The unseeing man at his side stared mightily up into the alien sky. His face was bleached, almost lifeless.
“God, if I could only see the sun!”
“You can feel it on your hand, Skipper,” Brent said very quietly. But his brain wasn’t quiet at all. It was rioting.
“Yes—but which sun?”
“I don’t know. Our computer is shot. We’re lucky to be alive.”
“Lucky—?” Skipper echoed with sudden fury and strength. “No! If it’s A.D. 3955—oh, God! My wife—” His breathing was obviously becoming more difficult. “My two daughters. Dead. Their sons. Daughters. Dead. Everyone I ever knew. Everyone!”
“Yes, sir,” Brent agreed, more quiet than ever. “But I’m trying not to believe it.” He was too, with every fibre and atom of his being and reasoning power. “It’s quiet here, sir. God, it’s quiet.”
It was. There was no sound, no movement, save for the almost furtive whisper of that phantom wind hurrying over the limitless expanses of sandy soil. This unknown planet was a wasteland.
Skipper suddenly pressed both deadening hands against his own chest and choked violently, desperately.
“Oxygen—” he gasped. “More . . .”
Brent leaped to obey, his heart hammering, his pulses pounding. Not even all of the intense, highly technological education instilled in him by the Space Program had ever prepared him for this. Sudden Death is forever a blow, a shock to the nervous system, no matter where, when or how it strikes.
Within the next torrid hour, he was burying Skipper. Shoveling sand over a rough grave just beyond the dune where the spacecraft had crashed to earth. A melancholy assignment, endured with aching muscles and ragged nerve ends, with tears poised on the lids of each eye. Brent was a young, athletic, handsome astronaut; clear-eyed, level-headed, with the look of eagles in his eyes. But Skipper’s dying reduced him to a terribly lonely and frightened young scientist.
He felt like a small boy lost in a maze.
It was only when he had patted the last shovel of loose sand over Skipper’s grave that the man in him returned. The one who had wanted to explore outer space and learn the secrets of the skies.
For it was then that he heard the first sound of life on this planet since the spacecraft had come down; the initial indication that other forms of animal life existed on this unknown, blazing chunk of terra firma beyond the stars.
He heard the clopping sounds of the horse’s hooves long before he saw the beast and the savage-looking female riding it.
Nova, forlorn and aimlessly wandering since the strange disappearance of Taylor, had blundered across the path of the wrecked reconnaissance spacecraft. Another lost child.
Brent watched her from the concealment of the sand dune overshadowing Skipper’s grave. He didn’t make a move until it looked as if Nova would continue on her way. The horse was balky, frightened.
Then he sprang erect, looming before her path, waving his arms, calling out “Hi!” like a maniac, blocking the way.
Nova stared down at him, her gaze torn between him and the shining wreckage of the spacecraft. Brent came closer, cautiously, quietly now, not wanting to frighten her off.
“Who are you?”
Nova did not answer.
“Can you understand me?”
Nova continued to stare, eyes uncomprehending. Brent came still closer. As bewildered as he was, he decided he had never seen a more beautiful, primeval-looking female in all his life. She might have stepped out of one of those old Tarzan movies of the twentieth century.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said easily, smiling to make it more palatable. “Just tell me where I am.”
Still she did not answer.
“My name is Brent.” He reached out to touch the horse’s nose in a gesture of friendliness. “Brent—!” With the same fervor which had characterized Taylor’s attempts, Brent mimed his own name, pointing to himself with grand gestures. Nova gazed down at him, unblinking. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking, what her attitude might be. Brent felt defeat rise in his chest but he shook it off.
“I’m not going to hurt you—I just want to know where I am. Where are you from? Where are your people? How do I get to them? Which way? Can you talk?” He paused, watching her closely. He had his answer in her mute, unspoken demeanor. “You can’t talk.”
Bitterly, he shook the rage out of his brain. The defeat.
Then his eye caught sight of the identification tag looped about her dusky throat where its bright disc caught the rays of the fierce sunlight.
“You have a name—?” She didn’t flinch as he reached up to turn the tag toward his own eyes so that he could read it. In that single instant, Brent felt all the miracle of rebirth. And a hope for Tomorrow. The name TAYLOR, clearly imprinted on the disc, set off rockets in his heart, soul and mind. “TAYLOR! Is he alive? Is he hurt?”
Now, for the very first time, Nova came to life. Her eyes lit up, showing emotional response. She nodded excitedly. Once, twice, three times. Her whole body seemed to take on new vitality. The horse shifted its weight with her movements. Brent, now more desperate than ever to make himself understood, literally seized on all the play-acting ability at his command. He was using sign language, gestures, vocal emphasis to get through to this strange young woman, who had wandered from nowhere to find him.
“Look . . . is there anyone . . . any other . . . someone who can talk . . .?”
Nova smiled at that, dismounting from the horse.
Brent took heart.
“You—” he pointed to her, “take me—to Taylor”
Her smile widened. A dazzling, marvelous smile that rivaled the sun overhead. She relooped the ID tag about her throat. Without asking her permission, Brent quickly mounted the horse directly behind her back. She started at that, staring at him, uttering a tiny cry of dismay. Brent grinned, urged the horse forward and motioned her to mount behind him. With a glad cry, she did so, huddling against his shoulders. Brent looked at her, just once more.
Their eyes met. Held.
“Taylor,” he said. “Now.”
The dazzling smile once more washed over him.
“Where?” he asked.
She held onto him, even more closely than before. He could see that her gaze was focused intently toward the right. Whatever direction of the compass that might be.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll just ride on—till we run out of gas.”
With that, he broke the horse into a slow trot over the scorched, baked dunes. Leaving the spacecraft, Skipper’s grave, and the greatest mystery of his life behind him.
Temporarily, at least.
There was only one thing left in the universe, A.D. 3955 or not.
Find Taylor.
The search became a trek. A wearying, parching, searing exodus across a land which might have sprung whole from the pages of the Old Testament. Never had Brent known so much desert, so much sun, so much dry, sandy, barren nothingness. There was nothing to be seen of a horizon, for the mantle of blazing heat and cloudless skies seemed to blend in waves of infernal, dancing heat which made vision valueless and pointless beyond more than five hundred yards. It was as if this strange planet lay like a skeleton bleaching beneath the ferocity of a never-extinguished sunlight. Night seemed an impossibility. It was difficult to assess anything. Neither place, Time nor direction. Brent could only let the horse plod along in a forward direction and hope for the best. The girl clinging to his dampened body was like some lovely homunculus growing out of his very back. Brent could barely see straight. His eyeballs ached, he had difficulty keeping his lids open. Great weights pressed down on his eyelids. And all about him, and the girl, beat down a heat so furnace-like and unrelenting that he felt as if the blood within his flesh was boiling. Time crawled, droned on. Not even the random furtive breeze which intermittently made its presence known by hissing across this blasted panorama of a Death Valley could relieve the depressing sensation of parboiled desolation and extinct living matter. Nothing could live in this inferno. Nothing. Brent was forcibly reminded of the many sites of atomic bomb testings on Earth where he had experienced this selfsame feeling of utter loss and obliteration. This vast, barren wasteland was exactly like that. He had not seen so much as an ant crawling across the ground. Not even the indestructible ant could have survived in this mass of deadness.