He took Jim's arm and they walked over to the crippled spacer, lying like a great silver bug with its nose smashed, in the stark hollow of this ravine. They entered. Hugh walked forward and examined the thin sheet of berryllium that patched the ship's wounded hull for the night. He went astern and turned on the generators at quarter speed, to provide a miserly warmth. On his way back to the inner cabin he stopped and peered out of a porthole at a now familiar scene: Europa's dark mad terrain becoming swiftly suffused with Jupiter's red.
He entered the cabin, glanced at Jim and saw that he was now in the sulking stage. The hunger problem pressed insistently upon Hugh's own mind. That little furry creature! In spite of hunger, he was still glad he had let it escape; but damn it, he wished he knew why! Hugh thrust the problem from him and glanced again at Jim. Soon Jim's mind, bordering upon necessity, would begin scheming.
Hugh knew the man....
Despite an utter weariness, Hugh didn't sleep through the rest of that short night. His mind, alert and hunger-clear, wrestled with the problem of survival in this mad world of snow and silence. In the opposite beryllium-mesh bunk, Jim snored fitfully, as though rehearsing in his sleep some violence in his mind.
Hugh arose slowly, and donned with caution the stiff, heavy space-suit as protection against the cold. Adjusting the helmet and oxygen tank, he opened the airlock and ventured out into the Dantesque magnificence of Europa's night. The red opaline haze had the quality of a waking nightmare. The great snow crystals were drifting lazily again, appearing now like livid blotches of ruby. Jupiter loomed like a great gloating nemesis across the entire ragged horizon.
Hugh didn't know where he was going. No pre-determined plan guided his footsteps. There was only a great urgency to leave the spacer and go somewhere and seek.... Hugh stopped, brushed the brittle red snow from his face-plate and wished he could wipe the sweat from his brow. Go where, and seek what? Seek oxide crystals of course, he told himself; but there was something else now, something strange and powerful that gripped a part of his mind and urged him on like the fear of madness.
He stumbled on for hours it seemed, until he was in the fearsome cavern country. Here the stark, heaven-rearing cliffs were honeycombed with tortuous caves and gullies and immense grottoes. He entered a low gallery-like cave that wound in and downward into the mass of a gigantic cliff.
Now an unshakable inner dread plucked at his mind and gripped his throat as he tried to check his precipitate descent, but couldn't. He no longer seemed possessed of any volition of his own. He shrugged fatalistically; then he felt a thrill of excitement, as he noticed a faint luminescence of the surrounding walls. This light increased as he descended deeper and deeper through widening passages. Then at last, at the end of a turn a burst of radiance met his eyes.
He was in a grotto of titanic proportions. The substance of its walls and distant ceiling gave it the gentle radiance of a sunless day. But it was a glaucous radiance, ineffably green as the light beneath the waters of a shallow sea.
"Holy, roaring comets!" Hugh swore aloud as he stood there quite still, staring. "By all the Red-Tails on Venus, it's oxide—all of it!" His voice echoed inside his helmet and beat against his eardrums.