The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  “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 North-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 possible 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 Orm nor Jim commented.

  The girl realized, however, that she would have to devote herself diligently to the plan, 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 as underwater 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.

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

  Guiltily she looked back; ha
d 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 path, heading uphill. The sole pattern, when she got close enough to 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 come 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 organized 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.