Thunderhead

4

The orange sun of Longone was still below the eastern horizon when Carnaby came out the gate to the road. Terry Sickle was there, muffled to his ears in an oversized parka, waiting for him.

“You got to get up early to beat me out, Lieutenant,” he said in a tone of forced jocularity.

“What are you doing here, Terry?”

“I heard you still need a man,” the lad said, less cocky now.

Carnaby started to shake his head and Terry cut in with: “I can help pack some of the gear you’ll need to try the high slope.”

“Terry, go on back home, son. That mountain’s no place for you.”

“How’m I going to qualify for the Fleet when your ship comes, Lieutenant, if I don’t start getting some experience?”

“I appreciate it, Terry. It’s good to know I have a friend. But—”

“Lieutenant—what’s a friend, if he can’t help you when you need it?”

“I need you here when I get back, to have a hot meal waiting for me, Terry.”

“Lieutenant…” All the spring had gone from the boy’s stance. “I’ve known you all my life. All I ever wanted was to be with you, on Navy business. If you go up there, alone…”

Carnaby looked at the boy, the dejected slump of his thin shoulders.

“Your uncle know you’re here, Terry?”

“Sure. Uh, he thought it was a fine idea, me going with you.”

Carnaby looked at the boy’s anxious face.

“All right, then, Terry, if you want to,” he said at last. “As far as Halliday’s Roost.”

“Oh, boy, Lieutenant! We’ll have a swell time. I’m a good climber, you’ll see!” He grinned from ear to ear, squinting through the early gloom at Carnaby. “Hey, Lieutenant, you’re rigged out like a real…” he broke off. “I thought you’d, uh, wore out all your issue gear,” he finished lamely.

“Seemed like for this trek I ought to be in uniform,” Carnaby said. “And the cold-suit will feel good, up on the high slopes.”

The two moved off down the dark street. The lights were still on in Sal Maverik’s general store. The door opened as they came up; Sal emerged, carrying a flour sack, his mackinaw collar turned up around his ears. He swung to stare at Carnaby.

“Hey, by God! Look at him, dressed fit to kill!”

Carnaby and Terry brushed past the thick-set man.

“Carnaby,” Sal raised his voice, “was this poor kid the best you could get to hold your hand?”

“What do you mean, poor kid?” Terry started. Carnaby caught his arm.

“We’re on official business, Terry,” he said. “Eyes front.”

“Playing Navy, hah? That’s a hot one,” the storekeeper called after the two. “What kind of orders you get? To take a goony-bird census, up in the foothills?”

“Don’t pay any attention, Lieutenant,” Terry said, his voice unsteady. “He’s as full of meanness as a rotten meal-spud is weevils.”

“He’s had some big disappointments in his life, Terry. That makes a man bitter.”

“I guess you did, too, Lieutenant. It ain’t made you mean.” Terry looked sideways at Carnaby. “I don’t reckon you beat out the competition to get an Academy appointment and then went through eight years of training just for this.” He made a gesture that took in the sweep of the semi-arid landscape stretching away to the big world’s far horizon, broken only by the massive outcroppings of the pale, convoluted lava cores spaced at intervals of a few miles along a straight fault line that extended as far as men had explored the desolate world.

Carnaby laughed softly. “No, I had big ideas about seeing the Galaxy, making Fleet Admiral, and coming home covered with gold braid and glory.”

“You leave any folks behind, Lieutenant?” Terry inquired, waxing familiar in the comradeship of the trail.

“No wife. There was a girl. And my half brother, Tom. A nice kid. He’d be over forty, now.”

The dusky sun was up now, staining the rounded, lumpy flank of Thunderhead a deep scarlet. Carnaby and Sickle crossed the first rock slope, entered the broken ground where the prolific rock lizards eyed them as they approached, then heaved themselves from their perches, scuttled away into the black shadows of the deep crevices opened in the porous rock by the action of ten million years of wind and sand erosion on thermal cracks.

Five hundred feet above the plain, Carnaby looked back at the settlement; only a mile away, it was almost lost against the titanic spread of empty wilderness.

“Terry, why don’t you go on back now,” he said. “Your uncle will have a nice breakfast waiting for you.”

“I’m looking forward to sleeping out,” the boy said confidently. “We better keep pushing, or we won’t make the Roost by dark.”