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race can't match. We've got to get word home. And to get word home, we've got
to get someone with the Messenger to the top of that mountain."
He stopped talking. Maury stood there.
"You understand me, Maury?" said Joe. "I'm Survey Leader. It's my
responsibility. And in my opinion if there's one man who can get the Messenger
to the top of the mountain, it's Cal."
The bed seemed to make a slow half-swing under him suddenly. He lost his
balance. He toppled back off the support of his elbow, and the sky overhead
beyond the bubble began to rotate slowly around him and things blurred.
Desperately he fought to hold on to consciousness. He had to convince Maury,
he thought. If he could convince Maury, the others would fall in line. He knew
what was wrong with them in their feelings toward Cal as a leader. It was the
fact that the mountain was unclimbable. Anyone could see it was unclimbable.
But Cal was going to climb it anyway, they all knew that, and in climbing it
he would probably require the lives of the men who went with him.
They would not have minded that if he had been one of them. But he had always
stood apart, and it was a cold way to give your life for a man whom you had
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never understood, or been able to get close to.
"Maury," he choked. "Try to see it from Cal's try to see it from his "
The sky spun into a blur. The world blurred and tilted.
"Orders," Joe croaked at Maury. "Cal command "
"Yes," said Maury, pressing him back down on the bed as he tried blindly to
sit up again. "All right.
All right, Joe. Lie still. He'll have the command. He'll be in charge and
we'll all follow him. I promise . . ."
IV
During the next two days, the Survey Leader was only intermittently conscious.
His fever ran to dangerous levels, and several times he trembled and jerked as
if on the verge of going into convulsions.
John Martin also, although he was conscious and able to move around and even
do simple tasks, was pale, high-fevered and occasionally thick-tongued for no
apparent reason. It seemed possible there was an infective agent in the claw
and teeth wounds made by the alien, with which the ship's medicines were
having trouble coping.
With the morning of the third day when the climbers were about to set out both
men showed improvement.
The Survey Leader came suddenly back to clearheadedness as Cal and the three
others were standing, all equipped in the bubble, ready to leave. They had
been discussing last-minute warnings and advices with a pale but alert John
Martin when Joe's voice entered the conversation.
"What?" it said. "Who's alive? What was that?"
They turned and saw him propped up on one elbow on his makeshift bed. They had
left him on it
since the sleeping quarters section of the ship had been completely destroyed,
and the sections left unharmed were too full of equipment to make practical
places for the care of a wounded man. Now they saw his eyes taking in their
respirator masks, packs, hammers, the homemade pitons and hammers, and other
equipment including rope, slung about them.
"What did one of you say?" Joe demanded again. "What was it?"
"Nothing, Joe," said John Martin, coming toward him. "Lie down."
Joe waved him away, frowning. "Something about one being still alive. One
what?"
Cal looked down at him. Joe's face had grown lean and fallen in even in these
few days but the eyes in the face were sensible.
"He should know," Cal said. His calm, hard, oddly carrying baritone quieted
them all. "He's still
Survey Leader." He looked around at the rest but no one challenged his
decision. He turned and went into the corridor of the ship, down to the main
control room, took several photo prints from a drawer and brought them back.
When he got back out, he found Joe now propped up on pillows but waiting.
"Here," said Cal, handing Joe the photos. "We sent survey rockets with cameras
over the ridge up there for a look at the other side of the mountain. That top
picture shows you what they saw."
Joe looked down at the top picture that showed a stony mountainside steeper
than the one the
Harrier lay on. On this rocky slope was what looked like the jagged,
broken-off end of a blackened oil drum with something white spilled out on the
rock by the open end of the drum.
"That's what's left of the alien ship," said Cal. "Look at the closeup on the
next picture."
* * *
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Joe discarded the top photo and looked at the one beneath. Enlarged in the
second picture he saw that the white something was the body of an alien, lying
sprawled out and stiff.
"He's dead, all right," said Cal. "He's been dead a day or two anyway. But
take a good look at the whole scene and tell me how it strikes you."
Joe stared at the photo with concentration. For a long moment he said nothing.
Then he shook his head, slowly.
"Something's phony," he said at last, huskily.
"I think so too," said Cal. He sat down on the makeshift bed beside Joe and
his weight tilted the wounded man a little toward him. He pointed to the dead
alien. "Look at him. He's got nothing in the way of a piece of equipment he
was trying to put outside the ship before he died. And that mountainside's as
bare as ours. There was no place for him to go outside the ship that made any
sense as a destination if he was that close to dying. And if you're dying on a
strange world, do you crawl out of the one familiar place that's there with
you?"
"Not if you're human," said Doug Kellas behind Cal's shoulder. There was the
faintly hostile note in
Doug's voice still. "There could be a dozen different reasons we don't know [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]