Space Pioneers Read online

  He looked around. Gray everywhere, mottled with inky shadows. Gray ash underfoot, gray-and-black lumps thrusting up from the surface like colossal vertebrae, gray distance in all directions.

  "Been going for hours," he thought, "and there's no sign, really, that I'll ever get anywhere! I might as well be in the middle of the far side of Pluto!"

  The huge mountain towered behind him, like a hulking beast from some alien world stalking the only object in all its frozen world that dared to move. Hansen suddenly could not bear to have his back turned to it. He faced it and edged clumsily away. The helmet that reduced his field of vision was his prison. If that black-shadowed mass of rock chose to topple over, it would easily reach him, and more. He would be ground under countless tons of weight, mangled and frozen in one instant—

  Hansen whirled about and bolted.

  On his first stride, he caught the toe of his right foot in the sand and sprawled forward with flailing arms. He plowed into the ground, throwing up spurts of sand like a speedboat tossing spray.

  Somehow, he was up immediately, running in long, wobbling, forty-foot bounds. His eyes bulged and the breath rasped between his hps as he strove desperately to keep his balance.

  It was like running in a dream, the nightmare come true. More than once, until he adapted to the pace, he found himself churning two or three steps at the zenith of his trajectory, too impatient to wait for the touch of boot on sand. There was sudden, dynamic power in his tiring muscles. All his joints felt loose.

  His chest began to labor and he stumbled slightly. With a quick spasm, he blew his lungs and sucked in a deeper breath. After a few repetitions, he felt a trifle easier. In a minute he began to get his second wind. All this came like a half-perceived process of instinct, while he concentrated narrowly upon speeding ahead.

  He flew up a slight grade and took off in a soaring leap to the next crest of an undulating stretch of pale yellow ash. The next thing he knew, he was rushing upon a long shadow that barred his path.

  A hasty glance each way warned him there was no use trying to skirt it, for the shadow or hole or whatever it was ran for hundreds of yards right and left. Hansen stamped hard at the near edge and kicked off for at least sixty feet. Something seemed to snap in his right knee, but he came down all right and kept running, well clear of the shadow.

  How long he ran, dodging this way and that to avoid hills and shadows obstructing his path, he did not know. In the end, the tiny motors of his suit fell behind the rate at which he consumed oxygen and gave off carbon dioxide and copious moisture.

  When he began to feel like an underwater swimmer reaching his limit with writhing chest, Hansen gave up. He stopped.

  That felt worse. He moved on at a gentle walk, accomplishing it mostly by motion from the ankles down. Amid the stifling warmth and stickiness inside his spacesuit, it was borne in upon him how badly he had lost his head.

  He looked back, panting. Where was the mountain? Then, following the trail of isolated scars on the surface beyond where they faded into the gray distance, he saw a small knob of gray against the star-dotted black of the horizon.

  "I guess . . . I've . . . really been traveling!" he panted. "Twenty minutes or half an hour—wonder how fast I went to put a mountain out of sight? Of course ... I was well past when I started."

  That reminded him of his bolt, and he closed his eyes in a paroxysm of shame.

  The sweat beading his forehead began to trickle down his cheekbones or nose. Now and then, a drop rolled into his eye, despite efforts to shake his head inside the confines of the helmet. It stung, but he was too blown to get excited over that.

  "Why did I have to go and do that?" he groaned inwardly.

  He remembered how level-headed he had been in the first minutes of the catastrophe. Calmly, he had judged the odds of there being any survivors; calmly, he had climbed down for the prime requisite, the tank of oxygen; calmly, he had started off by a well-chosen route that led him accurately to landmarks so plain that they could be spotted from Earth with a good pair of field glasses.

  He had intended to go only as far as Pico, or perhaps the triple peak. Or had he?

  Somewhere back there, he remembered, he had begun planning a further march. There could be no reason for that except—

  Except that he was secretly aware that he could count upon no help to reach him in time!

  "Why should they send anybody out yet?" he asked himself. "For all they know, we're still inside Plato, camping on the nice level lava floor. I must have been thinking that, underneath, when I was figuring which side to pass Kirch."

  He had been skating on thin ice and should have expected a crack-up. For a moment, he considered the possibility that it would have been better had he broken down on the spot. But then he might have quit while still on the ringwall of the great crater.

  "As it is," he said aloud, "I'll at least get the most possible mileage out of this suit. If I live long enough, I might even walk in on them at Base, for a surprise."

  He grinned a bit as he considered that pleasant fantasy:

  "Hi, Paul; where you beenF'

  "Oh, just out for a little walk on the moon."

  "And where did you go on your little moon walk?"

  "Took a turn around Plato. Pretty boring but 'toujours gai, whatthehell whatthehell!'"

  He managed a deeper breath as his equipment caught up somewhat to his physical needs. The half-grin on his lean features faded, and he stepped up his plodding pace.

  "Why kid myself?" he snorted. "I'm just about scared senseless! And I've got a right to be!"

  Bucky O'Neil, as the pilot who was to take the scouting rocket, occupied the only extra chair in Dr. Burney's headquarters room. Burney sat across from him at the folding table and circled the proposed search area continuously with the butt of his pencil. Both men eyed the map reflectively. Burney looked as if he were trying to guess the precise location of his tractor crew. O'Neil, tracing his route with a blunt forefinger, was obviously attempting to estimate where he would have to punch his flare release in order to have his camera working by the time he whipped across Plato.

  "Just to save us the wait," said Burney, leaning back in the silent, crowded room, "report by radio as soon as you loop back. Have you checked your set with Mike?"

  The radio operator, standing to the rear of the little group, spoke up, "Joey's checking with the field now."

  "Good!" approved Burney. "Does anyone have anything to add?"

  He looked about. Sherman whistled quietly and tonelessly. Wohl shook his head. Johnny Pierce hovered, waiting to get his hands on his photomap again. Louise leaned against one wall near the door, worrying a pencil end between her white teeth.

  "All right, then," said Burney, "you can get into your suit, Bucky. Good luck!"

  The gathering broke up. Burney signaled for Wohl and Dr. Sherman to stay behind, and forestalled Johnny's move to re-appropriate the map.

  "We may want to consider further," he offered as an excuse, and Pierce left with Mike.

  Outside, they watched Louise follow Bucky in the opposite direction.

  "Wonder how it feels to have her man out there and maybe not coming back?" murmured Johnny. His long face looked sad.

  "What do you think their chances are?" he persisted after a brief pause as they turned a comer in the corridor. Mike shrugged.

  "Tractor One is starting back already," he said simply. Hurrying along the other end of the corridor, Bucky was unable to shake off the following footsteps without putting on an obvious burst of speed. It sounded like Louise, and he wanted to think about his flight plan.

  Finally, as he passed through the safety door—a double mounting that could be used in an emergency as an airlock—he had to pause long enough to acknowledge her presence.

  "Do you mind if I ask you something, Bucky?" Louise inquired.

  "Of course not, but I have to—"

  "I know; I won't take more than a minute. The thing I don't like is that they
just want you to photograph Plato."

  Bucky released the door which swung shut automatically. He looked puzzled.

  "Don't you think it's worth doing?" he asked.

  "Oh, yesl Yes, I do. But how about all the other places?"

  The pilot fidgeted.

  "I can't take shots of the whole Mare Imbrium, Louise."

  "You might take a few of the section this side of Plato, though. How do we know they ever reached the crater? If tracks show up on your pictures, we'll know how far they got."

  "That's a good point," admitted Bucky, scratching his head. "But why didn't you bring it up in the meeting?"

  Louise looked away. She shrugged slightly.

  "Well, maybe Burney would have talked you out of it," Bucky conceded. "We all know you're worried."

  "I know what everybody thinks," Louise replied. "I'm getting excited because one of the four happens to be my husband. I'm not thinking calmly about what's best for the Base as a whole, whether it's worth taking people off other jobs to play hide and seek out on the surface. I probably shouldn't have come to Luna in the first place."

  Bucky looked around, but there was no one passing through the Junction. Louise stepped closer and put a trembling hand on his arm.

  "All right, Bucky, it's true enough. I'm frightened. I wish I'd never thought of coming here and making Paul feel he had to trail alongl Are you married, Bucky, or engaged?"

  "Well, there's a little blonde waiting down there for me—I hope. She'd better wait."

  "How would you like it if she were out there?"

  "Ummm," murmured the pilot. "I see what you mean."

  He saw more than that. He saw how close she was to losing her grip, how she was keeping back the tears with an effort, trying to use every ounce of self-discipline so as to keep from being ignored as hysterical. Getting a few little things done, like influencing him to take extra photos, was all she could do at the moment to look out for her man. He remembered hearing from Pierce that Burney had refused her offer to take out a tractor herself.

  "Well . . ." he yielded, "I'll see if I have a chance. I figure to cover the approaches to the ringwall anyway; maybe I can get a shot out around Pico, or thereabouts."

  She did not thank him, but hid her face against his shoulder for a second. Bucky looked around again, touched her lightly on the head with one big, freckled hand, and disengaged himself gently.

  When he glanced back over his shoulder, Louise was opening the safety door to go back.

  "Heading for Mike and the radio, I bet," he thought. "Wonder when she slept last?"

  He reminded himself that he had a job to do which involved delicate judgments at high speed, and he had no business going into it with hindering worries on his mind. If that girl did not watch herself, she would wind up under the care of Jean and "M. D." McLeod.

  "I'm liable to, myself," he muttered, "if I don't snap out of it now! I wonder who'll pick me up if I zig out there when I ought to zag?"

  He stopped at a phone connection and called the field control dome to learn if they were ready for him.

  Dazzling glints of light flashed here and there from that part of the Pacific Ocean still in bright sunlight as Hansen came in sight of Kirch. The coast of California had faded into the darkness and Asia was partly in view. He estimated that he had been moving for nearly eight hours.

  His pace was still a rhythmic lope, but the feeling of having vigorous reserves of strength had worn off. Hansen knew that he must rest soon. In traversing the flat, crater-speckled plain since his panic, he had paused only once when he took a few minutes to recharge the oxygen tank of his suit.

  "But I'm due for a good half hour off my feet," he decided.

  His legs, he noticed, had lost some of their snap, so that his bounding trot was less exuberant. On the other hand, this resulted in his getting slightly better control of his stride; he no longer broke his rhythm by bouncing too high. The thing that bothered him most was the growing ache across the small of his back.

  He skirted the ringwall of the last of a series of small craters and saw the shadowed side of the seven-mile wall. He was approaching the left curve of it, for he had hours ago decided to abandon the tractor tracks when he had crossed them again.

  "No use running up the right and getting into the Kirch Mountains," he had muttered. "I'd have to zig-zag through them and I doubt I'll feel like making any extra distance by then."

  His guess now, from the angle of Earth in the starry sky, was that he was heading a shade left of his generally southerly route. He reminded himself that he must change after rounding Kirch.

  "I'll keep going till I'm past," he promised himself. 'Then I'll sit down and relax a while."

  He could not see much point in making another few miles out into the empty wasteland beyond Kirch. The crater was a natural goal to mark a section of his journey. About halfway between Plato and Archimedes, it was further than he had dreamed of going. Even now, after he had seen how fast he could travel in the light gravity, it struck him as almost unbelievable that he would have covered such a distance. It was nearly a hundred and fifty miles.

  Yet here he was, not in bad shape at all. He glanced at the outer slope of the ringwall on his right, and mentally catalogued his various irritations. There was, of course, the general clamminess that resulted from spending hours in a spacesuit, plus the fact that his bladder was beginning to bother him and there was nothing he could do about it. The overheating due to his exertions had been partially adjusted when he had discovered during his last halt that he could regulate the heating unit by a small dial in his battery pack, which discovery left him slightly aggrieved at not having had the finer points of the care and handling of spacesuits more exhaustively explained to him.

  "But then," he reflected, "I was probably expected to spend a lot of time in the darkroom as a spare photographer."

  He could not say he was hungry, although he supposed that sooner or later he would discover feelings of weakness. His suit seemed to be functioning as well as could be expected, except for something that had given way in the right knee on that one leap. He wondered if a spring were working loose.

  "That could end up giving me a beautiful limp," he thought. "With fourteen pounds inside, and no air at all outside, it'd be tough to bend a joint without some mechanical help."

  By now, he could see light-streaks along the ringwall, and knew that he was rounding it. The lighting gradually increased as he continued, until when he began to move out into the open plain some time later, the walls were mostly gray with earth-light. Kirch had a "new" appearance, as craters went. Its floor was not lava-filled, nor its ringwall seemingly as long exposed to thermal erosion, so that the probability was that it had been formed after the "sea" around it.

  Hansen began to keep an eye out for a suitable place to sit down. Presently, he located a rock the size of an auto.

  "Time for a drink, and then 111 pick out a good spot," he sighed.

  The second he stopped to grope with his lips for the little hose, he knew he was really tired.

  The water, cool from being only partly surrounded by heating coils to protect it from the exterior cold, refreshed him but slightly. The running had left a thick taste in his mouth.

  Hansen unslung the big cylinder he had carried on his back and set it down beside a comfortable indentation in the rock. He then unfastened his back pack of tank and batteries. The metal-covered connection protecting the hose and wires was long enough to permit the pack to be set at his side.

  He lowered himself to the fine sand and leaned his back against the rock with a sigh of relief. He squirmed into a more comfortable position.

  "Wish I hadn't drunk all that water," he growled.

  He leaned the back of his neck against the neckpiece of his suit. It was not uncomfortable except that he found himself staring directly into the light of Earth.

  "I'm getting used to it all right, if I think that's too bright," he thought. "Bet my pupils are big as a cat
's now."

  Ironically, his feet had not started to hurt until his weight was off them. It felt as if he were developing blisters. The coveralls he wore under the spacesuit, moreover, had begun to chafe in a few places—around the armpits as he swung his arms, behind his right knee, on the inside of his thighs.

  He also was reminded of the sweat that had trickled around or into his eyes, for the lids felt sore.

  "I want a different view," he grunted, picking himself up. "Facing the other way, maybe I can rest my eyes."

  Carrying his back pack, he started around the rock, then prudently went back for his big oxygen cylinder. He could think of no good reason for dragging this with him, but he somehow felt more comfortable with it beside him.

  The other face of the rock was blackly shadowed, and he was forced to find a convenient spot by groping about. With a sigh, he settled down, squirmed again into an easy position, and found himself contemplating the ringwall of Kirch a few miles away. The regular sough of air through his suit and the quiet hum of the mechanisms that were keeping him alive were so familiar by now that he hardly noticed them. It was the cessation of movement, not any diminishment of the normal sounds, that lent an impression of quiet to the scene.

  He looked at the ringwall, squinting against the sting in his eyes that caused them to water occasionally. The left extremity was dim in the distance, but to the right, he could clearly see the slope of the wall as it curved to meet the plain. There was no feeling of a towering, insecurely balanced mass like that of the mountain.

  "Although a crater at a distance does look like a mountain range," he thought. "Not so close as this; it goes up too steeply."