Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (18 page)

It was not wholly dark where they were, even aside from their own small
fire. The burning trees in the departing ship's rocket-trail sent up a
column of white which remaining flames illuminated. The remarkably
primitive camp Cochrane had made looked like a camp on a tiny
snow-field, because of the ashes.

"We've got to think about shelter," said Babs presently, very quietly
indeed. "If there are glaciers, there must be winter here. If there is
winter, we have to find out which animals we can eat, and how to store
them."

"Hold on!" protested Cochrane. "That's looking too far ahead!"

Babs clasped her hands together. It could have been to keep their
trembling from being seen. Cochrane was regarding her face. She kept
that under admirable control.

"Is it?" asked Babs. "On the broadcast Mr. Jamison said that there was
as much land here as on all the continent of Asia. Maybe he exaggerated.
Say there's only as much land not ice-covered as there is in South
America. It's all forest and plain and—uninhabited." She moistened her
lips, but her voice was very steady. "If all of South America was
uninhabited, and there were two people lost in it, and nobody knew where
they were—how long would it take to find them?"

"It would be a matter of luck," admitted Cochrane.

"If the ship comes back, it can't hover to look for us. There isn't fuel
enough. It couldn't spot us from space if it went in an orbit like a
space platform. By the time they could get help—they wouldn't even be
sure we were alive. If we can't count on being found right away, this
burned-over place will be green again. In two or three weeks they
couldn't find it anyhow."

Cochrane fidgeted. He had worked out all this for himself. He'd been
disturbed at having to tell it, or even admit it to Babs. Now she said
in a constrained voice:

"If men came to this planet and built a city and hunted for us, it might
still be a hundred years before anybody happened to come into this
valley. Looking for us would be worse than looking for a needle in a
haystack. I don't think we're going to be found again."

Cochrane was silent. He felt guiltily relieved that he did not have to
break this news to Babs. Most men have an instinctive feeling that a
woman will blame them for bad news they hear.

A long time later, Babs said as quietly as before:

"Johnny Simms asked me to come along while he went hunting. I didn't. At
least I—I'm not cast away with him!"

Cochrane said gruffly:

"Don't sit there and brood! Try to get some sleep."

She nodded. After a long while, her head drooped. She jerked awake
again. Cochrane ordered her vexedly to make herself comfortable. She
stretched out beside the wall of wood that Cochrane had made. She said
quietly:

"While we're looking for food tomorrow morning, we'd better keep our
eyes open for a place to build a house."

She closed her eyes.

Cochrane kept watch through the dark hours. He heard night-cries in the
forest, and once toward dawn the distant volcano seemed to undergo a
fresh paroxysm of activity. Boomings and explosions rumbled in the
night. There were flickerings in the sky. But there were fewer temblors
after it, and no shocks at all.

More than once, Cochrane found himself dozing. It was difficult to stay
in a state of alarm. There was but one single outcry in the forest that
sounded like the shriek of a creature seized by a carnivore. That was
not nearby. He tried to make plans. He felt bitterly self-reproachful
that he knew so few of the things that would be useful to a castaway.
But he had been a city man all his life. Woodcraft was not only out of
his experience—on overcrowded Earth it would have been completely
useless.

From time to time he found himself thinking, instead of practical
matters, of the astonishing sturdiness of spirit Babs displayed.

When she waked, well after daybreak, and sat up blinking, he said:

"Er—Babs. We're in this together. From now on, if you want to tell me
something for my own good, go ahead! Right?"

She rubbed her eyes on her knuckles and said,

"I'd have done that anyhow. For both our good. Don't you think we'd
better try to find a place where we can get a drink of water? Water has
to be right to drink!"

They set off, Cochrane carrying the weapon he'd brought from the ship.
It was Babs who pointed out that a stream should almost certainly be
found where rain would descend, downhill. Babs, too, spotted one of the
small, foot-high furry bipeds feasting gluttonously on small round
objects that grew from the base of a small tree instead of on its
branches. The tree, evidently, depended on four-footed rather than on
flying creatures to scatter its seeds. They gathered samples of the
fruit. Cochrane peeled a sliver of the meat from one of the round
objects and put it under his watchstrap.

They found a stream. They found other fruits, and Cochrane prepared the
same test for them as for the first. One of the samples turned his skin
red and angry almost immediately. He discarded it and all the fruits of
the kind from which it came.

At midday they tasted the first-gathered fruit. The flesh was red and
juicy. There was a texture it was satisfying to chew on. The taste was
indeterminate save for a very mild flavor of maple and peppermint mixed
together.

They had no symptoms of distress afterward. Other fruits were less
satisfactory. Of the samples which the skin-test said were
non-poisonous, one was acrid and astringent, and two others had no taste
except that of greenness—practically the taste of any leaf one might
chew.

"I suppose," said Cochrane wryly, as they headed back toward the
ash-clearing at nightfall, "we've got to find out if the animals can be
eaten."

Babs nodded matter-of-factly.

"Yes. Tonight I'm taking part of the watch. As you remarked this
morning, we're in this together."

He looked at her sharply, and she flushed.

"I mean it!" she said doggedly. "I'm watching part of the night!"

He was desperately tired. His muscles were not yet back to normal after
the low gravity on the moon. She'd had more rest than he. He had to let
her help. But there was embarrassment between them because it looked as
if they would have to spend the rest of their lives together, and they
had not made the decision. It had been made for them. And they had not
acknowledged it yet.

When they reached the clearing, Cochrane began to drag new logs toward
the central place where much of last night's supply of fuel remained.
Matter-of-factly, Babs began to haul stuff with him. He said vexedly:

"Quit it! I've already been realizing how little I know about the things
we're going to need to survive! Let me fool myself about masculine
strength, anyhow!"

She smiled at him, a very little. But she went obediently to the fire to
experiment with cookery of the one palatable variety of fruit from this
planet's trees. He drove himself to bring more wood than before. When he
settled down she said absorbedly:

"Try this, Jed."

Then she flushed hotly because she'd inadvertently used his familiar
name. But she extended something that was toasted and not too much
burned. He ate, with weariness sweeping over him like a wave. The cooked
fruit was almost a normal food, but it did need salt. There would be
trouble finding salt on this planet. The water that should be in the
seas was frozen in the glaciers. Salt would not have been leached out of
the soil and gathered in the seas. It would be a serious problem. But
Cochrane was very tired indeed.

"I'll take the first two hours," said Babs briskly. "Then I'll wake
you."

He showed her how to use the weapon. He meant to let himself drift
quietly off to sleep, acting as if he had a little trouble going off.
But he didn't. He lay down, and the next thing he knew Babs was shaking
him violently. In the first dazed instant when he opened his eyes he
thought they were surrounded by forest fire. But it wasn't that. It was
dawn, and Babs had let him sleep the whole night through, and the sky
was golden-yellow from one horizon to the other. More, he heard the
now-familiar cries of creatures in the forest. But also he heard a
roaring sound, very thin and far away, which could only be one thing.

"Jed! Jed! Get up! Quick! The ship's coming back! The ship! We've got to
move!"

She dragged him to his feet. He was suddenly wide-awake. He ran with
her. He flung back his head and stared up as he ran. There was a
pin-point of flame and vapor almost directly overhead. It grew swiftly
in size. It plunged downward.

They reached the surrounding forest and plunged into it. Babs stumbled,
and Cochrane caught her, and they ran onward hand in hand to get clear
away from the down-blast of the rockets. The rocket-roaring grew louder
and louder.

The castaways gazed. It was the ship. From below, fierce flames poured
down, blue-white and raging. The silver hull slanted a little. It
shifted its line of descent. It came down with a peculiar deftness of
handling that Cochrane had not realized before. Its rockets splashed,
but the flame did not extend out to the edge of the clearing that had
been burned off at first. The rocket-flames, indeed, did not approach
the proportion to be seen on rockets on film-tape, or as Cochrane had
seen below the moon-rocket descending on Earth.

The ship settled within yards of its original landing-place. Its rockets
dwindled, but remained burning. They dwindled again. The noise was
outrageous, but still not the intolerable tumult of a moon-rocket
landing on Earth.

The rockets cut off.

The airlock door opened. Cochrane and Babs waved cheerfully from the
edge of the clearing. Holden appeared in the door and shouted down:

"Sorry to be so long coming back."

He waved and vanished. They had, of course, to wait until the ground at
least partly cooled before the landing-sling could be used. Around them
the noises of the forest continued. There were cooling, crackling sounds
from the ship.

"I wonder how they found their way back!" said Babs. "I didn't think
they ever could. Did you?"

"Babs," said Cochrane, "you lied to me! You said you'd wake me in two
hours. But you let me sleep all night!"

"You'd let me sleep the night before," she told him composedly. "I was
fresher than you were, and today'd have been a pretty bad one. We were
going to try to kill some animals. You needed the rest."

Cochrane said slowly:

"I found out something, Babs. Why you could face things. Why we humans
haven't all gone mad. I think I've gotten the woman's viewpoint now,
Babs. I like it."

She inspected the looming blister-ports of the ship, now waiting for the
ground to cool so they could come aboard.

"I think we'd have made out if the ship hadn't come," Cochrane told her.
"We'd have had a woman's viewpoint to work from. Yours. You looked ahead
to building a house. Of course you thought of finding food, but you were
thinking of the possibility of winter and—building a house. You weren't
thinking only of survival. You were thinking far ahead. Women must think
farther ahead than men do!"

Babs looked at him briefly, and then returned to her apparently absorbed
contemplation of the ship.

"That's what's the matter with people back on Earth," Cochrane said
urgently. "There's no frustration as long as women can look ahead—far
ahead, past here and now! When women can do that, they can keep men
going. It's when there's nothing to plan for that men can't go on
because women can't hope. You see? You saw a city here. A little city,
with separate homes. On Earth, too many people can't think of more than
living-quarters and keeping food enough for them—them only!—coming in.
They can't hope for more. And it's when that happens—You see?"

Babs did not answer. Cochrane fumbled. He said angrily:

"Confound it, can't you see what I'm trying to say? We'd have been
better off, as castaways, than back on Earth crowded and scared of our
jobs! I'm saying I'd rather stay here with you than go back to the way I
was living before we started off on this voyage! I think the two of us
could make out under any circumstances! I don't want to try to make out
without you! It isn't sense!" Then he scowled helplessly. "Dammit, I've
staged plenty of shows in which a man asked a girl to marry him, and
they were all phoney. It's different, now that
I
mean it! What's a
good way to ask you to marry me?"

Babs looked momentarily up into his face. She smiled ever so faintly.

"They're watching us from the ports," she said. "If you want my
viewpoint—If we were to wave to them that we'll be right back, we can
get some more of those fruits I cooked. It might be interesting to have
some to show them."

He scowled more deeply than before.

"I'm sorry you feel that way. But if that's it—"

"And on the way," said Babs. "When they're not watching, you might kiss
me."

They had a considerable pile of the red-fleshed fruits ready when the
ground had cooled enough for them to reach the landing-sling.

Once aboard the ship, Cochrane headed for the control-room, with Jamison
and Bell tagging after him. Bell had an argument.

"But the volcano's calmed down—there's only a wall of steam where the
lava hit the glaciers—and we could fix up a story in a couple of hours!
I've got background shots! You and Babs could make the story-scenes and
we'd have a castaway story! Perfect! The first true castaway story from
the stars—. You know what that would mean!"

Cochrane snarled at him.

"Try it and I'll tear you limb from limb! I've put enough of other
people's private lives on the screen! My own stays off! I'm not going to
have even a phoney screen-show built around Babs and me for people to
gabble about!"

Bell said in an injured tone: