Andre Norton (ed) (9 page)

"Why did I have to go
and do that?" he groaned inwardly.

He remembered how level-headed he had been in
the first minutes of the catastrophe. Calmly, he had judged the odds of there
being any survivors; calmly, he had climbed down for the prime requisite, the
tank of oxygen; calmly, he had started off by a well-chosen route that led him
accurately to landmarks so plain that they could be spotted from Earth with a
good pair of field glasses.

He had intended to go only as far as Pico, or
perhaps the triple peak. Or had he?

Somewhere
back there, he remembered, he had begun planning a further march. There could
be no reason for that except—

Except
that he was secretly aware that he could count upon no help to reach him in
time!

"Why
should they send anybody out yet?" he asked himself. "For all they
know, we're still inside Plato, camping on the nice level lava floor. I
must
have been thinking that, underneath, when I was figuring which side to
pass Kirch."

He had been skating on thin ice and should
have expected a crack-up. For a moment, he considered the possibility that it
would have been better had he broken down on the spot. But then he might have
quit while still on the ringwall of the great crater.

"As it is," he said aloud,
"I'll at least get the most possible mileage out of this suit. If I live
long enough, I might even walk in on them at Base, for a surprise."

He
grinned
a bit as he considered that pleasant fantasy:

"Hi, Paul; where you
beenF'

"Oh, just out
for
a little walk on the moon."

"And where did you go
on your little moon walk?"

"Took a turn around Plato.
Pretty boring but
'toujours gai, whatthehell whatthehell!'"

He
managed a deeper breath as his equipment caught up somewhat to his physical
needs. The half-grin on his lean features faded, and he stepped up his plodding
pace.

"Why
kid myself?" he snorted. "I'm just about scared senseless! And I've
got a right to be!"

Bucky O'Neil, as the pilot who was to take
the scouting rocket, occupied the only extra chair in Dr. Burney's headquarters
room. Burney sat across from him at the folding table and circled the proposed
search area continuously with the butt of his pencil. Both men eyed the map
reflectively. Burney looked as if he were trying to guess the precise location
of his tractor crew. O'Neil, tracing his route with a blunt forefinger, was
obviously attempting to estimate where he would have to punch his flare release
in order to have his camera working by the time he whipped across Plato.

"Just
to save us the wait," said Burney, leaning back in the silent, crowded
room, "report by radio as soon as you loop back. Have you checked your set
with Mike?"

The
radio operator, standing to the rear of the little group, spoke up,
"Joey's checking with the field now."

"Good!" approved
Burney. "Does anyone have anything to add?"

He
looked about. Sherman whistled quietly and tonelessly. Wohl shook his head.
Johnny Pierce hovered, waiting to get his hands on his photomap again. Louise
leaned against one wall near the door, worrying a pencil
end
between her white teeth.

"All
right, then," said Burney, "you can get into your suit, Bucky. Good
luck!"

The gathering broke up. Burney signaled for
Wohl and Dr. Sherman to stay
behind,
and forestalled
Johnny's move to re-appropriate the map.

"We may want to consider further,"
he offered as an excuse, and Pierce left with Mike.

Outside, they watched Louise follow Bucky in
the opposite direction.

"Wonder how it feels to have her man out
there and maybe not coming back?" murmured Johnny. His long face looked
sad.

"What do you think their chances
are?" he persisted after a brief pause as they turned a comer in the
corridor. Mike shrugged.

"Tractor
One
is
starting back already," he said simply. Hurrying along the other end of
the corridor, Bucky was unable to shake off the following footsteps without
putting on an obvious burst of speed. It sounded like Louise, and he wanted to
think about his flight plan.

Finally,
as he passed through the safety door—a double mounting that could be used in
an emergency as an airlock—he had to pause long enough to acknowledge her
presence.

"Do you mind if I ask
you something, Bucky?" Louise inquired.

"Of course not, but I
have to—"

"I
know; I won't take more than a minute. The thing I don't like is that they just
want you to photograph Plato."

Bucky
released the door which swung shut automatically. He looked puzzled.

"Don't you think it's
worth doing?" he asked.

"Oh, yesl Yes, I do.
But how about all the other places?"

The pilot fidgeted.

"I can't take shots of
the whole
Mare
Imbrium,
Louise."

"You
might take a few of the section this side of Plato, though. How do we know they
ever reached the crater? If tracks show up on your pictures, we'll know how far
they got."

"That's
a good point," admitted Bucky, scratching his head. "But why didn't
you bring it up in the meeting?"

Louise looked away. She
shrugged slightly.

"Well,
maybe Burney would have talked you out of it," Bucky conceded. "We
all know you're worried."

"I
know what everybody
thinks," Louise replied. "I'm getting excited because one of the four
happens to be my husband. I'm not thinking calmly about what's best for the
Base as a whole, whether it's worth taking people off other jobs to play hide
and seek out on the surface. I probably shouldn't have come to Luna in the
first place."

Bucky looked around, but there was no one
passing through the Junction. Louise stepped closer and put a trembling hand on
his arm.

"All
right, Bucky, it's true enough. I'm frightened. I wish I'd never thought of
coming here and making Paul feel he had to trail alongl Are you married, Bucky,
or engaged?"

"Well,
there's a little blonde waiting down there for me—
I
hope. She'd better wait."

"How would you like it
if
she
were out there?"

"Ummm," murmured
the pilot. "I see what you mean."

He saw more than that. He saw how close she
was to losing her grip, how she was keeping back the tears with an effort,
trying to use every ounce of self-discipline so as to keep from being ignored
as hysterical. Getting a few little things done, like influencing him to take
extra photos, was all she could do at the moment to look out for her man. He
remembered hearing from Pierce that Burney had refused her offer to take out a
tractor herself.

"Well . . ." he yielded, "I'll
see if I have a chance. I figure to cover the approaches to the ringwall
anyway; maybe I can get a shot out around Pico, or thereabouts."

She
did not thank him, but hid her face against his shoulder for a second. Bucky
looked around again, touched her lightly on the head with one big, freckled
hand, and disengaged himself gently.

When
he glanced back over his shoulder, Louise was opening the safety door to go
back.

"Heading for Mike and the radio, I
bet," he thought. "Wonder when she slept last?"

He reminded himself that he had a job to do
which involved delicate judgments at high speed, and he had no business going
into it with hindering worries on his mind. If that girl did not watch herself,
she would wind up under the care of Jean and "M. D."
McLeod.

"I'm
liable to, myself," he muttered, "if I don't snap out of it now! I
wonder who'll pick me up if I zig out there when I ought to
zag?
"

He stopped at a phone connection and called
the field control dome to learn if they were ready for him.

Dazzling glints of light flashed here and
there from that part of the Pacific Ocean still in bright sunlight as Hansen
came in sight of Kirch. The coast of California had faded into the darkness and
Asia was partly in view. He estimated that he had been moving for nearly eight
hours.

His pace was still a rhythmic lope, but the
feeling of having vigorous reserves of strength had worn off. Hansen knew that
he must rest soon. In traversing the flat, crater-speckled plain since his
panic, he had paused only once when he took a few minutes to recharge the
oxygen tank of his suit.

"But I'm due for a
good half hour off my feet," he decided.

His
legs, he noticed, had lost some of their snap, so that his bounding trot was
less exuberant. On the other hand, this resulted in his getting slightly better
control of his stride; he no longer broke his rhythm by bouncing too high. The
thing that bothered him most was the growing ache across the small of his back.

He
skirted the ringwall of the last of a series of small craters and saw the
shadowed side of the seven-mile wall. He was approaching the left curve of it,
for he had hours ago decided to abandon the tractor tracks when he had crossed
them again.

"No
use running up the right and getting into the Kirch Mountains," he had
muttered. "I'd have to zig-zag through them and I doubt I'll feel like
making any extra distance by then."

His
guess now, from the angle of Earth in the starry sky, was that he was heading a
shade left of his generally southerly route. He reminded himself that he must
change after rounding Kirch.

"I'll
keep going till I'm past," he promised himself. 'Then I'll sit down and
relax a while."

He
could not see much point in making another few miles out into the empty
wasteland beyond Kirch. The crater was a natural goal to mark a section of his
journey. About halfway between Plato and Archimedes, it was further than he had
dreamed of going. Even now, after he had seen how fast he could travel in the
light gravity, it struck him as almost unbelievable that he would have covered
such a distance. It was nearly a hundred and fifty miles.

Yet
here he was, not in bad shape at all. He glanced at the outer slope of the
ringwall on his right, and mentally catalogued his various irritations. There
was, of course, the general clamminess that resulted from spending hours in a
spacesuit, plus the fact that his bladder was beginning to bother him and there
was nothing he could do about it. The overheating due to his exertions had
been partially adjusted when he had discovered during his last halt that he
could regulate the heating unit by a small dial in his battery pack, which
discovery left him slightly aggrieved at not having had the finer points of
the care and handling of spacesuits more exhaustively explained to him.

"But
then," he reflected, "I was probably expected to spend a lot of time
in the darkroom as a spare photographer."

He
could not say he was hungry, although he supposed that sooner or later he would
discover feelings of weakness. His suit seemed to be functioning as well as
could be expected, except for something that had given way in the right knee on
that one leap. He wondered if a spring were working loose.

"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.