leaf-like dregs still remained inside. There were small bottles made of
pearly glass, too--empty except for gummy traces. They were stoppered
with a stuff like rubber. There were also crumpled scraps, like paper or
cellophane, most of them marked with designs or symbols.
After ten Earth-days, in the lunar afternoon, Frank found the grave. He
shouted as his brushing hands uncovered a glassy, flexible surface.
Rodan took charge at once. "Back!" he commanded. Then he was avidly busy
in the pit, working as carefully as a fine jeweller. He cleared more
dust away, not with a trowel, not with his gloved fingers, but with a
little nylon brush.
The thing was like a seven-pointed star, four feet across. And was the
ripped, transparent casing of its body and limbs another version of a
vacuum armor? The material resembled stellene. As in an Archer, there
were metal details, mechanical, electronic, and perhaps nuclear.
In the punctured covering, the corpse was dry, of course--stomach, brain
sac, rough, pitted skin, terminal tendrils--some coarse, some fine,
almost, as thread, for doing the most delicate work, half out of
protecting sheaths at the ends of its arms or legs.
In the armor, the being must have walked like a toe dancer, on metal
spikes. Or it might even have rolled like a wheel. The bluish tint of
its crusty body had half-faded to tan. Perhaps no one would ever explain
the gaping wound that must have killed the creature, unless it had been
a rock fall.
"Martian!" Lester gasped. "At least we know that they were like this!"
"Yes," Rodan agreed softly. "_I'll_ look after _this_ find."
Moving very carefully, even in the weak lunar gravity, he picked up the
product of another evolution and bore it away to the shop dome.
Frank was furious. This was his discovery, and he was not even allowed
to examine it.
Still, something warned him not to argue. In a little while, his
treasure hunter's eagerness came back, holding out through most of that
protracted lunar night, when they worked their ten hour periods with
electric lamps attached to their shoulders.
But gradually Frank began to emerge from his single line of attention.
Knowing that Lester must soon collapse, and waiting tensely for it to
happen, was part of the cause. But there was much more. There was the
fact that direct radio communication with the Earth, around the curve of
the Moon, was impossible--the Tovies didn't like radio-relay orbiters,
useful for beamed, short-wave messages. They had destroyed the few
unmanned ones that had been put up.
There were the several times when he had casually sent a slender beam of
radio energy groping out toward Mars and the Asteroid Belt, trying to
call Storey or the Kuzaks, and had received no answer. Well, this was
not remarkable. Those regions were enormous beyond imagining; you had to
pinpoint your thread of tiny energy almost precisely.
But once, for an instant, while at work, he heard a voice which could be
Mitch Storey's, call "Frank! Frankie!" in his helmet phone. There was no
chance for him to get an instrument-fix on the direction of the incoming
waves. And of course his name, Frank, was a common one. But an immediate
attempt to beam Mars--yellow in the black sky--and its vicinity,
produced no result.
His trapped feeling increased, and nostalgia began to bore into him. He
had memories of lost sounds. Rodan tried to combat the thick silence
with taped popular music, broadcast on very low power from a field set
at the diggings. But the girl voices, singing richly, only made matters
worse for Frank Nelsen. And other memories piled up on him: Jarviston,
Minnesota. Wind. Hay smell, car smell. Home... Cripes...! Damn...!
Lester's habit of muttering unintelligibly to himself was much worse,
now. Frank was expecting him to start screaming at any minute. Frank
hadn't tried to talk to him much, and Lester, more introverted than
ever, was no starter of conversations.
But now, at the sunrise--S.O.B., was it possible that they had been here
almost a month?--Frank at the diggings, indulged in some muttering,
himself.
"Are you all right, Frank?" Lester asked mildly.
"Not altogether!" Frank Nelsen snapped dryly. "How about you?"
"Oh, I believe I'm okay at last," Lester replied with startling
brightness. "I was afraid I wouldn't be. I guess I had an inferiority
complex, and there was also something to live up to. You see, my dad was
here with the original Clifford expedition. We always agreed that I
should become a space-scientist, too. Mom went along with that--until
Dad was killed, here... Well, I'm over the hump, now. You see, I'm so
interested in everything around me, that the desolation has a cushion of
romance that protects me. I don't see just the bleakness. I imagine the
Moon as it once was, with volcanoes spitting, and with thundrous sounds
in its steamy atmosphere. I see it when the Martians were here--they
surely visited Earth, too, though there all evidence weathered away. I
even see the Moon as it is, now, noticing details that are easy to
miss--the little balls of ash that got stuck together by raindrops, two
billion years ago. And the pulpy, hard-shelled plants that you can still
find, alive, if you know where to look. There are some up on the ridge,
where I often go, when offshift. Carbon dioxide and a little water vapor
must still come out of the deep crack there... Anyhow, they used to say
that a lonesome person--with perhaps a touch of schizophrenia--might do
better off the Earth than the more usual types."
Frank Nelsen was surprised as much by this open, self-analytical
explanation, and the clearing up of the family history behind him, as by
the miracle that had happened. Cripes, was it possible that, in his own
way, Lester was more rugged than anybody else of the old Bunch? Of
course even Lester was somewhat in wonder, himself, and had to talk it
all out to somebody.
"Good for you, Les," Nelsen enthused, relieved. "Only--well, skip it,
for now."
Two work periods later, he approached Rodan. "It will take months to
sift all this dust," he said. "I may not want to stay that long."
The pupils of Rodan's eyes flickered again. "Oh?" he said. "Per
contract, you can quit anytime. But I provide no transportation. Do you
want to walk eight hundred miles--to a Tovie station? On the Moon it is
difficult to keep hired help. So one must rely on practical
counter-circumstances. Besides, I wouldn't want you to be at Serenitatis
Base, or anywhere else, talking about my discovery, Nelsen. I'm afraid
you're stuck."
Now Nelsen had the result of his perhaps incautious test statement. He
knew that he was trapped by a dangerous tyrant, such as might spring up
in any new, lawless country.
"It was just a thought, sir," he said, being as placating as he dared,
and controlling his rising fury.
For there was something that hardened too quickly in Rodan. He had the
fame-and-glory bug, and could be savage about it. If you wanted to get
away, you had to scheme by yourself. There wasn't only Rodan to get
past; there was Dutch, the big ape with the dangling pistol.
Nelsen decided to work quietly, as before, for a while... There were a
few more significant finds--what might have been a nuclear-operated
clock, broken, of course, and some diamond drill bits. Though the long
lunar day dragged intolerably, there was the paradox of time seeming to
escape, too. Daylight ended with the sunset. Two weeks of darkness was
no period for any moves. At sunup, a second month was almost finished!
And ten acres of dust was less than half-sifted...
In the shop and supply dome, David Lester had been chemically analyzing
the dregs of various Martian containers for Rodan. In spare moments he
classified those scarce and incredibly hardy lunar growths that he found
in the foothills of the Arabian Range. Some had hard, bright-green
tendrils, that during daylight, opened out of woody shells full of
spongy hollows as an insulation against the fearsome cold of night. Some
were so small that they could only be seen under a microscope. Frank's
interest, here, however, palled quickly. And Lester, in his mumbling,
studious preoccupation, was no companionable antidote for loneliness.
Frank tried a new approach on Helen, who really was Rodan's daughter.
"Do you like poetry, Helen? I used to memorize Keats, Frost,
Shakespeare."
They were there in the dining room. She brightened a little. "I
remember--some."
"Do you remember clouds, the sound of water? Trees, grass...?"
She actually smiled, wistfully. "Yes. Sunday afternoons. A blue dress.
My mother when she was alive... A dog I had, once..."
Helen Rodan wasn't quite a zombie, after all. Maybe he could win her
confidence, if he went slow...
But twenty hours later, at the diggings, when Dutch stumbled over
Frank's sifter, she reverted. "I'll learn you to leave junk in my way,
you greenhorn squirt!" Dutch shouted. Then he tossed Frank thirty feet.
Frank came back, kicked him in his thinly armored stomach, knocked him
down, and tried to get his gun. But Dutch grabbed him in those big arms.
Helen was also pointing a small pistol at him.
She was trembling. "Dad will handle this," she said.
Rodan came over. "You don't have much choice, do you, Nelsen?" he
sneered. "However, perhaps Dutch was crude. I apologize for him. And I
will deduct a hundred dollars from his pay, and give it to you."
"Much obliged," Frank said dryly.
After that, everything happened to build his tensions to the breaking
point.
At a work period's end, near the lunar noon, he heard a voice in his
helmet-phone. "Frank--this is Two-and-Two...! Why don't you ever call or
answer...?"
Two-and-Two's usually plaintive voice had a special quality, as if he
was maybe in trouble. This time, Frank got a directional fix, adjusted
his antenna, and called, "Hey, Two-and-Two...! Hey, Pal--it's me--Frank
Nelsen...!"
Venus was in the sky, not too close to the sun. But still, though Nelsen
called repeatedly, there was no reply.
He got back to quarters, and looked over not only his radio but his
entire Archer. The radio had been fiddled with, delicately; it would
still work, but not in a narrow enough beam to reach millions of miles,
or even five hundred. An intricate focusing device had been removed from
a wave guide.
That wasn't the worst that was wrong with the Archer. The small nuclear
battery which energized the moisture-reclaimer, the heating units, and
especially the air-restorer--not only for turning its pumps but for
providing the intense internal illumination necessary to promote the
release of oxygen in the photosynthetic process of the chlorophane when
there was no sun--had been replaced by a chemical battery of a far
smaller active life-span! The armor locker! Rodan had extra keys, and
could tamper and make replacements, any time he considered it necessary.
Lester had wandered afield, somewhere. When he showed up, Nelsen jarred
him out of his studious preoccupations long enough for them both to
examine his armor. Same, identical story.
"Rodan made sure," Frank gruffed. "That S.O.B. put us on a real short
tether!"
David Lester looked frightened for a minute. Then he seemed to ease.
"Maybe it doesn't make any difference," he said. "Though I'd like to
call my mother... But I'm doing things that I like. After a while, when
the job is finished, he'll let us go."
"Yeah?" Frank breathed.
There was the big question. Nelsen figured that an old, corny pattern
stuck out all over Rodan. Personal glory emphasized to a point where it
got beyond sense. And wouldn't that unreason be more likely to get worse
in the terrible lunar desert than it ever would on Earth?
Would Rodan ever release them? Wouldn't he fear encroachment on his
archeological success, even after all his data had been made public?
This was all surmise-prediction, of course, but his extreme precautions,
already taken, did not look good. On the Moon there could easily be an
arranged accident, killing Lester, and him--Frank Nelsen--and maybe even
Dutch. Rodan's pupils had that nervous way of expanding and contracting
rapidly, too. Nelsen figured that he might be reading the signs somewhat
warpedly himself. Still...?
At the end of another shift, Nelsen took a walk, farther than ever
before, up through a twisted pass that penetrated to the other side of
the Arabian Mountains. He still had that much freedom. He wanted to
think things out. In bitter, frustrating reversal of all his former
urges to get off the Earth, he wanted, like a desperate weakling, to be
back home.
Up beyond the Arabians, he saw the tread marks of a small tractor
vehicle in a patch of dust. There was a single boot print. A short
distance farther on, there was another. He examined them with a
quizzical excitement. But there weren't any more. For miles, ahead and
behind, unimpressable lava rock extended.
Another curious thing happened, only minutes later. A thousand miles
overhead, out of reach of his sabotaged transmitter, one of those around
the Moon tour bubbs, like the unfortunate _Far Side_, was passing. He
heard the program they were broadcasting. A male voice crooned out what
must be a new, popular song. He had heard so few new songs.
"Serene...
Found a queen...
And her name is Eileen..."
Nelsen's reaction wasn't even a thought, at first; it was only an eerie
tingle in all his flesh. Then, realizing what his suspicion was, he
listened further, with all his nerves taut. But no explanation of the
song's origin was given... He even tried futilely to radio the pleasure
bubb, full of Earth tourists. In minutes it had sunk behind the abrupt
horizon, leaving him with his unanswered wonder.
Girls, he thought, in the midst of his utter solitude. All girls, to
love and have ... Eileen? Cripes, could it be little old Eileen Sands,
up on her ballet-dancing toes, sometimes, at Hendricks', and humming
herself a tune? Eileen who had deserted the Bunch, meaning to approach
space in a feminine way? Holy cow, had even _she_ gotten _that_ far, so
fast?
Suddenly the possibility became a symbol of what the others of the
Bunch must be accomplishing, while here he was, trapped, stuck futilely,
inside a few bleak square miles on the far side of Earth's own
satellite!
So here was another force of Frank Nelsen's desperation.
He made up his mind--which perhaps just then was a bit mad.
With outward calm he returned to camp, slept, worked, slept and worked
again. He decided that there was no help to be had from Lester, who was
still no man of action. Better to work alone, anyway.
Fortunately, on the Moon, it was easy to call deadly forces to one's
aid. Something as simple as possible, the trick should be. Of course all
he wanted to do was to get the upper hand on Rodan and Dutch, take over
the camp, get the missing parts of his radio and Archer, borrow the
solar tractor, and get out of here. To Serenitatis Base--Serene.
His only preparation was to sharpen the edges of a diamond-shaped trowel
used at the diggings, with a piece of pumice. Then he waited.
Opportunity came near sundown, after a shift. Rodan, Dutch, and he had
come into the supply and shop dome, through its airlock. Lester and
Helen--these two introverts had somehow discovered each other, and were
getting along well together--were visible through the transparent wall,
lingering at the diggings.
Nelsen saw Rodan and Dutch unlatch the collars of their helmets,
preparatory for removing them, as they usually did if they stayed here a
while, to pack new artifacts or stow tools. Nelsen made as if to unlatch
his collar, too. But if he did it, the gasket would be unsealed, and his
helmet would no longer be airtight.
Now!--he told himself. Or would it be better to wait fourteen more
Earth-days, till another lunar dawn? Hell no--that would be chickenish
procrastination. Rodan and Dutch were a good ten feet away from him--he
was out of their reach.
With the harmless-looking trowel held like a dagger, he struck with all
his might at the stellene outer wall of the dome, and then made a
ripping motion. Like a monster gasping for breath, the imprisoned air
sighed out.
Taking advantage of the moment when Rodan's and Dutch's hands moved in
life-saving instinct to reseal their collars, Frank Nelsen leaped, and
then kicked twice, as hard as he could, in rapid succession. At Dutch's
stomach, first. Then Rodan's.
They were down--safe from death, since they had managed to re-latch
their collars. But with a cold fury that had learned to take no chances
with defeat, Nelsen proceeded to kick them again, first one and then
the other, meaning to make them insensible.
He got Dutch's pistol. He was a shade slow with Rodan. "You won't get
anything that is mine!" he heard Rodan grunt.
Frank managed to deflect the automatic's muzzle from himself. But Rodan
moved it downward purposefully, lined it up on a box marked dynamite,
and fired.
Nelsen must have thrown himself prone at the last instant, before the
ticklish explosive blew. He saw the flash and felt the dazing thud,
though most of the blast passed over him. Results far outstripped the
most furious intention of his plan, and became, not freedom, but a
threat of slow dying, an ordeal, as the sagging dome was torn from above
him, and supplies, air-restorer equipment, water and oxygen flasks, the
vitals and the batteries of the solar-electric plant--all for the most
part hopelessly shattered--were hurled far and wide, along with the
relics from Mars. The adjacent garden and quarters domes were also
shredded and swept away.
Dazed, Nelsen still got Rodan's automatic, picked himself up, saw that
Dutch and Rodan, in armor, too, had apparently suffered from the
explosion no worse than had he. He glanced at the hole in the lava rock,
still smoking in the high vacuum. Most of the force of the blast had
gone upward. He looked at Helen's toppled tomatoes and petunias--yes,
petunias--where the garden dome had been. Oddly, they didn't wilt at
once, though the little water in the hydroponic troughs was boiling away
furiously, making frosty rainbows in the slanting light of the sun.
Fragments of a solar lamp, to keep the plants growing at night, lay in
the shambles.
Rodan and Dutch were pretty well knocked out from Frank Nelsen's
footwork. Now Dave Lester and Helen Rodan came running. Lester's face
was all stunned surprise. Helen was yelling.
"I saw you do it--you--murderer!"
When she kneeled beside her father, Frank got her gun, too. He felt an
awful regret for a plan whose results far surpassed his intentions, but
there was no good in showing it, now. Someone had to be in command in a
situation which already looked black.
"Frank--I didn't suppose--" Lester stammered. "Now--what are we going to
do?"
"All that we can do--try to get out of here!" Frank snapped back at him.
With some shreds of stellene, he tied Dutch's arms behind his back, and
lashed his feet together. Then he pulled Helen away from Rodan.
"Hold her, Les," he ordered. "Maybe I overplayed my hand, but just the
same, I still think I'm the best to say what's to be done and maybe get
us out of a jam, and I can't have Helen or Rodan or anybody else doing
any more cockeyed things to screw matters up even worse than they are."
Nelsen trussed Rodan up, too, then searched Rodan's thigh pouch and
found a bunch of keys.
"You come along with me, Les and Helen," he said. "First we'll find out
what we've got left to work with."
He investigated the rocket. That the blast had toppled it over, wasn't
the worst. When he unlocked its servicing doors, he found that Rodan had
removed a vital part from the nuclear exciters of the motors. His and
Lester's blastoff drums were still in the freight compartment, but the
ionics and air-restorers had been similarly rendered unworkable. Their
oxygen and water flasks were gone. Only their bubbs were intact, but
there was nothing with which to inflate them.
When Frank examined the sun-powered tractor, he found that tiny platinum
plates had been taken from the thermocouple units. It was clear that,
with paranoid thoroughness, Rodan had concentrated all capacity to move
from the camp's vicinity in himself. He had probably locked up the
missing items in the supply dome, and now the exploding dynamite had
ruined them.
Exploring the plain, Nelsen even found quite a few of the absent parts,
all useless. Only one oxygen flask and one water flask remained intact.
Here was a diabolical backfiring of schemes, all around.
Returning to Rodan and Dutch, he examined their Archers through their
servicing ports. Rodan's was as the manufacturer intended it. But
Dutch's was jimmied the same as his and Lester's.
Nelsen swung Helen around to face him, and unlatched a port at her
Archer's shoulder.
"He put even you on a short string, kid," he pronounced bitterly, after
a moment. "Well, at least we can give you his nuclear battery for a
while, and let him have his chemical cell back."
Helen seemed about to attack him. But then her look wavered; confusion
and pain came into her face.
Nelsen was aware that he was doing almost all of the talking, but maybe
this had to be.
"So we've got a long walk," he said. "Toward the Tovie settlement. In
Archers of mostly much-reduced range. Whose fault the situation is,
can't change anything a bit. This is a life-or-death proposition, with
lasting-time the most important factor. So let's get started. Has
anybody got any suggestions to increase our chances?"
Both Rodan and Dutch had come to. Rodan said nothing. His look was pure
poison.
Dutch sneered. "Smart damn kid you are, huh, Nelsen? _You think!_ Wait
till you and your mumblin' crackpot pal get out there! I'll watch both
of you go bust, squirt!"
Lester seemed not to hear these remarks. "All that gypsum, Frank," he
said. "The water-and-oxygen mineral. But this is for real. There's no
gimmick--no energy-source--to release it and save us..."
Frank Nelsen untied Rodan's and Dutch's feet, and, at pistol point,
ordered them to move out ahead. From the charts he knew the
bearing--straight toward the constellation Cassiopeia, at this hour,
across an arm of Mare Nova, then along a pass that cut through the
mountains. Eight hundred hopeless miles...! Well, how did he know,
really? How much could a human body take? How fast could they go? How
long would the chemical batteries actually last? What breaks _might_
appear?
They loped along, even Rodan hurrying. They made a hundred miles in the
hours before darkness. With just Helen's shoulder lamp showing the way,
they continued onward through the mountains.
Was there truly much to tell, in that slow, losing struggle? Nelsen
attached the oxygen flask to his air system for a while, relieving the
drain on his battery. Then he gave the flask to Lester. Later he began
to move the nuclear battery around to all the Archers, to conserve all
of the other batteries a little. Soon they filled the drinking-water
tanks of their armor, so that they could discard the flask, whose slight
weight seemed to have tripled.
After twenty hours, the power of the chemical batteries began to wane.
David Lester, hovering close to Helen, muttered to himself, or to her.
Rodan, still marching quite strongly, retreated into an unreality of his
own.
"Have another scotch on the rocks, Ralph," he said genially. "I knew I'd
make it... Nobel Prize... Oh, you have no idea what I went through...
Most of my staff dead... But it's over, now, Ralph... Another good,
stomach-warming scotch..."
"Damn, loony squirt's crackin' up!" Dutch screamed suddenly.
He began to run, promptly falling into a volcanic crack, the bottom of
which couldn't even be found with the light. Fortunately he wasn't
wearing the nuclear battery just then.
Somehow, Lester remained cool. It was as if, with everyone else scared,
too, and nobody to show superior courage, he had found himself.
The batteries waned further. The cold of the inky lunar night--much
worse than that of interplanetary space, where there is practically
always sunshine, began to bite through the insulation of the Archers,
and power couldn't be wasted on the heating coils.