The Weather on Mercury by William Morrison

Author:William Morrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jovian Press

* * *

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.”

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