Gordon Dickson - The Human Edge

The sky spun into a blur. The world blurred and tilted.

“Orders,” Joe croaked at Maury. “Cal—command—”

“Yes,” said Maury, pressing him back down on the bed as he tried blindly to sit up again. “All right. All right, Joe. Lie still. He’ll have the command. He’ll be in charge and we’ll all follow him. I promise…”

During the next two days, the Survey Leader was only intermittently conscious. His fever ran to dangerous levels, and several times he trembled and jerked as if on the verge of going into convulsions. John Martin also, although he was conscious and able to move around and even do simple tasks, was pale, high-fevered and occasionally thick-tongued for no apparent reason. It seemed possible there was an infective agent in the claw and teeth wounds made by the alien, with which the ship’s medicines were having trouble coping.

With the morning of the third day when the climbers were about to set out both men showed improvement.

The Survey Leader came suddenly back to clearheadedness as Cal and the three others were standing, all equipped in the bubble, ready to leave. They had been discussing last-minute warnings and advices with a pale but alert John Martin when Joe’s voice entered the conversation.

“What?” it said. “Who’s alive? What was that?”

They turned and saw him propped up on one elbow on his makeshift bed. They had left him on it since the sleeping quarters section of the ship had been completely destroyed, and the sections left unharmed were too full of equipment to make practical places for the care of a wounded man. Now they saw his eyes taking in their respirator masks, packs, hammers, the homemade pitons and hammers, and other equipment including rope, slung about them.

“What did one of you say?” Joe demanded again. “What was it?”

“Nothing, Joe,” said John Martin, coming toward him. “Lie down.”

Joe waved him away, frowning. “Something about one being still alive. One what?”

Cal looked down at him. Joe’s face had grown lean and fallen in even in these few days but the eyes in the face were sensible.

“He should know,” Cal said. His calm, hard, oddly carrying baritone quieted them all. “He’s still Survey Leader.” He looked around at the rest but no one challenged his decision. He turned and went into the corridor of the ship, down to the main control room, took several photo prints from a drawer and brought them back. When he got back out, he found Joe now propped up on pillows but waiting.

“Here,” said Cal, handing Joe the photos. “We sent survey rockets with cameras over the ridge up there for a look at the other side of the mountain. That top picture shows you what they saw.”

Joe looked down at the top picture that showed a stony mountainside steeper than the one the Harrier lay on. On this rocky slope was what looked like the jagged, broken-off end of a blackened oil drum—with something white spilled out on the rock by the open end of the drum.

“That’s what’s left of the alien ship,” said Cal. “Look at the closeup on the next picture.”

Joe discarded the top photo and looked at the one beneath. Enlarged in the second picture he saw that the white something was the body of an alien, lying sprawled out and stiff.

“He’s dead, all right,” said Cal. “He’s been dead a day or two anyway. But take a good look at the whole scene and tell me how it strikes you.”

Joe stared at the photo with concentration. For a long moment he said nothing. Then he shook his head, slowly.

“Something’s phony,” he said at last, huskily.

“I think so too,” said Cal. He sat down on the makeshift bed beside Joe and his weight tilted the wounded man a little toward him. He pointed to the dead alien. “Look at him. He’s got nothing in the way of a piece of equipment he was trying to put outside the ship before he died. And that mountainside’s as bare as ours. There was no place for him to go outside the ship that made any sense as a destination if he was that close to dying. And if you’re dying on a strange world, do you crawl out of the one familiar place that’s there with you?”

“Not if you’re human,” said Doug Kellas behind Cal’s shoulder. There was the faintly hostile note in Doug’s voice still. “There could be a dozen different reasons we don’t know anything about. Maybe it’s taboo with them to die inside a spaceship. Maybe he was having hallucinations at the end, that home was just beyond the open end of the ship. Anything.”

Cal did not bother to turn around.

“It’s possible you’re right, Doug,” he said. “They’re about our size physically and their ship was less than half the size of the Harrier. Counting this one in the picture and the three that fell with the one that we killed here, accounts for five of them. But just suppose there were six. And the sixth one hauled the body of this one outside in case we came around for a look—just to give us a false sense of security thinking they were all gone.”

Joe nodded slowly. He put the photos down on the bed and looked at Cal who stood up.

“You’re carrying guns?” said Joe. “You’re all armed in case?”

“We’re starting out with sidearms,” said Cal. “Down here the weight of them doesn’t mean much. But up there…” He nodded to the top reaches of the mountain and did not finish. “But you and John better move inside the ship nights and keep your eyes open in the day.”

“We will.” Joe reached up a hand and Cal shook it. Joe shook hands with the other three who were going. They put their masks on.

“The rest of you ready?” asked Cal, who by this time was already across the bubble enclosure, ready to step out. His voice came hollowly through his mask. The others broke away from Joe and went toward Cal, who stepped through the bubble.

“Wait!” said Joe suddenly from the bed. They turned to him. He lay propped up, and his lips moved for a second as if he was hunting for words. “—Good luck!” he said at last.

“Thanks,” said Cal for all of them. “To you and John, too. We’ll all need it.”

He raised a hand in farewell. They turned and went.

They went away from the ship, up the steep slope of the old glacier stream bed that became more steep as they climbed. Cal was in the lead with Maury, then Jeff, then Doug bringing up the rear. The yellow bright rays of K94 struck back at them from the ice-scoured granite surface of the slope, gray with white veinings of quartz. The warmsuits were designed to cool as well as heat their wearers, but they had been designed for observer-wearers, not working wearers. At the bend-spots of arm and leg joints, the soft interior cloth of the warmsuits soon became damp with sweat as the four men toiled upward. And the cooling cycle inside the suits made these damp spots clammy-feeling when they touched the wearer. The respirator masks also became slippery with perspiration where the soft, elastic rims of their transparent faceplates pressed against brow and cheek and chin. And to the equipment-heavy men the feel of the angle of the steep rock slope seemed treacherously less than eyes trained to Earth gravity reported it. Like a subtly tilted floor in a fun house at an amusement park.

They climbed upward in silence as the star that was larger than the sun of Earth climbed in the sky at their backs. They moved almost mechanically, wrapped in their own thoughts. What the other three thought were personal, private thoughts having no bearing on the moment. But Cal in the lead, his strong-boned, rectangular face expressionless, was wrapped up in two calculations. Neither of these had anything to do with the angle of the slope or the distance to the top of the mountain.