"About ten minutes ago. McCracken doesn't know anything about chess,
and neither do I, so we both wandered away after the first ten minutes.
McCracken said he had an idea where those mountains were."
Lamoureux's eyes narrowed. "Those noises are undoubtedly a message. I
seem to remember that some centuries back there was a code invented by
a man named Morris. That's it, the Morris code. But where could such a
message have come from?"
Sprott shook his head. "I couldn't say, sir. There's supposed to be no
one but Kalinoff on Mercury, and his radio set doesn't work. Could the
message have been sent from Earth?"
"Impossible, Sprott. That set will hardly get more than twelve thousand
miles."
Sprott looked uncomfortable. "Then maybe what I heard wasn't a message
at all, sir."
"I think it was. Does McCracken know you overheard him?"
"I don't think so, sir."
"Then don't let him know that we suspect anything wrong. Come to think
of it, McCracken never seems to act quite as stupid as he pretends
to be. I shouldn't be surprised if, when he shot that Mercurian, he
understood very well what he was doing."
"You believe, sir, that he deliberately tried to cause trouble? Why
would he do that?"
"I don't know," said Lamoureux slowly.
That wasn't the whole truth. He didn't know, but he certainly could
make a shrewd guess. All along, his chief reason for fearing delay on
this expedition had been that Kalinoff might die before he could get to
him. Now there was another reason for fearing delay. Suppose there were
another expedition on the way to rescue Kalinoff. And suppose McCracken
was secretly in the pay of the people behind that expedition, and doing
everything possible to sabotage this one.
Lamoureux nodded to himself. That was probably it. The first thing,
then, was to get the radio set from McCracken.
* * * * *
Big Muscles, as the other men had nicknamed McCracken, was a few
hundred feet away, staring off into the distance. What else he could
see besides snow, Lamoureux couldn't guess. He yelled, "Hey, McCracken!"
"Coming, Captain."
McCracken took a few tentative steps, broke into a short run, and then
made a leap that carried him seventy-five feet through the air, past
where Lamoureux was standing. He ended up at attention, his hand raised
in a military salute.
Lamoureux frowned. Knowing what he did about McCracken, this attempt
to seem carefree, childish, and perhaps a little stupid impressed him
unfavorably. He said, "McCracken, I'm taking you out of Carvalho's
group and putting you into my own. I may need some strong-arm work and
you're just the man for it."
"I sure am, Captain."
"Seeing as I already have a radio, you may as well turn yours over to
Carvalho."
McCracken seemed a trifle less eager. "It's rather heavy, Captain. If
you'd like, I'd carry it for you just the same."
"I prefer to have my own where I can get at it whenever the need
arises. Turn yours over to Carvalho, McCracken."
"Yes, sir. Meanwhile, I want to report, sir, that from where I was
standing when you called to me, I think I could see those mountains."
Lamoureux had his doubts, but he kept them to himself. "Good," he said
briefly. "We'll get going."
He called the men together again and gave them their marching orders.
Whether the Mercurian understood what he said, Lamoureux didn't know.
At any rate, it went along willingly.
They reached the place where McCracken had been standing, and Lamoureux
stared where Big Muscles pointed. There were two mountains rising
off in the distance, barely visible through the snow, and there was
certainly a saddleback ridge between them. The only trouble was that
one of the mountains was almost twice the height of the other.
Kalinoff had reported them as approximately the same height.
"That doesn't fit Kalinoff's description."
McCracken said, "Maybe he looked at them from a different angle, sir.
Then they might have seemed the same height."
"If he looked at them from a different angle, the ridge would no longer
seem saddlebacked."
"That's true, sir. But then you know, sir, Kalinoff is a screwball--"
Lamoureux found this a little hard to take from a man he suspected of
quietly trying to stab him in the back. But he continued to hide his
feelings. "That's as may be, McCracken, but he's not cockeyed. These
aren't the mountains he described. Still, we may as well approach them.
We may be able to get a good view from the top of the taller one."
* * * * *
They moved onward again. A quarter of an hour's marching took them
to the edge of the falling snow. As they walked further, the air
became completely clear, and Lamoureux could see the mountains without
straining his eyes. There was no doubt about it. They were _not_ the
mountains Kalinoff had described.
The Mercurian horizon was not so far away as the more familiar horizon
of Earth, and it was a little difficult for Lamoureux to estimate
distances. Still, the foothills of the mountains could not be more than
twenty miles away. For the past day, little more than the rim of the
Sun had been visible above the horizon, and while the peaks were ablaze
with scarlet and golden colors, only the higher one was out of the
shadow to any considerable extent. The saddlebacked ridge itself was a
vague outline of dull black.
The snow did not catch up with them until four or five hours later,
when they stopped to prepare a meal and rest. Then it began to fall
gently after they had been in the same place for three-quarters of an
hour. By now, Lamoureux was sure that it was the Mercurians who were to
blame. He still wondered how they did it.
The one they had come across had remained with them, and Lamoureux
found it harder than ever to regard the creature as intelligent.
All the thing had done was walk and play chess. Lamoureux had a low
opinion of chess players, even when they were fairly human. He had an
even lower opinion of trained animals. This Mercurian fell, in his
estimation, somewhere between.
They were no more than a mile or two from the foothills of the larger
mountain by now, and the saddlebacked ridge loomed several hundred
feet into the air. Unfortunately, the snow was between it and them,
and prevented them from gaining too clear a view. Lamoureux wondered
if the snow would keep up even at the top of the mountain, and damned
McCracken again for shooting that Mercurian. And then he discovered
that McCracken's feats of arms were not yet ended. McCracken was at
that very moment aiming at some target that Lamoureux could not see.