Collected short fiction, p.663
Collected Short Fiction, page 663
At that point the platform lost contact, as its own orbital motion carried it behind the moon, out of laser range. Its observers reported the rayed crater still glowing on the moon’s horizon as long as they could see.
Sherman Parkinson called Skygate to beg for help. Told again that COSMOS couldn’t break its code of peace in space without proof of actual attack, he said profanely that he would get the proof. Ignoring all protests, he took off in an unarmed skippercraft for the site of the crash.
The sun was rising there when he arrived.
THE sun was rising there when he arrived. Its harsh glare washed out any trace of that dying glow. The impact crater and its northward rays now looked black, his taped report states, as if a shipload of ink had struck and splashed. The skipper’s counters detected no anomalous radiation and nothing revealed any sign of a transgalactic base.
There was only Seeker Two, standing tilted among the boulders on the steep north crater rim. She showed neither damage from her reckless landing nor any trace of life. Parkinson dropped cautiously a little farther from the crater lip and made a discovery that exhausted his Marine vocabulary.
As he hoarsely reported to the moon platform, three sets of footprints left Seeker Two. They wandered north among the boulders for a distance of several hundred meters. Finally they returned. It was those returning prints that set off his most explosive diction. Magnet-cleated flight boots had made the outgoing prints, but three sets of bare feet returned.
“Relay this to Skygate.” Parkinson paused as if to clear his head and clean up his language. “We’ve found Seeker Two—and something the medics have to explain. Prints in the dust show that all three crew members went for a barefoot walk and somehow got back aboard.”
“Better check your eyes and look again,” the platform advised him. “Men don’t go barefoot on the moon. Not far anyhow. You’ll have to collect some pretty solid evidence, sir, or you won’t last long as Moon Control.”
Parkinson looked again. He moved the skipper twice to photograph the prints before he sealed his own moonsuit and went out with a spaceman to inspect the seeker.
The air lock had been sealed again. Hammered signals brought no response. Parkinson had to knock out an emergency access plate to cycle the lock and get aboard. Marko and Hood and Thorsen lay sprawled on the deck where they must have collapsed when they got back from their unexplained excursion into the moon’s deadly night.
The three men wore no boots, gloves or helmets. Their faces were stained with dried blood, which must have boiled out of their lungs into the vacuum of space. Parkinson felt certain at first that they were dead.
The damage to their bodies was far less severe, however, than might have been expected. Savagely cold as that dust must have been, their feet were not frozen. The rigor of death had not set in. On a second examination, after he had increased the oxy-helium pressure, Parkinson decided that they were still breathing.
“I think they were out collecting this black dust,” he reported to the platform. “The stuff that colors the crater dark. A sort of coarse grit, actually. Sprayed all around the crater. But mostly north, as if scattered by an impact from the south.
“Queer stuff.” Parkinson’s voice was hoarse and breathless. “The particles are sharp-edged, have a bright black shine and they all look identical. Like nothing else I ever saw. These men were after this queer grit. Their boots are stuffed with it. Their tool pockets are full of it. Hodian had it crammed in his mouth.”
Relayed from the platform to Armstrong Point and from there down to Skygate, Parkinson’s reports elicited every shade of amusement and unbelief. He was variously advised to change his brand of whiskey, to get the fingerprints of the little green men and to photograph everything before he touched it.
“I nearly wish we had found those invaders from Venus,” he told the spacemen on the seeker with him. “We know what to do with enemies we can reach.”
SIFTING now through the COSMOS bulletins and the leaked reports from Hudson’s spies, I can almost watch the interrogation of the seeker crew there in the hospital under Armstrong Point, Details emerge from the raspy tapes. The dull drone of the fans. The chemical sting of the air. The narrow tunnel room, drill-scarred moon rock glistening with glassy sealant. The three men, cocoons in white gauze, reeking of sterifoam, surrounded by medics and guards. Parkinson barking questions at them, growing redder and louder with every answer he can’t accept.
Yuri Marko is questioned first.
“—a secret base.” The surviving tape begins in midsentence. Marko’s throat is raw and swollen from his unbelievable exposure to the lunar night. His scratchy voice is hard to make out. “But the beings there aren’t from Venus, sir. They aren’t from any planet of our sun.”
Parkinson sounds grittily skeptical. “How do you know?”
“I saw the base.” Marko answers, “I talked to its people. They belong to a high culture that spreads far through the galaxy. They’ve been stationed on the moon a long time to watch our evolution. They’re delighted that we’ve come far enough to qualify for contact.”
“Hunh!”
“Sir, think of what it means!” Marko’s awed elation comes clearly through his hoarseness and pain. “They want to share their tremendous civilization with us. Our lives will never be the same—”
“There is no base,” Parkinson cuts in. “The platform was watching the spot. I’ve just been out there. There’s nothing but some odd black grit scattered around in the impact crater. If you saw anything it must have been some sort of space mirage.”
For a few seconds the tape runs silently.
“Sir, I know what’s real,” Marko’s faint whisper insists at last. “I’ve tried drugs. I’ve had illusions. They feel different. No matter what anybody saw, that base is real.”
“Tell about it.”
“It’s a structure.” Marko pauses as if to think. “But everything about it reflects an unknown culture. The design, the materials, the unbelievable dimensions. Our language doesn’t fit, but I’ll try to give you my impression. Imagine a tight cluster of round white columns, each a different height. The six lower columns are capped with platforms arranged in a rising spiral around the central tower. It’s tall! Its onion-shaped dome must have been ten kilometers above our orbit. That dome changes color like a beacon—I think the platforms are landing stages under it. Some were empty, but I saw great globe-shaped ships on two of them.” Marko raises his voice. “Sir, does that sound like a dream?”
“It ain’t there now,” Parkinson sneers. “You say you were in voice contact with—whatever you thought you saw. What language did you use?”
“Why—” Marko pauses as if astonished by his own recollection. “Ukrainian! The voice I heard wasn’t human. It was a modulated electronic hum, like—like a computer simulating speech. I remember wondering if it didn’t come through some kind of translating device. But it spoke the Ukrainian peasant dialect my parents used at home. That is remarkable!”
“Remarkable ain’t the word. What happened after you landed?”
The tape whirs quietly.
“I can’t recall,” Marko mutters at last. “That buzzing voice coached us in. I remember firing the retros. I remember watching the lowest stage of the tower, where I thought we were going to land. I remember thinking we were coming in too low to make it. Then it all fades out.”
“Because it wasn’t there.”
ERIK THORSEN is next on the tape. Parkinson greets him heartily as “Major,” as if expecting something saner from a fellow soldier, and asks him to tell in his own words what happened to Seeker Two.
“Yes, sir, Colonel Parkinson.” Thorsen crispily returns the military courtesy. “We were all three on duty, sir. Alert for whatever got Seeker One. We were all observing that luminous patch on the surface ahead. We all saw something beyond it at the same time, sir. What I saw was a fort.”
“Venusian?”
“I can’t say, sir. It was enormous. Round like a turret. Buried in the moon. Camouflaged with a rocky ridge that looked like a crater rim. It rose as we got closer. Bristling with missiles like I never saw before.”
“Did it fire on you?”
“No, sir. Hood was working our radio and laser gear. He picked up a voice commanding us to land beside the fort. That voice—” Thorsen hesitated. “It spoke Norwegian, sir. My own good mother’s Riksmaal, that I learned at home in Stavanger.”
“Norwegian?” Parkinson’s startled voice has lost its warm tone of military fellowship. “Is little Norway building forts in space?”
“That’s all I know, sir.” Thorsen sounds angry. “I don’t remember landing.”
“Listen, Colonel.” My brother’s voice comes on the tape, husky from exposure but still shrewdly fluent. “Don’t let ’em put you on. I saw what they did—and it was neither a galactic base or a Venusian fort. They’re trying to snow you, sir. To hide a million tons of gold!”
“What’s this, Hood? What gold?”
“What I saw was a gold meteor,” Tom says. “It hit the moon hard enough to burst. But the mass of it stands up in the middle of that crater. A blazing hill of yellow gold. More gold scattered all around. Hundred-ton nuggets of pure shining gold!”
“Did you hear any voice?”
“My father’s voice.” Tom pauses, as if struck with awe. “My own father’s! He disappeared on Earth a dozen years ago. We gave him up for dead. But here he was, calling from his own little survey rocket—speaking broken English with a funny Turko-Yiddish accent, like he did when I was a kid. He said he was all alone. He’d located that gold with electronic gear and swept the moon dust off it. He wanted us to land and witness his finder’s claim, under the conventions of COSMOS. That’s what we did.” Tom’s voice turns sharp. “And that’s why these men are lying—to defraud my poor old father of that gold claim!”
“I saw no gold,” Parkinson grates. “Let’s go over all this again.”
HE KEEPS hammering questions at all three men for as long as they can talk. When the doctors make him stop he orders them back to their wards under guard and calls in the engineers who had been at work on samples of that black grit. Their answers don’t improve his temper.
The grit is impure carbon in crystal form, the engineers report. Most of the crystals have been damaged by impact or eroded by long exposure to micrometeors, but apparently they had all once been perfect tetrahedrons, crystals of something new to science.
The intact samples measure nearly eight millimeters on edge. They are slightly radioactive and strongly magnetic. Besides the carbon content, chemical analysis shows six percent silicon, three percent gold, and nearly two percent thorium, with traces of lead and a few other elements. One chemist suggests that the crystals are an unknown allotrope of natural carbon.
“Hogwash,” an engineer objects. “They’re too much alike. Originally, they seem to have been identical in every feature, down to our limits of measurement. Nothing natural is quite that perfect. I say they’re manufactured.”
“Who made them?” Parkinson’s voice demands. “What for?”
The tapes run on, revealing Parkinson’s blundering efforts to force an answer to that question. When Seeker Two has been inspected for possible damage and checked out to another team, he sends her back into orbit to resume her interrupted survey flight.
Observers eye her from the moon platform, as she returns along her charted path to the impact crater. Engineers in skipper craft watch from posts near the crater, prepared to photograph and measure anything that brings her down again.
But nothing happens. The seeker skims low over the crater, observing no transgalactic base, no space fort, no golden meteor. The platform watchers see no surface glow. The engineers discover nothing to photograph or measure.
The voices of Marko and Thorsen and my brother sound stronger on the tapes when Parkinson questions them again, but they refuse to reconcile their contradictory stories. Each remains stubbornly certain of what he thinks he saw, and none of them remembers leaving the seeker to gather that black grit.
Parkinson delays his own second visit to the crater, running down blind alleys and filing his inconclusive reports while he waits for night to end there. The tapes record his landing, timed to meet the lunar sunrise. Now he finds something new.
Reporting to the moon platform, his voice sounds apoplectic. Somebody else hasn’t waited for the sun. Some time after Seeker Two passed over the impact site a cargo rocket has landed there. Magnetic gear has been used to sweep up the remaining crystal grit. A few bootprints are left in the dust, but nothing more revealing.
Parkinson spends half the long lunar day at the site, sifting the surface dust again and drilling a pattern of test holes around the crater, but all he finds is disappointment. No buried mascon, no trace of the impact object. Nothing to explain the crystal grit. Not even a broken tool to identify the raiders.
AT THE Antilles Hudson, we had been able to follow events to this point through those intercepted reports, but now our news from the moon was cut off. Hudson’s leaking secrets had spread from the office to the hotel guests. An unfriendly newsman broadcast the story, adding a notion of his own that the midnight raid on the crater had been planned and led by Hudson himself.
Hudson was away when the story broke, but he called home. Half a dozen of us were instantly fired and nobody shared any more tapes from the moon. When Hudson returned—in about the time his private spaceplane might have required for a quick return flight from the moon—he had no comment on the story or his own absence or anything at all. I was still marooned. After all deductions for room and food and bar chits my discharge pay came to twenty-three dollars. I lost that at the hotel casino, trying to win my fare to the mainland. When I went back to the employment office, an unpleasant clerk suggested that I might either wash dishes or swim for it.
I said I’d swim. As I walked the decks that afternoon, uncertain what I could really do, I heard a news announcement that Robin Hudson had arrived to spend the weekend with her father. On impulse, I went up to her suite.
Surprisingly, the doorbox let me in. Robin met me with a moist kiss, but her smile went out when she learned I had no news from Tom. And she turned nasty when I asked her to help me ashore.
Perhaps I lost my own temper. I remember calling her a rich bitch. She replied that, she was entirely happy to be rich and quite content that I was a pauper. She added that Tom said I had always been a sniveling schlemiel and that they had both had more than plenty of me.
She did listen sulkily, however, when I decided to apologize and explain my predicament. For Tom’s sake she called the flight deck and got me a seat on the Key West jet.
Back on the mainland I took a job writing publicity for Dial-a-Mood, an emotion-conditioner designed for home installation. We were at war with a rival named Joy-Aire. The Joy-Aire people had spread rumors that our toners were loaded with addictive psychedelics. My new job was to plant counterrumors that the Joy-Aire toners had such undesirable side-effects as excessive weight gain, paralysis and idiocy.
For some months all I knew of the moon story came from the colorless COSMOS bulletins. The seeker survey was still in progress, with no further incident. Sherman Parkinson had been replaced at Moon Control by a former manager of the Crater Hudson. Thomas Hood and his fellow crash survivors were well enough to be returned from the moon to Skygate for further examination at the laboratory of exobiology there.
That was all. Filled with news of the amazing bioforms seen flying about the atmosphere of Jupiter, the COSMOS releases said no more about the moon. I mailed two or three letters to Tom at Skygate, which he didn’t bother to answer.
Never quite secure at Dial-a-Mood, because I lacked what our president called “conditional sincerity,” I kept job applications going out. One went to Skygate. The reply offered me a special assignment to write a report on the commercial use of space science.
Though the salary wasn’t half what Dial-a-Mood paid, I accepted with delight, because! was so anxious to pick up the story of the moon grit and its queer effects on the crew of Seeker Two.
IV
SKYGATE was their birthplace.
A delicate green had dusted the mesa in the wake of rain before I arrived, but its more common colors were sandstone red and the yellow of wind-drifted dust. The spaceplanes came down on an asterite strip fringed with resin-scented pihon and juniper. Tiny green oases like scattered beads were strung along the Albuquerque road, but the wild ridges west were as bleak and barren as the moon.
The riddle of that crystal grit was still unsolved as far as I could learn, but my brother and his team had apparently recovered from their crash behind the moon. Discharged from the space hospital, they had been allowed to marry. All three wives were pregnant.
My brother’s wife was Robin Hudson. The match surprised me. Tom had always said no woman would get her hooks into him and, frankly, I thought Robin might have done better. Perhaps she was drawn to a sort of wolfish rapacity that Tom shared with her own father—and I think she liked the notion of becoming Robin Hood.
Thorsen’s bride was a nurse he had met at the hospital on the moon. Her parents were Japanese and her dainty, sloe-eyed charm made an odd contrast to his brawny Viking power. Though her hesitant English was hard for me to understand at first, I could feel her kindly warmth and her lively comic sense. In fact, I fell in love with Suzie Thorsen.
Marko’s wife became almost as dear to me. She was Dr, Carolina Carter, whom he had met at a briefing session in space labs on his way to the moon. The daughter of a black astronaut who had died in quarantine on Phobos, she had earned her own degree in exobiology. She was a tall beauty, scholarly and gracious, but Robin refused to receive her.
She was employed in the labs when I came to Skygate; she worked with cultures of the microscopic beta-life the probes had brought from the upper air of Venus. She was generous with facts for my special report. She and Marko asked me to their home for dinner and it was Marko who later offered me a permanent job, doing publicity for COSMOS.
