"We were heading into a clump of baby asteroids the size of peas. The
radar warning was too slow. We couldn't pull away; we had to stop. The
deceleration got him--crushed him. He lived for five minutes afterward."
The little man produced a folded paper from a pocket of his suit.
"Jacob said he had some ideas he had to get down on paper. God knows
why, but during those five minutes he drew up this plan for improving
our deceleration compensator."
"Plans for--" she gasped.
"He was a spaceman, Mrs. Pierce." The man handed her the paper. Ben
caught a glimpse of scribbled circuits, relays, cathodes.
"When he finished," the man continued, "he said to tell you that he
loved you."
She started to hand the paper back.
The spaceman shook his head. "No, the original is yours. I've made
copies for our own ships and for the brass in Hoover City."
* * * * *
Maggie kept talking to the little man, lost in the world he was
creating for her. Ben was excluded from that world, a stranger.
Then Ben saw his opportunity.
Simple Simon's face was expressionless, but tears were zig-zagging down
his gray, reptilian features. Ben stared for several seconds, wondering
if his vision had deceived him. Till this instant, he'd somehow assumed
that the big Venusian was devoid of emotion.
But Simple Simon was crying.
It was unlikely that the creature would peer into his mind at a moment
like this.
Step by step, Ben backed toward the open door in the rear of the
compartment. Silently, he slipped through it. He attempted to move
automatically, without feeling.
He darted into the supply room. The continued drone of voices told him
his action had not been observed.
He didn't like it at all. Escaping this way was like crumpling Maggie's
grief into an acid ball and hurling it into her face. But he had no
other choice.
A few seconds later, he was dressed in windsuit and oxygen helmet. A
can of vita-rations was strapped to his back and his compass was in his
hand.
Heart refusing to stop pounding, he threw the levers and switches to
open the airlock. He cringed under the grinding, scraping noise, as
loud to him as the ringing clash of swords.
But the murmur of voices continued.
He stepped outside. The airlock door clanged shut. He was caught by the
biting dust and the shrill banshee wind. He fell, then scrambled erect.
To his right, he saw the silver sheen of Jacob's rocket shining behind
a row of golden, eyelike portholes. Beneath it were black outlines of
moving, helmeted figures.
He bent low to study the luminous dial of his compass.
Behind him was a grating and a sliding of metal. A movement in the
darkness.
He turned.
Dimly illuminated by the glow from the rocket ports was the grim, stony
face of Simple Simon.
* * * * *
The Venusian was like a piece of the night itself, compressed and
solidified to form a living creature. The impression was contradicted
only by the glowing whiteness of his eyes.
The reptilian body shuffled forward. The scales on his great face
and chest reflected the lights from the rocket like Christmas tree
ornaments dusted with gold.
His hands reached out.
Words thundered in Ben's memory: _God knows Simon didn't try to kill
him. Simon's hands--well, he doesn't realize--_
Ben hopped away from the groping hands, slipped the compass into his
pocket, balled his fists. The wind caught at his body. He stumbled,
then recovered his balance.
Despite the wind and his suit's bulkiness, he was surprised at his own
agility. He recalled that the gravitational pull of Venus was only
four-fifths of Earth's. That was an advantage.
Crouching against the wind, he stepped to his left, away from the
rocket. He was reluctant to enter an area of greater darkness, but
neither did he want to risk observation by the men he'd seen near
Jacob's ship.
Simple Simon followed. He moved like an automaton, functioning with
awkward, methodical slowness. His hands, speckled with reflected light,
rose up out of the darkness.
Ben stepped back, wiped the dust from his clouded face-plate. One swoop
of those hands, he knew, could shatter his helmet, destroy his oxygen
supply, leave him choking on deadly methane and carbon dioxide.
But, so far, Simon seemed bent on capture, not destruction. That fact
gave Ben a second advantage.
Scaly fingers, moving now with greater swiftness, closed over the
shoulder of his suit. Ben felt himself being pulled forward, a child
in the grasp of a giant. His brief surge of confidence vanished. Cold
terror swept upon him.
He lashed out wildly. His right fist found his target, found it so well
that the skin split on his gloved knuckles.
Simon's head snapped back. The grasping fingers slipped from Ben's suit.
But still the Venusian lumbered ahead, an irresistible juggernaut, the
hands continually groping. Ben ducked and slipped aside. The can of
vita-rations was ripped from his back.
He crouched low, fighting the wind, maneuvering for another blow.
His lungs ached, but he had no opportunity to increase his helmet's
oxygen flow. His weak leg muscles were beginning to pain as though with
needles of fire.
* * * * *
The hands crashed down upon his shoulders. This time, his fist found
Simon's stomach. The creature released a grunt audible above the
howling of wind. His body doubled up.
Ben struck again and again. His lungs throbbed as if they'd break
through his chest. A fresh layer of dust coated his face-plate, nearly
blinding him. He fought instinctively, gauntleted fists battering.
Simple Simon fell.
Ben brushed away the dust from his face-plate, turned up his helmet's
oxygen valve. Then he knelt by the fallen creature.
A new fear came to Ben Curtis--a fear almost as great as that of being
caught in Simon's crushing grip. It was the fear that he had killed
again.
But even in the near-darkness, he could distinguish the labored rise
and fall of the massive chest.
_Thank God_, he thought.
From the direction of Jacob's ship, a flash of light caught his eye.
The black shapes of helmeted men were becoming larger, nearer.
Ben tensed. The spacemen couldn't have heard sounds of the struggle,
but they _might_ have noticed movement.
Puffing, Ben plunged into the darkness to his left, slowing only long
enough to consult the dial of his compass.
"Sixty-eight degrees," he breathed.
The compass dial was now his only companion and his only hope. It was
the one bit of reality in a world of black, screaming nightmare.
* * * * *
At first Ben Curtis fought the wind and the dust and the night. His
fists were clenched as they had been while struggling with Simon. Each
step forward was a challenge, a struggle and--so far, at any rate--a
victory.
But how far was the city? Five miles? Ten? How could you judge distance
through a haze of alien sand?
And were Simple Simon or Jacob's men following? How good was a
Venusian's vision at night? Would the scaly hands find him even now,
descending on him from out of the blackness?
He kept walking, walking. Sixty-eight degrees.
Gradually his senses grew numb to the fear of recapture. He became
oblivious to the wailing wind and the beat of dust against his
face-plate. He moved like a robot. His mind wandered back through time
and space, a pin-wheel spinning with unforgettable impressions, faces,
voices.
He saw the white features of a dead man, their vividness fading now and
no longer terrifying.
_A Space Officer Is Honest. A Space Officer Is Loyal. A Space Officer
Is Dutiful._ The words were like clear, satisfying music.
He cursed at the image of a pop-eyed Martian boy. _A tres fine table,
monsieur. Close in the shadows._
And yet, he told himself, the boy really didn't do anything wrong. He
was only helping to capture a murderer. Maybe he was lonesome for Mars
and needed money to go home.
Ben thought of Maggie: _While other gals were dressing for their junior
proms, I'd be in sloppy slacks down at the spaceport with Jacob.... If
I'd only known her back on Earth--_
Maggie, sitting alone now with a wrinkled paper and its mass of
scrawled circuits. Alone and hollow with grief and needing help. Ben's
throat tightened. Damn it, he didn't want to think about that.
What was it the little big-eared man had said? _I've made copies for
our own ships and for the brass in Hoover City._
Why had he said that? Why would renegades give their secrets to the
Space Corps? The Corps would incorporate the discoveries in their
ships. With them, they'd reach the asteroids. Jacob's group would be
pushed even further outward.
Ben stopped, the wind whipping at his suit and buffeting his
helmet--but not as hard as the answer he had found.
* * * * *
Jacob and his men had an existence to justify, a debt to pay. They
justified that existence and paid that debt by helping humanity in its
starward advance.
Maggie had said, _We carry cargoes of almost pure uranium and tungsten
and all the stuff that's getting scarce on Earth and Mars and Venus. If
we want to risk our lives getting it, that's our business.... The dome
we're in now was designed and built by us a few years ago. We lost a
few men in the construction, but with almost every advance in space,
someone dies._
The wind pressed Ben back. The coldness of the Venusian night was
seeping into his suit. It was as if his body were bathed, at once, in
flame and ice.
He slipped, fell, his face turned toward the sandy ground. He did not
try to rise.
Yet his mind seemed to soar above the pain, to carry him into a
wondrous valley of new awareness.
Man would never be content to stay on nine insignificant globes-not
when his eyes had the power to stare into a night sky and when his
brain had the ability to imagine. There would have to be pioneers to
seek out the unknown horror, to face it and defeat it. There would have
to be signposts lining the great road and helping others to follow
without fear.
For all the brilliancy of their dreams, those men would be the lonely
ones, the men of no return. For all the glory of their brief adventure,
they would give not only their cloaks, but ultimately their lives.
Ben lay trembling in the darkness.
His brain cried, _You couldn't rig up a radar system or a deceleration
compensator, but you could chart those asteroids. You can't bring a man
named Cobb back to life, but you could help a thousand men and women to
stay alive five or ten or twenty years from now._
Ben knew at last what decision Jacob would have made.
The reverse of sixty-eight on a compass is two-forty-eight.
* * * * *
Like flashing knitting needles, strong hands moved about his
face-plate, his windsuit, his helmet. Then they were wiping
perspiration from his white face and placing a wet cloth on the back of
his neck.
"You were coming back," a voice kept saying. "You were coming back."
His mouth was full of hot coffee. He became aware of a gentle face
hovering above him, just as it had a seeming eternity ago.
He sat up on the bed, conscious now of his surroundings.
"Simon says you were coming back, Ben. _Why?_"
He fought to grasp the meaning of Maggie's words. "Simon? Simon found
me? He brought me back?"
"Only a short way. He said you were almost here."
Ben closed his eyes, reliving the whirlwind of thought that had whipped
through his brain. He mumbled something about pioneers and a scrawled
paper and a debt and a decision.
Then he blinked and saw that he and Maggie were not alone. Simple Simon
stood at the foot of his bed--and was that a trace of a smile on his
reptilian mouth? And three windsuited spacemen stood behind Maggie,
helmets in their hands. One was a lean-boned, reddish-skinned Martian.
Simple Simon said, "Ben--changed. Thinks--like us. Good now.
Like--Jacob."
The little big-eared man stepped up and shook hands with Ben. "If Simon
says so, that's good enough for me."
A blond-haired Earthman helped Ben from the bed. "Legs okay, fellow?
Think you're ready?"