At best their traveling was laborious past imagining, and there were unseen perils, as when one of their number vanished without sound or outcry, and they backtracked and found where he'd gone through snow that had held the rest of them, down into a crevasse on an unsuspected semi-glacier.
It was daunting to move through a night that never lifted, in cold so bitter that no word for it was known, in a world which was mostly noiseless, yet which sometimes made abrupt harsh sounds for which no reason could be assigned. They traveled doggedly, in the dark and over rough and broken ice. They rested in the bitter chill of night. They waked in darkness and went on in darkness.
It was a nightmare. Their mission itself had the feeling of total unreality. They knew nothing of events except where they struggled desperately to cover distance swiftly in a blackness that never lifted. There was a shortwave set on one of the dogsleds, but it would not be wise to use it, not even for reception of broadcast news. Resonant receivers can be detected. So they did not know when, after days of seeming hesitation, the Greks appeared to agree to return to Earth.
On the fifth day's—night's—journeying they saw a light far away. It glowed for perhaps two minutes, the only light or sign of life in any form that they'd seen in two hundred miles. Then it went out.
Hackett and his small party moved onward with redoubled caution. There was life here—the light proved it.
It would be an installation armed and guarded, designed to help in the subjugation of the Earth and the enslavement of its population, with that population's wildly enthusiastic approval.
11
Cold, icy stars filled the firmament. They shone upon a faintly visible icescape which was totally un-unlike the planet Earth as Hackett had known it before. Even the sky was strange, because the Big Dipper was almost directly overhead and the Milky Way was strangely placed as well. There were no trees and no grass. The air entering one's nostrils was intolerably frigid. Hackett himself wore white outer garments over clumsy inner ones, white garments so he would be inconspicuous! The dogs were muzzled, muted lest they bark or snarl. The dog whips were lashed to the two sledges lest the Eskimo dog drivers forget the need for absolute silence. Sometimes, not often, a dog whined. But there were crunching sounds where men on snowshoes moved about on utterly brittle snow.
It occurred to Hackett that perhaps the precautions for silence were ridiculous, if only deaf Aldarians manned this hidden refuge. But there might not be only Aldarians; there'd been something which came from the moon. The Grek ship undoubtedly waited there. Greks could have journeyed to Earth in that space vehicle, whatever it happened to be. If Aldarians were their slaves, they would be sharply and suspiciously watched. There'd been reason, in Grek eyes, for the torture and murder and contemptuous burial in ship garbage of a number of them before the ship lifted off. The Greks would watch for other thoughts of insubordination. They'd look for failure of alertness and obedience. It was not impossible that one or more Greks would remain at this establishment.
And if one were, they'd be fighting with human powder-weapons against unguessable instruments of destruction in the hands of the Grek. They had weapons, certainly. The murdered Aldarians had been killed by weapons which exploded tunnels through their flesh. There might be other and more terrible devices ...
The small army went on as quietly and as alertly as they could. They'd seen a light. It was now gone. They looked to their weapons, making sure the cold had not ruined their action by freezing some overlooked trace of lubricant. Only graphite could be used to lubricate metal at temperatures like this. The automatic weapons carried explosive bullets, with one bullet in four a tracer. But here were the firmest of possible orders that there was to be no firing at machinery. The whole purpose of this appallingly desperate raid was to capture—or at least for Hackett to see—one of the broadcast-power generators that supplied half the broadcast power which was three-quarters of all the power used on Earth.
It was the most hair-raising gamble ever made by human beings since history began. Its only justification was the stupidity of humans in allowing our power networks to become useless since the Greks arrival, and our steam generators to become unusable. Even the hydraulic generators were unused and their reservoirs half-emptied for irrigation. And men had seized so avidly upon power to be taken from the air that the loss of the broadcast supply would bring all human communications to a stop. Electrified railroads couldn't begin to move again before starvation swept the world. There were ships at sea which would become derelicts. Even ships which came to harbor and their docks could be unloaded only by hand, and the distribution of their cargoes would be so limping and so halting and inadequate that there was no city in which famine would not immediately appear.
But this had to be risked because if only the Greks could distribute power, the Greks had power of life and death over mankind. Which they would use. Which they had been invited and implored to return and use. Therefore men of former authority had very desperately and secretly set up this raid, because the great public believed in the Greks; because it could not be persuaded that their benevolence was a sham; because most men did not want to be independent of the Greks—they wanted to be their pensioners.
But there was that necessary few who gambled their fives and ours together with all the future of the race, because otherwise the gamble would be lost.
There came a time when, advancing with the greatest possible caution over snow between towering cliffs of stone, there were disturbances of the normal surface. The party of snowshoe-wearing men were groping as nearly as possible in the line along which the momentary light had been seen. A man at the end of the staggering advance felt firmness underfoot. The snow had been packed there, and he passed the word to the man next to him. A lieutenant of infantry made every man stop where he stood. With Hackett, who should have stayed behind until the others were successful or dead, he went ploughing across the snow-field to the spot.
There was semi-solidity under the snow. There were depressions where the snow had been packed. Something had pressed it down.
They fumbled about in the darkness. Only fifty yards away the sheer, overhanging mass of a pinnacled cliff blotted out half the sky. From somewhere near here a light had been visible an hour ago. Hackett and the lieutenant of infantry tramped back and forth. The packed snow was not all footprints. Here it had been compacted by a solid object of considerable size and weight.
Hackett began to feel cold chills running up and down his spine. His skin crawled at the back of his neck. This was almost certainly the landing place of the thing—whatever it was—that had come down from the moon and gone away again. If so, the power generator of the Greks was nearby. The aliens who intended the enslavement of Earth were close, with weapons that could only be guessed at, and who would certainly be as merciless to men as to their enslaved Aldarians.
The thing that made Hackett feel desperate was a feeling that the window from which the light had shone might open and pour pitiless light upon himself and his companions. The Greks would violently resent their presence. At any instant any conceivable weapon might open on them. They would be exterminated and the fact that humans were suspicious would be revealed, as well as the fact that they dared attack Greks . . .
There were lesser concretions under the snow. They were foot tracks. The snow was compacted as if the Greks and Aldarians had passed many times between the thing from the moon and—somewhere else.