Gordon Dickson - The Human Edge

“Yes,” said Jeff. “We can’t calculate exactly the time it would take for a balloon to drift to a firing altitude, and we have to know the time to set the destination controls. We can’t improvise any sort of a booster propulsion unit for fear of jarring or affecting the destination controls. The Messenger is meant to be handled carefully and used in just the way it’s designed to be used, and that’s all.” He looked around at them. “Remember, the first rule of a Survey Ship is that it never lands anywhere but Earth.”

“Still,” said Cal, who had been calmly waiting while they talked this out, “we can make the Messenger work.”

“How?” challenged Doug, turning on him. “Just how?”

Cal turned and pointed to the wind-piping battlemented peaks of the mountain looming far above.

“I did some calculating myself,” he said. “If we climb up there and send the Messenger off from the top, it’ll break free and go.”

None of the rest of them said anything for a moment. They had all turned and were looking up the steep slope of the mountain, at the cliffs, the glacier where no glacier should be able to hang, and the peaks.

“Any of you had any mountain-climbing experience?” asked Joe.

“There was a rock-climbing club at the University I went to,” said Cal. “They used to practice on the rock walls of the bluffs on the St. Croix River—that’s about sixty miles west of Minneapolis and St. Paul. I went out with them a few times.”

No one else said anything. Now they were looking at Cal.

“And,” said Joe, “as our nearest thing to an expert, you think that”—he nodded to the mountain—“can be climbed carrying the Messenger along?”

Cal nodded.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I think it can. I’ll carry the Messenger myself. We’ll have to make ourselves some equipment in the tool shop, here at the ship. And I’ll need help going up the mountain.”

“How many?” said Joe.

“Three.” Cal looked around at them as he called their names. “Maury, Jeff and Doug. All the able-bodied we’ve got.”

Joe was growing paler with the effort of the conversation.

“What about John?” he asked looking past Doug at John Martin, Number Nine of the Survey Team. John was a short, rugged man with wiry hair—but right now his face was almost as pale as Joe’s, and his warmsuit bulged over the chest.

“John got slashed up when he tried to pull the alien off you,” said Cal calmly. “Just before I shot. He got it clear across the pectoral muscles at the top of his chest. He’s no use to me.”

“I’m all right,” whispered John. It hurt him even to breathe and he winced in spite of himself at the effort of talking.

“Not all right to climb a mountain,” said Cal. “I’ll take Maury, Jeff and Doug.”

“All right. Get at it then.” Joe made a little, awkward gesture with his hand, and Maury stooped to help pull the pillows from behind him and help him lie down. “All of you—get on with it.”

“Come with me,” said Cal. “I’ll show you what we’re going to have to build ourselves in the tool shop.”

“I’ll be right with you,” said Maury. The others went off. Maury stood looking down at Joe. They had been friends and teammates for some years.

“Shoot,” whispered Joe weakly, staring up at him. “Get it off your chest, whatever it is, Maury.” The effort of the last few minutes was beginning to tell on Joe. It seemed to him the bed rocked with a seasick motion beneath him, and he longed for sleep.

“You want Cal to be in charge?” said Maury, staring down at him.

Joe lifted his head from the pillow. He blinked and made an effort and the bed stopped moving for a moment under him.

“You don’t think Cal should be?” he said.

Maury simply looked down at him without words. When men work and sometimes die together as happens with tight units like a Survey Team, there is generally a closeness amongst them. This closeness, or the lack of it, is something that is not easily talked about by the men concerned.

“All right,” Joe said. “Here’s my reasons for putting him in charge of this. In the first place he’s the only one who’s done any climbing. Secondly, I think the job is one he deserves.” Joe looked squarely back up at the man who was his best friend on the Team. “Maury, you and the rest don’t understand Cal. I do. I know that country he was brought up in and I’ve had access to his personal record. You all blame him for something he can’t help.”

“He’s never made any attempt to fit in with the Team—”

“He’s not built to fit himself into things. Maury—” Joe struggled up on one elbow. “He’s built to make things fit him. Listen, Maury—he’s bright enough, isn’t he?”

“I’ll give him that,” said Maury, grudgingly.

“All right,” said Joe. “Now listen. I’m going to violate Department rules and tell you a little bit about what made him what he is. Did you know Cal never saw the inside of a formal school until he was sixteen—and then the school was a university? The uncle and aunt who brought him up in the old voyageur’s-trail area of the Minnesota-Canadian border were just brilliant enough and nutty enough to get Cal certified for home education. The result was Cal grew up in the open woods, in a tight little community that was the whole world, as far as he was concerned. And that world was completely indestructible, reasonable and handleable by young Cal Hartlett.”

“But—”

“Let me talk, Maury. I’m going to this much trouble,” said Joe, with effort, “to convince you of something important. Add that background to Cal’s natural intellect and you get a very unusual man. Do you happen to be able to guess what Cal’s individual sense of security rates out at on the psych profile?”

“I suppose it’s high,” said Maury.

“It isn’t simply high—it just isn’t,” Joe said. “He’s off the scale. When he showed up at the University of Minnesota at sixteen and whizzed his way through a special ordering of entrance exams, the psychology department there wanted to put him in a cage with the rest of the experimental animals. He couldn’t see it. He refused politely, took his bachelor’s degree and went into Survey Studies. And here he is.” Joe paused. “That’s why he’s going to be in charge. These aliens we’ve bumped into could be the one thing the human race can’t match. We’ve got to get word home. And to get word home, we’ve got to get someone with the Messenger to the top of that mountain.”

He stopped talking. Maury stood there.

“You understand me, Maury?” said Joe. “I’m Survey Leader. It’s my responsibility. And in my opinion if there’s one man who can get the Messenger to the top of the mountain, it’s Cal.”

The bed seemed to make a slow half-swing under him suddenly. He lost his balance. He toppled back off the support of his elbow, and the sky overhead beyond the bubble began to rotate slowly around him and things blurred.

Desperately he fought to hold on to consciousness. He had to convince Maury, he thought. If he could convince Maury, the others would fall in line. He knew what was wrong with them in their feelings toward Cal as a leader. It was the fact that the mountain was unclimbable. Anyone could see it was unclimbable. But Cal was going to climb it anyway, they all knew that, and in climbing it he would probably require the lives of the men who went with him.

They would not have minded that if he had been one of them. But he had always stood apart, and it was a cold way to give your life—for a man whom you had never understood, or been able to get close to.

“Maury,” he choked. “Try to see it from Cal’s—try to see it from his—”