“Too long,” Fox growled.
“Well, these will be good protection if we don’t have to depend on them too heavily.”
“I still don’t see why we didn’t see the ship blast,” Lars said. “Could they have thrown it straight into Koenig drive without clearing the planet?”
“If they did, we’re better off than they are, because they’d all be dead. They’d have disintegrated half the planet and blown themselves to atoms. No, Salter was a navigator. He knows you have to be in free space to use the drive.”
“I still don’t see how they could have blasted,” Lars said doggedly.
“Do you want to go back there and look for yourself?” Fox snapped. “Do you think I’m blind? Or are you just so sold on your friend that you can’t admit to yourself that he’s turned traitor? Eh? Well?”
“There’s no point to fighting about it,” Lambert cut in. “It’s not there. All right. That cuts it pretty thin for us. We’d better make the best of what we’ve got.”
Fox glowered at Lars for a moment; then his face softened. “John’s right,” he said. “Sorry. I guess I just needed something to strike out at. Have we got those packs ready? Let’s move.”
They moved. They had no enthusiasm for it, but they realized that now was the time to make speed, while they had warmth and food. The started up the trail toward the jutting ridge, Fox and Klein leading, Lars and Lambert behind. The wind was high now, bearing down on them as though to hinder progress as much as it could, and angry black clouds scudded across the bleak sky.
“How long can a man go without food?” Lars asked Lambert as they worked their way up the rocky animal trail.
“With plenty of water, quite a while. Provided he doesn’t have to use up his energy moving, and provided he has no coldness and wetness to worry about. It isn’t food we have to worry about for a while yet. If you want to fret about something, fret about pneumonia, or broken legs.”
The latter, at least, was an ever present danger. The tough underbrush covered the trail, giving way from time to time to piles of broken rock, the remains of ancient slides. Soon the trail took a sharp upward course as they moved around the face of the ridge they had seen the night before, blanking out their view of the mountain ridge beyond. What if they, too, found blank cliff waiting for them around the abutment? Lars felt his slender nylon cord looped around his shoulder. It was strong, but one man had to get up a cliff before others could climb a rope.
It took several hours of work to reach the end of the obstruction, but finally they broke out on a high rounded knoll and could see the rising crags before them. The cliff extended up from the far side of the river, where the stream of water coursed over it in a gigantic waterfall. But here there was a break in the obstructing wall. A jagged slide-course of boulders slanted up through a split in the cliff, reaching to a snow-covered plateau above. Far above this, as the clouds broke, they caught a glint of metal.
“It’s bad,” Fox said. “It’ll take a day at least to get up that slide, if we can do it without breaking our necks. And then I’m not certain we can get onto those higher ridges that lead to the ship.”
Jerry Klein studied the course with field glasses. “I’ve done some climbing back home,” he said. “It looks possible— barely—from here. Of course, I don’t know what it’ll look like from there.”
“I wish we had Kennedy’s films,” Fox said.
“They wouldn’t help much. It isn’t the horizontal plane that worries me, it’s the vertical. That’s a vicious rise there.”
“But it looks possible?”
“I think so.”
“Then let’s move,” said Commander Fox.
They did not reach the top of the rock-slide by darkness. The day was spent scrambling over boulders the size of a house, working their way like a creeping snake up the treacherous mountainside. In full daylight it was difficult enough; when darkness fell Fox shook his head bitterly and waved the others in to a small cul-de-sac in the rock. “We’ll have to stop here. Let’s have a little food.”
They were exhausted and ravenous. They took half-rations, and felt as though they had eaten nothing. Then they tried to find comfortable places to sleep. It was hopeless. Lars dozed, jerking awake a dozen times as the hard rocks pushed through his heater-suit About midnight it began to snow, huge white flakes piling up on the dozing men, drifting against the rocks. Then Lars awoke to find his hands and toes numb with cold, and knew that his heater-pack was exhausted.
By daylight they were all cold. The food warmed them a little, but it was nearly the last, and it was not enough. They stomped themselves warm in the snow, and peered up into the blustery grayness that lay above them.
“Let’s move,” said Fox. They moved.
With aching limbs they started on up the slide. The ventilated suits were a burden now, insulating them somewhat, but growing too warm as they climbed, chilling them to the bone when they stopped. The whiteness around them grew thicker as they climbed, but Lars paid no attention to the surroundings. He kept his eyes on Jerry Klein’s boots above him, and followed, step by step upward, as the trip began to dissolve into a series of nightmare impressions, fleeting thoughts, almost-hopeless hopes.
Movement—to keep warm, to keep moving. Upward, always upward. A pause after what seemed like days, to finish the rations, melt some of the snow for water. Then on again. One foot forward, then the other. A scramble, a shout, a flurry of snow as Fox lost his footing, starting a small slide down toward them, and then the pause to rope together. Another pause, as they reached the top of the slide, searched the crags above for a way to reach further up.
Darkness, and coldness, another dawn. Above them, the mountain like a living, malignant thing, daring them to keep coming, but high on a ridge near the summit, a glint of metal, a glint of hope.
They moved upward.
It was too easy to despair. Lars found himself thinking bleakly of the wreck high above them on the ridge. Would they find food there? Would the generators still work, would there be recharges for their heater-packs? There had to be, if they hoped to survive. But there was more up there, more waiting for them. For the hundredth time Lars remembered Peter Brigham’s words: It just doesn’t fit, any of it. And we won’t nail it until we reach that wreck and find out what really happened to the Planetfall.
And over it all, the growing conviction that they were not alone on this planet, somehow, that somewhere alien eyes were watching, waiting.
On the fourth day they met the remainder of Lorry’s group.
It was a sorry reunion. They met on a high ridge, where Fox and his group had fought for hours to climb a series of rocky abutments. Tom Lorry spotted them from the other side of the ridge and shouted; then he was running toward them, with Bob Kennedy at his heels. Behind came Marstom, the engineer. There were no others.
“Where are the rest?” Fox demanded when they had joined into a huddled group on the ridge.
“Three of them ran out,” Lorry panted. “We all started up when we found the ship gone, but Blair broke his ankle. I left him down below with Burger and all the food we had. They’ve got fuel, and some protection from the wind. We started on up then. How is your food supply?”
“It isn’t,” Fox said.
“Then let’s get going. There’s got to be food in that wreck.”
They moved upward.
That night Kennedy began coughing, and so did Marstom. By morning both were feverish. Fox and Lars had frostbitten fingers which Lambert nursed back to warmth again. The wind was back, cold and biting, carrying drifts of sleet down the mountainside upon them. Lambert loaded both men with antibiotic, and distributed the rest of his stress-caps. They had lost sight of the wreck above them now; they were too close against the mountainside. But Klein thought he saw a way up.