ROCKET SHIP GALILEO By Robert A. Heinlein

“Maybe he is going to be all right. I don’t know.”

In fact he came around quickly, sat up and blinked his eyes. “Whassa matter?” he wanted to know.

“Lie down,” Cargraves urged and put a hand on his shoulder.

“All right . . . hey! I’m inside.”

Cargraves explained to him what had happened. Morrie blinked. “Now that’s funny. I was all right, except that I was feeling exceptionally fine-”

“That’s a symptom.”

“Yes, I remember. But it didn’t occur to me then. I had just picked up a piece of metal with a hole in it, when-”

“A what? You mean worked metal? Metal that some one made-”

“Yes, that’s why I was so ex-” He stopped and looked puzzled. “But it couldn’t have been.”

“Possible. This planet might have been inhabited . . . or visited.

“Oh, I don’t mean that.” Morrie shrugged it off, as if it were of no importance. “I was looking at it, realizing what it meant, when a little bald-headed short guy came up and . . but it couldn’t have been.”

“No,” agreed Cargraves, after a short pause, “it couldn’t have been. I am afraid you were beginning to have anoxia dreams by then. But how about this piece of metal?”

Morrie shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted “I remember holding it and looking at it, just as clearly as I remember anything, ever. But I remember the little guy just as well. He was standing there and there were others behind him and I knew that they were the moon people. There were buildings and trees.” He stopped. “I guess that settles it.”

Cargraves nodded, and turned his attention to Morrie’s oxygen pack. The valve worked properly now. There was no way to tell what had been wrong, whether it had frosted inside when Morrie walked on into the deeper shadows, whether a bit of elusive dirt had clogged it, or whether Morrie himself had shut it down too far when he had reduced pressure at Cargraves’ suggestion and thereby slowly suffocated himself. But it must not happen again. He turned to Art.

“See here, Art. I want to rig these gimmicks so that you can’t shut them off below a certain limit. Mmmm . . no, that isn’t enough. We need a warning signal too — something to warn the wearer if his supply stops. See what you can dream up.”

Art got the troubled look on his face that was habitual with him whenever his gadget-conscious mind was working at his top capacity. “I’ve got some peanut bulbs among the instrument spares,” he mused. “Maybe I could mount one on the neck ring and jimmy it up so that when the flow stopped it would-” Cargraves stopped listening; he knew that it was only a matter of time until some unlikely but perfectly practical new circuit would be born.

Chapter 13: SOMEBODY IS NUTS!

The top ring of hills showed them the earth, as Morrie had thought. Cargraves, Art, and Ross did the exploring, leaving Morrie back to recuperate and to work on his celestial navigation problem. Cargraves made a point of going along because he did not want the two passengers to play mountain goat on the steep crags — a great temptation under the low gravity conditions.

Also, he wanted to search over the spot where Morrie had had his mishap. Little bald men, no; a piece of metal with a hole in it — possible. If it existed it might be the first clue to the greatest discovery since man crawled up out of the darkness and became aware of himself.

But no luck — the spot was easy to find; footprints were new to this loose soil! But search as they might, they found nothing. Their failure was not quite certain, since the gloom of the crater’s rim still hung over the spot. In a few days it would be daylight here; he planned to search again.

But it seemed possible that Morrie might have flung it away in his anoxia delirium, if it ever existed. It might have carried two hundred yards before it fell, and then buried itself in the loose soil.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *