It was six hours before the first of the search parties Lamoureux had
sent out returned. The men were soaked, but they had seen no trace of
Kalinoff. They had faithfully tried to follow Lamoureux's directions,
but in a downpour where it was impossible to see more than fifty feet
ahead of them, they stood little chance of rescuing anyone. Most of the
six hours had been spent finding their own way home.
The other search parties drifted in slowly, until all had returned.
Lamoureux checked them off one by one, and discovered, with practically
no surprise, that McCracken was missing.
"Where is the idiot?" he growled.
"McCracken separated from the rest of us," replied Carvalho. "He
thought he could catch a glimpse of those mountains Kalinoff described."
"When was this?"
"Just before it started to rain."
"He's probably within a few hundred yards of the ship right now, but
can't find us because of this rain. I hope he has sense enough to dig
up a white-bush and get some shelter."
"We can never be sure how much sense McCracken has. Anyway, Captain, it
can't go on raining like this for very long."
But it could, and it did. The men sat around in the ship, stretching
lazily, and took life easy. They had not had time to unpack many of the
five hundred pound crates, and what materials were exposed to the rain
would not be spoiled. There was no harm in leaving them where they were.
A vacation of this sort would have been welcome, if the trip through
space to Mercury had itself not been so largely a vacation. After a
day, Lamoureux saw plainly that his men were sick of inactivity. So,
for that matter, was he. He had come to take part in a strenuous and
dangerous expedition, not to sit on his fanny waiting for the rain to
go away.
Twenty-four hours after everyone else had returned to the ship,
McCracken made a sensational reappearance. With that independence of
thought that Lamoureux was beginning to recognize, he had found his own
way of coping with the bad weather. He had stripped off his soggy and
unpleasant clothing, and had meandered around for the past day clad in
nothing but his shorts, with his rifle, his one remaining possession,
held firmly in the crook of his right arm. The rain was fairly warm,
and outside of giving him his usual ravenous appetite, his outing had
done him no harm.
* * * * *
Lamoureux got one of the crew to dig up an extra suit of clothes to
cover McCracken's manly beauty. "Where did you sleep?"
"I didn't."
"You wandered around all this time shocking the natives without rest?"
"I'm no sissy," grunted McCracken. "I'm not even tired."
He yawned, and caught himself. "I didn't see anything of Kalinoff. But
I got a good look at those mountains he described. The pair with the
saddleback ridge between them."
"Where are they?"
McCracken scratched his head. "I think I lost my sense of direction.
But they're not far from here. No, sir, they're not far. Kalinoff is as
good as found. The screwball."
His eyes closed while he was talking, and Lamoureux had him led to his
bunk and deposited there. Two minutes later, McCracken's snoring was
competing successfully with the noise of the rain.
There was little sense in looking for the mountains until the rain let
up. Lamoureux waited, and waited in vain. The downpour kept on until
its monotonous sound had become an integral part of their life. They
learned to talk without paying any attention to it, and without even
hearing it. But not without, now and then, cursing it.
After it had been raining for a week, Lamoureux noticed that the
temperature was falling. It probably signified that on this part of the
Twilight Zone the Sun was dropping further behind the horizon. As if he
didn't already have troubles enough. He cursed Mercury; he cursed the
Twilight Zone; he cursed the rain; he even cursed the Sun. A few hours
later, he also cursed the snow and the hail.
Such weather was absolutely incredible. There was nothing to explain
it. As he had told Haskell, the cook, no previous explorer had ever
seen a sign of rain, snow, or hail. Kalinoff had not reported such
phenomena, and Kalinoff got around.
The men were going crazy with inactivity. Worst of all, to Lamoureux,
was the way they looked at him. They seemed to feel that, as leader of
the expedition, he was responsible for the weather. Lamoureux almost
found himself agreeing with them.
* * * * *
On the tenth day, he could stand it no longer. He called the men
together and made a short speech. "Men, this rain seems able to go on
forever. We can't stay here waiting for it to clear up."
Somebody cheered hopefully, and the others, for the sake of exercising
their lungs, joined in.
Lamoureux held up his hand. "McCracken has reported that he saw the
mountains we were looking for, with the saddleback ridge between them.
Rain or no rain, we're going to find them."
Somebody yelled, "Three cheers for Big Muscles McCracken!" The three
cheers were roared. Then there came, "Three cheers for our brave and
heroic captain!" and, "Three cheers for the mountains!" and even,
"Three cheers for the lousy rain and snow."
Lamoureux began to feel uncomfortable. This was too much like a high
school football rally, with burlesque overtones, to suit him. The men
were bursting with pent-up energy, and it had to get out somehow.
"I'm leaving only a half dozen of you behind to stay with the ship. The
rest are coming with me. Any volunteers?"
He had expected what followed. They all volunteered. He made his
choices rapidly. McCracken went along because he had actually seen
the mountains. Carvalho would make an intelligent assistant. Gronski,
Marsden, Sprott--he reeled off the names rapidly, and in less than a
minute had his group, leaving a disgruntled half dozen who would have
nothing to do but continue to sit around the ship.
Lamoureux himself carried a two-way radio transmission set capable of
receiving intelligible signals over a distance of 12,000 miles. He
gave another of the sets to McCracken, and ordered the man to hang on
to it no matter what happened. In the rain, it would be their only way
of maintaining communications with the ship. He put McCracken and the
radio in the second squad under Carvalho, and himself took charge of
the first. The two squads would stick together unless some emergency
demanded that they separate.
When they set out in the snow, wearing the heaviest clothing they had,
the men were singing. McCracken's voice, like the croaking of a huge
bullfrog, supplied an unharmonized but ear-filling bass. It sounded so
impressive to Lamoureux that not until McCracken had reached the third
song did he perceive that the man didn't know any of the melodies at
all. He just oom-pahed as the spirit moved him, evidently feeling that,
on Mercury, noise and good spirits were more important than any tune.
* * * * *
They had been marching for a half hour when Gronski exclaimed, "Well,
I'll be damned to Venus and back!"
"What's wrong, Gronski?"
"It isn't snowing so hard, Captain."