One Against the Moon (13 page)

The nature of the tribe's culture remained much of a mystery. They were very primitive, yet they seemed to have a complicated series of taboos and ceremonies. There was clearly a very definite code of marriage and family relations, though its limitations were puzzling.

Robin discovered something about them, however. One of the circular enclosures was apparently a tribal storehouse, or temple, or arsenal, or magic circle—exactly what he could not tell—save that no family lived within and there were little piles of oddities carefully placed inside its magic circle. The penny Robin had "pulled from the chief's head" reposed therein on a raised mound. The burnt match stick lay beside it. The rest of the contents seemed to be curiously shaped stones, odd bits of animal skin, a skeleton of something big and round which might perhaps have been that of a Moonbowler slain by the hero of the tribe. Several diamond spearheads were there, including some that had fractured in use. And something that glistened like metal.

Robin saw this latter, and, stepping boldly inside the magic circle, picked this object up and examined it. It was a knife blade!

It was nothing of Terrestrial manufacture. It was about nine inches long and a couple of inches wide at the hilt, tapering down to a point. It was edged on one side, and bore the marks of having been hammered down and shaped by a hand mallet rather than ever having felt the heat of a forge. Engraved in its rather soft white metal were a series of odd hooks and lines that looked like writing of a sort. The hilt end was jagged as if the blade had been snapped off in careless usage.

Robin called to Korree and asked him about the object. Korree consulted with the chief and returned. "Sharp thing, it come from down-there people," he said, pointing to the regions below. "Glassie of those die in break of tunnel. We find, take this."

Well, Robin thought, this adds to the evidence. There is some sort of higher civilization below. Not yet at the fire-building stage, but advancing at the dawn of the Iron Age. I wonder if this is really writing or just a design? And I wonder what metal this is? Not iron surely.

He thought a while, then deciding that as a creature of magic he could get away with it, informed Korree that he would take the knife blade away with him. The Glassies seemed unconcerned. It was evident that Robin was far outside their taboos.

The question of time among the Glassies was an odd one. The Earthling had surmised as much in his observations of Korree. There seemed to be no effort to divide the periods into rest and work. Some hunted and worked when they felt like it, others slept at the same time.

When the time came, Robin and Korree made their way out of the cavern upward along a ledge on one side of the bubble wall, through a fault higher up and began to climb a sloping tunnel.

For several more days they traveled, always working upward, passing through bubbles of gradually diminishing diameter and sparser vegetation. At one point they waded through a shallow pond, at another they choked in a sulfury cloud of gas that hung about. They squeezed through ever tighter cracks, and the air began to get distinctly thinner and harder to breathe. They were both getting exhausted quite easily; Robin knew they were nearing the surface and the spongy mass of the Moon's interior was tightening.

Then at last they stood in a tiny spherical bubble and gazed at a pool of brackish water at one end. There were no cracks in this little cave, no further tunnel or means of progress. "What now?" asked Robin, turning to his companion. Had they taken the wrong turn and come to a dead end?

Korree went over to the water pool. He gestured at it, made motions of holding his breath. "We go down in here, move under and come up ... out." He waved a hand in a down-and-under gesture. Robin looked into the water. Maybe the Glassie was right. It was possible that the water at the bottom passed into a fault and led into another cavern. But could he risk it?

Korree nodded and without another word, suddenly jumped into the water, spear and all, and vanished. Robin waited. In a little while Korree's head appeared again and the Glassie climbed out. "Tunnel over there," he said, waving beyond the wall of the bubble. "Go up sharp."

Well, there was nothing to do but to try it. Robin set down his pack and thought a moment. Cheeky the monkey was scampering around the floor of the small bubble. Robin took off his jacket and shoes, took out of his pocket anything that might be damaged by water, and leaped into the pool.

It was an eerie sensation. The water was as dense as on Earth but its weight was so much less. It seemed almost to lack substance as Robin pushed through it, dived deep, and let himself come up again as far as possible.

He broke water in total darkness. He was outside the cavern, but exactly where he could not tell. Korree with his light organ had known and that was sufficient. Robin reached for a bank, felt a sloping wall. He grabbed it, pulled himself up in the darkness. That much was right. There was a tunnel here running steeply upward. He sniffed the air. It was strange—breathable, but strange. This part of the Moon enclosure was certainly cut off from the other sections, that was certain.

Robin let himself back into the water, swam for the cavern, and came up in it. He got hold of Cheeky, opened his pack, and extracted his homemade space helmet. He stuffed the monkey into it, closed end upward, and got into the water again. Moving swiftly under water, the terrified animal clutching the inside of the helmet, Robin transferred him to the other side, found a small level section by probing around, and deposited the helmet. He returned for the rest of his pack by this method, and finally everything was complete again in the new passage. By the light of Korree's head, he saw that they were in a narrow tunnel angling steeply upward. Robin's clothes and the pack had dried with great speed in the thin air and the low gravity. They made their way up this passage with difficulty and at last found themselves facing a lighted opening.

They emerged into a new cavern, but one quite different from those that had gone before. It was long, perhaps two or three miles long, but narrow, not more than a hundred feet or so at the widest. Looking upward, the steep perpendicular walls seemed to come together and closed up tightly about a quarter of a mile high.

A faint phosphorescence dimly lighted the new area. As they walked on, Robin became aware that there was no vegetation here, that his feet were moving through light dust. He let it run through his fingers. It felt chalky as pumice.

He looked around them again and then he realized that he had at last reached the surface of the Moon. He was walking through the bottom of a long crack in the surface, a cleft that had somehow closed up again to preserve a cache of air. But this dust, this was the surface dust of Luna, fallen to the bottom of the cleft!

As they walked, the dimness seemed to diminish. A whitish glow began to envelop them. Robin blinked at the strange light. Things began to take on strange colorations that he had not noticed before. He looked upward and saw that the ceiling of the cleft no longer was bathed in blackness. Instead there seemed a break there, a glassy glimmer through which poured a dazzling white light.

Somewhere up there the crack had been sealed by volcanic action into grayish natural glass. Somewhere outside the sun was shining down upon the Moon. Its rays were bathing the surface above the concealed cleft and some were finding their way down. For the first time in many long and difficult months Robin felt warmth and light together. He had reached the sunlight!

There had been a distinct chill in the strange surface canyon, but from the moment that the white sunlight began to stream in, there was a definite warming effect. The rays were diffused by the substance above which sealed the cleft, yet the sun was strong while it lasted. Robin felt good as he bathed in its rays. He looked at himself, at Korree, in wonder.

For the clear white light was the first normal lighting he had seen in all the time he had been marooned below. Now he received the first true color visualization of himself and his companion. He saw from his hands that he had become very pale-skinned; all his normal tan had been lost in the cavern worlds. He unpacked the bright, gleaming space helmet and used it as a makeshift mirror. His hair had faded to a light blond, and there were several white hairs now visible, the result presumably of his period of exposure to the unshielded rays of the sun during his passage through space.

In the clear light Korree seemed even more transparent than ever, and indeed Robin could make out the shadowy, pulsating shapes of his internal organs quite clearly—his skeleton standing out sharply. He realized how dim and abnormal the phosphorescence of the caverns had really been.

Reshouldering his pack, they continued up the deep canyon. In a little while, the gray ashy surface gave way to sandy soil and there was a dampness in the air that indicated the presence of one of the deposits of water. Now the familiar Lunar vegetation was making its presence known and before long they were wandering through a very dense thicket of huge ball-trees and plants.

Robin had never seen such a dense jungle growth on the Moon before and he attributed it to the occasional bath of sunlight this one cavern received. It was like a hothouse, a natural one, more or less sealed with a high dampness, natural warmth augmented by screened sunlight.

Soon the two found themselves forcing their way single file through the growth, while Cheeky swung into the tops and made his own way, happy in the sort of thick, warm forest his monkey nature demanded. Robin pushed his way through first, with Korree following in the path the Earthling cleared.

Robin went on through the jungle, struggling in spite of his powerful Earth muscles to push his pack along. After a while he stopped to rest, looked back. He saw behind him only the bruised and broken stalks of the ball-trees he'd passed through. There was no sign of Korree.

Robin stared, but the forest was too thick to allow much vision. He set the pack down, called, "Korree!"

There was no answer. Somewhere in the distance a stalk snapped. Robin called again. Still no answer. He started back a few steps, retracing his path, but there was still no sign of his Glassie friend.

He suddenly felt uneasy. What was going on here? How had his companion vanished? He went back to where he had left his pack, waited, again calling his friend's name. But still there was no answer. There were more crackling noises somewhere in the thick vegetation. Perhaps Korree was in trouble there?

Robin turned in that direction, started to push through the barrier of tree stalks. Suddenly there was a rushing noise, a chorus of shrieks all around, and something heavy fell around him.

He whirled, but something sticky and tight was encircling his body. He caught glimpses of glasslike, one-eyed faces jumping around him, hiding in the branches, shrieking. He struggled again to free himself but the encircling Glassies threw more of the sticky ropes around him, more things like barrel staves that fell and tied him up.

He struggled to use his full strength against them but his arms were pinned to his sides, he was tight amid the stalks and he could not brace himself. Fight as he might, he was caught, and he saw that there were stalk-ropes attached to those that had trapped him and these were being further secured by the creatures around him.

He stopped struggling, quieted. It was obviously no use to waste his strength. Let's see what they intend to do next, he thought.

For a while they did nothing. Then his Glassie captors—he still could see little of them so thick was the jungle—seemed to be working their way together so that all their attached ropes were soon leading off in the same direction. Then they started to pull.

Had Robin chosen to resist it might have become a fruitless tug of war, but he did not. He had decided that his best course was to go along with them. Doubtless they would lead him to their village or at least to an open space where his great Earth strength might then come into better play.

For a while, therefore, he allowed himself to be led through the Moontree forest, dragging himself enough to give his captors a workout. Robin had cagily decided that the more tired they were when they finally arrived, the better for him.

After a time the thicket of plants came to an end and Robin found himself, as he had presumed, at the native settlement. Unlike the ones he had seen in Korree's home cavern, these Glassies were cavemen. They evidently made their homes in a section of this narrow surface-cleft where one of the walls was greatly pocked with holes and openings. The cliff walls were apparently quite like pumice here. Under the circumstances and because of the limited width of the area, it was quite logical that the inhabitants should have made use of these holes.

There were several dozen such cave entrances and Robin could see a fair number of Glassies around them, including women and young ones. His captors, he now saw, numbered about fifteen, all male hunters like Korree. They hustled him along to a central cave, whose entrance was decorated with blue circles, clearly the designation of their chief.

Korree was already there, tied, as was Robin. He looked relieved to see the Earthling, and also a little puzzled at seeing that Robin too was a prisoner.

"They catch me when Robin not looking," he said, explaining the obvious. "I not like these Glassies' ways. I think they mean kill."

Robin looked around at them. "We'll see. Back in my land, we have a saying, 'There's many a slip between the cup and the lip.' I think we will get away. Wait and watch."

Korree immediately showed relief. He had a profound faith in Robin's magical abilities. To him, therefore, Robin's lack of fright was enough evidence that all was really well.

The band gathered before the chief's cave was waiting. Presently a voice came from the cave darkness. It questioned one of the captors, who turned and repeated the query to Korree. Korree answered at length, and his answer in turn was repeated into the cave.

At Robin's query, Korree said that he had just informed the hidden chief that Robin was a great man-beast who would destroy them all if he was not immediately released and placated.