Out Around Rigel Part 4

Then Garth and I were upon them. They halted as if stupefied. We had hacked our way half through their ma.s.s. The rest fled, and we began running toward the _Comet_, praying that we might reach the ship before they could get organized again. How we floundered through the sand in wild and desperate haste.

Before we had covered half the distance, the pursuit began. There was no attempt to drag us down directly, but the two wings raced past to cut us off in front. At the base of the little cliff where the _Comet_ lay, the circle closed.

"Jump," I called, and threw myself up over them toward the stone. Garth would have fallen back, but I caught his hand and pulled him to safety.

We had won.

But had we? Joined by reinforcements from somewhere, the creatures were packed all around the base of the cliff and had begun to climb its walls, to cut us off from the ship. We rushed separately toward the two sides, and they backed away. But those in front were now established on the top. We stepped backward, and the whole line came on. But now we turned and ran for the _Comet_.

We were just able to turn again and clear them away with our swords. In a moment others would be climbing up from behind over the ship. And the door to safety was on a level with our heads.

There was just one chance. Stamping threateningly, we cleared the things out for ten feet in front of us. But once we turned our backs for a running start they were at us again.

"Boost you up, Dunal," said Garth pantingly.

"No, you first."

But in the midst of my words, he almost threw me into the doorway. I turned to pull him up after me. They were around his legs, and one had jumped down upon his helmet. And he must have known it would happen.

"Go back to her," he cried, and slammed shut the door.

There was no time to help him, to interfere with the way of expiation he had chosen. I tried to look away, but a sort of fascination kept me watching him through the gla.s.s. He had been dragged to his knees. Then he was up again, whirling to keep them away on all sides in a mad, gallant fight. But the creatures knew it was the kill. Now they were around his knees, now up to his waist in their overpowering ma.s.s. It was only a matter of minutes.

Garth took a staggering step backward, dragging them all with him. He was facing me, and swung up his sword in the old Lunar salute. "Good luck, Dunal." The words, coming clearly over the radio, had a note of exaltation.

Then flashing his blade over his head, he hurled it into the midst of the accursed things. With a tremendous effort, Garth tore the protecting helmet from his head, and plunged backward over the cliff....

There was nothing to do but get in out of the lock and start for home, and little on the trip is worthy of recounting. Without unsurpa.s.sable difficulty, I was able to operate the machinery and steer, first for Betelguese, then for the sun. Counting on the warning bells to arouse me, I managed to get in s.n.a.t.c.hes of sleep at odd intervals. At times the strain of the long watches was almost maddening.

By the time the midpoint had been pa.s.sed, I was living in a sort of waking dream; or rather, a state of somnambulism. I ate; my hands moved the controls. And yet all the while my mind was wandering elsewhere--out to Garth's body under the blazing light of Rigel, back to the moon and Kelvar, or else in an unreal, shadowy world of dreams and vague memories.

With perfect mechanical accuracy I entered the solar system and adjusted the projectors for the sun's attraction. Running slower and slower, I watched Venus glide by. And then, gradually, everything faded, and I was walking along the great Nardos bridge with Kelvar. The ocean was so still that we could see mirrored in it the reflection of each white column, and our own faces peering down, and beyond that the stars.

"I shall bring you a handful for your hair," I told her, and leaned over farther, farther, reaching out.... Then I was falling, with Kelvar's face growing fainter, and in my ears a horrible ringing like the world coming to an end.

Just before I could strike the water, I wakened to find the alarm bell jangling and the object-indicator light flashing away. Through the telescope, the moon was large in the sky.

It was an hour, perhaps two, before I approached the sunlit surface and hovered over the sh.o.r.e by Nardos. Try as I would, my sleep-drugged body could not handle the controls delicately enough to get the _Comet_ quite in step with the moon's rotation. Always a little too fast or too slow.

I slid down until I was only ten or fifteen feet off the ground that seemed to be moving out from under me. In another minute I should be above the water. I let everything go, and the _Comet_ fell. There was a thud, a sound of sc.r.a.ping over the sand, a list to one side. I thought for an instant that the vessel was going to turn over, but with the weight of the reserve mercury in the fuel tanks it managed to right itself on a slope of ten or fifteen degrees.

From the angle, I could barely see out the windows, and everything looked strange. The water under the bridge seemed too low. The half-full Earth had greenish-black spots on it. And the sky?

So dead with sleep that I could scarcely move, I managed to crane my neck around to see better. There was no sky, only a faint gray haze through which the stars shone. And yet the sun must be shining. I stretched still further. There the sun burned, and around it was an unmistakable corona. It was like airless s.p.a.ce.

Was I dreaming again?

With a jerk, I got to my feet and climbed up the sloping floor to the atmosphere tester. My fingers slipped off the stop-c.o.c.k, then turned it.

And the air-pressure needle scarcely moved. It was true. Somehow, as the scientists had always told us would be the case eventually, the air of the moon, with so little gravity to hold it back, had evaporated into s.p.a.ce.

But in six months? It was unthinkable. Surely someone had survived the catastrophe. Some people must have been able to keep themselves alive in caves where the last of the atmosphere would linger. Kelvar _must_ be still alive. I could find her and bring her to the _Comet_. We would go to some other world.

Frantically, I pulled on my s.p.a.ce-suit and clambered through the air-lock. I ran, until the c.u.mbersome suit slowed me down to a staggering walk through the sand beside the Ocea.n.u.s Procellarum.

Leaden and dull, the great sea lay undisturbed by the thin atmosphere still remaining. It had shrunk by evaporation far away from its banks, and where the water once had been there was a dark incrustation of impurities. On the land side, all was a great white plain of glittering alkali without a sign of vegetation. I went on toward Nardos the Beautiful.

Even from afar off, I could see that it was desolate. Visible now that the water had gone down, the pillars supporting it rose gaunt and skeletal. Towers had fallen in, and the gleaming white was dimmed. It was a city of the dead, under an Earth leprous-looking with black spots where the clouds apparently had parted.

I came nearer to Nardos and the bridge, nearer to the spot where I had last seen Kelvar. Below the old water level, the columns showed a greenish stain, and half-way out the whole structure had fallen in a great gap. I reached the land terminus of the span, still glorious and almost beautiful in its ruins. Whole blocks of stone had fallen to the sand, and the adamantine pillars were cracked and crumbling with the erosion of ages.

Then I knew.

In our argument as to the possible speed of the _Comet_, Garth and I had both been right. In our reference frame, the vessel had put on an incredible velocity, and covered the nine-hundred-odd light-years around Rigel in six months. But from the viewpoint of the moon, it had been unable to attain a velocity greater than that of light. As the accelerating energy pressed the vessel's speed closer and closer toward that limiting velocity, the ma.s.s of the ship and of its contents had increased toward infinity. And trying to move laboriously with such vast ma.s.s, our clocks and bodies had been slowed down until to our leaden minds a year of moon time became equivalent to several hours.

The _Comet_ had attained an average velocity of perhaps 175,000 miles per second, and the voyage that seemed to me six months had taken a thousand years. A thousand years! The words went ringing through my brain. Kelvar had been dead for a thousand years. I was alone in a world uninhabited for centuries.

I threw myself down and battered my head in the sand.

More to achieve, somehow, my own peace of mind, than in any hope of its being discovered, I have written this narrative. There are two copies, this to be placed in a helio-beryllium box at the terminus of the bridge, the other within the comet[TN-3]. One at least should thus be able to escape the meteors which, unimpeded by the thin atmosphere, have begun to strike everywhere, tearing up great craters in the explosion that follows as a result of the impact.

My time is nearly up. Air is still plentiful on the _Comet_, but my provisions will soon run short. It is now slightly over a month since I collapsed on the sands into merciful sleep, and I possess food and water for perhaps another. But why go on in my terrible loneliness?

Sometimes I waken from a dream in which they are all so near--Kelvar, Garth, all my old companions--and for a moment I cannot realize how far away they are. Beyond years and years. And I, trampling back and forth over the dust of our old life, staring across the waste, waiting--for what?

No, I shall wait only until the dark. When the sun drops over the Grimaldi plateau, I shall put my ma.n.u.scripts in their safe places, then tear off my helmet and join the other two.

An hour ago, the bottom edge of the sun touched the horizon.