The Star Road

by Gordon R. Dickson

  He had hardly called the warning before there was a choked-off yell from behind him and the sound of more-than-ordinary roaring and sliding of rock.

  He spun around. With the masked figures of Maury on his left and Doug on his right he went scrambling back toward Jeff Ramsey, who was lying on his back, half-buried in rock fragments and all but underneath a ten by six foot slab of rock that now projected reeflike from the smaller rock pieces around it.

  Jeff did not stir as they came up to him, though he seemed conscious. Cal was first to reach him. He bent over the blond-topped young man and saw through the faceplate of the respirator mask how Jeff’s lips were sucked in at the comers and the skin showed white in a circle around his tight mouth.

  “My leg’s caught.” The words came tightly and hollowly through the diaphragm of Jeff’s mask. “I think something’s wrong with it.”

  Carefully, Cal and the others dug the smaller rock away. Jeff’s right leg was pinned down under an edge of the big rock slab. By extracting the rock underneath it piece by piece, they got the leg loose. But it was bent in a way it should not have been.

  “Can you move it?”

  Jeff’s face stiffened and beaded with sweat behind the mask faceplate.

  “No.”

  “It’s broken, all right,” said Maury. “One down already,” he added bitterly. He had already gone to work, making a splint from two tent poles out of Jeff’s pack. He looked up at Cal as he worked, squatting beside Jeff. “What do we do now, Cal? We’ll have to carry him back down?”

  “No,” said Cal. He rose to his feet. Shading his eyes against the sun overhead he looked down the hanging valley to the Harrier, tiny below them.

  They had already used up nearly an hour floundering over the loose rock, where one step forward often literally had meant two steps sliding backward. His timetable, based on his water supplies, called for them to be at the foot of the ice slope leading to the hook glacier before camping for the night—and it was already noon of the long local day.

  “Jeff,” he said. “You’re going to have to get back down to the Harrier by yourself.” Maury started to protest, then shut up. Cal could see the other men looking at him.

  Jeff nodded. “All right,” he said. “I can make it. I can roll most of the way.” He managed a grin.

  “How’s the leg feel?”

  “Not bad, Cal.” Jeff reached out a warmsuited hand and felt the leg gingerly. “More numb than anything right now.”

  “Take his load off,” said Cal to Doug. “And give him your morphine pack as well as his own. We’ll pad that leg and wrap it the best we can, Jeff, but it’s going to be giving you a rough time before you get it back to the ship.”

  “I could go with him to the edge of the loose rock—” began Doug, harshly.

  “No. I don’t need you. Downhill’s going to be easy,” said Jeff.

  “That’s right,” said Cal. “But even if he did need you, you couldn’t go, Doug. I need you to get to the top of that mountain.”

  They finished wrapping and padding the broken leg with one of the pup tents and Jeff started off, half-sliding, half dragging himself downslope through the loose rock fragments.

  They watched him for a second. Then, at Cal’s order, they turned heavily back to covering the weary, strugglesome distance that still separated them from the foot of the rock face.

  They reached it at last and passed into the shadow at its base. In the sunlight of the open slope the warmsuits had

  struggled to cool them. In the shadow, abruptly, the process went the other way. The cliff of the rock face was about two hundred feet in height, leading up to that same ridge over which the weather balloon had been sent to take pictures of the fragment of alien ship on the other side of the mountain. Between the steep rock walls at the end of the glacial valley, the rock face was perhaps fifty yards wide. It was torn and pocked and furrowed vertically by the splitting off of rock from it. It looked like a great chunk of plank standing on end, weathered along the lines of its vertical grain into a decayed roughness of surface.

  The rock face actually leaned back a little from the vertical, but, looking up at it from its foot, it seemed not only to go straight up, but—if you looked long enough—to overhang, as if it might come down on the heads of the three men. In the shadowed depths of vertical cracks and holes, dark ice clung.

  Cal turned to look back the way they had come. Angling down away behind them, the hanging valley looked like a giant’s ski-jump. A small, wounded creature that was the shape of Jeff was dragging itself down the slope, and a child’s toy, the shape of the Harrier, lay forgotten at the jump’s foot.

  Cal turned back to the cliff and said to the others, “Rope up.

  He had already shown them how this was to be done, and they had practiced it back at the Harrier. They tied themselves together with the length of sounding line, the thinness of which Cal had previously padded and thickened so that a man could wrap it around himself to belay another climber without being cut in half. There was no worry about the strength of the sounding line.

  “All right,” said Cal, when they were tied together—himself in the lead, Maury next, Doug at the end. “Watch where I put my hands and feet as I climb. Put yours in exactly the same places.”

  “How’ll I know when to move?” Doug asked hollowly through his mask.

  “Maury’ll wave you on, as I’ll wave him on,” said Cal. Already they were high enough up for the whistling winds up on the mountain peak to interfere with mask-impeded conversations conducted at a distance. “You’ll find this cliff is easier than it looks. Remember what I told you about handling the rope. And don’t look down.”

  “All right.”

  Cal had picked out a wide rock chimney rising twenty feet to a little ledge of rock. The inner wall of the chimney was studded with projections on which his hands and feet could find purchase. He began to climb.

  When he reached the ledge he was pleasantly surprised to find that, in spite of his packload, the lesser gravity had allowed him to make the climb without becoming winded. Maury, he knew, would not be so fortunate. Doug, being the younger man and in better condition, should have less trouble, which was why he had put Doug at the end, so that they would have the weak man between them.

  Now Cal stood up on the ledge, braced himself against the rock wall at his back and belayed the rope by passing it over his left shoulder, around his body and under his right arm.

  He waved Maury to start climbing. The older man moved to the wall and began to pull himself up as Cal took in the slack of the rope between them.

  Maury climbed slowly but well, testing each hand and foothold before he trusted his weight to it. In a little while he was beside Cal on the ledge, and the ascent of Doug began. Doug climbed more swiftly, also without incident. Shortly they were all on the ledge.

  Cal had mapped out his climb on this rock face before they had left, studying the cliff with powerful glasses from the Harrier below. Accordingly, he now made a traverse, moving horizontally across the rock face to another of the deep, vertical clefts in the rock known as chimneys to climbers. Here he belayed the rope around a projection and, by gesture and shout, coached Maury along the route.

  Maury, and then Doug, crossed without trouble.

  Cal then led the way up the second chimney, wider than the first and deeper. This took them up another forty-odd feet to a ledge on which all three men could stand or sit together.

  Cal was still not winded. But looking at the other two, he saw that Maury was damp-faced behind the faceplate of his mask. The older man's breath was whistling in the respirator. It was time, thought Cal, to lighten loads. He had never expected to get far with some of their equipment in any case, but he had wanted the psychological advantage of starting the others out with everything needful.

  “Maury,” he said, “I think we’ll leave your sidearm here, and some of the other stuff you’re carrying.”

  “I can carry it,” said Maury. “I don�
�t need special favors.”

  “No,” said Cal. “You’ll leave it. I’m the judge of what’s ahead of us, and in my opinion the time to leave it’s now.” He helped Maury off with most of what he carried, with the exception of a pup tent, his climbing tools and the water container and field rations. Then as soon as Maury was rested, they tackled the first of the two really difficult stretches of the cliff.

  This was a ten-foot traverse that any experienced climber would not have found worrisome. To amateurs like themselves it was spine-chilling.

  The route to be taken was to the left and up to a large, flat piece of rock wedged in a wide crack running diagonally up the rock face almost to its top. There were plenty of available footrests and handholds along the way. What would bother them was the fact that the path they had to take was around a boss, or protuberance of rock. To get around the boss it was necessary to move out over the empty atmosphere of a clear drop to the talus slope below.

  Cal went first.

  He made his way slowly but carefully around the outcurve of the rock, driving in one of his homemade pitons and attaching an equally homemade snap-ring to it, at the outermost point in the traverse. Passing the line that connected him to Maury through this, he had a means of holding the other men to the cliff if their holds should slip and they have to depend on the rope on their way around. The snap-ring and piton were also a psychological assurance.

  Arrived at the rock slab in the far crack, out of sight of the other two, Cal belayed the rope and gave two tugs. A second later a tug came back. Maury had started crossing the traverse.

  He was slow, very slow, about it. After agonizing minutes Cal saw Maury’s hand come around the edge of the boss. Slowly he passed the projecting rock to the rock slab. His face was pale and rigid when he got to where Cal stood. His breath came in short, quick pants.

  Cal signaled on the rope again. In considerably less time than Maury had taken Doug came around the boss. There was a curious look on his face.

  “What is it?” asked Cal.

  Doug glanced back the way he had come. “Nothing, I guess,” he said. “I just thought I saw something moving back there. Just before I went around the corner. Something I couldn’t make out.”

  Cal stepped to the edge of the rock slab and looked as far back around the boss as he could. But the ledge they had come from was out of sight. He stepped back to the ledge.

  “Well,” he said to the others, “the next stretch is easier.”

  VI

  It was. The crack up which they climbed now slanted to the right at an almost comfortable angle.

  They went up it using hands and feet like climbing a ladder. But if it was easy, it was also long, covering better than a hundred feet of vertical rock face. At the top, where the crack pinched out, there was the second tricky traverse across the rock face, of some eight feet. Then a short climb up a cleft and they stood together on top of the ridge.

  Down below, they had been hidden by the mountain walls from the high winds above. Now for the first time, as they emerged onto the ridge they faced and felt them.

  The warmsuits cut out the chill of the atmosphere whistling down on them from the mountain peak, but they could feel the pressure of it molding the suits to their bodies. They stood now once more in sunlight. Behind them they could see the hanging valley and the Harrier. Ahead was a cwm, a hollow in the steep mountainside that they would have to cross to get to a further ridge leading up to the mountain peak. Beyond and below the further ridge, they could see the far, sloping side of the mountain and, black against it, the tiny, oil-drum-end fragment of alien ship with a dot of white just outside it.

  “We’ll stay roped,” said Cal. He pointed across the steep-sloping hollow they would need to cross to reach the further rocky ridge. The hollow seemed merely a tilted area with occasional large rock chunks perched on it at angles that to Earth eyes seemed to defy gravity. But there was a high shine where the sun’s rays struck.

  “Is that ice?” said Maury, shading his eyes.

  “Patches of it. A thin coating over the rocks,” said Cal. “It’s time to put on the crampons.”

  They sat down and attached the metal frameworks to their boots that provided them with spiked footing. They drank sparingly of the water they carried and ate some of their rations. Cal glanced at the descending sun, and the blue-black sky above them. They would have several hours yet to cross the cwm, in daylight. He gave the order to go, and led off.

  He moved carefully out across the hollow, cutting or kicking footholds in patches of ice he could not avoid. The slope was like a steep roof. As they approached the deeper center of the cwm, the wind from above seemed to be funnelled at them so that it was like a hand threatening to push them into a fall.

  Some of the rock chunks they passed were as large as small houses. It was possible to shelter from the wind in their lees. At the same time, they often hid the other two from Cal’s sight, and this bothered him. He would have preferred to be able to watch them in their crossings of the ice patches, so that if one of them started to slide he would be prepared to belay the rope. As it was, in the constant moan and howl of the wind, his first warning would be the sudden strain on the rope itself. And if one of them fell and pulled the other off the mountainside, their double weight could drag Cal loose.

  Not for the first time, Cal wished that the respirator masks they wore had been equipped with radio intercom. But these were not and there had been no equipment aboard the Harrier to convert them.

  They were a little more than halfway across when Cal felt a tugging on the line.

  He looked back. Maury was waving him up into a shelter of one of the big rocks. He waved back and turned off from the direct path, crawling up into the ice-free overhang. Behind him, as he turned, he saw Maury coming toward him, and behind Maury, Doug.

  “Doug wants to tell you something!” Maury shouted against the wind noise, putting his mask up close to Cal’s.

  “What is it?” Cal shouted.

  “—Saw it again!” came Doug’s answer.

  “Something moving?” Doug nodded. “Behind us?” Doug’s mask rose and fell again in agreement. “Was it one of the aliens?”

  “I think so!” shouted Doug. “It could be some sort of animal. It was moving awfully fast—I just got a glimpse of it!”

  “Was it—” Doug shoved his masked face closer, and Cal raised his voice—“was it wearing any kind of clothing that you could see?”

  “No!” Doug’s head shook back and forth.

  “What kind of life could climb around up here without freezing to death—unless it had some protection?” shouted Maury to them both.

  “We don’t know!” Cal answered. “Let’s not take chances. If it is an alien, he’s got all the natural advantages. Don’t take chances. You’ve got your gun, Doug. Shoot anything you see moving!”

  Doug grinned and looked harshly at Cal from inside his mask.

  “Don’t worry about me!” he shouted back. “Maury’s the one without a gun.”

  “We’ll both keep an eye on Maury! Let’s get going now. There’s only about another hour or so before the sun goes behind those other mountains—and we want to be in camp underneath the far ridge before dark!”

  He led off again and the other two followed.

  As they approached the far ridge, the wind seemed to lessen somewhat. This was what Cal had been hoping for—that the far ridge would give them some protection from the assault of the atmosphere they had been enduring in the open. The dark wall of the ridge, some twenty or thirty feet in sudden height at the edge of the cwm, was now only a hundred yards or so away. It was already in shadow from the descending sun, as were the downslope sides of the big rock chunks. Long shadows stretched toward a far precipice edge where the cwm ended, several thousand feet below. But the open icy spaces were now ruddy and brilliant with the late sunlight. Cal though wearily of the pup tents and his sleeping bag.

  Without warning a frantic tugging on the rope
roused him. He jerked around, and saw Maury, less than fifteen feet behind him, gesturing back the way they had come. Behind Maury, the rope to Doug led out of sight around the base of one of the rock chunks.

  Then suddenly Doug slid into view.

  Automatically Cal’s leg muscles spasmed tight, to take the sudden jerk of the rope when Doug’s falling body should draw it taut. But the jerk never came.

  Sliding, falling, gaining speed as he descended the rooftop-steep slope of the cwm, Doug’s body no longer had the rope attached to it. The rope still lay limp on the ground behind Maury. And then Cal saw something he had not seen before. The dark shape of Doug was not falling like a man who finds himself sliding down two thousand feet to eternity. It was making no attempt to stop its slide at all. It fell limply, loosely, like a dead man—and indeed, just at that moment, it slid far upon a small, round boulder in his path which tossed it into the air like a stuffed dummy, arms and legs asprawl, and it came down indifferently upon the slope beyond and continued, gaining speed as it went.

  Cal and Maury stood watching. There was nothing else they could do. They saw the dark shape speeding on and on, until finally it was lost for good among the darker shapes of the boulders farther on down the cwm. They were left without knowing whether it came eventually to rest against some rock, or continued on at last to fall from the distant edge of the precipice to the green, unknown depth that was far below them.

  After a little while Maury stopped looking. He turned and climbed on until he had caught up with Cal. His eyes were accusing as he pulled in the loose rope to which Doug had been attached. They looked at it together.

  The rope’s end had been cut as cleanly as any knife could have cut it.