Master of the Moondog Part 4

Less than an hour before she had entered the _Pot o' Stars_ with nothing on her mind but a.s.sessing the clients and the possible receipts for the day. Too much had happened and too rapidly. She could not a.s.similate details.

Something launched itself through darkness at her. It snugged tightly to shoulder and neck and made chuckling sounds. Stiff fur nuzzled her skin. There was a vague p.r.i.c.kling of hot needles, but it was disturbing rather than painful. She screamed.

"Shut up!" said Denver, laughing. "It's just Charley. But don't excite him or you'll regret it."

From the darkness came a confused burble of sounds as Charley explored and bestowed his affections upon a new friend still too startled to appreciate the gesture. Darbor tried vainly to fend off the lavish demonstrations.

Denver gunned the s.p.a.ce sled viciously, and felt the push of acceleration against his body. He headed for a distant mountain range.

"Just Charley, my pet moondog," he explained.

"What in Luna is that?"

"You'll find out. He loves everybody. Me, I'm more discriminating, but I can be had. My father warned me about women like you."

"How would he know?" Darbor asked bitterly. "What did he say about women like me?"

"It's exciting while it lasts, and it lasts as long as your money holds out. It's wonderful if you can afford it. But Charley's harmless. He's like me, he just wants to be loved. Go on. Pet him."

"All males are alike," Darbor grumbled. Obediently, she ran fingers over the soft, wirelike pseudo-fur. The fingers tingled as if weak charges of electricity surged through them.

"Does it--er, Charley ever blow a fuse?" she asked. "I'd like to have met your father. He sounds like a man who had a lot of experience with women. The wrong women. By the way, where are we going?"

Tod Denver had debated the point with himself. "To the scene of the crime," he said. "It's not good, and they may look for us there. But we can hole up for a few days till the hunt dies down. It might be the last place Big Ed would expect to find us. Later, unless we find something in the Martian workings, we'll head for the far places.

Okay?"

Darbor shrugged. "I suppose. But then what. I don't imagine you'll be a chivalrous jacka.s.s and want to marry me?"

The s.p.a.ce sled drew a thin line of silver fire through darkness as he debated that point.

"Now that I'm sober, I'll think about it. Give me time. They say a man can get used to to anything."

A ghostly choking sounded from the seat beside him. He wondered if Charley had blown something.

"Do they say what girls have to get used to?" she asked, her voice oddly tangled.

Tod Denver tempered the wind to the shorn lamb. "We'll see how the workings pan out. I'd want my money to last."

What Darbor replied should be written on asbestos.

Their idyl at the mines lasted exactly twenty-seven hours. Denver showed Darbor around, explained some of the technicalities of moon-mining to her. The girl misused some precious water to try was.h.i.+ng the alley-filth from her clothes. Her experiment was not a success and the diaphanous wisps of moonsilver dissolved. She stood in the wrapped blanket and was too tired and depressed even to cry.

"I guess it wasn't practical," she decided ruefully. "It did bunch up in the weirdest places in your spare s.p.a.cesuit. Have you any old rag I could borrow?"

Denver found cause for unsafe mirth in the spectacle of her blanketed disaster. "I'll see." He rooted about in a locker and found a worn pair of trousers which he threw to the girl. A sweater, too shrunken and misshapen for him to wear again, came next. Dismayed, she inspected the battered loot; then was inspired to quick alterations.

Pant-legs cut off well above the baggy knees made pa.s.sable shorts; the sweater bulged a trifle at the shoulders, it fit adequately elsewhere--and something more than adequately.

Charley fled her vicinity in extremes of voluble embarra.s.sment as she changed and zipped up the subst.i.tute garments.

"Nice legs," Denver observed, which was an understatement.

"Watch out you don't skin those precious knees again," she warned darkly.

Time is completely arbitrary on the Moon as far as Earth people are concerned. One gets used to prolonged light and dark periods. Earth poked above the horizon, bathing the heights of the range with intense silver-blue light. But moonshadows lay heavily in the hollows and the deep gorges were still pools of intense gloom. Clocks are set to the meaningless twenty-four hour divisions of day and night on Earth, which have nothing to do with two-week days and nights on Luna. After sunset, with Earthlight still strong and pure and deceptively warm-looking, the landscapes become a barren, haunted wasteland.

Time itself seems unreal.

Time pa.s.sed swiftly. The idyl was brief. For twenty-seven Earth-hours after their landing at the mines came company...!

An approaching s.h.i.+p painted a quick-dying trail of fire upon the black vault of sky. It swooped suddenly from nowhere, and the trapped fugitives debated flight or useless defense.

Alone, Denver would have stayed and fought, however uneven and hopeless the battle. But he found the girl a mental block to all thoughts of open, pitched battle on the shadowy, moonsilvered slopes.

He might surprise the pursuers and flush them by some type of ambush.

But they would be too many for him, and his feeble try would end either in death or capture.

Neither alternative appealed to him. With Darbor, he had suddenly found himself possessed of new tenacity toward life, and he had desperate, painful desire to live for her.

He chose flight.

IV

The s.h.i.+p dropped short-lived rocket landing flares, circled and came in for a fast landing on the cleared strip of brittle-crusted ash.

Some distance from the hastily-patched and now hastily abandoned mine buildings, Tod Denver and Darbor paused and shot hasty, fearful glances toward the landed s.h.i.+p. By Earthlight, they could distinguish its lines, though not the color. It was a drab shadow now against the vivid grayness of slopes. Figures tiny from distance emerged from it and scattered across the flat and up into the cl.u.s.tered buildings. A few stragglers went over to explore and investigate Denver's s.p.a.ce sled in the unlikely possibility that he and the girl had trusted to its meager and dubious protection.

Besides the s.h.i.+p, the hunters would find evidence of recent occupation in the living quarters, from which Denver had removed the frozen corpse before permitting Darbor to a.s.sist with the crude remodeling which he had undertaken. Afterward, when the mine buildings and exposed shafts had been turned out on futile quest for the fugitives, the search would spread. Tracks should be simple enough to follow, once located. Denver had antic.i.p.ated this potential clue to the pursuit, and had kept their walking to the bare, rocky heights of the spur as long as possible.

He hoped to be able to locate the old Martian working, but the chance was slim. Calculating the shadow-apex of Mitre Peak at 2017 ET was complicated by several unknown quant.i.ties. Which peak was Mitre Peak?

Was that shadow-apex Earth-shadow or Sun-shadow? And had he started out in the correct direction to find the line of deep-cut arrow markings at all?

The first intangible resolved itself. One mitre-shaped peak stood out alone and definite above the sharply defined silhouettes of the mountains. It must be Mitre Peak. It had to be.

The next question was the light source casting the shadow-apex. There were two possible answers. It was possible to estimate the approximate location of either sun or Earth at a given time, but calculations involved in working out too many possibilities on different Earth-days of the Lunar-day made the Earth's shadow-casting the likeliest prospect. Neither location was particularly exact, and probably Laird Martin had expected his directions to be gone into under less harrowing circ.u.mstances than those in which Denver now found himself.

With time for trial and error one could eventually locate the place.

But Denver was hurried. He trod upon one of the markings while he still sought the elusive shadow apex.

After that, it was a grim race to follow the markings to the old mines, and to get under cover behind defensible barricades in time to repel invasion.

They played a nerve-wracking game of hare and hounds in tricky floods of Earthlight, upon slopes and spills of broken rock, amid a goblin's garden of towering jagged spires. It was tense work over the bad going, and the light was both distorted and insufficient. In shadow, they groped blindly from arrow to arrow. In the patches of Earthglare, they fled at awkward, desperate speed.

Life and death were the stakes. Life, or a fighting chance to defend life, possible wealth from the ancient workings, made a glittering goal ahead. And ever the gray hounds snapped at their heels, with death in some ugly guise the penalty for losing the game.

Charley was ecstatic. He gamboled and capered, he zoomed and zigzagged, he essayed quick, climbing spirals and almost came to grief among the tangled pinnacles on the ridge of the hogback. He swooped downward again in a series of shallow, easy glides and began the performance all over again. It was a game for him, too. But a game in which he tried only to astound himself, with swift, dizzy miracles of magnetic movement.