On leaving the metal shed which had housed his one-man vehicle, Ted
Dustin hovered for a moment to get his bearings—then shot away from the
earth at such speed that his exterior thermometer registered a terrific
heat from the shell of his craft before five seconds had elapsed. Forced
to slacken his speed because of the danger of crippling his machine, he
proceeded at a more leisurely pace until his instruments told him he was
entirely out of the earth’s atmosphere.
Once assured of this, he set his meteoroid detector—an extremely
sensitive magnetic instrument which registered the approach of all
meteoric masses, automatically repelling the smaller ones by blasts from
the exhaust of the atomotor, and driving the craft away from those of
greater mass. He next set his automatic course corrector, which was
designed to throw the machine back on its course after each forced
deviation. Then he set the motor for full speed ahead.
To his surprise and satisfaction he found, on glancing at the magnetic
speedometer, that the little untested motor was driving the craft almost
twice as fast as he had anticipated. He would thus, barring accidents,
be able to reach the moon in a day and a half instead of the three days
he had previously allowed himself for the undertaking. This necessitated
the setting of a new course, as he would otherwise have arrived at the
moon’s path just a day and a half ahead of that satellite.
Having made his calculations and adjusted his instruments accordingly,
he opened his visor, swallowed a concentrated food pellet, drank a cup
of hot coffee from the thermos tank, and lighted his black briar.
Finding the cabin uncomfortably cold with his visor open, he drew up an
extra set of glass panels all around and turned on his atomic heater.
Then he studied the translations of the professor, hoping that he might
thus learn enough of the Lunite writing to form a basis for intelligent
communication.
When the first hour had elapsed he looked back at the earth, which
appeared as an enormous, semi-luminous globe set in a black sky, its
seas and continents faintly defined by the light of the full moon. The
disc of the sun remained hidden behind the earth, but other heavenly
bodies were far brighter in appearance, shining from this black sky,
than he had ever seen them appear from on earth.
As the hours passed and the apparent size of the earth grew less while
that of the moon grew correspondingly greater, he was surprised at not
having encountered a single meteor. Presently, after about twelve hours
of travel, one caused the craft to swerve, and he noticed with
satisfaction that the automatic course corrector functioned perfectly.
He swallowed another food pellet, sipped his coffee, and tried to sleep,
but despite the fact that he had trained himself to take rest or go
without it as the occasion required, he found sleep out of the question.
The excitement of his thrilling race with the earth’s satellite was too
much for that. He could scarcely bear to close his eyes for a moment,
for looking and wondering.
Before he realized it, twenty-four hours had slipped by. The shrinking
shape of the earth was now on his left—the silver disc of the moon, with
craters, hills and valleys, was now plainly visible to the naked eye, on
his right. He was traveling with his keel in the plane of the ecliptic.
As he progressed, the prow leaned more and more toward the moon’s north
pole.
The last twelve hours were packed with wonders, thrills, and dangers.
Previously he had encountered only a relatively few meteoroids. Now, he
found they traveled in swarms in and near the neutral gravity point
between moon and earth. His craft swerved this way and that—dropped—or
shot suddenly upward, as huge masses of meteoric matter hurtled
dangerously near it. He caught fleeting glimpses of these desultory
travelers, some of them almost perfectly spherical, others jagged lumps
of rock and metal—grim remnants of some planetary or planetoidal tragedy
of the past.
With the neutral gravity point well past and the moon directly beneath
his keel, the danger from meteoroids was considerably lessened. The
delays were more than compensated for by the increasing pull of the moon
itself.
His goal almost realized, Ted’s next problem was to decide where to
land. Copernicus, plainly visible to the north east with its brilliant
yellow ray system, and Tycho, to the south, with its still more dazzling
white rays branching out in all directions, were the two most
conspicuous objects on the lunar landscape.
Although his purpose was to find the belligerent ruler, P’an-ku, his
only hint as to his whereabouts was the probability that the crater,
Hipparchus, was somewhere within the limits of that worth’s empire,
which might be as extensive as the moon itself, or confined to a
relatively small area. The thing to do, he decided, was to land at
Hipparchus and investigate.
As he approached the great ring-mountain, Ted saw no signs of life. The
damage wrought by his projectile, however, was evident—for in the center
of the huge, enclosed plain, gaped a jagged black hole fully five miles
in diameter, while the interior of the crater was strewn with jagged
rock debris, some of the larger fragments the size of a terrestrial city
block. Of the city of Ur, mentioned in the radio message, he saw no sign
whatever. Greatly puzzled, he slowly circled the crater, then crossed
the rim and set out in a widening spiral, flying only a few thousand
feet above the ground, looking for some sign of a human being or
habitation.
Although there had been no sign of vegetation in the enormous crater
which had been laid waste by his projectile, Ted now began to notice
signs of lunar forests and meadows. Flying slowly at an altitude of two
hundred feet, he passed over level areas covered with velvety stretches
of gray vegetation that resembled mosses and lichens, and over hills and
valleys clothed with forests of weird, grotesque growths.
There were fungi shaped like saucers, umbrellas, cones, spearheads, and
even upraised hands, all rusty black in color. There were black stalks,
fully fifty feet in height, topped by five-pointed purple stars, huge
gray pear-shaped growths from which there curled sinuous branches that
resembled the tentacles of cuttle fish, and black trees, some of which
were a hundred feet in height, with branches that unrolled like the
leaves of sword-ferns.
Disposed to view some of these wonders at closer range, Ted lowered his
craft to the ground. A glance at his exterior thermometer showed the
outside temperature to be 210° above zero, Fahrenheit, almost the
boiling point of water at sea level on earth! He accordingly closed his
visor and turned on the valve of his insulated compressed air tank
before opening the door of his turret. Slamming this quickly behind him,
he stepped down from his craft, sinking ankle deep in the soft, gray
moss that coated the forest floor.
As the suit he wore protected him from either extreme heat or cold he
was able to maintain a normal body temperature, but the comparatively
slight gravitational pull of the earth’s satellite gave him an uncanny
freedom of motion. His first incautious step shot him ten feet in the
air and landed him, with startling suddenness, face downward in a tangle
of black creepers fully twenty feet from where he had started.
Instinctively he scrambled erect and was as suddenly precipitated on his
back at a distance of fifteen feet in the opposite direction. This time
he arose slowly, stepped forward with great care, and found himself able
to progress after a somewhat jerky fashion.
Having thus, to a degree, mastered the art of walking on the moon, he
took the opportunity to observe the queer vegetation around him. To his
intense surprise, he saw that it was growing _visibly_! Although the
rates of growth varied in different plants, he could see that all were
swelling and elongating with amazing rapidity. Watching an umbrella
shaped fungus which was on a level with his eyes, he calculated that it
was growing taller at the rate of a foot an hour! The black, fern-like
branches of a great tree unrolled and enlarged before his eyes. Spore
pods beneath the leaves, swelled and burst, scattering tiny dust-like
particles which floated about, or settled on the surrounding vegetation,
rocks and soil. A tall, black and gray fungus opened its gills,
releasing a cloud of silver spores that glittered in the sunlight like
mica dust.
Ted was attracted by the movements of the tentacles of an octopus-like
plant a short distance ahead of him, and walked toward it. They writhed
and twisted like the snakey locks of a Medusa, yet the roots which held
the pear-shaped trunk showed the vegetable nature of the monstrosity.
Prompted by a rash curiosity, he had no sooner arrived beside the
grotesque anomaly than he grasped one of the slithering branches,
expecting, from its slimy appearance, to find it soft and yielding. To
his surprise and dismay it suddenly coiled around his forearm with a
grip as firm and unyielding as the loops of a steel cable. He was jerked
off his feet, straight toward a black, horny lipped opening of
triangular shape, which yawned at the top of the pear-shaped body.
Instinctively, he reached with his free hand for his pistol degravitor,
but too late. A score or more of tough, unyielding tentacles bound his
arms to his sides and circled his body with such force that his bones
would have been instantly crushed and his flesh reduced to pulp had it
not been for the metal plates of his protective armor. Even these
creaked, and seemed about to give way, as he was drawn, head downward,
into the yawning, spike-toothed opening.