"That's not all," Harris muttered. "There's other stores missing! Wire, tools, batteries, spare plates for repairing the hull!" His eyes flicked toward the darkness beyond the portholes. "There were plenty of times we were all down at the mine working when whatever it was that got Allers and Kennerly might have entered the ship, taken those things. I've seen shadows out there sometimes. Shadows that weren't just right, sliding among the rocks. And ... and it's bad luck to have a woman aboard ship."
A silence fell over the cabin. Grant frowned. Five flasks of oxygen ... and the air-regenerator useless without power! Nothing could save them unless word got through to Bowman's Crater, on the edge of the Cerean Darkside. Two men had tried to get through, and those two men had vanished. To permit Joan Conway to attempt the trip was unthinkable. Grant reached for one of the bulky space-suits that hung on the wall.
"All right, men," he grated. "We're going to get to the bottom of this! Here's the plan! I'll take the trail to Bowman's Crater; the same trail Allers and Kennerly took! If there's anything lying in wait out there, it ought to attack me, and I'll be armed! At the same time I want you, Harris, and you, Miller, to go out also, to climb the other side of the crater and circle about, picking up the trail to Bowman's a mile or so from here. I'll draw It's attention, while you try to get through and take word to the outpost. Got it?"
The three men nodded, climbed into the heavily insulated space-suits. Electric heating wires ran through the lining, from portable batteries good for several hours, enabling the men within them to maintain comfortable warmth even though the soles of their thick lead gravity shoes, in contact with the icy ground, were within a few degrees of absolute zero. Gloves of heavy lead, a part of every radium miner's equipment as protection against the highly concentrated ore he was forced to handle, covered the asbestoid "hands" of the space-suits. Grant paused before snapping his transparent plastic helmet into place, turned to the men who were to remain aboard the Comet.
"Miss Conway's feeling a little ragged because of the air," he said, unsmilingly. "When she's better, tell her where we've gone."
The men grinned understandingly. They knew that the girl, in spite of her frail form, felt that command of the expedition required her to share in all its dangers. And Grant, like most men who had spent their lives on far-flung frontiers, seeking adventure in the woman-less outposts of terrestial civilization, had curiously archaic ideas of chivalry, to say nothing of deep-rooted convictions that a woman's place was on earth. Disregarding the grins of the men, he closed his helmet, opened the valve of his oxygen tank.
"Ready?" he barked into the mouthpiece of his radio communications set.
Two space-suited figures nodded grimly behind their helmets, followed Grant through the airlock. In the clean, airless void the stars shone like white beacons, shedding a thin eerie light over the barren plain. A dark inferno worthy of a Dore's brush, it seemed, malevolent, intangibly evil. Tortured pinnacles of rock, jagged spires stabbing at the sable sky; deep craters, dug by countless meteors, pock-marking the bleak terrain; yawning crevasses, towering cliffs, jagged, sharp-angled blocks of stone, for Darkside had neither sun, air, nor rain to round them, soften their weird outlines.
Grant loosened his heat-gun in its holster, glanced about. Up the side of the big crater, in which the mine-shaft and the space-ship lay, was a poorly defined trail, winding in and out among the towering rocks. This was the way to Bowman's, the little mining town situated in the twilight zone between Ceres' bitter Darkside and its blazing Sunside. Allers and Kennerly had taken that rude trail. Grant waved Harris and Miller to the right.