Let’s get out.
Aye, aye, Trace. About time…
Look, Dunc! There it goes! The robot’s dinghy.
A shooting star, a fire trail, streaking downward out of control towards the planet…
Good thing. We’ll have plenty of time to hunt for the slag. Let’s go.
Trace shook himself free of the voices and the vivid recall. The photograph was finished. He marked his position in the centre of it, and began drawing lines, his search pattern. When he was done, he grunted with satisfaction: he would cover the entire area in two trips, one this afternoon, one in the morning. By noon the following day he would have the other dinghy, or at least be able to go directly to it. There would be the problem of the shield, but he would think about that after he located it.
He thought about his figures; the fuel ratio for travelling close to the surface of the planet compared to returning to orbit was on the order of one to three, which meant that the fuel that would have taken him back the two hundred and fifty miles to the orbiting ship, would on the planet take him seven hundred and fifty miles; of that distance he had already gone four hundred and thirty-six miles, actually slightly more than that. He had enough fuel left to fly no more than three hundred miles. The rings he had drawn around his camp site were one and a half miles apart. There was a total of two hundred and fifty miles to be covered. With luck he could hope to come across the radiation trail early before reaching the outer rings, but he might not. After finding the trail there would be the fuel used in backtracking it to the landing area of the other dinghy, another ten miles more or less…
He eased the dinghy out of the chimney; the sun was still high and there were few shadows on the ground as yet ― only a darkening on one side of the rocks with bases that looked slightly out of proportion to the rising masses. He climbed to only twenty feet over the topmost peak of the surrounding cliffs, and he went due north to start his first lap, one and a half miles from his hideaway. The slower his speed, the less efficient his motors were, but that couldn’t be helped; he had to travel slowly enough to study the land below him.
His detectors could pick up the radiation from a distance of four miles, but that became almost meaningless as he considered the terrain below him. The rocks were massive here with narrow gorges between them that twisted in sharp angles, now and then opening to a trail-like clearing of nearly fifty feet, again narrowing to two or three feet. Any of the pinnacles would serve to damp the trail of radiation. From his vantage point he could see how well concealed his valley actually was from the ground approaches; also, he could see that there were only two other entrances to it, with a third that had become choked with rocks. It would be easily fortified if he failed to find and enter the other dinghy.
He finished the first turn and headed out another mile and a half, the ground unchanging below, with the cliffs, peaks, obelisks all the same, the same tumbled masses of rocks that had cracked and flaked off, now lying in heaps of rubble. There was the start of a plateau, a high mesa that was windswept clean, level, with stair-like approaches to it. He slowed even more to study it carefully, knowing that his fuel was being consumed faster each time he decelerated. The mesa was of granite, not the black basalt he was searching for. He went on, picking up speed again. He finished the second sweep around the valley. His radiation system continued quiet.
The heat was building up in the dinghy; inside his suit he was perspiring heavily, and he was starting to have a peculiar optical illusion: the land seemed to hunch itself up into the jagged peaks, then abruptly the ground would change and there seemed to be sudden, deep holes with precipitous sides and black slides that led to the centre. The effect was dizzying and for ten or fifteen minutes he kept his attention on his controls, relying solely on the radiation alarm. He welcomed the mesa, when he approached it again, as he would have a familiar sight back on Venus, or even on Earth which he hadn’t seen since his twentieth birthday. The mesa seemed to go on for miles, flat, sheered off neatly. The third lap had been covered. The shadows were now pronounced, as sharp and cruel as the rocks that cast them, and on each north and south sweep, the sun shone straight in the dinghy, and he was forced to close the ports and depend wholly on his screen. Viewing the savage land through the screen seemed merely to remove it further from reality, to make it easier to succumb to the changing ground as it rose in mountain peaks and then fell in craters and crevices.
He had gone less than four miles around the next lap when the radiation alarm sounded, bringing him up with a start of excitement and fear. It became silent almost immediately and desperately he turned, circling back to where he had picked up the beep. He set the controls to follow it, flying as low as he could around the peaks, around the mesa for almost a mile, and then climbing over it, zigzagging back and forth, detouring only when there was a mass of rocks too steep for the robot to have navigated. Suddenly there were two lines on the screen, the trail was being crossed by another; the robot had crossed its own path. He hesitated momentarily, then decided to stick with the first trail. He went to the edge of the ten-mile circle he had drawn, continued three miles beyond, then turned back, retracing the hot path to the intersection. His dinghy was recording his route, marking the trail of radiation for him. If he had to leave it unfinished that day, there would be the next; he would be able to start again exactly where he left off. He followed the second trail for another eight miles, taking it to the edge of the outermost circle, then turned back on it to follow it the other way. The shadows were lengthening fast, and he knew he had no more than another half-hour before he would be forced to return to the valley. The path was crossed again, and then again, and he fought back the waves of doubt that passed through him.
If all the land continued to be so crisscrossed with the trails, it might become impossible to follow any of them…
He would have to return and go on foot, groping with his hands to discover the invisible dinghy. Finally he knew that he had to turn back. In minutes the wind would start to blow; the shadows were black stripes over the land now, and the white spaces were grey. He didn’t want to be out when the white spaces were gone, when the black shadows claimed all of the land. It was only nine miles back to the camp site in a straight line. The wind was a thin, distant shrilling when he circled the valley and dropped slowly to the floor, and then crept back to the safety of the chimney.
He was rigid with tension when he turned off the engines. He was able to relax only with great effort. To have come so close to locating the dinghy, and then to have failed. He checked his fuel consumption: he had flown a total of one hundred and thirty-four miles; there would be approximately that many miles left to him to fly before the fuel became dangerously low, too low to leave the valley again.
He stripped off his sodden suit and wiped his body thoroughly with a treated square of soft material that at first felt cool against his skin, but too soon became hot and sticky with his sweat. He was running out of squares. God, how he stank! He threw the cloth pieces into the disposer and tried not to think of all the water he had used on Duncan. He thought longingly of a swim, or a cool shower, or a plunge in a sudsy bath. When he had finished trying to clean himself, there was little else he could do. His stiffness had returned along with the soreness of his muscles, and the assorted aches and pains where rocks and sand had cut and bruised him. His head ached from the strain of watching the sharply etched land streak by as he had flown over it. He looked at the aerial map he had made, crisscrossed with the hot trail; he put it aside. He couldn’t stop the feeling of motion the map gave him. He sat again on the edge of the seat-bed and he put his head down in the palms of his hands. If only there were something he could be doing.