“Maybe not,” Sevigny barked. “We’ll find out.”
“And kill four more? That thing’s going to spit molten rock any minute.”
Briefly, Sevigny failed to understand. The situation just didn’t make logic. It was like being caught in a dream.
His gauntlets closed on the cab rim, so hard that the thermo wires in them creaked. “You—” All at once he understood. “You Earthlings‘.”
“By God, Boss, you’re right.” Aarons came over the plain in kangaroo bounds. Dust puffed where his boots struck. One by one, some others began to follow. Sevigny could only identify them, through the long shadows, by the phosphorescent numbers on their chests.
“Youkhannan and Nakajima,” he rapped. “You’re closest. The rest of you get our stuff to a safe distance.” Anger lifted fresh and he finished with a chosen insult: “R’ku, you’re in charge.”
“Very well.” The Martian had not stirred. Now his gaunt shape got into motion, a few jumps that no human could have matched, a sweeping overview, and a series of cool orders.
I don’t blame him for not volunteering, Sevigny thought. He’d be no use the minute that much water hit his skin; and Martians don’t go in for romantic gestures. The rest, though—I didn’t take them for crawlguts.
But it struck him that Earthlings did not, after all, have clan bonds like Cythereans. For that matter, if he’d simply been one of the crew, he too might have hesitated to risk his neck for somebody with whom he had swapped no oaths. As boss, of course, he was in a different situation.
Aarons, Youkhannan, and Nakajima reached the flat bed of the trac and grabbed the cargo kingposts for support. Sevigny threw himself into the pilot’s seat and gunned the right engines. Electric power surged from the accumulators massed below. The vehicle turned until its blunt nose pointed at the geyser. Sevigny cut in the left engines. Eight huge, soft-tired wheels rolled forward.
A crevasse had opened in the ground between. Sevigny didn’t pause to gauge distances. After a year on the Moon, his eyes were well trained. He threw a switch at a moment which he felt with his bones rather than his intellect was correct. Two metal arms lifted the portable bridge off the trac bed, carried it over the cab and laid it down precisely as the trac arrived at the verge. Wheels trundled across, with a boom and a rattle that resounded dimly through the cataract noise of the eruption. When weight was off the bridge, the arms swung it back into place.
Wind-whipped ash drove across the view. Sevigny heard it click against his faceplate. The trac lurched over tumbled stones, wallowed in new-formed mud. He leaned forward, straining to see, while his hands and feet wrestled with the machine. There—He steered for the dim bulk on the crater’s edge, reached it and braked to a halt.
Half buried in wet cinders, the other trac lay broken on its side. A section of pipe had been coughed from the well and rammed through the hoist engine block. Close by was the drill rig’s force unit, grotesquely canted, the casing scarred by energetic debris. He saw no human figures. The wind squealed faintly through the volcano roar.
He turned his amplifier to max and asked, “Anybody see either of them?”
“No, sir.” Youkhannan’s voice was only identifiable by the Iraqi accent. “Likely they were pitched downslope and buried.”
“Grab shovels and go look,” Sevigny commanded. “I’ll scratch around here.”
He ignored the ladder, vaulted over the canopy edge and fell with maddening slowness. Heat gusted from the crater to bite through his suit’s insulation. The thermostatic units switched over to cool-off; their pump-throb went in time with his pulse. He stumbled through black shards that grated underfoot and slipped beneath his soles.
Wait! Under the cab of the wreck…a boot projected! Sevigny knelt and dug with his hands, dog fashion. Sweat was sharp in his nostrils, painful in his eyes, clammy in his undergarment. Somewhere far off a stranger cursed without cease and another stranger remembered how Mount Victory loomed over green Carl’s Lake, beautiful and irrelevant on Venus. The brawling around him deepened; there came a fresh moonquake and cinders shot forth to turn the murk nearly absolute.
Sevigny freed both legs, rose and heaved. The breath was harsh and dry in his throat. Almost at the end of his endurance, the body came loose with a suddenness that tumbled him on his rear. He crawled back, unclipped his flashlight, squatted and squinted through the ash rain. It was Leong. Air oozed in a vapor cloud from a rip in the man’s suit, but some bubbles of blood on the lips behind the faceplate still seemed to move. Sevigny got him in his arms, pulled himself erect, and lurched toward his own vehicle.
With a deliberate and terrible drumfire, the first magma spilled from the hole. Sevigny dragged Leong onto the trac bed, laid him down and fumbled with a patch from the kit at his belt. The teakettle stream came to an end. On shaking legs, Sevigny rose to switch on the floodlamp above the cab. Should’a done this before. How else can the boys find me? I’m beaten stupid. Now he could again make out the force unit, through the mineral rain and swirling primordial dust. On a half animal impulse, he activated the crane that extended from the left kingpost. It swung out, hovered above the two-meter steel cube, dipped and grabbled. He raised it. The trac swayed beneath such a weight. Metal sang in the cables.
The lava was veiy close now, a dully glowing glacier. Sevigny got into the cab. “Nakajima!” he cried uselessly against the reverberations. “Youk-hannan! Aarons! Get back here, for everything’s sake!” Momentarily he—rather, his clansman’s reflexes—debated the ethics of abandoning them. They should be able to reach safety on foot…No. Someone had to give first aid on the way, or Leong might be dead before he reached the camp wagon.
A blackened shape came out of the whirl, and another and another. They hadn’t found Erich, then. Well, we did what we could. Sevigny gunned the engines. He barely waited for his gang to climb aboard before he engaged the transmission.
“One of you get Poy here and treat him.” he said. “The rest hang on!”
He dared not go full speed on this terrain, though the Mare Serenitatis might open beneath him at any time. And what a hell of a name that was, he thought in the back of his head. So lost was he in his driving that he didn’t notice what went on around him. When he emerged from the smoke into clear vision, onto safe and stable rock, he was actually surprised to find the canopy dogged down and the air tanks opened to make full pressure.
He glanced behind. Leong’s airsuit had been peeled off. The man sprawled on the rear seat, eyes closed, breath fast and shallow. Aarons knelt beside him, helmet and gloves removed. The lean hooked face dripped sweat down onto the blood that trickled from Leong’s nostrils.
“Well?” Sevigny asked.
“Decompression, of course,” Aarons said in an exhausted monotone. “Probably shock, concussion, maybe a fracture or two.” He opened the medikit, got a hypodermic needle, and filled it from an ampoule. “I’ll give him twenty cc. of ADR to play safe, but looks like you got him in time. Where was he?”
“By his own trac. I imagine he hit something when it was knocked over, and therefore simply slid down. Erich got thrown a distance.”
Aarons looked back at the pillar of smoke and the slow flood of fire. He shivered. “No use hunting any more for him.” After a silence: “I’m glad you made us come along, Boss, even if we didn’t have much luck.”
Sevigny grunted.
The four remaining vehicles—camp and service wagons, ‘dozer and scoop—were close now, boxlike shapes on the plain with the men huddled around. R’ku stood a little apart. His long thin legs were crouched as if to leap, but folded arms and lowered abdomen bespoke repose. Earthlight shimmered off the metal-blue hide. His unhuman head seemed crowned with stars.
As Sevigny pulled alongside the camp wagon, which held bunks and some sickbay equipment, the Martian stirred. A single spring brought him to the trac. Seen thus in flight, the mantis-like form was no longer stiff or grotesque, but fluid elegance, an abstract statue cast in mercury. When he land
ed, his head was level with Sevigny’s; and the cab seat was 150 centimeters off the ground.
His stare had long stopped bothering the Cytherean; it had merely been that those big turquoise eyes were made so unlike a man’s, and never blinked. The narrow insectoidal face had always seemed more handsome than otherwise. At present it was largely hidden by the air helmet. Lunar atmosphere had by now gotten so thick that Martians didn’t require suits, but the composition remained wrong. Not enough nitrogen to breathe, poisonous methane and ammonia; and while they needed small amounts of water as men need vitamins, there was too much of the vapor around these days for their metabolisms to handle.
“What success did you have?” R’ku inquired. His words penetrated the glasolite canopy with the expected flatness. Sevigny sometimes wondered if the Martians’ reputation for unemotionality was due to no more than the fact that they must use vocalizers to make humanly recognizable sounds. On the other hand, they seldom showed excitement in their behavior…
“We saved Leong,” he answered. “Have ‘em snake a tube from the wagon for him.”
R’ku gestured. Four men got busy. They avoided looking in Sevigny’s direction.
“You brought back the force unit,” R’ku observed.
“Yeah. Maybe that’s what caused the trouble. We’ll take it on to GHQ. Nothing more we can do here. And Poy has to get to a hospital.”
“He is salvageable, then.”
“I hope so.” With an idiotic desire for conversation: “What’d you do if he wasn’t?”
“I understand that your custom is burial.”
“On Mars, I mean.”
“That would depend upon what culture was involved. We of the Great Confederation would dry and powder the body and scatter it on the winds. But in Illach they would process it to fuel their Biological Engine; K’nea would use it for animal fodder; Hs’ach—”
“Never mind.” The man sagged in his seat. Weariness rose and hit him like a fist.
He had not felt so alone since he first arrived at Port Kepler. Then he was a bright young terraform engineer, with no more than three standard years’ experience in the Drylands to justify a job offer from the Luna Corporation. Subsequently, he’d been too busy learning the tricks of this world’s trade, working his way up until he headed a deeptap gang, losing himself in riotous furloughs at Paradise, to think widely. But how little the clans of Venus knew about the rest of the universe, under their clouded sky…how isolated they were!
A man lay dead under molten stone because his well had erupted.
He shook himself. “Move along, you sons,” he said harshly. “Get that tube connected.”
The Buffalo laid his cigar in an old-fashioned ashtray and said, “Hi, there. You’re Sevigny? I thought at first you were the wrath of God.”
“I feel like its results,” Sevigny mumbled.
The Buffalo laughed. “Well, come on in, ease your freight…and your black friend, too. I’m kind of curious about him.”
Sevigny blinked, startled a little out of his lassitude. “Oscar? But how—”
“I got a visual to the outer office.” The Buffalo pointed at a screen set in his intercom box. “I like to see who my secretary is telling I’m in conference.” Small eyes darted slyly toward the visitor. “I also got an auditory to her. Earplug set; that’s how come all my girls wear their hair long. In case I decide I’m not in conference. Besides,” he added thoughtfully, “I like long hair on women.”
Sevigny felt himself under closer observation than he would have believed possible. Automatically, he bristled, and one hand edged the least bit nearer his sidearm. A man did not pay that kind of heed to another man on Venus unless a fight was brewing. He remembered he was on Luna. But he still had the pride of his clan to maintain.
“As you wish,” he snapped, and turned on his heel with calculated insolence. The frosted glass on the door said
It opened for him and he stuck his head out and whistled. Oscar jumped from the chair on which he had been grooming himself and darted inside, up to Sevigny’s shoulders in one low-gravity spring.
The secretary gave him a surprised look, which lingered. He was not handsome: a big, rawboned young man with jutting nose and chin, blue eyes under shaggy fair brows, sandy hair not as well combed as it might be. But the sun had browned him, and he walked like a soldier. Long tunic with clan insignia, bare knees, and buskins marked him out too, among the Russian blouses and bell-bottomed trousers currently fashionable on Earth. Cythereans weren’t often seen off their planet.
He returned the girl’s look with interest, in both senses of the word. The Buffalo’s fame for choosing spectacular female help had turned out to be quite justified.
A little regretfully, but also a little more cheerful, he let the door close and faced around again. The gray-thatched, kettle-bellied giant behind the desk waved at a chair. “Squat yourself. Cigar?”
“No, thanks. I don’t smoke.” Sevigny took the edge of the seat.
“What’s the matter, you want to live forever? Well, how about a drink? I estimate the sun just went over the yardarm. But let’s see.” The chief activated a full-wall viewscreen.
It scanned the surface, rather than the underground warren which Port Kepler mostly was. In the direction of the harsh morning sun, the crater floor lay almost untouched, naked rock reaching toward the stark ringwall. Elsewhere, though, entry turrets, radars, control towers, solar cell banks, rail lines, the whole clutter of man had overrun the landscape. Earth was a wan half disc in a deep-blue sky where a few tentative clouds drifted.
Crow’s feet meshed in a broad ruddy visage. “Um-m-m,” the Buffalo said, “reckon we’ll have to lower the yardarm a trifle. Selah.” He reached into a drawer for a bottle of brandy and tumblers, into another, refrigerated one for ice and soda.
“I don’t know, Mr. Norris,” Sevigny hesitated. “This is a serious matter-”
“Good Lord, man! Have you no redeeming vices?”
“Oh…all right. Thanks.” A nearly involuntary smile tugged at the comer of the Cytherean’s mouth.
Liquid gurgled forth. Oscar sat up, curious. Silky midnight fur tickled Sevigny’s neck.
“Here’s to our noble selves.” The Buffalo tossed off half a glass in a gulp and resumed puffing on his cigar. “I concede. What is that beastie?”
“A dirrel. They’re kind of one-man animals, so I had to bring him with me.” That still looked frivolous. “Everyone, almost, keeps a dirrel in the Shaws, my home country. It’d be too easy to get lost in the wilderness without something for a guide that can climb the tallest trees; and they’re good at finding game.”
”I thought Venus was mainly desert still.”
“Some regions were ripe for ecology as soon as the water had precipitated. Native organic matter in the soil. When life was introduced, it multiplied explosively.”
”M-m…yeah, I remember now. That’s probably the source of a lot of your clan feuds, hey? Squabbles over land that didn’t need so much work before it could be settled. What species did the geneticists make your pet from?”
Sevigny shrugged.”1 don’t know. Some rodent. They bred to a mass of seven or eight kilos, hands of a sort, and a pretty good brain. Oscar can communicate with me, a little, in a special language.” He rubbed the large, sharp-nosed head between the ears. Oscar arched his back and elevated his magnificent plume of tail.
”Oh. Sure. I see. His ancestors—But no importe. This is a pleasure, meeting you,” said the Buffalo. “I wish I could get back out in the field myself. Those crews are apt to be weird and wonderful mixtures. I recall one Nigerian…”
The tension which had been departing returned to Sevigny. He sat straight again and said roughly, “I’m sure your time is valuable, Mr. Norris. What did you want to see me about?”
“That accident…now hold on, son. Not so defensive, if you please. By all accounts, you did just fine. I know it was pretty much a shock, your first job as crew chief going sour that way. But you
handled matters better n a lot of veterans would have. What I’d like is your own story of what happened. From the beginning.”
“You have my report.”
“Pretend I haven’t read it. Pretend I don’t even know deeptap procedure. I’ll tell you why, later on, but right now go ahead and talk.”
Sevigny scowled. He didn’t know what to make of this first encounter with his ultimate boss. Okay, he thought, blame yourself for the consequences.
“We reached Mare Serenitatis Site Four at sunset, as per schedule,” he bit off. “While the drill rig was being erected and started, the rest of the crew made camp. Everything seemed normal until circa eighteen hundred hours of the second day past midnight. We cleared ground and dug channels for the expected outflow of liquid, according to the maps drawn by Survey. At the time of the accident, a work shift was ending. Decker and Leong were at the well, about to change the cutter. The eruption caught them. We managed to rescue Leong—he’s recovering nicely now—but couldn’t find Decker before the lava forced us back. We struck camp and proceeded directly here. R’ku, the Martian on the team, stayed behind to observe. His last radio report to me was that the well had collapsed and outflow ceased. I told him to return. He ought to arrive at Little Mars shortly.”
As he spoke he had a vision of that tall strange figure, imperturbably watching the volcano die, then loading the meager gear he needed on his thorax and soaring off across barrenness, into lunar day. That was hot enough and bright enough to kill a man who wasn’t careful; the atmospheric blanket was still too thin to moderate the climate as much as Earth’s is moderated. But the Martians had never suffered, though temperature rocketed beyond anything they had ever known at home. It was one reason the corporation paid them so well… Somehow, the picture was an eldritch and lonely one.
Sevigny’s attention switched back to immediacies as the Buffalo asked, “In your opinion, what caused the accident?” •
Seven Conquests Page 20
