Pawlak interrupted by repeating his report. It did not affect Donegan.
“So what?” he blazed. “We expected that. All the gear around the tunnel mouth has sunk — we're in a big pit now anyway. That's making things still worse — we'll lose sight of the sun that much sooner. Now let me get back and work!”
“Go back and work if you want, provided you can do anything with the naked eye,” retorted Ries, “but the camera's going back to the ship pronto. That's one thing we forgot — or maybe it was just assumed that gaseous ammonia in this concentration and at this temperature wouldn't do anything to silver. Maybe it isn't the ammonia, for all I know; maybe it's something we've been picking up from the corona; but look at that camera of yours! The polish is gone; it's picking up heat much faster than it was expected to, and not getting rid of it any quicker. If that magazine of exposed film you have in there gets too hot, you'll have wasted a lot of work. Now come on, or else let me take the camera back.” Ries started along the tunnel without further words, and the physicist followed reluctantly.
Inside, Donegan disappeared with his precious film magazine, without taking time to thank Ries.
“Self-centered character,” Pawtak muttered. “Not a word to anyone — just off to develop his film before somebody opens the cartridge, I suppose.”
“You can't blame him,” Ries said mildly. “He did a lot of work for it.”
“He did a lot of work? How about us? How about you; it was all your idea in the first place…'
“Careful, Joe, or they'll be taking my nickname away from me and giving it to you. Come on; I want to see Doc Sonne. My feet hurt.” He made his way to the main deck, and Pawlak drifted after him, grumbling. By the time the engineer arrived, the rest of the group was overwhelming Ries with compliments, and the fellow was grinning broadly. It began to look as though the name “Grumpy” would have to find a new owner.
But habit is hard to break. The doctor approached, and without removing his patient's shoes dredged a tube of ointment out of his equipment bag.
“Burn ointment,” the doctor replied. “It'll probably be enough; you shouldn't have taken too bad a dose. I'll have you patched up in a minute. Let's get those shoes off.”
“Now wouldn't you know it,” said Ries aloud. “Not even the doctor around here can do the right thing at the right time. Physicists who want A's gear fixed on B's time — won't let a man go out to do a job in the only way it can be done — won't give a person time to rest — and now,” it was the old Grumpy back again, “a man spends two hours or so swimming around among sacks of frozen methane, which melts at about a hundred and eighty- five degrees Centigrade below zero — that's about two hundred and ninety below Fahrenheit, doctor — and the doctor wants to use burn ointment. Break out the frostbite remedy, will you, please? My feet hurt.”
Uncommon Sense
“So you've left us, Mr. Cunningham!” Malmeson's voice sounded rougher than usual, even allowing for headphone distortion and the ever-present Denebian static. “Now, that's too bad. If you'd chosen to stick around, we would have put you off on some world where you could live, at least. Now you can stay here and fry. And I hope you live long enough to watch us take off — without you!”
Laird Cunningham did not bother to reply. The ship's radio compass should still be in working order, and it was just possible that his erstwhile assistants might start hunting for him, if they were given some idea of the proper direction to begin a search. Cunningham was too satisfied with his present shelter to be very anxious for a change. He was scarcely half a mile from the grounded ship, in a cavern deep enough to afford shelter from Deneb's rays when it rose, and located in the side of a small hill, so that he could watch the activities of Malmeson and his companion without exposing himself to their view.
In a way, of course, the villain was right. If Cunningham permitted the ship to take off without him, he might as well open his face plate; for, while he had food and oxygen for several days' normal consumption, a planet scarcely larger than Luna, baked in the rays of one of the fiercest radiating bodies in the galaxy, was most unlikely to provide further supplies when these ran out. He wondered how long it would take the men to discover the damage he had done to the drive units in the few minutes that had elapsed between the crash landing and their breaking through the control room door, which Cunningham had welded shut when he had discovered their intentions. They might not notice at all; he had severed a number of inconspicuous connections at odd points. Perhaps they would not even test the drivers until they had completed repairs to the cracked hull. If they didn't, so much the better.
Cunningham crawled to the mouth of his cave and looked out across the shallow valley in which the ship lay. It was barely visible in the starlight, and there was no sign of artificial luminosity to suggest that Malmeson might have started repairs at night. Cunningham had not expected that they would, but it was well to be sure. Nothing more had come over his suit radio since the initial outburst, when the men had discovered his departure; he decided that they must be waiting for sunrise, to enable them to take more accurate stock of the damage suffered by the hull.
He spent the next few minutes looking at the stars, trying to arrange them into patterns he could remember. He had no watch, and it would help to have some warning of approaching sunrise on succeeding nights. It would not do to be caught away from his cave, with the flimsy protection his suit could afford from Deneb's radiation. He wished he could have filched one of the heavier worksuits; but they were kept in a compartment forward of the control room, from which he had barred himself when he had sealed the door of the latter chamber.
He remained at the cave mouth, lying motionless and watching alternately the sky and the ship. Once or twice he may have dozed; but he was awake and alert when the low hills beyond the ship's hull caught the first rays of the rising sun. For a minute or two they seemed to hang detached in a black void, while the flood of blue- white light crept down their slopes; then one by one, their bases merged with each other and the ground below to form a connected landscape. The silvery hull gleamed brilliantly, the reflection from it lighting the cave behind Cunningham and making his eyes water when he tried to watch for the opening of the air lock.
He was forced to keep his eyes elsewhere most of the time, and look only in brief glimpses at the dazzling metal; and in consequence, he paid more attention to the details of his environment than he might otherwise have done. At the time, this circumstance annoyed him; he has since been heard to bless it fervently and frequently.
Although the planet had much in common with Luna as regarded size, mass, and airlessness, its landscape was extremely different. The daily terrific heatings which it underwent, followed by abrupt and equally intense temperature drops each night, had formed an excellent substitute for weather; and elevations that might at one time have rivaled the Lunar ranges were now mere rounded hillocks like that containing Cunningham's cave. As on the Earth's moon, the products of the age-long spalling had taken the form of fine dust, which lay in drifts everywhere. What could have drifted it, on an airless and consequently windless planet, struck Cunningham as a puzzle of the first magnitude; and it bothered him for some time until his attention was taken by certain other objects upon and between the drifts. These he had thought at first to be outcroppings of rock; but he was at last convinced that they were specimens of vegetable life — miserable, lichenous specimens, but nevertheless vegetation. He wondered what liquid they contained, in an environment at a temperature well above the melting point of lead.
The discovery of animal life — medium-sized, crablike things, covered with jet-black integument, that began to dig their way out of the drifts as the sun warmed them — completed the job of dragging Cunningham's attention from his immediate problems. He was not a zoologist by training, but the subject had fascinated him for years; and he had always had money enough to indulge his hobby. He had spent years wandering the Galaxy in search of bizarre lifeforms — proof, if any were needed, of a lack of scientific training — and terrestrial museums had always been more than glad to accept the collections that resulted from each trip and usually to send scientists of their own in his footsteps. He had been in physical danger often enough, but it had always been from the life he studied or from the forces which make up the interstellar traveler's regular diet, until he had overheard the conversation which informed him that his two assistants were planning to do away with him and appropriate the ship for unspecified purposes of their own. He liked to think that the promptness of his action following the discovery at least indicated that he was not growing old.
But he did let his attention wander to the Denebian life forms.
