Rocket Ship Galileo (18 page)

Cargraves hesitated. With automatic caution, he had intended always to keep at least one man in the ship, as a safety measure. On second thought there seemed no reason for it. A man inside the ship could do nothing for a man outside the ship without first donning a pressure suit and coming outside. “We’ll compromise,” he said. “Morrie and I—no, you and I.” He realized that he could not risk both pilots at once. “You and I will go first. If it’s okay, the others can follow us. All right, troops,” he said, turning. “Into your space suits!”

They helped each other into them, after first applying white sunburn ointment liberally over the skin outside their goggles. It gave them an appropriate out-of-this-world appearance. Then Cargraves had them check their suits at twice normal pressure while he personally inspected their oxygen-bottle back packs.

All the while they were checking their walky-talkies; ordinary conversation could be heard, but only faintly, through the helmets as long as they were in the air of the ship; the radios were louder.

“Okay, sports,” he said at last. “Art and I will go into the lock together, then proceed around to the front, where you can see us. When I give you the high sign, come on out. One last word: stay together. Don’t get more than ten yards or so away from me. And remember this. When you get out there, every last one of you is going to want to see how high you can jump; I’ve heard you talking about it. Well, you can probably jump twenty-five or thirty feet high if you try. But don’t do it!”

“Why not?” Ross’s voice was strange, through the radio.

“Because if you land on your head and crack your helmet open, we’ll bury you right where you fall! Come on, Morrie. No, sorry—I mean ‘Art’.”

They crowded into the tiny lock, almost filling it. The motor which drove the impeller to scavenge the air from the lock whirred briefly, so little was the space left unoccupied by their bodies, then sighed and stopped. The scavenger valve clicked into place and Cargraves unclamped the outer door.

He found that he floated, rather than jumped, to the ground. Art came after him, landing on his hands and knees and springing lightly up.

“Okay, kid?”

“Swell!”

They moved around to the front, boots scuffing silently in the loose soil. He looked at it and picked up a handful to see if it looked like stuff that had been hit by radioactive blast. He was thinking of Morrie’s theory. They were on the floor of a crater; that was evident, for the wall of hills extended all around them. Was it an atomic bomb crater?

He could not tell. The moon soil did have the boiled and bubbly look of atom-scorched earth, but that might have been volcanic action, or, even, the tremendous heat of the impact of a giant meteor. Well, the problem could wait.

Art stopped suddenly. “Say! Uncle, I’ve got to go back.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I forgot my camera!”

Cargraves chuckled. “Make it next time. Your subject won’t move.” Art’s excitement had set a new high, he decided; there was a small school of thought which believed he bathed with his camera.

Speaking of baths, Cargraves mused, I could stand one. Space travel had its drawbacks. He was beginning to dislike his own smell, particularly when it was confined in a space suit!

Ross and Morrie were waiting for them, not patiently, at the port. Their radio voices, blanked until now by the ship’s sides, came clearly through the quartz. “How about it, Doc?” Ross sang out, pressing his nose to the port.

“Seems all right,” they heard him say.

“Then here we come!”

“Wait a few minutes yet. I want to be sure.”

“Well—okay.” Ross showed his impatience, but discipline was no longer a problem. Art made faces at them, then essayed a little dance, staying close to the ground but letting each step carry him a few feet into the air—or, rather, vacuum. He floated slowly and with some grace. It was like a dance in slow motion, or a ballet under water.

When he started rising a little higher and clicking his boot heels together as he sailed, Cargraves motioned for him to stop. “Put down your flaps, chum,” he cautioned, “and land. You aren’t Nijinsky.”

“Who’s Nijinsky?”

“Never mind. Just stay planted. Keep at least one foot on the ground. Okay, Morrie,” he called out, “come on out. You and Ross.”

The port was suddenly deserted.

When Morrie set foot on the moon and looked around him at the flat and unchanging plain and at the broken crags beyond he felt a sudden overwhelming emotion of tragedy and of foreboding welling up inside him. “It’s the bare bones,” he muttered, half to himself, “the bare bones of a dead world.”

“Huh?” said Ross. “Are you coming, Morrie?”

“Right behind you.”

Cargraves and Art had joined them. “Where to?” asked Ross, as the captain came up.

“Well, I don’t want to get too far from the ship this first time,” Cargraves declared. “This place might have some dirty tricks up its sleeve that we hadn’t figured on. How much pressure you guys carrying?”

“Ship pressure.”

“You can cut it down to about half that without the lower pressure bothering you. It’s oxygen, you know.”

“Let’s walk over to those hills,” Morrie suggested. He pointed astern where the rim of the crater was less than half a mile from the ship. It was the sunward side and the shadows stretched from the rim to within a hundred yards or so of the ship.

“Well, part way, anyhow. That shade might feel good. I’m beginning to sweat.”

“I think,” said Morrie, “if I remember correctly, we ought to be able to see earth from the top of the rim. I caught a flash of it, just as we inverted. We aren’t very far over on the back side.”

“Just where are we?”

“I’ll have to take some sights before I can report,” Morrie admitted. “Some place west of
Oceanus Procellarum
and near the equator.”

“I know that.”

“Well, if you’re in a hurry, Skipper, you had better call up the Automobile Club.”

“I’m in no hurry. Injun not lost—wigwam lost. But I hope the earth is visible from there. It would be a good spot, in that case, to set up Art’s antenna, not too far from the ship. Frankly, I’m opposed to moving the ship until we head back, even if we miss a chance to try to contact earth.”

They were in the shadows now, to Cargraves’ relief. Contrary to popular fancy, the shadows were not black, despite the lack of air-dispersed sunlight. The dazzle of the floor behind them and the glare of the hills beyond all contrived to throw quite a lot of reflected light into the shadows.

When they had proceeded some distance farther toward the hills, Cargraves realized that he was not keeping his party together too well. He had paused to examine a place, discovered by Ross, where the base rock pushed up through the waste of the desert floor, and was trying in the dim light to make out its nature, when he noticed that Morrie was not with them.

He restrained his vexation; it was entirely possible that Morrie, who was in the lead, had not seen them stop. But he looked around anxiously.

Morrie was about a hundred yards ahead, where the first folds of the hills broke through. “Morrie!”

The figure stood up, but no answer came over the radio. He noticed then that Morrie was veering, weaving around. “Morrie! Come back here! Are you all right?”

“All right? Sure, I’m all right.” He giggled.

“Well, come back here.”

“Can’t come back. ’M busy—I’ve found it!” Morrie took a careless step, bounded high in the air, came down, and staggered.

“Morrie! Stand still.” Cargraves was hurrying toward him.

But he did not stand still. He began bounding around, leaping higher and higher. “I’ve found it!” he shrieked. “I’ve found it!” He gave one last bound and while he floated lazily down, he shouted, “I’ve found…the bare bones—” His voice trailed off. He lit feet first, bounced through a complete forward flip and collapsed.

Cargraves was beside him almost as he fell, having himself approached in great flying leaps.

First the helmet—no, it was not cracked. But the boy’s eyes stared out sightlessly. His head lolled, his face was gray.

Cargraves gathered him up in his arms and began to run toward the
Galileo
. He knew the signs though he had seen it only in the low-pressure chamber used for pilot training—anoxia! Something had gone wrong; Morrie was starved for oxygen. He might die before he could be helped, or, still worse, he might live with his brain permanently damaged, his fine clear intellect gone.

It had happened before that way, more than once during the brave and dangerous days when man was conquering high-altitude flying.

The double burden did not slow him down. The two together, with their space suits, weighed less than seventy pounds. It was just enough to give him stability.

He squeezed them into the lock, holding Morrie close to his chest and waited in agonizing impatience as the air hissed through the valve. All his strength would not suffice to force that door open until the pressure equalized.

Then he was in and had laid him on the deck. Morrie was still out. He tried to remove the suit with trembling, glove-hampered fingers, then hastily got out of his own suit and un-clamped Morrie’s helmet. No sign of life showed as the fresh air hit the patient.

Cussing bitterly he tried to give the boy oxygen directly from his suit but found that the valve on Morrie’s suit, for some reason, refused to respond. He turned then to his own suit, disconnected the oxygen line and fed the raw oxygen directly to the boy’s face while pushing rhythmically on his chest.

Morrie’s eyes flickered and he gasped.

“What happened? Is he all right?” The other two had come through the lock while he worked.

“Maybe he is going to be all right. I don’t know.”

In fact he came around quickly, sat up and blinked his eyes. “Whassa matter?” he wanted to know.

“Lie down,” Cargraves urged and put a hand on his shoulder.

“All right…hey! I’m inside.”

Cargraves explained to him what had happened. Morrie blinked. “Now that’s funny. I was all right, except that I was feeling exceptionally fine—”

“That’s a symptom.”

“Yes, I remember. But it didn’t occur to me then. I had just picked up a piece of metal with a hole in it, when—”

“A
what?
You mean worked metal? Metal that some one had—”

“Yes, that’s why I was so ex—” He stopped and looked puzzled. “But it couldn’t have been.”

“Possible. This planet might have been inhabited…or visited.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that.” Morrie shrugged it off, as if it were of no importance. “I was looking at it, realizing what it meant, when a little bald-headed short guy came up and…but it couldn’t have been.”

“No,” agreed Cargraves, after a short pause, “it couldn’t have been. I am afraid you were beginning to have anoxia dreams by then. But how about this piece of metal?”

Morrie shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted “I remember holding it and looking at it, just as clearly as I remember anything, ever. But I remember the little guy just as well. He was standing there and there were others behind him and I knew that they were the moon people. There were buildings and trees.” He stopped. “I guess that settles it.”

Cargraves nodded, and turned his attention to Morrie’s oxygen pack. The valve worked properly now. There was no way to tell what had been wrong, whether it had frosted inside when Morrie walked on into the deeper shadows, whether a bit of elusive dirt had clogged it, or whether Morrie himself had shut it down too far when he had reduced pressure at Cargraves’ suggestion and thereby slowly suffocated himself. But it must not happen again. He turned to Art.

“See here, Art. I want to rig these gimmicks so that you can’t shut them off below a certain limit. Mmmm…no, that isn’t enough. We need a warning signal too—something to warn the wearer if his supply stops. See what you can dream up.”

Art got the troubled look on his face that was habitual with him whenever his gadget-conscious mind was working at his top capacity. “I’ve got some peanut bulbs among the instrument spares,” he mused. “Maybe I could mount one on the neck ring and jimmy it up so that when the flow stopped it would—” Cargraves stopped listening; he knew that it was only a matter of time until some unlikely but perfectly practical new circuit would be born.

“SOMEBODY IS NUTS!”

• 13 •

THE TOP OF THE RING OF HILLS
showed them the earth, as Morrie had thought. Cargraves, Art, and Ross did the exploring, leaving Morrie back to recuperate and to work on his celestial navigation problem. Cargraves made a point of going along because he did not want the two passengers to play mountain goat on the steep crags—a great temptation under the low gravity conditions.

Also, he wanted to search over the spot where Morrie had had his mishap. Little bald men, no; a piece of metal with a hole in it—possible. If it existed it might be the first clue to the greatest discovery since man crawled up out of the darkness and became aware of himself.

But no luck—the spot was easy to find; footprints were new to this loose soil! But search as they might, they found nothing. Their failure was not quite certain, since the gloom of the crater’s rim still hung over the spot. In a few days it would be daylight here; he planned to search again.