"You'll make a long half-circle," he announced. "It'll be tough going, but with my following the trail, I should draw any attack and enable you to pick up the trail further along, and reach Bowman's. Okay, now. Let's go!"
Harris and Miller disappeared among the up-thrust monoliths, Grant swung along the trail. In spite of his heavy space-suit and his thick lead-soled gravity shoes, he was able to move at a brisk pace, hand on his gun, eyes probing the gloom to right and left. Onward he went, steadily, skirting craters, leaping narrow crevasses, squeezing through rocky defiles whose overhanging ledges often met to form a dark passageway. For all the heating wires within his suit, he could feel the cold; the utter silence was maddening.
Grant stared at the murky shadows with narrowed eyes. What was it that had spirited away Allers and Kennerly, two brave men, well armed? Some unknown force of nature, or something more tangible? Superstitious spacemen whispered of monstrous reptilian beasts, of space-pirates' hide-outs, of strange, spectral Shapes. Drink-inspired hallucinations, Grant had said scornfully. Now he was not so sure. So little was known of Darkside.
Suddenly Grant froze in his tracks. In the middle of the path, perhaps a hundred feet ahead, was a strange, grotesque figure. Swathed in a bulky space-suit, it crouched ape-like on the ground, feet flat against the rock, hands touching the trail as though to balance itself. Motionless as some robot it crouched there, in a patch of white frost, seemingly poised to spring.
Grant's heat-gun rose to cover the strange figure. His voice shook as he spoke into his communications set.
"Who's there? What'd you want?"
The crouching figure made no reply. Very deliberately Grant pressed the trigger of the heat-gun, aiming it at the motionless form's feet. Dirt, chips of stone, flew up, but the crouching form did not move. Muscles tense, Grant moved forward. Pale starlight winked on the unknown's helmet. All at once Grant gasped. Behind the transparent glass of the headpiece, the man's features were visible. Distorted, despairing features set in an expression of ghastly, appalling horror! Kennerly ... dead!
Grant bent over the grim figure, tried to lift it. One of Kennerly's fingers, frozen solid, snapped within the space-suit like brittle glass. Grant glanced warily about. If he could get the body back to the ship, find out how Kennerly had died, there might be a chance of overcoming the menace that lurked on this shadowy insane world. All at once his eyes caught queer dark streaks on a rock not far from the inert figure ... letters, words, that looked as if they had been made by a heat-gun's blast. Slowly he deciphered the scrawled sentences. "Allers dead. No hope. Unknown forces. Doomed."
Grant's jaw tightened. Kennerly's last message! And somehow he had known that Allers was dead, that there was no hope. Face set in harsh lines, Grant swung the body over his shoulder, set out along the trail to the Comet.