he wakened in the morning to the sound of furious argument.
corbett and jenks, of course. a trifle—division of the breakfast ration, or of the breakfast chores—had set off their nerves like trains of explosive. even as wofforth rose from his bedstrip, corbett swung a cobble-like fist at jenks' gaunt, grimacing face. the nimbler, smaller man ducked and sidled away. corbett took a lumbering step to close in on his enemy, and jenks darted a hand to his belt behind, then brought it forward again with an electro-automatic pistol.
"i've been keeping this for you!" jenks shrilled. "i'll just diminish the population of pluto by thirty-three and one-third percent!"
"hold it!" bellowed wofforth.
he was too late. a stream of bullets chattered through corbett's body, folding him over and ripping through the paper-thin wall of the tent. air whistled out; the tent began to collapse.
jenks, pinned under corbett's body, was squealing like a pig. "lieutenant, help me—!"
wofforth saw in an instant that the wall could not be patched in time; the bullets had torn loose an irregular strip, pressure had done the rest: even now, the tent was only a few seconds away from complete collapse. as he stumbled across the floor toward the spacesuits, his heart was laboring and his chest straining for breath. spots swam in front of his eyes. he found the topmost spacesuit by touch, and fumbled for the helmet. the tent drifted down on his head in soft, murderous folds. he opened the valve, shoved his face into the helmet, and gulped precious oxygen. his dulled awareness brightened again, momentarily; but he knew he was still a dead man unless he could get into the suit before pressure fell completely. numbed fingers plucked at the suit opening. somehow he got the awkward garment over his legs, closed and locked the torso, pulled down the helmet....
he was lying in darkness, with a low, steady hiss of oxygen in his ears. he rolled over weakly, got to his feet. he turned on his helmet light. he was propping up a gray cave of metal foil, that fell in stiff creases all around him. at his feet were the bodies of jenks and corbett. both were dead.
after a while, clumsily, painfully, he dragged the two corpses free of the tent. he found the heater and thawed a hole in the frozen surface, big enough for both. he tumbled them in, then undercut the edges of the hole with the heater, so that chunks fell in and covered them. while he watched, the cloud of vapor he had made began to settle, slowly congealing on the broken surface and blurring it over again. in a year, there would be no mark here to show that the surface had been disturbed. in a thousand years, it would still be the same.
in the first ray of dawn he flung all supplies from the sled except the fuel containers. he checked the engine, and started it.
into his belt-bag he thrust the log book. nothing else went aboard the sled—no food, no water container, no tools, instruments or oxygen tanks. the tent he left lying there, with all that had been carried inside the night before.
as the sun rose clear of the distant rim of the plain to eastward, he rigged a line to the steering boom, then lashed himself securely within reach of the engine. steering by the taut line, he started westward, slowly at first, then faster. it was as he had hoped. the lightened sled attained and held a greater speed than on any previous day.
"i'll make it," he said aloud, with nobody else to listen on all pluto. "i'll make it!"
faster he urged the engine's rhythm, and faster. he clocked its speed by the indicators on the housing. a hundred and fifty miles an hour. a hundred and sixty; not enough. whipping the boom line tight around his waist to hold his course steady, he sighted between the upcurve of the runner forward. there was level, smooth-frozen country, mile upon mile. he speeded up to one hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. more. the sled hummed at every joining.
at noon, he had done a good thousand miles. at mid-afternoon, sixteen hundred. two and a half hours of visibility left, and more than four hundred miles to go.
"i can do those on my head," muttered wofforth to himself, and then, far in the distance, the flat rim of the horizon was flat no longer.
it had sprung up jagged, full of points and bulges. speeding toward it, he steered by the line around his waist while he cut his engine. he came close at fifty miles an hour, almost a crawl.
some ancient volcanic action had thrown up those mountains, like a rank of close-drawn sentries. the sled could not cross them anywhere. still reducing speed, wofforth drew close to a notch, but the notch gave into a crater, a great shallow saucer two miles in diameter and filled with shadows below, so that wofforth could not gauge its depth. opposite, another notch—perhaps once the crater had been a lake, with water running in and out. if he had come there at noon, he could have seen the bottom, and perhaps—
"but it isn't noon." wofforth was talking to himself again. his voice sounded thin and petulant in his own ears. "by noon tomorrow, the heat will be out of this suit."
he stopped the sled, unlashed himself and trudged to the notch. he stood in it, looking down, then across.
the little bright jewel of the sun, sagging toward the horizon, showed him the upper reaches of the crater's interior, pitched at an angle of perhaps fifty degrees.
even if it had been noon, it would have been no use. the sled could never climb a slope like that.
then he looked again, this way and that. he nodded inside his helmet.
he might as well try.
returning to the sled, he started the engine and lashed himself fast again. he steered away from the crater, and around. he made a great looping journey of twenty miles or so across the plain, building speed all the time.
as he rounded the rear curve of his course, he was driving along at two hundred and sixty miles an hour, and he had to apply pressure to the boom with both hand and knees to point the sled back straight for the notch. straightening his humming vehicle into a headlong course, he leaned forward and sighted between the upcurved runners.
"now!" he urged himself, and watched the break in the crater wall rush toward him.
it greatened, yawned. he leaped through, and with a groaning gasp of prayer he dragged the boom over to steer the sled right.
