Moon of Mutiny Page 11

  He couldn't be sure. It was a spindly, spiny little thing, faintly green, appearing to be made of dry plastic rather than living tissue. Life on the Moon could not be like that on Earth; the water and air needed for soft growth wasn't there. It might be only a strange crystal formation; Fred had seen chemical crystals grow, almost like little mineral trees and bushes. Somehow, this growth seemed different. Its branches had a look of purpose, as if reaching for the light that came down faintly from above, and there was a cluster at the end of one branch that might be a seed or a spore sack.

  He found himself trembling as he got up from his knees. If there were life here—even a single living plantlife thing—the excitement of the discovery would bring enough expeditions from Earth to keep the colony humming and active for years.

  Wallace was moving forward; Fred waved him back. He wanted Dr. Villiers, who would know what to do about the plant, and whether it was a true sign of life.

  He could see Villiers and Whitley moving onto the far end of the trail. Villiers was signaling with the light and talking continuously. Obviously they had found a way up here, and the tractors must be following behind. Fred tried to get a word in, but there was no free channel. The tractors should be directly below, from the way Villiers was moving close to the edge, bending so his helmet antenna stuck out just beyond the cliff.

  "Dr. Villiers!" This time Fred's call penetrated, and the biologist looked up. "Dr. Villiers, I've found something you've got to see."

  Villiers gasped. He didn't have to be told to know what would call for his full attention. Fred hadn't dared to put the thought of life into words until he could be more certain. Villiers turned and touched helmets with Whitley, then came trotting forward rapidly, while the other man took up the signaling.

  "Where?" the biologist asked sharply as he touched his helmet to Fred's. "And is it . . . ?"

  "I don't know for sure—it looks like a plant," Fred answered. "Back here about fifteen feet . . ."

  A wild yell from Wallace brought their heads up sharply. Fred felt his muscles knot savagely at what he saw.

  Whitley had been moving along the edge, apparently trying to beam his signal down toward the tractors. He seemed to pay no attention as his foot moved on. He stepped on the small rock Wallace had seen, and it rolled under him.

  They were all too far from Whitley to help him, and would not have dared to try; a sudden touch might startle him and make him lose his balance.

  Amazingly, Whitley seemed to right himself. He gave a faint cry of surprise at the first touch of the stone. Apparently he had cut off his receiver to divert all the battery power into the transmitter and had not heard the warning cry from Wallace. There was no terror in his reactions. He took a twisting, half-dancing step as the stone moved under him, and his arms flailed out like those of a tight-rope walker. He almost recovered his balance. His step carried him a few inches back from the edge where he had been, and his next one nearly brought him to safety.

  Then another fragment of rock was in his path, and there was no way to avoid it. His foot came down on it, sliding sideways. His ankle seemed to turn under him. Now, for the first time, he cried out in fear.

  It was too late for help. The man's body twisted again, this time in the wrong way. His other foot skidded, and he half-leaped in an attempt to recover. The effort merely sent him upward a few inches, but could not check his outward motion. He seemed to drift over the edge of the cliff and to coast downward.

  The cries of fright cut off as his helmet disappeared beyond the edge. A second later, they came again in some signal by reflection. Then there was no sound from him.

  Fred felt his heart pounding and heard the rasping of his breath. His stomach churned; he managed to master it before he could be sick in his suit. Beside him, Villiers was bent over, retching. Wallace seemed frozen, like a figure carved out of stone.

  "Wallace!" Fred called thickly, and got a weak answering nod. "Go below and find the tractors. Bring them here at once. Ill look for Whitley."

  Wallace hesitated, then turned back along the trail, moving uncertainly. Fred approached the place where Whitley had gone over. He got down on his hands and knees, then flat on his stomach. There was no use in taking chances on some fault that would weaken the ledge, even though it seemed to have held Whitley's weight. There would be no advantage in having two men fall.

  He wriggled his way cautiously toward the edge and finally stuck his helmet over.

  In the beam of his headlight, there wasn't much to be seen at first. On the other side of the yawning pit, he could see the trail with one of the tractors just moving out of sight. Between the ledge being used as a path and the cliff where he lay, Fred could see only a great hole that seemed to go down beyond the range of his light. It was far too deep for any man to fall the entire distance and live. Even if all allowances were made for the weaker gravity, such a drop had to be fatal.

  He swept his light up the nearer edge, looking for anything that might have caught the body. Shock must have numbed his senses at first, because he suddenly became aware that he was looking for a tree or vine such as might grow from a cliff on Earth. There could be none here.

  There was a ledge perhaps fifty feet down, where the cliff curved back below Fred. It ended in a sort of pocket, like a groove cut in the rock. This was strewn with boulders, and pitted as if gas bubbles had broken, marring the smoothness of the stone.

  He swept his light across it, but there was no sign of a spacesuited body.

  He was shifting position when Villiers' quaking voice reached him. The man had managed to get control of himself. Now he was on the edge, looking over as was Fred. "See if we can cross our headlights, get rid of some of the shadows."

  He was far enough away to make it worth while, but there were no results. They could not see anything that resembled Whitley among the rock fragments on the ledge.

  Fred moved farther forward, to make sure his antenna was well over the edge so a signal would reach all parts of the ledge.

  "Whitley!" he called. He kept calling, shifting to one after another of the five frequencies the set handled. But there was no sound from below.

  If Whitley had gone all the way down, there would be no response. The radio should be as dead as the man.

  Chapter 12 Trouble Trail

  the expedition reached the top of the ledge a few minutes later, the tractors laboring up at low speed. They headed away from Fred and stopped. The trailers began disgorging people. Someone took Villiers and led him off to clean up. The rest spread out, well back from the edge of the cliff. This time, nobody had to tell them to keep out of the way.

  Dr. Sessions and Boland brought a light powerful enough to reach the distant bottom, but Fred didn't watch. He was back where he'd first seen Whitley fall, trying to remember everything. Anything falling in a vacuum obeys the laws of some kind of an orbit or trajectory; with knowledge of his speed and the pull of gravity, Whitley's fall could be predicted.

  It was hard, trying to reconstruct the flight from the little he had seen, instead of sensing it directly; at the time, horror had paralyzed the strange sense in his head. Or maybe it had worked, but the message had never become conscious.

  He was reasonably sure when he joined the group, however. "Dr. Sessions, he didn't reach bottom. The way he was faffing, he would have struck against that

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  ledge just below us, and he'd have landed far enough inside it not to be thrown out again. He must be there, even if we can't see him from here. I'd like to be let down on a rope to see."

  There were doubtful looks from some of the men. Sessions didn't look scornful, but he wasn't convinced. He'd put the computing incident into the background and dismissed it, never fully believing it.

  Someone began explaining why Whitley couldn't have landed on the ledge, making the mathematics sound completely convincing. He'd have been right, if the cliff curved at exactly the angle he believed, but it didn't fit the path of the body Fred had seen. S
essions cut off the argument abruptly and seemed to consider the idea.

  Finally he shrugged. "You'll be taking a chance— something down there might rip your suit or cut the line. And I'm not sold on your estimate, Fred. If you're at all right, we can't afford not to try it. Have you figured out how to work it?"

  Boland came forward with a better plan than Fred's rough one, and they nodded as he finished. The biggest problem was getting a rope over the edge without letting it wear against the rock. But they had enough material to rig up a crude hoist that would carry the weight of two men. At Sessions' nod of approval, Boland chose men to help him and to get the parts. Fred replaced his oxygen and gave all his equipment a final check. The little structure of rods and spare parts, braced and weighted down by six volunteers, was already hanging over the edge when he returned.

  The worst part was the first step. Fred sat in the loop of rope at the edge, then he was eased out carefully, to avoid putting a strain on the device. It was a long way down, and his eyes couldn't avoid the ugly blackness below, where the lights failed to pierce. He felt the hoist start to lower him, and brought his attention back to the work.

  Either by accident or good planning on Boland's part, the rope eased him down to a bare spot on the ledge. It was deeper, he saw, than it had appeared from above. There was no sign of a body.

  He slipped from the rope and began exploring, moving with as much care as he could. Rocks were piled up one on top of another in a disorder that threatened to break free and roll over the edge at the first disturbance. He made his way around one pile, found nothing, and went on.

  Behind the second pile, he found Whitley. The man must have struck and been thrown back and sideways. There was no sign of movement, and the helmet was cracked, while the radio was broken and useless. The damage hadn't rendered the suit airless—its swelling showed there was still pressure. Then, as Fred watched, there was the faintest movement of his chest. He was alive.

  Fred moved him as little as possible while checking for air leaks. There might be tiny ones; they wouldn't matter in the few minutes more it would take. Finally, he lifted Whitley, hoping there were no broken vertebrae to worry about; an injured spine could kill him during the rescue. The risk had to be taken.

  As he picked up the man, a faint sound came through from suit to suit. Fred bent to press his helmet to Whitley's and spoke quickly. "It's all right, Whitley. We'll have you topside in a couple more minutes."

  "Darned fool," the other's voice said softly. "Didn't look where I was going. Nuisance. Thanks."

  Fred wasn't wasting time trying to call those above him. He carried Whitley back carefully. It was an effort to get into the sling and take him in his arms again, but he made it. The rope began lifting at the first signal. Several minutes later, men were taking foolish chances near the edge as they eased Whitley away from Fred, then pulled Fred in where he could slip out of the loop.

  Boland waved Fred back to the trailer as he began breaking up the improvised rig. But Fred was looking for Villiers.

  The biologist was obviously torn between a feeling that Fred needed a rest and his own eagerness. Now that the rescue had been made, they both suddenly remembered the plant Fred thought he had seen.

  Fred took the older man's arm and began to lead him off, waving back a couple of worried people who seemed to think he needed rest. He touched the biologist's helmet. "I don't want anyone to know until you confirm what I think it is," he said. There was no use raising false hopes that might be dashed, on top of all the other strains they'd just been through. His legs were still feeling a reaction from everything.

  He paused, studying the stone around them. "It was about here . . ."

  Then he spotted the rock. The place was right, the little fissure in it was as he remembered it. But there was no plantlike thing.

  Villiers gasped as he saw Fred's face change. They both moved forward. There were footprints all over here, and the marks of hobnails from someone's boot were ground faintly into the very rock where the plant had been. There was no evidence of anything which could ever have lived.

  Fred tried to describe it as it had been, while Villiers studied the ground and the rock. If there had been anything like roots, they were gone. At last he stood up, looking like a man promised immortality, only to have it snatched away.

  "I don't know, Fred. I can't tell, from what you say. It wouldn't matter—any life existing here would have to be almost crystalline in dryness, I suspect. It would shatter like a true crystal if anyone touched it." Then his face lightened a little. "Well, it's something to hope on. If there was one, maybe there are more someplace. You've given me a little more evidence than those rumors in the colony, at least. All right, we'd better go back before someone gets suspicious."

  Then he glanced at the edge of the cliff and back to the place where the plant had been. "There may be more plants, but there couldn't be another Ted Whitley. I guess we're lucky."

  In a few hours, the expedition reached the top of the divide through the mountains and began heading down. Fred had taken over the driving again, in spite of protests. He felt as capable as he could hope to feel, and the work might do him good. Boland stayed for a while, and then nodded, as if satisfied everything was going well.

  "Whitley's pretty badly bruised, and he's got a sprained ankle. But he'll be all right in a couple more days. I hear he's issued an ultimatum to our friend Mona Williams—the next time she opens her mouth about you, he's threatened to pull her tongue out. I've got a feeling most of the rest of us feel the same, kid. Well, take it easy."

  He climbed out to return to the trailer for a rest. Fred went on driving, cautiously easing down the cluttered, winding trail. There were times when men had to go out to scout the way, but the pass proved far less difficult than they had expected. For once, the photographs seemed to have shown all the major details.

  By the time his shift was over, they were moving down steadily onto another flat plain. It was one of the places where the basic level was badly broken by small out-croppings and numerous tiny craters. Driving required constant attention, at least until they could get beyond the dark shadows of the mountains. The long trip was coming to an end.

  It wasn't entirely over, however. One of the trailers found a hole in the ground exactly the size needed to make it drop violently down on one side. There was a snapping sound inside, and when they pulled it out they found an axle had been broken off cleanly. It was something no one had expected. With many wheels on each side to hold the trailer up, no single wheel should have received such a jolt.

  They were out of the shadow by then, and they stopped to eat and survey the damage. Boland and Fred managed to get far enough under the trailer to free the whole axle and work it out. The only thing they could do was to weld it. There was some doubt as to whether their welding torch was powerful enough to handle the job.

  Fred began the work. He'd done some welding at the Station, and he'd had a course in repairing motors which included the use of such equipment. They were using an oxyacetylene torch, since it required less weight than any equivalent electrical installation.

  "At least we don't have to worry much about corrosion here," Boland said as he watched the blue flame through his helmet shield. "Nothing like having a vacuum around you at a time like this."

  Fred was about to agree when he noticed something that made no sense. The metal had been completely bright when he laid it down. Now there was a faint film around one spot. He reached out to wipe it off, but it wasn't dust. He began scanning the ground.

  Then he saw a faint stirring in the fine dust. In one small spot, it seemed to lift up slightly. Boland grunted and shoveled the dust aside, to get down to the ground half an inch below. When they looked closely there was a tiny hole.

  Sessions came over at their call and studied it. "Gas escaping, all right. It must have been trapped down there until a tractor passed over it and cracked that little hole. We've seen evidence of such gas before, but never traced
it down. Get a bottle and collect some of it."

  Erica Neufeld brought the bottles—little plastic balloonlike flasks. She was a chemist as well as a geologist, and her small face was beaming as one of the flasks slowly filled. "Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. What marvelous luck that axle broke right here!"

  "Hardly what I'd call luck/' Boland commented, but he was smiling.

  She was staring at the flask. "It is, though. We may learn more about the nature of the crust from this than anything else. When I can get a few of these filled and start analyzing the gas, we'll have a key to all kinds of activity down there. There must be sulfur in it—that's what caused the corrosion on that alloy you were welding—and some trace of water vapor. Sulfur won't act like that without water and . . ."

  Fred and Boland left her to her specimens and moved the axle to another spot where there would be no further trouble. Here the welding went according to plan. But Fred was thinking that Villiers should have one of the specimens of the gas, or a report on it. He'd want to know about any possible organic compounds. Also, if there were water vapor and perhaps oxygen, such seepage might account for the possibility of life.

  When they finished with the axle, it seemed as good as new. Anyhow, in normal use there would be no great strain at the welded spot. They found that Erica had finally collected all the gas she could use and that Dr. Villiers hadn't needed a suggestion from Fred to take his own samplings. By the time the trailer was ready to move, the whole expedition was speculating on the work already being done in the laboratory.

  For a time, things went smoothly. But it seemed that on the Moon nothing could work properly for any length of time. Again, it was Fred's tractor where the trouble started. He found that he was shoving up the power higher and higher to get the same response out of the motor. At lunch, he checked his supply of peroxide fuel and whistled unhappily when he saw how much had been used. There must be a leak somewhere that was robbing him of efficiency.