News From Elsewhere (14 page)

Immediately Captain Harper spoke over the personal radio. “What’s the setup? Are you all right?”

With a sigh of relief, he heard Jackson’s voice loud and steady. “No one at home. Come and have a look. . . . I’m beginning to believe in fairies!”

“What have you found?”

“It’s either a technician’s nightmare or some kind of laboratory. Hellfire! I’ll believe anything now!”

“What’s happaned?” asked Harper urgently.

“I’ve just discovered what looks like three king-size coffins!”

Three hours later the tractor had returned to base, and Captain Harper was giving an account of the trip to Professor Jantz, Pegram, and Dr. Holt, while Davis and Dr. Jackson kept watch on the surface. In view' of the knowledge recently acquired, it was felt now that two men should always be on surface patrol.

“The place wasn’t at all pressurized,” said Harper, “which is fairly significant. Its walls were about three inches thick with—I should guess—cavity or insulation layer. The dull red glow came from some sort of activated crystal suspended over a circular bench, about five feet high, that ran all around. There were various mechanical gadgets strewn all over the bench, and some fairly large apparatus, about which we just didn’t have a clue. Jackson thought there was some geological equipment, and Davis swears that a sizable box of tricks underneath the bench was a radio transmitter. But not having seen junk like that before, we could only guess vaguely at its functions.”

“About these boxes you dramatically describe as coffins,” said Professor Jantz. “Can you give me any more details?”

“They were ten feet long and lay horizontally. The hinged lids were open, and we took a good look inside. They were made of black metal and lined with a sort of glassy fabric. When Dr. Jackson moved to touch it, a spark shot across to his pressure suit and was earthed automatically. He didn’t try again. . . . They appear to have been occupied.”

“This is damn funny,” said Dr. Holt with a nervous laugh. “We thought the moon was uninhabited, and now we’ve collected a trio of scientific zombies for next-door neighbors.”

“I’m not laughing,” said Harper bitterly. “At the moment my sense of humor is conspicuous by its absence. What happens if these creatures don’t want to be friendly—if and when we meet ’em? They aren’t going to use bows and arrows.”

“The possible occupation of the—er—coffins presents an interesting train of thought,” said Jantz enigmatically. “I begin to form a mental picture of an intelligent, muscular biped, about nine feet tall, who supplies his own atmosphere, conducts scientific experiments, ignores animal comfort, and is capable of walking nearly a hundred miles in high temperatures.”

“A pretty unpleasant sort of enemy,” commented Harper.

“If he turns out to be an enemy,” added Holt.

“Were there many tracks around the place?” asked the professor.

“Dozens.”

“Did you follow any of them up?”

“We thought we’d better get back with the information so far acquired before we ran into trouble. . . . Are you implying that we ought to establish contact?”

“As soon as possible,” said Jantz. “At the moment we are afraid of them—yet we haven’t seen them—and they,

I presume, will be afraid of us. An unsatisfactory situation. . . . We must do something to allay or confirm our fears, so that we can plan a definite course of action.”

“I’ve cooked up enough radio mines to lay a fairly close field around the base,” said Holt. “We can make sure that this place is reasonably safe, anyway.”

Suddenly the table shuddered and an empty coffee cup fell over. From years of experience, the men instinctively listened for the sounds of the accompanying explosion. There was nothing.

“What the devil’s that?” snapped Harper.

Pegram dashed to the transmitter. “Hello, surface patrol! What’s happening? Over.”

There was no answer. As he tried again, Captain Harper and Dr. Holt put their headpieces on and hurried to the airlock.

“Hello, surface patrol. Hello, surface patrol. What is happening? Over.”

After a few moments Jackson’s voice came faintly. “For God’s sake come quickly! The moonship is ... is destroyed. I’ve got a leak in my pressure suit. . . .”

In three minutes Captain Harper and Dr. Holt had reached the surface. For a moment they stood paralyzed,

gazing at the tangled ruin of the moonship a mile away. Then they dashed to the lunar tractor, jumped abroad, and headed for the wreckage at full speed.

They had gone three-quarters of the way when they came across Jackson. He was lying quite still on the hard rock. Dr. Holt jumped out of the tractor, lifted him bodily, and brought him back into the pressurized compartment.

“Is he alive?” demanded Harper tersely as he started the motor.

“I think so. It’s a very slow leak, and he had the sense to turn the oxygen to full pressure.” He began to unscrew Jackson’s headpiece.

The geologist’s lips quivered. He gave a tremendous shudder and opened his eyes. “Get Davis,” he mumbled weakly. “He was only about fifty yards from the moonship.”

“What did it?” asked Harper, keeping his eyes on the lava plains ahead as he steered directly for the wrecked ship.

In normal atmospheric pressure Dr. Jackson was recovering quickly. The color returned to his face, and he managed to sit up. “I didn’t see a thing,” he said with an effort. “The ship just crumpled. Then the shock wave dropped me on a sharp rock, and I knew a leak had started. It was all I could do to switch oxygen and helium to full, and pray you’d pick me up before the pressure dropped too much.”

“Look, there he is!” exclaimed Holt. He pointed to a prone figure sixty yards away. As the tractor slid toward it, the three occupants could see that Davis had no head-piece. But it was not until the tractor had stopped that they discovered that he also had no head.

“Poor devil,” said Harper. “Too near the blast.”

“He wouldn’t even have time to feel it,” said Dr. Holt in subdued voice.

“God Almighty! Look at the mess!” exclaimed Harper. He pointed to the wreck.

The moonship had been destroyed most efficiently. The long spider-legs and tubular backbone were twisted like tinfoil. The personnel sphere was nonexistent, but beads of molten metal, scattered like raindrops, gave ample testament of its utter destruction. No ordinary high explosives would have produced such tremendous heat. It could only have been achieved—by Earthlings, anyway —with the use of atomic power.

Dr. Jackson was the first to break the silence. “I wonder,” he said quietly, “if Man Friday is still hanging about?”

“There’s not much cover here for a character nine feet high,” said Holt. “Nor for his transport, if he has any.”

Captain Harper started the motor again. “Better see if we can find any tracks,” he said.

The tractor began to crawl slowly around the wreck in expanding circles.

The council of war, held in the pressurized living unit below the lunar surface, was brief and to the point. The five men sat around the table, smoking and drinking coffee in quantities well above the legitimate ration.

“Well, we’ve had die reply from Earth,” announced Harper grimly. “They’re very sorry for us, but they aren’t going to send any more moonships until they know what we’re up against.”

“I’ll bet they’re already planning a nice epitaph,” said Holt cynically.

“It was the logical answer,” remarked Jackson. “What’s the point of endangering the whole expedition?”

“The ethical problem can be left till later,” observed Professor Jantz with a faint smile. “The most important thing at the moment is to decide what we are going to do.”

“Return the compliment,” suggested Holt. “We ought to go along to their hideaway and blast it to pieces. It may serve to warn them off for a while, and it may also stop them from presenting us with another atomic shell.”

“If it was atomic,” said Professor Jantz.

“It certainly wasn’t H.E.,” returned Jackson. “The personnel sphere was half vaporized.”

“I think we are, at the moment, a little too belligerent,” said the professor mildly. “After all, if our absent friends have been on the moon some time, they have a right to resent intruders. Providing we remain hidden and inactive, there is no reason why they should not assume that they have already destroyed us.”

“We followed their tracks,” retorted Harper. “Obviously they’ll follow ours. For all we know, they might be preparing to drop another atomic shell right here. ... In view of the fact that they have won the first round, I think: it’s up to us to make sure they don’t win the next. Besides, one of our party is already dead, and Dr. Jackson only survived by about ninety seconds. The longer \ye stay inactive, the more chance these creatures have of picking us off.”

“I think Captain Harper is right,” said Jackson. “We’ve got to do everything we can either to destroy them or to discourage them.”

“We’ll put it to a vote,” said the Captain. “Make a noise if you’re in favor of having an all-out effort to make them lose interest.”

There was an immediate response. Only Professor Jantz remained silent.

A couple of hours later, preparations were complete. A radio-controlled minefield had been placed around the entrance to the base unit, practice throws had been made with dummy grenades, and the men had been gratified to discover that the moon’s weak gravity enabled them to hurl a grenade with reasonable accuracy over two hundred yards. The improvised rocket bombard could deliver fifty pounds of high explosive at targets more than a mile away.

Captain Harper’s strategy was extremely simple—it had to be, for their resources were severely limited. The rocket bombard would be mounted in the crow’s nest of the tractor; then three men would take the tractor on its destructive mission while the other two stayed at base.

If the tractor failed to return from its fifty-mile journey to the metal hemisphere near the foothills of Tycho, it would be the duty of the survivors to radio as much information as possible to Earth while remaining hidden.

Pegram and Professor Jantz would stay at base while the others did what they could.

Each of the five men realized with bitter clarity that the fate of man’s first expedition to the moon hung precariously in the balance. If they failed now, another attempt might not be made for several decades.

Presently all the weapons and supplies were aboard the lunar tractor, and everything was ready for departure. The three men piled aboard while Pegram and Jantz stood by, 
offering occasional suggestions and checking that nothing had been left behind.

“As from now,” said Captain Harper over his personal radio, “we won’t break radio silence unless it’s a matter of life and death. Our friends may have some sort of direction-finding apparatus, and there’s no point in making it easy for them.”

“As a scientist I disapprove of your purpose,” said Professor Jantz with irony. “But as a man—well, good luck, you people. I hope you succeed.”

“It’ll be just too bad if we don’t,” said Harper grimly.

Holt gave a dry laugh. “Tell them,” he said, “that my last thoughts were of mother.”

“We’re fighting for the human race,” remarked Dr. Jackson. “Oh, how we hate its bloody face.”

Amid laughter that gave a brittle impression of being lighthearted, Captain Harper started the tractor, coaxed it into gear, and let out the clutch. Leaving behind it a quick-falling wake of lunar dust, the tractor rocked silently across the blinding lava plains.

It was the expedition’s fifth terrestrial day on the moon, but already it seemed as if they had never known any other existence. The earth itself had become an illusion, a receding dream. The only realities now were the hard, dusty lava plains, the distant craters, and the ominous power of unseen creatures—the threat of those elusive and apparently tireless beings whom Jantz sarcastically referred to as “our absent friends.”

Pegram and the professor watched the tractor shrink until it was no more than a tiny beetle toiling over a rippling sea of rock.

From a black, star-studded sky, the sun flung down its harsh, unfiltered radiation, creating the unbelievable surface heat of a late lunar morning.

In the distance, the mountains of Tycho rose grim and forbidding, bathed by the burning sunlight. The whole landscape, locked in its own peculiar stillness, looked like a painted desert—the backcloth of a drama of suspense and danger, as indeed it was.

Captain Harper stopped the tractor a mile away from the metal hemisphere, and after hasty confirmation of the general plan of attack, Holt and Jackson got out. Holt 
took up position two hundred yards away on the right, thus preventing a direct hit knocking out the entire attacking force.

Armed with grenades, the two men would' advance steadily until they were in throwing range, or encountered opposition. If they were able to demolish the building without tackling the enemy, they would do so and withdraw; if not, they would do their best to engage the defense while Captain Harper drove the tractor in as close as possible and used the rocket bombard.

As soon as they had reached their flanking positions, Harper waved his arm in the observation turret, and the two men moved forward at an ungainly, bounding trot.