William F. Temple by Battle on Venus

Author:Battle on Venus
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2011-09-07T16:29:18+00:00

The glacier was a bigger affair than he'd imagined: wider, higher, steeper. This he decided on the fifth day of painful step-cutting, inching up a slope that seemed to mount forever. Every night they'd hacked out a niche in which to sleep, enfolded in the silken layers of the parachute. Even so he, in his thick air-suit, slept poorly because of the cold.

He marveled at the hardihood of Mara. Clad only in her thin frock, placing her bare feet unhesitatingly in the ice holes he'd chipped out, she climbed behind him without complaint or obvious fatigue. Nor did she question why she should have to retrace so tediously the route of her escape from Fami. There were on infantile regrets or crying for the moon in her make-up. She dealt only with facts.

Her simple line of reasoning, George suspected, was:

This man has food. He is a fool, and gives it away. Therefore, if I stay with him, I shall have food.

That night, as they lay in their small, artificial cave, he accused her directly: "Mara, you're not interested in the war, are you? You don't care whether we find the white circle G.H.Q or not?"

"No."

"And you don't want to return to Fami?" "No."

"You only come with me because I feed you and there is no food on the plain?"

"It is nice to be fed. I always had to feed others."

He sighed, and felt oddly regretful. He would have preferred that she kept him company just because she liked him. He'd certainly grown to like having her around in this cold, dreary desolation. She was, for instance, less unsettling company than Captain Freiburg, for she was uncomplicated, self-controlled, unfearful of the present or the future. And, underneath, deep down, he'd found a queer little streak of quiet humor. Not the purely surface kind of facetious humor, the cover-up for uncertainty, but the genuine vein, seeing things for what they were and smiling at them, unafraid.

Suddenly, she said: "Of course, if I wished, I could take the food any time I wanted to."

"No, Mara, not now. The box is locked and the key is in my pocket."

She made no answer, but presently fidgeted about as though she were trying to get in a comfortable position for sleep. George lay there dozing lightly and wondering formlessly about the men back at the space-ship. Had there been any further attacks? How was the work on the fins going? He'd been away almost a week now, and almost anything might have happened back there.

Again, how was he going to get back to the ship? If he contacted the white circle Venusians soon, and they happened to be in a cooperative mood, they might provide transport If not, if he never found them, then it wasn't going to be easy.

The automatic direction-recorder in the helicopter had been pulverised in the crash. So he'd small notion of where the ship lay from here. He only knew that out on the plain were mountain ranges other than this one, and the ship was somewhere over the other side of them.

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