“Spending the capacitor charges,” Vadász objected. “That leaves only your slugthrower for defense.”
“Shucks, Endre, local tigers are no problem. We’re as unsavory to them as they’d be to us.
Our biggest enemy is the gravity drag; our second biggest the short food and medicine supply; our third, maybe, bad weather if we hit any.”
“M-m-m… as you say. I would still like to know precisely what the Slaughter Machines are. But—yes, of course, we will try.” The minstrel got up almost bouncily. “In fact, you have made me feel so much better that I think I can take my turn at digging.”
They had not much time to spare, enough barely to scrape a little earth over the fallen man and hear Vadász sing the Paternoster. Then they departed.
V
Four Staurnian days? Five? Heim wasn’t sure. The nightmare had gone on too long.
At first they made good time. The ground rolled quite gently upward, decked with sparse forest that hid them from aerial searchers without hindering their feet. They were all in trim physical shape. And their survival gear, awkward though it seemed, was a miracle of lightness and compactness.
Yet between it and the gravity, each was carrying a burden equal to more than his own Earth weight. “Good time” meant an average of hardly over one kilometer per hour.
Then the land canted and they were on the slopes of Kimreth’s foothills. Worse, their bodies. were beginning to show cumulative effects of stress. This was nothing so simple as exhaustion.
Without a sealtent, they could never take off their airsuits. The recyclers handled volatile by-products of metabolism; but slowly, slowly, the fractional percent that escaped chemical treatment built up. Stench and itch were endurable, somewhat, for a while. Too much aldehyde, kettone, organic acid, would not be.
And high gravity has a more subtle, more deadly effect than overworking the heart. It throws the delicate body-fluid balance—evolved through a billion years on one smaller planet—out of kilter.
Plasma seeps through cell walls. Blood pools in the extremities, ankles swell while the brain starves. On Staurn this does not happen fast. But it happens.
Without the drugs in their medikits, gravanol, kinesthan, assorted stimulants and analgesics, the travelers would not have traveled three days. When the drugs gave out (and they were getting low) there would be perhaps one day in which to go on, before a man lay down to die.
Is it worth it? gibbered through the querning in Heim’s skull. Why didn’t we go back home? I can’t remember now. His thought fluttered away again. Every remnant of attention must go to the Sisyphus task of picking up one foot, advancing it, putting it down, picking up the other foot, advancing it… Meanwhile a death-heavy weight dragged at his right side. Oh, yes, Jocelyn, he recalled from a remote past. The rest of us have to take turns helping her along.
She stumbled. Both of them came near falling. “Gotta rest,” her air-warped voice wavered.
“You rested… till ten minutes ago… Come!” He jerked brutally on the improvised harness which joined them.
They reeled on for another five hundred seconds. “Time,” Vadász called at the end. They lowered themselves down on their backs and breathed.
Eventually Heim rose to his knees. His vision had cleared and his head throbbed a bit less.
He could even know, in a detached way, that the scenery was magnificent.
Eastward the hills up which he was laboring swooped in long curves and dales toward the illimitable hazy plain. The gentled light of an evening sun turned their colors—tawny and orange, with red splashes to mark stands of forest—into a smoldering richness. Not far away a brook twisted bright among boulders, until it foamed over in a series of cataracts whose noise was like bells through the still air. A swarm of insectoidal creatures, emerald bodies and rainbow wings, hovered above the pools it made.
Westward the mountains loomed dark and wild against the sun, which was near their ridge.
Yet it tinged Lochan’s snowcone, a shape as pure as Fuji’s, with unearthly greens and blues under a violet heaven. The crags threw their shadows far down the sides, dusking whatever was ahead on Heim’s route. But he saw that, a kilometer hence, a wood grew. His field glasses showed it apparently thick with underbrush. But it was too far to go around—he couldn’t see the northern or southern end—while it was probably not very wide.
Vadász had also been looking in that direction. “I think best we call this a day,” he said.
“It’s early yet,” Heim objected.
“But the sun will soon go below that high horizon. And we are exhausted, and tomorrow we shall have to cut our way through yonder stuff. A good rest is a good investment for us, Gunnar.”
Hell, we’ve been sleeping nine hours out of the eighteen! Heim glanced at the others. Their suits had become as familiar to him as the seldom seen faces. Jocelyn was already unconscious.
Uthg-a-K’thaq seemed to flow bonelessly across the place where he lay. Vadász and Bragdon sat tailor style, but their backs were bent. And every nerve in Heim carried waves of weariness. “All right,” he said.
He hadn’t much appetite, but forced himself to mix a little powder with water and squeeze the mess through his chowlock. When that was done, he stretched himself as well as his backpack allowed. Some time had passed before he realized that he wasn’t sleepy. Exhausted, yes; aching and throbbing; but not sleepy. He didn’t know whether to blame overtiredness or the itch in undepilated face and unwashed skin. Lord, Lord, what I’d give for a bath, clean sheets to lie between, clean air to breathe! He braked that thought. There was danger enough without adding an extra psychological hazard.
Pushing himself to a seated position, he watched the light die on Mount Lochan. The sky darkened toward night, a few stars trembled, the little crescent of the outer moon stood steely near the zenith.
“You too?”
; Heim shifted so he could see through his faceplate who had joined him. Bragdon.
Reflexively, his hand dropped to his pistol.
Bragdon laughed without humor. “Relax. You’ve committed us too thoroughly.”
After a moment: “Damn you.”
“Who made this mess in the first place?” Heim growled.
“You did, back in the Solar System… I’ve heard that Jews believe death itself to be an act of expiation. Maybe when we die here on Staurn, you’ll make some amends for him we had to bury.”
“I didn’t shoot him,” Heim said between his teeth.
“You brought about the situation.”
“Dog your hatch before I take a poke at you.”
“Oh, I don’t hold myself guiltless. I should have managed things better. The whole human race is blood guilty.”
“I’ve heard that notion before, and I don’t go along with it The human race is nothing but a species. Individuals are responsible for what they personally do.”
“Like setting out to fight private wars? I tell you, Heim, that man would be alive today if you’d stayed home.”
Heim squinted through the murk. He could not see Bragdon’s face, nor interpret nuances in the transformed voice. But—“Look here,” he said, “I could accuse you of murder in the course of making your own little foreign policy. My expedition is legal. It may even be somewhat more popular than otherwise. I’m sorry about Greg. He was my friend. More, he was under my command. But he knew the risks and accepted them freely. There are worse ways to die than in battle for something that matters. You do protest too much.”
Bragdon started backward. “Don’t say any more!”