"I'm in no hurry. Injun not lost—wigwam lost. But I hope the earth is visible from there. It would be a good spot, in that case, to set up Art's antenna, not too far from the ship. Frankly, I'm opposed to moving the ship until we head back, even if we miss a chance to try to contact earth."
They were in the shadows now, to Cargraves' relief. Contrary to popular fancy, the shadows were not black, despite the lack of air-dispersed sunlight. The dazzle of the floor behind them and the glare of the hills beyond all contrived to throw quite a lot of reflected light into the shadows.
When they had proceeded some distance farther toward the hills, Cargraves realized that he was not keeping his party together too well. He had paused to examine a place, discovered by Ross, where the base rock pushed up through the waste of the desert floor, and was trying in the dim light to make out its nature, when he noticed that Morrie was not with them.
He restrained his vexation; it was entirely possible that Morrie, who was in the lead, had not seen them stop. But he looked around anxiously.
Morrie was about a hundred yards ahead, where the first folds of the hills broke through. "Morrie!"
The figure stood up, but no answer came over the radio. He noticed then that Morrie was veering, weaving around. "Morrie! Come back here! Are you all right?"
"All right? Sure, I'm all right." He giggled.
"Well, come back here."
"Can't come back. I'm busy—I've found it!" Morrie took a careless step, bounded high in the air, came down, and staggered.
"Morrie! Stand still." Cargraves was hurrying toward him.
But he did not stand still. He began bounding around, leaping higher and higher. "I've found it!" he shrieked. "I've found it!" He gave one last bound and while he floated lazily down, he shouted, "I've found... the bare bones-" His voice trailed off. He lit feet first, bounced through a complete forward flip and collapsed.
Cargraves was beside him almost as he fell, having himself approached in great flying leaps.
First the helmet—no, it was not cracked. But the boy's eyes stared out sightlessly. His head lolled, his face was gray.
Cargraves gathered him up in his arms and began to run toward the Galileo. He knew the signs though he had seen it only in the low-pressure chamber used for pilot training—anoxia! Something had gone wrong; Morrie was starved for oxygen. He might die before he could be helped, or, still worse, he might live with his brain permanently damaged, his fine clear intellect gone.
It had happened before that way, more than once during the brave and dangerous days when man was conquering high-altitude flying.
The double burden did not siow him down. The two together, with their space suits, weighed less than seventy pounds. It was just enough to give him stability.
He squeezed them into the lock, holding Morrie close to his chest and waited in agonizing impatience as the air hissed through the valve. All his strength would not suffice to force that door open until the pressure equalized.
Then he was in and had laid him on the deck. Morrie was still out. He tried to remove the suit with trembling, glove-hampered fingers, then hastily got out of his own suit and un-clamped Morrie's helmet. No sign of life showed as the fresh air hit the patient.
Cussing bitterly he tried to give the boy oxygen directly from his suit but found that the valve on Morrie's suit, for some reason, refused to respond. He turned then to his own suit, disconnected the oxygen line and fed the raw oxygen directly to the boy's face while pushing rhythmically on his chest.
Morrie's eyes flickered and he gasped.
"What happened? Is he all right?" The other two had come through the lock while he worked.
"Maybe he is going to be all right. I don't know."
In fact he came around quickly, sat up and blinked his eyes. "Whassa matter?" he wanted to know.
"Lie down," Cargraves urged and put a hand on his shoulder.
"All right... hey! I'm inside."
Cargraves explained to him what had happened. Morrie blinked. "Now that's funny. I was all right, except that I was feeling exceptionally fine-"
"That's a symptom."
"Yes, I remember. But it didn't occur to me then. I had just picked up a piece of metal with a hole in it, when-"
"A what? You mean worked metal? Metal that some one made-"
"Yes, that's why I was so ex-" He stopped and looked puzzled. "But it couldn't have been."
"Possible. This planet might have been inhabited... or visited.
"Oh, I don't mean that." Morrie shrugged it off, as if it were of no importance. "I was looking at it, realizing what it meant, when a little bald-headed short guy came up and...ut it couldn't have been."
"No," agreed Cargraves, after a short pause, "it couldn't have been. I am afraid you were beginning to have anoxia dreams by then. But how about this piece of metal?"
Morrie shook his head. "I don't know," he admitted "I remember holding it and looking at it, just as clearly as I remember anything, ever. But I remember the little guy just as well. He was standing there and there were others behind him and I knew that they were the moon people. There were buildings and trees." He stopped. "I guess that settles it."
Cargraves nodded, and turned his attention to Morrie's oxygen pack. The valve worked properly now. There was no way to tell what had been wrong, whether it had frosted inside when Morrie walked on into the deeper shadows, whether a bit of elusive dirt had clogged it, or whether Morrie himself had shut it down too far when he had reduced pressure at Cargraves' suggestion and thereby slowly suffocated himself. But it must not happen again. He turned to Art.
"See here, Art. I want to rig these gimmicks so that you can't shut them off below a certain limit. Mmmm...o, that isn't enough. We need a warning signal too—something to warn the wearer if his supply stops. See what you can dream up."
Art got the troubled look on his face that was habitual with him whenever his gadget-conscious mind was working at his top capacity. "I've got some peanut bulbs among the instrument spares," he mused. "Maybe I could mount one on the neck ring and jimmy it up so that when the flow stopped it would-" Cargraves stopped listening; he knew that it was only a matter of time until some unlikely but perfectly practical new circuit would be born.
Chapter 13 - SOMEBODY IS NUTS!
THE TOP OF THE RING OF HILLS showed them the earth, as Morrie had thought. Cargraves, Art, and Ross did the exploring, leaving Morrie back to recuperate and to work on his celestial navigation problem. Cargraves made a point of going along because he did not want the two passengers to play mountain goat on the steep crags—a great temptation under the low gravity conditions.
Also, he wanted to search over the spot where Morrie had had his mishap. Little bald men, no; a piece of metal with a hole in it—possible. If it existed it might be the first clue to the greatest discovery since man crawled up out of the darkness and became aware of himself.
But no luck—the spot was easy to find; footprints were new to this loose soil! But search as they might, they found nothing. Their failure was not quite certain, since the gloom of the crater's rim still hung over the spot. In a few days it would be daylight here; he planned to search again.
But it seemed possible that Morrie might have flung it away in his anoxia delirium, if it ever existed. It might have carried two hundred yards before it fell, and then buried itself in the loose soil.
The hill top was more rewarding. Cargraves told Art that they would go ahead with the attempt to try to beam a message back to earth... and then had to restrain him from running back to the ship to get started. Instead they searched for a place to install the "Dog House".
The Dog House was a small pre-fab building, now resting in sections fitting snugly to the curving walls of the Galileo. It had been Ross's idea and was one of the projects he and Art had worked on during the summer while Cargraves and Morrie were training. It was listed as a sheet-metal garage, with a curved roof, not unlike a Quonset hut, but it had the special virtue that each panel could be taken through the door of the Galileo.