Corriston stared at him incredulously. “You’re certainly outspoken. You were pleading for your life a moment ago — going soft, as you’d put it. Now you’re talking realistically, analyzing your own motivations and mine”.
“I’m not quite as dumb as you think me, Corriston”.
“All right. Let’s say you’re not dumb. Few people are, when it comes to a matter of life or death. That’s beside the point right now. I’ve got to tie you up. Where can I find some rope?”.
“It would be much simpler to lock me in a vacant compartment”.
“All right. Then I’ll lock you in one of the compartments.
You can pick your own compartment. I’d advise you not to waste my time. Pick your own compartment and I’ll slide the bolt fast on the outside”.
Stone showed no disposition to put up an argument. Corriston kept the gun pressed into the small of his back and he seemed to realize that his life hung by a thread.
They found a compartment that was small and dark, and into it Stone walked at gunpoint, offering no protest, and answering the questions Corriston put to him readily enough.
“You’ll find all the equipment you need at the end of this passageway”, Stone said. “Activate the third door on your left. Anything else you’d like to know”.
Corriston shook his head. He walked out of the compartment backwards, keeping his gun trained on Stone until he was in the corridor. Then he swung the door shut and shot the bolt home.
He had no trouble at all in finding the equipment he knew he’d, need, thanks to Stone’s generosity. Stone could afford to be generous, he reflected bitterly. The Henley combine still held all of the trump cards.
He cursed the time it took him to equip himself for a near-suicidal crossing of eight-seven miles of Martian desert. He would travel on foot, after nightfall, and in freezing cold. The compartment in which he labored was a basal compartment, and set in the massive bulkhead, against which he leaned with his bootstraps still unlaced, was an airlock opening directly on the Martian plain.
He collected the smaller articles first, setting them down in a row on a long metal bench directly opposite the airlock: three compasses, each weighing perhaps twenty ounces; a cathode ray compass; a non-magnetic compass and a sun compass. The sun compass would perhaps prove the most valuable until darkness fell. The sun, shining down with brilliance from the clear Martian sky, could throw a directional kind of shadow, enabling a man on foot to take fairly accurate bearings without the use of sighting and viewing instruments.
To the compasses on the bench he added five map coordinates and a Lambert conformal projection chart.
Food concentrates came next: four shining aluminum cubes, four inches by four inches, which would go into the knapsack on his back. Then a canteen, already filled with sterilized water from the ship’s central water supply system.
Next, he took from the locker the right kind of clothing: a tubeflex inner suit with a warm lining and a heavy outer suit equipped with heat lamps.
Oxygen masks next — oxy-respirators, to be exact. One to attach to the face and one to hold in reserve as a spare. They covered only a third of the face, but that third had everything to do with a man’s staying alive and vigorous in the thin air of Mars. When night fell, and the cold descended, oxy-respirators were not enough. Then you had to pull down the entire front of your helmet and stagger on with your sight impaired, for in a cold that was almost beyond endurance, helmets had a way of clouding over from time to time.
The clouding over of the vision plate was not too important. It could be constantly wiped clean. But if his brain started “clouding over” too...
He dismissed the possibility from his mind. He was clothed now, fully clothed, and ready to depart.
He started moving toward the airlock, feeling and looking like a giant beetle of the tropics, feeling awkward, cumbersome and insecure. His boots were weighted, and the bulge of the oxygen tank on his shoulder made him look almost hunchbacked in the cold light glimmer that turned the bulkhead into a mirroring surface as he advanced.
He manipulated the airlock and it opened with a slow, steady droning and then he was passing through it, still moving awkwardly...
At last! He was out on the Martian desert in bright sunlight, staring up at the clear blue sky.
The first few miles were not difficult at all. He walked away from the ship with his shoulders held straight, the cumbersome feeling dissipated by the lightness of his stride in the incredibly light gravity.
The air pressure about him was less than seventy millimeters of mercury. The thought sprouted in his mind that he was the god Mercury striding along with winged shoes, and for the first five miles his weighted boots did seem to develop wings.
Then the temperature began slowly to drop. The sun sank lower. Its brightness diminished, and his cheeks began to tingle with the cold.
There was a slight wind blowing over the desert, raising dust flurries on the summits of the tallest dunes, causing the gray patches of crust lichen, which were scattered widely over the plain, to change color as their threadlike surfaces were ruffled by the breeze.
Far in the distance he could see a “canal”, one of those strange blue-green declivities in the terrain which looked from the air like an actual waterway, and had deceived — or bewildered — three generations of men.
Despite the increasing cold, Corriston did not moderate his stride. He let his thoughts dwell on the most imaginative of the canal speculations. It had been proven completely false, but its originality fascinated him. Long ago, the theory held, there had been volcanic activity on Mars. Great faults or fissures had opened up in the planet’s crust, and when the coming of spring thawed the polar ice caps, curtains of fog swirled equatorward, filling those natural crevices with swirling, rivers of mist.
Corriston stopped walking for a moment, shifting the weight of his equipment slightly, easing a too heavy drag on his right shoulder. He made sure that the thin flexible tube which connected his oxygen mask with the small tank on his back was securely clipped into place at both ends, tested the harness buckle which supported supplies which were as necessary to him as breathing, and took a turn up and down the sand, stamping, shaking himself, to make absolutely certain that nothing vital had been jarred loose.
Then he was under way again, moving along at a steady pace over the rust-red desert, the ship now lost to view far behind him, his mind leaping ahead to the very great dangers which he was determined to face and overcome so long as one slender thread of hope remained.
16
IT MIGHT have been almost any sleepy little town on Earth, picked at random from a train window — a dust bowl town with a prairie name: Hawk’s Valley, Buzzard’s Gulch, and the like. It might have been, but it wasn’t.
The buildings were thinner, of more precarious construction, and each had been built to house three or more families. They were at unusual angles on sloping ledges where the soil was firm enough to resist overnight erosion from winds of hurricane force, and in many places their prefabricated metal foundations were pierced and supported by shafts of solid rock.
Without modem technology at its most advanced, the town could never have been built. Yet in the streets of the town there was a village rudeness of construction which no pioneering effort could quite efface: a wide main street that gleamed red in the sunlight on which three caterpillar tractors stood stalled, their guard rails caked with yellow mud; a pool of stagnant black water with a wooden plank thrown haphazardly across it; a discarded fuel container upended against a half-rusted away metal cable, and the remnants of an hydraulic actuator overgrown with hardy lichens that had colored it yellow and ash gray. And here and there, projecting from the tumbled sand, were spiny cactus-like growths.