by Andre Norton
"Uh-unh," grunted Mike, plugging in the speaker again. "I just believe in equal rights for men. How'd you like to be married to a dame like that and have to trail her to a place where there's three women to forty-eight men?"
"Ask me how I'd like to be married to a dame like that period!" Joey invited him.
Mike adjusted the shade on the light so as to shadow half the room. He straightened the blanket where the three visitors had sat, appropriated the one from the upper bunk to cover himself, and lay down.
"Your watch," he announced coldly. "Wake me up if anything comes in!"
The rope lacing of the canvas creaked as he settled himself; then Joey was left with only the quiet hiss of the radio. He leaned back in the folding chair and relaxed.
Hansen paused and turned to survey the ground he had covered in the past half hour. The hiss of his air-circulator and the whine of the tiny motors within his suit were a comfort in the face of his bleak surroundings.
He had found himself trotting along at such an easy pace that he had kept going past Mt. Pico. Now he wondered if he ought to stop.
"Might as well go on," he muttered. "Now that I've picked up the tractor trail from Archimedes, I can hardly be missed by the relief crew."
He eyed the twin tracks in the gray sand. Flanked by his own wide-spaced footprints, they stretched away into the dim distance. As a sign that man had passed, they did little but accentuate the coldness of the scene.
"Maybe I'll stop at the big triple peak," Hansen planned. "That's about thirty-five or forty miles . .. they ought to be along by then if they started right away."
Careful not to admit to himself that relief might be slow in starting from Archimedes, he took a last look at Pico. Rearing starkly upward, it projected a lonely, menacing grandeur, like a lurking iceberg or an ancient monument half-buried in the creeping sands of a desert. In the fight of the nearly full Earth, it was a pattern of gray angles and inky black patches—not a hospitable sight.
"Come on, come onl" Hansen reproved himself. "Let's get moving! You want to turn into a monument too?"
He had stopped just before reaching Pico to replenish his suit tank from the big cylinder, and still felt good at having managed the valves without the mishap he had feared. He did not feel like a man who had traveled seventy miles.
"Why, on Earth," he thought, "that would be a good three-day march! I feel it a little, but not to the point of being tired."
He looked up at Earth as he started out again. The cloudy eastern coast of North America had moved around out of sight in the narrow dark portion. Hansen guessed that he had been on the move for at least four or five hours.
"I'd like to see their faces when they meet me way out here," he chuckled.
It occurred to him that he might be more tired than he thought, and as he went on he tried to save himself by holding his pace to a brisk walk. He found that if he got up on his toes a bit, he could still bound along that way.
The gray sand flowed under his feet, relieved occasionally by a stretch of yellowish ground. Hansen kept his eyes on his path and avoided the empty waste. When he did glance into the distance, he felt a twinge of loneliness. It was like the wide plains-land of the western United States, but grimly bare of anything so living as a wheat field.
He tried to remember as he moved along where it was that they had driven the tractor up a mountain ridge. He decided that he would rather avoid the climb, and kept an eye open for the chain of vein mountain beyond Pico.
"It ought to be faster to go around the end of them," he thought. "I can always pick up the tracks again."
When he finally sighted the rise ahead, he bore to his right. He remembered from the maps he had studied that the mountains curved somewhat toward another isolated peak, and he watched for that. As far as he knew, it had no name, but although only half the height of Pico, it was an unmistakable landmark.
The mountains on his left gradually dwindled into ragged hills and sank beneath the layer of lava. Hansen turned toward the last outcroppings as the triple mountain he sought came into sight. He climbed onto a broad rock and started to sit down.
The end of the big cylinder slung across his back clanged on the back of his helmet. Hansen lost his balance and tumbled over the side of the rock. Under his groping hands, the heat-tortured surface of it flaked away, and he bounced once on the ground before sprawling full length.
"Damn!" he grunted. "When'll I learn to watch my balance with this load?"
He picked himself up and unslung the tank. Then, allowing for the normal bulk of his back pack of tank and batteries, he backed against the outcropping until he was resting at a comfortable angle.
"Maybe I ought to relax a few minutes," he told himself. "Give the air-circulator time to filter out some of the sweat. Then, too, I don't want to get tired and miss them when they come along."
He idly scanned the arc between the peak toward which he was heading and Mt. Pico, still easily visible off to his right. The northern part of the Mare Imbrium drew his gaze coaxingly into the distance until he felt an insane desire to thrust his head forward. It almost seemed that if he could get beyond the double glass of his insulated faceplate, if he could escape from the restraint of his helmet, he might perceive his bleak surroundings with a better, more real sense of proportion.
There was nothing out there, of course, he forced himself to realize. Except for shadows of craterlets that looked like low mountains, there was nothing to see for fifty miles, and nothing even then more noteworthy than a couple of minor craters.
"Then what are you looking for?" Hansen snapped. "You want it to get on your nerves? And quit talking to yourself I"
He suppressed, however, the sudden urge to spring up and break into a run. Instead, he hitched around to stare along the ridge at whose end he sat.
He was far enough south to be able to see the side lit by earth-light. The ridge climbed higher the further it went, like the back of some sea monster rising from placid waters. Several miles away, a spur seemed to project out to the south; and Hansen thought he could remember a mile-wide crater on the maps.
He was a bit more comfortable inside his suit by now. He shifted his position to expedite the drying of the coveralls he wore under the spacesuit. Then he raised his arms and tried to clasp his hands behind his neck, but found that his garb was not that flexible.
"Shouldn't kick, I guess," he thought. "Without plenty of springs in the joints, I wouldn't be able to bend anything, considering the pressure difference."
He spent a minute admiring the construction of the suit that alone stood between him and instant extinction. That led him to think of the marvelous mechanism of the vacuum tractor that had carried him so comfortably—though he had not appreciated it at the time—across the Lunar plain. That, logically, recalled the men who had come with him and now were buried beneath one of Plato's many landslips.
"Talk about borrowed time!" he thought. "I wonder how long I'll stay lucky? Any little thing might do it—"
He had already taken three or four tumbles, or was it more? On any one of them, had he rolled the wrong way perhaps, he might have cracked that faceplate on a projecting rock. It was made as tough as possible, true, but if he even cracked the outer pane, the insulating sheet of air would spurt out to leave him with a slow leak. The inner plate would lose heat and cloud up from his breath, so that he would end up without even knowing where he was dying.
Or if he had slid over a surface jagged enough to tear through his yellow chafing suit, and then to rip the tough material of the inner suit—
A puncture here would be a real blowout!
He reminded himself to be careful about stepping into shadows, especially if they were more or less straight-edged. He did not remember encountering on the way out any of the canyon-like rills that ran like long cracks straight through all other surface features of Luna—except occasional small craters slammed into the rock after the rill had been formed—but there was always the chance that h
e might step into some other kind of a hole.
Fortunately, the earthlight shone into his face, so that he should be able to tell a shadow resulting from some elevation ahead of him.
"I'm getting the jitters squatting here," Hansen thought. "It won't do any harm to move on a little way. At least out past that mountain, where I'll have a good view towards Archimedes."
He arose and slung the big cylinder over his back again, jiggling on the toes of his boots to jockey it into place. With one last look over his shoulder at the trail of his footprints splotched in the ashy sand, he started off.
He was surprised to discover that the rest had stiffened him slightly, but that soon worked out. As soon as he was warmed up, he moved out in a brisk walk which on Luna sent him bounding along with fifteen-foot strides. Swinging his arms to keep his balance, he concentrated upon the footing ahead of him. Once more he was alone with the hissing and humming of his suit and the sound of his own breathing, undisturbed by either memory or anticipation.
Mike Ramirez stirred on his bunk with the change of the quiet hissing of the radio. Something more than the occasional crackle or creak of Joey's chair or football in the corridor brought him up with eyes still half-closed. To his sleep-drugged mind, it seemed that nothing had existed until a second ago, when a faint, dreamlike voice had started to speak.
He started to push back his blanket—Joey's blanket—and said, "Joey! You got a call!"
". . . to Archimedes Base. Hello Base! Over."
"I hear him!" snarled Joey. "Go back to sleep!"
He pushed his switch and the rushing noise that had partly muffled the weak voice gave way before the surge of his own transmitter.
"Archimedes Base to Tractor One!" Joey answered, and Mike leaned back on one elbow and sighed.
He did not listen while Joey took the message, but swung his feet to the floor and sat up. Wiggling his toes uncomfortably, he wished he had taken off his shoes; but he had expected to lie down only half an hour or so. Until the call came in, he had been sound asleep.
Joey acknowledged the message and turned to Mike after dropping his pencil.
"The Serenitatis bunch," he said. "They left two of them at Linné to take photos and poke around while the other pair brought the tractor back through between the Apeninness and Caucasus to call in."
"Everything okay?"
"Yeah, they're on the way back already, but they say Linné didn't look as if it was ever a volcano after all."
"Very true if interesting," said Mike. "Okay, take it to Burney. I'll bend an ear a while."
He tossed the blanket back onto the upper bunk and walked over to the chair. He stretched, and sat down as Joey's footsteps departed down the corridor.
He sat there, staring moodily at the softly lighted dials of the radio, wishing he had a cigarette. That was one habit he had had to cut off short when joining the expedition.
"I think I'm getting over it some," he congratulated himself. He looked up at the sound in the corridor, thinking that Joey had made good time to Burney's compartment and back. He raised an eyebrow as Louise entered.
"I just saw Joey go by," she announced hastily. "Did some news come in?"
"Tractor One reported—just routine. What are you doing, picketing this dive?"
"I—I just happened to be passing the Junction, and I saw the paper in Joey's hand." "Uh-huh," grunted Mike.
What the members of the expedition had come to call the "Junction" was an intermediate dome equipped with the main airlock. The other buildings connected with it through safety doors so as to localize any danger or air loss in the event of a rupture in one of the domes. It was, in effect, the front hall of the whole Base.
And if you stand there long enough, thought Mike, everyone you know on Luna will pass by, and you'll find out everything that's going on.
"Where is number Two now?" demanded Louise quietly.
Scared, thought Mike, noting the over-controlled tenseness of her voice.
"I don't know for sure," he answered, not looking at her. "It's time they were inside Plato, and we can't expect to hear them from in there."
Louise walked jerkily to the bunk and sat on the foot of the lower section. She crossed her legs. Seeing the nervous manner in which she twitched her foot, Mike turned to his radio.
After a moment, she spoke again, and his shoulders quivered at the agonized harshness of her tone.
"Don't string me along, Mikel I want to knowl You were worried about them hours ago, weren't you?"
Mike licked his lips.
"That don't mean anything," he muttered.
"The others backtracked to report, didn't they? To call in, I mean. Something happened to number Two, didn't it?"
"Now, take it easy, Louise!" Mike squirmed in his chair, then forced himself to sit still. It was not the sort of furniture that would stand much squirming. "Burney kinda considered that as a possibility, but in the end they decided things were probably okay."
"Then why did they have Bucky in here?" she demanded.
"Just in case they thought it worth the trouble of scouting the Plato region. Nothing special."
Louise bounced up from the bunk. She stood beside it, stiff, with her little fists clenched tightly at her sides.
"They wouldn't let this long a time go by without calling in and you know it!" she declared. "Even if they did, there ought to be a tractor on the way to check."
"You might have a point there," admitted Mike.
"It could always be called back."
"It's probably been thought of," said Mike. "Look, Louise, why don't you calm down and let the worryin' get done by the people supposed to do it?"
She did not look at him. The darkness of her eyes surprised him, and he realized how she had paled beneath her tan.
"I can't help it," she said. "It's my fault, in a way. He only came along because I got so excited about the expedition I couldn't stay down on Earth. He didn't want to come, and now he's out there-"
Mike rose and shoved his chair aside with his foot. He thought the girl was going to faint. Watching her narrowly, he reached out to put his hand on her arm.
He sighed with relief as he heard Joey whistling outside. Louise straightened and moved away from his hand as the younger operator entered.
"Why don't you go see Burney?" suggested Mike. "He'll explain how he figures the odds; or if you want to argue, it's more sense to do it with him than me. I got nothing to do with it."
The girl pulled herself together with a visible effort.
"I know, Mike. Thanks for listening, anyway."
"Joey, go along with her to Burney's quarters!"
"That's all right," said Louise. "I can find my way further than that."
They watched her leave.
Once more, Joey took the chair before the set and the pair of them sat in glum silence. The ventilation system came to life in one of its efforts to homogenize the Base atmosphere, and its sigh partly drowned out the hiss of the radio.
"You know something, Joey?" grunted Mike.
"What?"
"I got a feelin' we're not gonna see those guys again." "Hope you're wrong," said Joey. "It's awful tough digging around here, after the first few inches."
Hansen trotted along steadily with the four thousand foot mountain rising in a sheer sweep out of the lava "sea" over to his right. There were three distinct peaks, he knew, but they ran in a line away from him so that the whole thing appeared one towering mass to him. Most of it, from his position, was black with the deepness of Lunar shadows, although he was gradually reaching a location where he could see the splashes of earthlight on the tortured rocks.
"Pretty soon I'll be out in the real flat, with nothing but a scattering of little craters to steer by," he reflected. "If I don't want to stop, how had I better head?"
Just in case the problem should arise, he began to estimate the direction he should take and the sort of ground he would find.
The first thing would be to bear slightl
y left until he picked up the trail of the tractor once more. Then he could expect a region of fairly frequent craterlets, leading up to Kirch, a modest but respectable seven miles in diameter. If he passed to the right of Kirch, he would be kept from wandering aimlessly out into the Mare Imbrium by a range of vein mountains. He might go farther astray by passing Kirch to the left, but there the going would probably be easier.
"Then what?" he murmured, trying to recall the map and the journey in the tractor.
There was another open area, he seemed to remember, and then the forty-mile string of peaks called the Kirch Mountains, bordered on the right by an even longer ridge of vein mountains which might once have been part of the range.
And then, another thirty miles or so would bring him to the ringwall of Archimedes!
Hansen shook his head.
"That would be going a little too far," he muttered.
His voice sounded husky to his own ears, and he paused to suck up a few swallows of water through the hose. He must have been half-hypnotized by the steady streaming of the gray surface under his feet, for he suddenly realized that he had gone considerably beyond the triple peak.
Without his steady forward speed, he found it difficult for a moment to stand erect. He braced against the movement of the big tank on his back, and turned around to look back.
He stared at the dark, earthlit ground over which he had been trotting. With the looming mountain in the foreground, and the upthrust ringwalls of smaller craterlets here and there above the level, aseptic frigidity of the plain, it was a scene of complete desolation. It was more naked of life or any kind of softness than any desert on Earth; yet to Hansen, it did not really seem like a desert. There was some further overtone plucking at the fringe of his consciousness.
Then it came to him.
"It's like an oceanT he exclaimed. "There's something about it that's like .. . like a cold, gray, winter sea smashing in on a rocky coast!"
There was the same monstrous, chilling power, the same effect upon the beholder that here was a massive, half-sentient entity against whose callous strength and cruelty nothing human could stand. It was a thing to observe from a safe distance, to cower from lest it somehow become aware of the puny structure of bone, blood, and flesh spying upon it. Then there would be no escape, no withstanding the crushing force of its malice. But he was on no safe cliff. He was down in the sea.