INVADERS OF THE FORBIDDEN MOON
By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN
Annihilation was the lot of those who ventured
too close to the Forbidden Moon. Harwich knew
the suicidal odds when he blasted from Jupiter to
solve the mighty riddle of that cosmic death-trap.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1941.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"Calling the pilot of space ship X911!" Evan Harwich shouted into the
radio transmitter of his little Interplanetary Patrol Boat. "Good God!
Turn your crate back, you crazy fool! Don't you know you're headed
right into the danger zone of Jupiter's Forbidden Moon? You'll get
yourself burned to a crisp in another few seconds if you don't turn
back...."
Evan Harwich's growling voice was almost shrill at the end. His police
duties patrolling the vicinity of Io, innermost of Jupiter's larger
satellites, rarely developed moments as tense as this. Most other
pilots had brains enough to give the Forbidden Moon a wide berth. And
for excellent if mysterious reasons!
Yet the craft ahead, a sleek new job with the identification number
X911 painted on its conning tower, kept steadily on. Its slim hull,
which betrayed an experimental look, was pointed straight at the
threatening greyish disc of Io, the one world in the solar system which
no exploring ship of the void had ever reached--intact!
Almost everybody among the inhabited spheres knew about the dangers of
the desolate Forbidden Moon. Ever since the colonial empire of Earth
had been extended to the region of Jupiter and his numerous satellites,
Io had been a grim menace; sure destruction to any rocket that
approached within five thousand miles of its dreary, almost airless
surface.
Nobody seemed to know just why this was true; but some scientists
claimed that somehow there was an invisible layer or shell all around
Io; an immense blanket of strange energy or force that fused and
blasted the metal hulls of all ether craft that ran into its insidious
web.
Tensely and helplessly Evan Harwich watched, as the ship ahead
continued on its way toward what seemed sure catastrophe. No danger in
front of the recklessly piloted craft could be seen, of course. Five
thousand miles of clear, cold vacuum was all that was visible between
it and Io. But since this region held concealed in it all the potential
violence of a hair-triggered trap, ready to unleash a flaming death
that involved unknown physical laws and principles, maybe it wasn't
just plain vacuum after all!
With dogged persistence Harwich kept yelling futile warnings into his
radio. His shouts and curses were unheeded, and no answer was given. He
knew what was going to happen in another second. There would be a burst
of dazzling white fire all around the rocket of this foolhardy pilot
he had tried to save from suicide. Metal would drip and sparkle in the
absolute zero of space. In just another instant....
Harwich swung his patrol boat aside, not caring to end his own life.
But he kept watching the X911 from the side-ports of his cabin.
And now, something quite different from what he had expected was taking
place. Suddenly the apparently doomed ship was enveloped in a bluish
halo which seemed to emanate from a great helix or spiral of metal that
wrapped its hull!
Immediately afterward, as the X911 entered definitely into the zone of
destruction around Io, great white sparks lanced dazzlingly through
the blue halo. It was as though the latter was fighting back those
gigantic, unknown forces that had seemed to make the Forbidden Moon
forever inviolable. It was as though the halo was keeping the X911,
and whoever was flying it, safe!
Evan Harwich's slitted eyes widened a little in astonishment and hope.
"Dammit!" he grumbled happily. "That idiot's got some kind of new
invention that's protecting him! Maybe the Forbidden Moon is going to
be reached and explored after all!"
A second more that weird conflict of hidden forces continued. Watching
it was like watching a race, on which you have staked everything you
own. Visibly, that daredevil space ship seemed to slow, as if resisted
by a tangible medium. For an agonizing instant of suspense, Harwich saw
those wicked sparks brighten in the X911's bluish aura. Then the latter
dimmed, flickered, went out!
As if angry demons were waiting to pounce, destruction struck--quicker
than a lightning bolt.
* * * * *
If there had been any humor in the situation before, it was gone now
utterly! The patrol man's lips dropped apart in sheer awe. The muscles
of his massive, freckle-smeared forearms tightened futilely as he
longed to help the X911's doomed pilot. In the pit of his stomach there
was a sickish feeling.
Where that rocket that had dared the inscrutable enigma of the
Forbidden Moon had been, there was a sudden, terrific blaze of light.
The intolerable incandescence of it seemed to reach out to infinity
itself, illuminating even the blackness between the distant stars of
space. But it was all as silent as the bouncing of a bubble on velvet.
No explosion, however huge, can transmit sound in the emptiness of the
void.
The magnificent, horrible blast broke into a million gobs and sparks of
molten metal--from what had once been a space ship's hull. Superheated
gas from ignited rocket fuel shot out. Scattered far and wide, the
white-hot fragments of the wreck continued on their way, following
the original direction of the once bold X911 toward Io. Their speed
increased gradually, as the gravity of the Forbidden Moon pulled them.
The larger chunks, falling at meteoric speed, would bury themselves
deep in the cold Ionian deserts.
The secret of Io had claimed another victim, one who might have
been victorious. But Io's mystery was still unviolated. Evan Harwich
had seen other ships, disabled and unmaneuverable for some reason
beforehand, go to their ends like this; but he was still not used to
the spectacle, and to the unholy wonder it provoked in him.
Dazzled and almost blinded, he guided his patrol boat shakily away from
the Forbidden Moon. There was cold sweat in his thick, black hair,
under his leather helmet; and cold sweat too on his narrow, bristly
cheeks. His movements of the controls were a trifle vague and fumbling
with emotion, making his patrol boat waver a little in its course.
For perhaps the millionth time Harwich wondered: "What makes Io so
dangerous? Dammit all, those scientists who claim that there is a
deadly shell of unseen energy completely enveloping the Forbidden
Moon, must be right! There isn't anything else that could explain
the continual destruction of all rocket craft that come within that
five-thousand-mile limit!"
Evan Harwich was ready to accept this much as fact. But beyond this,
there was still a vast, unguessable question mark.
Was this shell of energy a natural phenomenon; or was it something
planned, made, intended for a purpose? If the latter guess was right,
who could have created such a gigantic screen of force? What kind of
beings? What kind of science?
Io was an almost dead world, Harwich knew. Very cold. Very little water
and air. Astronomers had taken photographs of its terrain through
powerful telescopes, from the other moons of Jupiter. Very little could
be seen on those photographs but deserts and grey hills, and curious
formations which might be the magnificent ruins left by an extinct race.
Evan Harwich was far from a weakling; but cold chills were playing over
his big body as he groped to understand the unknown.
His vision was clearing somewhat, after having been so dazzled by the
incandescent blast that had accompanied the destruction of the X911 a
moment ago.
In the feeble sunlight, so far out here in the void, Harwich saw a
second rocket, leaving the scene of the disaster along with himself.
Evidently someone else had witnessed that weird demonstration of Io's
destructive might, too!
Squinting through a pair of binoculars, Harwich read the obviously
ancient craft's number. Then he snapped on his radio again.
"Calling space ship RQ257!" he grated into the transmitter.
"Interplanetary Patrol just behind you. Pilot, please identify
yourself! Do you know who was aboard the experimental rocket X911, that
was just destroyed?"
A few seconds later he heard a dazed, grief-anguished voice speaking in
response: "Yes ... I ought to know. I came out to watch our test of the
Energy Barrage Penetrator, which we thought would be successful. I am
Paul Arnold. The man who was just killed was John Arnold, my father."
John Arnold! Yes, Harwich had often seen photographs of this daring,
hawk-faced old student of the Forbidden Moon in the scientific
journals. He had been the greatest of them all! But there wasn't much
to do for him now but shrug ironically, and report the nature of his
death by radio to the Interplanetary Patrol Base on Ganymede, largest
of Jupiter's satellites.
"I'm sorry, Paul Arnold," the patrol man told his informant in sincere
sympathy.
"Thank you," the quavering voice of Paul Arnold returned. "And now, if
you don't mind, I've got to get back to Ganymede City. Dad's gone, but
I've got to carry on his work."
* * * * *
Harwich didn't meet Paul Arnold, the son of the dead scientist, face
to face for more than a month, Earthtime. But on patrol duty out
there in the lonely reaches of the void, with the stars and the roar
of his rocket motors for company, he saw a good deal of the leering,
greyish sphere of Io. It seemed to taunt him with its masked secrets,
hanging so near to the tremendously greater bulk of Jupiter. But the
Forbidden Moon told him nothing new at all. Through his binoculars he
saw the deserts and hills and those supposed ruins. Near the equator
was something that looked like a vast, pointed tower. But Harwich had
seen this before, often. Something moved near the tower now and then,
as on other occasions. But maybe this distant movement was only the
shifting of clouds of dust, blown by a thin, frigid wind, in a tenuous
atmosphere.
Then, back in Ganymede City, came that meeting with Paul Arnold. It
happened at the Spacemen's Haven. Evan Harwich, on furlough now, was
sipping Martian _kasarki_ at the bar.
Presently a hand was laid on his arm. He turned to face a slight-built
youngster, who could not have been more than eightteen. But his
peculiar gold-flecked eyes were as distant and scared and bright as if
they had seen Hell itself.
"You're Harwich," said the boy. "I'm Arnold. They pointed you out to me
as the patrol pilot who reported my father's death. I wanted to talk to
you. I don't know just why, except that you were there too, when Dad
was killed. You saw what happened. And people have told me that you
were a square shooter, Harwich."
Somewhat startled, but glad to know the youth, and more than willing
to talk with him on the subject mentioned, Evan Harwich tried to smile
encouragingly. It wasn't too easy, considering his weathered, space
darkened features and threatening size; but he did his best.
"Pleased to meet yuh, Arnold," he said rather clumsily, offering a big
hamlike hand. "I wanted to talk to you too. How about a drink and a
quiet corner, where the crowd here won't be stepping all over us?"
They retired to a table in a screened nook. "Now," said young Arnold,
"you've seen as much of the Forbidden Moon as anybody alive, Harwich.
You must know that the energy aura around her is real and not a fable.
You must know, too, that it couldn't be a natural phenomenon, since
nothing in nature acts like it does. There's only one alternative
possibility as to what could cause it! Even though Io seems so
deserted, somehow there are machines there, functioning to maintain
that shell of force! Right?"
Harwich nodded. Little glints of intense interest seemed to show in his
eyes. "I've believed that for a long time," he admitted. "But those
machines must be plenty wonderful to build up a barrage of invisible
energy, thousands of miles in extent! Our scientists couldn't even
begin to dream of doing anything like it! Even the principles employed
must be a million years ahead of our time!"
"Right again!" the boy responded. For a second he cast a guarded,
suspicious glance around the room, where Earthmen and leathery Martians
were talking and laughing and drinking.
"The evidence can't be disputed," Paul Arnold whispered at last.
"It might be that the people who invented those machines have been
extinct for ages. But the mechanisms they created are still operating.
There's superscience there on Io, Harwich! How much could we benefit
civilization, if we could somehow find out what the principles of
those machines are? How much damage might be done if those principles
happened to fall into the wrong hands, among men? War and conquest--a
whole solar system thrown into chaos--might result!"
Evan Harwich wanted to laugh scornfully, wanted to call the kid a
dreamer of wild dreams; but the realization that young Arnold probably
told the truth, made his hide tingle and pucker instead.
"Maybe you're right, fella," he growled.
"Of course I am!" Arnold almost snapped. "My father believed it
for years, and his work must go on, even though the Forbidden Moon
scares me plenty. You saw yourself, Harwich, that his Energy Barrage
Penetrator was almost successful. I've been trying to build another,
with enough power to get through."
Harwich's lips curved, a nameless, wild thrill stirring in his blood.
But after all, even before he'd left a great consolidated farm in
southern Illinois nine years ago, to become a spaceman, he'd been an
adventurer at heart.
"Do you suppose you'll need any help?" he asked simply, realizing that
even as he spoke, death on a tomb-world might well be lurking in the
background.
The question sounded like impulse, but it wasn't. Harwich had lived too
long in the shadow of the Forbidden Moon's taunting enigma, not to want
to take a personal part in any effort to penetrate its grim secrets.
Besides, he had a month's furlough from patrol duty now. The thought of
possible adventures to come made his nerves tingle.
Paul Arnold's eyes widened. "I almost hoped you would want to join me,
Harwich," he stammered happily, seeming only to need the moral support
of an experienced spaceman, to bring him out of the black mood he was
in. "Shall we go to my laboratory?"
* * * * *
The Arnold lab and dwelling proved to be one of the oddest that Evan
Harwich had ever seen. It was just outside the great steel-ribbed
airdrome that confined a warm, breatheable atmosphere over Ganymede
City, the small mining metropolis of a dying world.
The Arnold lab was a group of subterranean rooms, beneath the desert.
They were reached by a private tunnel from the City, and were
hermetically sealed against leakage of air to the cold semi-vacuum of
the Ganymedean atmosphere above.
Cellar rooms, vaults, not exactly modern but restored from some ancient
ruin; for Ganymede had had its extinct clans of quasihuman people too,
ages ago. A weird place, this was, a place of poverty, perhaps, since
all of the Arnold resources must have gone into experimentation; but a
homey sort of place, too, with its scatterings of books and quaint art
objects and pictures.
"This is the Energy Barrage Penetrator, Harwich," Paul Arnold was
saying in husky tones, as the two men bent over a copper helix or
spiral, attached to a maze of wires, tubes, and power-packs. "I
rebuilt it here on this test-block from Dad's plans; with certain
rearrangements, of course. But we need a new Gyon condenser, if we
want to raise the Penetrator's strength enough to make our venture
successful."
Evan Harwich nodded beneath the single illuminator bulb that glowed
here, its rays glinting from the battered, patched hull of the space
ship, RQ257, that stood in the center of the great room, under the
airtight exit doors provided for it in the ceiling.
"So I see," Harwich commented with subdued eagerness. "Well, that's not
so bad. I can buy a new Gyon condenser from one of the supply shops
in town. I'm no scientist, fella, but they give us a pretty complete
scientific training in the patrol service. Enough so that I can see
that the Penetrator is going to do the trick, this time, with your
improvements. And I don't think it will take very long to get things
ready for a real trip to the Forbidden Moon."
The patrol man had hardly finished speaking, when a door, somewhere,
groaned on its hinges. In the dusty silence there were footsteps,
coming nearer through the series of rooms.
"Well, have we got company?" a voice boomed heavily after a moment.
Evan Harwich turned about slowly. Standing in the arched entrance of
the laboratory chamber, beneath the ancient, grinning gargoyle of
carven granite that formed the keystone of the arch, were two people.
They must have just come in from town.
One was a man, as tall as Harwich himself, but much broader. He looked
jovial, overfed, and just faintly sly. Harwich knew him a little.
He kept a small printer's establishment in Ganymede City, repaired
delicate instruments, and made loans on the side.
"Hello, Harwich!" the big man greeted loudly. "You look surprised to
see me here! Well, I'm just as up in the air as you are, to find you
around. How come? You see I've been financing Paul Arnold's researches
since old John was killed. Has Paulie talked you into some part in the
great miracle hunt on Io, too?"
"Hello yourself, Bayley," the patrol man returned in not too friendly
a tone. "Yes, I've joined up."
Harwich was a little more than surprised to see the fat printer here.
He didn't like the setup at all. Not that he had anything definite
against George Bayley. The latter had always seemed good-natured and
honest, except for some elusive trace of insincerity in his manner, his
voice, and his little squinted eyes.
Was this the kind of man for Paul Arnold to choose as a patron,
particularly when he was in pursuit of the incredibly advanced science
which must exist on Io? A science that might benefit the human race
immeasurably, or might result in wholesale destruction and confusion,
if it was wrongly and selfishly used?
Evan Harwich couldn't have answered yes or no to this question.
* * * * *
There was a painful pause in the conversation. Harwich found himself
looking at the girl, who had entered with the big printer, and to whose
arms the latter clung with a kind of bearish possessiveness. She was
small and dainty. Her blonde hair, combed back tightly, fitted her head
like a cap. She was wearing a plain but tasteful black dress with a
white collar.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" Paul Arnold exclaimed after a moment. "Clara, this is
Evan Harwich of the Patrol. Evan, this is my sister. I didn't tell you
that I had a sister, did I?"
The girl only nodded slightly, and smiled a warm, friendly little
smile. But why did the big patrol pilot find her more attractive than
any other girl he had ever seen? Perhaps mostly it was those wistful
eyes of hers, not gold flecked like her brother's, but clouded amber.
They were mild and troubled and knowing. Maybe Clara Arnold's life, as
the daughter of a martyred scientist, had made them like that. Harwich
knew that he might conquer not only the Forbidden Moon, but the stars
themselves, and still remember those eyes.
"Now we all know each other," Bayley boomed. "We're one big happy
family--or are we?" He looked at Harwich significantly, a definite
scowl now crinkling his heavy brows. "Harwich," he added, "we
appreciate your company a lot. Only we are engaged in some pretty
serious business here, and it doesn't allow us to take in outsiders."
For reasons of his own, Bayley was trying to get rid of the big patrol
pilot. But Harwich was inclined to be very stubborn, naturally, and
faint, pleading looks from both Clara and Paul Arnold, made him doubly
so, just at present.
Harwich had the aspect of a very dangerous adversary in a physical
encounter; his weathered features were far from beautiful, and at
certain times he had a way of grinning that made him look like a
good-natured devil with a hot pitchfork hid behind his back. He turned
on that grin, now.
"What's in that package sticking out of your coat-pocket, George?" he
asked the fat printer breezily. "It's about the right size and shape
to be the new Gyon condenser we need. I was going to buy one myself;
but seeing that you've already done so, we might as well go to work
installing it in the Penetrator apparatus."
"Well, all right, Harwich," Bayley growled with some slight show of
timidity. "As long as you're Paul's friend, I suppose you can stick
around."
"Thanks a lot, George," Harwich chuckled, as the printer set the
package containing the precious Gyon condenser on a work table.
The patrol pilot was almost sure he heard faint sighs of relief from
the two Arnolds, as Bayley backed down. Had they come to mistrust him
too, since he had been financing them? Did they feel more at ease
because he, Evan Harwich, whom Bayley could never bulldoze, was their
partner now too?
The spaceman wondered, and he couldn't help wondering something
else. On Clara Arnold's left hand, there was a diamond gleaming. An
engagement ring. Bayley's? The way the latter had clung to the girl's
arm, it couldn't very well be anybody else's. Could Clara, quiet and
beautiful, ever love the boisterous, paunchy printer?
The Arnolds were a strange family, anyway. The son was ready to
sacrifice his life in an effort to reach the Forbidden Moon, where his
father's ashes lay entombed. The daughter? Might she not be of the same
fanatical breed? Might she not be willing to marry Bayley, so that he
would supply funds for their experiments?
For a moment, Evan Harwich felt a sharp, hurt ache, deep in his heart.
But he fought it down. All this was none of his business. And from a
heavy-glazed window slit in the ceiling of the laboratory room, a shaft
of soft light from ugly Io, the Forbidden Moon, was stabbing down,
appealing to his own adventurous nature.
Paul had slipped on a pair of lab coveralls. He tossed another pair
to the patrol pilot. "Come on! Let's get started, Evan," he urged
pleasantly. "We've got a big job in front of us, and remember you said
we'd get through with it before long!"
* * * * *
True to Harwich's predictions, the rearrangement of the Energy Barrage
Penetrator for far greater power than the original had possessed, did
not take really a lot of time.
Within forty hours after the patrol pilot's arrival at the lab, the
task of installing the Arnold apparatus in the old space ship, RQ257,
was complete. The tests of the Penetrator had been made, and judged as
successful as anyone could have hoped for.
The space ship stood ready there in the laboratory room, a slender,
copper helix wrapped around its hull.
"All set, eh?" George Bayley boomed jovially. "Got your emergency
supply-packs loaded aboard, too, eh? But you won't need them, boys,"
he added seriously. "You've got everything in your favor. And in five
hours you'll be back here with Clara and me, at the lab with a dandy
story to tell."
Bayley seemed honest and sincere, now. Evan Harwich almost felt
sheepish about the matter. Maybe he'd misjudged the big, bearish
printer. Anyway, he watched his every move, during the assembly and
installation of the Penetrator.
Paul Arnold was whistling a little tune of confidence and exultation.
Harwich's pulses beat happily, his thoughts on the enigma of the
Forbidden Moon, that now must yield to the new Energy Barrage
Penetrator. Superscience there on Io! Unutterable wonders! Who could
guess beforehand what the Forbidden Moon's vast screen of force was
meant to bar from intrusion? But maybe they would soon know!
Only Clara Arnold showed worry. There was a slight shadow in her amber
eyes, when she took Harwich's hand.
"I suppose this is only a preliminary test flight to Io and back," she
said. "Not much dangerous exploration. But please be careful," she
pleaded. "Please be careful, Evan."
The spaceman muttered a word of thanks. Evan. His first name. To have
Clara Arnold use it like that might have given a new meaning to life.
His heart was suddenly pounding very hard, before he remembered that
diamond on her left hand. She was promised to George Bayley.
The girl and the printer retreated from the laboratory chamber, waving
a farewell. The space ship was sealed. The great exit doors in the
ceiling of the lab opened wide, and the air rushed out.
In another moment the RQ257 was shooting skyward. In the night, among
the welter of stars, huge Jupiter and his many satellites shone down on
the Ganymedean deserts. The nose of the ship swung unerringly toward Io.
* * * * *
The RQ257, wrapped in its protecting halo of blue fire from the
Penetrator, struck the Forbidden Moon's tremendous, invisible envelope
of energy, squarely. There was a snarling sound in the ship's interior.
White sparks lanced through cold space beyond the windows of the
cabin, as two opposed forces fought each other. But the RQ257 bored on
steadily.
"We're going to make it, Paul!" Harwich shouted through the reeking,
dinning cabin.
"Of course we are!" young Arnold yelled back at him. "How could we
fail!"
The two men were on the brink of success.
Then there was an abrupt, strident, angry, snap from the vitals of
the Penetrator apparatus. Everything seemed to happen at once. The
protecting blue aura outside the ship waxed and waned perilously. And
whenever it waned, there was a grinding, crumpling sound, as of steel
plating being crushed like so much paper in a giant's grip. Heat, and
the cindery pungence of scorched metal, filled the cabin.
Paul Arnold and Evan Harwich were frozen rigid with stunning, agonized
paralysis, as strange energy snapped into their bodies. In the jolting,
erratic motion of the wounded space ship, the two men were hurled from
their feet like a pair of stiff wooden dolls.
Rolling and tumbling, his vision half blinded, Harwich saw the metal
walls of the cabin buckle and redden with heat, as the craft floundered
in that region of mysterious force and energy that heretofore had
destroyed every ship that had attempted to reach Io.
There was another growl from the protecting apparatus. In a flash
of electricity, the side of the bakelite case that housed the Gyon
condenser exploded outward. At once the staggering Penetrator quit
completely. Its last shred of protecting force was gone.
But that momentary hell had ended, too, with almost dazing suddenness.
The grinding, snapping sounds had ceased. And there was only the heat
and the stench of burnt metal, and the weightless sensation of free
fall. That and the mocking stars.
Paul Arnold, panting, his face darkened and beaded with perspiration,
clutched a bakelite handrail in one corner.
"We got through Io's energy barrage!" he shouted wildly. "We did that
much, at least; and for a moment, when our Penetrator went wrong, I
didn't think our luck would be even that good."
Evan Harwich leered back at the youth, from near the now useless
apparatus that John Arnold had invented. "Yes, we got through," he
grunted hoarsely. "The energy shell must be only a couple of thousand
miles thick, with free space underneath, between it and Io itself. The
Gyon condenser kept working raggedly just long enough to get us out of
the danger zone, without being completely blown apart!"
Harwich didn't have to test the controls of the ship to know that they
were useless, now. The rockets were silent too. The RQ257 was falling
free toward the Forbidden Moon, still a couple of thousand miles
beneath.
"But dammit, Evan!" young Arnold growled. "The Gyon condenser
shouldn't have quit on us at all! Those things are tested for heavy
loads of power!"
The patrol pilot was well aware of that. Clinging to the base of the
Penetrator, he was close enough to see detail. The lights in the cabin
had gone out, but the ugly effulgence of Io was streaming through the
windows.
Projecting from the shattered bakelite box of the Gyon condenser, were
two slender, bent wires that should have been joined together. It had
been one wire once, but it had snapped in the middle.
The ends were faintly scorched and blued; but there was something else,
too. They were bevelled off curiously, as if they had been notched.
"Cut with a file!" Harwich fairly snarled. "The wire was cut with a
file. Then the insulation was rewrapped carefully so that all the
evidence was hidden!"
The cause of the accident was plain. The wire had been able to carry
the load of power easily enough during the tests; but under the
additional load of fighting the Ionian hell-zone, it had burned through
and snapped!
"Bayley!" Paul Arnold whispered in the ominous stillness that now
pervaded the plummeting derelict of the RQ257. "He brought the
condenser, you remember! Evan, I know you were careful to watch
everything he did during the assembly and tests in the lab itself. He
must have had the Gyon condenser at his apartment before he brought it
to us. He must have doctored it there! He was planning even then to get
rid of me! And when he found you around, he decided that he wouldn't
weep if he got rid of you too!"
"But why?" Harwich growled in momentary confusion. "Why should Bayley
want to get rid of you?"
* * * * *
It was almost a silly question, as Harwich realized at once; but now
Paul was answering it.
"It's simple," said the youth. "Bayley financed me after Dad was
killed--yes. He watched my experiments and tests and studied my
apparatus. He has a pretty keen mind. With me out of the way, no one
but himself will know just how the Penetrator works! He can fix up
another ship and come to Io himself without any competition! Anything
he learns or discovers on the Forbidden Moon will be his alone! Or so
he thinks, anyway."
It was too clear now! Evan Harwich knew that he and the boy were
tumbling helplessly into the maw of hell now. In a useless, derelict
ship they were falling toward the Forbidden Moon! They were already
within the gates of unholy mystery! Death seemed very close. Yet the
cold anger that hissed in the patrol pilot's brain, made him determined
to live, somehow, for revenge!
"We'll be smashed if we stay in the ship, Paul," he said fiercely. "So
we've got to jump for it with our safety equipment."
Quickly and more smoothly than did the youth, for he was well-trained,
Harwich got into his space armor. Next he donned two massive packs, one
on his chest and one on his back.
The exit door of the cabin was jammed, but with his pistol the patrol
pilot fired an explosive bullet into its hinges.
A second afterward, Arnold and Harwich crept through the rent, while
escaping air puffed out around them. They leaped into the emptiness
almost together. With the heat-warped wreck of the gallant old RQ257
falling beside them, they continued their plummeting descent. There
were still almost a thousand miles to go, for the distance between
Io itself, and the gigantic energy envelope that surrounded it, was
perhaps three thousand miles.
Down and down, with only regulation spacemen's emergency equipment to
rely on to avert being crushed on those greyish hills and deserts,
rushing nearer and nearer. Even a thousand miles did not take many
moments at that terrific speed.
The Forbidden Moon was like a sullen, silent nether world, with an
atmosphere so rare that an unprotected human being would gasp and die
in it in a few minutes! Even a man in a space suit could not hope to
survive that desolation for long! Io seemed like a Pit now to Evan
Harwich, an Abyss of Hell from which there was no escape! A place where
no Earth being was meant to venture!
This moment was too grim to think of thrills. Helplessness removed that
intriguing glamor utterly. And there was only savage determination
left. That and smoldering hate of the man who had caused misfortune!
Presently, through the thin metal of his oxygen helmet, Harwich heard
a soft, hissing, whistling sound. Gradually it grew stronger. The
patrol pilot knew what it was, of course. He had entered the intensely
thin upper atmosphere of Io, and the hissing was made by his own space
armored body passing through those tenuous gases at fearful velocity.
The sound served as a signal for action. Again, though the situation
was new to him, Harwich's training made his responses accurate. With
a gauntletted hand, he groped for the metal ring on the pack that
bulged from his chest. It was ancient history when he jerked that ring,
but sometimes, in emergency landings like this, on worlds that had a
blanket of air, however slight, it was still useful. In another second
the patrol pilot was dangling beneath a gigantic mushroom of metal
fabric. He felt the firm tug of the shrouds. Deceleration.
He wondered vaguely why the fragile parachute did not tear apart in the
terrific speed of his fall. But it was the utter thinness of the air,
of course, here in the upper layer. Its resistance was so very slight.
So there was time for velocity to be checked gradually, as the air grew
denser, and its retarding effect greater with lowered altitude.
Paul Arnold had opened his chute too. Its vast top, a hundred feet in
diameter, gleamed dully in the faint sunshine.
In a great plume of dust far below, the derelict space ship crashed.
Fire flew as the force of the impact generated heat. But the wreckage
was out of sight, and there was only a pit smoldering on a bleak, dusty
hillside. The RQ257 was buried deep.
* * * * *
Harwich and Paul Arnold landed several miles away from the grave of the
ruined ship; for they had drifted with the thin, dry, frigid wind.
Their booted feet spanged painfully against the sand and broken rock,
and they crumpled to their knees; for even in the feeble gravity of Io
the impact had been heavy.
Harwich snapped on his helmet radio-phone. Young Arnold's voice was
already audible in it, faint and thready and sarcastic.
"Well, here we are, Evan," he was saying. "The first Earthmen to set
foot alive on the Enchanted World! I guess I got part of what I wanted
anyway, didn't I? But with what equipment we've got to keep alive with,
we might just as well be buried with the RQ257! Funny I'm not scared. I
guess I don't realize...."
His bitterly humorous tone faded away in vague awe.
Still lying prone the two men, looked around them, at the hellish,
utterly desolate scene. The hills brooded there under the blue-black
sky and tenuous, heatless sunshine. A rock loomed up from a heap of
sand. It was a weathered monolith with weird carvings on it, resembling
closely those left by the extinct peoples of Ganymede, that other, now
colonized moon of Jupiter. A curious pulpy shrub, ugly and weird, grew
beside the monolith. A scanty breath of breeze stirred up a little
ripple of dust.
That and the stillness. The stillness of a tomb. Harwich could hear
the muted rustle of the pulses in his head. Everything here seemed to
emphasize the plain facts. The Forbidden Moon was a trap to them now.
A pit from which they could expect no rescue. An abyss that was worse
than the worst dungeon--worse than being literally buried alive!
It was like the end of things. Was this the kind of slow, creeping,
maddening death that George Bayley, the treacherous printer, had
planned for them?
Again fury steadied Evan Harwich's determination. Grimly he struggled
to steady his nerves.
"Listen, Paul," he said quietly into his phones. "We mustn't ever let
ourselves think we're licked! That's sure poison! The stuff we've
got in our emergency packs will enable us to keep living for a while
anyhow. We know Bayley'll come to Io sometime, with a ship fitted out
with a new Penetrator. We know he'll be looking for the secret of the
force aura of the Forbidden Moon, and whatever else there is to find.
Maybe we can get ahead of him yet, if we keep on the move. Which way do
you suppose would be best to go?"
Harwich asked this question because Paul Arnold, in his more academic
study of Io, should know more about its terrain than he.
"You know the Tower?" Paul Arnold questioned. "The queer pinnacle, or
ruin, or building, near the equator, on what is known as the Western
Hemisphere? You must have seen it often when you were on patrol."
Harwich nodded. He remembered very well. Only a hundred hours ago,
still on duty as a patrol pilot, he'd seen that pointed mystery from
the void, vague dusty movement around its base.
"It was my Dad's guess that whatever miracles are to be discovered
on Io, they will probably be located around the Tower," Paul Arnold
answered. "But I was careful to notice our position when we landed.
We're far north of the Tower now--a good fifteen hundred miles. A nice,
long walk--especially when the normal air of the Forbidden Moon is too
thin to be breatheable."
"Stop that pessimist stuff, and let's get started!" Harwich snapped.
"We'll have to live very primitively, of course, but who knows what
will turn up?"
They discarded their parachutes and started out, plodding southward,
carrying their heavy packs. As if to save their energy, they did not
speak much.
The hills rolled past, under their plodding feet. More fragmentary
ruins appeared, and were left behind. Their boots sank into soft dust,
as they marched on and on. At first their muscles were fresh, but
tiredness came at last. And the miles which lay ahead were all but
undiminished.
The tiny sun sank into the west and the cold increased. Night was
coming.
"We'd better camp," young Arnold suggested wearily.
So they opened their packs, and took out the carefully folded sections
of airtight fabric that composed their tent. It was part of the usual
equipment kept for emergency purposes by those in danger of being
stranded on dead or almost dead worlds. The tent could be hermetically
sealed. Harwich and Arnold set it up carefully and crept inside. Air
was freed from their oxygen flask, and the queer shelter ballooned out
like a bubble.
They could remove their space suits now, and breathe, here in the
tent. They ate sparingly from their concentrated rations. Meanwhile
a little pump and separator unit, driven by a tiny atomic motor, was
busy compressing the thin Ionian air, separating out the excess of
carbon-dioxide and nitrogen it contained, and forcing the oxygen into
the depleted air flasks.
Once in the darkness Paul and Evan were awakened by a strange sound,
eerie in that dead quiet, and very faint because the scant Ionian
atmosphere could not conduct it well. But when they crept to the
flexoglass window of the tent, they saw nothing unusual.
"I guess we're getting jumpy," Paul whispered nervously, his breath
steaming in the cold, frosty air that filled the shelter.
"It looks that way," Evan Harwich returned reassuringly.
But after the boy was asleep again, he crept back to the frosted window
to watch. He knew that there had to be something mighty on Io. The
shell of force that surrounded the evil moon couldn't exist all alone.
There had to be more. Something that lay back of it, went with it.
Something that could easily be very dangerous.
Jupiter, so near to Io, was a gigantic threatening mass in the heavens.
But its light was deceptive. There were so many dense shadows.
Did he see some of the stars near the horizon wink out suddenly, and
then appear again, as though something big and nameless and sinister
had momentarily blocked their light and then passed on? He could not be
sure, and nothing further happened. To save his companion unnecessary
concern, when nothing could be done about the threatening danger
anyway, he decided to keep the incident to himself.
* * * * *
Long before the dawn they were once more on the march. How many hours
was the Ionian day? Something over forty. It didn't matter much.
When the daylight finally came, they had slept again, this time in
their space suits, without bothering to set up the tent. Rising to his
feet, Paul Arnold pointed suddenly.
"Look! An ancient road!" he shouted.
It was true. The highway ran there between the hills. A stone ribbon,
covered here and there with drifted sand, which showed that there was
no traffic of any sort now. The ruins along it looked a little less
battered than those which the two men had previously seen, and there
were vast lumps of corroded metal, too. Machinery in a former age.
"The road goes our way," Harwich commented. "We'll follow it."
Hours later, Paul Arnold offered an opinion. "Part of the mystery of Io
is clearing up, Evan," he said. "The ruins around here. They're almost
identical in architecture to the ruins of Ganymede and the other Jovian
satellites. The evidence looks plain. There must have been a single
great civilization once, extending over all the moons of Jupiter."
Harwich, thinking of, and hating George Bayley for his diabolical
treachery, was only half listening.
"Yes?" he questioned.
"Yes," the boy answered. "And look at those dry ditches, and the big,
rusty pumps! The valley here must have been rich, irrigated farmland,
once!"
They were going across a huge bridge, now, made of porcelain blocks.
It was a magnificent structure, magnificently designed according to
intricate principles of engineering.
"What I can't understand is why all this country became deserted,"
Paul offered. "You'd think that people who could build things like
this would never die out! They could conquer any difficulty that might
come up, it would almost seem. Even if their world got old and worn
out. After all, even Earthmen can make almost dead worlds artificially
habitable again with airdromes, and with imported atmosphere and water."
This was another mystery. But it touched Evan Harwich's thoughts only
faintly. Nor did he care very much when later Paul pointed out to him
rich deposits of ore--outcroppings along the road. He'd seen them
himself, and the tunnel mouths, too, of ancient mine workings. There
were many fortunes to be won here, in costly metals, just as on the
other Jovian satellites. But how could this be important, now, with
death dogging their tracks, and so many other things more important,
to be concerned with?
Evan Harwich reserved his determination for what he knew was coming.
The slow wearing down of stamina. Water he and Paul had a little of.
And more could be reclaimed from the thin, dry atmosphere. It collected
in the bottoms of oxygen bottles, when they were pumped full, condensed
by compression. A few precious drops. You could drink it out after each
bottle was emptied of air. Just about enough water to sustain life.
In the matter of food, you had to ration yourself so stringently
that you caught yourself looking with longing eyes at the few,
weird, bulbous shrubs and the scattered lichens, which were the only
vegetation on this dying world. Only you knew that these arid growths
would never be good to eat.
Those long Ionian days passed. One after another. Five, ten, fifteen.
Harwich knew he was losing strength slowly. The inevitable was catching
up with him. But those hard years in the Interplanetary Patrol Service,
and the rigid physical discipline, had made him as tough as steel wire.
With the boy, Paul Arnold, it was not the same. He was very young, and
not too robust. And he was slipping fast.
"What's the matter with me, Evan?" he would grumble. "All this desert
isn't real, is it? We're not on the Forbidden Moon, are we? I'm
dreaming."
"You're just tired out, that's all, fella," Harwich would answer in a
tone that he would try to make reassuring. He would put an arm around
the kid's shoulders, to support his faltering steps.
Big brother stuff.... Paul had plenty of pluck, all right, but there
wasn't much else left in him. He was wearing out, mile by mile,
staggering under his heavy pack.
* * * * *
Every resource was reaching its limit, now. Food supplies had dwindled
away to nothing, at last. The little atomic motor that worked the air
compressor and separator unit, was breaking down. It could hardly pump
enough oxygen into the air flasks any more.
But there was nothing to do but keep on the march, anyway, in spite
of handicaps. Evan Harwich felt as though he was going slowly mad.
Brooding thoughts came into his mind constantly.
Clara Arnold. Where was she now? What had happened back there on
Ganymede? What had George Bayley done? When would he come to Io, with
the ship he would surely fit out with a new Penetrator?
What was Clara thinking? What if she knew her brother was alive on the
Forbidden Moon, but slowly dying? What if Bayley told her that maybe
Paul was still alive, adding that he himself was the only person that
might be able to effect a rescue? What if he had finally used this
means, this possibility, to make Clara marry him? She didn't love
Bayley, the fat printer! She couldn't! And he wouldn't even have to
promise to attempt a rescue--only suggest that he might try. Clara must
be half crazy herself, thinking of her brother. After all she'd lost
her father to the Forbidden Moon too.
The thought of demure Clara Arnold in the arms of that bulky,
squint-eyed printer, who had shown his true colors at last, and
proved his diabolical cleverness, fairly strangled Harwich. Maybe he
had no right to harbor such an attitude. After all he hardly knew
Clara. He only knew her haunting beauty and friendly amber eyes, with
quiet wisdom and a little of the martyr in them--like her father,
perhaps. But Harwich couldn't help thinking. It was only by exercising
super-human self-control, that he kept himself from turning into a
raving maniac.
Supporting Paul Arnold's feeble, struggling steps, Harwich watched
the sky like a starved, wounded wolf. Sometimes, in sheer, wild
determination, he longed to claw at that cold, forbidding firmament,
and climb out of that hell-pit of a world into which he had fallen.
He yearned with a savagery beyond words to claw his way up there into
space, to wherever George Bayley might be, and feel the fat throat of
the man who had tampered with the Gyon condenser aboard the RQ257,
squeezed between his hooked fingers.
But the frigid sky and the bleak, dying hills, and the weary miles,
mocked all his hate-born desires. His numbed, aching feet could only
plod on and on in this grave-like desert. Ruins, rusted machinery,
silence, and cold that crept even through the heavy insulation of his
space armor.
Still, he could remember another thing. In the far distance to the
south, was something wonderful and strange. Something that made the
deadly and insidious energy barrier of the Forbidden Moon possible.
Where the Tower loomed on the astronomical photographs of Io.
That night came at last when a streak of silver fire traced its way
across the sky. It couldn't be anything but the flames ejected from the
rockets of an approaching space ship.
Paul Arnold saw it too, turning his haggard face upward. "There he is,
Evan," he croaked into his helmet phones. "Bayley's coming at last."
"I see," Harwich returned softly; his teeth gritted and his lips
curling furiously, behind the transparent front of his space headgear.
They dropped down beside the wall of a ruin, to watch. The ship was
coming straight in, toward Io. At its tremendous altitude, nothing but
its rocket blasts could be seen at first. But then there was a sudden
flare of bluish light. It had struck Io's force barrier, and that blue
glow was the evidence of a Penetrator, functioning. The craft seemed to
slow a little, as its pale, protecting shell of counter-energy fought
back that invisible, guardian screen of the devil moon.
"He got through the force shield," Harwich growled after a moment. "We
knew he would, of course, with his Penetrator operating right. Damn
him!"
There was no more blue fire visible now; but the little silver-tailed
path of rocket flame, showed that the ship was coming in safe and
sound, its propelling jets working steadily.
Among the stars it turned southward toward that deepest enigma of Io.
Toward the unknown scientific wisdom, which lay hidden somewhere near
the Ionian equator.
"He'll get there in a few minutes' time," Paul whispered. "And I guess
we won't get there at all. I'm sorry, Evan, that I got you mixed up
with the Forbidden Moon. Me--I'm just about finished--now."
* * * * *