The Major shook his head. “I don’t mean McIvers. I mean the kid.”
Stone was shaking. He was over near the tractor—away from the rest of us—and he was lying on his back, but he wasn’t asleep. His whole body was shaking, convulsively. I saw him grip an outcropping of rock hard.
I walked over and sat down beside him. “Get your water all right?” I said.
He didn’t answer. He just kept on shaking.
“Hey, boy,” I said. “What’s the trouble?”
“It’s hot,” he said, choking out the words.
“Sure it’s hot, but don’t let it throw you. We’re in really good shape.”
“_We’re not_,” he snapped. “We’re in rotten shape, if you ask me. _We’re not going to make it_, do you know that? That crazy fool’s going to kill us for sure—” All of a sudden, he was bawling like a baby. “I’m scared—I shouldn’t be here—I’m _scared_. What am I trying to prove by coming out here, for God’s sake? I’m some kind of hero or something? I tell you I’m scared—”
“Look,” I said. “Mikuta’s scared, _I’m_ scared. So what? We’ll make it, don’t worry. And nobody’s trying to be a hero.”
“Nobody but Hero Stone,” he said bitterly. He shook himself and gave a tight little laugh. “Some hero, eh?”
“Sure,” he said finally. “Sorry. I’ll be okay.”
I rolled over, but waited until he was good and quiet. Then I tried to sleep, but I didn’t sleep too well. I kept thinking about that ledge. I’d known from the look of it what it was; a zinc slough of the sort Sanderson had warned us about, a wide sheet of almost pure zinc that had been thrown up white-hot from below, quite recently, just waiting for oxygen or sulfur to rot it through.
I knew enough about zinc to know that at these temperatures it gets brittle as glass. Take a chance like McIvers had taken and the whole sheet could snap like a dry pine board. And it wasn’t McIvers’ fault that it hadn’t.
Five hours later, we were back at the wheel. We were hardly moving at all. The ragged surface was almost impassable—great jutting rocks peppered the plateau; ledges crumbled the moment my tires touched them; long, open canyons turned into lead-mires or sulfur pits.
A dozen times I climbed out of the Bug to prod out an uncertain area with my boots and pikestaff. Whenever I did, McIvers piled out behind me, running ahead like a schoolboy at the fair, then climbing back again red-faced and panting, while we moved the machines ahead another mile or two.
