,
that's how I feel about it."

"You
can see what has happened," Beneker went on. "It is what I have
feared from the beginning. I have not mentioned it before because there's no
point in arousing needless apprehension."

"To what do you
refer?"

"A set-up similar to that on Neshanta.
A slave world complete
with master-types."
He sighed, lugged his hand-projector out of its
grip, dumped it on the desk,
poked
it away from him.
"What we need, and must find if it can be found, is a world of
psychologically suitable dupes waiting for someone to dupe 'em. But nature
abhors a vacuum. Demand creates supply. I feel we're going to have a tough time
finding a planet-load of dupeless dupes sitting around with their mouths
dangling, waiting for us to come along and take them over." He gave Dith a
sour eye. "Don't you pass that opinion on to the
crew.
Let 'em do their own sorting out."
"Yes,
Commodore."

"Our best chance lies on a slave world
bossed by illusionaries inferior to ourselves," Beneker continued.
"We can beat the teeth out of lesser types, especially if they're in
smaller numbers. But I wouldn't care to try it here. It is a big and crowded
planet. Those master-types we encountered at the last moment undoubtedly swarm
like gnawers on an unbathed gallumpat. It was fortunate for us that we spotted
them in good time. This world is a trap, and a dangerous one."

"Like the pink world," reminded
Molop, becoming suddenly garrulous.

"Shut up!" Beneker edged his
hand-projector a bit nearer, making it a sinister move. Morbidly he went on as
if speaking to himself, "I would never have believed that this world's
illusionaries could have such powers had I not seen them for myself."

"They violated all
natural laws," indorsed Dith.

"Yes,
that is what I cannot understand. They could impose their vision on us! What is
more, they could do it while remaining unconscious of our existence. That is
real power!" He mulled it over. "But that isn't all.
Incredible as it may seem, they could construct illusions of such
immense strength and potency that they could live in them themselves."
His gaze rested on Dith. "Could you enjoy a convincing existence inside
one of your own dreams?"

"Not in a million
years."

"Neither
could any other master-Neshantan. A dreammaker is proof against dreams. That's
an inviolable law—and they've shot it to a stink-star!" His expression
showed that he regarded law-smashing as a personal affront. "So, having
abilities we don't possess, they've developed a different set-up. They don't
bother to keep their slaves happy in phantasmal heavens. They enjoy the heavens
themselves and rule their slaves by force. That means they are well-armed and
utterly ruthless."

"They looked mighty
tough to me," said Dith.

"I do not like them," Beneker
declared. "Not one little bit. I am going to cross this world from our
list of possible conquests. In fact, I'm going to delete this whole solar
system. We'll take off forthwith and try some other sun."

"That's just what I've been wanting all
along," Dith reminded. "I'll be glad to get out of this place."

Molop
opened his mouth, whereupon Beneker picked up his projector, flourished it and
growled, "If you say what I think you have in mind to say, there's going
to be a terrible accident." He paused, finished, "I would deplore a
terrible accident."

"I, likewise," said Molop, and got
away with it.

The
counter-gravs operated. The Neshantan vessel slid silently into the night. It
never came back.

The
big biped trod heavily down the village stem, two paces ahead of his escort, a
suitably surly expression on his face. Captive and captors stopped only when
they came level with the barber shop whose occupant was leaning on the
doorpost, chewing a toothpick, studying them speculatively.

"Well,
Bill," said the barber to the leader of the escort. "I see you got
the low-down, lily-livered skunk."

"We sure did," agreed Bill. He
pointed his weapon eastward.
"Caught him coming down the
mountain trail."

"Nice
work." Taking out the toothpick, the barber stared at its ragged end, put
it back. "Ain't much use doing half a job,
though.
"

"What d'you mean?"

"Ain't much use pinning him down while
his mob runs
loose.
"

"
You seen
'em?" Bill stiffened, watching the other keen-eyed.

'Tup.
Must've known you were coming. They skinned out fast half a minute back."
He pointed down the road. "They went thata-ways."

Bill poked the captive toward the shop.
"You take care of him." He turned to his alert companions.
"C'mon, let's after 'em!"

Weapons
held ready, the four raced headlong down the road, skidded around the far
corner and were gone.

Thankfully lowering his
arms, the captive sat on the bench out-

side
the shop, pulled an enormous pipe from his
pocket, slowly stuffed it with tobacco.

"I'd appreciate it, Lou," he said
to the barber, "if you'd hold off calling me a low-down, lily-livered
skunk.
Them's
fightin words."

"Yah!"
scoffed the barber. He gave the toothpick an expert shift from left to right,
looked down at the other. "Jesse, don't you ever get sick and tired being
shot up by them kids?"

"Kids?
What kids?" The local blacksmith felt
himself
for matches. "I didn't see
no
kids." He
applied a flame, his cheeks going hollow as he sucked. "That was Wyatt
Earp and his posse." The glance he shot upward was shrewd and penetrating.
"Remember?"

The barber stared down the road and gradually
a faraway look came into his eyes. After a while, he said, very quietly,
"Yeah, Jesse, I remember."

V^/
UR FIRST stride into space is to the Moon,
for the dead Luna is an important way station on Man's journey across the solar
system. A Terran explorer trapped on one
of
its deadly stone deserts might well break under the realization
of
his situation. It required a wiU
of
steel to face the full menace
of
the Moon at its most forbidding. Hansen
proved in a crisis that he possessed just that—as well as a pair
of
willing,
if
weary, feet.

H. B.
FYFE

The radio operator stopped sending out his
call and slumped back in the folding chair of canvas and aluminum. Concern
showed through the impassivity of his broad, Mexican features.

The
footsteps in the corridor outside the radio room pattered lightly because of
the
Lunar
gravity, but with a haste that suggested
urgency. Two men entered. Like the operator, they wore dungarees and heavy
sweaters, but the gray-haired man had an air of authority.

"Dr. Burney wanted to check with you
himself, Mike," said the youth with him. The operator shrugged.

"Tractor
One
is okay, Doctor," he reported, "but as
Joey must have told you, we've lost Two."

"When was the last time they called
in?" asked Bumey.

Mike
gestured at the map on the side
wall,
and the elder
man stepped over to study it. The area shown was that surrounding the
fifty-mile-wide crater of Archimedes.

"The
blue line is
One
and the red is Two," said Mike.
"I guess you know the planned routes. Well, the little
x's
show the positions reported and the times."

Burney glanced briefly at the blue line. From
the black square near the northern side of the crater that represented the first
major base on Luna, it climbed slantingly over the ringwall. After zigzagging
down the broken outer slope and skirting a ridge of
vein
mountains
, the line swept in a wide curve north of Aristillus and
Autolycus, the next largest craters of the region, and moved into that
subregion of the
Mare
Imbrium
whimsically
christened "Misty Swamp." Thereafter, the blue trail led toward
possible passes through the Lunar Apennines to the
Mare Serenitatis.

"I
could expect to lose
One
," muttered the operator,
"in spite of our tower here. But
Two
shouldn't be
blocked by anything yet."

The
red line was more direct.
Parting from the blue north of the
ringwall of Archimedes, it pushed out across the level plain, avoiding isolated
mountain ridges and the seven-mile craters of Kirch and Piazza Smyth.
After something like three hundred miles, it passed the towering lonely Mt.
Pico and probed a dotted delta of possible routes up the ringwall of Plato.
This route was x'ed almost to Pico.

"They
were supposed to report before attempting the descent," mused Burney.
"Maybe the depression of the
Mare Imbrium
isn't
quite what we estimated. The normal curvature would put a lot of rock between
us, in that case.
An awful lot of rock."

"Maybe they went over
the ringwall in a hurry," suggested Joey.

Burney
considered that in a short silence. He ran a hand absently over his balding
temple. His lean face became a mask of lines as he puckered up his eyes in
thought.

"Number
Two has Hansen driving, hasn't it? And Groswald, the mechanic
...
Van Ness, the astronomer . . . and who
else?"

"Fernandez from
Geology," said Joey.

The
entire personnel of the base numbered scarcely fifty. They were just beginning
their surface exploration projects after completing the low domes of their
buildings. With such scanty resources, Burney was naturally worried about four
men and one of the precious tractors.

"They were with us an hour ago,"
said Mike, fingering his microphone. "Their set must have gone
sour."

When no one replied, he hitched around to
face his own controls. "Or else, they're in trouble—"

On
the ledge atop the ringwall of Plato, Hansen teetered and tried to maintain his
balance by pressing a gauntleted hand against an outcropping of gray
Lunar
rock. The thermal-eroded surface crumbled slightly
beneath the metal-tipped mitten.

In his bulky spacesuit, he found it difficult
to lean very far forward, but he could not bear not seeing. The landship
tumbled down the inner slope of the ringwall with horrible deliberation.

"I told them 'Don't move her till I find
a way downl'" Hansen muttered. "I told them, I
told
them!"

He
was hardly conscious of speaking aloud. Somewhere in the churning mass was the
vacuum tractor in which he had driven from Archimedes. Inside, unless it had
already been split open„ were Van Ness, Groswald, and Fernandez.

The collection of loose rock and dust passed
out of sight for a moment over the edge of a terrace. It reappeared further
down. Once, Hansen thought he saw a glint of bright metal, but the slide almost
immediately plunged down another sheer drop.

The
phase of Luna being closer to "new" than to "first
quarter," the sun was far too low on the horizon to light the floor of the
crater, or even the three mountain peaks on the ringwall to Hansen's right
front. The light from the gibbous Earth, however, was bright enough for him to
see quite clearly the surface around him.

The
slide finally reached the bottom, at this point nearly
3
,000
feet
below the man's precarious position. He breathed deeply and tried to straighten
the ache from his shoulders.

"Must
have taken five minutes," he murmured, realizing that he had frozen in a
cramped position as he stared.

It had seemed more like an hour. In the dim
shadows of the crater floor, the dust settled rapidly because of the lack of
air, but the debris remained heaped at an angle much steeper than would have
been possible on Earth. Even the slight vibration Hansen had felt through his
boots ceased.

He was alone in the dead silence of a world
for eons dead.

He stood there, a spot of color in the chrome
yellow of the protective chafing suit. The transparent faceplate of his
unpainted helmet revealed a blond young man, perhaps twenty-six, with a lean,
square-jawed face. Against the tanned skin, his eyebrows were ludicrously
light, but the gray eyes under them were wide with horror.

He was of medium height, but the bulkiness of
the suit hid his welterweight trimness; and the pack of oxygen tank and
batteries for powering radio, heat pads, and air-circulator increased the appearance
of stubbiness.

The quiet hiss of the air being circulated
through his suit finally aroused him. With painstaking care, he climbed from
the ledge to the level terrace on which the tractor was to have remained while
he scouted the route down. A hundred yards away, a great bite seemed to have
been snapped out of the ridge.

"All
the way from Archimedes, and we didn't even get a look at the floor," he
whispered.

For a moment, following the raw scar of the
slide with his eye, he considered climbing all the way down and venturing out
onto the crater floor to examine the ground. For centuries, the floor of Plato
had been reported by Earth observers to darken with the rising sun until at
noon it was nearly black. Occasionally, there were stories of misty clouds
obscuring the surface, and of shifts in the pattern of light streaks and spots.

One of the expedition's first assignments,
therefore, had been the investigation of Plato, to check the unlikely
possibility that there might be some primitive, airless form of life present.
But the present sortie was clearly ended.

"Not one damn chance," Hansen told
himself as he squinted downward. "None of them had a suit on when I got
out."

On a terrace about a third of the way down
lay
an object with an oddly regular shape. It gleamed in the
blue-green earth-light, and Hansen peered more intently. It looked like one of
the spare oxygen cylinders that had been carried on top of the tractor.

Hansen abruptly became sensitive about the
supply of his suit tank. Before he did anything, even sitting down to think the
situation over, he wanted to get down there and find out if the cylinder was
full.

Despite his eagerness, he held back until he
thought he had spied a reasonable path. It involved going two or three hundred
feet out of his way, but Hansen managed to work his way down to the lower level
without serious difficulty. Once or twice, he slithered a few feet when loose
rock shaled off under his grip, but even with his suit and equipment, he
weighed little over forty pounds. As long as he did not drop very far, he could
always stop himself one-handed.

He
walked back along the level strip which was about fifty yards wide at this
point, until he approached the path of the landslip. Near it, apparently having
been scraped off as the tractor
rolled,
lay the
cylinder.

He checked it hurriedly.

"Whew!
Well, that's some help, anyway," he told himself, discovering that the
tank had not been tapped.

He
left the cylinder and walked over to the inner limit of the level band.
Scanning the steep slope and the debris of the slide, he thought he could pick
out two or three scraps of twisted metal. There was nothing to be done.

"I'd better get back
up and think this out," he decided.

He took the broken chain that had held the
tank to the tractor and hooked a broken link through it to make a sling. For
the time being, he contented himself with using it as a handle to drag the
lucky supply of oxygen after him.

After regaining his original position, the
going was easier to the top of the ringwall. They had come over one of the
several passes crossing the southern part of the cliffs, and Hansen walked
through in a few minutes. The thickness of the ringwall here was only a mile or
so, although at the base it probably approached ten miles.

He came out onto a little plateau, and the
dim plain of the
Mare
Imbrium
spread
out before him. Hansen suddenly felt tiny, lost, and insignificant.

"What am I gonna
do?" he asked himself.

For the first time, he had admitted his
predicament to himself. His gauntlet crept up to his chest where the switch of
his radio protruded through the chafing suit.

"Hello Base! Tractor
Two to Base! Tractor Two to Base!
Over."

He
waited several minutes, and repeated the call five or six times. He screwed his
eyes shut to throw every ounce of concentration into listening.

No
human voice broke into the quiet hissing of the earphones. Hansen sighed.

"Never reach them, of course!" he
grumbled. "This set is made to reach about your arm's length."

He
remembered that Van Ness had complained about the reception the last time they
had called in, and asked Hansen to maneuver to the top of a ridge of
vein mountains
near the hulking silhouette of Pico.
Hansen was higher now, but also much farther from home.

"Mike
Ramirez and Joey Friedman aren't the kind to miss a call," he muttered.
"It seems to me, Paul E. Hansen, my boy . . . that you are
...
on your own!"

The
radio had been but a faint hope, inspired by his height and tales of freak
reception. He was not too disappointed. Looking down the rough outer slope of
the ringwall, he saw that it was not by any means as steep as the inner, and
that fact settled it.

"Guess
I'd better see how far I can get," Hansen decided. "When they don't
get the regular report over the tractor radio, they'll probably send out
another crew to follow the trail. If I can meet them out a way, maybe even as
far as Pico, it'll save that much time."

After
considerable fumbling, he balanced the large cylinder on his back atop the
other equipment with the chain sling across his chest. He started along the
series of gentle slopes the tractor had climbed earlier. Deliberately, he
pushed to the back of his mind the possibility he would have to face sometime:
Base might decide the crew had been too eager to negotiate the ringwall to
call back before being blanked out by the mass of rock.

He had to restrain a temptation to rush
headlong down to the plain across miles of rough grades. Even with his
tremendous load of equipment, he might still travel in twenty-foot bounds in
Lunar
gravity; but he had no desire to plunge all the way to
the bottom with one misstep.

"It'll
be easy enough going down," he murmured. "And after that, I can judge
the direction well enough from Earth."

He looked up at the brightness of the planet.
Earth was rather high in the
Lunar
sky, although not
overhead because of his position far north. It would indicate roughly his southerly
course towards Archimedes. As he looked, he noticed that much of the eastern
coast of North America, which to his view was almost centered on the
hemisphere,
was blanketed in clouds.

"Wish I was there
right now," he sighed.
"Rain and all!"

He
wondered about the next step as he worked his way around ridges radiating from
the sizable minor craterlet in Plato's ringwall. He still had a good view of
the gray plain at the foot of the heights. Although reasonably flat—probably
leveled by the colossal flow of lava that had formed the
Mare Imbrium,
filling older craters and melting down or
inundating existing mountains until merely their crests showed—it contained
many hills and irregularities that would be even more apparent to a man on foot
than from the tractor.