Eden Read Free Page B

but what remained of him and his ship!"
    "Or take the Moon probe. They had to tunnel into rock to get it out. Into rock!"
    "On the Moon you have pumice…"
    "But who knows what we have here?"
    "It looks like marl."
    "At the hatchway, yes—but beyond?"
    The instruments were a problem. Like all long-range craft, the ship carried a duplicate set of robots and remote-controlled semiautomata for every sort of task, including ground-surface tasks under various planetary conditions. But the machines were dead, and without current there was no chance of repairing them. The only large-scale unit they had, an excavator powered by a micro-reactor, also required electricity to be started. So they would have to make do with primitive tools: shovels and pickaxes. This, too, presented problems. After several hours of toil, the crew went back and got three hoes, flattened and curved at the end, two steel poles, and large sheets of metal—to reinforce the walls of the tunnel. They carried the earth in buckets as well as in large plastic boxes supported litter-fashion by short aluminum tubing.
    Approximately eighteen hours had passed since the crash, and the men were exhausted. The Doctor felt that they should have at least a few hours' sleep. But first they needed to improvise beds of some sort, since the bunks in their sleeping quarters, bolted to the floor, were now vertical. It would have taken too much effort to detach them, so the men lugged air mattresses to the library (now almost half empty) and lay down side by side.
    But, except for the Chemist and the Engineer, no one could sleep. So the Doctor got up again, took his flashlight, and went in search of sleeping pills. For almost an hour he cleared a path to the first-aid room through a hallway filled with broken equipment and instruments that had tumbled from the wall compartments. At last—his watch showed four in the morning, ship time—the pills were dispensed, the light was extinguished, and fitful breathing soon filled the dark room.
    They awoke unexpectedly quickly—all except the Cyberneticist, who had taken too large a dose and was like one drunk. The Engineer complained of a sharp pain in the back of his neck. The Doctor discovered a swelling there: the Engineer had probably got a sprain when they were grappling with the hatch wheels.
    Spirits were low. Even the Doctor was not talkative. The food supplies in the air lock were inaccessible now, buried beneath a heap of dirt, so once again the Physicist and the Chemist trudged off to the storeroom for cans of food. It was nine when work resumed on the tunnel.
    They went at a snail's pace. There was little room to move about in the oval opening. The men in front broke the packed earth with their hoes, and those behind them removed it to the corridor. Then it was decided to pile the earth in the navigation room, which was closer and contained nothing that might be needed in the immediate future.
    Four hours later, the soil in the cabin was knee-high but the tunnel was only six feet long. Though the marl, compact, was not that hard, the poles and hoe blades kept getting stuck in it, and the iron handles bent as the men labored frantically. The steel hoe that the Captain used worked the best. The Engineer, afraid that the ceiling might cave in on them, took care that it was always well propped. By nightfall, when, smeared with clay, they sat down to supper, the tunnel, which led up from the hatch at a steep, almost seventy-degree angle, extended no more than twenty feet.
    The Engineer looked into the shaft that led to the lower level, where the loading-bay hatch, steel-plated, lay a hundred feet astern of the main hatch, but all he could see was black water. The level was higher than on the previous day; one of the tanks must still be leaking. The water was contaminated, radioactive. He verified this with his small Geiger counter, closed the shaft, and returned to his comrades without mentioning his discovery.
    "If all goes