by Hal Clement
Before they were half a mile from the Ranger relic, all sunlight was gone. The landscape beyond the headlights was just barely visible, lit by the circle of crimson fire that marked Earth’s position halfway down the western sky. The awed youngsters in the trailer were silent. Jim, facing east and driving, had little chance to look at the magnificent display.
The search party crept on, across four miles of gently rolling plain, around occasional craterlets, toward the ridges separating them from Picard G and the valley route Rick should have taken. Even Talles, by now, had lost his doubt. He was convinced this was Rick’s trail they were following.
As they reached the hills and the slopes grew steeper, new troubles developed. The comparatively loose material that took footprints so well began to give way to bare rock. The breaks in the trail that Talles had foreseen became more and more numerous. The searchers had to take to their feet once more, headlights supplemented by individual flashlights. Sometimes the track would be recovered two minutes after a break, sometimes not for ten; but the author of the footprints had evidently been determined to keep going east. This conviction always, in the end, let the hunters find the prints again.
By the time they reached the top of the first ridge, the eclipse was nearly over. The bottom of the crimson circle was showing the astonishing “ruby ring” phenomenon. It was a beautiful sight. Yet Marie did not so much as glance back at it. Well ahead of the others, she reached the top of the ridge. For just a moment she stood looking down and ahead, into another valley. It led back to her right, to the Wilsonburg-Picard G road. Beyond other ridges she could glimpse Picard G itself.
Taruntius X was still out of sight around the shoulder of the hill to her right. Poor as the seeing still was, it was good enough to remind Marie that getting the first ridge out of the way meant more area in line-of-sight, therefore in communicator reach. On impulse she cried out:
“Rick! Can you hear us?”
The others, still below the crest, heard her call. They did not dare speak themselves for fear of drowning out any answer Marie might be getting. They simply hurried as fast as they could to catch up with her. The girl, therefore, was the only one to hear all of the answer.
“Marie! Where have you been? Down in GA? I’ve been calling off and on ever since I could see Pic G, but no one has answered.”
Her laugh was like a sob. Tears of relief streamed down her cheeks.
“Oh, Rick! We’re behind you. We followed you from the Ranger relic. We’re just at the ridge from where we can see over to Pic G. How far ahead of it are you?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly. I reached that ridge maybe half an hour before the eclipse started.” It must have been longer than that, Marie thought. Otherwise he would have heard our radio talk when we first came out of the valley. Rick was saying, “I kept on as well as I could toward Picard, but you can’t hold to a straight line among these hills even when you can see. With the sunlight gone it was even harder. I’ve gone pretty straight though, I think, and have crossed a couple more ridges, so I should be between you and Pic G about—oh, maybe halfway there.”
Jim Talles was on the crest by now, like all the others, and heard the last few sentences. Happy now, his tensions wonderfully eased, he took over the conversation.
“All right, Rick, the safest thing now is for you to hold up. Don’t try to find the rest of the way to Pic G. It’s a wonder you got as far as you have—I can’t imagine whether it’s luck that’s kept you out of a bubble, or what. I wish I knew how you managed to duck them in the dark. But you stay right where you are. Even when full light comes back, just stand by until we reach you. You understand?”
But this time there was no answer.
V
TALLES followed his own advice. He made the group stay where it was until sunlight returned. Then, with everyone riding, he struck out eastward toward Picard G. The footprints were now few and far between; this side of the ridge had little soft soil even in the hollows. It was not, for now, a matter of following a trail but of interpreting a report, filling in its broad gaps with guesses at what Rick would have done in a particular situation. Jim had developed a healthy respect for Marie’s judgment on this point since she had been proven right in her major theory; his respect was shared by all the others. Where there was disagreement, Marie’s word carried the weight.
A couple of ridges. Did that also mean “two” to Earthers? Marie thought so, and they acted accordingly.
Straight toward Pic G. But the visible part of Picard G filled thirty degrees of horizon. Which point would Rick have decided was nearest?
Halfway. On what basis? What would have looked like halfway from the ridge? What seemed like half the necessary walking to Rick after groping around in near-darkness for more than two hours? Even Marie felt unsure about that one.
They finally stopped at what they guessed might have been the place from which they had heard Rick’s voice. They were grimly aware that they were only guessing. The ground was rocky, did not readily show prints. They parked the crawler and spread out.
Even in sunlight, many parts of the Moon are hard to search effectively. This was certainly one of them. Moon shadows are intensely dark, since scattered light from the landscape does little to make up for scattered light from the sky. A dark patch may prove to be the foot-wide opening of a bubble deep enough to contain a person—or a three-inch-deep crater if the lighting is low enough. It is seldom possible to be sure of anything from a distance and, even for Moon-dwellers, distance itself is hard to judge.
There was one easy way to hunt, though. Searchers could go to the top of each hill in the neighborhood and call Rick on the communicators. This was soon done—the only trouble being that it did not work. Either he was far enough away to be in radio shadow from all the places tried, or he was trapped in some local bit of radio shadow such as a bubble. It was the latter likelihood that made detailed searching necessary.
With nine people it does not take long to closely examine, say, a football field. However, a very large number of football fields can be fitted into a single square mile—many more football fields than there could possibly be half-hours left by now in Rick’s oxygen cartridge. None of the searchers, other than Jim, had even seen a football field but they all had equally valid mental similes for the job facing them—and the time left to do it in. By reasonable criteria, Rick had about eleven hours of oxygen left. That estimate might not be too accurate, of course; they had no data on his basic consumption rate. There might be one or even two hours more; there might, if he had been particularly active, be considerably less. Nobody spent much time thinking about the latter possibility but all did force their weary selves to move as rapidly as possible . . .
One hour’s work. Six fissures, about forty dark patches to make sure of, two bubbles—empty. Move the crawler.
A second hour. Two fissures, one bubble, twelve patches.
A third hour. No fissures, a dozen loose rocks at the foot of a slope, with no way of telling how long they had been there. Two bubbles near the top of the same slope. Eight hours left, more or less—emergency? Talles drove to a hilltop to request help from town, the request going via the Picard G relay network.
A fourth hour, with fewer workers. Talles flatly ordered three of the searchers to rest in the trailer. They were dangerously close to utter exhaustion.
A fifth hour.
A sixth. Talles could not see Marie’s face clearly, or he would have tried to order her to rest also in spite of his knowledge that she would refuse. Moon-dweller or not, he himself was getting panicky at this point. Somehow the air in his own suit felt stale and oppressive, not quite up to keeping him going.
The remaining searchers were reaching their absolute limit. They had had neither food nor sleep for a good eighteen hours. Yet they insisted on carrying on, even after two dozen fresh searchers arrived from the town.
That was another thing Rick’s stepmother could never understand: why so few were sent out in ans
wer to the emergency call. She could not grasp the fact that most of the jobs in a Moon settlement are essential to its survival and the survival of everyone in it. There is some leeway, to be sure. People need recreation as much on the Moon as on Earth, and even Moon-dwellers get ill at times. Still, with a small population completely dependent on a high-level technology, it is not possible to spare many individuals at one time for an unscheduled activity of unpredictable duration.
The additional searchers who did arrive had no more success than the Footprints crew.
“He just can’t be in this area!” Marie said at last. “My guess is that we lost contact because he started back to meet us before you finished talking. He must have been right on the edge of a radio shadow. Chief—everybody—these new people won’t find him. You know they can’t. It’s up to us. We understand him. We figured out what he did, and got this close to him. We’re the only ones who can get close to him again.”
“You could be right,” Talles admitted. He was as weary and discouraged as any of the youngsters—and as determined to keep searching. “Marie, you calculated where we should look for him—led us into radio contact. Can you do it again? Can you tell what Rick did after that one message? And what happened to prevent his answering me a few seconds later?”
“I’ve been trying,” she said impatiently. “I’ve told you what I think. He must have started back toward us the second I told him we were behind him. His course took him downward, obviously, into radio shadow. We’ve passed places where he could have been that would have cut him off the moment he started downhill.”
“Why didn’t he go back up when he found himself in shadow?”
“Because he didn’t know you had more to say. You told him not to go on—you didn’t say until the end of your message that he was to stay put. I’m betting he didn’t hear that. Actually I could see four hilltops from where we were then which were just barely sticking over nearer ridges. He could have been on any one of them. We’ve covered the area of two since then, including the one I still think was most likely.”
“Have you figured out why he didn’t meet us, if he was coming back for that purpose?”
“He could have stepped into a collapsed bubble, which I don’t think he’d do—or he could have broken through a new one. We haven’t found him in any bubble hole, though. Possibly he simply got led off by the ground. Personally, I think it would be best just to backtrack to those hilltops, particularly to the one where I think he was, and see where he would be most likely to go at each choice.”
TALLES nodded, remembered that his helmet was not following his head motion, and made the affirmative hand gesture.
“Right. Or at least reasonable,” he agreed. “Just the same, it seems pretty likely that he’s had some sort of accident. Otherwise, the chances are, he’d have come within radio range of someone hours ago. If the accident occurred at the beginning, just as he started back toward us—well, he should still be somewhere around here. It seems to me we should keep at what we’re doing right now—search this area. It’s the best chance.”
“Maybe,” returned Marie. “But it would make sense for at least one person to follow back and try my idea. I’d be willing to go by myself—” She fell silent. She knew the dangers of traveling alone on Moon territory. She was putting Jim Talles in a completely impossible position.
But Talles didn’t consider it impossible. He didn’t even stop to think. “Take the crawler,” he said. Marie stood motionless for perhaps a second, a startled expression behind her faceplate. Then she whirledand leaped toward the vehicle.
“Just don’t turn your brains off,” he added as she swung into the cab. Then the machine was rolling smoothly away behind its shadow toward the hilltop where they had started searching. It stayed in sight for several minutes, finally vanished over a ridge.
A sensibly calculated risk, Talles told himself. Even if he did have to worry now about two kids instead of one.
A seventh hour.
An eight and ninth. Another small group of helpers arrived, with the cheerful news that they had seen nothing of either Marie or the crawler, much less of Rick. The news was cheerful only because Talles was able to convince himself that it meant the girl must have found a reasonable branch-off point on the backtrail. The orderly search went on.
Peter Willett caught the first glimpse of the returning crawler. He was so nearly asleep that it took him several seconds to digest what his eyes were trying to tell ‘ him. The reaction of Jim Talles to Peter’s call was almost as slow. Jim had managed to make the young people take some sort of rest in brief shifts but had had none himself. He watched the slowly approaching machine for perhaps half a minute before finding his voice.
“Marie! Have you found him? Is he all right?” Then, as he took in the astonishingly slow speed at which the machine was approaching, he croaked, “What’s wrong?”
“Sorry, Uncle Jim,” came Rick’s voice. “Marie is asleep. She told me which way to go and explained the crawler’s controls, then just could not stay awake. Say, I’m not very good at driving this thing. Maybe I’d better stop here and let you come and take over.”
FOUR hours later, at North-Down, Marie was awake enough to make light of the matter.
“Once you understand how a fellow thinks, it’s easy enough to guess what he’ll do. The only really difficult choice after I took the crawler was my first one, between a fairly wide and level gully that led southwest and a narrow one that went more nearly west, the way Rick would want to go. I didn’t think the narrow one would go through, so I picked the other. I still don’t know whether Rick wasted any time on the dead end. At the next guessing point I had a footprint to help, but it was wrong. Rick must have started one way and then changed his mind. Another blind alley. After that it was easy, until I came to a fault where you could see the Sun coming through—it had to be a clear path west. Partway through it there’s a thirty-foot downstep in loose soil, and I could see where the edge had broken away—”
“Bixby’s Grave,” remarked one of her adult listeners. “How did he get that far off course?”
“That whole area is mostly fault cracks,” pointed out Marie. “Most of the time the Sun can’t be seen, and sunlight on rocks overhead can be very tricky. Anyway, Rick had left prints in the gully, so I knew I was right by then. It was too narrow for the crawler and I’d gone in on foot. I didn’t dare follow Rick over the edge. But I flashed my light on the walls over the step, and he saw it and flashed his. So I went back to the crawler and got a rope and that was all.”
“All?” asked Jim Talles. “I wouldn’t say so.”
“Well, except for the luck. Rick said he’d been asleep down there for a while—the other end was blocked, and the crack the sun was shining through didn’t come within forty feet of his level. If he’d been asleep when I flashed my light, he’d be there now and I’d still be looking for the other end of the crack so as to guess my way away from him. But how did you know about that? Or were you guessing, too?”
“That wasn’t what I had in mind; I neither knew nor guessed. I—”
“I know what I want you to tell me,” cut in Jeb McCulloch. “I know you were right, but what made you decide that Rick had gone along the road to Lick E instead of the way up to Pic G as had been planned? I imagine that’s what Jim would like you to explain, though I realize he must know the answer.”
“Easy enough,” Marie D’Nombu smiled. “Which way is Pic G from North-Down?”
“Straight north, of course.”
“Right. And Rick knew that from the maps. How did you find north, Rick?”
The boy was surprised. “North Star, of course. You can see—”
Marie shook her head, and grinned at McCulloch.
“No, Rick. It’s too bad you didn’t get here and start your hike a couple of hours later. Polaris would have been set by then, instead of hanging right above Lick E Pass—and when you couldn’t find it you might have remembered that it isn’t the North
Star here.”
THE LOGICAL LIFE
“Excuse me, Laird.” T’Nekku put the helm hard over, and his boat swung about so that her bow was into the wind, the boom trailing aft just above the giant’s head.
The human passenger swung the infrared flash in his hand to see what his friend, pilot and guide was up to. The Tuinainen was partly hidden by the mast and rigging—Cunningham was riding as far up in the bow as he could get, in the interest of comfort and safety for both of them—but the beam showed fairly clearly the bulky pyramid that was his body. It looked whitish, but color of course was meaningless through the converter goggles. The native had stood up without disturbing the boat’s trim—it was merely a matter of straightening the four blocky legs which supported him—and seized a harpoon. Judging by the weapon’s position, his attention was directed off to port; Cunningham swung the flash in that direction, but could see only ocean. He pushed up his goggles for a moment, but unaided human eyes did no better. The Orion Nebula covered a quarter of the sky behind him, and several O-type stars lay within a parsec of Omituinen; but starlight is still only starlight and no nebula is much help to Earthly optics.
“What’s the trouble, Nek?” he asked. “Anything I can do?”
“Nothing,” came the rumbling voice of the native. “It’s a kind of fish you haven’t seen, or at least we don’t have a common word for it. He’s hungry too, I judge; just a moment while I settle who eats whom.” The harpoon suddenly vanished; the arm holding it had swung too fast for Cunningham’s eye to follow. The missile plunged into a wave with a barely audible schloop twenty yards away, and the ocean surface erupted into a cloud of spray. The man was not sure whether to be frightened or not. T’Nekku seemed to be taking the whole matter calmly, but the only emotion Cunningham had ever seen him show was humor. The giant took the serious things of life with a calmness few human beings could even emulate, much less feel. The man wondered whether the fish represented a real menace or not. He could tell from the splashing that it must be quite large, but the boat was over thirty feet long and, in spite of its bone frame and skin covering, solidly built.
