“We can’t take these men with fevers,” Lambert protested.
“We can’t leave them here. Maybe there’ll be some shelter when we get up there, some food.”
Both men agreed. Marstom had difficulty with his breathing as they started to hike again, but by stopping periodically he was able to keep up. Kennedy was wracked with coughing. They moved up one cliff face, then another. Only once that day did they see their goal. It looked as distant as the day they had started. But they knew it couldn’t be. “Another push, a hard one, tomorrow and we might make it,” Fox said hopefully. “We’ll have to start as soon as there’s any light at all. How are the sick ones?”
“I’m nearly out of drugs,” Lambert said.
“But they’re holding their own?”
“For now.”
“There may be drugs on the ship.”
“If there’s just some food it’ll suit me,” Jerry Klein growled. “There might even be some way to salvage it, you know.”
“Of course!” Fox said, forcing enthusiasm. “If only the engines are reparable, it wouldn’t be tough to repair a wrecked shell. But we can’t do it down here. Let’s try to sleep now, and then move. I don’t want to spend another night on this iceberg with a rock for a pillow.”
“It’ll be a tough climb tomorrow,” Klein warned.
“So we climb,” said Fox. “At least we’ll stay warm that way.”
That night Lars began coughing, felt the unnatural heat of fever in his cheeks. By the time light was visible, he felt groggy, stumbling forward with the others in a dim half-world of unreality. He was tired, tired beyond words, tired with a bone-weariness that cut all purpose out of his steps, as he fell mechanically into his place in line. He didn’t even mention the fever to Lambert, what was the use? The drugs were almost gone. It seemed as though he were wrapped in a cocoon, miles away from the rest of the group, looking down on them as they moved up the steep face of the mountain. He found himself chuckling to himself, and caught himself sharply, shaking his head to bring reality closer.
They moved at infinitesimal speed, but they moved. A series of rock wall jutted up above them, vanishing into snow-clouds. Jerry Klein studied the wall, then began shinning up, wedging his feet into crevasses, seeking hand-holds, the coil of nylon cord over his shoulder. He vanished into the gloom as the others waited, not talking, not even looking up—just waiting. Then they heard his call, as the nylon swished wetly down to them, and they pulled themselves up, one by one. Lambert strapped Kennedy and Marstom tightly to the rope, and Lars and Fox pulled from above to help them up. One such climb behind them, another loomed up, and another. With each passing moment Lars’ hopes sank; he was moving in a dream now, hardly paying attention to anything. It was a delusion all along, he thought. We shouldn’t have hoped to make it.
But always there was the flicker of hope, wan and fading, but present. They took the next rock wall, and steadied themselves for the next.
But there wasn’t any next.
They were on a snowfield, a high narrow valley stretching up to the very summit of the mountain beyond. Clouds scudded across, blotting out the peak, then revealing it again, and the snow was a fuzzy blanket as it fell. Across the snowfield was a crag that wasn’t a crag, but the jets of a Star Ship, dimly outlined, one fin raised in gray silhouette against the sky. A cry went up, and Fox and Lorry were running through waist-deep snow, fighting their way toward the distant outline. Lars stumbled after them as Kennedy and Marstom fell to their knees, then scrambled up again in their eagerness. A cloud blotted out the view, but they had seen it, they knew it was there. Half laughing, half crying, Lars stumbled after the dark figures of Fox and Lorry, leaving Lambert to catch up as he could.
Then, as if a signal had been given, the snow stopped and the obscuring cloud lifted. They were very near the wrecked ship now, near enough to see the detail, when Commander Fox stopped cold in his tracks, staring at her. Lorry stumbled, gripped Fox’s shoulder, and pulled himself erect again, panting as he too stared. Something cold crept up Lars’ spine; he stopped, blinking at the thing on the ridge ahead of him. It was a ship, a Star Ship, the goal they had fought so hard for.
But the ship didn’t look right.
The lines were wrong, and it was too big. The part they could see rising up from the snowfield was not the full length of the hull, but only a fragment. It was a pile of wreckage, half-buried in silt and snow, disintegrating from the brutal weathering of many decades.
Lars rubbed his eyes, his mind denying what his eyes told him as he stumbled forward toward the wreck. It was an Earth ship—true—but it was not the Star Ship Planetfall. Barely legible letters on the windbeaten hull spelled out another name, the name of a ship that had left Earth over three hundred years before, taking its crew out bravely and blindly on the Long Passage.
The thing on the ridge was the wreck of the Star Ship Argonaut.
Chapter Ten
For as much as five minutes they stood staring incredulously at the wraith before them, not moving, the only sound their panting breath. Snow began falling again, lazily, spinning down in their faces, falling to form yet another layer of snow on the ancient wreckage before them.
Then Jerry Klein burst forward with a sob. He tripped over a buried piece of hull plate, dragged himself to his feet and ran into the dead, swinging airlock door. He braced himself, peering in, and the door crashed off its hinges in his hand. “Nothing!” he cried. “There’s nothing here. It’s dead, dead.”
He slammed the hull with his fist, and it jerked and swayed dangerously. As Fox and Lambert ran forward, Klein ducked into the gaping lock; they could hear him crashing about inside like a wild man.
And then they were all moving about the decaying ship, hoping against hope that their eyes had been playing tricks, searching for a sign of life, something to restore their hope. They moved through the twisted wreckage numbly, like ghosts of a time long past, searching for something they could no longer hope to find.
No food, no warmth. No hope of repairing engines
smashed into fragments and buried under centuries of silt.
Nothing there but the half-buried skeleton of a ship long despaired of, almost forgotten.
They dragged Klein out of the wreckage laughing and giggling and screaming and fighting them with hysterical fury until Fox struck him hard across the face. He sagged, then, and crumpled into the snow, and sat staring dully at nothing and shaking his head.
When Fox turned to the others tears were streaming down his face. “Get those sick men on their feet, and get back on the rope again. Were going to go on.”
Numbly, Lars and Lambert went back across the snowfield to the half-delirious Kennedy and Mars torn. Their ship on the ridge had been a mirage, even worse than a mirage, for it had indeed existed, taunting them and drawing them on to the last moment. No one had dreamed that it could be the wrong ship. But now they knew that it was. Somehow, missing its course in that valiant journey so long ago, the Argonaut had found another star, another planet, and a grave. What had happened? How long had the journey taken? Only the decaying wreckage could hint at the answer.
The group of men who had labored up the mountain to find the lost Planetfall with its food and generators and its hope of escape from this gray death-planet had found a tomb instead.