He was lying in darkness, with a low, steady hiss of oxygen in his ears. He rolled over weakly, got to his feet. He turned on his helmet light. He was propping up a gray cave of metal foil, that fell in stiff creases all around him. At his feet were the bodies of Jenks and Corbett. Both were dead.
After a while, clumsily, painfully, he dragged the two corpses free of the tent. He found the heater and thawed a hole in the frozen surface, big enough for both. He tumbled them in, then undercut the edges of the hole with the heater, so that chunks fell in and covered them. While he watched, the cloud of vapor he had made began to settle, slowly congealing on the broken surface and blurring it over again. In a year, there would be no mark here to show that the surface had been disturbed. In a thousand years, it would still be the same.
In the first ray of dawn he flung all supplies from the sled except the fuel containers. He checked the engine, and started it.
Into his belt-bag he thrust the log book. Nothing else went aboard the sled—no food, no water container, no tools, instruments or oxygen tanks. The tent he left lying there, with all that had been carried inside the night before.
As the sun rose clear of the distant rim of the plain to eastward, he rigged a line to the steering boom, then lashed himself securely within reach of the engine. Steering by the taut line, he started westward, slowly at first, then faster. It was as he had hoped. The lightened sled attained and held a greater speed than on any previous day.
“I’ll make it,” he said aloud, with nobody else to listen on all Pluto. “I’ll make it!”
Faster he urged the engine’s rhythm, and faster. He clocked its speed by the indicators on the housing. A hundred and fifty miles an hour. A hundred and sixty; not enough. Whipping the boom line tight around his waist to hold his course steady, he sighted between the upcurve of the runner forward. There was level, smooth-frozen country, mile upon mile. He speeded up to one hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. More. The sled hummed at every joining.
At noon, he had done a good thousand miles. At midafternoon, sixteen hundred. Two and a half hours of visibility left, and more than four hundred miles to go.
“I can do those on my head,” muttered Wofforth to himself, and then, far in the distance, the flat rim of the horizon was flat no longer.
It had sprung up jagged, full of points and bulges. Speeding toward it, he steered by the line around his waist while he cut his engine. He came close at fifty miles an hour, almost a crawl.
Some ancient volcanic action had thrown up those mountains, like a rank of close-drawn sentries. The sled could not cross them anywhere. Still reducing speed, Wofforth drew close to a notch, but the notch gave into a crater, a great shallow saucer two miles in diameter and filled with shadows below, so that Wofforth could not gauge its depth. Opposite, another notch—perhaps once the crater had been a lake, with water running in and out. If he had come there at noon, he could have seen the bottom, and perhaps—
“But it isn’t noon.” Wofforth was talking to himself again. His voice sounded thin and petulant in his own ears. “By noon tomorrow, the heat will be out of this suit.”
He stopped the sled, unlashed himself and trudged to the notch. He stood in it, looking down, then across.
The little bright jewel of the sun, sagging toward the horizon, showed him the upper reaches of the crater’s interior, pitched at an angle of perhaps fifty degrees.
Even if it had been noon, it would have been no use. The sled could never climb a slope like that.
Then he looked again, this way and that. He nodded inside his helmet.
He might as well try.
Returning to the sled, he started the engine and lashed himself fast again. He steered away from the crater, and around. He made a great looping journey of twenty miles or so across the plain, building speed all the time.
As he rounded the rear curve of his course, he was driving along at two hundred and sixty miles an hour, and he had to apply pressure to the boom with both hand and knees to point the sled back straight for the notch. Straightening his humming vehicle into a headlong course, he leaned forward and sighted between the upcurved runners.
“Now!” he urged himself, and watched the break in the crater wall rush toward him.
It greatened, yawned. He leaped through, and with a groaning gasp of prayer he dragged the boom over to steer the sled right.
It worked, as he had not dared hope. The runners bounced, bit. Then he was racing around the inside of the great cup’s rim, like a hurtling bubble on the inner surface of a whirlpool’s funnel. Two miles across, three miles and more on the half diameter—the engine laboring up to three hundred miles an hour, centrifugal force holding it there—
Little more than
