Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “Track here, Marie!” Orm’s voice scrubbed her thoughts.

  Guiltily she looked back; had she passed a set of prints without noticing? No. She could see her own extending backward at least two hundred yards—her own, no others. She looked ahead again, glimpsed what had to be the track that had caught Orm’s eye. The line of prints, imbedded clearly in the Moondust, intersected her tracks heading uphill. The sole pattern, when she got close enough see it clearly, she confirmed as Type IV. Maybe Rick had come this far out of the way after all.

  “Start following them up, Orm. I’ll backtrack for age traces.” Her tone was elated. The indifference of a few minutes before had vanished.

  “Traveling,” he answered. “They bear a little to-the right of straight uphill, sort of toward that hump half a mile back.”

  She goosed her communicator. “Jim Talles! We have a track here that looks good. I’m making sure it’s new.”

  “Great!” came the voice from the crawler. “I’m just putting my passengers off at GA. I’ll go around as I planned, but keep me wired—I can cut back to you anytime.” Talles added, “Orm, how does it look to you?”

  “Whoever this is wasn’t just wandering. The prints go in as near a straight line as the ground allows. There are some breaks on bare rocks but I’m having no trouble finding the trail again just by following the original direction. Does it backtrack the same way, Marie?”

  “No. There’s a fairly sharp bend a little way out. He was going east, just as we were—and then he seems to have suddenly got the idea of going up. Unreasonable! A waste of energy and oxygen! This must be Rick—it’s got to be.”

  “You keep backchecking,” said Jim Talles. “Rick isn’t wearing the only Type IV boots on the Moon. He hasn’t the only 16-C-A suit. Also, I wouldn’t bet much money that no one else has climbed that hill in the last forty years.”

  “Traveling, sir.”

  THERE was radio silence for five or six minutes. Then Orm spoke again.

  “I see a dip between me and the hilltop. The trail goes down into it. If I follow directly, I think I’ll lose the relays. Shall I go ahead, Jim—uh—Chief?”

  “Yes. I’m proceeding toward your position now. If we don’t hear from you before I arrive, I’ll go after you.”

  “Traveling,” Orm said.

  Marie had paused to listen. Now she looked back up the slope. She could still see her companion but as she watched, the fluorescent orange torso that marked a Wilsonburg spacesuit disappeared over the rise, followed by the green-and-yellow helmet. Colors were selected for contrast against likely Lunar background, not esthetic values.

  The crawler, decorated in the same three colors, was visible a full two miles away. She glanced in its direction, saw that it was nose-on to her, and returned her attention to the footprints.

  She wondered why Rick had not gone farther out on the crater floor before turning eastward. He must have known that the closest part of GA lay a couple of miles from the southern foothills. Of course, his judgment of Moon distances might be poor. There was no telling what someone with his background would use as a yardstick. His pace length would, she supposed, be shorter on Earth. And to help him on the Moon there was none of that bluish overtone, increasing with the distance of background objects, that she had seen on pictures of Earthscapes. Perhaps he thought he had came farther north than had been the case. But if so, why had he trudged so much farther east than necessary? Marie was now seven miles from the end of the valley, actually about even with the eastern rim of GA. The tracks, if they continued in their present direction, would not have led to the work site but would have gone right past.

  Her theories grew more and more abstract as she plodded along. Her notions of what Rick must have been doing and thinking, and why, grew more and more complex and less and less solidly based on what she knew of the young Earther. Then suddenly she was jarred back to reality.

  Another pattern of footprints lay before her, coming on a slant from her left—from the valley end, that is. It represented the trail of several people and joined the one she was following, completely concealing it. She looked ahead to pick up her Type IV pattern where it emerged on the other side of the interference, and discovered with a shock that it didn’t.

  The implications were obvious but she resisted them. Instead of calling Talles at once, she devoted several minutes to a careful examination of the Moonsoil and its impressions. When she finally made the call, discouragement was back in her voice at full strength.

  “Chief, sir—and Orm if you can hear me—cancel this one. We’re wrong again.”

  Talles smothered a tortured curse.

  “Explain!”

  “Our quarry came from the direction of the valley with a group of either eight or nine people. He left them at the place where I am now. He was actually with them, not a latecomer following the track of an earlier party. Some of his prints are under theirs and some on top. This trail certainly isn’t Rick’s.”

  “All right.” Talles had got hold of himself. Evenly he said, “Stay where you are, Marie, and I’ll pick you up. Then we’ll go after Orm—or can any of you others make radio contact with him? He’s out of touch with me.”

  For several seconds the communication spectrum was crowded as everyone called Orm. No answer came. Apparently he was still in radio shadow. Talles spoke again after a brief wait.

  “Marie, I can’t see you and don’t know just where you are. If you can see me, give me a flash.”

  The girl unclipped a pencil-sized tube from the waist of her suit, aimed it at the distant vehicle, pressed a switch. Bright as it was, the beam was, of course, invisible to her in the vacuum. She waved the tube gently in both planes. In a few seconds Jim spoke again.

  “Good. I have you zeroed. Stand by—I’ll be there in two minutes.”

  He fulfilled the promise. Marie swung up into the cab as the vehicle pulled up beside her. He had been unable to think of anything consoling to say. She would have to live with the collapse of hope, the bitter letdown. He had been getting optimistic himself about the trail that had petered out. Well, he told himself, nothing to do but keep trying.

  “Where is Orm? You’d better drive, Marie, and head us as close as you can to where you think he ought to be.”

  She slipped into the control seat he had vacated. “Let’s see—I came from over there, and he was going—yes, that way—” She swung the vehicle smoothly and let it build up speed.

  “You’re sure?” Jim’s question was purely rhetorical. He did not expect more than a rhetorical answer. He certainly did not expect what he got.

  “Well—” She gestured vaguely ahead, toward a hillock that would have seemed part of the more distant backdrop of the south rim to an eye unfamiliar with Lunar scenery. “That’s where we . . . Wait a minute!” To Marie’s credit, the crawler did not swerve as the idea struck her. “I’ve just thought of something. The ground right outside North-Down is packed solid for hundreds of yards around. It hasn’t taken a new print since the Mark Twenty crawler came out. Right? We knew the direction to Pic G from experience but Rick knew it only from maps. So if there were no footprints or anything to guide him, how did he know which way to start walking?”

  That question, too, must have been rhetorical. Certainly the girl gave Jim Talles no time to answer it, if he had an answer available. She kept right on talking, thinking aloud. The man recognized the symptoms. Marie had fallen in love with an idea again. He tried to muster some defenses but it was difficult. The kid, as usual, was being reasonable as well as enthusiastic. She was still chattering as they reached the hillock and started up. Talles managed to get in a few words now and then but they were vague ones like “. . . you still can’t be sure.” Such objections did not impress Marie. She was sure enough. He got in a few more words near the top of the hill. But by the time they were over it and back in touch with Orm Hoffman, Talles had pretty much decided to go along with her.

  The idea of breaking up an orderly and or
ganized search pattern on the chance that she was right seemed unsafe. If she were not right, the error could be fatal.

  On the other hand if she were right and he did not follow her lead, the result could be just as fatal.

  THE TRAIL Orm had been pursuing swept on past the next hilltop and apparently over the crater’s south rim. They never did find out who had made it, or when, or why. Orm had the sense not to go beyond the second hill without making another radio check, so when they did re-establish contact with him he was already coming back. This saved time, which ballooned Marie’s already surging morale even more.

  Twenty-five minutes after the girl had her inspiration the crawler was approaching the valley mouth with eight of the Footprints group aboard.

  Jim Talles had been in touch with the team still at GA. Although they were in radio shadow by intent, one of them had come up to the rim to make a routine safety report. Jim had salved his conscience by telling them to stay and carry on with Aichi’s project but to be ready to resume the search in Picard G if the new idea collapsed. He also called the two searchers still in Taruntius X and told them to continue their hunt back to North-Down. Privately he decided that if this idea of Marie’s did not crystallize he would declare a full emergency and get more help.

  Evelyn Suspee, afterward, was to have great difficulty understanding Talles’ attitude. She had been convinced that Rick was somewhere in town and was not told about his misadventure until much later. After getting over the first shock, she reacted most to what she called the cold-bloodedness of Aichi and his friends. It was a long time before she could admit that a civilized human being could have put anything at all ahead of an all-out search for her missing son. And a certain coolness toward her brother-in-law for allowing anything else persisted even longer.

  Talles’ insistence that there had not been a genuine emergency until the very end carried little weight with her. She was culturally conditioned to values and priorities differing from those of Moon-dwellers. Their experience-dictated credo was that anything resembling panic is to be avoided at all costs, frantic efforts are to be avoided even in the most trying circumstances, and work must go on if humanly possible. Only imminent loss of life or limb could justify taking citizens from their labors by declaring an emergency.

  While Jim Talles fully recognized the threat to Rick’s life, neither Jim nor his young cohort considered the threat that immediate. If Rick’s suit had failed, he could not be helped. If the suit were whole, he still should have oxygen enough to last a few hours.

  Talles took over the driving after the crawler reached the valley. He sent Marie back into the trailer with the others to do some map work. Half an hour took the crawler through the valley and into Taruntius X. Once out on the plain, however, Jim did not continue toward Wilsonburg. He turned to his right and followed the irregular north side of the area for some five miles. Then he turned right once more along another valley, one that led northwest to the Lick E mines. At that point the search party began to implement Marie’s plan.

  Instead of dropping them off in pairs, Talles had the entire group spread across the width of the valley and start toward Lick E. He eased the vehicle along in the central, heavily trodden path, keeping pace with the young hikers on either side. They were going slowly enough to make sure that they missed no print of a Style IV boot of the size appropriate for a 16-C-A spacesuit.

  Fortunately Rick was rather small for his age. Most adults took a considerably larger suit, which meant that boot patterns of his type and size were relatively rare. They could easily be noticed when going off the main road on solo prospecting expeditions. Two such sets were encountered during the first half-dozen miles. They were quickly identified as having been made by the members of the Footprints group themselves.

  The valley floor narrowed then for a distance of some miles. Since there was less width of ground to be inspected, the searchers made good speed. Then the valley opened out and they had to slow down even though they paid most attention to the right side. On the theory that Rick had gone this way by mistake, he would have assumed that he was entering Picard G at the valley mouth. Hence, he would presumably have turned right—toward where he would have expected GA to be.

  The widening of the valley allowed the “road” to spread, and many more individual footprints became distinguishable. This slowed things down even further. Jim Talles changed his technique, running the crawler half a mile ahead and getting out to search himself until the group caught up, then repeating the process.

  Speed was down to about five miles an hour. Nearly two hours passed in this fashion. They were now well out of the valley and slowing down even more as they struggled to cover an ever-widening front—in fact, progress might better have been expressed in square miles per hour. Even Marie’s bubbling mixture of enthusiasm and confidence was beginning to go a little flat once more, sure as she still felt that Rick must have come this way. All of the searchers were bone-tired and hungry. Talles reached the decision that it would be best to break off, alert the authorities by radio, then drive the kids back to town. He opened his mouth to broadcast the call-in—and at that instant Peter Willett’s voice came crackling over the communicator.

  “Hey—here’s a track! Breaking right out of the packed lane! Take a look.”

  ORM reached the place first, examined the evidence. Excitedly he called, “Peter’s got something. Wherever it crosses other prints, it’s on top. The right size and style—and it’s turning off to the east. We’ll have to chase this one.”

  “Marie, you and Orm follow it,” Talles ordered. “The rest of you get into the trailer and rest for a while. If this one peters out we’ll have to go back and call for an emergency rescue party. I know you all have plenty of oxygen, but you can’t do a good job indefinitely without food and rest. Get aboard. Orm and Marie, lead on.”

  THE two spacesuited figures hustled along the line of Style IV footprints. Orm was still placidly doing a job. Marie, though, was once more effervescent. She had to be right, she told herself.

  This had to be Rick’s trail.

  It was.

  The searchers reached the spot where Rick had paused for the second time—they had missed the one where he had slept. After unsuccessfully trying to locate him visually from some high ground, they followed his abrupt turn from the edge of the plain toward the hill where the Ranger lens had landed. There were, as Rick had noticed, no other tracks there. So for the moment there was no way to be sure that this one was recent except for the back-trail evidence. At any rate, it was the most recent track in the vicinity to have left the main path to Lick E.

  They followed the prints up the hill to the Ranger relic. All of them knew where they were. All had seen the historical monument before, and while not completely indifferent to it they were far more concerned with the trail. This, of course, vanished on the packed area near the wall. They piled out of the crawler and gathered around the spot where the prints disappeared.

  “It shouldn’t be hard to find which way he went,” Peter said. “Just walking around the edge of the packed ground should do it.”

  Talles had his doubts. “Marie, you got us this far. Which way, do you think, would he have gone from here?”

  The girl’s expression could not be seen inside her helmet but there was no trace of uncertainty in her voice.

  “With all that map study, Rick certainly knows where this monument is. He would have had two choices of what to do next. So when he got here, he must have realized his mistake. The sensible one would have been to go back to North-Down the way he came.”

  “Which he didn’t,” Orm said acidly.

  “Correct—because what seems sensible to us may not seem sensible to him,” Marie said. “The other thing he’d have thought of would be to cut over to Pic G straight across the hills. Look east, there. This landing scar would have given him the direction if he didn’t have it already. And that first ridge is only four or five miles away. He must be lost on those hills some
where. Look for his prints going east.”

  A straightforward enough suggestion, but a complication arose in carrying it out. No one looks directly at the Sun from the Moon any more than one does from Earth. The searchers had not noticed before, but the general illumination had been fading during the last hour. Everyone had known perfectly well why Aichi Yen had set up his apparatus when he did; they had all heard him remark, as they had left Picard G, that the eclipse would be full in only a few hours more. Nevertheless the dwindling light took the group by surprise.

  As they started eastward along the wall to carry out Marie’s suggestion, someone exclaimed that it was getting hard to see. Nine pairs of eyes lifted to look through the heavy filters on the top of as many face-plates as nine spacesuited figures turned to face west.

  For Jim Talles one glance was enough.

  “Quick!” he roared. “Orm and Marie, carry on. Check your temperature controls. Call back if the prints are there. I don’t want anyone outside but you two. The rest of you get back into the trailer. We’ll have to carry on with the crawler’s lights, if we can do so at all. The ground ahead is strange to most of you, and we could lose track of someone who went outside the sweep of the lights . . .”

  TALLES was obeyed without question. As he climbed into the cab, Marie’s voice reached him. “They’re here! Come on!”

  The remaining sliver of sun was narrowing rapidly now, the scarlet ring of Earth’s sunlit atmosphere providing more and more of the total illumination. Jim switched on the main driving lights before he started the motors, and suddenly the ruby-lit landscape outside the illuminated swath was hard to see. He swung the vehicle toward the east. The lights picked out the two figures a few yards from the end of the wall. One was standing, beckoning to them. The smaller was already picking its way along the relocated trail. Talles thought of having the two come back into the cab and do the tracking from its vantage, but he dismissed the idea. Not all the Moon’s surface takes footprints. Breaks in the trail could be handled more surely, and even more quickly, by trackers on foot. It was even possible, especially if Rick had changed his direction at a bad spot, that the whole party would have to fan out once more to recover the trail.