Part 25 (1/2)

”And they agreed to it?”

I smiled in the darkness.

”I was the First Pilot. Gimma could not give rne orders, only suggest, I would weigh the chances and say yes or no. Most of the time, of course, I said yes. But in emergencies the decision was mine.”

”And Olaf?”

”Well, you know Olaf a little by now. As you might imagine, I couldn't take off right away. But when it came down to it, I was the one who had sent Thomas out. Olaf couldn't deny that. So I took off. Without a rocket, of course.”

”Without a rocket . . . ?”

”Yes, in a suit, with a gas shooter. It took a while, but not so very long. I had some trouble with the detector, which was practically a chest, awkward to handle. Weightless, of course, but when I was entering the cloud, I had to be careful not to hit anything. I ceased to see the cloud as I approached it; first the stars began to disappear, a few at a time, on the periphery, then half the sky got black; I looked back and saw the Prometheus glowing in the distance -- she had special equipment that made the hull luminous. Looked like a long white pencil with a ball at one end, the photon headlight. Then everything winked out. The transition was so abrupt. Maybe a second of black mist, then nothing. My radio was disconnected; instead, I had the detector hooked up to the earphones. It took me only a few minutes to fly to the edge of the cloud, but over two hours to drop to the surface -- I had to be careful. The electric flashlight was useless, as I had expected. I began the search. You know what stalact.i.tes look like in caves. . .”

”Yes.”

”Something like that, only more outlandish. I'm talking about what I saw later, when the dust settled, because during my search I couldn't see a thing, as if someone had poured tar over the window of my suit. The box I had on straps. I moved the antenna and listened, then walked with both arms extended -- I'd never stumbled so much in my life. No harm, thanks only to the low gravity. With just a little visibility, of course, a man could have regained his balance ten times over. But this way -- it's hard to explain to someone who's never experienced it -- the planetoid was all jagged peaks, with boulders piled up around them, and wherever I put my foot I began falling, in that drunken slow motion, and I couldn't jump back up: that would send me soaring for a quarter of an hour. I simply had to wait, keep trying to walk on. The rubble slid beneath me, debris, pillars, shards of rock, everything was barely held in place, the force that held them was unusually weak -- which does not mean that if a boulder landed on a man, it would not kill him. The ma.s.s would act then, not the weight; there would be time to jump clear, of course, if you could see the thing falling. . . or at least hear it. But, then, there was no air, so it was only by the vibration under my feet that I could tell whether I had again sent some rock structure toppling, and I could do nothing but wait for a fragment to come out of the pitch-dark and begin to crush me. . . I wandered about for hours and no longer thought that my idea of using the detector was brilliant. I also had to be careful because now and then I would find myself in the air, that is, floating, as in some clownish dream. At last I caught a signal. I must have lost it eight times, I don't remember exactly, but by the time I found the rocket, it was night on the Prometheus.

”The rocket stood at an angle, half-buried in that fiendish dust. The softest, most delicate stuff you can imagine. Almost insubstantial. The lightest fluff on Earth would offer more resistance. The particles were so incredibly small. . . I checked inside the rocket; he was not there. I've said that it stood at an angle, but I wasn't at all sure; it was impossible to find the vertical without using special equipment, and that would've taken at least an hour, and a conventional plumb line, weighing practically nothing, was useless, since the bob wouldn't have held the string tight. . . I wasn't surprised, then, that he hadn't tried to take off. I entered. I saw immediately that he had jury-rigged something to determine the vertical but that it hadn't worked. There was plenty of food left, but no oxygen. He must have transferred it all to the tank on his suit and left.”

”Why?”

”Yes, why. He had been there three days. In that type of rocket you have only a seat, a screen, the control, levers, and a hatch at the rear. I sat there for a while. I realized that I would never be able to find him. For a second I thought that possibly he had gone out just as I landed, that he'd used his gas shooter to return to the Prometheus and was sitting on board now, while I wandered over these drunken stones. . . I jumped out of the rocket so energetically that I flew upward. No sense of direction, nothing. You know how it is when you see a spark in total darkness? The eyes fantasize, there are rays, visions. Well, with the sense of balance, something similar can happen. In zero gravity there's no problem, a person accustoms himself. But when gravity is extremely weak, as on that planetoid, the inner ear reacts erratically, if not irrationally. You think you're zooming up like a Roman candle, then plummeting, and so on, all the time. And then the sensations of spinning and s.h.i.+fting, of the arms, legs, torso -- as if the parts of your body changed places and your head wasn't where it belonged. . .

”That was how f flew, until I collided with a wall, bounced off it, caught on something, was sent rolling, but managed to grab hold of a projecting rock. . . Someone lay there. Thomas.”

She was silent. In the darkness the Pacific roared.

”No, not what you think. He was alive. He sat up at once. I switched on the radio. At that short distance we could communicate perfectly.

” 'Is that you?' I heard him say.

” 'It's me,' I said. A scene from a ridiculous farce, it was so farfetched. Yet that's how it was. We got to our feet.

” 'How do you feel?' I asked.

” 'Fine. And you?'

”This surprised me a little, but I said: ” 'Very well, thank you. And everyone at home, too, is in good health.'

”Idiotic, but I thought that he was talking this way to show that he was holding up, you know?”

”I understand.”

”When he stood close to me, I saw him as a patch of denser darkness in the light of my shoulder lamp. I ran my hands over his suit -- it was undamaged.

” 'Do you have enough oxygen?' I asked. That was the most important thing.

” 'Who cares?' he said.

”I wondered what to do next. Start up his rocket? That would be too risky. To tell the truth, I wasn't even very pleased. I was afraid -- or, rather, unsure -- it is difficult to explain. The situation was unreal, I sensed something strange in it, what exactly I didn't know, I was not even fully aware of how I felt. Only that I wasn't pleased by this miraculous discovery. I tried to figure out how the rocket could be saved. But that, I thought, was not the most important thing. First I had to see what shape he was in. We stood there, in a night without stars.

” 'What have you been doing all this time?' I asked. This was important. If he had tried to do anything at all, even to take a few mineral samples, that would be a good sign.

” 'Different things,' he said. 'And what have you been doing, Tom?'

” 'What Tom?' I asked and went cold, because Arder had been dead a year, and he knew that very well.

” 'But you're Tom. Aren't you? I recognize your voice.'

”I said nothing; with his gloved hand he touched my suit and said: ” 'Nasty, isn't it? Nothing to see, and nothing there. I had pictured it differently. What about you?'

”I thought that he was imagining things in connection with Arder. . . That had happened to more than one of us.

” 'Yes,' I said, 'it isn't too interesting here. Let's go, what do you say, Thomas?'

” 'Go?' He was surprised. 'What are you talking about, Tom?'

”I no longer paid attention to his 'Tom.'

” 'You want to stay here?' I said.

” 'And you don't?'

”He is pulling my leg, I thought, but enough of these stupid jokes.

” 'No,' I said. 'We must get back. Where is your pistol?'

” 'I lost it when I died.'

” 'What?'

” 'But I didn't mind,' he said. 'A dead man doesn't need a pistol.'

” 'Well, well,' I said. 'Come, I'll strap you to me and we'll go.'

” 'Are you crazy, Tom? Go where?'

” 'Back to the Prometheus.'

” 'But it isn't here. . .'

” 'It's out there. Let me strap you up.'

” 'Wait.'

”He pushed me away.