Big Book of Science Fiction (14 page)

Fats had figured as much and was
already braking the ship down, working against the spasmodic flutter of the
blasts, and swearing at the effects of even the moon’s weak gravity. But the
screens showed that he was making progress toward the spot he’d chosen—a small
flat plain with an area in the center that seemed unusually clear of debris and
pockmarks.

“Wish they’d at least put up an
emergency station out here,” he muttered.

“They had one once,” Slim said. “But
nobody ever goes to Luna, and there’s no reason for passenger ships to land
there; takes less fuel for them to coast down on their fins through Earth’s
atmosphere than to jet down here. Freighters like us don’t count, anyway. Funny
how regular and flat that place is; we can’t be over a mile up, and I don’t see
even a meteor scar.”

“Luck’s with us, then. I’d hate
to hit a baby crater and rip off a tube or poke a hole in the shell.” Fats
glanced at the radio altimeter and fall indicator. “We’re gonna hit plenty
hard. If—Hey, what the deuce!”

Slim’s eyes flicked to the screen
just in time to see the flat plain split into two halves and slide smoothly out
from under them as they seemed about to touch it; then they were dropping
slowly into a crater of some sort, seemingly bottomless and widening out
rapidly; the roar of the tubes picked up suddenly. Above them, the over-screens
showed a pair of translucent slides closing together again. His eyes stared at
the height indicator, neither believing nor doubting.

“Hundred and sixty miles down and
trapped in! Tube sounds show air in some amount, at least, even up here. This
crazy trap can’t be here. There’s no reason for it.”

“Right now, who cares? We can’t
go through that slide up there again, so we go down and find out, I guess.
Damn, no telling what kind of landing field we’ll find when we reach bottom.”
Fats’ lack of excess imagination came in handy in cases like this. He went
about the business of jockeying down the enormous crater as if he were docking
at York port, too busy with the uncertain blast to worry about what he might
find at the bottom. Slim gazed at him in wonder, then fell back to staring at
the screen for some indication of the reason behind this obviously artificial
trap.

~ * ~

Lhin
scratched idly through the pile of dirt and rotten shale, pried a thin scrap of
reddened stone out from where his eyes had missed it the first time, and rose
slowly to his feet. The Great Ones had been good to him, sending a rockslide
just when the old beds were wearing thin and poor from repeated digging. His
sensitive nostrils told him there was magnesium, ferrous matter, and sulphur in
abundance, all more than welcome. Of course, he’d hoped there might be copper,
even as little as the end of his finger, but of that there seemed to be no
sign. And without copper—

He shrugged the thought aside as
he had done a thousand times before, and picked up his crude basket, now filled
half with broken rock and half with the lichenlike growth that filled this end
of the crater. One of his hands ground a bit of rottenstone together with
shreds of lichen and he popped the mixture into his mouth. Grace to the Great
Ones who had sent the slide; the pleasant flavor of magnesium tickled his
tongue, and the lichens were full-flavored from the new richness of the soil
around them. Now, with a trace of copper, there would have been nothing left to
wish for.

With a rueful twitch of his
supple tail, Lhin grunted and turned back toward his cave, casting a cursory
glance up at the roof of the cavern. Up there, long miles away, a bright glare
lanced down, diffusing out as it pierced through the layers of air, showing
that the long lunar day was nearing noon, when the sun would lance down
directly through the small guarding gate. It was too high to see, but he knew
of the covered opening where the sloping walls of the huge valley ended and the
roof began. Through all the millennia of his race’s slow defeat, that great
roof had stood, unsupported except for the walls that stretched out around in a
circle of perhaps fifty miles in diameter, strong and more lasting than even
the crater itself; the one abiding monument to the greatness that had been his
people’s.

He knew without having to think
of it that the roof was artificial, built when the last thin air was deserting
the moon, and the race had sought a final refuge here in the deepest crater,
where oxygen could be trapped and kept from leaking away. In a vague way, he
could sense the ages that had passed since then and wonder at the permanence of
the domed roof, proof against all time.

Once, as the whole space about
him testified, his had been a mighty race. But time had worked on them, aging
the race as it had individuals, removing the vigor of their youth and sending
in the slow creepers of hopelessness. What good was existence here, cooped up
in one small colony, away from their world? Their numbers had diminished and
some of their skill had gone from them. Their machines had crumbled and
vanished, unreplaced, and they had fallen back to the primitive, digging out
the rocks of the crater walls and the lichens they had cultured to draw energy
from the heat and radioactive phosphorescence of the valley instead of
sunlight. Fewer young were planted each year, and of the few, a smaller
percentage proved fertile, so that their original million fell to thousands,
then to hundreds, and finally to a few grubbing individuals.

Only then had they awakened to
the danger of extinction, to find it too late. There had been three elders when
Lhin was grown, his seed being the only fertile one. Now the elders were gone
long years since, and Lhin had the entire length and breadth of the crater to
himself. And life was a long series of sleeps and food forages, relieved only
by the same thoughts that had been in his mind while his dead world turned to
the light and away more than a thousand times. Monotony had slowly killed off
his race, but now that its work was nearly done, it had ended. Lhin was content
with his type of life; he was habituated, and immune to boredom.

His feet had been moving slowly
along with the turning of his thoughts, and he was out of the valley proper,
near the door of the shelter carved into the rocky walls which he had chosen
from the many as his home. He munched another mouthful of rock and lichen and
let the diffused sunlight shine on him for a few minutes more, then turned into
the cave. He needed no light, since the rock walls about had all been rendered
radioactive in the dim youth of his race, and his eyes were adapted to wide
ranges of light conditions. He passed quickly through the outer room,
containing his woven lichen bed and few simple furnishings, and back into the
combination nursery and workshop, an illogical but ever-present hope drawing him
back to the far corner.

But as always, it was reasonless.
The box of rich earth, pulped to a fine loam and watered carefully, was barren
of life. There was not even the beginning of a small red shoot to awaken him to
hope for the future. His seed was infertile, and the time when all life would
be extinct was growing near. Bitterly he turned his back on the nursery bed.

So little lacking, yet so much! A
few hundred molecules of copper salt to eat, and the seeds he grew would be
fertile; or those same copper molecules added to the water would render the
present seeds capable of growing into vigorous manhood-or womanhood; Lhin’s
people carried both male and female elements within each member, and could grow
the seeds that became their children either alone or with another. So long as
one member of the race lived, as many as a hundred young a year could be reared
in the carefully tended incubating soil—if the vital hormone containing copper
could be made.

But that, it seemed, was not to
be. Lhin went over his laboriously constructed apparatus of hand-cut rock bowls
and slender rods bound together into tubes, and his hearts were heavy within
him. The slow fire of dried lichen and gummy tar burned still, and slowly, drop
by drop, liquid oozed from the last tube into a bowl. But even in that there
was no slightest odor of copper salts. Well, he had tried that and failed. The
accumulation of years of refining had gone into the water that kept the nursery
soil damp, and in it there had been too little of the needed mineral for life.
Almost dispassionately he threw the permanent metal rolls of his race’s science
back into their cylinders and began disassembling the chemical part of his
workshop.

That meant the other solution,
harder, and filled with risks, but necessary now. Somewhere up near the roof,
the records indicated, there was copper in small amounts, but well past the
breathable concentration of air. That meant a helmet and tanks for compressed
air, along with hooks and grapples to bridge the eroded sections of the old
trail and steps leading up, instruments to detect the copper, and a pump to
fill the tanks. Then he must carry tanks forward, cache them, and go up to make
another cache, step by step, until his supply line would reach the top
and—perhaps—he could find copper for a new beginning.

He deliberately avoided thinking
of the time required and the chances of failure. His foot came down on the
little bellows and blue flames licked up from his crude forge as he drew out
the hunks of refined metal and began heating them to malleability. Even the
shaping of it by hand to the patterns of the ancient records was almost
impossible, and yet, somehow, he must accomplish it correctly. His race must
not die!

He was still working doggedly
hours later when a high-pitched note shot through the cave. A meteor, coming
into the fields around the sealing slides of the roof, and a large one! In all
Lhin’s life there had been none big enough to activate the warning screens, and
he had doubted that the mechanism, though meant to be ageless and draw sun
power until the sun died, was still functioning. As he stood staring at the
door senselessly, the whistling note came again.

Now, unless he pressed his hand
over the inductance grid, the automatic forces would come into play, twisting
the meteor aside and beyond the roof. But he gave no thought to that as he
dashed forward and slapped his fingers against the grille panel. It was for
that he had chosen his rock house, once the quarters of the Watchers who let
the few scouting rockets of the dim past ages in and out. A small glow from the
grid indicated the meteor was through, and he dropped his hand, letting the
slides close again.

Then he waited impatiently for it
to strike, moving out to the entrance. Perhaps the Great Ones were kind and
were answering his prayers at last. Since he could find no copper here, they
were sending a token from outer space to him, and who knew what fabulous
amounts it might contain—perhaps even as much as he could hold in one hand! But
why hadn’t it struck? He scanned the roof anxiously, numb with a fear that he
had been too late and the forces had thrown it aside.

No, there was a flare above—but
surely not such as a meteor that size should make as it sliced down through the
resisting air! A sharp stinging whine hit his ears finally, flickering off and
on; and that was not the sound a meteor would logically make. He stared harder,
wondering, and saw that it was settling downward slowly, not in a sudden rush,
and that the flare struck down instead of fading out behind. That meant-could
only mean-intelligent control. A rocket!

Lhin’s mind spun under the shock,
and crazy ideas of his ancestors’ return, of another unknown refuge, of the
Great Ones’ personal visit slid into his thoughts. Basically, though, he was
severely logical, and one by one he rejected them. This machine could not come
from the barren moon, and that left only the fabled planet lying under the
bottom of his world, or those that wandered around the sun in other orbits.
Intelligence there?

His mind slid over the records he
had read, made when his ancestors had crossed space to those worlds, long
before the refuge was built. They had been unable to colonize, due to the
oppressive pull of gravity, but they had observed in detail. On the second
planet were only squamous things that slid through the water and curious fronds
on the little dry land; on his own primary, gigantic beasts covered the globe,
along with growth rooted to the ground. No intelligence on those worlds. The
fourth, though, was peopled by more familiar life, and like his own
evolutionary forerunners, there was no division into animal and vegetable, but
both were present in all. Ball-shaped blobs of life had already formed into
packs, guided by instinct, with no means of communication. Yet, of the other
worlds known, that seemed the most probable as a source of intelligence. If, by
some miracle, they came from the third, he abandoned hope; the blood lust of
that world was too plainly written in the records, where living mountain-like
beasts tore at others through all the rolls of etched pictures. Half filled
with dread, half with anticipation, he heard the ship land somewhere near, and
started toward it, his tail curved tightly behind him.