Just then, they passed a full-length mirror, and Broward saw their
images. Scone looked like a mountain of stone walking. And he, Broward
thought, he himself looked like a man of leather. His shorter image,
dark brown where the skin showed, his head shaven so the naked skull
seemed to be overlaid with leather, his brown eyes contrasting with the
rock-pale eyes of Scone, his lips so thick compared with Scone's, which
were like a thin groove cut into granite. Leather against stone. Stone
could outwear leather. But leather was more flexible.
Was the analogy, as so many, false? Or only partly true?
Broward tended to think in analogies; Scone, directly.
At the moment, a man like Scone was needed. Practical, quick reacting.
But, like so many practical men, impractical when it came to long
range and philosophical thinking. Not much at extrapolation beyond the
immediate. Broward would follow him up to a point. Then....
* * * * *
They came to the entrance to the dome. Only the sound of voices came
from it. Together, they stuck their heads around the side of the
entrance. And they saw many dead, some wounded, a few men and women
standing together near the center of the floor. All, except one, were
in the variously colored and marked uniforms of the Soviet Republics.
The exception was a tall man in the silver dress uniform of Argentine.
His right arm hung limp and bloody; his skin was grey.
"Colonel Lorentz," said Scone. "We've one prisoner, at least."
After shouting to those within the dome not to fire, the two walked in.
Major Panchurin, the highest-ranking Russian survivor, lifted a hand to
acknowledge their salute. He was too busy talking over the bonephone to
say anything to them.
The two examined the dome. The visiting delegation of Axis officers
was dead except for Lorentz. The Russians left standing numbered six;
the Chinese, four; the Europeans, one; the Arabic, two; the Indian-East
Asiatic, none. There were four Americans alive. Broward. Scone. Captain
Nashdoi. And a badly wounded woman, Major Hoebel.
Broward walked towards Hoebel to examine her. Before he could do
anything the Russian doctor, Titiev, rose from her side. He said, "I'm
sorry, captain. She isn't going to make it."
Broward looked around the dome and made a remark which must, at the
time, have seemed irrelevant to Titiev. "Only three women left. If the
ratio is the same on the rest of the Moon, we've a real problem."
Scone had followed Broward. After Titiev had left, and after making
sure their bonephones were not on, Scone said in a low voice, "There
were seventy-five Russians stationed here. I doubt if there are over
forty left in the entire base. I wonder how many in Pushkin?"
Pushkin was the base on the other side of the Moon.
They walked back to the group around Panchurin and turned on their
phones so they could listen in.
Panchurin's skin paled, his eyes widened, his hands raised
protestingly.
"No, no," he moaned out loud.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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