He glanced around the room, selected a dice table that had a good view of the door. “Let’s risk a few dollars,” he suggested. “I have a feeling that this is my lucky night!”
TEMPLIN played cautiously, for the stakes were too high for any man on a salary to afford. But by carefully betting against the dice and controlling the impulse to pyramid his winnings, he managed to stay a few chips ahead of the game.
Ellen, scorning to play, was fuming beside him. She said in a vicious whisper, “Temp, this is the most idiotic thing I ever heard of! Don’t you know that the Patrol is after you? Olcott comes here every night; if he sees you—it’s all up!”
Templin grinned. “Patience,” he said. “I know what I’m doing. Give you six to five that the man doesn’t make his eight.”
Ellen tossed her head. “Too bad,” said Templin. “I would have won.” The dice passed to Templin; he made one point, picked up his winnings, threw another and sevened out. He sighed and waited expectantly for the man beside him to bet.
Then—he saw what he was waiting for.
Joe Olcott appeared briefly in the door of the gambling salon. Templin spotted him at once and carefully took the opportunity to light a cigarette, screening most of his down-turned face with his hand. But it was an unnecessary precaution; Olcott was looking for someone else, a chubby little servile-looking man, who trotted up to him as soon as the big man appeared in the door. There was a brief whispered conversation, then Olcott and the chubby one disappeared.
Templin waited thirty seconds after they left. “I knew it,” he exulted. “Olcott said he was coming back here—and I know why! Come on, Ellen—I want to see where he’s going.”
Ellen stuttered protest but Templin dragged her out. They followed the other two into the hall and saw that the elevator indicator showed that the cage was on its way down. “They’re on it,” said Templin. “Come on—stairs are faster.” He led the complaining girl down the long basalt stairways at a precipitous pace. She was exhausted, and even Templin was breathing hard, when they rounded the landing to come to the last flight of stairs. He slowed down abruptly, and they carefully peeked into the lobby of Hadley Dome before coming into sight.
Olcott’s chubby companion had parted from him, was disappearing down a long corridor that led to the Dome’s radio room. Olcott himself was putting on a pressure suit, preparatory to going outside.
Templin halted, concealed by the high balustrade of the stair. He nodded sharply, to himself. “This is it, Ellen,” he said to the girl. “Something has been going on—something so fantastic that I hardly dare speak of it, far beyond anything we’ve dreamed of. But I think I know what it is…and the way Olcott is acting makes me surer of it every minute.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded the girl.
Templin laughed. “You’ll see,” he promised. “Meanwhile, Olcott’s on his way to a certain place that I want very much to see. I’m going after him; you stay here.”
Ellen Bishop stamped a foot. “I’m going along!” she said.
Templin shook his head. “Uh-uh. You’re not—that’s final. When this is over I’ll be working for you again—but right now I’m the boss. And you’re staying here.”
HE LEFT her fuming and went out through the pressure chamber, hastily tugging on the suit he had reclaimed from the attendant. Templin had barely sealed the helmet when the outer door opened, and vacuum sucked at him.
He blinked painfully, staggered by the shock, as he stepped out into the blinding fierce sun. In the days that had passed since last Templin was at Hadley Dome, the Moon’s slow circling of the Earth had brought the Dome into direct sunlight, agonizingly bright—hot enough to warm the icy rock far above the boiling point of water overnight. The helmet of his suit, even stopped down as far as the polarizing device would go, still could not keep out enough of that raging radiation to make it really comfortable. But after a few moments the worst of it passed, and he could see again.
Templin stared around for Olcott, confident that he wouldn’t see him…and he did not. Olcott was not among the ships parked outside the Dome. Olcott was out of sight around the Dome’s bulk; Templin followed and stared out over the heat-sodden Sea of Serenity.
Olcott’s figure, bloated and forbidding-looking in the pressure suit, was bounding clumsily down the long slope of Mount Hadley, going in the general direction of a small crater, miles off across the tortured rocky Sea. Templin stared at the crater thoughtfully for a second. Then he remembered its name.
“Linne,” he said underneath his breath. “Yes!” With a sudden upsurge at the heart he recalled the story of Linne Crater—site of one of the biggest and least-dilapidated Lunarian cities—the so-called “Vanishing Crater” of the Nineteenth Century.
Templin nodded soberly to himself, but wasted no more time in contemplation. Already Olcott was almost out of sight, his bloated figure visible only when he leaped over a crevasse or surmounted a plateau. It would be easy enough to lose him in this jagged, sun-drenched waste, Templin knew…so he hurried after the other man.
Templin remembered the story of Linne, always an enigma to Moon-gazers. It was Linne that, little more than a century before, had been reported by Earthly astronomers as having disappeared…then, a few years later in 1870, it had been discovered again in the low-power telescopes of the period—but with important changes in its shape.
What—Templin wondered abstractly—did those changes in its shape mean?
Obviously, Linne was their goal. It lay directly ahead in the path Olcott had taken, a good thirty miles away—across the roughest, most impassable kind of terrain that existed anywhere in the universe men traversed. A good three-day hike on Earth, it was only about an hour’s time away on foot, on the light-gravitied surface of the Moon. But it would be an hour of sustained, strenuous exertion, and Templin gave all his concentration to the task of getting there.
A mile farther on, Templin glanced up as he cleared a hundred-foot-deep crevasse. Olcott’s figure was nowhere to be seen.
Templin halted, a frown on his lean face. The fat man couldn’t have reached the shelter of Linne crater yet—or could he? Had Linne been a wrong guess, after all—was Olcott’s destination some place between?
Templin shrugged. Certainly Olcott was out of sight; it behooved Templin to get moving, to try to catch up.
He put his full strength into a powerful leg-thrust that sent him hurtling across a ravine and down into a shallow depression on the other side of it. As he balanced himself for the next leap…
Disaster struck.
OUT OF THE corner of his eye, Templin saw a flicker of motion. A sprawling, spread-eagled figure in a pressure suit was sailing down on him from the lee of a small crater nearby; and from one of the outstretched hands glittered a brilliant, diamond-like reflection of sunlight on steel.
It was a spaceman’s knife…and the man who bore it, Templin knew, was Olcott.
Templin writhed aside and out of the way of the knife, but the flailing legs of Olcott caught him and knocked him down. Templin rolled like a ball, landed on his feet facing the other man. Olcott’s face behind the clouded semi-opacity of the helmet was contorted in hatred, and the long knife in his hand was a murderous instrument as he leaped toward Templin again.
Templin paused a moment, irresolute. Olcott didn’t have a gun with him, he saw; if Templin chose, he could take to his heels and Olcott wouldn’t have a chance in the world of catching him. But something within Templin would never let him run from a battle…with scarcely a second’s hesitation, he grabbed for the dirk at his own belt and faced his antagonist. If it was fight that Olcott was after, he would give it to the man.