_"And I've Brought You to This!"_
The master pilot, when he stepped forth upon that weird globe which was
the Moon, found himself plunged into a spectral world. Even from within
the air-tight suit, through whose helmet-glass he peered, he sensed, as
he had not when inside the ship, the vast desolation, the frozen
emptiness of this rocky waste.
His suit of woven metal was lined throughout with heavy fabric of
insuline fibers, that strange product brought from the jungle heat of
the upper Amazon to keep out the bitter cold of this frozen world. His
ship was felted with the same material between its double walls; without
it there would have been no resisting the cold of these interstellar
reaches.
But, despite the padding within his suit, he felt the numbing cold of
this dead world strike through. And the bleak and frigid barrenness that
met his gaze was so implacably hostile to any living thing as to bring a
shudder of more than physical cold.
No warming sun, as yet, reflected from the rocks. About him was the
blackness of a fire-formed lithosphere, whose lighter veining and
occasional ashy fields were made ghostly in the earthlight.
One slow, all-seeing glance at this!--one moment of wondering amazement
when he tilted his head far back that he might look up to the mouth of
the crater and see, in a dead-black sky, the great crescent of earth--a
vast, incredible moon peeping over the serrate edge. Then, as if the
interval of time since leaving the ship had been measured in hours
instead of brief seconds, he remembered the flashing lights that had
signaled from below.
* * * * *
His first step carried him, slipping and sprawling awkwardly, across a
rocky slope white with the rime of carbon dioxide frost. He came to his
feet and turned once to wave toward the ship where he knew Spud O'Malley
must be watching from a lookout. Then, moving cautiously, to learn the
gage of his own strength in this world of diminished weights, he started
down.
Rough going, Chet found; the wall of this great throat had not hardened
without showing signs of its tortured coughing. But Chet learned to
judge distance, and he found that a fifty-foot chasm was a trifle to be
crossed in one leap; huge boulders, whose molten sides had frozen as
they ran and dripped, could be surmounted by the spring of his leg
muscles that could throw him incredibly through the air. And always he
went downward toward the place where the lights had flashed.
They came once more. He had descended a thousand feet, he was
estimating, when the black igneous rocks blazed blindingly with a
reflected light like that of a thousand suns.
Another hundred feet below, down a precipitous slope, was a broad table
of rock. He saw it in the instant before he threw one metal-clad arm
across the eye-piece of his helmet to shut out the glare. And he saw, in
that fraction of a second, a moving figure, another like himself, clad
in an armored suit whose curves and fine-woven mesh caught the light in
a million of sparkling flames.
It was Haldgren, he told himself; and there was something that came
chokingly into his throat at the thought. That lonely figure--one tiny
dot of life on a bleak and lifeless stage! It was pitiful, this undying
effort to signal, to let his own world know that he still lived.
* * * * *
Chet did not put it into coherent words, but there was an overwhelming
emotion that was part pity and part pride. He was suddenly glad and
thankful to belong to a race of men who could carry on like this--who
never said die. And, as the glare winked out, he threw himself
recklessly down that last slope and brought up in a huddle at the feet
of the one who had started back in affright. There was one metal-cased
hand that went in a helpless gesture to the throat; the figure, all
silvery white in the dim Earth-glow, staggered back against a wall of
rock; only by inches did it miss a fall from the precipice edge where
the rock platform ended.
From the floor, where his fall had flung him in awkward posture, Chet
saw this; saw it and marveled vaguely. What picture he had formed of
Haldgren--what he had expected of him--he could not have told. Certainly
it was not this slenderly youthful figure, nor this reaction that was
more of fright than startled amazement. And the voice! Surely he had
heard an involuntary, half-stifled scream!
He came slowly to his feet. And he was wondering now if his deductions
had been wrong. He had been to sure that the sender of those messages
was an Earth-man; he had been so certain of finding Haldgren.
* * * * *
Slowly he crossed the table of rock toward the waiting figure; gently he
extended his hands, palms upward, in a gesture of peaceful promise.
Whoever, whatever this was--this Moon-being who had signaled and in
doing so had happened upon the letters that had a definite meaning of
Earth--Chet knew he must not frighten him. One outstretched hand touched
the metal that cased an arm; moved upward to the headpiece, as
close-fitting as his own; tilted it that the light of Earth might shine
within and show him what manner of being he had found.
And Chet, who had seen strange creatures on that Dark Moon where he and
Harkness had explored, was prepared, despite the suit so like his own,
to see some weird being of this newer world. But for what the soft light
of that distant Earth disclosed he was entirely unprepared.
Eyes, blue and lovely as an azure sea but wide with terror and dismay;
eyes that showed plainly a consternation of unbelief that changed
slowly, as the blue eyes stared into Chet's gray ones, until they were
suddenly misty with tears; and the figure sagged and would have dropped
at his feet had he not caught it in his arms.
He heard his own voice exclaiming in wonderment: "A girl! One of our own
kind! Out here! On the Moon!"
And another voice, sweetly tremulous, replied:
"Oh, it's true--it's true! You have come! You read my call! Oh, I hardly
dared hope--"
Then the thrilling ecstasy of happiness in the voice gave place to
accents of dismay as some horror of fear swept in upon her.
"And I've brought you to this! You will be lost! Quick! Climb for your
life! I will come after. Quick! Quick!"
* * * * *
There was agony in the voice now, and the figure wrenched itself from
Chet's arms to point one slender hand upward in frantic urging, while
yet the head turned that the eyes might look backward as if some danger
threatened from below.
"I've got a ship," Chet assured her. "God knows who you are or how you
got here, but it's all right now. We'll leave."
He had regained his grip upon one of those slender hands and was
preparing to swing her up to the top of an incredibly high rock. Her
scream checked him and sent his one free hand to the detonite pistol at
his waist.
"Behind you!" she cried. "Look back! They have come out!"
The crater-pit behind and below them was black with the inky blackness
of smooth, fire-formed rock. Its many facets were smooth and polished;
they made mirrors, many of them, for the earthlight reflected from the
crater mouth. They served to diffuse this dim light and throw it again
upon the monstrous blacknesses that were swarming from below.
"Men!" thought Chef in one instant of half-comprehension. Then, as he
saw the chalk-white bodies, the dead and flabby whiteness of their faces
from which red eyes stared, he revised his estimate; here was nothing
human.
The pistol was in his hand, but as yet he had not fired. Only the terror
in the girl's voice had told him that these were enemies; he waited for
a closer view or for some direct attack, and needed to wait but a
moment.
Only an instant after he had seen, the chalk-white bodies clustered
below were in motion. They came leaping up the smooth expanses of rock,
and they were obscured at times as if by black curtains that were drawn
across their bodies. Then they would flash out again in dead-white
nakedness.
* * * * *
It was uncanny. Chet had a feeling that they were wrapping themselves in
black invisibility. Only when a score of the white things threw
themselves out into space did he know the truth.
Out and upward they sprang, to soar above Chet's head and land on the
slope above. All escape was cut off now; but it was not this thought
that held Chet motionless for that moment of horror. It was the glimpse
he had had against the light of the crater mouth of beating, flailing
wings that whipped the thin air above him; of curved claws; and of long,
horrible tails that might have belonged to giant rats. And the demoniac
cries that the thin air brought him were no more suggestive of devils
unleashed than were the leathery wings and the fleshy tails of the
beasts.
Yet it was not this alone that stunned the mind of the master pilot, but
the horrible incongruity, of this monstrous inhumanness allied with the
human form of their bodies. And throughout he observed, with a curious
sense of detachment, the furious beating of the wings, almost useless in
the thin air, and the expansion and contraction of sac-like membranes on
each side of the necks which he took to be auxiliary lungs.
* * * * *
It was the girl's action that brought Chet to his senses. She moved
slowly across the smooth table of rock toward the three or four beasts
who had gained its level. Her head was bowed in utter dejection; Chet
sensed it as plainly as if she had spoken. She held out her hands
helplessly toward the creatures--and in that instant Chet's pistol
spoke.
Tiny shells, those of a detonite pistol, and the grain of explosive in
the tip of each bullet is microscopic. But no body, human or inhuman, be
it made of flesh, can withstand the shattering concussion of that
exploding shell.
The beasts beside that figure, slenderly girlish even in its metal
sheath, fell into the pit beyond; their screams rang horribly as they
fell. There were others who took their places, and they, too, vanished
under the smashing shots.
And then, after timeless moments of waiting, while the only sound was
the half-audible voice of the girl who sobbed: "Now you are surely lost.
They will kill you--you should not have fired--I should never have
brought you here"--there came the familiar thunder of a ship's exhausts.
Down from above, a black shadow came silently crashing; a blaze of light
terrific in its brilliance brought an exclamation to Chet's lips and
hope to his heart.
"Spud! You old fool, you're coming to get us!"
But the words ended with an avalanche of bodies that threw themselves
down the black slope. There were others coming from below, leaping from
the stones. The ledge was filled with them.
Chet was firing blindly as he felt himself borne down--felt long fingers
that ripped, then closed about his throat and jammed the metal of his
suit in chokingly. He heard the beating of giant wings about him; felt
himself half-carried and half-thrown toward a floor of rock far below.
There was an opening that loomed blackly in that floor; one glimpse of
his surroundings Chet had before the press of bodies closed him in. They
were forcing the shining, silvery figure of a girl into that black
opening--dropping her! Then he felt himself hurled into the same void,
while above him a ship of space thundered vainly from her great exhausts
as if roaring in rage at her own futility.