The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum Part 22

After a while I picked one of a series of narrow parallel valleys, one with what I knew was a salt pool in the center-though most of them had that; they'd be desert without it-and pointed it out to Claire.

"That one," I said, adding mali-ciously, "and I'd better warn you that it's narrow and deep-a ticklish landing place."

She flashed me an unfriendly glance from sapphire eyes, but said nothing. But a voice behind me sounded unex-pectedly: "To the left! The one to the left. It-it looks eas-ier."

Gogrol! I was startled for a moment, then turned coldly on him. "Keep out of the control room during landings," I snapped.

He glared, muttered something, and retired. But he left me a trifle worried; not that his valley to the left was any easier to land in-that was pure bunk-but it looked a little familiar! Actually, I wasn't sure but that Gogrol had pointed out Gunderson's valley.

But I stuck to my first guess. The irritation I felt I took out on Claire. "Take it slow!" I said gruffly.

"This isn't a landing field. n.o.body's put up leveling poles in these valleys. You're going to have to land completely blind from about four hun-dred feet, because the blast begins to splash sooner in this thin air.

You go down by level and guess, and Heaven help us if you roll her! There's no room for rolling between those cliffs."

She bit her lip nervously. The Minos was already rolling un-der the girl's inexpert hand, though that wasn't dangerous while we still had ten or twelve miles of alt.i.tude. But the ground was coming up steadily.

I was in a cruel mood. I watched the strain grow in her lovely features, and if I felt any pity, I lost it when I thought of the way she had treated me. So I taunted her."This shouldn't be a hard landing for the Golden Flash. Or maybe you'd rather be landing at full speed, so you could fall into a braking ellipse-only that wouldn't work here, because the air doesn't stick up high enough to act as a brake."

And a few minutes later, when her lips were quivering with tension, I said, "It takes more than publicity and gambler's luck to make a pilot, doesn't it?"

She broke. She screamed suddenly, "Oh, take it! Take it, then!" and slammed the U-bar into my hands. Then she hud died back in her corner sobbing, with her golden hair streaming over her face.

I took over; I had no choice. I pulled the Minos out of the roll Claire's gesture had put her in, and then started teetering down on the underjets. It was pitifully easy because of Eu-ropa's low gravitation and the resulting low falling accelera-tion; it gave the pilot so much time to compensate for side sway.

I began to realize how miserably little the Golden Flash really knew about rocketry, and, despite myself, I felt a surge of pity for her. But why pity her? Everyone knew that Claire Avery was simply a wealthy, thrill-intoxicated daredevil, with more than her share of money, of beauty, of adulation. The despised Jack Sands pitying her? That's a laugh!

The underblast hit and splashed, turning the brown-clad valley into black ashes and flame. I inched down very slowly now, for there was nothing to see below save the fiery sheet of the blast, and I watched the bubble on the level as if my life depended on it-which it did.

I knew the splash began at about four hundred feet in this density of air, but from then on it was guesswork, and a ques-tion of settling down so slowly that when we hit we wouldn't damage the underjets. And if I do say it, we grounded so gently that I don't think Claire Avery knew it until I cut off the blast.

She rubbed the tears away with her sleeve and glared blue-eyed defiance at me, but before she could speak, Henshaw opened the door. "Nice landing, Miss Avery," he said.

"Wasn't it?" I echoed, with a grin at the girl.

She stood up. She was trembling and I think that under Earthly gravitation she would have fallen back into the pilot's seat, for I saw her knees shaking below her trim, black shorts.

"I didn't land us," she said grimly. "Mr. Sands put us to ground."

Somehow my pity got the best of me then. "Sure," I said. "It's into my shift. Look." It was; the chronometer showed three minutes in. "Miss Avery had all the hard part-"

But she was gone. And try as I would, I could not bring my-self to see her as the hard, brilliant thrill-seeker which the pa-pers and broadcasts portrayed her. Instead, she left me with a strange and by no means logical impression of-wistfulness.

Life on Europa began uneventfully. Little by little we re-duced the atmospheric pressure in the Minos to conform to that outside. First Coretti and then Claire Avery had a spell of alt.i.tude sickness, but by the end of twenty hours we were all acclimated enough to be comfortable outside.

Henshaw and I were first to venture into the open. I scanned the valley carefully for familiar landmarks, but it was hard to be sure; all these canyonlike ditches were much alike. I know that a copse of song-bushes had grown high on the cliff when the Hera had landed, but our blast had splashed higher, and if the bushes had been there, they were only a patch of ashes now.

At the far end of the valley there should have been a cleft in the hills, a pa.s.s leading to the right into the next valley. That wasn't there; all I could distinguish was a narrow ra-vine cutting the hills to the left.

"I'm afraid I've missed Gunderson's valley," I told Hen-shaw. "I think it's the next one to our left; it's connected to this one by a pa.s.s, if I'm right, and this is one I came in sev-eral times to hunt." It recurred to me suddenly that Gogrol had said the left one.

"You say there's a pa.s.s?" mused Henshaw. "Then we'll stay here rather than chance another take-off and another landing. We can work in Gunderson's valley through the pa.s.s. You're sure it's low enough so we won't have to use oxygen helmets?"

"If it's the right pa.s.s, I am. But work at what in Gunder-son's valley? I thought this was an exploring expedition."

Henshaw gave me a queer, sharp look, and turned away. Right then I saw Gogrol standing in the portof the Minos, and I didn't know whether Henshaw's reticence was due to his presence or mine. I moved a step to follow him, but at that moment the outer door of the air lock opened and Claire Avery came out.

It was the first time I had seen her in a fair light since the take-off at Young's Field, and I had rather forgotten the love-liness of her coloring. Of course, her skin had paled from the weeks in semidarkness, but her cadmium-yellow hair and sap-phire-blue eyes were really startling, especially when she moved into the sun shadow of the cliff and stood bathed only in the golden Jupiter light.

Like Henshaw and myself, she had slipped on the all-envel oping ski suit one wore on chilly little Europa. The small world received only a fourth as much heat as steamy Io, and would not have been habitable at all, except for the fact that it kept its face always toward its primary, and therefore re-ceived heat intermittently from the Sun, but eternally from Jupiter.

The girl cast an eager look over the valley; I knew this was her first experience on an uninhabited world, and there is al-ways a sense of strangeness and the fascination of the un-known in one's first step on an alien planet.

She looked at Henshaw, who was methodically examining the scorched soil on which the Minos rested, and then her glance crossed mine. There was an electric moment of ten-sion, but then the anger in her blue eyes-if it had been anger -died away, and she strode deliberately to my side.

She faced me squarely. "Jack Sands," she said with an un-dertone of defiance, "I owe you an apology. Don't think I'm apologizing for my opinion of you, but only for the way I've been acting toward you. In a small company like this there isn't room for enmity, and as far as I'm concerned, your past is yours from now on. What's more, I want to thank you for helping me during the take-off, and"-her defiance was crack-ing a bit-"d-during the-the landing."

I stared at her. That apology must have cost her an effort, for the Golden Flash was a proud young lady, and I saw her wink back her tears. I choked back the vicious reply I had been about to make, and said only, "O.K.You keep your opinion of me to yourself and I'll do the same with my opin-ion of you."

She flushed, then smiled. "I guess I'm a rotten pilot," she admitted ruefully. "I hate take-offs and landings. To tell the truth, I'm simply scared of the Minos. Up to the time we left Young's Field, I'd never handled anything larger than my little racing rocket, the Golden Flash."

I gasped. That wouldn't have been credible if I hadn't seen with my own eyes how utterly unpracticed she was. "But why?" I asked in perplexity. "If you hate piloting so, why do it? Just for publicity? With your money you don't have to, you know."

"Oh, my money!" she echoed irritably. She stared away over the narrow valley, and started suddenly.

"Look!" shecried. "There's something moving on the peaks like a big ball. And way up where there's no air at all!"

I glanced over. "It's just a bladder bird," I said indifferently. I'd seen plenty of them; they were the commonest mobile form of life on Europa. But of course Claire hadn't, and she was eagerly curious.

I explained. I threw stones into a tinkling grove of song-bushes until I flushed up another, and it went gliding over our heads with its membrane stretched taut.

I told her that the three-foot creature that had sailed like a flying squirrel was the same sort as the giant ball she had glimpsed among the airless peaks, only the one on the peaks had inflated its bladder. The creatures were able to cross from valley to valley by carrying their air with them in their big, balloonlike bladders. And, of course, bladder birds weren't really birds at all; they didn't fly, but glided like the lemurs and flying squirrels of Earth, and naturally, couldn't even do that when they were up on the airless heights.

Claire was so eager and interested and wide-eyed that I quite forgot my grudge. I started to show her my knowledge of things Europan; I led her close to the copse of song-bushes so that she could listen to the sweet and plaintive melody of their breathing leaves, and I took her down to the salt pool in the center of the valley to find some of the primitive crea-tures which Gunderson's men had called "nutsies,"

because they looked very much like walnuts with the hulls on. But within was a small mouthful of delicious meat, neither ani-mal nor vegetable, which was quite safe to eat raw, since bac-terial life did not exist on Europa.I guess I was pretty exuberant, for after all, this was the first chance at companionship I'd had for many weeks. We wandered down the valley and I talked, talked about any-thing. I told her of the various forms life a.s.sumed on the planets, how on Mars and t.i.tan and Europa s.e.x was un-known, though Venus and Earth and lo all possessed it; and he on Mars and Europa vegetable and animal life had never differentiated, so that even the vastly intelligent beaked Mar-tians had a tinge of vegetable nature, while conversely the song-bushes on the hills of Europa had a vaguely animal con-tent. And meanwhile we wandered aimlessly along until we stood below the narrow pa.s.s or ravine that led presumably into Gunderson's valley to our left.

Far up the slope a movement caught my eye. A bladder bird, I thought idly, though it was a low alt.i.tude for one to in-flate; they usually expanded their bladders just below the point where breathing became impossible. Then I saw that it wasn't a bladder bird; it was a man. In fact, it was Gogrol.

He was emerging from the pa.s.s, and his collar was turned up about his throat against the cold of the alt.i.tude. He hadn't seen us, apparently, as he angled down what mountaineers call a col, a ledge or neck of rock that slanted from the mouth of the ravine along the hillside toward the Minos. But Claire, following the direction of my gaze, saw him in the mo-ment before brush hid him from view.

"Gogroll" she exclaimed. "He must have been in the next valley. Stefan will want-" She caught herself sharply.

"Why," I asked grimly, "should your friend Coretti be in-terested in Gogrol's actions? After all, Gogrol's supposed to be a biologist, isn't he? Why shouldn't he take a look in the next valley?"

Her lips tightened. "Why shouldn't he?" she echoed. "I didn't say he shouldn't. I didn't say anything like that."

And thenceforward she maintained a stubborn silence. In-deed, something of the old enmity and coolness seemed to have settled between us as we walked back through the valley toward the Minos.

That night Henshaw rearranged our schedule to a more convenient plan than the requirements of s.p.a.ce. We divided our time into days and nights, or rather into sleeping and waking periods, for, of course, there is no true night on Eu-ropa. The shifts of light are almost as puzzling as those on its neighbor Io, but not quite, because to has its own rotation to complicate matters.

On Europa, the nearest approach to true night is during the eclipse that occurs every three days or so, when the landscape is illumined only by the golden twilight of Jupiter, or at the most, only by Jupiter and Io light. So we set our own night time by arbitrary Earth reckoning, so that we might all work and sleep during the same periods.

There was no need for any sort of watch to be kept; no one had ever reported life dangerous to man on little Europa. The only danger came from the meteors that swarm about the giant Jupiter's...o...b..t, and sometimes came crashing downthrough the shallow air of his satellites; we couldn't dodge them here as we could in s.p.a.ce. But that was a danger against which a guard was unavailing.

It was the next morning that I cornered Henshaw and forced him to listen to my questions.

"Listen to me, Harris," I said determinedly. "What is there about this expedition that everybody knows but me? If this is an exploring party, I'm the Ameer of Yarkand. Now I want to know what it's all about."

Henshaw looked miserably embarra.s.sed. He kept his eyes away from mine, and muttered unhappily, "I can't tell you, Jack. I'm d.a.m.ned sorry, but 1 can't tell you."

"Why not?"

He hesitated. "Because I'm under orders not to, Jack." "Whose orders?"

Henshaw shook his head. "d.a.m.n it?" he said vehemently. "I trust you. If it were my choice, you'd be the one I'd pick for honesty. But it isn't my choice." He paused. "Do you un-derstand that? All right"-he stiffened into his captain's man-ner-"no more questions, then. I'll ask the questions and give the orders."

Well, put on that basis, I couldn't argue. I'm a pilot, first, last, and always, and I don't disobey my superior's orders even when he happens to be as close a friend as Henshaw. But I be-gan to kick myself for not seeing something queer in the busi-ness as soon as Henshaw offered me the job.

If Interplanetary was looking for favorable publicity, they wouldn't get it by signing me on. Moreover, the government wasn't in the habit of reissuing a revoked pilot's license with-out good and sufficientreason, and I knew I hadn't supplied any such reason by loafing around brooding over my troubles. That alone should have tipped me off that something was screwy.

And there were plenty of hints during the voyage itself. True, Gogrol seemed to talk the language of biology, but I'll be dogged if Coretti talked like a chemist. And there was that haunting sense of familiarity about Gogrol, too. And to cap the climax was the incongruity of calling this jaunt an explor-ing expedition; for all the exploring we were doing we might as well have landed on Staten Island or Buffalo.

Better, as far as I was concerned, because I'd seen Europa but had never been to Buffalo.

Well, there was nothing to be done about it now. I sup-pressed my disgust and tried as hard as I could to cooperate with the others in whatever project we were supposed to be pursuing. That was rather difficult, too, because suspicious-appearing incidents kept cropping up to make me feel like a stranger or an outcast.

There was, for instance, the time Henshaw decided that a change in diet would be welcome. The native life of Europa was perfectly edible, though not all as tasty as the tiny sh.e.l.l creatures of the salt pools. However, I knew of one variety that had served the men of the Hera, a plantlike growth con-sisting of a single fleshy hand-sized member, that we had called liver-leaf because of its taste.

The captain detailed Coretti and myself to gather a supply of this delicacy, and I found a specimen, showed it to him, and then set off dutifully along the north-that is, the left-wall of the valley.

Coretti appeared to take the opposite side, but I had not gone far before I glimpsed him skirting my edge of the salt pool. That meant nothing; he was free to search anywhere for liver-leaf, but it was soon evident to me that he was not searching. He was following me; he was shadowing my move-ments.

I was thoroughly irritated, but determined not to show it. I plodded methodically along, gathering the fat leaves in my basket, until I reached the valley's far end and the slopes back and succeeded in running square into Coretti before he could maneuver himself out of a copse of song-bushes.

He grinned at me. "Any luck?" he asked.

"More than you, it seems," I retorted, with a contemptu-ous look at his all but empty basket.

"I had no luck at all. I thought maybe in the next valley, through the pa.s.s there, we might find some."

"I've found my share," I grunted.

I thought I noticed a flicker of surprise in his black eyes. "You're not going over?" he asked sharply.

"You're going back?"

"You guessed it," I said sharply. "My basket's full and I'm going back."

I knew that he watched me most of the way back, because halfway to the Minos I turned around, and I could see him standing there on the slope below the pa.s.s.

Along toward what we called evening the Sun went into our first eclipse. The landscape was bathed in the aureate light of Jupiter alone, and I realized that I'd forgotten how beautiful that golden twilight could be.

I was feeling particularly lonesome, too; so I wandered out to stare at the glowing peaks against the black sky, and the immense, bulging sphere of Jupiter with Ganymede swinging like a luminous pearl close beside it. The scene was so lovely that I forgot my loneliness, until I was suddenly reminded of it.

A glint of more brilliant gold caught my eye, up near the grove of song-bushes. It was Claire's head; she was standing there watching the display, and beside her was Coretti. While I looked, he suddenly turned and drew her into his arms; she put her hands against his chest, but she wasn't struggling; she was perfectly pa.s.sive and content. It was none of my business, of course, but-well, if I'd disliked Coretti before, I hated him now, because I was lonely again.

I think it was the next day that things came to a head, and trouble really began. Henshaw had been pleased with our meal of indigenous life, and decided to try it again. This time Claire was a.s.signed to accompany me, and we set off in si-lence. A sort of echo of the coolness that had attended our last parting survived, and besides, what I had seen last night in the eclipse light seemed to make a difference to me. So I simply stalked along at her side, wondering what to choose for the day's menu.

We didn't want liver-leaves again. The little nutsies from the salt pool were all right, but it was a half-day's job to gather enough, and besides, they were almost too salty to be pleasant fare for a wholemeal. Bladder birds were hopeless; they consisted of practically nothing except thin skin stretched over a framework of bones. I remembered that once we had tried a brown, fungoid lump that grew in the shade under the song-bushes; some of Gunderson's men had liked it.

Claire finally broke the silence. "If I'm going to help you look," she suggested, "I ought to know what we're looking for.

I described the lumpy growths. "I'm not so sure all of us will like them. Near as I can remember, they tasted some thing like truffles, with a faint flavor of meat added. We tried them both raw and cooked, and cooked was best." "I like truffles," said the girl. "They're-"

A shot! There was no mistaking the sharp crack of a .38, though it sounded queerly thin in the rare atmosphere. But it sounded again, and a third time, and then a regular fusillade!

"Keep back of me!" I snapped as we turned and raced for the Minos. The warning was needless; Claire was unaccus-tomed to the difficulties of running on a small planet. Her weight on Europa must have been no more than twelve or fifteen pounds, one eighth Earth normal, and though she had learned to walk easily enough-one learned that on any s.p.a.ce journey-she had had no opportunity to learn to run.

Her first step sent her half a dozen feet in the air; I sped away from her with the long, sliding stride one had to use on such planets as Europa.

I burst out of the brush into the area cleared by the blast, where already growth had begun. For a moment I saw only the Minos resting peacefully in the clearing, then I reeled with shock. At the air lock lay a man-Henshaw-with his face a b.l.o.o.d.y pulp, his head split by two bullets.

There was a burst of sound, voices, another shot. Out of the open air lock reeled Coretti; he staggered backward for ten steps, then dropped on his side, while blood welled up out of the collar of his suit. And standing grimly in the opening, an automatic smoking in his right hand, a charged flame-pistol in his left, was Gogrol!

I had no weapon; why should one carry arms on airless Europa? For an instant I stood frozen, appalled, uncompre-hending, and in that moment Gogrol glimpsed me. I saw his hand tighten on his automatic, then he shrugged and strode to-ward me.

"Well," he said with a snarl in his voice, "I had to do it. They went crazy. Anerosis. It struck both of them at once, and they went clean mad. Self-defense, it was."

I didn't believe him, of course. People don't get anerosis in air no rarer than Europa's; one could live his whole life out there without ever suffering from air starvation. But I couldn't argue those points with a panting murderer armed with the most deadly weapon ever devised, and with a girl coming up behind me. So I said nothing at all.

Claire came up; I heard her shocked intake of breath, andher almost inaudible wail, "Stefan!" Then she saw Gogrol holding his guns, and she flared out, "So you did it! I knew they suspected you! But you'll never get away with it, you-"

She broke off under the sudden menace of Gogrol's eyes, and I stepped in front of her as he raised the automatic. For an instant death looked squarely at both of us, then the man shrugged and the evil light in his eyes dimmed.

"A while yet," he muttered. "If Coretti dies-" He backed to the air lock and pulled a helmet from within the Minos, an air helmet that we had thought might serve should we ever need to cross the heights about a blind valley.

Then Gogrol advanced toward us, and I felt Claire quiver against my shoulder. But the man only glared at us and spat out a single word. "Back!" he rasped. "Back!"

We backed. Under the menace of that deadly flame-pistol he herded us along the narrow valley, eastward to the slope whence angled the ravine that led toward Gunderson's valley. And up the slope, into the dim shadows of the pa.s.s itself, so narrow in places that my outstretched hands could have spanned the gap between the walls. A grim, dark, echo-haunted, and forbidding place; I did not wonder that the girl shrank against me. The air was thin to the point of insuffi-ciency, and all three of us were gasping for breath.

There was nothing I could do, for Gogrol's weapons bore too steadily on Claire Avery. So I slippedmy arm about her to hearten her and inched warily along that shadowy canyon, until at last it widened, and a thousand feet below stretched a valley-Gunderson's valley, I knew at once. Far away was the slope where the Hera had rested, and down in the lower end was the heart-shaped pool of brine.

Gogrol had slipped on the helmet, leaving the visor open, and his flat features peered out at us like a gargoyle's. On he drove us, and down into the valley. But as he pa.s.sed the mouth of the ravine, which by now was no more than a nar-row gorge between colossal escarpments that loomed heaven-ward like the battlements of Atlantis, he stooped momentarily into the shadows, and when he rose again I fancied that a small sound like the singing of a teakettle followed us down the slope. It meant nothing to me then.

He waved the automatic. "Faster!" he ordered threaten-ingly. We were down in the talus now, and we scrambled doggedly among the rocks and fallen debris. On he drove us, until we stumbled among the boulders around the central pond. Then, suddenly, he halted.