It had been anger that had made him do it … that unaccountable anger which had flared when Hoffman told him to get out.
After all, what difference would a few days make? He was going to leave anyhow. He’d seen about all there was to see in Asteroid City. He wanted to see the Prowler and the stones with the strange inscriptions on them, but they were sights he could get along without.
If he turned around and walked the other way he could reach his space ship in just a few minutes. There was fuel enough to take him to Ganymede. No one would know until he was already gone. And after he was gone, what would he care what anybody thought?
He stood irresolutely, arguing with himself. Then he shook his head, resumed his march toward the Silver Moon.
A figure stepped from a dark doorway. Meek saw the threatening gleam of steel. His hands streaked toward his gun-butts, but something prodded him in the back and he froze, fingers touching metal.
“All right, marshal,” said a mocking voice. “You just turn around and walk the other way.”
He felt his guns lifted from their holsters and he turned around and walked. Footsteps crunched beside him and behind him, but otherwise he walked in silence.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked, his voice just a trifle shaky.
One of the men laughed.
“Just on a little trip, marshal. Out to take a look at Juno. It’s a right pretty sight at night.”
Juno wasn’t pretty. For the most part, there was little of it one could see. The stars shed little light and the depressions were in shadow, while the cragged mountain tops seemed like shimmering mirages in the ghostly starlight.
The ship lay on a plateau between a needle-like range and a deep, shadowed valley.
“Now, marshal,” said one of the men, “you stay right here. You’ll see the Sun come up over that mountain back there. Interesting. Dawn on Juno is something to remember.”
Meek started forward, but the other waved him back with his pistol.
“You’re leaving me here?” shrieked Meek.
“Why sure,” the man said. “You wanted to see the Solar System, didn’t you?”
They backed away from him, guns in hand. Frozen in terror, he watched them enter the ship, saw the port close. An instant later the ship roared away, the backwash of its tubes buffeting Meek to the ground.
He struggled to his feet, watching the blasting tubes until they were out of sight. Clumsily he stepped forward and then stopped. There was no place to go … nothing to do.
Loneliness and fear swept over him in terrible waves of anguish. Fear that dwarfed any emotion he had ever felt. Fear of the ghostly shimmer of the peaks, fear of the shadow-blackened valley, fear of space and the mad, cold intensity of unwinking stars.
He fought for a grip on himself. It was fear such as this that drove men mad in space. He’d read about that, heard about it. Fear of the loneliness and the terrible depths of space … fear of the indifference of endless miles of void, fear of the unknown that always lurked just at elbow distance.
“Meek,” he told himself, “you should have stayed at home.”
Dawn came shortly, but no such dawn as one would see on Earth. Just a gradual dimming of the stars, a gradual lifting of the blacker darkness as a larger star, the Sun, swung above the peaks.
The stars still shone, but a gray light filtered over the landscape, made the mountains solid things instead of ghostly shapes.
Jagged peaks loomed on one side of the plateau, fearsome depths on the other. A meteor thudded somewhere to his right and Meek shuddered. There was no sound of the impact but he could feel the vibrations of the blow as the whizzing mass struck the cliffs.
But it was foolish to be afraid of meteors, he told himself. He had greater and more immediate worries.
There were less than eight hours of air left in the tanks of his space suit. He had no idea where he was, although he knew that many miles of rugged, fearsome country stretched between him and Asteroid City.
The space suit carried no food and no water, but that was of minor moment, he realized, for his air would give out long before he felt the pangs of thirst or hunger.
He sat down on a massive boulder and tried to think. There wasn’t much to think about. Everywhere his thoughts met black walls. The situation, he told himself, was hopeless.
If only he hadn’t come to Asteroid City in the first place! Or having come, if he had only minded his business, this never would have happened. If he hadn’t been so anxious to show off what he knew about card dealing tricks. If only he hadn’t agreed to be sworn in as marshal. If he’d swallowed his pride and left when Hoffman told him to.
He brushed away such thoughts as futile, took stock of his surroundings.
The cliff on the right hand side was undercut, overhanging several hundred feet of level ground.
Ponderously, he heaved himself off the boulder, wandered aimlessly up the wider tongue of plateau. The undercut, he saw, grew deeper, forming a deep cleft, as if someone had furrowed out the mountain side. Heavy shadows clung within it.
Suddenly he stopped, riveted to the ground, scarcely daring to breathe.
Something was moving in the deep shadow of the undercut. Something that seemed to glint faintly with reflected light.
The thing lurched forward and, in the fleeting instant before he turned and ran, Oliver Meek had an impression of a barrel-like body, a long neck, a cruel mouth, monstrous eyes that glowed with hidden fires.
There was no speculation in Oliver Meek’s mind. From the description given him by Stiffy, from the very terror of the thing, he knew the being shambling toward him was the Asteroid Prowler.
With a shriek of pure fear, Meek turned and fled and behind him came the Prowler, its head swaying on the end of its
