by Hal Clement
“Back inside, all of you,” he ordered.” We have some map-figuring to do, and I’ll have to get the relay units between here and Pic G turned on. Then we won’t have to wait until Aichi gets back to hear his report.”
“But Chief, you ordered us to suit up,” Norman objected.
“I know, but I’ve changed plans. We’d better not waste our suit charges while waiting to hear from Aichi. We’ll occupy the time deciding where to look next if the others don’t find him.”
No one argued further, and in a few minutes all were gathered inside. There were plenty of maps available at every lock. Talles laid out a set presenting a complete mosaic of the area. For nearly an hour discussion ensued about the possible places where someone with Rick’s background might be if he had wandered from the planned route.
The trouble was that none could actually believe that anyone, under the circumstances, would have been silly enough simply to go off somewhere on his own. If he had, there was no guessing what else he might do, since his criteria of elementary common sense would have to be incomprehensible. They all realized that the term “outside” meant simply “outdoors” to an Earth person and so did not carry the same frightening implications as it would to someone brought up on the Moon. But none could see why this difference should turn off one’s brain completely. All the segments came to a dead end with some remark to the effect that “. . . If he was dumb enough to do that, he was dumb enough to do anything.”
Jim Talles alone was reluctant to accept that notion, partly because he was sure his nephew was quite intelligent and partly because it implied the need for a complete, square-yard by square-yard search of the entire area around Wilsonburg. An impossible task to accomplish before Rick’s oxygen would run out.
Rick had started with about thirty-six hours of the stuff in his cartridge. Of course, he might run into an emergency cache. But sensible planning would have to be based on the assumption that he would not. More than twelve of those precious hours were gone. The area that could be searched thoroughly in the remaining twenty-four by all the people who could reasonably be put on the job represented a frighteningly small fraction of the sector in which he might possibly be. The main hope was still that one of Aichi’s searchers would find the boy along the route to Picard GA. After the relay stations had been turned on, Talles spent more of his time at the lock communicator than at the maps.
Aichi kept his crawler well out in the center of the valley and was in continuous touch once contact had been made. Some of the searchers on foot were occasionally shadowed from the relay antennas. They were trying to cover the valley sides far enough from the main “road” to spot individual footprints. Any set of these that could not be accounted for somehow, especially those that left the main trail without any matching return set, had to be investigated further.
It was a slow process. The hills around Wilsonburg had been well examined by prospectors during the last few decades. Many of their trails were known to the Footprints’ group but there were many that had to be checked out in detail.
Time passes slowly. Suspense in the lock grew unbearable.
THEN suddenly Aichi reported. He had reached his instrument site. Rick was not there. And no clue to his whereabouts had been encountered en route.
“All right,” Talles answered the relayed voice. “If he’s not there, he isn’t. As I remember GA, he’d have to be deliberately hiding in one of the small pits not to be visible—there aren’t any bubbles at the place that I ever heard of.”
“Nor I,” agreed Aichi Yen. “That’s one reason they let me set up here. The school is pretty careful even with its full-rated seniors.”
“Right. Therefore we have to assume Rick never got there—or if he did, he left for some reason. I can’t offhand imagine a reason that wouldn’t have brought him straight back toward Wilsonburg. In that case, you would have met him on the way—”
“But we didn’t. So he never reached this place. Something must have delayed him on the way. It couldn’t have been suit troubles or we’d have found him along the road. Anyway, he knew enough to check his oxygen cartridge and heat-control pack before starting off—if he hadn’t, Pierre would have spotted him for a beginner and never let him out.”
“I agree, Aichi.” Talles thought a moment. “Anyway, until the foot searchers finish their coverage, you stay there and do what you can on your own project—you can accomplish plenty alone, and the last pair you dropped off can help you when they work their way out to where you are. That’s Digger and Anna, isn’t it?”
“Right. They’re quite a way back, though. I left them with a couple of miles of the valley to check before they got out onto Pic G. I figured I could see all that was necessary from the crawler, once I was out on the plain. It seemed best to have the others concentrate on places where Rick might have let his curiosity override his common sense.”
“Good. I don’t see what more you could have done. We’ll leave you to your own work for now. I hope the others will rout out that young scamp without our having to bother you again.”
“Thanks, sir. I’ll keep the receiver on and make the standard checks with North-Down.”
“All right. Out, here.” Jim frowned. “Digger? Kort? Are any of you foot searchers in relay contact?”
Three were. Talles got them to report one at a time but the word was negative in every case. He had each describe as exactly as possible the sections searched. With the aid of the other group members he marked these off on the map.
The result was discouraging on two grounds. First, because so much of the probable area had been covered—and second, because so little of the possible area had been. The group looked at the shaded portions of the map in moody silence. Only a few remarks were exchanged as the minutes dragged by and negative after negative came in over the communicators. With each report, someone shaded another small bit of the map. At last the valley’s entire length was penciled in. Digger and Anna had reached Picard G, and were heading on toward Aichi’s station at A. Kort and Jem had reached the middle of the valley, where the other pair started.
Kort closed his final report with a question.
“Should we go on out to GA with the others, or recheck what Anna and Dig have done here, or return to town? I’m starting to get worried about that kid. There just isn’t any way to get lost along this road, that I can see. So if he isn’t out at Aichi’s setup, what could have happened to him? He didn’t strike me as a completely jammed valve, so I’m sure he’s not hiding from us as a joke. Is there any sort of—well, attack, or something, that can hit Earthers under low gravity? Could he possibly have gone off his head?”
“I doubt it,” Talles replied. “Earthers do sometimes panic because of the breathing restriction imposed by a spacesuit. Rick is used to underwater gear, though. That’s even worse, from the breathing angle. So a spacesuit shouldn’t bother him. Besides, even if he did panic he wouldn’t run off and hide in a hole, would he? Aloneness is the last thing he’d want.”
“Sure, Chief,” Kort said doubtfully.
“I think you’d better start back,” Talles told him. “Come as fast as you can until you reach the plain, then spread out as before and again check each side of the main trail for prints. I’ll send people out from this end to do the same. It doesn’t seem likely he’s on Tar X, but—wait, change that. Maybe he got the idea of climbing one of the hills there to get a better look around. Both of you follow east around the edge of Tar X, at the foot of the hills, and check for prints climbing. He was wearing Type IV boots, Pierre says. I know his suit size is 16-C-A. Any prints of that pattern and approximately matching that size, whether you think you remember them from before or not, report to me.”
“Traveling,” Kort said. “But I wish we’d had that boot data earlier.”
“Sorry. Pierre Montaux thought of it and visiphoned us a little while ago. Carry on, Kort. Digger and Anna, have you been reading us? If you’re not too far out on Pic G, how about doing the same thin
g? Rick might very well have been uncertain of direction when he got out of the valley. He could have decided to go uphill to try and sight GA.”
Anna’s voice came back. “We’re a couple of miles out—nearly halfway from the valley to Aichi’s spot. But you may have something. It’s worth going back for. Look, Dig, if Rick decided to do something like that when he reached Pic G, there’s a hill he might have used. Let’s head for its foot, close to the valley side. That’s where Rick would have reached it and started to climb.”
“Sounds good,” Talles encouraged. “Check in at the foot of the hill, and do your best to stay line-of-sight from the nearest relay antenna—you know where they are.”
“Will do,” came Digger’s voice.
“If you have to follow a trail out of range, try to arrange your own relay—one of you on trail, the other in sight of both the tracker and the antenna.”
“Right, sir. Traveling.”
Marie, like the others, had been paying close attention to the radio conversation.
“Shouldn’t some of us go out there to Pic G to help Dig and Anna?” she asked. “As I remember it, there are miles of hills along the south side. Rick might have climbed any one of them.”
“That’s a thought, Marie. But by the time any more of you could hike out there, those two would have pretty well covered the ground, wouldn’t they?”
“Not if there turned out to be a lot of Type IV, size 16-C-A tracks to follow. And for that matter, why should we hike out? Wouldn’t it be faster to take a crawler?”
“Can you drive one?”
“Well—not legally.”
“How about the rest of you?” Jim glanced over the group gathered around the map table.
“Aichi took all the rated ones—Anna, Kort, Digger, and Jem—with him.” Marie added, “That wasn’t very bright. But you could drive some of us out. There are plenty of crawlers at this lock.”
“Sure I could drive you. Except that it would be too hard to keep in touch with the other searchers while I was driving, especially in the valley.”
“You can get through it without necessarily losing touch with the relay net. It would take a lot of zigzagging, that’s all.”
“I know. But I can’t get through it without devoting most of my attention to driving.”
“I could drive, or Orm. It would be legal as long as you were in the cab.”
“You’re a stubborn little wench, Marie.” Talles sighed. “I suppose you do have a point about the southern side of Pic G.”
THERE was a flurry of dressing and helmet-tightening. The group flowed over to where the vehicles were parked. Jim Talles went through the formalities of signing one out. He, Marie, and two of the others entered the cab, and the rest got into the trailer. He stared at Marie thoughtfully for a moment, then motioned her to the driver’s seat.
Under her handling the fuel batteries came up to voltage, the individual wheel-motors were tested, and the machine rolled gently to the nearest vehicle lock. Marie established connection with the passengers in back, received their assurance of complete suit checks. She repeated the procedure for those in the cab with her, made a final check of her own suit. Finally she signaled for the opening of the outer door.
Moments later the crawler was rolling smoothly northward at forty miles an hour—slightly better than its fuel batteries could maintain. Marie was drawing from reserve charge as well. Talles disapproved but decided to say nothing. The storage cells could be recharged while the group was searching around Picard on foot.
He turned his attention back to communication, fine-tuning the crawler’s radio to the relay system. A voice check confirmed that Aichi, the four searchers, and the dispatcher at Nortlf-Down were all able to hear him.
Marie stopped the crawler, to his surprise, before any report came in from the foot searchers. As he glanced at her, mystified, she pointed to the right. He gazed in that direction and gestured understanding.
Some ten miles north of North-Down lies a two-mile crater. It is not the only such depression on the floor of Taruntius X. But it is the sole depression even close to that size along the straight path from North-Down to Picard G. Marie knew that Aichi had not dropped his first search party until reaching the valley, so she was pretty sure that this crater had not been searched. She also considered it a likely place to tempt a newcomer to the Moon into taking a close look. Jim Talles smiled in unspoken agreement.
A two-mile circle has an area of more than three square miles, which can use up a great deal of search time. It was fortunate that a check of the circumference proved sufficient. No boots of Rick’s type had crossed the rim except two that were overlaid, as a few minutes’ follow-up showed, by later prints. Even so, half an hour was lost.
Marie had remained at the radio while Talles and three others had gone out. As soon as they were inside again, she started the crawler.
“Digger and Anna reported. They can’t find anything at the hill she picked,” the girl said. “They’ve moved to the west and are still looking. But—but all the reasonable possibilities seem wrong! Maybe we ought to try the unreasonable.”
“Or the more reasonable,” Jim Talles said.
The crawler passed no more likely-looking stopping places before reaching the valley. There were a few bubbles along the way—lava pits whose thin glass ceilings sometimes gave way under weight—but the known ones had all been checked by the searchers and no new holes had been noted.
An hour and twenty minutes after leaving North-Down, Marie brought the crawler to a halt beside two spacesuited figures. Digger and Anna were waiting at the foot of the rise that marked the southern boundary of Picard G. That feature is irregular—but much less so than Taruntius X, and its southern side in particular is much less steep than usual for the inner slope of a Lunar walled plain. It ‘seemed doubtful that Rick could have lost himself here. The climbing was safe, hardly to be considered climbing at all. There were comparatively few places where radio contact would be a problem.
Marie’s attitude had changed. She had begun to feel far less sure that Rick was somewhere along the line of march between Wilsonburg and Picard G. The enthusiasm that had caused her to pressure Talles into driving from town had pretty well evaporated. She did not want to hike along a planned path looking for footprints. She wanted to try the unreasonable—or the more reasonable, as Jim Talles had said. The two need not be incompatible. Because what might appear most reasonable to an Earther might seem least reasonable to a Moon denizen.
Somehow Marie felt she was coming to know what might have gone on in Rick Suspee’s mind after he had walked out of the lock at North-Down. She wished she could be alone to think.
But she couldn’t be. Talles was already assigning search areas.
“All right,” he said, “we’ll work in pairs, as always. Digger and Anna, stay with the crawler. You’ve been afoot a long time, and probably want to assist Aichi anyway. I’ll drive you to GA as soon as I drop the others.”
“You need all the searchers you can get,” Anna objected.
“You two are so weary you’ll be a handicap rather than a help. As for Aichi, I don’t want him to miss out on the chance of a lifetime.”
Jim turned away.
“We’ll take two miles for each pair,” he went on. “Norm and Peter, start here. Cover the low slopes for prints. Call in if you see anything likely, then check it out before going any farther. Dan and Don, the next section. Same orders, when we drop you off. Jennie and Cass the third section, Orm and Marie the last. After I reach GA, I’ll make one circuit of it. Unless I find something I’ll come right back to pick you up as you finish your sections. Questions?”
IV
FIFTEEN minutes later Marie watched the crawler roll away toward the northwest. Orm Hoffman, at her side, had to call twice to get her attention.
“Let’s get with it, Marie. What’s best, I think—you follow this contour while I parallel it uphill a couple of hundred feet. Then anytime one of us finds a pos
sible the other checks at his level. That would let us catch trails actually going up or downhill.”
“That seems all right.” Marie’s lack of enthusiasm was obvious even over the communicator. Orm Hoffman noticed and wondered. Jim in the receding crawler heard, and remembered Marie’s remark about the “unreasonable.” Neither Orin nor Jim commented.
The girl realized, however, that she would have to devote herself diligently to the plain, futile though she now felt it to be. She and Orm started eastward as he had suggested. They went slowly, the boy examining the ground carefully and attentively, the girl’s eyes doing their duty as she tried to concentrate.
But she kept remembering details of the evening At the Talles home—the questions Rick had asked, the ones he had answered, the ideas he had volunteered under her careful manipulation. She felt more and more that she could put herself in the shoes of Rick Suspee.
Yet the more certain she felt of that, the less could she understand his disappearance. It just did not fit. The time mistake was natural—people were always making it. Following a group he thought had gone ahead was foolish but perfectly understandable. Marie would not have done so herself, to be sure, but her upbringing had been different. Outside carried much the same implications to her asunderwater did to him, she surmised. On the other hand outside to him was no more special than the term outdoors so offhandedly used by Earthers. He would know there was a certain amount of danger involved in going through an airlock but he probably equated it with, say, the danger of crossing a street in an Earth city—a danger recognized and respected yet lived with and faced casually. Yes, she could understand his going out alone.
What had happened then? Rick knew where the group was going, knew the area as well as maps could teach it. Although he had never seen it before, he should not have had the slightest difficulty in identifying the well packed trail from North-Down. There was no special risk along the route. The normal ones like bubbles would not have caused him to disappear—unless he had broken through a new one, and in that case the traces should have been obvious to the searchers. Even if his suit had failed and he was a fatality—Marie could grant the possibility, much as she hated to—his body should have been along the trail somewhere in plain sight. The disappearance made no sense.
