The Ranger Boys in Space

by Hal Clement

  "It's him!" he almost shrieked, forgetting any grammar he might have known.

  "You can see Tumble himself?" Bowen's voice came back. "I don't believe it."

  "Not Tumble, but his ship." Bart took over the reporting. "There's no mistake about that, but it's down on its side."

  "He couldn't have landed it that way; he'd have had enough sideways speed to spread the rocket over a mountain," pointed out Bowen.

  "Well, I can't see any break in the hull from here. I can't see Tumble either, but he might be inside—or maybe I just couldn't see him at this range; the ship itself looks pretty small. Which of us ought to land, Uncle Jim?" There was a pause before the radio gave answer.

  "The station will be below the horizon from where you are in about eighty minutes. If you can get down, look around, and back up again in seventy, all right;

  but otherwise you'll have to wait until the station comes around again, and come back here in the meantime."

  "If we don't go down now, we may not be able to when you come back," Peter cut in. "The sun is pretty low here right now, and I don't think you'd want us to try our first planet landings in the dark."

  "Good point. All right, you and Dart go down; Bart, hold where you are and watch them. We haven't been able to spot your ships with the big telescope yet, and probably won't—they should have put running lights on them—so we can't watch you from the station. Put out your gear, and ease down slowly, Pete and Dart."

  "What gear?" asked Dart. "The radar's already out, and it won't help."

  "That's right, you wouldn't know, since you haven't actually landed anywhere but in the cradles here. There are retractable legs designed to keep the engine block off the ground when you make a tail landing; it's not such a good idea to get the tubes blocked, you know."

  "I suppose it would blow us up pretty thoroughly," remarked Peter.

  "It would, except for the fact that you have safety switches which will keep the motor from starting if the block has weight on it, or the tubes don't let gas out; so if you land without the legs out you'll stay right there." He explained the location of the switch controlling the landing gear, and the boys carefully checked that it had extended, looking at each other's ships to be sure; then, safe on that point, they eased off their drives once more and settled the last half mile to the surface of the moon.

  Dart was in the air lock almost before his instrument needles had dropped to zero; Peter was a little slower, but wasted no time. Their ships were about two hundred yards apart, and perhaps twice as far from the helpless hulk of the Tumblesauce; Dart's Jabberwock was a trifle closer to it than Peter's Jon. By rights the younger boy might have been expected to make a dash for the crippled rocket; but something held him back until Peter caught up, and together they walked toward the little metal cylinder and whatever secret it might contain.

  19

  PETER THINKS

  "THE outer door is open." Peter's voice came through his suit radio to the receivers in Bart's rocket and in the station. "He's been outside, I guess; he must have lived through the landing."

  "I bet he has some bruises, if the ship is on its side." Bowen spoke roughly, trying to mask the relief he felt, but Bart could tell his real feelings. Peter and Dart could not hear him, as the amplifiers in their suit radios were not powerful enough to make the station audible from its present distance. They were not listening anyway; they were standing outside the open air lock engaged in a wordless argument over who should be first to go in. Peter won, and by the time Dart had followed him, was able to report that Tumble was nowhere to be found. They tried to call the station on the Tumblesauce's set, but of course had no luck, and had to go back outside to inform those above that the ship was empty. Its metal walls naturally cut off any suit-radio contact between inside and out.

  Bowen's relief at the evidence that Tumble had survived his landing vanished at the new report, and he expressed himself rather forcefully.

  "For the love of Mike! I thought every six-year-old on Earth had read enough flying stories to know that the sensible thing to do when you're forced down is to stay with your ship! Even if that young idiot can't read, you'd think he would realize that we could find the ship more easily than a space suit—blast it, we never would find a space suit; they're plastic, and won't look any different on a radar screen than the rocks of the moon! Where on the moon does that silly redhead think he's going, anyway? Did he discover a hamburger stand during his approach, and think he'd better walk over to it in case we didn't find him by breakfast time? Bart, tell those eyes of ours down there to see if they can find any sort of tracks. I suppose we'll have to keep looking, though I'm tempted to wait for him to come back from his little walk." Bart relayed the important part of this message to the boys down below, and they obediently spread out to look for traces of the elusive Tumble.

  They were not long finding them. The dust which covers so much of the level areas of the moon had been swept away in a fairly large circle about the landing point of each of the three ships, but outside those circles it was quite thick enough to take footprints. Tumble's trail was still perfectly clear some thirteen hours after he had left it—with no wind or weather on the moon, it would probably be equally clear after as many thousand years, Peter guessed. Dart was the first to come across the trail, which led from the helpless Tumble-sauce toward a low hill a mile or so away. He reported .his discovery, and waited for orders while Peter came over from the area he had been searching. Instead of instructions, a question was relayed by Bart.

  "What direction did he take?" Bowen wanted to know. The boys looked a trifle blank when this message was relayed, and Dart looked around unthinkingly for something which might tell him which way was north.

  "Wait a minute," Peter said. "I'll have to go back to the Ion and get one of the maps. You had the north pole marked on those, I believe, even though there wasn't time to get the regular longitudes transferred from the telescope maps. We know pretty well where we are, and should be able to recognize some of the mountains around us on the map; then we can figure direction." He suited action to this speech, heading back toward his rocket as fast as his armor would let him—even in the feeble gravity of the moon, the space suits were rather awkward things to carry around. He had no trouble finding the maps, which had been clipped to the side of the control panel for use in the search, and he quickly selected the ones which covered the area where he was fairly sure they had landed. He picked these up rather clumsily in the gauntlets of his suit and went back out through the air lock.

  By the time he had returned to the point where Dart was waiting, however, a little trouble had developed. The maps were photographic copies of the ones made at the station. They had been properly exposed, developed, and fixed, and dried sufficiently for any ordinary use—a photographic technician on Earth would have said they were completely dry. However, objects don't really get completely dry anywhere on Earth or under Earthlike conditions; when Peter exposed the prints to the nearly perfect vacuum of the moon, there were quite a few molecules of water left in the gelatin and paper. These proceeded to evaporate as he walked, and as they did so the prints began to curl. He was not watching them, and when he raised them toward his helmet after reaching Tumble's trail he was rather surprised. Without thinking, he tried to flatten them with his heavy gloves; and immediately the dry, brittle shards of gelatin flaked away from the paper, dropping gently to the ground and leaving him with a handful of maps almost as good as the Lewis Carroll ones which "had been left blank so that they would be easier to read."

  Dart looked at the sheets with sheer amazement, and left to Peter the problem of reporting what had happened. Bowen himself was a little surprised, but after some moments' thought was able to make a good guess at the cause of the phenomenon.

  "They'll have to do your spotting from inside the ships, I guess," he said to Bart at last. "Dart's maps are still all right; the two of them can use those inside the Jabberwock. We'll make up another set for Peter, and
he can pick them up when he comes back to the station, if he still needs them."

  The boys had already started toward Dart's ship when Bart relayed this information; Peter acknowledged the message. The air lock, like that in the TumbJesauce, would hold only one at a time, so there was a little delay in their getting together over the maps. At last, however, they found one on which the pattern of mountain ranges and walled plains, revealed by the long shadows near the pole, seemed to match the region where the rockets stood. This also checked with the spot where Dart should have been according to the original search pattern. They asked Bart if he could make a further check, but he felt that it might take his attention from his controls for too long a period. They decided to be satisfied with what they had.

  According to their estimate, they were located five degrees—eighty-five miles, on the moon—from the north pole, well beyond the region seen at "average" times from the earth, but still at a point which could be and had been mapped from Earth at favorable times. North of them, just beyond the horizon, was a range of fairly high mountains running in a direction which would have led a person trying to reach the pole well off to the right of his course. Near its farther end this range passed fairly close to the rim of the crater within which the pole was located; and it was this part of the range whose peaks received sunlight at all times, owing to the fact that the moon's axis is not tilted like Earth's.

  The "land of the midnight sun" is an area extending only about twenty miles from each pole of the moon, while on the earth its radius is about sixteen hundred miles. It is quite easy, therefore, for a mountain in or near this circle to be tall enough to reach sunlight even during the six-month polar night.

  The range just out of sight from the point where the Tumblesauce had landed was, therefore, the "Mountains of Eternal Light" in which Tumble had been so interested. The question now was whether he had realized this fact, and gone on foot to see them. The trail he had left suggested that he had not; it pointed only a little north of west (not the astronomer's west, but the actual sunset direction) and would not come in sight of the mountains at all if it continued as it started. Since the surface of the moon was far from smooth even where there were no actual ranges, it seemed unlikely that the boy would have been able to distinguish the genuine peaks on the horizon from lower hillocks closer to him, even if he had barely come within sight of the range.

  "But why did he go off in that direction?" asked Dart, reasonably enough. "There doesn't seem to be anything interesting that way, and it certainly doesn't lead anywhere........"

  "It's pretty much toward the sun, now," pointed out Peter, "but it couldn't have been when he started."

  "Why not?" asked Bowen. No relay of this was necessary, since Peter and Dart were still in the latter's ship. "We don't know when he started. He might have realized that the sun was going to set soon, and decided he'd better stay in sunlight."

  "But why should he do that? He could keep warm enough in his ship even after sunset, and you'd think he'd know that we could find the ship by radar even in the dark."

  "I don't know, Bart. I can't even guess. The only reason I can see for his leaving at all would be that he had some reason to think we'd find him more easily wherever he was going. That would mean the Mountains of Light, and you say he didn't head in that direction."

  "We didn't follow his tracks far, though," pointed out Dart. "They were leading toward a nearby hill. Maybe he simply climbed it to see the countryside better."

  "Then why hasn't he come back by now? If he were anywhere in the neighborhood he'd have heard our radio conversations—the suits and the rockets are all on the same wave length just now. He would have seen you boys landing, for that matter. No, he kept on going; it seems that someone had better find out just which way and how far. I suppose the footprints can't be seen from above unless you fly too low for safety "

  "And if you fly low enough and slow enough, the jet wash will sweep dust and footprints away anyway," pointed out Peter. "There's bare rock all around the three ships down already, for a good deal farther than footprints show at all clearly. We'll have to follow on foot."

  "All right, see how far you can get before sunset," returned Bowen. "The two of you had better go together. Keep in touch." The boys promised to do so, and left Dart's rocket once more.

  It took only a few minutes to reach the top of the hill, though the trail was harder to follow on the slope. The dust was much thinner, and in many places patches of bare rock showed. In spite of the lack of air, and resultant lack of wind, the dust apparently got downhill in some fashion. At first, it appeared that this would merely slow down the job of trailing, but when the hilltop was reached they could see that matters were a good deal worse. On the far slope, the general surface was much rougher. The dust had drifted into the numerous hollows, and even Dart admitted that the hollows were just the places where a person would not walk—at least, as long as the ridges of bare rock projected above the dust where they could be seen.

  Tumble apparently had felt the same way; they lost his trail on the downhill grade, and a quarter of an hour's careful search failed to recover it. Eventually they reported this fact, and asked for further suggestions. The answer came from Bart, rather faintly.

  "I'm relaying both ways, now. The station has gone below your horizon, so they can't hear you. I've gone up to keep in touch with them, but I can't go much higher and still have you hear me. I think you'd better get back to your ships and at least get up where we can talk more easily—it will probably be better to get back to the station until it comes around again, anyway."

  "But the sun will have set here by that time!" exclaimed Peter. "He couldn't possibly live through two weeks of darkness—he'd starve, freeze, and everything else during the moon's night."

  "But he's probably not going to be caught by night. He'd only have to go a few dozen miles to stay in sunlight—he's close enough to the north pole, isn't he?"

  "I suppose so. But how are we going to find him? We'd have to start our search from here, and I can't see going over this country by flashlight. We've got to stay until we find out where he's gone."

  "It seems to me you've already found out all that place can tell you. Uncle Jim is agreeing with me; he says to come back. He thinks Tumble must have made a try for sunlight, and probably for his Mountains of Light where he could be sure of getting it permanently, but that you'd never be able to trail him all the way anyway; the sun will go down. The thing to do is get over to those mountains and search there. If he didn't make it, we couldn't find him anyway."

  "All right. We'll head back to the ships." Peter was by no means resigned, but could think of nothing else to do; he realized that Bowen was perfectly right. The two boys trudged back up the hill until they were in sight of their rockets, and turned for a last look across the rocky waste where Tumble must have ventured. If they only knew why he had gone the way he did........

  Peter eyed the line of footprints, standing out as black marks under the nearly horizontal sunlight, leading from near the hulk of the Tumblesauce to the point where they were lost in the shadow of the hill. It was too straight; Tumble had not been walking around sightseeing. He had had a goal in mind. Maybe it was the hilltop where Peter was standing, of course, but maybe it wasn't. He shook his head at the mystery, and started down the slope toward the ships, with Dart at his heels.

  As they went, they waded deeper into the hill's shadow. The sun had not gone down very far since they had climbed it earlier, but that little was enough to turn this slope from dull-colored rock to a nearly total darkness, the surface lighted only by reflection from a few hilltops ahead of them that still caught the sun's rays. Peter wondered whether the shadow was deep enough to bury them completely near the bottom, and was rather pleased when he found that it was. He had not been really in the dark since landing, and with the sunlight off his helmet there was quite a difference. He could see the stars again

  "Dart! Bart!" Peter stopped suddenly.

&nb
sp; "What is it?" The question came from both brothers at once.

  "We should have thought of it. I know why Tumble went the way he did. He didn't have any map!"

  "So what? Why should that make him go one way rather than another?"

  "How did he know which way was north? He knew the Mountains of Light were near the pole, but what good did that do him?"

  "He did just what I'd do, probably—use the stars. You can see 'em, can't you?"

  "I certainly can. That's why I know what he did. How would the stars help?"

  "Well, the North Star is easiest—o-o-h-h!"

  "Right. You get it. Polaris isn't the North Star for the moon! It must be over twenty degrees off, and this near the pole it could even be south of you. We'll be right up; get someone in the station who knows some arithmetic to start earning his keep—have him find out where our North Star would have led Tumble during the last thirteen or fourteen hours!"

  20

  PETER ACTS

  WITHOUT caring precisely where he went, as long as he followed in general the direction taken by the station in its orbit about the moon, Peter sent the Jon leaping upward at two gravities. Dart had already taken off; there was no need to wait to make sure that the younger boy would not have trouble with his ship. This was just as well, for Peter was in a hurry.

  It never occurred to him to doubt that his idea was right; he was too sure of his knowledge of Tumble and his ways. The only question in his mind was how quickly the men at the station could decide on the redhead's whereabouts, so that the scouts could start searching the area in question. Within a minute of take-off he called Bowen, in order to find whether the Jon was in line-of-sight contact with the station, and almost at once he received an answer. The station was not far around the curve of the moon from his starting point, and it is possible to move a long way in a short time at two gravities acceleration.