He thought Cragg was going to hit him. The man was half out of his chair before he controlled himself. “Between you and me I’m not saying I think you’re physically afraid. That’s what Ames is going to say back on Earth. I’m not even sure what you want out of this trip. Reputation and a general’s star maybe. I do think your vanity means more than your life to you. So I’m going to put you over this barrel. You can take your choice between the danger here that you might not get the Far Venture back to Earth and the certain loss of your reputation when you do get back—if you don’t give a search party a chance to go after Dr. Pembroke.”
Cragg smashed the straightedge down on the desk. “Look”—his voice deepened—“Dr. Pembroke and his men, I say they’re dead. You’ve got some flimsy evidence they’re not. But I am in command of this spacecraft. That includes responsibility for its safety and the safety of all the crew and passengers. It’s my first duty to get the Far Venture back to Earth. That I’m going to do even if I have to leave half the personnel behind. This business is over your head. Pembroke may be the Director of Science on Expedition Mars. He can be the high priest of the almighty atom, for all I care when it comes to completing our mission. Like I told you, there are millions of men. Quite a few even as valuable as Dr. Pembroke. But this vehicle”—Cragg banged down again—“cost five years’ work and three billion dollars to get it ready. Regardless of science and observations and specimens, regardless of some men’s lives, the Far Venture has to get back to Earth.”
“And Colonel Cragg is again the great hero. First of the Martian captains. Until Ames gets through with you!”
“You think that kind of stuff is going to work on me, you’ve got another think coming. Supposing you wait until I finish. I’ve got no way of knowing whether you’re right or wrong about Pembroke, but I don’t intend to close out four men if there’s some chance of saving them.”
He tossed the straightedge on the scarred table. “You heard what I said about my responsibility. You said noon you could be back. Now let’s see about your guts. I’ll go you one hour better—maybe. Here’s the deal I make you. First, nobody goes but volunteers. You’re personally included as the first volunteer. Second, I wait no longer, regardless, than one hour past noon. If you’re not back by 1300 hours, then I don’t care where you are or how much you signal you’re alive, or what. We take off at 1300 regardless. I will not risk the afternoon radiation peak.”
Dane heard himself say, “Fair enough.”
“That’s not all,” Cragg said grimly. “So far it’s been true that both radiation and the spark fires have died down at night and haven’t come back until late in the morning. But we’ve only been here three mornings. Tonight you plotted a spark-fire concentration obviously aimed at the Far Venture. I don’t understand it and neither do you. I know I don’t like it. If either the radiation or any evidence of spark fire picks up intensity in the morning faster than it has been doing, I take off without you. I take off when we register fifteen per cent penetrations, no matter what time it is or where you are.”
Dane thought that one over. Fifteen hours for twenty miles. Through loose sand and vegetation. Including a search and maybe injured men to get out. Pressure suits.
He took a deep damn-fool breath. “You have a deal.”
3
DANE PUSHED down a clumsy foot. When he felt the ground, he got free and watched the ladder retract. The thick hatch drew up flush with the hull thirty feet overhead.
He stood solid-footed in a luminescent, wine-red fog. They had already kicked up enough dust to diffuse and obscure the glaring guard lights. Every step of the heavy footgear puffed another explosion up into the dead atmosphere.
Dane’s spirits sagged. The lurid scene fitted the implausible journey to which he was committed. If he let himself think about it at all, he saw very plainly how right Colonel Cragg had been.
He moved toward the rim-lit figure of Wertz, a powerful body squatting short in the grotesque pressure suit. At least in Lieutenant McDonald he was fortunate. About the chemist Wertz of large mustache he was less certain. He was assertive and something of a loudmouth, but yet his scientific reputation was solid to back him up. And he had volunteered to come along. Abruptly and definitely he had volunteered, so firmly as to exclude any of the others at once.
From habit Dane huddled with the two of them, Earth style, in the thin nitrogenous atmosphere while they ran through their final suit, instrument, and communications check.
When McDonald gave the word to move out, it was 2120. Fifty minutes of their time had already ticked off.
The course was 39 degrees east of the planet’s magnetic pole, along the direct path across the northern reach of Isidis Regio that Dr. Pembroke had taken to the green-dark vegetation of Syrtis Major. Five miles of dust to the lichen beds.
McDonald looped the tow cord of the specimen cart over his shoulder. As soon as they left the bright narrow zone, the Martian night plunged over them. At last light the sky had been free from dust clouds and clear, but now only Earth and Jupiter and a handful of stars were picked out above them. The high frost haze was thick. Both moons were down.
To conserve battery power, they plodded along in the black dark. The air-conditioned pressure suits really worked admirably. But for the constriction of the harness and the swinging gait to accommodate the articulated joints, they were free and easy, like papier-mâché armor. Dane estimated the pace at two miles per hour.
Not much sounded off in the earphones. A half-hearted joke about sardines out for a stroll without taking off their cans. A guess about how far they had come, with a glance back at the beacon light on top of the spacecraft. Then they settled down to the work of locomotion. After an hour Phoebus rose in the west, a hazy blotch of light.
McDonald was signaling the spacecraft of the liaison frequency. “McDonald to Baker Home,” he called in the traditional jargon. They were two hours out.
A crisp reply came at once.
“How do you read me now?” McDonald queried.
“Strong and clear.”
“Roger. What is our location?”
It took them a couple of minutes to plot. “You are one-zero-five yards right of course. You are approximately one-one-zero-zero yards from the intersection of course with the lichen forest. Your course to the intersection of original course and lichen forest is now three-three degrees, three-two minutes. Repeat: change course to three-three degrees, three-two minutes. Do you read? Over.”
McDonald repeated the message and went out.
Wertz came in on the intercom frequency. “Did you hear that slide-rule jockey?”
McDonald said, “Yeah. That was Major Noel himself. It’s a wonder he didn’t give us the odd seconds. Be mighty handy. Especially with a wristwatch compass. I can hardly even see mine through this fishbowl.”
“Nothing can stop the United States Air Force,” Wertz said. “Precise. Daring. Glamorous.”
McDonald said, “I hope nothing stops us from getting us back. I don’t want to think of that take-off tomorrow.”
“In front of civilians, Lieutenant?”
Under their talk Dane heard the ground bass of apprehension. The interchange quickly sputtered out and they plodded along again in silence, each so wrapped in his solitude that they came against it unaware, blundering against it in the dark with nerves jarred by a clutching around their legs before they could get their lights switched on.
The white beams danced over a thicket of waist-high plants. Dane poured his light on the things before him, “God!” he murmured, awed that John Dane, born into the clean, practical little town of New Braunfels, Texas, had come over the horizon of space to stand on another world, face to face with an alien something that lived.