The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  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 somewhere. 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 faceplates 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.

  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 answer to the emergency call. She could not grasp the fact that most of the jobs in a Moon settlement are essent
ial 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.”