by John Burke
When the flap lifted, I let her get down first.
She stared around the barren, starlit landscape. The rocky pinnacle behind the dome reeled against the sky and seemed ready to topple down on us.
Her voice crackled in my ear. “It’s... quiet, isn’t it?” There was certainly no welcoming music, and nobody hurrying toward us from the dome. I went to the dome and peered in through a porthole. Then I took a look at the Bug.
When I turned around, there was no sign of Gem.
I barked into my helmet mike: “Clem, where are you? Where’ve you got to?”
There was no reply. I was just about to yell something foul, not giving a damn who heard it, when there was a little click as she switched to transmission and said:
“Just around the comer. Behind the rock. I’ve found... something.”
I pounded after her. She looked tiny and insignificant against the petrified ogres above.
“Don’t wander off like that,” I said. “You’ve got to stay in sight.”
“I’m sorry, but... look!”
A shallow pit had been scooped out of the ground, and some yards beyond it was the beginning of a deeper shaft.
“You see,” said Gem, “he has been mining.”
I didn’t know we’d ever needed any evidence on that, one way or the other. You didn’t banish yourself to parts like these unless you intended to do some digging.
“Doesn’t mean he’s found anything useful,” I observed. She was looking around. “Where could he have gone?” “Not far, or he’d have taken his Bugdozer.”
We walked on. This time she played the good girl and stayed in step with me, though I could feel her wanting to push on, to hurry over the next ridge and see what was waiting there. Right now was the time for the big happy ending: Wally coming up against the starshine, waving triumphantly, and Gem rushing into his brotherly arms. Happy laughter, and a background of the music of the spheres.
We came around a squat abutment, and I heard Gem shout deafeningly, the echoes ringing around my helmet. “Wally!”
There it was, a figure outlined against the sky, taking a sight through a theodolite.
She bounded toward it.
“Careful!” I went after her. If she tore her suit against any of those jagged edges, there’d be no happy reunion.
Clem slowed, but not all that much. She blundered up to her brother and grabbed him ecstatically by the shoulder.
He stood erect for one more moment, just the way he had been as we approached; and then, slowly and gently, he fell and lay at her feet.
I heard Clem gasp. Then she screamed.
I came up alongside and looked down, and saw what she was seeing. From behind the faceplate of the helmet, what was left of Wally Taplin’s face grinned fixedly back at us.
There wasn’t going to be any happy reunion anyway. And if Wally had discovered anything in the way of riches, he wasn’t ever going to get the chance of spending the profits.
8
THE BEST I could do in the way of a memorial was a rough cross made of pick-handles lashed together with wire. I had to bash a hole in the harsh ground to take it, and then tamp dust and grit down around the upright. Wally, too, had a covering of dry shale and rock drippings.
“Maybe we can send back and have something better put up, one day,” I said.
Clem shook her head slowly inside her helmet. “No. That’s right for a miner. Poor Wally. I hope he did find something, just for the fun of it... for his own sake... over this hill.”
I shouldered the equipment I’d taken from the body— two airbottles and the tackle that went with them—and eased the rocket pistol into a more comfortable position against my thigh. We walked slowly back to our Moon-bug.
“You couldn’t tell,” asked Clem wretchedly, “what it was... what was it made him die?”
“No idea.”
“I suppose the idiot just made a mistake.”
That didn’t make much sense to me. Wally had managed two years without making one, and in two years you usually got yourself pretty well organized. He had snuffed out with incredible speed—incredible, considering his suit hadn’t been punctured. And to go the way he did, to rot like that, there had to be air inside his suit. Experimentally I thumbed the knob of one of the airbottles on my shoulder. The cylinder was empty. But when I tried the other, it spat a puff of vapor.
“A mistake,” I mused aloud.
“And if we can’t prove he found anything on the claim, we can’t register it, can we?”
“No.”
“So we can’t sell it. We just lose it. And Mother doesn’t get her money back.”
“That’s the way it goes.”
We reached the Bug and loaded the bits and pieces in through the airlock. When I’d adjusted the pressure and | checked the seal, we lifted our faceplates.
Clem looked pale and lost. She said: “I don’t know what to say. Or do. Or... or anything. I won’t be able to pay you for the flight.”
“Not to worry. Better than being in jail, anyway.”
She stared forward through the reinforced pane.
“Couldn’t we have another look around? Around the claim, I mean—just to see if he did find something?”
“All nine hundred square miles of it?” I said. I settled myself into the driving seat and waved her into place beside me. “We’d do better to get back and report this.”
“But if he had found something...”
I could sympathize with her. I could feel for her, still clinging to some shred of hope—some belief in a last-minute miracle. But sympathy was one thing and miracles were another; and as far as I was concerned it was time to be moving back to base.
The Bug coughed to itself and then rumbled forward. We swung around the rock that had originally obscured the little dome from our view. I switched the headlights on full.
And there, bathed in the light, three men were waiting for us.
They stood as still as Wally had stood, but I knew they Weren’t dead. There was something menacing in the way jthey were grouped, and in the way their hands rested close to their belts. Hands poised above guns, that was the way it looked to me.
They wore bright, distinctive Moon suits—red, yellow, and green. The best and the newest, showing up against the monochrome landscape, and neatly distinguishing one man from another.
I snapped on the radio. “Who’s that out there?”
The hand of one of them dropped and closed on his gun.
“Who is it?” I demanded.
The gun came up. I slammed the Bug into reverse, and it sprang backward with a tortured scream of transmission mechanism up through the flooring.
His aim was good, though. The window starred and dissolved before my eyes. Air was sucked toward it, and the map churned up in a coil of paper and whipped past my ear. I threw myself across Clem and slammed down the faceplate of her helmet.
No miracles? It wasn’t much less than a miracle that we had kept our Moon suits on while arguing about that little matter of staying or leaving.
The Bug was still careering backward, bouncing off every obstacle. I pushed myself back from Clem and made a grab at the controls again.
There was another protesting whine from below as I threw it into full forward drive. The three men had started to trot toward us, but now they scattered as the Bug’s weight came thundering down on them.
I saw a puff of shots as we went through, and there was a fizz and crackle of electricity from under the dashboard. The whine of the motors became a groan, then a stutter.
I swung the Bug around a rocky steeple, and it coughed and died about twenty-five yards from the base of the cliff.
Clem was still struggling for breath. She mouthed something, realized she hadn’t switched on, and flicked the button on her wrist. “What did they—?”
I grabbed her wrist and switched off again. Then I raised a finger, and said loudly and slowly and clearly: “We’ll stay in here. Safer than outside.”
They stopped when they saw the Bug. Then they spread out, rocket pistols thrusting from their fists.
I tugged at the sprung, self-coiling wire in my belt, and plugged one end into the socket of Clem’s suit. She looked down at it. Something else new to her. She knew none of the routines.
I said: “We’re on telephone now, as long as we’ve got this link. Don’t say a word on the radio: they’d pick it all up.”
I balanced Wally’s pistol in my hand, got the weight and feel of it, and waited. Around the snag of rock I could see our three Mends advancing on the Bug.
I could have shot one of them down right away. Maybe two, leaving only one to deal with. But my finger wouldn’t squeeze. Not yet. I waited.
And a voice in my ears said: “Come on out of there, both of you. Or we’ll drill it like a sieve.”
I flicked the mike switch and said: “I surrender. I haven’t got a gun. But the girl’s hurt. You’ll have to help me.”
Clem looked at me, puzzled.
“Okay,” came the reply. “Just stay right there, and we’ll come on in.”
They came on in, all right. They marched up to the Bug, and when they were a few feet away they leveled their guns again and poured shots into it. It had a tough hide, but it wasn’t proof against that sort of treatment at that range. Holes were torn in its sides. They’d have been torn in Clem and myself if we’d been where we were supposed to be.
Well, that was it. Now I knew what kind of bastards we were dealing with. I knew the rules.
I took careful aim and shot the green man. He went down.
The other two dived behind the Bug.
I pushed Clem well back into the shelter of the rock. Chips flew suddenly, silently in front of us. There were puffs of vapor from behind the Bug, and a scouring of fire through the ground a few inches away. All in eerie, deadly, deathly silence.
Clem tugged at my arm. I glanced back. She nodded toward a crevice in the face of the cliff.
We edged toward it I urged her in, then faced back the way we had come. There was a flicker of color as one of the men sprinted from behind the Bug to a nearby rock.
More splinters flew into the air not six inches from us.
I plugged the telephone lead in again and said: “Keep down. A piece of flying rock can bust your suit as bad as any rocket blast.”
Leaning out, I waited for another sign. The red suit appeared suddenly, bright in the darkness between the Bug and the cliff. I fired; but a scorching blast showered dust around my helmet, and I missed and dodged back.
I checked the charges left in the magazine. Only six. Through the telephone I said: “Any more ammunition in that belt?”
Clem bent over it in the weird, uncertain light. “No. Nothing.”
I backed away. If I only had six more shots, I wasn’t going to take any chances. Clem huddled into the crevice. Then she disappeared as though sucked in by the rock. I heard her gasp.
“Bill, this cave... no, it isn’t. It isn’t!”
I backed away, keeping a reasonable distance so that she wouldn’t tug the telephone line out. “Isn’t what?” I grunted.
“It’s not a cave. It’s a shaft. Wally must’ve dug it.”
I ducked in close to her, and suddenly she snapped on the light of her torch. It picked out an unmistakable sawtooth pattern of tool-marks on the shaft walls.
“Put that light out!” I snapped.
The light went off, but I could feel her groping about, and a moment later she leaned cautiously toward the light, balancing a piece of rock on her palm.
“Do you know what that is?”
I was still watching the ground outside, waiting for the first sign of movement. I spared her only a glance, and said:
“Piece of rock.”
“With a vein of nickel. A good rich vein. Wally did find something.”
“Are you sure?”
“I know something about mining by now,” she said touchily. She weighed the hunk of rock, shot through with a leaden glow, in her hand and brooded over it. “Was this why they murdered him?”
“Did they?”
“Well, they’re trying to murder us, aren’t they? Or is this just an old Moon ceremony of welcome?”
“You’re probably right,” I conceded. “But let’s sort this problem out first.”
As though to emphasize this, a shot hissed silently across a spur nearby. Then there was a second, and I saw from the angle of the scour that it came from above. I edged out, then dodged back. Several heavy chunks of hillside came down where I’d been standing.
I gave Clem a gentle tug, and began to ease along the base of the cliff. After a few steps I felt a faint plop against my chest, and realized that I had pulled the telephone lead out
No time to stop now. Clem should be following and keeping quiet anyway.
I reached an outcrop like an elephant’s foot. As I was about to clamber over it, Clem cannoned into me from behind. I half turned to swear at her, even if she couldn’t hear, when she stabbed the telephone plug back into place.
“Bill... behind you!”
I looked back. The bulldozer Bug was shambling toward us. As we tried to plunge over the spur into cover, shots sprayed past us. I crouched, staggered to one side, and for a moment was staring up at the jagged silhouette of a ridge against the sky—and the silhouette of the man who had hoped to smash down on us from above.
I fired.
He toppled gently, and somersaulted in a slow curve, out from die hillside. It was the man in the yellow suit.
As he hit the ground, a sharp rock sliced into his suit, and it crumpled. A wisp of vapor puffed out, and that was it.
The Bug was coming on at us, its scoop jutting forward like a battering ram. I went one way, Clem went another, and the telephone lead parted again. I fired, but the shot was deflected by the scoop. Not enough shots to play that sort of game—and it wasn’t a game I stood much chance of winning anyway.
I wondered where Clem was, but there was no time to check on her. The Bug was weaving clumsily but purposefully from side to side, herding me back toward the cave.
If I made a run for it, before I was trapped...
But where? If I dashed across the boulder-strewn plain, I’d be a perfect target from the side windows of the Bug. I was safer in the cave, if I could wedge myself far back in it, beyond the reach of the Bug.
I clawed my way back around the cave mouth, and stopped for breath.
The Bug lowered its scoop and tore rocks and shale up from the ground, pushing them forward in a moving wall.
A few gouges of the scoop like that, and I could be walled in. Like some holy man of old. And I wasn’t feeling holy.
The Bug backed away a few feet, then charged again, shoving an even higher mound of clashing rocks at me.
Then it stalled.
I didn’t think. I just flung myself up the wall, grabbed hold of the scoop and then, as the engine stuttered into life again, was carried back with it. I hooked an arm over it and tried to swing myself over so that I’d be able to get a shot through the front window. I caught the flash of the red Moon suit inside, then I was skied up in the air. The driver began to manipulate the scoop in a frenzy, flailing it up and down and from side to side, trying to pitch me off or smash me to the ground at the bottom.
I clung on, every bone in my body jarred by the swoop and crash of the scoop. There was no sound outside—but in my head there was a pounding and throbbing that couldn’t go on for lo
ng. My fingers slipped. I grabbed another hold, praying I wouldn’t slice the suit open against the harsh rim of the scoop.
The Bug scuttled backward a long way. I wondered if this was going to be a last charge—a canter, to ram me against the rock face. It shivered, then began to lumber forward again. Abruptly the airlock at the back opened, and the man in red flung himself out, turning with his gun in his hand. He was hoping to be fast enough to shoot me off the scoop.
He wasn’t.
I jumped from the top of the scoop before he could fire. I sailed over the roof of the Bug slowly, turning like a dolphin as I swung toward him. In mid-air I fired.
There was an explosion of vapor from his airbottles. He staggered, regained his balance, tried to aim. Then he dropped his pistol and started clawing at his helmet.
All right, I’d tried to kill him. But not this way. When you saw a man in throes of that kind, you dropped everything and went to his rescue. Or you tried.
I stumbled back toward the cave. Clem was cowering back against the wall. I grabbed the telephone lead and. made contact again.
“Give me that full airbottle!”
Clem looked wildly around, then humped the bottle out. I heaved it up and sprang toward the writhing man on the ground. I tried to steady him while I clipped the new bottle into place. Then I turned it on.
He thrashed over once more. His face stared up imploringly from within his helmet. He took a deep breath—I could see him, and I waited for it to calm him—but then his face contorted even more, he drew his lips hideously back from his teeth, and with one final convulsion he died.
Clem came and stood beside me.
I got to my feet. I was baffled. And then I wasn’t baffled any more. I switched on the radio—there were no enemies to hear us any more—and said:
“This one was your brother’s, wasn’t it?”
I touched the airbottle with my foot. Clem stooped to look at it, and nodded.
“Well, he was murdered all right,” I said. “Whatever’s in here, it isn’t air.”
She winced.
And now, how did we get out of here? Our Moonbug was a writeoff. It was a long walk back to Farside Five.