“Hurt yourself?”
“I’ll live.”
“I wonder,” I answered. “Nobody knows we are here—and you say we can’t get out. Looks like we starve. Not that I give a hoot.”
‘Speaking of that,” he said. “I saved you some of our lunch. I’m afraid I didn’t leave much; you were asleep a long, long time.”
“Don’t mention food!” I retched and grabbed at my side.
“Sorry. But look—I didn’t say we couldn’t get out”
“But you did.”
“No, I said I couldn’t get out.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Uh, never mind. But I think we’ll get out. It was what you said about getting a tractor——”
“Tractor? Are you out of your head?”
“Skip it,” Bill answered. “There is a sort of tractor thing back there—or more like a scaffolding, maybe.”
“Make up your mind.”
“Call it a wagon. I think I can get it out, at least across the crystals. We could use it as a bridge.”
“Well, roll it out.”
“It doesn’t roll. It, uh-well, it walks.”
I tried to get up. “This I got to see.”
“Just move over out of the way of the door.”
I managed to get to my feet, with Hank helping me. “I’m coming along.”
“Want the ice pack changed?”
“Later, maybe.” Hank took me back and showed me. I don’t know how to describe the walker wagon–maybe you’ve seen pictures since. If a centipede were a dinosaur and made of metal to boot, it would be a walker wagon. The body of it was a sort of trough and it was supported by thirty-eight legs, nineteen on a side.
“That,” I said, “is the craziest contraption I ever laid eyes on. You’ll never shove it out the door.”
“Wait until you see,” he advised. “And if you think this is crazy, you should see the other things in here.”
“Such as?”
“Bill, you know what I think this place is? I think it’s a hangar for a space ship.”
“Huh? Don’t be silly; space ships don’t have hangars.”
“This one has.”
“You mean you saw a space ship in here?”
“Well, I don’t know. It’s not like any I ever saw before, but if it’s not a space ship, I don’t know what it is good for.”
I wanted to go see, but Hank objected. “Another time, Bill; we’ve got to get back to camp. We’re late as it is.”
I didn’t put up any fight. My side was paining me again, from the walk. “Okay, what happens next?”
“Like this.” He led me around to the end of the contraption; the trough came nearly down to the floor in back. Hank helped me get inside, told me to lie down, and went up to the other end. ‘The guy that built this,” he said, “must have been a hump-backed midget with four arms. Hang on.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked.
“I moved it about six feet before; then I lost my nerve. Abracadabra! Hold onto your hat!” He poked a finger deep into a hole.
The thing began to move, silently, gently, without any fuss. When we came out into the sunshine, Hank pulled his finger out of the hole. I sat up. The thing was two thirds out of the cave and the front end was beyond the crystals.
I sighed. “You made it, Hank, Let’s get going. If I had some more ice on my side I think I could walk.”
“Wait a second,” he said. “I want to try something. There are holes here I haven’t stuck a finger in yet.”
“Leave well enough alone.”
Instead of answering he tried another hole. The machine backed up suddenly. “Woopsl” he said, jerked his finger out, and jabbed it back where it had been before. He left it there until he regained what we had lost.
He tried other holes more cautiously. At last he found one which caused the machine to rear up its front end slightly and swing it to the left, like a caterpillar. “Now we are in business,” he said happily. “I can steer it.” We started down the canyon.
Hank was not entirely correct in thinking he could guide it. It was more like guiding a horse than a machine—or perhaps more like guiding one of those new groundmobiles with the semi-automatic steering. The walker wagon came to the little natural bridge of ice through which the crystals passed and stopped of itself. Hank tried to get it to go through the opening, which was large enough; it would have none of it. The front end cast around like a dog sniffing, then eased gradually up hill and around the ice.