_Life Monstrous and Horrible_
"It looks," said Spud O'Malley, "as if some bad little spalpeen of the
skies had thrown pebbles at it when 'twas soft. It's fair pockmarked
with places where the stones have hit."
He was staring through a forward lookout, where the whole sky seemed
filled with a tremendous disk. One quarter was brilliantly alight; it
formed a fat crescent within whose arms the rest of the globe was held
in fainter glowing. By comparison, this greater portion was dark, though
illuminated by earthlight far brighter than any moonlight on Earth.
But light or dark, the surface showed nothing but an appalling
desolation where the rocky expanse had been still further torn and
disrupted--pockmarked, as O'Malley had said, with great rings that had
been the walls of tremendous volcanoes.
Chet was consulting a map where a similar area of circular markings had
been named by scientists of an earlier day.
"Hercules," he mused, and stared out at the great circle of the moon.
"The crater of Hercules! Yes, that must be it. That dark area off to one
side is the Lake of Dreams; below it is the Lake of Death. Atlas!
Hercules! Suffering cats, what volcanoes they must have been!"
"I don't like your names," objected O'Malley. "Lake of Death! That's
not so good. And I don't see any lake, and the whole Moon is wrong side
up, according to your map."
Chet reached for the ball-control, moved it, and swung their ship in a
slow, rotary motion. The result was an apparent revolution of the Moon.
"There, it's right side up," Chet laughed; "that is, if you can tell me
what direction is 'up' out here in space. And, as for the names, don't
let them disturb you; they don't mean anything. Some old-timer with a
little three-inch telescope probably named them. The darker areas looked
like seas to them. Astronomers have known better for a long time; and
you and I--we're darned sure of it now."
* * * * *
The great sea of shadow, a darker area within the shaded portion whose
only light came from the Earth, was plainly a vast expanse of blackened
rock. An immense depression, like the bottom of some earlier sea, it was
heaved into corrugations that Chet knew would be mountain-high at close
range. Marked with the orifices of what once had been volcanoes, the
floor of that Lake of Death was hundreds of miles in extent.
But as for seas and lakes, there was no sign of water in the whole,
vast, desolate globe. An unlikely place, Chet admitted, for the
beginning of their search, and yet--those flashes of light!--the S O S!
They had been real!
The bow blast had been roaring for over an hour; their strong
deceleration made the forward part of the ship seem "down." And down it
was, too, by reason of the pull of the great globe they were
approaching. But the roaring exhaust up ahead was checking their speed;
Chet measured and timed the apparent growth of the Moon-disk and nodded
his satisfaction at their reduced speed.
"This will stop us," he said. "I didn't know but we would have to swing
off, shoot past, and return under control. But we're all right, and
there is the place we are looking for--the big ring of Hercules, the
level floor of rock inside it. And over at one side the smaller
crater--"
* * * * *
He was gazing entranced at the mammoth circle that had been a volcano's
throat--the very one he had seen flashed on the screen. He moved the
control to open a side exhaust and change their direction of fall. He
was still staring, with emotions too overwhelming for words, and Spud
O'Malley was silent beside him, as the great ring spread out and became
an up-thrust circle of torn, jagged mountains some thirty or more miles
across and directly below.
They fell softly into that circle. Its mountainous sides were high; they
blocked off the view of the enormous terraces beyond that had been the
crater's sloping sides.
From the direction that had suddenly become "east," the rising sun's
strong light struck in a slant to make the bar rocks seem incandescent.
On one side the giant rim of the encircling mountains was black with
shadow. The shadow reached out across the vast, rocky floor almost to
the foot of the opposite wall many miles away. It enveloped their
falling ship like a cushioning, ethereal sea: velvety, softly black,
almost palpable.
It was wrapping them about in the darkness of night as Chet's slender
hand touched so delicately upon the ball-control--checked them, eased
off, drew back again until the thundering exhausts echoed softly where
their ship hung suspended a hundred feet above a rocky floor. The
shrouding darkness erased the harsh contours of mountain and plain; it
seemed shielding this place of desolation and horror from critical,
perhaps unfriendly eyes of these beings from another world. And Chet
laid their ship down gently and silently on the earthlit plain as if he,
too, felt this sense of intrusion--as if there might be those who would
resent the trespass of unwanted guests.
But Spud O'Malley must have experienced no such delicacy of feeling. He
let go one long pent-up breath.
"And may the saints protect us!" he said. "The Lake of Death outside,
and inside here is purgatory itself, or I don't know my geography. But
you made it, Chet, me bhoy; you made it! What a sweet little pilot you
are!"
* * * * *
"There's air here," Chet was telling his companion later; "air of a
sort, but it's no good to us."
He pointed to the spectro-analyzer with its groupings of lines and light
bands. "Carbon dioxide," he explained, "and some nitrogen, but mighty
little of either. See the pressure gage; it's way down.
"But that won't bother us too much. We've got some suits stowed away in
the supplies that will hold an atmosphere of pressure, and their oxygen
tanks will do the rest. We were ready for anything we might find on our
Dark Moon trip, but we didn't need them there. Now they'll come in
handy."
"That's all right," O'Malley assured him; "I've gone down under water in
a diving suit; I've gone outside a ship for emergency repairs in a suit
like yours when the air was as thin as this; I can stand it either way.
But what I want to know is this:
"What the divil chance is there of findin' your man, Haldgren, in such
a frozen corner of purgatory as this? How could he live here? Here
you've come in a fine, big ship, and his was a little bit of a bullet by
comparison. Yet I doubt if you could live here for five years with all
your big oxygen supply. Now, how could he have done it with his little
outfit?
"And what has he eaten? Does this look like a likely place for shootin'
rabbits, I ask you? Can a man catch a mess of fish in that empty Lake of
Death? Or did Haldgren bring a sandwich with him, it may be?"
* * * * *
Chet Bullard shook his head doubtfully.
"Don't get sarcastic!" he grinned. "You can't think of any wilder
questions than I have asked myself.
"He couldn't have lived here, Spud; that's the only answer. It just
isn't humanly possible. All I know is that he did it. I can't tell you
how I know it, but I do. Those lights were a human call for help. No
living man but Haldgren could have flashed them. He's alive--or he was
then; that's all I know."
Spud crossed the control room as he had done a score of times to look
through a glass port at the world outside. Chet, too, turned to the
lookout by which he stood and stared through it. The men had found
themselves surprisingly light within the ship. They had been compelled
to guard against sudden motion; a step, instead of carrying them one
stride, might hurl them the length of the room. This lowered
gravitational pull helped to explain to the pilot that outer world.
There, close by, was the rocky plain on which he had landed the ship:
Smooth and shiny as obsidian in places, again it was spongy gray, the
color of volcanic rock, bubbling with imprisoned gases at the instant
of hardening. It stretched out and down, that gently rolling plain, for
a thousand yards or more, then ended in a welter of nightmare forms done
in stone. It was like the work of some demented sculptor's tortured
brain.
* * * * *
Jutting tongues of rock stood in air for a hundred--two hundred--feet.
Chet hardly dared estimate size in this place where all was so strange
and unearthly. The hot rock had spouted high in the thin air, and it had
frozen as it threw itself frantically out from the inferno of heat that
had given it birth. The jets sprayed out like spume-topped waves; they
were whipped into ribbons that the winds of this world could not tear
down, and the ribbons shone, waving white in the earthlight. The
tortured stone was torn and ripped into twisted contortions whose very
writhing told of the hell this had been. Its grotesque horror struck
through to the deeper levels of Chet's mind with a feeling he could not
have depicted in words.
From the higher elevation where their ship lay he could look out and
across this welter of storm-lashed rock to see it level off, then vanish
where another crater mouth yawned black. Here was the inner crater! It
had seemed small before; it was huge now--a place of mystery, a black,
waiting throat into which Chet knew he must go--a place of indefinable
terror.
But it was the place, too, whence strange flashes had come, flashes that
had told of the distress and suffering of men since the time when
wireless waves had been widely used. The old call--the S O S!--it had
come from that throat; it had seemed a call sent directly to him! And
Chet Bullard's eyes held steadily toward that place of mystery and of a
sender unknown.
"I'm going down," he told himself more than O'Malley. "There's something
about it I can't understand, something pretty damnable about it, I
admit. But, whatever it is, that's what I am here to find out."
"'Tis a divil of a place to die," said O'Malley, "and not one I'd pick
out at all. But it may be we won't have to. I'm goin' along, of course."
* * * * *
The master pilot was reaching for the flexible metal suit he had brought
from the store room. It was air-tight, gas-proof; it would hold an
internal pressure far beyond anything the wearer would demand; and its
headpiece was flexible like the body of the suit, and would fit him
closely.
He drew the suit up over the clothes he wore and closed the front with
one pull of a metal tab. Within, soft rubber-faced cushions had
interlocked; the body would fasten to the headpiece in the same way. But
Chet paused with the headpiece in his hand.
He looked at the glass window that would be before his eyes; at the thin
diaphragms that would come over his ears and that would admit all
ordinary sounds; and he tried out the microphone attachment that he
could switch on to bring to his ears the faintest whisper from outside.
All this he examined with care while he seemed to be thinking deeply.
Then he straightened and looked at his companion.
"No, Spud, you're not going," he said. "This is my job. You'll stay with
the ship. You and I make a rather small army: we don't know yet what we
may be up against, and we mustn't risk all our forces in one advance.
I'll see what is there; and, in case anything happens, you can take the
ship back. I've taught you enough on the way over; I had this very
thing in mind."
He slipped the helmet over his blond head before O'Malley could reply.
* * * * *
The ear-pieces and the microphone allowed him to hear. Another diaphragm
in the center of the metal across his chest took his own voice and
shouted it into the room.
"Sure, I know you want to go. Spud; but you'll have to stay in reserve.
Now show me how well you can fly the ship. Lift her off; then drift over
that crater, and we'll have a look-see!"
Spud O'Malley's face was glum as he obeyed. Spud had seen nothing but
death in this place of horror--Chet had observed that plainly--yet it
was equally plain that the Irish pilot was finding the order to live in
safety a bitter dose. But Spud knew how to take orders; he lifted the
little ball gently and swung the ship out toward the blackness of that
deeper pit.
Chet was watching the changing terrain. He saw the place of
solid-spouted rock end; saw it flatten out to an undulating surface that
had rolled and heaved itself into many-colored shapes. Even in the
earthlight the kaleidoscopic colors were vivid in their changing reds
and blues and yellow sheens. Then this surface sloped sharply away,
though here it was rough with broken rock where half-hardened lava,
coughed from that throat, had fallen back and adhered to the molten
sides.
This rock in the inner crater was gray, pale and ghostly in the
earthlight. It went down and still down where Chet's eyes could not
follow--down to an utter blackness. Chet was staring speculatively at
that waiting dark when the first flash came.
Blindingly keen! A flash of white light!--another and another! It
blazed dazzlingly into their cabin in vivid dashes and dots--the same
signal as before was being repeated!
* * * * *
A hundred yards away was a little shelf of rock. Chet jerked at
O'Malley's shoulder with his metal-cased hand and pointed. "Set her
down!" he ordered "Let me out there! We can't put the ship down where
those lights are; the throat is too narrow; there may be air-currents
that would smash us on a sharp rock. I'll go down! You wait! I'll be
back."
He was opening the inner door of the entrance port. Another closure in
the outer shell made an air-lock. He took time for one grip at the hand
of Spud O'Malley, one grin of excited, adventurous joy that wrinkled
about his eyes behind the window of his helmet--then he picked up a
detonite pistol, examined again its charge of tiny shells, jammed it
firmly into the holster at his waist and swung the big door shut behind
him.
And Pilot O'Malley watched him go with a premonition that he dared not
speak. He heard the closing of the outer door; saw the tall, slender
figure in a metal suit like a knight of old as Chet waved once, settled
the oxygen tank across his shoulders and picked his way carefully over a
waste of shattered stone that led down and down into the dark.
Then the Irishman looked once at the suit he had expected to wear,
stared back where the figure of Chet had vanished, then dropped his head
upon his hands while his homely face was twisted convulsively.
* * * * *
It had come so soon! The great adventure was upon them before he had
realized. The reconnaissance--the flashes--and then Chet had gone! And
now he was alone in a silent ship that rested quietly in this soundless
world. The silence was heavy upon him; it seemed pressing in with actual
weight to bear him down. It was shattered at the last by the faintest of
whispered echoes from without.
Spud was on his feet in an instant, his eyes straining at one lookout
after another, each giving him a view of only the desolation he knew and
hated.
What could it have been? he demanded. He found and rejected a dozen
answers before he saw, far down in the black crater-mouth, a flash of
red; then heard again that ghost of a sound and knew it for what it was.
Thick walls, these of the space ship, and insulated well; and the thin
atmosphere of this wild world could cut a blast of sound to a mere
fraction of its volume! But the walls were admitting a fragmental echo
of what must have been a reverberating voice. They were quivering to the
roar of exploding detonite!
It was Chet! He was fighting, he was in trouble! Spud's trembling hands
steadied upon the metal control; he lifted the ship as smoothly as even
Chet might have done, and he drove it out and down into a throat too
narrow for safety, but where the tiny, red flash of a weapon had called
with an S O S as plain as any lettered call--a message to which brave
men have everywhere responded.
* * * * *
He saw Chet but once. The master pilot had shown him the flare release
lever; he moved it now, and the place of darkness was suddenly blinding
with light. There were rocks close at hand; the crater had narrowed to a
funnel throat that was cut and terraced as if by human hands. Below, it
ended in a smooth stone floor where the lava had sealed it shut.
From a terrace came the gleaming reflection of Chet's suit. Miraculously
the gleam was doubled, as if another in similar garb stood at his side.
And beyond, from blocks of stone, came leaping things--living creatures!
The light died. Spud realized he had not opened the release lever full.
He fumbled for it--found it, jammed it over! And in the light that
followed he saw only empty, terraced walls where nothing moved, and a
lava floor below that, for an instant, gaped open, then again was smooth
and firm.
And the thunder of his ship's exhausts came back to him from those
threatening walls to tell of a loneliness more certain and terrible than
any solitude he had found in the silence where he had waited above.
But through all his dismay ran an undercurrent of puzzled wonderment.
For here on a dead world, where all men agreed there could be no life,
he had seen the impossible.
Only one glimpse before the light had died; only for an instant had he
seen the things that leaped upon Chet--but he knew! Never again could
any man tell Spud O'Malley that the Moon was a lifeless globe ... and he
knew that the life was of a form monstrous and horrible and malign!