The Star Fox

At first they made good time. The ground rolled quite gently upward, decked with sparse forest that hid them from aerial searchers without hindering their feet. They were all in trim physical shape. And their survival gear, awkward though it seemed, was a miracle of lightness and compactness.

Yet between it and the gravity, each was carrying a burden equal to more than his own Earth weight. “Good time” meant an average of hardly over one kilometer per hour.

Then the land canted and they were on the slopes of Kimreth’s foothills. Worse, their bodies. were beginning to show cumulative effects of stress. This was nothing so simple as exhaustion. Without a sealtent, they could never take off their airsuits. The recyclers handled volatile by-products of metabolism; but slowly, slowly, the fractional percent that escaped chemical treatment built up. Stench and itch were endurable, somewhat, for a while. Too much aldehyde, kettone, organic acid, would not be.

And high gravity has a more subtle, more deadly effect than overworking the heart. It throws the delicate body-fluid balance—evolved through a billion years on one smaller planet—out of kilter. Plasma seeps through cell walls. Blood pools in the extremities, ankles swell while the brain starves. On Staurn this does not happen fast. But it happens.

Without the drugs in their medikits, gravanol, kinesthan, assorted stimulants and analgesics, the travelers would not have traveled three days. When the drugs gave out (and they were getting low) there would be perhaps one day in which to go on, before a man lay down to die.

Is it worth it? gibbered through the querning in Heim’s skull. Why didn’t we go back home? I can’t remember now. His thought fluttered away again. Every remnant of attention must go to the Sisyphus task of picking up one foot, advancing it, putting it down, picking up the other foot, advancing it … Meanwhile a death-heavy weight dragged at his right side. Oh, yes, Jocelyn, he recalled from a remote past. The rest of us have to take turns helping her along.

She stumbled. Both of them came near falling. “Gotta rest,” her air-warped voice wavered.

“You rested … till ten minutes ago … Come!” He jerked brutally on the improvised harness which joined them.

They reeled on for another five hundred seconds. “Time,” Vadász called at the end. They lowered themselves down on their backs and breathed.

Eventually Heim rose to his knees. His vision had cleared and his head throbbed a bit less. He could even know, in a detached way, that the scenery was magnificent.

Eastward the hills up which he was laboring swooped in long curves and dales toward the illimitable hazy plain. The gentled light of an evening sun turned their colors—tawny and orange, with red splashes to mark stands of forest—into a smoldering richness. Not far away a brook twisted bright among boulders, until it foamed over in a series of cataracts whose noise was like bells through the still air. A swarm of insectoidal creatures, emerald bodies and rainbow wings, hovered above the pools it made.

Westward the mountains loomed dark and wild against the sun, which was near their ridge. Yet it tinged Lochan’s snowcone, a shape as pure as Fuji’s, with unearthly greens and blues under a violet heaven. The crags threw their shadows far down the sides, dusking whatever was ahead on Heim’s route. But he saw that, a kilometer hence, a wood grew. His field glasses showed it apparently thick with underbrush. But it was too far to go around—he couldn’t see the northern or southern end—while it was probably not very wide.

Vadász had also been looking in that direction. “I think best we call this a day,” he said.

“It’s early yet,” Heim objected.

“But the sun will soon go below that high horizon. And we are exhausted, and tomorrow we shall have to cut our way through yonder stuff. A good rest is a good investment for us, Gunnar.”

Hell, we’ve been sleeping nine hours out of the eighteen! Heim glanced at the others. Their suits had become as familiar to him as the seldom seen faces. Jocelyn was already unconscious. Uthg-a-K’thaq seemed to flow bonelessly across the place where he lay. Vadász and Bragdon sat tailor style, but their backs were bent. And every nerve in Heim carried waves of weariness. “All right,” he said.