“What—?” Cooke began, but Blake cut him off with a terse, “Come on!” He ran toward the truck, estimating the distance they must cover before the black wall reached them. The truck was not far—but the wall was traveling at least fifty miles an hour.
“Is it—” Cooke began again, then gave up as a gust of wind whipped sand in his mouth and devoted his full attention to keeping up with the fleet Blake.
They reached the truck with the black wall looming almost upon them and jumped inside, slamming the doors. “Sandstorm,” Blake said, as Cooke started to ask again. A harder gust of wind lashed at the truck, stinging their faces with sand. “Close your window,” Blake said as he cranked up his own. “Those baby zephyrs are the advance guard. I think we’re in for a real one.”
* * *
The black wall struck a moment later with a thunderous roaring and screaming, smashing at the little truck with savage blows and enveloping them in darkness. Sand and gravel slashed against the windows with a sharp, dry hiss and, above the roar of the wind, Blake could hear a violent thumping as the wind found an empty and unfastened water can in the bed of the truck and slammed it back and forth. The pounding ceased abruptly and Blake had a mental vision of their water can going in kangaroo leaps across the mountainside.
“ . . . long do you think?” Cooke shouted through the darkness.
“What?” Blake asked, shouting, himself, to be heard above the howl and roar of the storm.
“How long do you think this will last?”
“Don’t know. Sometimes a sandstorm will last an hour, sometimes ten hours.”
He felt inside the utility box under the dash and found a flashlight. Its beam had the appearance of a three-dimensional cone in the dust-filled air of the cab.
“How did that get in here so quick?” Cooke demanded.
“It comes in every little crack and crevice,” Blake answered, flashing the light through the windshield. The light revealed the dust and sand flowing past them with incredible speed. There were bright gleams in the torrent of air and sand as larger pieces of diamond reflected the light for a microsecond and bits of dead vegetation were being carried along.
Blake shut off the light and made himself as comfortable as possible in his half of the small cab. “You might as well try to make your mind a contented blank for an indefinite number of hours,” he advised.
Cooke followed his advice, grumbling at the lack of leg room. He was asleep within fifteen minutes; a fact Blake confirmed by a quick flash of the light. Blake sighed enviously and composed himself for the hours of futile thinking and worrying that would be his own lot until sleep came. There was, in the genial Cooke’s philosophy, a blithe unconcern for “Unborn Tomorrow and Dead Yesterday.” But, while he envied Cooke for his carefree attitude, he wondered if it would be of sufficient stability to survive the eventual recognition of a not-so-remote possibility—that all their efforts to leave their shining prison might prove to be futile.
The wind was shaking the truck and roaring with undiminished fury when he finally went to sleep, still worrying about the diamond dust that was being driven into every tiny crack about the truck wherever two parts of metal moved against each other. Silica, over a period of time, would ruin machinery. This was diamond, not silica; this had a hardness of forty-two, not seven—
He awoke at dawn, stiff and cramped, with Cooke’s snoring loud in the silence that had replaced the storm. He jabbed an ungentle elbow into Cooke’s ribs. “Wake up—the storm is over.”
“Huh?” Cooke blinked and straightened with a moan. “My leg’s been asleep so long it—Hey! What happened to our windows?”
“We now have frosted glass all around,” Blake said, rolling down the opaque window on his own side. “Diamond sand is really tough on glass.”
He stepped out of the truck into the calm morning air and looked at the damage. Cooke came around from the other side and stared open-mouthed at the bright, gleaming metal side of the truck where, before, there had been a thick coat of hard red enamel.
“It looks like we need a new paint job,” he said at last. “And we’ll have to knock a hole in the windshield to see how to drive to camp.”
Blake lifted the motor cover and ran a finger through the blanket of diamond dust that covered every part of the motor. It was heaped on more thickly where there had been grease or oil to hold it.
“What do we do about that?” Cooke asked.
“Nothing. If we should try to wipe it off, it would cause it to work in deeper. We can only let it stay and hope the grease will keep most of it from getting any deeper into the moving parts.”
“I wonder how they made out at camp?” Cooke asked as Blake lowered the motor cover.
“I was wondering the same thing. We’d better let the canyons to be prospected between here and camp wait for the time being. They’re all near enough to camp that we can walk out to look at them, anyway.”
They removed the opaque windshield and got under way, the steering wheel and gearshift lever grating harshly. They saw something shining metallically a half mile farther on and it proved to be their errant water can; lodged beneath a thorn bush, stripped of its enamel and polished to a high luster.
* * *
Taylor and Lenson were waiting outside the ship when they drove up. The question and hope was plain to be seen on Lenson’s face but there seemed an almost imperceptible anxiety tingeing the questioning look on Taylor’s face.
Blake shut off the motor and climbed out. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a sign of uranium.”
Lenson’s face reflected a natural disappointment but Taylor seemed to have something on his mind more serious than simple disappointment. “Then there’s no hope of finding uranium in this range?” he asked.
“There was no indication whatever that there is any such thing anywhere along the range,” Blake answered. He looked toward the ship. “Where’s Wilfred?”
“He left early to spend the day prospecting. We have the ship pretty well fixed up inside and there hasn’t been much to do the past few days. Now—how about other minerals? Did you find anything at all?”
“A thin seam of lead-zinc ore that carries a small percentage of cadmium. But I don’t think the diamond drill could ever drill through the rock it’s in.”
Lenson grinned sourly. “I know it can’t,” he said. “We no longer have a diamond drill. While you were gone I got to looking around and found a formation that carried zircons. Since we’ll need zirconium, we all three agreed it would be a good idea to set up the drill, put down some holes and blast out some zirconium-bearing ore. We set the drill up yesterday morning. By mid-afternoon we had worn out six of our eight diamond bits and were down four inches. I came back to the ship late in the afternoon to get some more oil for the drill’s motor—we’ve been using it and it was getting worn—and the storm hit before I could get back to the drill. I had left the drill running; its progress was so slow that it didn’t need any attention. I got lost in the darkness of the storm and finally had to hole up behind an outcropping until morning. Then I saw where I was and went on to the drill. I found the sand blowing into it while it was running had ruined it. Not only the motor, but the gears of the drill, itself.”
“It was no loss, I’m afraid,” Blake said. “All the formations Cooke and I saw carried the same high percentage of diamond.”
“But suppose we should find some ore—how do we drill it without a drill?” Cooke asked. “That is, suppose we find some ore that isn’t so hard and filled with diamonds as to make drilling impossible.”
“In that case, we’d probably find we could fix up the old drill after all,” Blake said. He turned to Lenson. “You said you had been using the drill’s motor for something else—what was that?”
“Water pump,” Lenson said. “It seemed like a foolish waste of effort and time to carry water to the ship’s tanks in buckets so we took the little high-speed water pump that we had brought along for the very purpose of filling the ship’
s tanks, took the motor off the drill—we weren’t using the drill then—stripped enough tubing out of the ship’s air circulating system to reach to the creek and set up our pump.” He grinned again. “It lasted long enough to fill one tank, then the bearings went out. We fixed it and a week later, when we used it again, the bearings went out again. Finally, the last time we used it, the impellers were half abraded away as well as the bearings and shafting cut out.”
“And the motor was wearing out, too?”
Lenson nodded. “The bank was dry and sandy where we set the pump and breezes were always stirring up little clouds of dust. The motor was in pretty bad shape before it soaked through our thick skulls that the dust was pure diamond dust and not at all as harmless as it looked.”
“So now you’re back to carrying water in buckets?” Cooke observed. “And Red and I are going to be back to walking. This is a cruel world to anyone accustomed to mechanized assistance.”
“About finding uranium—” Taylor said, the aura of worry still about him. “What would you suggest next?”
“We can hike across the desert to the nearest range and see what we can find,” Blake said. “It will be slow, doing it all on foot, but we have a boundless supply of two things on this world—time and diamonds.”
“No.” Taylor shook his head. “Time is the very thing we don’t have. I haven’t said anything to Len or Wilfred about it yet. I wanted to wait until all five of us were here to talk over what we—”
“Hello.” Wilfred’s hail interrupted Taylor and he came hurrying toward them. “I saw your truck pull in so I turned around and came back. Any luck?”
“None,” Blake said. “It just wasn’t there to be found.”
“What was this about not having time, and something you hadn’t told us yet?” Lenson asked Taylor, his eyes on Taylor’s face.
The others turned their attention to Taylor as he spoke.
“I’ve been making daily observations with the transit, as you know,” he said. “I’ve observed the apparent motion of our sun, the yellow sun, and the Thousand Suns cluster. I found that this is spring—whether late or early I don’t know—but that’s of no importance. I thought, at first, the yellow sun was swinging in its orbit around our blue-white sun. You can see the yellow sun—like a very bright yellow star—in advance of our own sun each morning. According to my observations, the yellow sun is making an apparent advance of approximately one degree every five days in front of our own sun. This happens to be what its apparent advance should be as we swing out in our orbit, so I became suspicious and made other observations. I discovered we are approaching the Thousand Suns at a speed of one hundred miles a second.”
“That’s what you didn’t tell us?” Lenson asked. “I don’t understand—we’ll either be long since gone from here, or long since dust, before our wandering binary reaches the nearest star of the Thousand Suns.”
“I said the apparent advance of the yellow sun is accounted for by our own orbital movement,” Taylor said. “There is no orbital movement of the yellow sun observable. This isn’t a binary—the yellow sun is a member of the Thousand Suns.”
“You mean—” Blake began.
“In approximately seven and a half months the two suns will collide.”
“And our position in our orbit at that time?”
“We’ll go into the yellow sun the radius of our orbit—four hundred million miles—in advance of the collision.”
* * *
Tall Lenson barely changed expression and the surprise on Wilfred’s face hardened into quick stubbornness, as though he had already decided he would refuse to accept such a fate. Cooke leaned one hip on the fender of the truck, his black eyes flickering over the others as he analyzed their reactions. But for once, Blake felt, Cooke was finding nothing to amuse him.
“You’re sure your observations were accurate—that there’s no hope we might have already swung past the yellow sun by then?” Blake asked.
“I’ve made my observations as accurate as possible, and checked for errors. Our sun is moving toward the yellow sun at a hundred miles a second and a distance of slightly more than one and a half billion miles now separates them. Our observation of these suns couldn’t indicate that they were not a binary during the brief period we dropped into normal space—especially with our limited means for taking observations from the ship. It was natural for us to assume that two suns so close together were a binary. Only very precise observations during the short time we observed them could have revealed the truth and we had neither the proper instruments for such observations nor any reason to think such observations were necessary.”
“It wouldn’t have changed our circumstances,” Blake pointed out. “With seven or eight months of grace, we would have landed to see what the planet had to offer in the way of mineral wealth, anyway.”
“That’s true,” Taylor said. “The result would have been the same. So here we are and we have, according to my most optimistic calculations, six months to fit our ship with a drive and get away from here as fast as we can.”
“Six months?” Cooke demanded. “You said it would be seven and a half.”
“We’ll have to be a long way from here by then—Aurora carries an exceptionally high percentage of carbon and you know what happens when any nuclear conversion process absorbs an excess of carbon.”
“Oh-oh—nova!”
“And they reach out a long, long way,” Taylor said.
“The hyperspace units—the power for them—” Wilfred began.
“If we ever find a way to power them, it will have to be en route in space,” Taylor said. “Or that’s the safest course of action for us, I would say.”
“I agree,” Blake said. “If we can find ore pure enough, we might possibly be able to take off from here within six months. It would have to be exceptionally pure ore—it’s improbable that we can find such ore but we don’t know that it’s impossible. The first thing we want to do is to start getting as far away from here as possible, and as fast as possible. Given pure enough ores, we can do that, I think.”
“You said ‘improbable but not impossible,’ “ Taylor said. “Just how improbable do you think it is?”
“If the other ranges are similar to this one, our chances are very poor. We can try; we can go out as two different parties to save time. Cooke has had experience in the hills, now, and could go with one of you to the range north of us while I went with the other to the range south of us. If there’s nothing in the adjoining ranges, I would say there is no use looking farther.”
“Why?” Lenson asked.
“Time. Time and distance. Any ore we found would have to be carried to the ship on our backs—the truck is worn out.”
“Then let’s start today,” Cooke suggested. “Since our time is so short, we shouldn’t waste an hour of it. Let’s start right now.”
Blake glanced at the early morning sun. “A good idea. We certainly won’t have any days to waste. We’ll take along about sixty days’ supply of concentrated food tablets, plus spare shoe soles and, above all, canteens.”
“The concentrated food tablets for two months—” Wilfred began doubtfully, but was interrupted.
“For roughage we can eat thorn berries,” Blake told him. “Cooke and I tried them. They’re tasteless, but they’re completely harmless.” He turned to Cooke. “You can take Wilfred across to the north range, and Lenson is better built for the hike across the desert to the south range than Wilfred is—it will be about three days on the water in our canteens to reach that south range.”
“And if the south range has no creeks or springs in it—how will you come back across the desert without water?” Taylor asked.
“We won’t,” Blake said simply.
Cooke slid off the fender and looked at the truck, shaking his head. “If only we could have had this truck to use—”
* * *
Blake and Lenson reached the south range on the third day of tramping across the glittering
diamond sand of the desert, their throats burned and dry and their canteens empty. They found water; a seepage of sickening alkali water, but it was water. They found a creek of sweet water the next day as they started up the range’s northern front, tumbling down out of the mountains and disappearing beneath the sand at the mountain’s foot. It was a high, rugged range and they found other creeks and springs as they went. They reached its eastern end on the thirtieth day and turned down its southern face. They came to the last canyon on its southwest slope on the fiftieth day and knew they had failed. They had found an occasional vein of iron oxide and, once, a fairly soft vein of copper ore, but there had been no indications of uranium.
On the fifty-fourth day they reached the ship again, gaunt and ragged, with Blake’s red whiskers flaming riotously and Lenson’s brown beard giving him the look of a benign but destitute young religious father.