From the association's standpoint those things were up to him, of
course, Barney thought bitterly. In either unfortunate event, he
wouldn't be on _their_ consciences.
He felt a momentary spasm of the old hate, but a feeble one, hardly
more than a brief wash of the early torrents of rage. Something had
burned out of him these months; an increasing dullness was moving into
its place--
And just what, he thought, startled, was he doing outside the cabin
door now? He hadn't consciously decided to go that far; it must have
been months, actually, since he had walked beyond the doorway at all.
During the first few weeks he had made half a dozen attempts to
explore his surroundings by night, and learned quickly that he was
confined to as much of the valley as he could see from the cabin.
Beyond the ridges lay naked desert and naked mountain ranges, silent
and terrifying in the moonlight.
Barney glanced up and down the valley, undecided but not knowing quite
what he was undecided about. He didn't feel like going back into the
cabin, and to just stand here was boring.
"Well," he said aloud, sardonically, "it's a nice night for a walk,
Brother Chard."
Well, why not? It was bright enough to see by now if he kept away from
the thickest growths of trees, and getting steadily brighter as the
big moon moved up behind the distant desert rim. He'd walk till he got
tired, then rest. By the time he got back to the cabin he'd be ready
to lie down and sleep off the curious mood that had taken hold of him.
Barney started off up the valley, stepping carefully and uncertainly
along the sloping, uneven ground.
* * * * *
During the early weeks he had found a thick loose-leaf binder in the
back of one of the desk drawers. He thought it might have been left
there intentionally. Its heading was NOTES ON THE TERRESTRIAL
ECOLOGICAL BASE OF THE EIGHTEENTH SYSTEM, VOLUME III. After leafing
through them once, it had been a while before Barney could bring
himself to study the notes in more detail. He didn't, at that time,
want to know too much about the situation he was in. He was still
numbed by it.
But eventually he went over the binder carefully. The various reports
were unsigned, but appeared to have been compiled by at least four or
five persons--McAllen among them; his writing style was not difficult
to recognize. Leaving out much that was incomprehensible or nearly so,
Barney could still construe a fairly specific picture of the
association project of which he was now an unscheduled and unwilling
part. Selected plants and animals had been moved from Earth through
the McAllen Tube to a world consisting of sand, rock and water,
without detected traces of indigenous life in any form. At present the
Ecological Base was only in its ninth year, which meant that the
larger trees in the valley had been nearly full-grown when brought
here with the soil that was to nourish them. From any viewpoint, the
planting of an oasis of life on the barren world had been a gigantic
undertaking, but there were numerous indications that the McAllen Tube
was only one of the array of improbable devices the association had at
its disposal for such tasks. A few cryptic paragraphs expressed the
writer's satisfaction with the undetailed methods by which the Base's
localized climatic conditions were maintained.
So far even the equipment which kept the cabin in uninterrupted
operation had eluded Barney's search. It and the other required
machinery might be buried somewhere in the valley. Or it might, he
thought, have been set up just as easily some distance away, in the
desert or among the remotely towering mountain ranges. One thing he
had learned from the binder was that McAllen had told the truth in
saying no one could contact him from Earth before the full period of
his exile was over. The reason had seemed appalling enough in itself.
This world had moved to a point in its orbit where the radiance of its
distant sun was thickening between it and Earth, growing too intense
to be penetrated by the forces of the McAllen Tube. Another four years
would pass before the planet and the valley emerged gradually from
behind that barrier again.
* * * * *
He walked, rested, walked again. Now and then he was troubled by a
burst of violent sweating, followed by shivering fits until his
clothes began to dry again. The big moon edged presently over the
ridge above him, and in the first flood of its light the opposite
slope of the valley took on the appearance of a fanciful sub-oceanic
reef. The activity of the animal life about Barney increased promptly.
It was no darker now than an evening hour on Earth, and his fellow
occupants of the Ecological Base seemed well-adjusted to the strange
shifts of day and night to which they had been consigned.
He pushed through a final thicket of shrubbery, and found himself at
the edge of the lake. Beyond the almost circular body of water, a
towering wall of cliffs sealed the upper end of the valley. He had
come almost a mile, and while a mile--a city mile, at least--wouldn't
have meant much to Barney Chard at one time, he felt quite exhausted
now. He sat down at the edge of the water, and, after a minute or two,
bent forward and drank from it. It had the same cold, clear flavor as
the water in the cabin.
The surface of the water was unquiet. Soft-flying large insects of
some kind were swarming about, stippling the nearby stretch of the
lake with their touch, and there were frequent swift swirls as fish
rose from beneath to take down the flyers. Presently one of them broke
clear into the air--a big fish, thick-bodied and shining, looking as
long as Barney's arm in the moonlight--and dropped back with a splash.
Barney grinned twistedly. The NOTES indicated Dr. McAllen had taken
some part in stocking the valley, and one could trust McAllen to see
to it that the presence of his beloved game fish wasn't overlooked
even in so outlandish a project.
He shifted position, became aware of the revolver in his pocket and
brought it out. A wave of dull anger surged slowly through him again.
What they did with trees and animals was their own business. But what
they had done to a human being....
He scrambled suddenly to his feet, drew his arm back, and sent the gun
flying far out over the lake. It spun through the moonlight, dipped,
struck the surface with less of a splash than the fish had made, and
was gone.
Now why, Barney asked himself in amazement, did I do that? He
considered it a moment, and then, for the first time in over a year,
felt a brief touch of something not far from elation.
He wasn't going to die here. No matter how politely the various
invitations to do himself in had been extended by McAllen or the
association, he was going to embarrass them by being alive and healthy
when they came back to the valley four years from now. They wouldn't
kill him then; they'd already shown they didn't have the guts to
commit murder directly. They would have to take him back to Earth.
And once he was there, it was going to be too bad for them. It didn't
matter how closely they watched him; in the end he would find or make
the opportunity to expose them, pull down the whole lousy, conceited
crew, see them buried under the shambles an outraged world would make
of the secret association....