The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

True, they might have been into the valley before he had emerged onto Taruntius X. Yet if so they had traveled much faster than he had supposed possible.

  Rick himself had found that he could not walk much faster than on Earth. With far less fatigue, yes. Here he weighed less than twenty-five pounds. But faster, no. He did not have the coordination necessary to take the sort of steps that would keep both feet off the ground at once for any distance. When he tried it, landing on either foot was a matter of luck. Leaving the ground with an angular momentum close enough to zero for the result to resemble walking was still beyond his skill. Failing to land on at least one foot could be dangerous; helmets were strong but had their limits, and Moon rocks are no softer than those of Earth. It would be a long time before he could acquire the “lunar lope”—that swift, leaping walk at which Moon-dwellers were so adept.

  Yet even if the others had the skill he lacked and could “step” a distance limited only by their muscular strength rather than their coordination, it was hard to see how a lead of one hour or less could possibly have put them ten miles ahead.

  It then occurred to him that they might have stuck to the hills around the east side of Taruntius X, rather than cutting straight across its floor. Some of the badge tests that the hikers were going to take during the trip could easily have required this.

  If they had chosen the easterly course, that might account for the radio silence. They had been in a valley cutting them off from him. It also implied that he was ahead of them by now, since his path had been direct rather than circuitous. With this in mind, he settled himself down to wait. His position was a short distance from what he took to be the northeast end of the valley.

  He had intended to wait for two hours at most. But the sleep that had been eluding him so effectively for the last few “nights” caught up with Rick. He never knew how long he slept, since his watch was inside the spacesuit where he could not reach it and his oxygen-cartridge gauge meant little in terms of time without knowledge of his personal consumption rate.

  Well, he consoled himself, he had been out in the open where the others would have seen him if they had caught up. Evidently the around-the-hills hypothesis was wrong. They had been ahead of him all the time. They must certainly have reached Aichi’s place in Picard GA by now.

  GA, he knew, was about three miles across. It should be no more than three or four miles away. Presumably the whole crowd was below its rim, since he was still hearing no response to his radio calls.

  Unfortunately, no such feature was visible, or at least recognizable, on the slightly rolling plain before him. This might mean little; distances were hard to judge in the unfamiliar lighting. If the rim of GA were high, it might be difficult to pick it out from the background hills—hills whose feet were below the near horizon but whose upper details stood out as clearly as the valley walls a scant mile behind him. If the rim were low or nonexistent, finding it from a distance would be even harder.

  Just the same, his map memory told him that if he headed northeast from his present position for three or four miles he should reach the depression. And it was probably too large to miss.

  He looked around carefully, matching the shapes of the surrounding hills with his memory, and incidentally modifying the latter more than he realized. In case he would have to retreat, he made particularly sure that he could recognize the mouth of the valley leading back to Taruntius X and Wilsonburg. That was sensible although, as it turned out, superfluous.

  He set out sturdily, but there was no easy way to tell when he had walked four miles. His pace was probably not its Earth length, which he knew well, but he could not guess whether it was longer because of the lower gravity or shorter because of this spacesuit. Expended effort—fatigue—of course meant nothing as a distance guide. Nor did the passage of time, since he could not reliably judge his speed.

  Eventually so much time passed that he decided he must have started in the wrong direction. GA could not possibly lie this far from the valley mouth. Once more he stopped and looked around, less sure of himself than ever.

  The gently rolling plain furnished a large supply of low elevations, any one possibly the rim of GA. Some, as he already knew, were indeed crater rims, but none had proven anywhere near large enough to be his target. There seemed nothing to do but check every elevation in sight—unless, he thought suddenly, it would be better to go back to the southern hills and get a higher viewpoint. A few hundred feet might be enough to let him spot the hole he wanted without difficulty.

  It was a good idea. He would try it. First, though, he would check one rather noticeable rise to his left—roughly north, though without shade he could no longer see the stars to be sure of that. He made his way over to it and without much effort reached the top.

  It was not a crater lip but a low dome, some forty feet high. It measured about a hundred and fifty yards from north to south, and half that in the other direction.

  There had been no footprints on the southern side that Rick had climbed. But near the top he encountered a well-trampled area. To his surprise, a few yards ahead of him he saw a long, low, obviously artificial wall.

  He approached the structure curiously. It certainly was not an emergency oxygen cache—he knew what they looked like and how they were marked. The wall was only about two feet high and five wide, though it extended over a hundred feet from the top of the dome down its western side. Apparently the wall was made of cemented pebbles and the dome roof of glassy material covered by Lunar soil.

  Piercing soil and roof, near the high end, there was a long scar with a few footprints around it. At the other end, downhill, stood a piece of equipment he recognized instantly. There was no need to read the cast-metal sign that lay beside it. He knew the story.

  Eighty years earlier, Ranger VIII—one of the first hard-landing Lunar investigating robots—had plowed into the southern part of Mare Tranquillitatis at terminal-plus velocity. One of those freakish distributions of kinetic energy that sometimes occur in explosions and tornadoes had hurled an almost undamaged lens element—barrel and glassware—five hundred miles at nearly orbital speed. The fragment had expended most of its energy in cutting the groove on this hilltop, bounced once, and come to rest a little farther downhill. The wall surrounded track and relic, protecting them from the only feature of the environment likely to prevent their lasting another million years—human beings.

  Rick was impressed not by the recalled story or even by the sight of a piece of history. What struck home was that the Ranger relic, he knew, was not in Picard G. Somehow, in spite of his care and what he thought was a reliable memory, he had managed to come a dozen miles or more too far west.

  For a moment he considered beating a retreat to town. But the notion never got a firm hold.

  After all, Picard G lay only a few miles to the east—much closer than Wilsonburg. The hills in the way did not look difficult, and nothing he remembered from the maps suggested that they should be. He would find the Footprints gang, and safety, much more quickly if he cut straight across to his original objective. Furthermore, he had spent much time memorizing the locations of oxygen caches in G against the need for them ever arising. He was safe for a good many hours yet according to his cartridge gauge, but it would be nice to be close to a recharge should he require one.

  Without further thought he headed eastward toward the low hills.

  III

  Jim Talles had spent the time driving down from Northeast-Middle in thinking, since the road was both safe and familiar. He had come up with a plan of sorts. After Aichi Yen’s team had left and the short consultation with the others was over, Talles wasted no time standing around.

  “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 chang
ed 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 garnered 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 re-check 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 thing? 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.”