Andre Norton (ed) (6 page)

He worked past the craterlet, leaving it to
his right. Whenever he struck a reasonably level stretch, he moved at a
bounding trot. The first time he tried this, he tumbled head over heels and
gave himself a fright lest he rupture the spacesuit on a projecting rock.
Thereafter, he was more careful until he got used to being so top-heavy because
of the huge oxygen tank.

Finally,
scrambling down the last ridges of old debris, he found himself on the level
floor of the "Sea of Showers," in the region between Plato and the
jutting, lonely Mt. Pico. Off to his right, an extension of the ringwall behind
him thrust out to point at the group of other peaks known as the Teneriffe
Mountains, which were somewhat like a flock of lesser Picos. The ground on which
he stood had perhaps once been part of another crater, twin in size to Plato;
but now only detectable by faint outlines and vein mountains. In the past,
some astronomers had called it Newton, before deciding upon a more worthy
landmark for Sir Isaac.

It
had taken Hansen nearly half an hour, and he paused now to catch his breath.

"I
feel pretty good," he exclaimed with relief. "I'm carrying quite a
lot to go at that speed, but I don't seem to get tired." He thought a
moment, and warned himself, "You'd better not, either!"

He turned partly to look at the ringwall
towering behind him. It loomed grimly, scored with deep shadows of cracks into
which the rays of Earth, seventy times brighter than moonlight it received from
Luna, could not penetrate.

Hansen
turned away hastily. The mountainous mass made him uneasy; he remembered how
easily a landslip had started on the inner slope.

"I'd better get
moving!"

He struck out at a brisk, bounding pace, a
trot on Luna without the effort of a normal trot. The ground was fairly level,
and he congratulated himself upon making good time. Once or twice, he staggered
a little, having overbalanced; but he soon got into the rhythm of the pace and
the load on his back ceased to bother him. He bore slightly to the right,
toward the jutting point of the ring-wall.

The footing was like powdery gray sand.
Alternating extremes of temperature during the two-week
Lunar
day or night had cracked the rock surface until successive expansions and
contractions had affected the crystalline structure of the top layers. When
these had flaked off, the powder had formed an insulating layer, but the result
as far as Hansen was concerned was that he trotted on a sandy footing. When he
looked back, he could see the particles kicked up by his last few steps still
above the surface. They fell rather neatly, there being no air to whirl them
about.

Gradually,
he realized that the unobstructive noises of his space-suit had
risen
a notch in tone. The clever little machines were
laboring to dispel the effects of his faster breathing. He dropped down to an
easy walk, which was still a goodly pace in the light gravity.

"Guess I'm sweating more, too," he
told himself. "Now that I think of it, my mouth's a little dry."

He twisted his neck until he could get his
hps on the thin rubber hose sticking up to the left of his chin. He closed his
teeth on the clamp, and sucked up a few swallows of water from his tank. It was
not particularly tasty, but at least it was cool. It would have been a lot
colder if carried uninsulated, he reflected. The night temperature of Luna was
something like minus one-fifty Centigrade, and it dropped like a shot as soon
as the surface was shaded from the sun.

Refreshed, he started out again at a bounding
run, rejoicing in his strength. He felt as if he
were
just jogging along, but the ground rolled back under his feet swiftly. Had he
been on such a bleak desert on Earth, he knew he would be slogging ankle-deep
in sand— if he could move at all. His own weight was between a hundred and
fifty and a hundred and sixty pounds. With what he was wearing and carrying,
he was probably close to three hundred. It did not bother him here.

"It
isn't bad at all," he thought with satisfaction. "Feels like jogging
around the track in school, warming up for a race. One
...
two
...
three
...
four—still got pretty good form! Not
even breathing hard!"

It occurred to him that it resembled a
footrace in one other particular. He was deliberately putting off consideration
of the finish while he still felt good.

"Oh,
111 meet them somewhere along the way," he said aloud, despite a momentary
doubt that he was talking too much to himself. "Pretty soon, I'll cross
the tractor trail. I'll follow it out maybe as far as Pico and wait for them to
pick me up. The relief crew can't miss a landmark like that. It's damn' near
nine thousand feet high, straight up out of the flat plain."

He slowed down somewhat to scrutinize a ridge
ahead. It turned out to be an easy grade and he skimmed over
it
easily. Otherwise, however, he was
beginning to lose his recent feeling of satisfaction. Now that he moved out
into the flat, empty plain, the essential grimness of
Lunar
landscape was more apparent than when disguised by the majesty of the view from
atop the ringwall. It was a study in gray and black, the powdery sand and the
deep shadows groping toward him as he trotted into the earthshine. Above was
the deep black of an airless sky, lit by the bright Earih and chilly stars.

Gray,
black, green, white—and all of it cold and inhospitable.

"I
feel like I'm not wanted here," Hansen thought. "Well, that makes it
mutual, I guess!"

He
looked back, and was amazed at the distance he had covered. Already, Plato
looked more like a range of towering mountains than it did like a barrier of
cliffs.

"This
won't take so long," he reassured himself. "I must have covered five
miles, running like this.
Maybe almost ten."

He
circled a tiny craterlet, or "bead," a few hundred yards across. In
the precise center, it had a tiny peak, corresponding to the central mountain
masses found in nearly half the craters of Luna. For the first time, Hansen
regretted the camera that had gone down with the tractor.

"Too busy driving to take any pix on the
way," he growled, "and now that I come across a perfect miniature, I
have no camera.
A fine spare photographer for an expedition
this size!"

He
diverted himself for a few minutes by considering what a fool he was to come to
Luna in the first place. He had not really wanted to, and he was sure there
were plenty of others who would have been better qualified and better pleased
at the opportunity. Still, it was strange sometimes how a man would do things
he did not want to because someone else was doing them.

He glanced up at Earth, and kept moving
southward with the shining globe on his left front.

Mike and Joey sat before their radio, on
folding chairs and empty crate respectively, maintaining whenever not directly
addressed an almost sullen silence. Their tiny cubicle was becoming entirely
too crowded to suit them.

Dr.
Burney paced up and down before the wall map of the
Mare Imbrium.
Opposite him, the lower section of the
radiomen's double bunk—canvas and aluminum like their single chair—had collected
an overload of three. Dr. Sherman, the chief astronomer, sat between Bucky
O'Neil and Emil Wohl. Besides heading the geologists, Wohl was Burney's second
in command; and O'Neil was present in case it was decided to send out a rocket
to photograph the Plato region.

"Ya'd
think they could use their own rooms," Joey whispered into Mike's ear.
"All but Bucky got singles. How we gonna catch an incoming call with
all this
racket?"

The
"racket" at the moment consisted mostly of sighs, finger-drumming,
and a tortured semiwhistle from where Sherman sat staring at the map with his
chin cupped in one hand.

"There's
little doubt of the general location," repeated Bumey, once more reaching
a familiar impasse. "But I hate to hold up the other work to send out a
crew when we cannot with any certainty agree that something has gone
wrong."

"Let's
see," said Wohl, "there was some difficulty, was there not, the last
time they communicated?"

When
no one answered, Mike finally repeated his previous testimony.

"Van
Ness said they drove up a sort of mountain to get us.
Complained
a litde about reception.
He might've been getting to the limit."

"Then," said Wohl, "there is really no reason for alarm,
is there?
They could just as well have decided that continuing the mission was more
important than running around looking for a good radio position, couldn't
they?"

Mike considered that
glumly.

"It's funny they didn't back up far
enough to make
one
call to let me know they
were going out of reach," he grumbled. "The speed they make in that
rig, it wouldn'ta taken them long."

"That
would have been the proper action," admitted Bumey, "but we must not
demand perfect adherence to the rules when a group is in the field and may have
perfectly good reasons for disregarding them. No, I think we had best—
Who's
that coming?"

Bucky O'Neil bounded up from the end of the
bunk and stuck bis head out the door. When he looked around, his freckled face
was unhappy.

"Johnny Pierce from the map
section," he announced. "He's got Louise with him. I guess you don't
need me any more."

He
edged out the door as two others of the Base staff came in. The one who acted
as if he had business there was a lean, bespectacled man who managed to
achieve a vaguely scholarly air despite rough clothing.

Trailing
him was a girl who looked as if the heating economy that necessitated the
standard costume of the Base also had the effect of cheating the male personnel
of a brightening influence. The shapeless clothing, however, did not lesson the
attractiveness of her lightly tanned features or lively black eyes. She wore
her dark hair tucked into a knit cap that on Earth probably would have been
donned only as a joke.

"We've
looked at the photo maps," Pierce reported in a dry, husky voice.
"They might very well be out of range. Lots of curvature in that distance,
even with the depression caused by a mass of lava like that
Mare Imbrium."

Burney accepted this with
an expression of relief.

"I
heard them talking about the Plato crew," the girl put in. "What's
going on?"

Her
voice was warm and, like a singer's, stronger than her petite outline would
have suggested.

"Oh . . . just checking the radio
reception," said Burney. "You can get the details from Mike, I
suppose, if you have time off from the observatory. The rest of us are through
here."

Mike
scowled, and the girl looked puzzled; but Burney, Wohl, and Sherman crowded
through the door as if intent upon some new project. Sherman muttered something
about the problem of erecting a transparent dome for direct
observations,
and the voices receded down the corridor. Pierce slipped out after them.

"Did
I say something?" inquired Louise. "I only thought there might be
news."

"I guess they're just busy,
Louise," Mike said. He turned to the radio, unplugged the speaker, and
donned a set of earphones. "You know how it is. Why don't you catch Bucky?
He's
got nothing to do for a while."

Louise
had started to show her even white teeth in a smile which now faded. Joey
picked up his empty crate and busily moved it around to the other side of the
radio set-up.

"Sorry," said the girl, her dark
eyes beginning to smolder. "I'll ask somebody else."

They
listened to her footsteps as they faded away in the corridor. Mike looked at
Joey and shrugged.

"What was I gonna tell her?" he
asked. "That her husband either forgot to call in—or got himself
quick-frozen when something in his tractor popped?"

Joey shook his head
sympathetically.
"Tough on her."

"Dunno
why she had to come to Luna in the first place," Mike complained. "I
can see a nurse like Jean doin' it, and a typewriter pusher like old Edna
oughta be classed expendable. But
a babe like
Louisel"