The Princess of the Atom by Ray Cummings

Within an hour I was ready. An hour of hurried, feverish preparation. Yet after all, there was not much to do. I wore a bathing suit, with a belt of the drugs strapped about my waist. And the stoutest shoes I owned.

Foley's eyes were never for a moment off this fellow Alt. He appeared inoffensive enough. He was not badly injured. Exhausted -- he seemed only to desire a rest; he lay quiet while we bathed and dressed his wounds. They were bruises and superficial cuts where he had fallen on the sharp rocks of his outward journey. His feet were the worst. He had started with a pair of buskins, made of animal skin. The rocks had torn them to shreds; his feet were bleeding and swollen.

"Couldn't Drake get you shoes? " I demanded. "Something to protect your feet better than that?"

He smiled. A friendly, ingenuous sort of smile. I was alternating between liking him and being suspicious of him.

"No," he said. "We do not have what you call shoes. Drake did not know the journey would be so bad for me. It should not -- I was not clever -- I did it wrong."

"What do you mean by that? You got lost?"

"No. Not lost -- I will show you what I mean, when we start in."

He had brought no food or water, and needed both badly. He drank the water we supplied him, and ate the bread avidly. The meat he discarded; he did not know what it was. He shuddered when we told him -- as though to eat it would be cannibalistic.

I rigged a holster around my chest over one shoulder; and another about my waist, above the drug belt, so that I could carry four automatics and two or three knives. And with a cartridge belt, I was awkwardly equipped; I felt like a walking arsenal.

"I can carry some of them," Alt offered.

"No, thank you," I retorted.

He smiled, but made no further comment.

The trip in to Drake, he said, should only take a few hours. We would find water partway in; we needed little food. Alt suggested one small bit of bread.

A very casual fellow this! Certainly he hardly believed in preparedness. Suppose we got lost!

Strange journey! A trip, not of distance, but only of changing size. There were so many factors to it that I had yet to learn! Alt said quietly:

"Coming out, I used up my food at once. But going in that is not necessary. " He saw my puzzled expression, and added. "If we put that piece of bread on a rock beside us, then in a moment there is a mountain of bread that could feed a thousand."

We were ready at last. Alt needed rest. But he seemed anxious to start at once.

"Drake bade me hurry."

We had bound his feet; and I found a large pair of shoes for him to wear over the bandages.

"Can you walk?"