One Was Stubbron (7 page)

Suddenly he stopped, stared hard at Boyd without seeing him and then socked a fist into his palm.

“What's the matter?” said Boyd.

Angel went into the hangar where the big ship was getting ready to be rolled out on the rails now that her loading was done.

“General,” said Angel, “as long as I may never have the chance again—and being young makes it pretty hard—you might at least let me go to town and buy a couple quarts for the ride up.”

“You know the value of secrecy,” warned the general. And then more kindly, “You can take my car.”

Angel stood not. Some fifty seconds later the Cadillac was heading for town at speeds not touched in all its life before.

Whittaker and Boyd, in the back seat, bounced and applied imaginary brakes.

“Listen, you guys,” said Angel. “Your necks are out as much as mine”—he avoided two streetcars at a crossing and screamed on up toward “F” Street—“and I ought to ask your permission.”

“We're going to take a load of food to Slavinsky on the moon. Very hush-hush, though the only one we've to keep secrets from now is Slavinsky. But I intend to make a try at knocking off that base. Are you with me?”

“Why not?” said Whittaker.

“Your party,” said Boyd.

Angel drew up before an apartment house on Connecticut Avenue and rushed out. He was back almost instantly with a grip and considerable lipstick smeared on his cheek.

Boyd thought he heard a feminine voice in the darkness above calling goodbye as they hurtled away. He grinned to himself. This Angel!

Their next stop was before a drug store and Angel dashed in. But he was gone longer this time and seemed, according to a glimpse through the window, to be having trouble convincing the druggist. Angel came out empty-handed and beckoned to his two men.

Whittaker and Boyd walked in. A young pharmacist looked scared. There was no one else in the place.

Angel walked around behind the pharmacist. “Close the door,” said Angel. Three minutes later the pharmacist was bound quite securely in a back closet.

Angel ransacked the shelves and loaded up a ninety-eight-cent bag. They turned out the lights and closed the door softly behind them and went away.

Twenty-one minutes later a young chemical warfare classmate of Angel's was hauled from the bosom of his family and after some argument and several lies from Angel permitted himself to be convinced by SECNAV's Cadillac and went away with them.

They halted at an ordnance depot in Maryland at eight-fifteen and the young chemist opened padlocks and finally, with many words of caution, delivered into Angel's hands three small flasks.

It was well before two when Angel and his men came back to the field. They alighted with their burdens and whisked them into the ship.

“Find that drink?” said the general indulgently.

“Yes, sir,” said Angel.

“Good boy!” said the general, chuckling over having been young once himself. He had not missed the lipstick and had applied the
school solution
.

Commander Dawson was growling and snarling around the ship like a vengeful priest. Behind him came two quartermasters carrying the precious standard chronometer and spyglass.

“Better get aboard,” said Dawson roughly. “And don't monkey with those instruments. We're almost ready.” His scowl promised that it didn't matter to him what happened:
this
time he was going to get that rocket upstairs!

CHAPTER THREE

Moon Meeting

S
TARK
death was the moon. No halftones, no softness. Black and white. Knife-edged peaks and sharp
rills
. Hot enough to fry iron. Cold enough to solidify air. Brutal, savage, dead. Strictly
Mussorgsky
.

A place you wouldn't want to go on a honeymoon, Angel decided.

For all of Dawson's growling they had not hit the target exactly. Slavinsky had drawn a big lampblack X below the USSR on a plateau near
Tycho
but the ship had hit nearly eight miles from it.

Hit was the word, for if they had not landed in pumice some thirteen feet thick things would have been dented. The abrasive dust had risen suddenly and drifted down with an unnatural slowness.

For a week they had been lying around in the padded cabin, experiencing spacesickness, worn out from accelerations and decelerations, living on
K and
D and C rations
and cursing the engineers who had drawn such a thoroughly uncomfortable design.

Angel had sent off the pilot rocket as ordered, filled with the recording rolls, but he had added a few succinct notes of his own which he hoped the engineers would take to heart. Such things as the way air rarefied up front on the takeoff and nearly killed Boyd.

Such things as drinking bottles that wouldn't throw water in your face when you got thirsty. Such things as straps to hold you casually down when your body began to wander around and helmets to keep your head from cracking against the overhead when you got up suddenly and found no gravity.

But for all the travail of the past week the Angel was bright-eyed and expectant. It was balanced off in his mind whether he would kill Slavinsky by slow fire or small knife cuts.

For Angel had very far from enjoyed being cheated of the glory of being the first man to fly to the moon and he distinctly disliked a man who would make a slave country of the United States. Prejudiced perhaps, but the Angel believed America was a fine country and should stay free.

Boyd raked up three packages, tying a line and a C-ration can, buoy-like, upon it. Whittaker got a port open, inside pane only, and looked at the scenery.

He turned and spat carefully into another can—experience had taught him, this trip—and then put on his space helmet, screwing the
lucite
dome down tight. He glanced at his companions.

Angel was having some trouble getting into his suit because of his hair, but when he had managed it he led the way to the space port. The three of them crawled over the supplies and entered the chamber, shutting the airtight behind them.

They checked their air supplies and then their communications. Satisfied, they let the outer door open. With a swoosh the air went out and they began their vacuumatic lives.

It was thirty feet down but they didn't use the built-in rungs. Angel stepped out into space and floated down like a miniature spaceship to plant his ducklike shoes deep into the soft pumice. Boyd followed him. Whittaker, carrying debris in the form of cans and bottles in his hugely gloved hands, came after.

As though on pogo sticks the three small ships bounced around to the rear of the spaceship. Boyd threw the three packages down and stamped them into the pumice. Whittaker scattered the debris around the one can which was the real buoy marker.

The discarded objects floated in slow motion into place and lay there in the deathly stillness.

They looked around and their sighs echoed in their earphones, one to the other. No tomb had ever been this dead.

They were landed in a twilight zone, thanks to Dawson. And if their suits—rather, vehicles—had not been so extremely well insulated they would already be feeling the cold.

The sky was ink. The landscape was a study in
Old Dutch cleanser
and broken basalt. A mountain range thrust startlingly sharp and high to the west. A king-size grand canyon dived away horribly to their south. A great low plain, once miscalled a sea, stretched endlessly toward Tycho.

Two miles away a meteor landed with a crash which made the pumice ripple like waves. A great column of the stuff, stiffly formed in an explosion pattern, almost
stroboscopic
, stood for some time, having neither gravity nor wind to disperse it.

A few fragments patted down, making new slow-motion bursts. But the meteor had landed at ten miles a second and they all winced and looked up into the blackness. Having atmosphere was a subtle blessing. Having none was horrible.

Looking up, Angel saw Earth. It was bigger than a
Japanese moon
and a lot prettier. It had colors, diffused and gentle, below its aura of atmosphere. It looked fairylike and unreal. Angel sighed and thought about his favorite bar.

They snowshoed around the ship again. The last of the sun, half visible like an upended saucer made of pure
arc light
, came to them through their leaded lucite helmets. That sun was taking a long, long time to set. Hours later it would still be sitting there. Things obviously took their time on the moon.

Whittaker, unable to spit, was having difficulties. Heroically, he swallowed his chew.

They weren't on the same wavelength with the Russians and the approaching detachment came within a quarter of a mile before they saw it. The group was tearing along, bouncing like a herd of kangaroos, sending up puffs of pumice at each leap. They came alongside the ship in a moment and, without any greeting to the newcomers, scrambled up inside.

The officer came back and peered out at the horizon and then ducked in again. It was very difficult to see through the metal helmets of these people but they looked hungry.

Angel went up and stood in the space door. The Russians had left the inner airtight open and all the atmosphere had rushed from the ship. Like madmen they were ripping at the boxes and stuffing chocolate and biscuit into their capacious bags. This was evidently personal loot and the way they were going at it looked bad for the boys who had stayed behind.

Nobody paid any attention to Angel, not even glancing his way, until the officer motioned Boyd and Whittaker into the ship and then unceremoniously herded the three of them into the forward hold and bolted a door on them.

Through a forward port Angel saw the two tractors approach. They were made of aluminum mostly, and they seemed to run out of a propane type tank. They threw hooks into the skids of the ship and, their huge treads soundlessly clanking, began to yank the ship toward the king-size grand canyon.

After an hour or so of tugging they came to the brink and were snaked around until they fitted on an oblong metal stage which, carrying tractors and all, promptly began to descend.

The ship lurched in the lower blackness and then lights flared up by which the stage could be seen to rise into place above them.

Eager crews of spacesuited men swarmed out of an airtight set in a blank wall and in a few moments a stream of supplies was being shuttled, bucket-brigade fashion, toward the entrance.

It was a weird ballet of monsters in metal. The supplies, so heavy on Earth, were tossed lightly from monster to monster which added to the illusion. Big crates of dehydrated sailed along like chips.

The unloading took three hours and eight minutes by Angel's watch and then the line cleared away. Belatedly somebody thought of the crew and unlocked the door. At pistol point they were rushed out, down the ladder and to the airtight. The gutted ship stood forlornly behind them, their only contact with home, associating now with six other monsters, the Stars and Stripes outnumbered.

In the dank corridor behind the second airtight, men were standing around in various stages of relaxation and undress. They kept halting to gloat over the supplies which left one Russian still in helmet but without pack or gloves, another stripped to underwear, a third in pack and all. Nobody glanced at them.

Their guard shoved them into another tunnel and they wound down a gentle grade between basalt walls until they came to another series of airtights. At the end they were shoved into a chamber walled all in metal, a sort of giant strongbox with doors at each of the five sides.

A desk made of packing boxes stood in the center. A rubber mattress bed was several feet behind it. A crude hat tree bore the fragments of a space suit. The place was a combination of arsenal, bedroom and office, sealed in, double-bolted, entrenched and triple-guarded.

A
t the desk sat a singularly dirty man, covered with matted black hair, clad in pants, glistening with perspiration and scowling furiously under crew-cut bristles.

This was Slavinsky, Vladimir, onetime general of Russia, currently dictator of the world.

The guard had got out of his clumsy space helmet. “The ship crew, Ruler,” he said in English.

Whittaker had taken off his helmet and was biting at a plug of
Ole Mule
. Boyd was examining his fingernails.

Only Angel was still fully suited and helmeted.

“Who is commander?” barked Slavinsky, black eyes screwing up.

Boyd glanced up.

“I am Lieutenant Cannon Gray,” he said with blue eyes wide.

“Don't forget the dispatches, Lootenant,” said Whittaker.

Boyd tossed the packet on the desk. It floated down.

“I am displeased,” said Slavinsky.

“I'm sorry to hear it,” said bogus Gray. “I'll sure tell the president when I get back.”

“You're not going back!” said Slavinsky. “You have failed.”

“Looks to me like we brought a lot of supplies,” said Boyd.

“You brought no cigarettes!” said Slavinsky.

“Well, if that ain't something,” said Boyd. “I tell you them quartermasters ought to be horsewhipped and that's a fact. Well, well. No cigarettes. You sure you checked the inventory, general?”

“The title of address is ‘Ruler'! And I'll have no questioning of our actions. You brought no cigarettes and there's not a single pack on the moon.”

“Well, if it's okay with you,” said Whittaker, “we'll just trot down and fetch you a couple cartons.”

“That's impertinence! Lieutenant, have you no control over your men? Are you certain we have emptied all storage compartments of your ship?”

“Well, can't say. Back in the tube room we had a little layout for the return trip but you wouldn't want to take that away.”

“Aha!” said Slavinsky, jumping up to his full five feet.

He pushed down a communicator button and rattled orders into it.

Just as he finished a small bespectacled man entered timidly, his hands full of reports. “Ruler, I have just checked the supplies and I find them safe. I began when the first case entered and have just finished. The food is not poisoned.”

“So!” said Slavinsky to Boyd. “You knew better than to trip us up, did you. Ha!”

“I got to send my report to the president,” said Boyd.

“I am afraid,” said Slavinsky, “that I shall have to attend to that. Now, to business. You will be separated from your men, of course. And then men we need in our labor gangs. We have all too few men, you see.

“But you, as an officer, according to the usages of war, need not work outside but may have some light job. The meteors have been bad lately and we have lost several people. Guard, take this officer to a cell and put the men to work on the missile
emplacements
instantly.”

“With a guard, Ruler?”

“No, blockhead. Where would they go? Ha, ha. Yes, indeed. Where would they go?”

Angel had been half through the act of unscrewing his helmet. Now he hastily replaced it. He and Whittaker were thrust outside and in a moment found themselves in the hands of a non-com who was organizing a work party.

A radio technician came up and adjusted their radios to proper wavelength and in a moment they were drowned in Russian.

Angel sighed with relief and looked back at the last of the doors which had led out from Slavinsky. Ruler of the world, was he?

Well, maybe he could manage to get some good out of it. But as for Angel, give him control over a bar stool of the
Madrillon
and Slavinsky could keep the moon.

Musing, he found himself in a column and outward bound.