Space Police Page 18

Then he realized that Old Keno, wrestling the tractor, showed no signs of fatigue. Insensibly Moffat’s estimation of his own capabilities dropped. He began to regard Keno with a sort of awe.

  “Don’t you want me to take it for awhile?” he said at last out of of a guilty conscience.

  “Sorry, this will get tough as soon as those suns set and we’ll have to rely on our spots. I’ll just hold on if it’s all the same to you.”

  After a while young Moffat began to fidget. Then he suddenly realized what was the matter. “Say, aren’t you hungry?” he said.

  Old Keno looked at him blankly. Then he said, “Oh yes, yes of course. Get yourself something to eat.”

  Moffat started to turn and in that moment realized all the sensations that a man must feel who is caught in a strait jacket. He could not swivel more than an inch in either direction. His heavy uniform coat was frozen solid upon him.

  Impotently he cursed the supply station eighteen light years away. The trickle of heat had melted a filter of snow from under the windshield. While it was still daylight it had dampened his coat. As the suns set the temperature had dropped to about fifty below zero.

  “Turn up the heat,” he said plaintively. Old Keno blinked at him.

  “That’s all the heat there is,” he apologized.

  “Well, hit me with your fist or something,” said Moffat. Old Keno blinked again. “It’s my coat,” said Moffat.

  Keno grunted and brought a backhand slap against Moffat’s chest which cracked the ice sheathing. With the disintegration begun the young constable could move about. He procured a can of rations.

  These had been packed by some far-off organization which never had expected for a minute that anyone was going to eat any of them. Theoretically when one took off the lid heat was instantaneously generated through all the food. Moffat broke the cover and for the next ten seconds—but no more—the mass was warm. Before he could get the first mouthful between his teeth the savage cold had frozen it through.

  He started to complain and then he looked at the stolid Keno. Frozen rations were nothing to the old man—he was munching mechanically on the food. “Well,” thought Moffat, “if he can take it I can.” And he reached into an inner pocket with his clumsy glove and brought out a chocolate bar, which flew into splinters each time he took a bite from it.

  “You’d better let me drive,” said Moffat. “You’ll need some of your strength later on. We don’t want to get tired out.”

  He intended this as a vengeful reference to Old Keno’s age. But the senior constable paid no attention whatever.

  “I said you’d better let me drive for awhile,” said young Moffat.

  “You sure you can handle this thing?” said Old Keno.

  “We were taught all types of vehicles in school,” said Moffat a little savagely.

  “Well,” said Old Keno doubtfully, “I suppose we’ve got more time than we really need. And we’ve been making pretty good speed. You might as well start learning now as ever.” He set the automatic control on the tractor and when it reached a level stretch, during which the control could operate, they swiftly switched.

  Moffat may have been bitterly cold outside but he was burning within. So the old man thought they’d lose speed if he drove, did he? Well, since when did youth take any lessons from age on that subject.

  The dark was very thick and the floodlights were piercingly bright on the track ahead. The multicolored cliffs and valley of ice fled past them. Moffat found that it was extremely difficult to trace the track accurately. More than once Old Keno had to tap him sharply to keep him from straying.

  Each time Old Keno tapped young Moffat seethed anew. There sat the old fool in his patched blue shirt, not caring any more about this cold than he did about rations. Obviously the old man was out to show him up, to make a fool out of him, to break his spirit. Obviously Keno expected to send him back to headquarters with his resignation written and ready to be turned in. Well, that would never happen.

  The tractor roared and whined. Young Moffat let it out to two hundred and ninety miles an hour. At this speed the ice hummocks were a blur and even more often now Old Keno had to tap him to keep him on the track.

  “Pretty soon,” said Old Keno, “we’ll start down. The snow level at this time of the year stops at about twenty-three thousand feet. You’ll find Ooglach’s got a lot in the way of drops and rises. There isn’t any sea level, properly speaking.

  “We’ve got three seas but from the lowest to the highest there’s an eighteen-thousand-foot difference in elevation. I’d hate to think of what would happen if they ever got connected.

  “It’s two hundred and ninety thousand feet from the lowest point on this planet to the highest. Nature scraped her up some when she was built. I guess she wasn’t rightly intended for men. This plateau we’re on is the most comfortable spot you’ll discover.” Moffat listened with some disbelief. The old man was just trying to scare him away.

  “The low valleys are all scorchers,” Keno continued, “and the one where I think our friends are hanging out will be running about a hundred and fifty degrees now that the sun has set.”

  Young Moffat glanced sideways at him. “Warm, huh?”

  “Well, it isn’t so bad once you get used to it,” said Old Keno. “By the way you’ll want to start looking sharp now. We’ll have to turn off these lights. If we show them as we come over the top edge into the valley they’ll have plenty of time to get away in their space-can. D’ye mind?” he said.

  Young Moffat thought savagely that if Old Keno could drive in the dark, as he had immediately after sundown, he certainly could. He reached down and threw the light switch.

  Instantly, as a reaction, the whole world was black to him. He lost his sense of direction utterly. He was light-blinded and yet hurtling forward over uneven terrain at tremendous speed. He did not know whether he was turning to right or left and felt certain that he was about to shoot on a tangent from his course. In a panic young Moffat grabbed at the light panel but he was too late.

  He felt the tractor start to turn. He felt Old Keno’s savage pull at the levers which might avert the disaster. Then there was a terrifying crash and a roar, a splintering of glass, the scream of a dismembered motor and the dying whine of treads running down to a slow clatter.

  Young Moffat picked himself up off an ice hummock two hundred feet from the scene of the wreck. He was dazed and bleeding. One of his gloves was missing and one of his boots was ripped all the way down the side, exposing his flesh to the killing winds of the night. For a moment he could not tell ground from stars. A few planets of his own invention were spinning giddily in space.

  After a bit he located the direction of the wreck by the sound of dripping fuel. He crawled back to it fearfully. He thought perhaps Old Keno lay dead within it. Moffat saw his own track in the luminous snow and found that he had plowed straight through a feathery snowbank, which alone had saved him.

  Two feet above or below the course he had taken would have brought him into disastrous collision with enormous lumps of ice.

  He fumbled over the area and at last located the dark crushed blob of the wreck. All his resentment for Keno was gone now. He knew that this was his own fault. He felt that if the old man were dead he could never forgive himself. He should have known he would not be able to drive at that speed with the lights out.

  “Where are you?” he shouted into the cab, fumbling through the torn upholstery.

  With a sob he slid in through the broken windshield and felt along the upended floor for Old Keno’s body. But it was not there.

  Young Moffat scuttled crabwise out of the fuming wreckage and began to look through the debris for a pocket torch.

  “Well, I’m mighty glad to find that you’re all right, son.”

  Moffat leaped upright as though he’d been shot.

  “I walked on down the line,” said Old Keno. “We’re within about two hundred yards of the edge there and we would have been starting down soon
anyway. So we ain’t lost much time.”

  Moffat threw the torch he had found to the ground before him. If Old Keno had only been reproving or solicitous—if he had shown something, anything, but the calm cool detachment of a man who, immediately after a wreck, would walk on a little further just to see how things were—

  “I might have been killed,” said young Moffat.

  “Oh no,” said Old Keno. “On my way up to the rim I looked at you there in the snow and saw that you were all right.”

  The inferred superiority of this was almost more than Moffat could stand. He was rising to a point of fury.

  “Well, you’d better not stand there,” said Keno, the wind tugging at his thin shirt. “You’re liable to get cold. Come along.”

  Moffat fumbled through the drift and found his glove. Then he turned to trudge after Keno. As he cooled he found that something terrible and devastating had happened to his ego.

  He had always considered himself so competent. And he had always felt that older men were used up and worn out. Now he found that a man who must be well over sixty easily had the edge on him both in poise and in endurance. The cool rationality of the fellow had gnawed at young Moffat’s ego until its borders were frayed.

  Sunk now in his own estimation to the level of a schoolboy who is subject to tantrums, young Moffat followed in Keno’s tracks and presently came up with the old man.

  If he had expected an end to travail because they were to go downhill into a valley Moffat was mistaken. One of Ooglach’s moons, yellow and gibbous, had begun to rise. By its light the enormous crater before them, thirty thousand feet deep, lay like the entrance to the infernal regions.

  Its black sides were rough and jagged and precipitous. At twenty-three thousand feet one could see, by looking across several miles to the other side, where the snow level ended. Below that clung a handful of trees, ghostly now in the brilliant moonlight.

  Young Moffat stared at the precipice before him. There was a track down it which angled off at a steep grade, cut probably by some mining survey expedition. But Keno was not considering such a path.

  “We’ve lost quite a lot of time,” said Old Keno. “We’ll have to make up for it one way or the other. Let’s pitch off here and scramble on down the sidewall. It’s only about thirty thousand feet and the jumps are pretty easy.

  “I’ve been here before. I didn’t take this side but I don’t expect we’ll run into a lot of trouble. Now—you keep close to me and don’t go losing your hold on anything and falling because we don’t want to mess this up again tonight.”

  Young Moffat took the implied criticism haggardly. Old Keno slid forward over the ice and started to drop down from crevice to crevice with a swift agility which would have done credit to an orangutan.

  Young Moffat started out eagerly enough but in a very few minutes he discovered how bruised and shaken he had been by the wreck. And Old Keno, who must have been just as bruised, was stretching out a lead on him which was in itself a blunt criticism.

  Harassed and scrambling, young Moffat tried his best to keep up. He slid from one block of ice to the next, scraped his shins on pinnacles, cut his hands on ledges and, as the drop increased, time after time hung perilously to a crumbling chunk of basalt over eternity. He needed all his strength to get across each gap. And his foot hurt where his boot was torn.

  Old Keno, far far below and evidently having no trouble, constantly widened the gap. Young Moffat’s lungs were aching. If he had been too cold before he was too hot now. His uniform was shortly in ribbons and by the time he had gone down three thousand feet he gladly abandoned the jacket forever. He used only one sleeve of it to bind up a shin which really could have used a few stitches put in by a competent doctor.

  He was getting weaker as the swings and leaps took more and more heavy toll of him. He began to look down and ahead through a reddish haze which each time told him that the gap was getting wider and that Old Keno was having no trouble.

  An hour later he came up, an aching, half-sobbing wreck. He hit against a soft form. He could not even see the old man. He slumped down on a boulder.

  “Well, I’m glad you caught up to me,” said Old Keno. “Now let’s get moving. I took a look down into the valley and got the space-can spotted down there. They got a little fire lighted. Don’t drop so far behind again.”

  Young Moffat cleared his gaze and looked at Old Keno. “That man,” thought Moffat, “is going to kill me yet.”

  After all this terribly arduous mountaineering through the dark, over crevasses and down pinnacles and chimneys, swinging by razor-sharp outcrops to crumbling ledges, Old Keno Martin didn’t even have the grace or politeness to be short of breath. In the moonlight he was still his neat somewhat faded self.

  Beaten through and through, his conception of himself so thoroughly shot that only a miracle performed by himself could ever bring it back to life, young Moffat did his best to follow.

  Thirty thousand feet is a long way down! And the difficulties of the descent made it also a long way around. Time after time Old Keno waited for him. Never a word of encouragement, never a word of comment on the difficulties of the descent—Old Keno was neither short of breath nor apparently tired of limb.

  Hours later, when they at last came to the bottom of that scorching hell, Moffat supposed that he had at least passed through the worst of it. His breath was sobbing in and out of him. His body was a rack of pain. The only thing that had kept him going this long was the knowledge that the worst was almost over. Certainly he had no more to experience. But he was wrong!

  As Old Keno had said, it was a hundred and fifty degrees here in this crater. The sand was baking hot. He reached his hand up to his eyes and swept away some of the perspiration which was blinding him. His lips were thickened by dehI’dration.

  The night was so hot and so dry that it pulled the moisture out of a man with a physical force, cracking his skin and drying his eyes until it was torture to keep them open longer than a minute at a time.

  “Don’t walk forward,” said Keno, “there’s a two-thousand-foot drop about twenty feet in front of us.”

  Moffat, stumbling forward, hadn’t even realized he had caught up with Keno again. He was startled by the voice and he backed up a few steps. He concentrated his eyes on the spot Keno indicated and at last he saw the dark chasm. Gingerly he approached the edge.

  He felt that he was looking into the very bowels of the planet although he could see nothing but blackness. He sensed the awesome depth of it. He stepped back cautiously, afraid that if he made a sudden movement he might fall headlong over the edge. The heat waves coming up from that black hole made him dizzy and his legs felt as though they might slip out from under him at any second. He turned back to Keno.

  “We’re within a quarter mile of them,” said Old Keno. “I doubt if they got wind of us. It’s a heck of a long ways back there to the ridge and they probably figured we was a meteorite like I thought they would. If they saw our crash at all, that is. That crew can’t have been here more than ten or twenty minutes but they got a fire goin’ already. Smell it?”

  Moffat sniffed at the wind in vain. He could not discover the least odor of woodsmoke. Just breathing this air was enough to seal the lungs and burn scars on the throat without trying to smell anything in the bargain. He looked wonderingly at the old constable.

  “They’ll be boiling some fresh meat they got back at the mine,” said Old Keno. “It wouldn’t keep long down here and they probably haven’t any galley in their space-can. I figured I’d smell woodsmoke when I got here the second I noticed that a haunch of baysteer had been ripped from the drying racks outside the guard’s shack at the mine.”

  Trained arduously, given the highest grades in detection, the young constable felt insensibly lessened again. He was failing every test. He had missed an important clue. Hurriedly he changed the subject. “How’d they cross this gap?” he asked.

  “Oh, they’re on this side of it all right,” sai
d Old Keno. “I saw their last tracks back there about a quarter of a mile. They turned off to the left and we’re likely to find them about a quarter of a mile up the way. You’d better shed those boots. They’ll make an awful racket if we hit hard rock.”

  Again he felt like a small boy being told to do the most simple and obvious things. He shed the boots and was instantly aware of new difficulty. His feet were in ribbons from the terrible climb down and were chilblained by the shift in temperature as well. And now they had to contact sand which could have roasted eggs.

  With the first steps he felt his feet beginning to blister and tears shot into his eyes from the pain. But Old Keno had also shed his boots and was striding easily forward, oblivious of this new agony. The old man, thought Moffat, would have walked through walls of fire with only an impatient backward glance to see if Moffat was coming.

  “Are we close?” said Moffat at last and the words came out like rough pebbles, so achingly dry had his mouth become. Each gasp of air was like swallowing the plume on a blowtorch.

  “No need to talk low,” said Old Keno. “The wind’s from them to us. They’re camped by a running stream anyway and they can’t hear above it. It’ll be thirty degrees cooler where they are. This valley is like that. Hear it?”

  Moffat couldn’t but Old Keno was talking again, pointing to a tiny pinpoint, which was their fire, and the gleam, which was the space-can, beside it.

  “Cover all three from this side with your rifle. Don’t shoot unless you have to. I’ll circle and approach from the water side and challenge them. Don’t plug me by mistake now!”

  The disrespect in this made Constable Moffat wince. But he took station as requested. Lying across a frying hot rock with the night air broiling him, he laid the searing stock of the rifle against his cheek. He trained as ordered on the party about the fire.

  He almost didn’t care about what happened to himself any more. He knew that the rock was burning him. He knew that the rifle barrel was raising a welt on his cheek. He felt some slight relief that his now-bleeding feet were off the ground. But he just didn’t seem to care. There was the job to be done and that was all that mattered.