Thus, though it was a new thought to them, several went exploring with him to the north pole of their world. The journey was no more than fifteen miles, but took them across grassy, foodless plains which had never been worth negotiation. Parr chose Ling and another comparatively intelligent specimen who called himself Ruba. Izak, the mild-mannered one who had first met and guided Parr on the night of his banishment from the human village, also pleaded to go. Several others would have joined the party, but the deterioration of legs and feet made them poor walkers. The four went single file—Parr, then big Ling, then Ruba, then Izak. Each carried, on a vine sling, a leaf-package of fruit and a melon for quenching thirst. They also carried clubs.
The plain was well-grassed, as high as Ling’s knuckled knee. Occasionally small creatures hopped or scuttled away. The beast-men threw stones until Parr told them to stop—he could not help but wonder if those scurriers had once been men. The hot sun made him sweat under his plate-armor, but not for all the Solar System would he have laid it aside.
They paused for noonday lunch in a grove of ferny trees beyond the plain, then scaled some rough lava-like rocks. In the early afternoon they came to what must be the asteroid’s northern pole.
Like most of the asteroids, this was originally jagged and irregular. Martian engineers in fitting it artificially to support life, had roughed it into a sphere and pulverized quantities of the rock into soil. Here, at the apex, was a ring of rough naked hills enclosing a pit into which the sun could not look. Ling, catching up with Parr on the brow of the circular range, pointed with his great club.
“Look like mouth of world,” he hazarded. “Dark. Maybe world hungry—eat us.”
“Maybe,” agreed Parr. The pit, about a hundred yards across and full of shadow, looked forbidding enough to be a savage maw. Izak also came alongside.
“Mouth?” he repeated after Ling. “Mmm! Look down. Men in there.”
There was a movement, sure enough, and a flare of something—a torch of punky wood. Izak was right. Men were inside this polar depression.
“Come on,” said Parr at once, and began to scramble down the steep, gloomy inner slope. Ling grimaced, but followed lest his companions think him afraid. Ruba and Izak, who feared to be left behind, stayed close to his heels.
The light of the torch flared more brightly. Parr could make out figures in its glow—two of them. The torch itself was wedged in a crack of the rock, and beneath its flame the couple seemed to tug and wrench at something that gleamed darkly, like a great metal toadstool at the bottom of the depression. So engrossed were the workers that they did not notice Parr and his companions, and Parr, drawing near, had time to recognize both.
One was Sadau, who would have remained his friend. The other was Varina Pemberton. In the torchlight she looked browner and more vigorous than when he had seen her last.
“What are you doing?” he called to them.
Abruptly they both snapped erect and looked toward him. Sadau seized the torch and whirled it on high, shedding light. Varina Pemberton peered at the newcomers.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s you. Parr. Well, get out of here.”
Parr stood his ground, studying the toadstool-thing they had been laboring over. It was a wheel-like disk of metal, set upon an axle that sprouted from the floor of rock. By turning it, they could finish opening a great rock-faced panel near by. …
“Get out,” repeated the girl, with a hard edge on her voice.
Parr felt himself grow angry. “Take it easy,” he said. “Your crowd booted me out, and I’m not under your rule any more. Neither can this be said to be your country. We’ve as much right here as you.”
“Four of us,” added Ruba with threatening logic. “Two of you. Fight, uh?”
“Parr,” said Sadau, “do as Miss Pemberton tells you. Leave here.”
“And if I don’t?” temporized Parr, who felt the eagerness of his beast-men for some sort of a skirmish.
Varina Pemberton took something from her belt and pointed it. A brittle report resounded—whick! And an electro-automatic pellet exploded almost between Parr’s feet, digging a hole in the rock. He jumped back. So did his three comrades, from whose memories had not faded the knowledge of firearms.
“The next shot,” she warned, “will be a little higher and more carefully placed. Get out, and don’t come back.”
“They win,” said Parr. “Come on, boys.”
They retired to the upper combing of rock, with the sun at their backs. There Parr motioned them into hiding behind jagged boulders. Time passed, several hours of it. Finally they saw Sadau and Varina Pemberton depart on the other side of the hole.
“Good,” rumbled Ling. “We follow. Sneak up. Grab. Kill.”
“Not us,” Parr ruled. “No war against women, Ling. But we’ll go down where they were working, and see what it’s all about.”
They groped their way down again. At the bottom of the pit-valley they found the metal projection, so like a mighty steering wheel. Sadau’s torch lay there, extinguished, and Parr still carried a radium lighter in the pocket of his shabby shorts. He made a light, and looked.
The big panel or rock, that had been half-open, was closed. As for the wheel, it had
