At 0057 they came out of the lichens and stood all at once with unreasonable surprise on the broad dust plain, flat before them, denuded and barren as the bed of an old salt sea.
“Which way now?” Wertz wanted to know.
Dane had been thinking about that for an hour. “Unless we’re hopelessly off, we should be northeast of the landing place. If we follow the edge to the south, we ought to find our specimen cart. Then we’ll know our course exactly.”
They went south for a half mile, then another half mile, and then at least another. The straight edge of the plant land still ran empty before them as far as the lights would shine. Rest stops were coming closer together. As the distance fell behind, nobody said anything about how far they had come into the south.
At 0245 Lieutenant McDonald finally called a halt. “I hate to think it, but we must have turned the wrong way. We’ve come more than two miles. If we’d been walking in the right direction, we’d have come to the cart by now.”
They eased the sling to the ground.
Dane said, “I don’t think so. I mean I don’t think we had any reason to turn north. Unless we walked a long way straight south this morning, we’ve got to be right. If we were wandering around off bearing, we could just as likely have gone northerly.”
“Look,” Wertz said, “we know the spacecraft is gone, but even if it isn’t, it’s five miles out from the lichens. It’s five miles out there in the dust someplace. North or south from here, we don’t know which. I say we strike straight out. After we get out in the dust about five miles, we wait for daylight. We couldn’t be too far off. We’ll see it all right, if they waited for us. What’s more important, maybe they can see us. This way we can walk ourselves completely out of their sight. Even if the dust settles.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. Except for the cart. The cart would relieve them of their load and double their speed. “Maybe it’s only another hundred yards in front of us,” Dane told them. “If we turn out now, we know for certain we’ve got to carry this sling all night.”
“Maybe I ought to scout ahead,” McDonald said. “I can go twice as fast if I don’t have to lug anything. You two wait here and I’ll come back with the cart if I can find it in the next mile.”
“No!” Dane said sharply. “We stick together. You saw what happened to Houck.”
“What are you trying to do?” Wertz exploded. “You starting that up again!”
“I don’t know what I think. Except that it’s obvious Houck was coming back for help. Maybe he was even coming to warn the rest of us. Something happened to him. Or maybe again, something got him.”
McDonald whistled. “Jesus! You mean maybe something didn’t want him to get back to the spacecraft?”
“He’s nuts!” Wertz growled. “Nothing living could exist here. Except the damned lichens.”
“I hope you’re right,” Dane said. “I hope to hell you’re right. But what you really mean is that something like us couldn’t exist here. Something that our experience can describe. That’s all you can mean. It’s extremely probable that a lot of things exist in the universe that our experience is too limited to describe. Why not here?”
“Nuts again,” Wertz said.
“Just the same,” Dane persisted, “there’s a kind of pattern to the things that have been happening here on Mars. Maybe it’s a conscious pattern trying to impose itself upon us. Maybe we were deliberately kept from returning. Maybe Dr. Pembroke and the others were kept from getting back to the spacecraft.”
“But why?” McDonald demanded.
Dane picked up his rope. “Who knows? Maybe if some kind of conscious beings do exist here, they’re curious. Curiosity is the mark of consciousness. That’s why we came to Mars ourselves, isn’t it? Curiosity.”
“Curiosity killed a cat,” Wertz said grimly.
It’s an obsession, Dane told himself. It’s a kind of pathetic fallacy. I’m forcing my own thoughtways upon events to make them conform to my own experience. But he could not help finishing out his idea. “If there is curiosity here, it could be observing us. Like specimens, so to speak. That’s what we would do in its place.”
“Cut it out,” Wertz snapped. “You’ll have me believing you. Not that it matters a hell of a lot. Cragg is long gone.”
“We don’t say that until we know it for sure,” Dane said. “Let’s go.”
They took up the three-part load of the sling and resumed their grind along the edge of the lichen beds. At 0305 hours they rested for five minutes. At 0310 they headed again into the south, with McDonald on point at the apex of their little triangle.
At 0319 McDonald checked abruptly, hand upraised in the signal to halt. “What’s that up ahead?”
8
DANE STRAINED to see. There was nothing for him but the vague curtain of the dust haze. Nor for Wertz, behind his thick-lensed spectacles.
“It’s a fence, looks like!” McDonald exclaimed. “Right out there. Straight ahead. Can’t you see it!”
A hand came out of nowhere and gripped. Dane strove to speak. He heard himself say in a tight voice, “Let’s get a little closer.”
They freed themselves from the weight of the sling and huddled.
“We ought to spread out a little,” Dane told them, “and move up on it slow. Keep one light steady ahead. McDonald’s. He’s got the best eyesight. Wertz and I’ll cover us around the sides and behind.”
He snapped his own light on and began to play it to the right and right rear.
Wait a minute,” he added. “Remember our basic briefings. If there is something alive and conscious out there, don’t fire at it until it is definitely hostile and dangerous.”
“Jesus God!” Wertz rasped.
“We don’t know.” Dane forced himself to speak calmly. “They could be friendly. Wouldn’t we try to be friendly on Earth, until the unbelievable monsters from another world at-tacked us? We’ve got to remember that if the things are monsters to us, our appearance is for that very same reason monstrous to them.”
“I don’t want to take any more of this,” McDonald spoke out. “Let’s go on ahead and get it over with.”
They inched forward, deeper into the fantasy. McDonald’s beam gouged the dust that sifted through the night until it was diffused, dissipated, and throttled at the limit of vision. Playing his own light steadily to the side and rear, Dane wrestled with desire to face into the fearful front, if only for the briefest assurance.
It was unbearably long. Then Dane saw it himself. A long low barrier hugged the ground athwart their path.
Suddenly McDonald broke ahead, striding swiftly at the thing.
“Lieutenant!” Dane yelled at him, forgetting the helmet and the microphone.
A raucous reply burst in his ears. “Here’s your fence!” McDonald sounded as if he were choking on the words. “Completely without monsters. It’s only some more damned lichens.”
They went up, clammy with the draining suspense. Blocking further advance to the south, a long line of lichens stretched out as far to the right as they could see.
Wertz played his light about. “Looks like we’re in the pocket of a bay. They must have been falling back gradually to the left.”
Dane checked his compass quickly. “What do you get, McDonald?”
“What do you mean, what do I get?”
“Your compass. What direction does the edge of this bed run?”
McDonald raised his wrist to look. He shook the instrument and looked again. “East and west, according to this.”
“Mine reads the same. How about yours, Wertz?”
“East and west,” Wertz answered. “I don’t get it. The lichen beds run almost due north and south for forty or fifty miles. Something must be wrong with the compasses.”
They checked the instruments against each other. If they were in error, they were no more than a degree apart on the error.
Wertz said, “It’s probably a small promontory we over-looked.”
“T
hen we’re long miles away from the landing place,” McDonald said. “From the observation deck you can see the edge of the lichen forest runs north and south from horizon to horizon.”
“A small promontory could fool you from a distance,” Wertz argued. “It probably only runs out a hundred yards or so and then bends back to the south.”
Dane detected the taint in his voice. “You thinking what I’m thinking, Wertz?” he went on. “About the carts?”
“Where else could they be?” Wertz burst out angrily. “First we can’t find Dr. Pembroke’s cart. Then we can’t find ours. Now we find lichens where lichens are not supposed to be. Only they couldn’t grow that fast.”
Dane said, “What do we really know about them? Remember how fast the green areas on Mars have been observed to expand in the spring? Only an extremely intense metabolism in the plants could explain it. Maybe to cope with their environment they have a metabolism comparable to our rate of living raised several powers.”
“You saying they grew out around the carts?” McDonald asked.
“I can’t think anything else,” Dane said. “We should have thought of it sooner. There wasn’t any place for Dr. Pembroke’s cart to be except in the lichens, and he wouldn’t have dragged it into them. That goes for ours too.”
McDonald pointed at the plants in front of them. “In there someplace?”
Dane hesitated. Then he made up his mind. “No. Not in there. Somewhere behind us. I think we must have passed the place a long way back. I think these lichens grew out today for another reason. I think we’re directly opposite the landing place at its closest point to the lichens. I think this stuff is growing out towards the spacecraft.”
“The metal?” Wertz fumbled with the idea. “The metal, maybe? Attracted by it, maybe?”
Dane knew he was thinking about Houck’s pressure suit. He was thinking about that corroded, crumbling metal himself. “Or maybe by the power emanations of the spacecraft’s equipment,” he said. “Last night there was a significant spark fire pattern pointing directly at the spacecraft. If we follow this line on out, I’ll bet it will point directly at the landing place.”
Wertz said, “So what?”
A little more and Wertz would give up. “We don’t know that,” Dane told him sharply. “Until we do, we’ve got to keep trying. Maybe Colonel Cragg set a new time to wait us out. It could be daylight. We’ve got to hurry until we know he’s gone for sure.”
They retraced their steps to their burden and angled out to follow the lichens.
After a while Lieutenant McDonald said, “This is no promontory we overlooked. Not this big a one.”
The lichens ran on west for a quarter of a mile before they cut off and bent sharply back in the direction of the main beds. At the apex the peninsula was narrow. Fingerlike.
They slogged on. Out into the open dust plain, glad to leave the cursed lichens behind. Even if only a vast emptiness of rolling sand dust lay before them. It was, Dane noted, 0355.
Apathetically he listened to McDonald make the 0400 call and waited without hope for an answer. Dog-tired, he thought.
They now rested every ten minutes. Still the pace dragged. The load they bore was not backbreaking, but it had clung to them for so long that it was like the old man of the sea—unrelenting—endlessly swinging among them and trying to draw them down into the dust. At best they were making scarcely a mile for every hour of fighting to stay on their feet.
It was 0500. If his hunch about the lichen peninsula was correct, Dane thought, they could not be more than three miles from the landing place. No faintest imagining of beacon light had they seen. Perversely the dust settled more thickly over their own probing light rays.
“We couldn’t see the top light if we were within a thousand feet of it,” the lieutenant essayed. The note of hope was faint.
They rested and went on again. There was no end, Dane thought. They were marching in a non-time. The minutes and hours they measured on watches made no sense. Purpose was reduced to putting a foot forward, then the other, then the first, then the second. Except for the blessed stops.
At 0630 daylight was palpably in the air, but they still lived in the ocher folds of the dust storm. “Just let it stop,” McDonald swore. “Just let the damned wind stop blowing and we could see something.”
They could feel no wind, no familiar movement of air, but it was there, three or four miles an hour of it, stirring the feathery dust into vague billows. Like tired smoke. If it would stop, the dust would settle fast in the thin air.
At 0900 they stood together in the haze and agreed that they had come at least five miles. They ought to circle and search. Maybe they had already passed the place. Even if they had been coming out along the right line.
“What’s the use?” Wertz objected. “If the spacecraft is still here, we could be close enough to spit on it and not see it.”
“It’s getting lighter.” Dane tried to sound cheerful. “Maybe it’s settling out.”
“It’s just the sun climbing,” Wertz came back. He pointed up at a brighter spot in the eastern sky.
“We might as well rest awhile and see,” Dane decided. “There’s no use wandering around in it. We can’t go much longer anyway.”
With added gentleness they lowered their burden into the dust. Probably for the last time, Dane thought, not caring much about the fatigue. This is it, he decided. He sat down first and then stretched out full length on the red-dirtying soil, which had long since coated them with its own-claiming color. Waves of relief laved his numb muscles.
9
HE WAS bouncing around in a boat. Fishing? Somebody was shaking him.
He looked up into broad daylight. At a pressure-helmeted head bending over him. Memory flooded back. The dust had settled!
Then he saw! Behind the transparent visor was the face of Major Noel! He croaked at his microphone.
“Take it easy,” he heard.
Dane sat up. He saw the massive happy shape of the space-craft, geometrical on the red plain. Not a half mile away. He pointed. “Brother, am I glad to see that! We thought for sure that Cragg had left us.”
“He couldn’t,” Major Noel said.
Dane got stiffly to his feet. “Maybe he’s human after all.” He saw that Wertz and Lieutenant McDonald were sitting up, their visors wiped clean of red dust. There were three men with Noel and two carts.
“Couldn’t you hear us calling you?” he blurted. He was appalled now at the fright. Radio blackout, and a man left past hope. Anyway, he was happy. He was happy as all hell, with a great, lightheaded bubbling of spirits. He was thirsty. He was starving. He was everything that was being alive. He decided against the relief tube. In a few minutes they would be rid of the suits. And never again!
Dane, old boy, you made it, he exulted privately. You made it!
Noel said, “I may as well tell you now. The colonel didn’t wait for you. We couldn’t raise you, but the colonel was going anyhow. We couldn’t take off. She wouldn’t fire up. The activators are dead as a last year’s pullet.” He went over to the carts to look at Dr. Pembroke and the others.
It was the way the little major had said it. Dane had no intimate knowledge of the intricate organs of the great space-craft, no familiar kinship with the immense tubular rocket engines or the squat nuclear activators that topped them. Yet a machine was something a mechanic could fix. With time and effort perhaps but, by virtue of his calling, surely. For certainly a machine stood beyond the realm of organic decay or disease or accidental death.
“What’s the matter with them?” he asked.
Noel started the procession off towards the spacecraft. “We don’t know, he said shortly. “We can’t find anything wrong with them. Except that they won’t react for more than ten to twenty per cent power.”
He cut the explanation off as definitely as the slamming of a door and went back to questioning McDonald. Dane decided that only military conversation was desired. He didn’t want to talk any
way. He just wanted to get in the Far Venture and out of the suit as soon as he could. Before he starved to death. No ration pellets this close to the messroom. His watering mouth conjured with the taste image of a thick Air Force steak. With fried potatoes. With pan gravy made from the steak drippings. With ice-cold milk. With homemade bread and yellow butter. Maybe some of the mess cook’s speciality, the baked beans in tomato sauce he always had ready for snacks. It was the best thing about the whole oversized junket, eating in an Air Force mess again, day after day. If he didn’t quit letting his appetite run away, it would be more than a few pounds he had to lose.
Then the airlock was closing and there was the struggle to get out of the suits. Why all the quiet? He saw one or two of the rescuers glance at him and look away without smiling while they jostled out of the stiff suits and passed them up through the manhole for storage, mounting the ladders one by one, manhandling the inert bodies.
“You all quit talking?” he demanded.
Noel nodded at the last two crew members. He waited until they had stowed their gear and started up the ladders. He kept on waiting, his swarthy squeezed-up face contemplating the manual acts of bringing his cigarette to his lips and taking it away again to emit short exhalations of smoke. “To hell with it!” he grunted.
He swung on Dane. “This is it. The top rocket man on board this can is a Pembroke man. Like you. And a civilian. Like you. Now that you’re back on board, do we go?”
Silence swelled thick between them. The little major’s eye did not waver.
“Colonel Cragg?” Dane demanded.
“There are 125 men on this spacecraft,” Noel snapped. “Officers, crew, and scientific personnel. Six were out on the sands. That leaves 119. Besides your friend Vining, that leaves 117 or 118 who think you and Vining messed up the engines.”
“After Colonel Cragg suggested it, I suppose.”
“Suggest hell! He put Vining under arrest.”
Dane stared at him. “How stupid can you fellows get! How could Vining put the engines out? You’ve got rocket engineers on your crew. What’s the matter with them? Wouldn’t they know?”
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