The Edge of Time by David Grinnell

Author:David Grinnell [Grinnell, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1958-06-20T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

"We were on the Ice Moon for three full months before we finally managed to get back. The engines and tanks of the Tannok ship were in good condition, the nose and living quarters of mine were likewise. We moved the broken nose of his and welded on the front of mine. It took three months to complete the job."

Warren's voice, relating his experiences, was holding everyone spellbound. It was late in the evening, supper had been finished and the great living room in the lodge was mainly dark, save for the flickering of logs in the old fireplace. Around the big table were most of the staff of Thunderhook, all fascinated.

These were men who had heard many stories of strange worlds, but this time they knew they had passed over a line into something different. Warren's adventure was the first to go into a scientific achievement beyond those of Earth itself. He was the first human who had experienced—even though, in a sense, at second-hand—actual space flight and actual conditions on uninhabitable worlds.

Marge was there in the big room, but she had taken herself over to a corner by the fireplace and was exchanging whispers with the off-duty guard, Jack. Steiner and Hyatt were on duty. But the others had spent the hour after the table had been cleared listening to Warren.

"Why the laughter? Why the amity between the two antagonists?" asked Weidekind. "I don't understand what you two had in common. Didn't you both owe everything to your own nations?"

Alton pursed his lips. "It's hard for me to explain it now," he said, "but at the time it was quite clear. Somehow being so far away from the home world made its politics petty. It was the outer view. It wasn't a loss of patriotism or anything like that—rather, it was a new and greater sort of pride, a sort of planetary pride. We were both proud simply of being men and being from Komar. We had, you see, so much more in common with each other than with any conceivable thing or object on the Ice Moon where we had landed.

"Our act of planting our standards was sort of a conditioned reflex, you see. It was an act we had each thought of before ever starting our trip; but when we actually did it, it seemed so silly! You see, there was our home world right up there in plain sight in the sky, so much more awesome, so much vaster somehow than our silly little standards, representative of conflicting superstitions and the fossilized angers of long-dead ancients. On top of that, it was so obvious to us both that we were as good as dead. We had both cracked up, neither of us could return. Why fight?

"It wasn't until afterwards that we thought we could make the return trip up by patching one good ship out of two wrecks. If the gravity hadn't been so light there, we probably couldn't have achieved it. But we

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