by Jimmy Guieu
“At only 1,000 francs for a gram for platinum, that would be worth billions!” Kariven observed.
“We also used the Geiger counter and detected a rich vein of uranium at the bottom of a crevasse seven miles NNW of our base toward the Aristarchus crater.”
“A few days from now we’ll go explore that area with the taxis,” Commander Taylor said. “Then Lieutenant Clark can see for himself about the nature and origin of the light he saw in the Aristarchus crater. Plus, we’ll have to uncover the mystery of those footprints… and find their base or at least who made them.”
In the Bubble Base, the astronauts were sleeping, simply stretched out on the comfortable air mattresses. Rudy Clark was tossing and turning in his restless sleep, snapping awake often. Exhausted and exasperated he finally sat up on his rubbery mattress and dreamed… fully awake!
But at the bottom of the crevasse the hard rays of the sun beat down on a narrow area outside the protected cave and bounced off the end of the oblong base sheltering the Americans. Apparently their “nights” passed in full lunar daylight. On our satellite the days and nights lasted 14 Earth days each. In exactly seven days the lunar “night” would come to stay for 14 days measuring from Earth.
Such as it was, therefore, in the back of the cave, the base was only relatively dark. But the north tube was the only part sticking out in the rays of the sun.
Lieutenant Clark listened to the gentle hum of the generators producing energy for the various machines to circulate and purify the air. In the surrounding half-light his sleepy eyes stared across the base into the bright sunrays. After a while, Clark felt drowsy again. The round end of the base made him feel like he was sitting in a train speeding through a tunnel whose exit could be seen in the distance. The generator’s hum added to the illusion, making him sleepy. His eyelids felt heavier and heavier, started to close. He opened them again, yawned and stretched, then lay down, glancing one last time at the bright area. Again his eyelids drooped and his head fell back on the pillow, still turned toward the light.
Was he dreaming now? A shadow passed three times across the light fading under his half-closed eyes. Clark sat up again, cursing his insomnia. All of a sudden he stopped grumbling. His eyes popped open, stunned; he was sure he was not dreaming.
“Commander! Commander!” he shouted as he rushed in pajamas toward the spacesuits.
All at once the astronauts were on their feet, looking at where Clark was pointing.
“Don’t turn on the light!” Commander Taylor ordered. “Just leave the auxiliary lights on.”
At the front of the base, the curved line of sunlight was being briefly masked at intervals. At the same time a long shadow slid quickly over the floor of the crevasse.
When every man was in his spacesuit, they snuck out of the base through the decompression tube. Soon they were standing, Colts drawn, in a shadow zone under a sloping wall of the crevasse. Kariven and Clark crawled over to the ladder that sat in full light against the opposite wall and moved it 50 feet further down to a shaded curve. Followed by the others they climbed up the ladder, came out of the crevasse and crawled through the chalky ash to hide behind a small hill.
“I don’t see anything,” Kariven spoke into his mic. “Stay here. Clark and I will go scout it out.”
The two men crept from low hill to shallow depression to get to the rocket. Crawling in dust under the blazing sun—the special thermometer on their pressurized spacesuit protected from the cosmic rays registered 177C or 350F!—made them nervous.
“Good God!” Commander Taylor thundered. “Look at the rocket, Kariven! Look at the nose! The thing is right there!”
Indeed, on the ringed platform they had improvised around the cone of the rocket a shadow was overlapping the darker shadow of the heavy, space machine gun.
“Get back, Clark! Get back, Kariven!” Taylor screamed into his mic. “You’re in the open, damn it! The… the thing can swoop down on you like an eagle on a field mouse!”
“If the thing in question has the nature of an eagle,” Kariven said, not moving. “Don’t worry about me, Commander, I’ll get to safety. You and Clark cover me…”
“No, Kariven! You… I forbid you to…” the officer was fuming with anger against this “civilian” who dared to disobey his orders.
Kariven stood up and in a giant leap sprang 20 feet high, landing softly 30 feet away. Another extraordinary leap brought him exactly to the foot of the spaceship. Now he was safe under the rear tubes and feared no traitorous act by the thing that was hiding behind the nose of the rocket and whose presence was betrayed by the shifting shadow. Was it examining the machine gun?
The Commander hesitated, torn between the desire to rush forward and the prudent will to retreat into the crevasse. The former won the day and all together the astronauts jumped after Kariven, whom Clark had joined immediately. The nine men were crouched under Daisy’s huge bottom now.
“We were smart to close up the airlocks,” the Commander remarked. “If a… one of those things got into the cockpit and started the ignition when we got under here, the engines would have annihilated us.”
Automatically everyone looked up. Under the multitude of reactors staring down at them they felt a cold shiver run down their spines.
“We’re not going to just sit here,” Lieutenant Clark looked questioningly at Kariven who agreed wholeheartedly.
“Clark and I will crawl along…”
He broke off, stupefied. Between the fins that acted as landing gear, on the white ash, a long shadow was speeding away from the rocket. It looked like the shadow of a low flying object. Everyone scrambled out of the hiding place and stared up in awe.
In the dark sky dotted with bright stars something grayish-green, oblong, with a shiny front end, was disappearing into the horizon, heading toward the sun.
“I… I don’t know what it is,” Commander Taylor admitted, “but it’s alive or mechanical… and damn intelligent! That ‘thing’ took off straight into the sun that would be hard, if not impossible for a pilot to see anything. In fact, we should have seen if it had turned around but even with the blinding sunlight it disappeared smooth as silk.”
Kariven, after a long, thoughtful silence, believed he could offer a partial explanation of the phenomenon: “The being or thing that examined our machine gun and just disappeared is, for sure, one of the things that left footprints around our base and our rocket. The way that it or he vanished without the spaceship landing and its disappearance into space proves beyond doubt that the thing flies. In my opinion it must be fitted with a jet pack to account for all its movements in a place with no atmosphere—as well as in an atmosphere identical to ours for example. I’m saying that only a jet pack or more precisely its retro-jets could have swept away the footprints that vanished in the middle of an empty space. Rocket jets would have literally plowed the soil over a wide surface whereas the effects of a jet pack are obviously much more limited.”
“What you say makes sense,” the Commander agreed. “But who’d be using such a device on the Moon? Let’s suppose that the Russians got here before us and have got some base somewhere, I can’t see them with an invention like that. I know there are helicopter jet packs26 but they’re still not able to do the things that the gray-green thing just did. As for our jet shooters they can’t be used efficiently except in outer space to move outside the spaceships in case of an accident. They’re not powerful enough to fight the lunar gravity, however weak it is compared to Earth’s.”
Professor Harrington was puzzled. He reached up to scratch his head absent-mindedly but banged into his isothermal plastic helmet. Smiling at himself he shrugged and proposed, “Let’s not rack out brains trying to solve a problem with too many unknowns. Let’s go back to bed instead. During our stay here, which has only begun, other factors will arise that may shed some light on this.”
While they went back down the metal ladder to go back into the Bubble Base, on the horizon, hidden from them now by
the crevasse walls, the repaired Russian rocket was rising into the sky. It shot straight up, then at 30,000 feet tilted and slowed down in order to locate a good site for a research base.
The ship was flying at only 220 mph and its passengers, leaning over the video-periscope, were scrutinizing the ground scrolling by under their eyes. They had just crossed the terminator line27 to enter the sun-bathed side of the Moon. Their flight path took them a little farther away from the Kepler crater where the American astronauts had established their base.
The soviet pilot suddenly cried out in surprise, “Colonel Zavkom! There in that crater… on the horizon…”
“Damnation!” the Colonel swore. “A spotlight’s sweeping the sky. Land quickly! Those damn Americans are already in the Aristarchus crater. So, it’s true: they’re on the Moon!”
“The beam of light is gone,” Petrov, the pilot/physicist, observed. “It was weird, that light ray, dazzlingly and almost purple…”
Zavkom shrugged, “Some stupid experiment on certain wavelengths in outer space probably. Or searching for variations of the light spectrum without an atmosphere.”
Secretly, Petrov frowned in disappointment. He was tired of hearing his chief go on about scientific questions that he only pretended to know about.
Fearing that their presence would be signaled by those whom they believed were Americans set up in Aristarchus, the Russians landed their spaceship in the middle of a crater with a central spike, over a mile and half in diameter and hundreds of miles away from the so-called “Americans”.
On landing, the rear rockets kicked up a wave of chalky dust. A crown-shaped cloud rose up slowly from the ground. Although the ship had set down roughly, it was not damaged. Its tail fins, only needed to make it easier to glide on Earth, were buried three feet deep in the ash and flaky rock. In the middle of the crater stood a huge “spike” of rock or some matter that solidified after the formation of the crater. Its mushroom-shaped “head” was almost 600 feet off the ground.
Just to be careful, Zavkom had asked Petrov to land as close as possible to the central spike. Standing only 200 feet away from the rocky column the spaceship was “camouflaged” in a way. In fact, the ship was lined up perfectly with the spike, which buried it in its dark shadow. No one could see it if they came over the crater from a certain direction. Moreover, the sloping walls, almost 1,000 feet high, acted as screens.
“Let’s set up our mobile base right away between the rocket and the central spike,” Colonel Zavkom ordered.
Said base, composed of three plastic domes reinforced with steel frames, had been “assembled” while the astronavigraph was being repaired on the dark side of the Moon. It was simply a matter of taking the 13-foot wide domes down to the ground and connecting them with tubes, one of which would be the decompression chamber. The inner walls and floor were already installed. Anchoring the “bubbles” to the flat ground with super-metal cables only took a couple of hours. When the work was done the Russians went ahead with the checks and found all the equipment in working order. Then the men received orders from Zavkom to rest for six hours.
With the numbered spacesuits hanging above their bunks made of synthetic foam the astronauts stretched our gratefully in their respective places in the three domes. Everything was calm and quiet around them. The blazing heat of the sun did not bother them a bit in their air-conditioned base. Beyond the shadow of the central spike, the unbearable light of the day star flooded the white surface of the crater.
Confident in their “camouflage,” all the Russians fell asleep, figuring that there would be time enough “tomorrow” to set up a lookout on the top of the crater. Besides, even if a lookout was posted immediately on the wall or on the spike, it was unlikely that he could have spotted an enemy inside the crater. He would have been looking over the plain beyond the walls.
In the yellowish dust of the surface, he probably would not even have seen those deeper, brownish, disc-shaped spots that were slowly converging on the central spike… or on the rocket! He would have taken the changing color as an effect of the moving sun, probably a physico-chemical (or photo-chemical) reaction.
At the moment, the first rows of Selenites, like waves of a slow tide, had reached the tail fins of the spaceship. Their six ringed stalks topped by seven shiny little needles were swaying, cautiously feeling the smooth surface of the fin.
There was something like a ripple that ran through the front rows, then all of a sudden all the Selenites rushed at the spaceship. In a kind of vertical slithering the brown monsters in front crawled slowly up the long fins… leaving behind them thousands of pinkish stings that were in turn wiped away by the following rows that bit more deeply into the metal of the fins keeping the rocket balanced on the ground.
The stampede took place in total calm. In spite of some pushing and shoving the Selenites, obsessed by the metal mass, did not squabble. The last comers, naturally, had trouble finding free space. Moreover, sometimes one or more Selenites fell off the flanks of the spaceship. They were not very adept at climbing vertically. Those who fell searched quickly for a gap in the swarming throng so they could assuage their unquenchable hunger for metal. Not finding a place they crawled straight over their fellows from one shell to another until they found an area of open metal.
100 feet away under the three domes of their base, the Russians were sleeping soundly, completely ignorant of the tragedy unfolding so close to them.
Commander Taylor checked the (clearly visible) number on his helmet and started fitting the transparent globe onto the collar ring of his spacesuit. After verifying the seal, he swallowed a yawn and was the first to crawl out of the decompression chamber. Their sleep had been spoiled by the “flying phantom” hunt.
“Today,” Taylor decided, “we start with the second geophysical test. Then, when the terrain is cleared away, Kariven, Clark and Streiler will go out on reconnaissance up to the libration zone, the area of sporadic light28. Some interesting observations can probably be made there. The rest at the base will continue the necessary tasks: mineral analyses, examination and autopsy of Selenites, locating the exact position of the uranium found yesterday by Dr. Haller and his team. Let’s get to work.”
Everyone headed to a kind of vertical, metal box full of switches and buttons set on top of four telescopic legs.
Professor Harrington smiled, “Good old Taylor thinks he’s still with the military staff. I’m surprised he’s not giving the traditional orders: Fall out!”
While the three men appointed to leave on expedition were gathering the necessary equipment, Gordon, the geophysicist, was walking toward a small hill about 300 yards away from the ship. On this rocky knoll with cracks full of chalky dust, a rocket launcher had been built, formed of five big launch tubes and tilted on its vibration dampeners. The blue cone of a 20-foot long rocket stuck out of one of them.
Equipped with a powerful load of TNT29, the rocket was going to be launched on a carefully studied trajectory. At the point of impact the TNT explosion would cause a localized “moonquake.” The vibrations from this seismic activity would be recorded by various machines that Professor Harrington dealt with.
The professor checked one last time the seismograph, the magnetometer and all the buttons and switches on the chrome panel of the “block” on the telescopic legs. Certain waves or vibrations natural to earthquakes (or moonquakes) passed through solids. Others, however, were stopped by bodies in pasty and even liquid states. The graphics produced by the seismograph and magnetometer, therefore, revealed whether the underlying layers are solid or gluey thereby making it relatively easy to figure out the internal composition of the Earth… or Moon.
It was an experiment of this kind that the astronauts were tackling. With the armed missile ready to go, the geophysicist Gordon joined Professor Harrington who was making the final adjustments to the machines.
“Ready?”
“Ready, Gordon,” he simply replied, pulling the metal lever for ignition.
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On the plain, the TNT missile ripped out of its launch pad, accelerated quickly and curved through the sky. Shimmering in the sunlight the missile descended toward the horizon at incredible speed at the end of its trajectory. For a second it disappeared, then abruptly a blinding flash rose out of a crater around 100 miles away. The shockwave proliferated and while shaking up the astronauts produced angular lines on the rotating drum of the seismograph. The needles of the three dials went crazy for a few seconds before the vibrations gradually spaced out and then stopped completely.
From the crater where—in sepulchral silence due to the lack of atmosphere—the rocket had exploded, a cloud of dust rose up, soon falling back down without spreading out or swirling around.
“The missile was not supposed to land in a crater,” Professor Harrington was surprised. “Its electronic system must have been affected. Maybe it was the lunar magnetic field? The electronic circuits are so delicate that a simple opposite pulse can mean a large discrepancy in the aim.”
“Ahh,” the geophysicist said, “at least it’ll make a few less Selenites to worry about! We’ll make another launch tomorrow but toward the big plain. Anyway, the error in trajectory isn’t so serious in itself.”
Such was not the opinion of Colonel Zavkom. By the worst luck imaginable the TNT rocket had fallen in the very crater occupied by the Russians!
The soviet astronauts had just been startled awake by the frightening shock of the explosion in the walls of the crater. Before they could realize what was happening, a second, less violent shock shook the ground.
The thick carpet of white dust covering the surface had been kicked up all over the crater. The Russian base was buried in the powder drizzling over the three plastic domes.
“What happened?”
“I don’t see a thing outside!”
