“If they’re real,” added Ham. “We'll have to turn the infra-red camera on the next group or herd or swarm or flock, or whatever you call their gatherings. I still think they re mostly illusory.”
She shuddered. “I hope you're right,” she murmured.
“Bah!” said Harbord suddenly. “Women don't belong in places like this. Too timid.”
“Yeah?” retorted Ham, now fully prepared to defend Patricia. “She was cool enough to notice details during that fracas out there.”
“But afraid of shadows!” grumbled Harbord,
However, they weren't shadows. Some hours later Cullen reported that the fog around the Gaea was full of shifting, skittering shapes, and he trundled the long-wave camera from port to port.
Handicapped by the argon-laden air with its absorption spectrum that filtered out long rays, the infra-red plates were nevertheless more sensitive than the human eye, though perhaps less responsive to detail. But a photographic plate is not amenable to suggestion; it never colors what it sees by the tint of past experience; it records coldly and unemotionally the exact pattern of the light rays that strike it.
When Cullen was ready to develop his plates, Patricia was still asleep, tired out by the hectic first day on the planet, but Ham came out drowsily to watch the results.
These might have been less than she feared, but they were more than Ham expected. He squinted through a negative toward the light, then took a sheaf of prints from Cullen, frowning down at them.
“Humph!” he muttered. The prints showed something beyond doubt, but something not much more definite than the unaided eye had seen. Indubitably the fog shapes were real, but it was equally certain that they weren’t anthropomorphic.
The demoniac faces, the leering visages, the sardonic countenances, were decidedly absent to the eye of the camera; to that extent the beings they had seen were illusions, whose features had been superimposed by their own minds on the shadows in the fog. But only to that extent, for behind the illusion lay something unmistakably real. Tet what physical forms could achieve that flickering and shifting and change of shape and size that they had observed?
“Don’t let Pat see these unless she asks to,” he said thoughtfully. “And I think I'll confine her to the ship for the present. Judging from the couple of acres we’ve seen so far, this place isn’t the friendliest sort of locality.”
But he figured without the girl on both counts. When fifteen hours later, he moved the rocket a mile south and prepared for another circuit in the fog, she met his order with a storm of protest.
"Whats this expedition for?” she demanded. "The most important thing on a planet is the life it supports, and that’s a biologist’s business, isn’t it?”
She turned indignant eyes on Ham. “Why do you think the Institute chose me for this job? Just to sit idly in the rocket while a couple of incompetents look around—a chemist and an engineer who don’t know an epiphyte from a hemip-teron?”
“Well, we could bring in specimens,” muttered Ham miserably.
That brought a renewed storm. “Listen to me!” she snapped. “If you want the truth, I’m not here because of you. You’re here because of me! They could have found a hundred engineers and chemists and astrogators, but how many good extraterrestrial biologists? Darn few!”
Ham had no ready reply, for it was quite true. Despite her youth, Patricia, born on Venus and educated in Paris, was admittedly preeminent in her field. Nor, in all fairness to the backers of the expedition, could he handicap her in her work. After all, not even the government-financed Smithsonian could afford to spend somewhat over two million dollars without getting fair return for its money.
Sending a rocket out into the depths where Uranus plowed its lonely orbit was a project so expensive that in simple justice the expedition had to do its utmost, especially since forty long years would elapse before there would be another opportunity to visit the doubtful planet. So he sighed and yielded.
“That shows a faint glimmering of intelligence,” said Patricia. “Do you think I'm afraid of some animated links of sausages? I won't make the mistake of cutting them in the middle. And as for those funny-faced shadows, you said yourself that they were illusions, and—by the way, where are the pictures you were going to take of them? Did they show anything?”
Cullen hesitated, then at Ham’s resigned nod, he passed her the sheaf of prints. At the first glance she frowned suddenly.
“They're real!” she said, and then bent over them with so intent an expression that Ham wondered what she could read from so vague and shadowy a record. He saw, or fancied he saw, a queer gleam of satisfaction in her eyes, and felt a sensation of relief that at least she wasn’t upset by the discovery.
“What d'you make of them?” he asked curiously.
She smiled and made no answer.
Apparently Ham's fears concerning Patricia were ill-founded on all counts. The days passed uneventually; Cullen analysed and filed his samples, and took innumerable tests of the greenish Uranian atmosphere; Ham checked and rechecked his standard weights, and in spare moments examined the reaction motor on which the Gaea and their lives depended; and Patricia collected and classified her specimens without the least untoward incident.
Harbord, of course, had nothing to do until the rocket plunged once more into the vastness of space, so he served as cook and general utility man—an easy enough task consisting largely of opening cans and disposing of the debris.
Four times the Gaea soared aloft, picked her way through the eternal mists to a new station, and settled down while Ham and Patricia explored another thousand-foot circle. And somewhere in the grayness above, forever invisible, Saturn swung into conjunction, passed the slower-moving Uranus, and began to recede. Time was growing short; every hour meant additional distance to cover on the return.
On the fifth shift of position, Harbord announced the limit of their stay. "Not more than fifty hours more/' he warned, "unless you have an inclination to spend the next forty years here.”
“Well, it's not much worse than London,” observed Ham, pulling on his outdoor clothing. "Come on, Pat. This’ll be our last look at the pleasant Uranian landscape.”
She followed him into the gray open, waiting while he clicked his guide wire to the rocket, and the silken rope to her belt. “I’d like to get one more look at our chain-gang friends,” she complained. "I have an idea, and I’d like to investigate it.”
"And I hope you don’t,” he grunted. “One look was plenty for me.”
The Gaea disappeared in the eternal mist. Around them the fog shapes flickered and grimaced as they had done ever since that first appearance, but neither of them paid any attention now. Familiarity had removed any trace of fear.
This was a region of small stony hillrocks, and Patricia ranged back and forth at the full length of the rope, culling, examining, discarding or preserving the rare Uranian flora. Most of the time she was beyond sight or sound, but the cord that joined them gave evidence of her safety.
Ham tugged imaptiently. “Like leading a puppy past a row of trees,” he growled as she appeared. “Wire’s end!” he called. “We’ll circle back.”
“But there’s something beyond!” she cried. By virtue of the rope she could range an additional fifty feet into the obscurity. “There’s something growing just out of reach there —something new! I want to see it.”
“Hell, you can’t. It’s out of reach and that’s that.'We can lengthen the wire a little and come back for it.”
“Oh, it’s just a few feet.” She turned away. “I’ll release the rope, take a look, and come back.”
“You won t!” he roared. “Pat! Come here!”
He tugged mightily on the rope. A faint exclamation of disgust drifted out of the dimness, and then, suddenly, the rope came free in his hands. She had freed herself!
“Pat!” he bellowed. “Come back! Come back, I say!”
A smothered reply sounded, all but inaudible. Then there was utter
silence. He shouted again. The all-enveloping fog muffled his voice in his own ears. He waited a moment, then repeated his call. Nothing; no sound but the rustle of the fog shapes.
He was in a desperate quandry. After another pause he fired his revolver into the air; all ten shots at brief intervals. He waited, then fired another clip without response from the passive, leaden-hued fog. He swore bitterly at the girl's foolhardiness, at his own helplessness, and at the grimacing fog shapes.
He had to do something. Go back to the Gaea and set Harbord and Cullen searching. That wasted precious time; every moment Patricia might be wandering blindly away. He muttered a phrase that might have been either an imprecation or a prayer, pulled a pencil and piece of paper from his pocket, and scrawled a message: “Pat lost. Bring additional spool and attach to wire. Circle for me. Will try to stay within two-thousand-foot radius.”
He clipped the paper to the wire’s end, weighted it with a stone, and then tugged three times to summon the two from the Gaea. Then he deliberately released himself and plunged unguided into the fog.
He never knew how far or how long he walked. The fog shapes gibbered and mocked him, the condensation gathered on his face and dripped from his nose and chin, the fog pressed in about him. He shouted, he fired his automatic, he whistled, hoping that the shriller sounds might carry, he zigzagged back and forth across his route. Surely, he thought, Pat had sense enough not to wander. Surely a girl trained in the Hotlands of Venus knew that the proper procedure when lost was to remain still, lest one stray still farther from safety.
Ham himself was utterly lost now. He had no faintest conception of where the Gaea lay, nor in what direction was the guiding wire. Now and again he thought he spied the silver filament of safety, but each time it was only the glint of water or the dull sparkle of stone. He moved under an inverted bowl of fog that blocked off vision on every hand.
In the end it was the very weakness of the lost that saved him. After hours on hopeless plunging through the mist, he tripped—actually tripped—over the wire. He had circled.
Cullen and Harbord loomed suddenly beside him, joined by a silken rope. He gasped, “Have you—have you—”
“No,” said Harbord gloomily, his lined visage looking bleak and worn. “But we will. We will.”
“Say,” said Cullen, “why don't you go aboard and rest up? You look about in, and we can carry on for you.”
“No,” said Ham grimly.
Harbord was unexpectedly gentle. “Don t worry,” he said.
“She’s a sensible sort. She'll stay put until we find her. She can't have wandered a full thousand feet beyond the wire's end."
“Unless,” responded Ham miserably, “she was driven— or carried.”
“We'll find her,” repeated Harbord.
But ten hours later, after they had completely circled the Gaea at a dozen different distances, it became obvious that Patricia was not within the circumference described by their two-thousand-foot wire. Fifty times during the intolerable circuit Ham had fought against the impulse to free himself of the wire to probe just a little farther into the tantalizing fog.
She might be sitting despondently just beyond sight and earshot, or she might be lying injured within an easy stone's throw of the circle, and they'd never know it. Yet to release himself from the one guide that marked their base was little better than suicide and somewhat more than sheer insanity.
When they reached the stake that Cullen had driven to mark their starting point, Ham paused. “Back to the ship,” he ordered grimly. “We'll move her four thousand feet in this direction and circle again. Pat can’t have wandered a mile from the point^I lost her.”
“We'll find her,” reiterated Harbord.
But they didn't find her. After a futile, exhausting search, Ham ordered the Gaea to a point at which their wirebound circle was tangent to the two circles already explored, and grimly began again.
Thirty-one hours had passed since the girl had disappeared, and the three were nearing exhaustion. It was Cullen who yielded first, and groped his way wearily back to the ship. When the other two returned to move to a new base, they found him sleeping fully clothed beside a half-drained cup of coffee.
The hours dropped slowly into eternity. Saturn was pulling steadily ahead of the misty planet, bound placidly for their next meeting forty yeaxs in tire future. Harbord said not a word concerning the passing of time; it was Ham who broached the subject.
“Look here/' he said as the Gaea slanted down to a new position. “Time's short. I don’t want you two marooned here, and if we don't find Pat in this area, I want you and Cullen to leave. Do you understand?"
“I understand English/' said Harbord, “but not that sort.”
“There's no reason for you two to stay. I'm staying. I'll take our portion of food and all the arms and ammunition, and I'll stay.”
“Bah!” growled Harbord, “What's forty years?” He had turned sixty.
“I'm ordering you to leave,” said Ham quietly.
“You don't command once were clear of the surface,” grunted thet other. “We're staying. We'll find her.”
But it began to seem utterly hopeless. Cullen awoke and joined them as they emerged into the infinite fog, and they took their places at six hundred and fifty foot intervals along the wire. Ham took the outermost position and they began their endless plodding through the mists.
He was close to the breaking point. For forty hours he had neither slept nor eaten, save for a hurried gulp of coffee and a bite of chocolate when they moved the Gaea. The fog shapes were beginning to take the weirdest conformations in his tired eyes, and they seemed to loom ever closer, and to grin more malevolently.
So it was that he had to blink and squint and peer very closely when, a quarter way around the circuit, he saw something a little denser than the fog shapes in the gloom.
He jerked the wire once to halt Harbord and Cullen, and stared fixedly. There was a sound, too—a faint, steady thrumming quite different from the eerie rustles of the fog shapes. He started sharply as he heard still another sound, indescribable, muffled, but certainly a physical sound. He jerked the wire three times; that would summon his companions.
They came, and he pointed out the dusky mass. “We can reach it,” he suggested, “if we tie a couple of our ropes together. Two should be plenty.”
They moved cautiously into the mist. Something—something was stirring there. They crept quietly on, fifty feet, sixty. And suddenly Ham realized that he saw a chain of the multiple creatures—a vast chain, apparently, for it was still passing before them. In utter despondency he stopped, staring hopelessly ahead; then, very slowly, he turned back toward the wire.
A sound—a sharp sound—froze him. It sounded like a cough!
He whirled back. Regardless of the dangerous file close before him, he shouted, “Pat! Pat!”
The sublimity of relief! A thin little voice quavered beyond the line. “Ham! Oh, Ham!”
“Are—you—are you safe?”
“Y-Yes.”
He was at the very side of the passing file. Beyond, pale as the mist itself, was Patricia, no more than ten feet away.
“Thank God!” he muttered. “Pat, when this chain passes, run straight here. Don’t move a single step aside—not a single step!”
“Passes?” she quavered. “Oh, it won't pass. It isn’t a file. It’s a circle!”
“A circle!” Comprehension dawned. “A circle! Then how —how can we get you out? We can’t break it or—” He paused. Now the queer parade was leaderless, helpless, but once it were broken at any point, it would turn into a fierce and bloodthirsty thing—and it might attack the girl. “Lordl” he gasped.
Harbord and Cullen were beside him. “Here!” he snapped.
He seized the remaining rope. “I’m going across. Stand close.”
He crawled to the shoulders of the two. From that height it might be possible to leap the creatures. It had to be possible.
He made it, t
hough it left Cullen and Harbord groaning from the thrust of his hundred and eighty pounds, Uranus weight. He spent only a moment holding Patricia to him; the menace of those circling monsters was too imminent.
He flung an end of the rope to the two beyond the circle. “Can you swing across if we hold it high enough, Pat?” The girl seemed on the verge of exhaustion.
"Of course,” she murmured.
He helped her lock elbows and knees around the rope. Slowly, painfully, she inched her way in the manner of a South American tree sloth. Ham had one terrible instant of fear as she wavered directly over the file, but she made it, dropping weakly into Harbord's arms beyond.
Then she cried out, "HamI How can you get across?”
“Vault ’eml” he flashed.
He spent no time in reflection. He gathered all the strength remaining in his body, drew back for a short run, and actually cleared the six-foot barrier of deadliness, his knuckles just touching a black, blubbery back.
Patricia struggled to her feet, clinging to him. He held her a moment, then said huskily, “LordI If we hadn’t found you—”
"But you didlw she whispered. Suddenly she began to laugh hysterically, the sound broken by choking coughts. “Only what kept you? I expected you sooner!” She stared wildly at the circling file. "I short-circuited them!” she cried. “I—short—circuited—their brains!”
She collapsed against him. Without a word he lifted her and followed Harbord and Cullen back along the wire to the Gaea, Behind him, revolving endlessly, was the circle of doomed creatures.
Uranus was a banded green globe behind the flare of the afterjets, and Saturn a brilliant blue star to the left of a tiny, very fierce sun. Patricia, her cough already improved in the conditioned air of the Gaea, lay passively in a pivot chair and smiled at Ham.
Adventures on Other Planets Anthology Page 30
