The Star Road

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “John got slashed up when he tried to pull the alien off you,” said Cal calmly. “Just before I shot. He got it clear across the pectoral muscles at the top of his chest. He’s no use to me.”

  “I’m all right,” whispered John. It hurt him even to breathe and he winced in spite of himself at the effort of talking.

  “Not all right to climb a mountain,” said Cal. “I’ll take Maury, Jeff and Doug.”

  “All right. Get at it then.” Joe made a little, awkward gesture with his hand, and Maury stooped to help pull the pillows from behind him and help him lie down. “All of you—get on with it.”

  “Come with me,” said Cal. “I’ll show you what we’re going to have to build ourselves in the tool shop.”

  “I’ll be right with you,” said Maury. The others went off. Maury stood looking down at Joe. They had been friends and teammates for some years.

  “Shoot,” whispered Joe weakly, staring up at him. “Get it off your chest, whatever it is, Maury.” The effort of the last few minutes was beginning to tell on Joe. It seemed to him the bed rocked with a seasick motion beneath him, and he longed for sleep.

  “You want Cal to be in charge?” said Maury, staring down at him.

  Joe lifted his head from the pillow. He blinked and made an effort and the bed stopped moving for a moment under him.

  “You don’t think Cal should be?” he said.

  Maury simply looked down at him without words. When men work and sometimes die together as happens with tight units like a Survey Team, there is generally a closeness amongst them. This closeness, or the lack of it, is something that is not easily talked about by the men concerned.

  “All right,” Joe said. “Here’s my reasons for putting him in charge of this. In the first place he’s the only one who’s done any climbing. Secondly, I think the job is one he deserves.” Joe looked squarely back up at the man who was his best friend on the Team. “Maury, you and the rest don’t understand Cal. I do. I know that country he was brought up in and I’ve had access to his personal record. You all blame him for something he can’t help.”

  “He’s never made any attempt to fit in with the Team—”

  “He’s not built to fit himself into things. Maury—” Joe struggled up on one elbow. “He’s built to make things fit him. Listen, Maury—he’s bright enough, isn’t he?”

  “I’ll give him that,” said Maury, grudgingly.

  “All right,” said Joe. “Now listen. I’m going to violate Department rules and tell you a little bit about what made him what he is. Did you know Cal never saw the inside of a formal school until he was sixteen—and then the school was a university? The uncle and aunt who brought him up in the old voyageur’s-trail area of the Minnesota-Canadian border were just brilliant enough and nutty enough to get Cal certified for home education. The result was Cal grew up in the open woods, in a tight little community that was the whole world, as far as he was concerned. And that world was completely indestructible, reasonable and handlable by young Cal Hartlett.”

  “But-”

  “Let me talk, Maury. I’m going to this much trouble,” said Joe, with effort, “to convince you of something important. Add that background to Cal’s natural intellect and you get a very unusual man. Do you happen to be able to guess what Cal’s individual sense of security rates out at on the psych profile?”

  “I suppose it’s high,” said Maury.

  “It isn’t simply high—it just isn’t,” Joe said. “He’s off the scale. When he showed up at the University of Minnesota at sixteen and whizzed his way through a special ordering of entrance exams, the psychology department there wanted to put him in a cage with the rest of the experimental animals. He couldn’t see it. He refused politely, took his bachelor’s degree and went into Survey Studies. And here he is.” Joe paused. “That’s why he’s going to be in charge. These aliens we’ve bumped into could be the one thing the human race can’t match. We’ve got to get word home. And to get word home, we’ve got to get someone with the Messenger to the top of that mountain.”

  He stopped talking. Maury stood there.

  “You understand me, Maury?” said Joe. “I’m Survey Leader. It’s my responsibility. And in my opinion if there’s one man who can get the Messenger to the top of the mountain, it’s Cal.”

  The bed seemed to make a slow half-swing under him suddenly. He lost his balance. He toppled back off the support of his elbow, and the sky overhead beyond the bubble began to rotate slowly around him and things blurred.

  Desperately he fought to hold on to consciousness. He had to convince Maury, he thought. If he could convince Maury, the others would fall in line. He knew what was wrong with them in their feelings toward Cal as a leader. It was the fact that the mountain was unclimbable. Anyone could see it was unclimbable. But Cal was going to climb it anyway, they all knew that, and in climbing it he would probably require the lives of the men who went with him.

  They would not have minded that if he had been one of them. But he had always stood apart, and it was a cold way to give your life—for a man whom you had never understood, or been able to get close to.

  “Maury,” he choked. “Try to see it from Cal’s—try to see it from his—”

  The sky spun into a blur. The world blurred and tilted.

  “Orders,” Joe croaked at Maury. “Cal—command—”

  “Yes,” said Maury, pressing him back down on the bed as he tried blindly to sit up again. “All right. All right, Joe. Lie still. He’ll have the command. He’ll be in charge and we’ll all follow him. I promise . . .”

  IV

  During the next two days, the Survey Leader was only intermittently conscious. His fever ran to dangerous levels, and several times he trembled and jerked as if on the verge of going into convulsions. John Martin also, although he was conscious and able to move around and even do simple tasks, was pale, high-fevered and occasionally thick-tongued for no apparent reason. It seemed possible there was an infective agent in the claw and teeth wounds made by the alien, with which the ship’s medicines were having trouble coping.

  With the morning of the third day when the climbers were about to set out both men showed improvement.

  The Survey Leader came suddenly back to clearheadedness as Cal and the three others were standing, all equipped in the bubble, ready to leave. They had been discussing last-minute warnings and advices with a pale but alert John Martin when Joe’s voice entered the conversation.

  “What?” it said. “Who’s alive? What was that?”

  They turned and saw him propped up on one elbow on his makeshift bed. They had left him on it since the sleeping quarters section of the ship had been completely destroyed, and the sections left unharmed were too full of equipment to make practical places for the care of a wounded man. Now they saw his eyes taking in their respirator masks, packs, hammers, the homemade pitons and hammers, and other equipment including rope, slung about them.

  “What did one of you say?” Joe demanded again. “What was it?”

  “Nothing, Joe,” said John Martin, coming toward him. “Lie down.”

  Joe waved him away, frowning. “Something about one being still alive. One what?”

  Cal looked down at him. Joe’s face had grown lean and fallen in even in these few days but the eyes in the face were sensible.

  “He should know,” Cal said. His calm, hard, oddly carrying baritone quieted them all. “He’s still Survey Leader.” He looked around at the rest but no one challenged his decision. He turned and went into the corridor of the ship, down to the main control room, took several photo prints from a drawer and brought them back. When he got back out, he found Joe now propped up on pillows but waiting.

  “Here,” said Cal, handing Joe the photos. “We sent survey rockets with cameras over the ridge up there for a look at the other side of the mountain. That top picture shows you what they saw.”

  Joe looked down at the top picture that showed a stony mountainside steeper than
the one the Harrier lay on. On this rocky slope was what looked like the jagged, broken-off end of a blackened oil drum—with something white spilled out on the rock by the open end of the drum.

  “That’s what’s left of the alien ship,” said Cal. “Look at the closeup on the next picture.”

  Joe discarded the top photo and looked at the one beneath. Enlarged in the second picture he saw that the white something was the body of an alien, lying sprawled out and stiff.

  “He’s dead, all right,” said Cal. “He’s been dead a day or two anyway. But take a good look at the whole scene and tell me how it strikes you.”

  Joe stared at the photo with concentration. For a long moment he said nothing. Then he shook his head, slowly.

  “Something’s phony,” he said at last, huskily.

  “I think so too,” said Cal. He sat down on the makeshift bed beside Joe and his weight tilted the wounded man a little toward him. He pointed to the dead alien. “Look at him. He’s got nothing in the way of a piece of equipment he was trying to put outside the ship before he died. And that mountainside’s as bare as ours. There was no place for him to go outside the ship that made any sense as a destination if he was that close to dying. And if you’re dying on a strange world, do you crawl out of the one familiar place that’s there with you?”

  “Not if you’re human,” said Doug Kellas behind Cal’s shoulder. There was the faintly hostile note in Doug’s voice still. “There could be a dozen different reasons we don’t know anything about. Maybe it’s taboo with them to die inside a spaceship. Maybe he was having hallucinations at the end, that home was just beyond the open end of the ship. Anything.”

  Cal did not bother to turn around.

  “It’s possible you’re right, Doug,” he said. “They’re about our size physically and their ship was less than half the size of the Harrier. Counting this one in the picture and the three that fell with the one that we killed here, accounts for five of them. But just suppose there were six. And the sixth one hauled the body of this one outside in case we came around for a look—just to give us a false sense of security thinking they were all gone.”

  Joe nodded slowly. He put the photos down on the bed and looked at Cal who stood up.

  “You’re carrying guns?” said Joe. “You’re all armed in case?”

  “We’re starting out with sidearms,” said Cal. “Down here the weight of them doesn’t mean much. But up there . . .”

  He nodded to the top reaches of the mountain and did not finish. “But you and John better move inside the ship nights and keep your eyes open in the day.”

  “We will.” Joe reached up a hand and Cal shook it. Joe shook hands with the other three who were going. They put their masks on.

  “The rest of you ready?” asked Cal, who by this time was already across the bubble enclosure, ready to step out. His voice came hollowly through his mask. The others broke away from Joe and went toward Cal, who stepped through the bubble.

  “Wait!” said Joe suddenly from the bed. They turned to him. He lay propped up, and his lips moved for a second as if he was hunting for words. “—Good luck!” he said at last.

  “Thanks,” said Cal for all of them. “To you and John, too. We’ll all need it.”

  He raised a hand in farewell. They turned and went.

  They went away from the ship, up the steep slope of the old glacier stream bed that became more steep as they climbed. Cal was in the lead with Maury, then Jeff, then Doug bringing up the rear. The yellow bright rays of K94 struck back at them from the ice-scoured granite surface of the slope, gray with white veinings of quartz. The warmsuits were designed to cool as well as heat their wearers, but they had been designed for observer-wearers, not working wearers. At the bend-spots of arm and leg joints, the soft interior cloth of the warmsuits soon became damp with sweat as the four men toiled upward. And the cooling cycle inside the suits made these damp spots clammy-feeling when they touched the wearer. The respirator masks also became slippery with perspiration where the soft, elastic rims of their transparent faceplates pressed against brow and cheek and chin. And to the equipment-heavy men the feel of the angle of the steep rock slope seemed treacherously less than eyes trained to Earth gravity reported it. Like a subtly tilted floor in a fun house at an amusement park.

  They climbed upward in silence as the star that was larger than the sun of Earth climbed in the sky at their backs. They moved almost mechanically, wrapped in their own thoughts. What the other three thought were personal, private thoughts having no bearing on the moment. But Cal in the lead, his strong-boned, rectangular face expressionless, was wrapped up in two calculations. Neither of these had anything to do with the angle of the slope or the distance to the top of the mountain.

  He was calculating what strains the human material walking behind him would be able to take. He would need more than their grudging cooperation. And there was something else.

  He was thinking about water.

  Most of the load carried by each man was taken up with items constructed to be almost miraculously light and compact for the job they would do. One exception was the fifteen Earth pounds of components of the Messenger, which Cal himself carried in addition to his mountain-climbing equipment—the homemade crampons, pitons and ice axe-piton hammer—and his food and the sonic pistol at his belt. Three others were the two-gallon containers of water carried by each of the other three men. Compact rations of solid food they all carried, and in a pinch they could go hungry. But to get to the top of the mountain they would need water.

  Above them were ice slopes, and the hook-shaped glacier that they had been able to see from the ship below.

  That the ice could be melted to make drinking water was beyond question. Whether that water would be safe to drink was something else. There had been the case of another Survey ship on another world whose melted local ice water had turned out to contain as a deposited impurity a small wind-born organism that came to life in the inner warmth of men’s bodies and attacked the walls of their digestive tracts. To play safe here, the glacier ice would have to be distilled.

  Again, one of the pieces of compact equipment Cal himself carried was a miniature still. But would he still have it by the time they reached the glacier? They were all ridiculously overloaded now.

  Of that overload, only the Messenger itself and the climbing equipment, mask and warmsuit had to be held on to at all costs. The rest could and probably would go. They would probably have to take a chance on the melted glacier ice. If the chance went against them—how much water would be needed to go the rest of the way?

  Two men at least would have to be supplied. Only two men helping each other could make it all the way to the top. A single climber would have no chance.

  Cal calculated in his head and climbed. They all climbed.

  From below, the descending valley stream bed of the former glacier had looked like not too much of a climb. Now that they were on it, they were beginning to appreciate the tricks the eye could have played upon it by sloping distances in a lesser gravity, where everything was constructed to a titanic scale. They were like ants inching up the final stories of the Empire State Building.

  Every hour they stopped and rested for ten minutes. And it was nearly seven hours later, with K94 just approaching its noon above them, that they came at last to the narrowed end of the ice-smoothed rock, and saw, only a few hundred yards ahead, the splintered and niched vertical rock wall they would have to climb to the foot of the hook-shaped glacier.

  V

  They stopped to rest before tackling the distance between them and the foot of the rock wall. They sat in a line on the bare rock, facing downslope, their packloads leaned back against the higher rock. Cal heard the sound of the others breathing heavily in their masks, and the voice of Maury came somewhat hollowly through the diaphragm of his mask.

  “Lots of loose rock between us and that cliff,” said the older man. “What do you suppose put it there?”

  “It�
��s talus,” answered Jeff Ramsey’s mask-hollowed voice from the far end of the line. “Weathering—heat differences, or maybe even ice from snowstorms during the winter season getting in cracks of that rock face, expanding, and cracking off the sedimentary rock it’s constructed of. All that weathering’s made the wall full of wide cracks and pockmarks, see?”

  Cal glanced over his shoulder.

  “Make it easy to climb,” he said. And heard the flat sound of his voice thrown back at him inside his mask. “Let’s get going. Everybody up!”

  They got creakily and protestingly to their feet. Turning, they fell into line and began to follow Cal into the rock debris, which thickened quickly until almost immediately they were walking upon loose rock flakes any size up to that of a garage door, that slipped or slid unexpectedly under their weight and the angle of this slope that would not have permitted such an accumulation under Earth’s greater gravity.

  “Watch it!” Cal threw back over his shoulder at the others. He had nearly gone down twice when loose rock under his weight threatened to start a miniature avalanche among the surrounding rock. He labored on up the talus slope, hearing the men behind swearing and sliding as they followed.

  “Spread out!” he called back. “So you aren’t one behind the other—and stay away from the bigger rocks.”

  These last were a temptation. Often as big as a small platform, they looked like rafts floating on top of the smaller shards of rock, the similarity heightened by the fact that the rock of the cliff-face was evidently planar in structure. Nearly all the rock fragments split off had flat faces. The larger rocks seemed to offer a temptingly clear surface on which to get away from the sliding depth of smaller pieces in which the boots of the men’s warmsuits went mid-leg deep with each sliding step. But the big fragments, Cal had already discovered, were generally in precarious balance on the loose rock below them and the angled slope. The lightest step upon them was often enough to make them turn and slide.