Collected short fiction, p.38
Collected Short Fiction, page 38
He worked very hard. After he had quarters in the mine-shafts which he could inhabit during the night, he stayed on with his task, paying us brief visits during the day. Before the end of the year the trucks were beginning to haul metal from the mine in quantity.
The prospect had originally been for gold alone. Vast quantities of that metal there were, but great deposits of platinum, iridium, and osmium ores were struck at a depth of a few thousand meters. Since the three metals of the platinum group were the only ones that had been successfully used in the atomic blast projector, they commanded the highest prices paid for any metal save radium. Soon the mine was known as one of the most valuable on the moon.
A year after we had landed at Theophilus, Father had been able to construct a glass domed building on the hill above the shafts, in which we might live as comfortably as in the city. Mother and Valence and I were moved out there, and it was there that the happy days of my youth were spent.
CHAPTER VI
In Which I Grow Up
UNTIL I was ten or twelve years of age, I seldom left the vicinity of the mine. Remotely situated in the great plain of the “Sea of Tranquillity,” it was much apart from the rest of the moon-world, and as the mine grew, father’s buildings became a little city in themselves.
The mine-shafts opened into the floor of a low-walled crater, some two miles across. A smooth, white road connected the little metal domes above the shafts with the great smelter and refinery that had been built in the center of the circular valley.
The great buildings in which we lived were located on a little hill just north-east of the crater—a wide, rambling town, enclosed in glass. Always it was the first point lit by the rising sun, when the flat desert about was still shrouded white in snow and frozen air, and lost in the shadows of the night.
Mother christened it “Firecrest,” because of the way it glistened in the blaze of sunshine when she first saw it, as we came out in the automobile. Our little city, and the mine itself, came to be known by that name.
Sometimes I went with Valence and my parents on a business or pleasure trip to Theophilus—it took only a few hours to run the three hundred miles in our slender, torpedo-shaped automobile with the Orloff atomic engines. A few times we saw one of the “stereo” pictures from earth, which, in the wonders of natural color, perfect sound, and life-like depth, gave us children some knowledge of the planet of our birth.
But those trips were rare and great occasions. For the most part we lived at Firecrest, very simply. During the long, hot days, I was free to wander about the wild desert, inside the square of forts my father had erected to guard against the raids of the wild mooncalves. For long hours at a time I wandered about, climbing hills, exploring craters and rilles and caverns, thrilling over the discovery of strange bits of mineral in the hope that I was finding rare elements. I crept about in the rank, thorny, gray-green vegetation that sprang up in the craters, tasting strange fruits, and stalking the weird little creatures that roamed the spiky forests.
In other words, I was a normal boy, leading on the moon the natural life of childhood that I might have enjoyed on earth. Sometimes—and quite naturally—I got into difficulties.
My greatest adventure of childhood came one day when I stumbled upon the entrance to one of the great caverns that honeycomb the moon. It had the narrowest of openings, a slender crack between two great boulders, not five miles from “Firecrest.” Thrilling with the romance of discovery, common to all youth, I wriggled through, and explored the crack.
As I crept along—nerves atingle, trembling with excitement, yet not quite frightened—the fissure led down and down, widening as it went. I stumbled along in darkness, over the coarse sand of a subterranean waterway, ages dry. It must have been a half mile below the entrance that it widened out into a vast space, an amazing, strangely lighted chasm in the moon. A half mile away from me, and far below the bare ledge from where I viewed it, was a lake of black water. And about the lake was a weird forest, of luminous vegetation.
Dense jungle rimmed the lake, a jungle of the strangest plants known to science, the light-emitting flora of the caverns of the moon. Stranger of form than the spiky growth of the craters, the plants glowed with soft steady fire. Great, fleshy trees seeming to burn with dull blue light, huge mushroom-like things shining with a deep green incandescence. Slender, graceful, fern-like fronds glowing with a vivid scarlet radiance. A jungle of flowing flame!
For a long time I stood and watched. I had heard of phosphorescent forests, but this was the first I had ever seen. There was nothing unnatural about it, I knew; the plants merely supported colonies of luminiferous microorganisms similar to those found on earth. Yet the alien beauty and the weird wonder of it wrapped me in amazement.
For a long time I looked; then, lost in the strange spell of the place, I left my point of vantage, and clambered down over a slope of water-weathered rock, until I reached the edge of the jungle. I broke off thick leaves glowing with cold blue light, and slender stalks burning with violet and green, and a handful of the soft feathery fronds that shone with crimson fire. I wandered about the shore of the black lake, making myself a bouquet of flame.
Then I heard a sound that made me drop the splendorous glowing thing in a panic of sudden fear, a sound that froze me as I stood, with stilled heart and indrawn breath. An animal sound it was, a sort of grunt that ended in a whistling intake of breath. Then there was a rustling in the plants, that came toward me.
I saw a single purple eye, large as a man’s head, and shining with cold flame, that rose slowly above the glowing plants where the sound had been.
THE shock of the sight galvanized my unnerved limbs, and I turned and fled in mad fear. I tore a blind way through the flimsy glowing plants, stumbling over rocks and scrambling desperately to my feet to plunge on again.
At last I stopped, from sheer exhaustion. I was torn, bleeding, stained with black mud and luminous vegetable juices. Hot and panting, I threw myself down on a bare rock. When at last I was able to raise my head and look around, I saw the luminous thickets closing all about the bare boulder on which I lay. In the feeble light, walls and roof were invisible.
I stood up and shouted. There was no echo! The darkness swallowed my voice. Abruptly, I realized the vastness of the cave, and my foolishness in entering it alone. I realized my smallness, my weakness, the futility of my efforts.
I restrained an impulse toward another mad flight, and sat there a while, very soberly considering my chances—and finding them very slight. Then I climbed off the rock, and set out deliberately to find a way out. For a long, long time I wandered, breaking through luminous forests, stumbling over dark, rocky underground plains, running into boulders, falling into pits.
Always afterward, when I look back upon that dreadful time, it has seemed more nightmare than reality. I have no connected memory of it, only vague pictures of endless ages of exhausting effort, of growing hunger and torturing thirst, and of fear that was maddening. I know that sometimes I found black pools and drank, and I must have eaten some fruit of the weird vegetation. And my sleep ever since has been troubled with visions of huge black-winged things, with luminous eyes, circling ominously above me. For hours at a time I lay trembling in hiding from them.
I slept several times—or at least lay insensible, when I was too exhausted to move again. I had no ideas of direction, no plan save always to follow the passages that seemed to lead upward.
My ultimate escape must be credited rather to chance than to anything else. For the thousandth time, I thought I saw the gleam of daylight, struggled to it with hope and fear struggling in me, and walked into a beam of sunshine that fell athwart the rocky floor.
Above me was a sort of sloping chimney, large enough for a space flier to pass through, with a patch of deep blue sky in sight beyond. I clambered up it, crawled out into a strange little crater, grown up with a forty-foot forest of olive-green, spiky scrub, and lit with hot sunlight. The sun was low in the west. It had been morning when I had left Firecrest; I had been underground for a week!
I forced a way through the thorny undergrowth, and clambered out of the little crater. Looking about from a little eminence, I saw the glass-armored buildings of the city, blazing in the splendor of the sunshine, fifteen miles to the west. I was a full dozen miles from the hidden entrance I had found.
Five or six hours later, I stumbled into Firecrest, little better than dead. My parents and Valence received me with unbounded joy. They had scoured the country for me, finally had given me up as a victim of a raiding band of the wild moon-calves.
I told no one but my parents and a few selected friends of the vast cave; and it was a secret that was to prove an important factor in the moon’s war for independence.
That near-tragic adventure ended the careless days in which, alone or with a book, I had wandered about the crater, lost in dreams. I suffered a long sickness, induced in part by exhaustion, in part by my reckless meals on the fruits of the luminous plants. It was some months before I had completely recovered my strength; and during a long convalescence I did a great deal of reading, becoming intensely interested in studies, science especially.
As soon as I felt able I entered the little school at Firecrest, which father had established for the benefit of his employees’ children. After a few years there, I was sent off to the university at Theophilus, where I took a general scientific course, specializing in intra-atomic engineering.
BY that time, father was one of the richest men of the moon. Firecrest, inhabited largely by his employees, was a city of some ten thousands in population. He had acquired a sort of fame for justice and honesty, for generosity toward his associates and workers. His wages were the highest paid on the moon; he was one of the few mine-owners who had built a glass-covered city for their men.
His character, one of almost puritanic sturdiness and independence, had been of little use to him on earth; but he was appreciated under the less restrained conditions of the moon. He had become respected and influential throughout the satellite, a leader and adviser when important questions were to be considered.
Several times, in matters of dispute between the colonists and the agents of Metals Corporation, in regard to the interpretation of contracts or prices paid for metal, he had interfered—through his influence, the Moon Company had been able to secure more generous treatment for many a poor miner. For several years he had been a leader in the Board of Directors of the Moon Company.
It was through his influence that permission had been obtained to set up a synthetic food factory on the moon, for the Food Corporation of earth was jealous of its monopoly—the Corporation had had a small plant at New Boston for years, but the new concern was privately owned, and turned out vast quantities of food, at lower prices. He had also financed other manufacturing concerns that would tend to make the moon less dependent upon the earth, and had encouraged and aided the farmers who were struggling to grow the vitamine-containing fruits and vegetables that cannot be produced in factories.
Entering the university was a great event for me. It was a vast institution, for the moon numbered among its students thousands of young men and women from all the colonies. Located in one of the huge, sunlit, southern towers of Theophilus, with verdant parks about it, it was a delightful place of beauty.
The atmosphere was free and democratic. In my childhood I had been very much alone, self-sufficient and caring little for the society of others. But here I found myself among crowds of happy youngsters, who accepted me as an equal, without thought or inquiry concerning my station in life outside. I felt that their friendship would have been quite as real and genuine, if I had been a common miner’s son, instead of the heir of one of the planet’s leading citizens.
One of the most pleasant features of my school life was the friendship I formed with the Warrington family. George Warrington, who was a score of years older than myself, came of a family that has been outstanding for generations; and he held an important position in the Board of Directors of the Moon Company. Father had met him and won his friendship; thus it was that I was a frequent guest at his home.
Warrington was a kindly, friendly man, of simple tastes and quiet manners, though those who did not know him intimately, were apt to complain that he was unduly stiff and formal. He was a courteous host; it was delightful to bask in the genial warmth of his great intellect and noble character.
His wife was a simple mannered, cheerful woman, with keen, vivacious wit and a great and tender heart. She was beautiful to my eyes, and a second mother to me when I was lonely or homesick. There were no children in the family; perhaps for that reason, I was more welcome to the great, majestic rooms.
It was at dinner there one evening that I first met Benjamin F. Gardiner. His name was well known to me, as to the rest of the two spheres, for his brilliant work in science and philosophy. I was dazzled into diffident silence at meeting one so renowned, though there was nothing overwhelming in the appearance of the stooped, scholarly man, then somewhat past middle age. His quiet, gentle manner inspired only friendship, respect for his deep intellect, love for his great heart. Several years before he had given up the management of the manufacturing enterprise that had made him wealthy, to devote his time to scientific work for the benefit of mankind.
I had an automobile of my own, a small one, but as speedy as any that had been designed. Frequently I went home to see my sister and parents; and I spent much time traveling about the moon, visiting the other great cities, New Boston and Colon, the one in “The Sea of Clouds,” near the crater Herschel and at about the center of the lunar disk as seen from earth, the other at the base of the Appenines, on the edge of the Mare Serenitatis, or “Sea of Serenity.” I toured thousands of miles of smooth highway, visited fantastic and awe-inspiring natural wonders of the moon, and hung about the space-ports, where the great silver globes were landing with food and manufactured goods from earth, or departing with metal from the mines of the moon.
During one long moon-day, with a band of the more adventurous of my schoolmates, I traveled to the end of the roads in the south. We left our machines and went on afoot, on a prospecting expedition toward the great Doerfel mountains beyond Tycho. We had minor adventures enough, and once fought for our lives against a band of the wild Ka’Larbah.
But the greatest adventure of all my college career was one that came within the walls of Theophilus, and during the fourth and last year of my stay there. It was a girl, tall, dark-haired, beautiful. She had not the easy, familiar manners of the ordinary co-ed; she was inclined to be aloof, reserved, and silent.
I went to no end of pains to get an introduction to her. Her name was Mary Jons; I could learn nothing else about her. A few times I met her alone in the corridors or classroom, and on one memorable occasion she consented to go with me to see a “stereo” picture. At first, she seemed inclined to be friendly. I found, during our few meetings, that she had a keen, sparkling wit, a deep and genuine culture, and a wide knowledge of both earth and moon. But she told me nothing of her past life.
But on the day after we had seen the picture, she was somehow changed toward me. She was reserved, self-contained; a barrier had come between us that I could not break down. When I stopped her in one of the great halls, she left me suddenly, seemed angry and suspicious when I followed. The next day I found that she had left the university.
And do my best, I could not find Mary Jons at all. Whence she had come and where she had gone were equally puzzling. I could not even find anyone who knew her better than myself. Presently, after I had spent a few thousand credit units for private detective work, I began to doubt that her name was Mary Jons at all.
CHAPTER VII
The Fate of the Sandoval
MY college education was done; with a mind filled with impossible dreams of a dark-eyed, wistful girl who had called herself Mary Jons, I went back to the home of my youth—back to lonely Firecrest, standing isolated in that vast tract of grim, forbidding wilderness inappropriately called the “Sea of Tranquillity.” I was to live with the family, and learn the mining business.
During boyhood I had been much about the mines, and having the natural inclination toward science that had led me to choose an engineering course in the university, I found nothing difficult about the work. After the careless college years, I really enjoyed the soberer discipline of the long days in the bright, sunlit office, or in the cool, gloomy shafts, with their intricate mazes of conduits for power, for air and water, and for the escaping gases from the D-ray boring machines. I continued my scientific studies, too, fitting up a little laboratory about the mine-buildings, and having books sent from earth.
But often at night—and even by day, when I should have been at work—I saw a pair of dear, dark eyes before me, or glimpsed a fading face, with its bright, eager smile. I grew restless, with my dreams of Mary Jons. Perhaps, if I should go to the earth . . . I had no idea, really, where she was. But I imagined that she must have flown back across the void, because I had failed to find her on the moon.
The wonders of a trip back across the gulf to the planet of my birth had long appealed to me. I began to ponder it seriously, to imagine that I might meet the dark-haired girl at the space-port, or in the ways of New York. At last I resolved to speak to my father about it.
But before I had done so, something happened to turn my attention to affairs nearer home.
For a long time there had been difficulties between the Moon Company and its terrestrial superior, Metals Corporation. As I have said, the Moon Company had at first been owned outright by Metals. But the thrifty colonists, with a view to profit and to liberty, had bargained for stock in the Moon Company, when they were making a mining contract, or disposing of a cargo of ore. Gradually the incorporated cities—Theophilus, New Boston, and Colon were the leaders, though nine others, including Firecrest, had been admitted to the corporation—secured the ownership of the Moon Company stock, in order to be able to conduct their local affairs without interference from the agents of Metals.
