
rock which bent him over, moaning in pain.
But at last he had traversed the full length of the ledge, and at the far end, he found that it widened,
sloping gently upward to a flat space on which thick underbrush clung, root-fast to the mountainside.
Looking up in the thickening darkness, Andrew nodded. The clustered, thick foliage would resist the
wind—it had evidently been rooted there for years. Anything which could grow here would have to be
able to hang on hard against wind and storm, tempest and blizzard. Now, if his lamed foot would let him
haul himself up there…
It wasn’t easy, burdened with coat and food supplies, his foot torn and bleeding, but before the
darkness closed in entirely, he had dragged himself and his small stock of provision—crawling, at last,
on both hands and one knee—up beneath the trees, and collapsed in their shelter. At least here the
maddening wind blew a little less violently, its strength broken by the boughs. In the emergency supplies
there was a small battery-operated light, and by its pale glimmer he found concentrated food, a thin
blanket of the “space” kind, which would insulate his body heat inside its shelter, and tablets of fuel.
He rigged the blanket and his own coat into a rough lean-to, using the thickest crossed branches to
support them, so that he lay in a tiny dugout scooped beneath the tree-roots and boughs, where only
occasional snow-spray reached him. Now he wanted nothing more than to collapse and lie motionless,
but before his last strength left him, he grimly cut away the frozen trouser-leg and the remnants of his
boot from his damaged leg. It hurt more than he had ever dreamed anything could hurt, to smear it with
the antiseptic in the emergency kit and bandage it tightly up again, but somehow he managed it, although
he heard himself moaning like a wild animal. He dropped at last, exhausted beyond weariness, in his
burrow, reaching out finally for one of Mattingly’s candies. He forced himself to chew it, knowing that
the sugar would warm his shivering body, but in the very act of swallowing, he fell into an exhausted,
deathlike sleep.
For a long time, his sleep was like that of the dead, dark and without dreams, a total blotting-out of
mind and will. And then for a long time he was dimly aware of fever and pain, of the raging of the storm
outside. After it diminished, still in the darkening fever-drowse, he woke raging with thirst, and crawled
outside, breaking icicles from the edge of his shelter to suck them, staggering away from the shelter to
answer the needs of his body. Then he dropped exhausted inside his hollowed-out shelter to swallow a
little food and fell again into deep pain-racked sleep.
When he woke again it was morning, and he was clearheaded, seeing clear light and hearing only a
faint murmur of wind on the heights. The storm was over; his foot and leg still pained him, but endurably.
When he sat up to change the bandages, he saw the wound was clean and un-festered. Above him the
great blood-red sun of Cottman IV lay low in the sky, slowly climbing the heights. He crept to the edge
and looked down into the valley, which lay wrapped in mist below. It was wild, lonesome country and
seemed untouched by any human hands.
Yet this was an inhabited world, a world peopled by humans who were, as far as he knew,
indistinguishable from Earthmen. He had somehow survived the crash which had wrecked the Mapping
and Exploring plane; it should not be wholly impossible, somehow, to make his way back to the
spaceport again. Perhaps the natives would be friendly and help him, although he had to admit it didn’t
seem too likely.
Still, while there was life there was hope… and he still had his life. Men had been lost, before this, in
the wild and unexplored areas of strange worlds, and had come out of it alive, living to tell about it at
Empire Central back on Earth. So that his first task was to get his leg back in walking shape, and his
second, to get out of these mountains.Hellers . Good name for them. They were hellish all right.
Crosswinds, updrafts, downdrafts, storms blowing up out of nowhere—the plane wasn’t made that
could fly through them unscathed in bad weather. He wondered how the natives got across them.
Pack-mules or some local equivalent, he thought. Anyway, there would be passes, roads, trails.