Gone Fishing
Page 9
THE END OF YEAR ONE
Barney Chard came up out of an uneasy sleep to the sudden sharpawareness that something was wrong. For some seconds he lay staringabout the unlit cabin, mouth dry, heart hammering with apprehension.Then he discovered it was only that he had left the exit door open andthe window switched on.... Only? This was the first time since theyhad left him here that he had gone to sleep without sealing the cabinfirst--even when blind drunk, really embalmed.
He thought of climbing out of bed and taking care of it now, butdecided to let the thing ride. After all he knew there was nothing inthe valley--nothing, in fact, on this world--of which he had arealistic reason to be afraid. And he felt dead tired. Weak and sick.Feeling like that no longer alarmed him as it had done at first; itwas a simple physical fact. The sheet under him was wet with sweat,though it was no more than comfortably warm in the room. The cabinnever became more than comfortably warm. Barney lay back again, tryingto figure out how it had happened he had forgotten about the windowand the door.
It had been night for quite a while when he went to sleep, butregardless of how long he'd slept, it was going to go on being night agood deal longer. The last time he had bothered to check--which,Barney decided on reflection, might be several months ago now--thesunless period had continued for better than fifty-six hours. Notlong before dropping on the bed, he was standing in front of the bigclock while the minute hand on the hour dial slid up to the pointwhich marked the end of the first year in Earth time he had spent inthe cabin. Watching it happen, he was suddenly overwhelmed again bythe enormity of his solitude, and it looked as if it were going toturn into another of those periods when he sat with the gun in hishand, sobbing and swearing in a violent muddle of self-pity andhelpless fury. He decided to knock off the lamenting and get good anddrunk instead. And he would make it a drunk to top all drunks on thishappy anniversary night.
But he hadn't done that either. He had everything set up, downrightfestively--glasses, crushed ice, a formidable little squad of freshbottles. But when he looked at the array, he suddenly felt sick inadvance. Then there was a wave of leaden heaviness, of completefatigue. He hadn't had time to think of sealing the cabin. He hadsimply fallen into the bed then and there, and for all practicalpurposes passed out on the spot.
Barney Chard lay wondering about that. It had been, one might say, arough year. Through the long days in particular, he had been doing hislevel best to obliterate his surroundings behind sustained fogs ofalcoholism. The thought of the hellishly brilliant far-off star aroundwhich this world circled, the awareness that only the roof and wallsof the cabin were between himself and that blazing alien watcher,seemed entirely unbearable. The nights, after a while, were easier totake. They had their strangeness too, but the difference wasn't sogreat. He grew accustomed to the big green moon, and developed almostan affection for a smaller one, which was butter-yellow and on anorbit that made it a comparatively infrequent visitor in the sky overthe valley. By night he began to leave the view window in operationand finally even the door open for hours at a time. But he had neverdone it before when he wanted to go to sleep.
Alcoholism, Barney decided, stirring uneasily on the sweat-soiled,wrinkled sheet, hadn't been much of a success. His body, or perhapssome resistant factor in his mind, let him go so far and no farther.When he exceeded the limit, he became suddenly and violently ill. Andremembering the drunk periods wasn't pleasant. Barney Chard, thatsteel-tough lad, breaking up, going to pieces, did not make a prettypicture. It was when he couldn't keep that picture from his mind thathe most frequently had sat there with the gun, turning it slowlyaround in his hand. It had been a rather close thing at times.
Perhaps he simply hated McAllen and the association too much to usethe gun. Drunk or sober, he brooded endlessly over methods ofdestroying them. He had to be alive when they came back. Some whileago there had been a space of several days when he was hallucinatingthe event, when McAllen and the association seemed to be present, andhe was arguing with them, threatening them, even pleading with them.He came out of that period deeply frightened by what he was doing.Since then he hadn't been drinking as heavily.
But this was the first time he'd gone to sleep without drinking atall.
* * * * *
He sat up on the edge of the bed, found himself shaking a little againafter that minor effort, but climbed to his feet anyway, and walkedunsteadily over to the door. He stood there looking out. The cloudlayers always faded away during the night, gathered again at dawn. Bynow the sky was almost clear. A green glow over the desert to the leftmeant the larger moon was just below the horizon. The little yellowmoon rode high in the sky above it. If they came up together, thiswould be the very bright part of the night during which the birds andother animal life in the valley went about their pursuits as if itwere daytime. He could hear bird-chirpings now against the restlessmutter of the little stream which came down the center of the valley,starting at the lake at the right end and running out into stagnantand drying pools a short distance after it entered the desert.
He discovered suddenly he had brought the gun along from the bed withhim and was holding it without having been in the least aware of thefact. Grinning twistedly at the old and pointless precaution, heshoved the gun into his trousers pocket, brought out matches, acrumpled pack of cigarettes, and began to smoke. Very considerate ofthem to see to it he wouldn't run out of minor conveniences ... likeleaving him liquor enough to drink himself to death on any time hefelt like it during these five years.
Like leaving him the gun--
From the association's standpoint those things were up to him, ofcourse, Barney thought bitterly. In either unfortunate event, hewouldn't be on _their_ consciences.
He felt a momentary spasm of the old hate, but a feeble one, hardlymore than a brief wash of the early torrents of rage. Something hadburned out of him these months; an increasing dullness was moving intoits place--
And just what, he thought, startled, was he doing outside the cabindoor now? He hadn't consciously decided to go that far; it must havebeen months, actually, since he had walked beyond the doorway at all.During the first few weeks he had made half a dozen attempts toexplore his surroundings by night, and learned quickly that he wasconfined to as much of the valley as he could see from the cabin.Beyond the ridges lay naked desert and naked mountain ranges, silentand terrifying in the moonlight.
Barney glanced up and down the valley, undecided but not knowing quitewhat he was undecided about. He didn't feel like going back into thecabin, and to just stand here was boring.
"Well," he said aloud, sardonically, "it's a nice night for a walk,Brother Chard."
Well, why not? It was bright enough to see by now if he kept away fromthe thickest growths of trees, and getting steadily brighter as thebig moon moved up behind the distant desert rim. He'd walk till he gottired, then rest. By the time he got back to the cabin he'd be readyto lie down and sleep off the curious mood that had taken hold of him.
Barney started off up the valley, stepping carefully and uncertainlyalong the sloping, uneven ground.
* * * * *
During the early weeks he had found a thick loose-leaf binder in theback of one of the desk drawers. He thought it might have been leftthere intentionally. Its heading was NOTES ON THE TERRESTRIALECOLOGICAL BASE OF THE EIGHTEENTH SYSTEM, VOLUME III. After leafingthrough them once, it had been a while before Barney could bringhimself to study the notes in more detail. He didn't, at that time,want to know too much about the situation he was in. He was stillnumbed by it.
But eventually he went over the binder carefully. The various reportswere unsigned, but appeared to have been compiled by at least four orfive persons--McAllen among them; his writing style was not difficultto recognize. Leaving out much that was incomprehensible or nearly so,Barney could still construe a fairly specific picture of theassociation project of which he was now an unscheduled and unwillingpart. Selected plants and anima
ls had been moved from Earth throughthe McAllen Tube to a world consisting of sand, rock and water,without detected traces of indigenous life in any form. At present theEcological Base was only in its ninth year, which meant that thelarger trees in the valley had been nearly full-grown when broughthere with the soil that was to nourish them. From any viewpoint, theplanting of an oasis of life on the barren world had been a giganticundertaking, but there were numerous indications that the McAllen Tubewas only one of the array of improbable devices the association had atits disposal for such tasks. A few cryptic paragraphs expressed thewriter's satisfaction with the undetailed methods by which the Base'slocalized climatic conditions were maintained.
So far even the equipment which kept the cabin in uninterruptedoperation had eluded Barney's search. It and the other requiredmachinery might be buried somewhere in the valley. Or it might, hethought, have been set up just as easily some distance away,