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Eddie shrugged and followed her. There she insisted that each take a panrad. If they had to separate “for any reason, they could always communicate and also, using the DF’s—the built-in direction
essential they were on scouting or camping trips. The panrads were lightweight cylinders about two feet high and eight inches in diameter. Crampacked, they held the mechanisms of two dozen different utilities. Their batteries lasted a year without recharging, they were practically indestructible and worked under almost any conditions.
Keeping away from the side of the ship that had the huge hole in it, they took the panrads outside. The long wave bands were searched by Eddie while his mother moved the dial that ranged up and down the shortwaves. Neither really expected to hear anything, but to search was better than doing nothing.
Finding the modulated wave-frequencies empty of any significant noises, he switched to the continuous waves. He was startled by a dot-dashing.
“Hey, mom! Something in the 1000 kilocycles! Unmodulated!” “Naturally, son,” she said with some exasperation in the midst of her elation. “What would you expect from a radio-telegraphic signal?”
She found the band on her own cylinder. He looked blankly at her. “I know nothing about radio, but that’s not Morse.” “What? You must be mistaken!” “I —I don’t think so.”
“Is it or isn’t it? Good god, son, can’t you be certain of anything!” She turned the amplifier up. As both of them had learned Galacto-Morse through sleeplearn techniques, she checked him at once.
“You’re right. What do you make of it?” His quick ear sorted out the pulses. “No simple dot and dash. Four different time-lengths.” He listened some more. “They’ve got a certain rhythm, all right. I can make out definite groupings. Ah! That’s the sixth time I’ve
caught that particular one. And there’s another. And another.”
Dr. Fetts shook her ash-blonde head. She could make out nothing but a series of zzt-zzt-zzt’s. Eddie glanced at the DF needle. “Coming from NE by E. Should we try to locate?” “Naturally,” she replied. “But we’d better eat first. We don’t know how far away it is, or what we’ll find
there. While I fix a hot meal, you get your field trip stuff ready.” “O.K.,” he said with more enthusiasm than he had shown for a long time. When he came back he ate everything in the large dish his mother had prepared on the unwrecked galley
stove. “You always did make the best stew,” he said.
“Thank you. I’m glad you’re eating again, son. I am surprised. I thought you’d be sick about all this.”
“The challenge of the unknown. I have a sort of feeling this is going to turn out much better than we thought. Much better.”
She came close and sniffed his breath. It was clean, i
She said nothing, for she knew that if he tried to hide a bottle in his clothes or field sack while they were tracking down the radio signals, she would soon find it. And take it away. He wouldn’t even protest, merely let her lift it from his limp hand while his lips swelled with resentment.
They set out. Both wore knapsacks and carried the panrads. He carried a gun over his shoulder, and she had snapped onto her sack her small black bag of medical and lab supplies.
High noon of late autumn was topped by a weak red sun that barely managed to make itself seen through the eternal double layer of clouds. Its companion, an even smaller blob of lilac, was setting on the northwestern horizon. They walked in a sort of bright twilight, the best that Baudelaire ever achieved. Yet, despite the lack of light, the air was warm. It was a phenomenon common to certain planets behind the Horsehead Nebula, one being investigated but as yet unexplained.
The country was hilly, with many deep ravines. Here and there were prominences high enough and steep-sided enough to be called embryo mountains. Considering the roughness of the land, however, there was a surprising amount of vegetation. Pale green, red, and yellow bushes, vines, and little trees clung to every bit of ground, horizontal or vertical. All had comparatively broad leaves that turned with the sun to catch the light.
From time to time, as the two Terrans strode noisily through the forest, small multicolored insect-like and mammal-like creatures scuttled from hiding place to hiding place. Eddie decided to carry his gun in the crook of his arm. Then, after they were forced to scramble up and down ravines and hills and fight their way through thickets that became unexpectedly tangled, he put it back over his shoulder, where it hung from a strap.
Despite their exertions, they did not tire quickly. They weighed about twenty pounds less than they would have on Earth and, though the air was thi
Dr. Fetts kept up with Eddie. Thirty years the senior of the twenty-three-year-old, she passed even at close inspection for his older sister. Longevity pills took care of that. However, he treated her with all the courtesy and chivalry that one gave ones mother and helped her up the steep inclines, even though the climbs did not appreciably cause her deep chest to demand more air.
They paused once by a creek bank to get their bearings.
“The signals have stopped,” he said.
“Obviously,” she replied.
At that moment the radar-detector built into the panrad began to ping. Both of them automatically looked upward.
“It can’t be coming from either of those hills,” she pointed out. “There’s nothing but a boulder on top of each one. Tremendous rocks.” “Nevertheless, it’s coming from there, I think. Oh! Oh! Did you see what I saw? Looked like a tall stalk
of some kind being pulled down behind that big rock.” She peered through the dim light. “I think you were imagining things, son. I saw nothing.” Then, even as the pinging kept up, the zzting started again. But after a burst of noise, both stopped. “Lets go up and see what we shall see,” she said. “Something screwy,” he commented. She did not answer. They forded the creek and began the ascent. Halfway up, they stopped to sniff in puzzlement at a gust of
some heavy odor coming downwind. “Smells like a cageful of monkeys,” he said. “In heat,” she added. If his was the keener ear, hers was the sharper nose. They went on up. The RD began sounding its tiny hysterical gonging. Nonplussed, Eddie stopped. The
DF indicated the radar pulses were not coming from the top of the hill they were climbing, as formerly, but from the other hill across the valley. Abruptly, the panrad fell silent. “What do we do now?”
“Finish what we started. This hill. Then we go to the other one.” He shrugged and then hastened after her tall slim body in its long-legged coveralls. She was hot on the scent, literally, and nothing could stop her. Just before she reached the bungalow-sized boulder topping the hill, he caught up with her. She had stopped to gaze intently at the DF needle, which swung wildly before it stopped at neutral. The monkey-cage odor was very strong.
“Do you suppose it could be some sort of radio-generating mineral?” she asked, disappointedly. “No. Those groupings were semantic. And that smell…” “Then what—?” He didn’t know whether to feel pleased or not that she had so ! obviously and suddenly thrust the burden of responsibility and action on him. Both pride and a curious