The Fury Out of Time

by Biggle Jr. , Lloyd

  They marched straight for the base of the mountains, picked their way over chunks of rock that had eroded from the heights, and moved out of sight down the valley. Those in the observation room waited tensely, and Karvel watched the Hras rather than the viewing screen. They were mentally in contact with the search party, and the instant a uranium detector produced the smallest flicker they would know about it.

  They remained silent.

  The search party came into view again, returning from the opposite side of the valley. As it approached the ship the Hras abruptly left the room, leaving Karvel alone with Hras Drawa.

  “Nothing?” Karvel asked.

  Hras Drawa wheezed a lingering sigh. “No. Nothing at all.”

  Chapter 6

  They tried, of course. They laid out search patterns with geometrical precision, pacing off squares, and halving them, and halving the halves, until it seemed to Karvel that no square inch of the valley had not been tested with one of the damnably inert detectors. They ranged far out into Mare Imbrium and far up the valley. They scaled the mountains as high as they could climb, and Karvel watched apprehensively as the small figures edged their way upward, clinging to what was, from his vantage point, the sheer face of a cliff.

  All of the Hras searched. Karvel had never found out exactly how many there were of them, but he counted more than a hundred at a time on the viewing screen, pathetic figures that painstakingly plodded back and forth in small groups, intent on the precious crystals that they carried cupped in their flexible disks. They remained out for their entire waking periods, and when they returned to the ship for The Sleep Hras Drawa had always the same comment “No. Nothing at all.”

  “Is there any chance that something could be wrong with the detectors?” Karvel asked. “The explosion, perhaps—”

  “All have been tested,” Hras Drawa said.

  “How did you test them?”

  “With uranium. The fuel.”

  “Oh,” Karvel said, feeling absolutely like a fool.

  The line of the sunset moved relentlessly up the valley and left them in darkness. The glowing Earth reached its first quarter and began to soften the jagged landscape with earthlight. Aboard the ship there was no longer even a pretense that their gamble had not failed.

  Hras Drawa summoned Karvel, and tersely outlined a plan to extend the search. They would be able to equip two small teams of explorers. One would proceed north along the edge of the mare; the other would go south. They could carry enough air for four Earth-days, two days out and two returning. Later there would be other parties, but unfortunately their extreme range could never be farther than two days of traveling. Did Karvel have any suggestions?

  “You might work out a system of caching supplies,” Karvel said. “You’d start with a larger team, but half of the members would leave their extra air at the one-day limit and turn back. When the others returned they would have that air waiting for them. It would increase their range slightly. If a stock were built up there, then some of it could be moved to the two-day limit, and so on. It would be possible, with careful planning, to build the range up to a week or more. A similar system was used by polar explorers on Earth.”

  “We will consider that,” Hras Drawa said. “For a beginning, though, we shall limit ourselves to the two days. We do not know what problems we will encounter. You do not think such a short exploration worthwhile?”

  “Of course. It’s the only thing to do, since there isn’t any uranium around here. I was just thinking that we’re right back where we were on Earth, except that the conditions are infinitely more difficult.”

  “At least there are no dinosaurs,” Hras Drawa wheezed. “And no crocodiles.”

  Karvel turned away.

  “You must not feel badly about us,” Hras Drawa said. “We knew when we determined to come that we were much more likely to fail than to succeed. We do not regret our gamble, but we are sorry that you insisted on coming with us.”

  They did not regret their gamble, but the atmosphere in the ship, before the Hras collapsed in sleep, was downright funereal.

  The two expeditions left as soon as the Hras awakened again. Karvel watched them out of sight—twenty Hras in each group, the same mystical number that had taken part in the Earth expedition. Through some trick of optics in the spaceship viewing screen the squat, bulging figures labored endlessly on the edge of the horizon before they finally vanished.

  Later, pacing the dim corridors in edgy impatience, Karvel chanced upon Hras Klaa. “I want to go exploring,” he announced. “I want to walk up the valley, and climb a mountain or two, and leave my footprints in moon dust Couldn’t you rig up some kind of a suit for me?”

  Hras Klaa reacted with a rare enthusiasm, perhaps because the Hras had nothing better to do. A committee of spacesuit tailors was assembled. Never had Karvel been measured so meticulously, and never had he received a worse fit. His head posed almost insurmountable problems for them, because they insisted on viewing him not as a human but as a misshapen Hras. The suit that they constructed looked like a cylinder with limbs haphazardly attached. He entered it by squirming in through the top, and he had to squat down slightly in order to see through the misplaced vision ring. The flexible limbs would not bend properly at the knees and elbows, leaving him both stiff-legged and stiff-armed.

  “Splendid,” Karvel said. “Let’s try it out.”

  They insisted on running a lengthy pressure test; and anyway, it was time for The Sleep. As soon as they awoke, four of them, including Hras Klaa, suited up with him and accompanied him outside. They stood at the top of the ship’s ramp, and Karvel enjoyed the majestic silence of the moon’s surface for only a moment before he cursed, and motioned all of them back inside.

  “I’d feel better about this if I could communicate with someone,” he said. “What would I do if my back needed scratching?”

  They wheezed bewilderedly.

  “Of course you haven’t got any radios, because you don’t need them, so there’s no way you can talk to me. Can you receive my thoughts when I’m muffled up in this thing?”

  “Certainly,” Hras Klaa said.

  “Fine. Then I’ll think simple questions. You can tap out the answer on my arm—once for yes, twice for no. Got that?”

  “Certainly.”

  Karvel slammed the lid on his suit and stooped down so that Hras Klaa could inspect it. The air lock diaphragm dilated, closed behind them. Karvel mouthed a question into the confines of his suit. “Shall we go up the valley?”

  He felt one tap on his arm. They started out, moving with long, effortless strides.

  The valley, a precipitous slash in the Lunar Alps, was heavily shadowed. Karvel stopped frequently to gaze in wonderment at the play of earthlight on the tremendous heights, and to marvel at the dazzling density and brightness of the stars. Once he looked back and found Hras Klaa scrutinizing a uranium detector.

  He thought a question. “Hasn’t this area been checked?”

  Hras Klaa stuffed the detector into a pouch and did not respond. The wistfulness of the gesture broke Karvel’s heart.

  They moved slowly up the valley, the Hras waiting patiently when Karvel stopped to gape. In many places the mountains were split by fissures of tremendous depth, some only narrow cracks, others great crevasses that reached far down into the valley and pointed dim fingers of earthlight across the valley floor. There Karvel could see crisscrossing trails smudged in the moon dust—the mute record of the Hras’s painstaking search.

  After several miles they reached a point where an enormous rockfall had tumbled obstacles far out into the valley. Karvel turned back, made an experimental leap, and ran for several long, soaring steps. “What a place for a game of basketball!” he enthused. He stopped to wait for the Hras, and again saw Hras Klaa studying the uranium detector. Sobered, he walked on slowly.

  At the head of the valley he veered off to the northern wall, picking his way carefully through fallen rock. He found a foothold and
awkwardly began to climb. The wall was not nearly as sheer as it had looked from a distance, but the unyielding limbs of his suit soon thwarted him. He made a fast, half-sliding descent to where the Hras stood waiting.

  A few yards further on he tried again, with less success. Then he found a natural projection that slanted upward. He followed it to its end, an unsettling hundred feet above. A narrow ledge dipped down toward him, and he edged along that for a short distance and then turned back. Doubtless the moon’s low gravity and precipitous heights would someday provide a paradise for mountain-climbing enthusiasts, but Bowden Karvel was not one of them.

  They returned to the ship, and Karvel asked the spacesuit tailors to fashion arm and leg joints that would work.

  Life coursed along smoothly. Karvel ate his rations when he felt like it, slept usually, but not always, when the Hras did, and went outside frequently. He carried his own uranium detector, and he sometimes found himself, like Hras Klaa, gazing at it hypnotically and attempting to will it into luminescence.

  Life coursed along smoothly, but there was an occasional disquieting omen.

  The two expeditions returned, and no new ones were sent out. Karvel inquired about the plans for a system of caching supplies for a longer expedition, and Hras Drawa answered evasively. “Perhaps later,” he said, and days slipped away.

  One of the Hras, standing at the top of the landing ramp, suddenly went into a ludicrous dance and walked down the ramp on its central pair of limbs, waving the other four comically. The performance disturbed Karvel, but the Hras seemed not to notice.

  On a walk along the mountainous shore of the Mare Imbrium, Karvel came upon a solitary Hras who was flinging rocks far into the sky and then apparently hurrying to stand under them as they came down. Karvel watched for some time, marveling at the ease with which the swiveling arms were able, in the moon’s low gravity, to propel missiles literally out of sight. The Hras was less to be admired in its judgment of falling objects. It was fortunately unable to place itself within yards of a rock’s landing place.

  The Hras were increasingly afflicted with a strange lethargy. They responded when he spoke to them, but only after a long, inexplicable silence. They moved as quickly as ever, but they contemplated an action endlessly before they made it. When he left the ship, or returned to it, he began to find a group of Hras clustered motionless about the landing ramp, as though hypnotized by the magnificent light in the dark, star-flecked sky. “Earth-struck,” Karvel thought wryly. The group became larger as time went by, and he began to have difficulty in finding a path through it.

  Except during The Sleep. When that time approached the Hras shrugged off their trances with visible shudders and lined up in orderly fashion to await their turns at the air lock.

  Karvel’s contacts with them, his communication with them, became less and less, but for all that he had a foreboding awareness of deepening despair and the steady, corrosive growth of tension.

  Earth’s disk passed the full and slowly waned to a fragile crescent. Karvel, emerging from the air lock, glanced up at the sliver of light in the sky and decided that the moon’s long night must be nearly over. Soon there would be blinding sunlight on the mountain peaks. He was beginning to wonder how long the air supply would last, how many such sunrises they would live to see. He had stopped asking questions of the Hras, for they no longer answered him.

  He descended the ramp and hesitantly began to pick his way among the dim, motionless figures. He had never seen so many Hras standing there. It looked as if the entire company were gathered outside the ship, waiting for the mystic impulse that would send it back inside to The Sleep.

  He slowly threaded his way forward, and was almost clear when a Hras unaccountably reached out and gave him a firm push. He spun into another Hras, who reacted with a shove that knocked Karvel off balance. He managed to recover and leap aside, but as he turned away he was pushed again and sent sprawling. He rolled, scrambled to his feet, and stepped into the viselike embrace of four Hras arms.

  Karvel applied a knee to the bloated air tank, and after a brief struggle pushed free. All of the Hras were stirring. They milled about uncertainly, and several began a weird, jerky, arm-waving dance. Others drifted in Karvel’s direction as he backed slowly away.

  A Hras lurched forward and struck out at him. Karvel leaped aside, and immediately had to fend off another attack. He deftly side-stepped two more rushes, and in a sudden surge of panic it came to him that they were deranged. All of them had gone mad. He turned and fled, and the Hras swarmed after him.

  With great, leaping strides Karvel raced into the deep, protective gloom of the valley, intending to lose himself in darkness. For a short time the Hras kept on his heels, but he soon left them far behind. He turned toward the southern wall, and when he glanced back he could just make out the dim glint of their silvery space suits where they had gathered uncertainly far out in the valley.

  They hesitated only for a moment They turned unerringly and rushed after him.

  “They’re following my mind!” he exclaimed.

  He hurried on, clawing his way over rock slides, hearing nothing but his own labored breathing, until the mountain wall barred his way. He followed it, stumbling over fallen rock and expecting at any instant to feel Hras limbs closing upon him like a trap. He could only hope that the short-statured Hras would have more difficulty with the rock obstacles than he did.

  His flight had been instinctive, and he’d had no time to contemplate the possible consequences of nonflight. Now he began to wonder, wryly, what difference it could make. All of the Hras were doomed, and Karvel along with them. If in a moment of madness they tore him limb from limb and bathed their silver suits in his blood, the act would neither shorten his life significantly nor leave undone anything of consequence that he might otherwise have accomplished. Some rations uneaten, some few hours or days or weeks of breathing alien odors, some lonely walks on the moon— that was the measure of his loss.

  He relaxed, and slowed his pace.

  He found a foothold on the mountain wall, climbed a few steps, and slipped down again. Yards further on he made another attempt, with the same result. The impulse to climb was also instinctive, and the idea of the Hras searching for the source of his mental emanations down in the valley while he perched safely on the mountainside appealed to him. He had only to hold out until The Sleep approached, when he was certain that they would file docilely back to the ship.

  He moved on along the cliff, searching for footholds. Once he was able to climb perhaps twenty feet, but he could remain there only by clinging precariously, so he retreated. The climb wasted precious minutes, and he was certain, now, that they were close behind him.

  He climbed again, found a slanting ledge, and edged his way along it. Once it crumbled beneath his foot, but he scrambled to safety and continued to climb. He reached the end and hauled himself onto a higher ledge.

  As he cautiously felt his way forward the cliff exploded soundlessly in his face. Rock fragments showered him. An instant later his leg received a bruising blow, and a miniature avalanche of small rocks and fragments rained down on him from above.

  He halted confusedly, and peered into the silent darkness. Then his arm was struck and more fragments pelted him, and he understood.

  The Hras had located him. They were throwing rocks. They probably had the moon’s airless air filled with them, but in the soundless night he could tabulate only their hits and near-misses.

  He began to climb recklessly. The Hras could see him no better than he could see them, but all they needed was his general direction. His mind gave them that. If they threw enough rocks some were certain to hit him, and a solid hit with a large rock might knock him from the cliff. A worse danger was that the rocks would touch off a genuine avalanche.

  He climbed through a hail of missiles until he found another ledge to follow. His lateral movement soon left the rocks behind, but in his haste he nearly stepped off the end of the ledge. He flound
ered briefly, gained a new foothold, and climbed higher. The ledge widened under a bit of overhang, and he crouched there to take stock of his situation.

  The Hras were creatures of the sun. They had adapted themselves to Earth’s day-night cycle—perhaps it approximated their own—but the moon’s two-week night, with only an unvitalizing earthlight to sustain them, had driven them mad. Probably they had never been so long away from the warming light of a sun except in space, and there a properly fueled ship could supply some form of substitute.

  In their derangement they lashed out at the chief architect of their disaster. Karvel felt no resentment for them—only pity.

  They found him again. Rock fragments spattered down from above, but this time the overhang partially protected him. He waited resignedly. It seemed a damnably untidy way to die, but no more so than the death by suffocation that he would certainly suffer if he lived long enough.

  “My thinking is too loud,” he told himself.

  They were ranging in on him with uncanny accuracy. A large rock struck his shoulder a painful, staggering blow, and others landed at his feet. Unconsciously he picked one up, and halted himself in the act of throwing it back.

  He could terminate the fiasco instantly by opening the lid of his suit, or even with a short step forward, but both methods smacked repugnantly of suicide. Simple justice probably demanded that he climb down and let the Hras finish him off, but he wondered if that, too, might be called suicide. It was the kind of moral technicality that he would have pondered delightedly under circumstances that were less brutally realistic.

  Rocks continued to crash around him, and a sizable slide from above buried his feet in a slow seepage of dust and fragments. Huddled back against the cliff, pummeled by rocks and rock fragments, Karvel began to laugh hysterically. The first human explorers of this area would have a sensational mystery on their hands. They would have to account for an alien spaceship, a crew of dead aliens, and one dead human. Eventually it might occur to them to connect the aliens with the unhuman U.O. passenger, and then Haskins, if he were still around, would produce whatever data was necessary to identify Karvel. Karvel regretted very much that he wouldn’t be able to see the report Haskins’s experts would write about his four-toed right leg (one copy only, to be handed to me personally).