_The Grantline Camp_
In the mid-northern hemisphere upon the Earthward side of the Moon, the
giant crater of Archimedes stood brooding in silent majesty. Grim, lofty
walls, broken, pitted and scarred, rising precipitous to the upper
circular rim. Night had just fallen. The sunlight clung to the
crater-heights; it tinged with flame the jagged peaks of the Apennine
Mountains which rose in tiers at the horizon; and it flung great inky
shadows over the intervening lowlands.
Northward, the Mare Imbrium stretched mysterious and purple, its million
rills and ridges and crater holes flattened by distance and the
gathering darkness into a seeming level surface. The night slowly
deepened. The dead-black vault of the sky blazed with its brilliant
starry gems. The gibbous Earth hung high above the horizon, motionless,
save for the invisible pendulum sway over the tiny arc, of its
libration: widening to quadrature, casting upon the bleak naked Lunar
landscape its mellow Earth-glow.
Slow, measured process, this coming of the Lunar night! For an Earth-day
the sunset slowly faded on the Apennines; the poised Earth widened a
little further--an Earth-day of time, with the Earth-disc visibly
rotating, the faint tracery of its oceans and continents passing in
slow, majestic review.
Another Earth-day interval. Then another. And another. Full night now
enveloped Archimedes. Splotches of Earth-light and starlight sheen
slowly shifted as the night advanced.
Between the great crater and the nearby mountains, the broken,
pseudo-level lowlands lay wan in the Earth-light. A few hundred miles,
as distance would be measured upon Earth. A million million rills were
here. Valleys and ridges, ravines, sharp-walled canyons, cliffs and
crags--tiny craters like pock-marks.
Naked, gray porous rock everywhere. This denuded landscape! Cracked and
scarred and tumbled, as though some inexorable Titan torch had seared
and crumbled and broken it, left it now congealed like a wind-lashed sea
abruptly frozen into immobility.
* * * * *
Moonlight upon Earth so gently shines to make romantic a lover's smile!
But the reality of the Lunar night is cold beyond human rationality.
Cold and darkly silent. Grim desolation. Awesome. Majestic. A frowning
majesty that even to the most intrepid human beholder is inconceivably
forbidding.
And there were humans here now. On this tumbled plain, between
Archimedes and the mountains, one small crater amid the million of its
fellows was distinguished this night by the presence of humans. The
Grantline camp! It huddled in the deepest purple shadows on the side of
a bowl-like pit, a crudely circular orifice with a scant two miles
across its rippling rim. There was faint light here to mark the presence
of the living intruders. The blue-glow radiance of Morrell tube-lights
under a spread of glassite.
The Grantline camp stood mid-way up one of the inner cliff-walls of the
little crater. The broken, rock-strewn floor, two miles wide, lay five
hundred feet below the camp. Behind it, the jagged precipitous cliff
rose another five hundred to the heights of the upper rim. A broad
level shelf hung midway up the cliff, and upon it Grantline had built
his little group of glassite dome shelters. Viewed from above there was
the darkly purple crater floor, the upflung circular rim where the
Earth-light tinged the spires and crags with yellow sheen; and on the
shelf, like a huddled group of birds nests, Grantline's domes clung and
gazed down upon the inner valley.
Intricate task, the building of these glassite shelters! There were
three. The main one stood close at the brink of the ledge. A quadrangle
of glassite walls, a hundred feet in length by half as wide, and a scant
ten feet high to its flat-arched dome roof. Built for this purpose in
Great-New York, Grantline had brought his aluminite girders and braces
and the glassite panels in sections.
* * * * *
The air here on the Moon surface was negligible--a scant one
five-thousandth of the atmospheric pressure at the sea-level on Earth.
But within the glassite shelter, a normal Earth-pressure must be
maintained. Rigidly braced double walls to withstand the explosive
tendency, with no external pressure to counteract it. A tremendous
necessity for mechanical equipment had burdened Grantline's small
ship to its capacity. The chemistry of manufactured air, the
pressure equalizers, renewers, respirators, the lighting and
temperature-maintenance systems--all the mechanics of a space-flyer were
here.
And within the glassite double walls, there was necessity for a constant
circulation of the Erentz temperature insulating system.[D]
There was this main Grantline building, stretching low and rectangular
along the front edge of the ledge. Within it were living rooms, messroom
and kitchen. Fifty feet behind it, connected by a narrow passage of
glassite, was a similar, though smaller structure. The mechanical
control rooms, with their humming, vibrating mechanisms were here. And
an instrument room with signaling apparatus, senders, receivers,
mirror-grids and audiphones of several varieties; and an
electro-telescope, small but modern, with dome overhead like a little
Earth observatory.
From this instrument building, beside the connecting pedestrian passage,
wire cables for light, and air-tubes and strings and bundles of
instrument wires ran to the main structure--gray snakes upon the
porous, gray Lunar rock.
The third building seemed a lean-to banked against the cliff-wall, a
slanting shed-wall of glassite fifty feet high and two hundred in
length. Under it, for months Grantline's borers had dug into the cliff.
Braced tunnels were here, penetrating back and downward into this vein
of radio-active rock.
[D] An intricate system of insulation against extremes of temperature,
developed by the Erentz Kinetic Energy Corporation in the twenty-first
century. Within the hollow double shell of a shelter-wall, or an
explorer's helmet-suit, or a space-flyer's hull, an oscillating
semi-vacuum current was maintained--an extremely rarified air,
magnetically charged, and maintained in rapid oscillating motion. Across
this field the outer cold, or heat, as the case might be, could
penetrate only with slow radiation. This Erentz system gave the most
perfect temperature insulation known in its day. Without it,
interplanetary flight would have been impossible.
And it served a double purpose. Developed at first for temperature
insulation only, the Erentz system surprisingly brought to light one of
the most important discoveries made in the realm of physics of the
century. It was found that any flashing, oscillating current, whether
electronic, or the semi-vacuum of rarified air--or even a thin sheet of
whirling fluid--gave also a pressure-insulation. The kinetic energy of
the rapid movement was found to absorb within itself the latent energy
of the unequal pressure.
(The intricate postulates and mathematical formulae necessary to
demonstrate the operation of the physical laws involved would be out of
place here.)
The _Planetara_ was so equipped, against the explosive tendency of its
inner air-pressures when flying in the near-vacuum of space. In the case
of Grantline's glassite shelters, the latent energy of his room interior
air pressure went largely into a kinetic energy which in practical
effect resulted only in the slight acceleration of the vacuum current,
and thus never reached the outer wall. The Erentz engineers claimed for
their system a pressure absorption of 97.4%, leaving, in Grantline's
case, only 2.6% of room pressure to be held by the building's aluminite
bracers.
It may be interesting to note in this connection that without the Erentz
system as a basis, the great sub-sea developments on Earth and Mars of
the twenty-first century would also have been impossible. Equipped with
a fluid circulation device of the Erentz principle within its double
hull, the first submarine was able to penetrate the great ocean deeps,
withstanding the tremendous ocean pressures at depths of four thousand
fathoms.
* * * * *
The work was over now. The borers had been dismantled and packed away.
At one end of the cliff the mining equipment lay piled in a litter.
There was a heap of discarded ore where Grantline had carted and dumped
it after his first crude refining process had yielded it as waste. The
ore-slag lay like gray powder-flakes strewn down the cliff. Tracks and
ore-carts along the ledge stood discarded, mute evidence of the weeks
and months of work these helmeted miners had undergone, struggling upon
this airless, frowning world.
But now all that was finished. The radio-active ore was sufficiently
concentrated. It lay--this treasure--in a seventy-foot pile behind the
glassite lean-to, with a cage of wires over it and an insulation barrage
guarding its Gamma rays from escaping to mark its presence.
The ore-shelter was dark; the other two buildings were lighted. And
there were small lights mounted at intervals about the camp and along
the edge of the ledge. A spider ladder, with tiny platforms some twenty
feet one above the other, hung precariously to the cliff-face. It
descended the five hundred feet to the crater floor; and, behind the
camp, it mounted the jagged cliff-face to the upper rim-height, where a
small observatory platform was placed.
* * * * *
Such was the outer aspect of the Grantline Treasure Camp near the
beginning of this Lunar night, when, unbeknown to Grantline and his
score of men, the _Planetara_ with its brigands was approaching. The
night was perhaps a sixth advanced. Full night. No breath of cloud to
mar the brilliant starry heavens. The quadrant Earth hung poised like a
giant mellow moon over Grantline's crater. A bright Earth, yet no air
was here on this Lunar surface to spread its light. Only a glow,
mingling with the spots of blue tube-light on the poles along the cliff,
and the radiance from the lighted buildings.
The crater floor was dimly purple. Beyond the opposite upper rim, from
the camp-height, the towering top of distant Archimedes was visible.
No evidence of movement showed about the silent camp. Then a pressure
door in an end of the main building opened its tiny series of locks. A
bent figure came out. The lock closed. The figure straightened and gazed
about the camp. Grotesque, bloated semblance of a man! Helmeted, with
rounded dome-hood suggestion of an ancient sea diver, yet goggled and
trunked like a gas-masked fighter of the twentieth century war.
He stooped presently and disconnected metal weights which were upon his
shoes.[E]
Then he stood erect again, and with giant strides bounded along the
cliff. Fantastic figure in the blue-lit gloom! A child's dream of crags
and rocks and strange lights with a single monstrous figure in
seven-league boots.
He went the length of the ledge with his twenty-foot strides, inspected
the lights, and made adjustments. Came back, and climbed with agile,
bounding leaps up the spider ladder to the dome on the crater top. A
light flashed on up there. Then it was extinguished.
The goggled, bloated figure came leaping down after a moment.
Grantline's exterior watchman making his rounds. He came back to the
main building. Fastened the weights on his shoes. Signaled within.
The lock opened. The figure went inside.
It was early evening, after the dinner hour and before the time of
sleep, according to the camp routine Grantline was maintaining. Nine P.
M. of Earth Eastern-American time, recorded now upon his Earth
chronometer. In the living room of the main building Johnny Grantline
sat with a dozen of his men dispersed about the room, whiling away as
best they could the lonesome hours.
[E] Within the Grantline buildings it was found more convenient to use a
gravity normal to Earth. This was maintained by the wearing of
metal-weighted shoes and metal-loaded belt. The Moon-gravity is normally
approximately one-sixth the gravity of Earth.
* * * * *
"All as usual. This cursed Moon! When I get home--if ever I do get
home--"
"Say your say, Wilks. But you'll spend your share of the gold-leaf and
thank your constellations that you had your chance!"
"Let him alone! Come on, Wilks, take a hand here. This game is no good
with three."
The man who had been outside flung his hissing helmet recklessly to the
floor and unsealed his suit. "Here, get me out of this. No, I won't
play. I can't play your cursed game with nothing at stake!"
"Commissioner's orders."
A laugh went up at the sharp look Johnny Grantline flung from where he
sat reading in a corner of the room.
"Commander's orders. No gambling gold-leafers tolerated here."
"Play the game, Wilks." Grantline said quietly. "We all know it's
infernal doing nothing."
"He's been struck by Earth-light," another man laughed. "Commander, I
told you not to let that guy Wilks out at night."
* * * * *
A rough but good-natured lot of men. Jolly and raucous by nature in
their leisure hours. But there was too much leisure here now. Their
mirth had a hollow sound. In older times, explorers of the frozen polar
zones had to cope with inactivity, loneliness and despair. But at least
they were on their native world. The grimness of the Moon was eating
into the courage of Grantline's men. An unreality here. A weirdness.
These fantastic crags. The deadly silence. The nights, almost two weeks
of Earth-time in length, congealed by the deadly frigidity of Space. The
days of black sky, blaring stars and flaming Sun, with no atmosphere to
diffuse the daylight. Days of weird blending sheen of illumination with
most of the Sun's heat radiating so swiftly from the naked Lunar surface
that the outer temperature still was cold. And day and night, always the
familiar beloved Earth-disc hanging poised up near the zenith. From
thinnest crescent to full Earth, and then steadily back again to
crescent.
All so abnormal, irrational, disturbing to human senses. With the mining
work over, an irritability grew upon Grantline's men. And perhaps since
the human mind is so wonderful, elusive a thing, there lay upon these
men an indefinable sense of impending disaster. Johnny Grantline felt
it. He thought about it now as he sat in the room corner watching Wilks
being forced into the plaget-game, and he found it strong within him.
Unreasonable, ominous depression! Barring the accident which had
disabled his little space-ship when they reached this small crater hole,
his expedition had gone well. His instruments, and the information he
had from the former explorers, had picked up the ore-vein with a scant
month of search.
* * * * *
The vein had now been exhausted; but the treasure was here. Nothing was
left but to wait for the _Planetara_. The men were talking of that now.
"She ought to be well mid-way from here to Ferrok-Shahn by now. When do
you figure she'll be back here, and signal us?"
"Twenty days. Give her another five now to Mars, and five in port.
That's ten. We'll pick her signals in three weeks, mark me."
"Three weeks! Just give me three weeks of reasonable sunrise and sunset!
This cursed Moon! You mean, Williams, next daylight."
"Hah! He's inventing a Lunar language. You'll be a Moon-man yet, if you
live here long enough."
Olaf Swenson, the big blond fellow from the Scandia fiords, came and
flung himself down by Grantline.
"Ay tank they bane without not enough to do, Commander. If the ore yust
would not give out--"
"Three weeks--it isn't very long, Ollie."
"No. Maybe not."
From across the room somebody was saying, "If the _Comet_ hadn't smashed
on us, damn me but I'd ask the Commander to let some of us take her
back. The discarded equipment could go."
"Shut up, Billy. She is smashed."
The little _Comet_, cruising in search of the ore, had come to grief
just as the ore was found. It lay now on the crater floor with its nose
bashed into an upflung spire of rock. Wrecked beyond repair. Save for
the pre-arrangement with the _Planetara_, the Grantline party would have
been helpless here on the Moon. Knowledge of that--although no one ever
suspected but that the _Planetara_ would come safely--served to add to
the men's depression. They were cut off, virtually helpless on a strange
world. Their signalling devices were inadequate even to reach Earth.
Grantline's power batteries were running low.[F] He could not attempt
wide-flung signals without jeopardizing the power necessary for the
routine of his camp in the event of the _Planetara_ being delayed. Nor
was his electro-telescope adequate to pick small objects at any great
distance.[G]
All of Grantline's effort, in truth, had gone into equipment for the
finding and gathering of the treasure. The safety of the expedition had
to that extent been neglected.
Swenson was mentioning that now.
"You all agreed to it," Johnny said shortly. "Every man here voted that,
above everything, what we wanted was to get the radium."
[F] The Gravely storage tanks--the power used by the Grantline
expedition--were heavy and bulky affairs. Economy of space on the Comet
allowed but few of them.
[G] Electro-telescopes of most modern use and power were too large and
used too much power to be available to Grantline.
* * * * *
A dynamic little fellow, this Johnny Grantline. Short of temper
sometimes, but always just, and a perfect leader of men. In stature he
was almost as small as Snap. But he was thick-set, with a smooth shaven,
keen-eyed, square-jawed face, and a shock of brown tousled hair. A man
of thirty-five, though the decision of his manner, the quiet dominance
of his voice, mode him seem older. He stood up now, surveying the
blue-lit glassite room with its low ceiling close overhead. He was
bowlegged; in movement he seemed to roll with a stiff-legged gait like
some sea captain of former days on the deck of his swaying ship.
Queer-looking figure! Heavy flannel shirt and trousers, boots heavily
weighted, and bulky metal-loaded belt strapped about his waist.
He grinned at Swenson. "When we divide this treasure, everyone will be
happy, Ollie."
The treasure was estimated by Grantline to be the equivalent of ninety
millions in gold-leaf. A hundred and ten millions in the gross as it now
stood, with twenty millions to be deducted by the Federated Refiners for
reducing it to the standard purity of commercial radium. Ninety
millions, with only a million and a half to come off for expedition
expenses, and the _Planetara_ Company's share another million. A nice
little stake.
Grantline strode across the room with his rolling gait.
"Cheer up, boys. Who's winning there? I say, you fellows--"
An audiphone buzzer interrupted him, a call from the duty man in the
instrument room of the nearby building.
Grantline clicked the receiver. The room fell into silence. Any call was
unusual--nothing ever happened here in the camp.
The duty man's voice sounded over the room.
"Signals coming! Not clear. Will you come over, Commander?"
Signals!
* * * * *
It was never Grantline's way to enforce needless discipline. He offered
no objection when every man in the camp rushed through the connecting
passages. They crowded the instrument room where the tense duty man sat
bending over his helio receivers. The mirrors were swaying.
The duty man looked up and met Grantline's gaze.
"I ran it up to the highest intensity. Commander. We ought to get
it--not let it pass."
"Low scale, Peter?"
"Yes. Weakest infra-red. I'm bringing it up, even though it uses too
much of our power." The duty man was apologetic.
"Get it," said Grantline shortly.
"I had a swing a minute ago. I think it's the _Planetara_."
"_Planetara!_" The crowding group of men chorused it. How could it be
the _Planetara_?
But it was. The call presently came in clear. Unmistakably the
_Planetara_, turned back now from her course to Ferrok-Shahn.
"How far away, Peter?"
The duty man consulted the needles of his dial scale. "Close! Very weak
infra-red. But close. Around thirty thousand miles, maybe. It's Snap
Dean calling."
The _Planetara_ here within thirty thousand miles! Excitement and
pleasure swept the room. The _Planetara's_ coming had for so long been
awaited so eagerly!
The excitement communicated to Grantline. It was unlike him to be
incautious; yet now with no thought save that some unforeseen and
pleasing circumstance had brought the _Planetara_ ahead of time;
incautious Grantline certainly was.
"Raise the ore-barrage."
"I'll go! My suit is here."
* * * * *
A willing volunteer rushed out to the ore-shed. The Gamma rays, which in
the helio-room of the _Planetara_ came so unwelcome to Snap and me, were
loosed.
"Can you send, Peter?" Grantline demanded.
"Yes, with more power."
"Use it."
Johnny dictated the message of his location which we received. In his
incautious excitement he ignored the secret code.
An interval passed. The ore was occulted again. No message had come from
us--just Snap's routine signal in the weak infra-red, which we hoped
Grantline would not get.
The men crowding Grantline's instrument room waited in tense silence.
Then Grantline tried the telescope. Its current weakened the lights with
the drain upon the distributors, and cooled the room with a sudden
deadly chill as the Erentz insulating system slowed down.
The duty man looked suddenly frightened. "You'll bulge out our walls,
Commander. The internal pressure--"
"We'll chance it."
They picked up the image of the _Planetara_! It came from the telescope
and shone clear on the grid--the segment of star-field with a tiny,
cigar-shaped blob. Clear enough to be unmistakable. The _Planetara_!
Here now over the Moon, almost directly overhead, poised at what the
altimeter scale showed to be a fraction under thirty thousand miles.
The men gazed in awed silence. The _Planetara_ coming....
But the altimeter needle was motionless. The _Planetara_ was hanging
poised.
A sudden gasp went about the room. The men stood with whitening faces,
gazing at the _Planetara's_ image. And at the altimeter needle. It was
moving. The _Planetara_ was descending. But not with an orderly swoop.
The image showed the ship clearly. The bow tilted up, then dipped down.
But then in a moment it swung up again. The ship turned partly over.
Righted itself. Then swayed again, drunkenly.
The watching men were stricken into horrified silence. The _Planetara's_
image momentarily, horribly, grew larger. Swaying. Then turning
completely over, rotating slowly end over end.
The _Planetara_, out of control, was falling!