by Jimmy Guieu
“It’s… maybe it’s a… moonquake?”
“Or a sudden landslide of the crater wall…”
“Get your spacesuits on instead of wasting time!” Zavkom ordered, having turned pale.
When they were installed in their suits the astronauts got ready to leave but a howl of rage paralyzed them.
“The rocket! The ro…”
The worlds choked Zavkom’s throat. His eyes bulging, his face scarred with unutterable anguish, he was looking through the dust that was finally settling on the ground. The Russian spaceship, whose fins had been eaten away by the Selenites, had toppled over in the explosion. Its nose had hit the top of the rocky spike that had stopped its fall. Leaning at a 45 angle, with its tail fins gnawed away, corroded, the rocket lay like a broken toy, its twisted conic nose on top of the column of rock.
In the violent shock the nose had been shattered and a 10-foot long crack gaped in the upper fuselage. The soviet astronauts fought to hold back their emotional reaction. Faced with this disaster Zavkom’s anger vanished in a flush of panic.
“I… I think it’d be better to leave… to see what happened…” the usually decisive officer stammered.
Outside, as the last grains of dusts settled, the sight before their eyes was even more tragic. The spike had been weakened and split down the middle, so the nose of the rocket lay stuck between the jaws on top.
Stunned by what he was seeing Zavkom closed his eyes for a few seconds, hoping that the hellish image was just a hallucination. But when he opened them again, the nightmare was still there.
In its fall the rocket had stopped 20 feet from their base! By a miracle the astronauts had escaped a horrible death. If the rocket had only crashed into one of the domes, the occupants would have suffocated to death. With the artificial air instantly escaping, they would not have had time to put on their spacesuits. Maybe they would have been crushed? The outcome would have been no better.
Crazed and panic-stricken, the eleven men wandered around the base. Grim thoughts ran through their minds. Would they manage to repair the terrible gash in the hull? For sure, but how could they replace the four fins that were so mysteriously corroded, eaten away up to the pipe openings?
“Colonel Zavkom! Colonel Zavkom!” boomed the voice of Boris Ilyine, bent over the ground. “Come here, everyone come here!”
Shaken up and jolted by this call in the middle of the chaos, the astronauts temporarily abandoned their despair and leaped over to their comrade.
“Look at this!” the physicist said, handing the Colonel a piece of blue metal, swollen up as if attacked by a strong flame. “And this!” he held in his articulated claws a metallic fragment as big as a dinner plate and with a distinct curvature.
“It’s debris from a rocket, a V2 charged with explosives. We weren’t victims of seismic activity but of a bombardment!”
“The Americans!” Colonel Zavkom thundered, clenching his jaws and fists. “They dared to attack us!”
“Just a minute, Colonel,” Petrov intervened. “I fell the same as all of you here, maybe even worse since this rocket was a little like… my rocket. I watched it being built, I contribute to its technology, I tested it on a secret base and finally I brought it here where…”
“What are trying to say, Petrov?” the Colonel growled.
“This,” the pilot replied. “I love this rocket as much as anyone can… but I can’t let my feelings blind my reasoning. There’s no proof that we were attacked. This V2 might have been just a missile fired to cause a shock wave for the Americans to study…”
“NO!” Zavkom raged. “We, too, have identical missiles to study the structure of the Moon through vibrations. But we’d never launch it into a crater! The walls would absorb part of the shock wave and distort the results of our research. No. We’ve been attacked, savagely attacked, traitorously attacked by the Americans. And I guarantee you that they’ll pay dearly for it! Maybe they’re thinking we’re destroyed, killed, buried under the wreckage of our ship? Let them believe it and we’ll go set up our base on a ledge at the top of the crater. We’ll camouflage it well and wait no matter what for the toads30 to come! We’ll welcome them with all the weapons we’ve got left. No one will be spared. Then it’ll be in their rocket that we’ll get back to Earth!”
CHAPTER SIX
Petrov reflected. He walked up to the rocket and examined the gnawed away base, as if corroded by a strong acid that left a weird, pink, solidified “drool” on the stumps.
“Excuse me, Colonel,” the pilot piped up again, “but our spaceship did not fall because of the explosion of a V2. At least the explosion was not the only cause of its fall. How could an explosion, however strong, produce this kind of corrosion? A corrosion capable of transforming the ship’s metal into dust?”
Colonel Zavkom and the other specialists, dazed among the wreckage, had to accept his evidence. Petrov’s reasoning was correct. This corrosion could not be explained.
“Could they have discovered a process of corrosion that works without an atmosphere?” someone asked. “Maybe…”
He did not finish his thought but suddenly shot his arm out to grab onto somebody or something. Before his astonished comrades he steadied himself by holding onto a tear in a tail pipe.
“Are you feeling dizzy?” Zavkom asked.
With his eyes focused on the ground the man explained, “I felt like the ground was moving… Hey! Look!”
Under a thin layer of dust a Selenite was wriggling feebly. The Russian must have stepped on it and the creature trying to get free had upset his balance.
“Damnation! What’s that?”
“It’s… it’s moving,” Ilyine the physicist muttered. “It’s… alive!”
One by one or together in small groups, the Selenites that had survived the explosion were slithering out of their ashy death shrouds. Their brown shells, spotted with chalky dust, still bore traces of their burial. Most of them coiled off toward their lairs in the foot of the crater walls, but some headed straight for the bottom of the rocket.
Faced with this tidal wave of living “things” advancing on their spaceship, the astronauts backed away, horrified and not knowing what to do. Some Selenites were already stuck to the fuselage, climbing very slowly they absorbed every inch of metal. It was not a very thick layer of metal, true, but one after another they would end up gradually eating it all, leaving behind only a disgusting, pinkish substance, very thin and glimmering with shifting colors.
“Metal-eating monsters,” Colonel Zavkom murmured.
“Metallophage Selenites,” Petrov corrected him, his face twisted in fear and almost hypnotized by the progress of the awful creatures.
Commander Taylor was keeping a close eye on the winches lowering the three “space taxis” out of the hold. These machines, 16 feet long and 4 feet wide could hold one man with his arms along his sides lying down on a reinforced rubber-foam “mattress.” In spite of the discomfort these space taxis could save an astronaut’s life if a space ship crashed or if in the astronomical neighborhood of Earth it started into free fall. By carrying these individual rockets the members of the spacecraft team could abandon their mother ship and escape to Earth. In the terrestrial atmosphere, thanks to the deployable wings, a long, gliding flight would reduce their speed and at a reasonable altitude, 70,000-100,000 feet, a super-resistant metallo-plastex parachute would be automatically ejected. Moreover, every space taxi was submersible!
Unfortunately, in case of an “astral shipwreck” millions of miles away from Earth, these space taxis would only be good for coffins!
On the Moon these mini-ships were going to be used as reconnaissance rockets. The Moon’s weak gravity would make landing relatively easy.
Dressed in their heavy spacesuits Kariven, Streiler and Lieutenant Clark were each stretched out in their “capsules,” on their space taxi beds. They closed up the hatches that were carefully sealed and with their pads on a tilted frame equipped with directional cells, they
shot up at high speed. The three ships were soon only three dots shining in the sunlight and heading toward the dark side of our satellite.
In formation 100 feet from each other, the three space taxis crossed to the north of the Marius crater, then flew over the huge Helvetius crater and headed due west. Now they were starting to slow down. The dazzling whiteness of the sun on the lunar horizon stopped rather suddenly to give way to perpetual night on the dark side. The three space taxis took a tight turn and headed due south. At 16,000 feet altitude they flew along the border separating the zone of eternal shadows, which no human eye had ever seen, from the zone of brightness, the only side visible from the Earth.
The automatic cameras with telephoto lens had just turned on, filming the stretch of turbulent terrain, while the magnetometer recorded the variations in the lunar magnetic field.
In spite of their uncomfortable position, the pilots could see a large stretch of ground thanks to a periscopic sight with zoom. In theory the “zone of intermittent visibility” or the “libration zone” was no different than the bright area. Assumedly, the same should be said for the dark side. Craters of all sizes with or without central spikes, vast plains called “seas,” mountains and fissures ought to be found on the opposite side with a similar distribution as observed on the visible side. On the other hand, if the temperature on the bright side could reach up to 185C during the lunar “day” and when the sun was at its zenith, on the dark side it could get as low as -200C!
The three space taxis just passed by Montes Doerfel and Leibniz at the lunar South Pole and were heading east. They had already made one quarter of their trip and were continuing on a straight line along the libration line. In less than three hours they will have made a complete trip around the Moon and could then pursue a few reconnaissance points on the unknown hemisphere.
Streiler, flying to the left of Kariven, called through his transmitter, “Did you see that, Kariven? On the sides of some of the craters and on the plains we flew over, those dark zones different than the chalky color of the ground?”
“Yes. Some of those huge brown ‘stains’ stop right at the edge of a canyon.”
Lieutenant Clark, flying on Kariven’s right, joined in the conversation, “I saw the same marks on the dark side at certain points being swept by our spotlights. They weren’t brown, though, but kind of purple. They… There’s one to my right!”
“Let’s get a closer look,” Kariven said as he started descending toward the spot indicated.
The three cylindrical ships entered the shadows with their spotlights on and started circling above the strangely colored area. By moving their spotlights the Earthlings could see that the part of the purple zone unlit was emitting a faint, mauve-tinted phosphorescence.
Adjusting the focus of their periscopic sights the pilots examined their screens to detect some details of the ground. After a moment of careful observation, Kariven was speechless. On the long libration band hundreds of thousands of giant Selenites were moving in close ranks. They each measured from one and a half to two feet in diameter. Their purple shells were flashing that same weird, mauve phosphorescence.
“Giant Selenites!”
“Look to the west!” Streiler cried out. “That brown stain moving fast over the Hannon crater is a bunch of dwarf Selenites… Let’s call them brown Selenites since they look the same as the ones we’ve already seen.”
“It’s like they’re running away from big, purple Selenites,” Kariven remarked. “Both of them are heading west or northwest.”
The pilots pointed their cameras to film the movements of the two huge “stains,” one brown and the other purple.
“Let’s land in the zone that the giant Selenites just left,” Kariven decided. “We’ll take a sample of the soil and take off again to finish our round-the-moon flight.”
A minute later the three space taxis set down gently, their pads sinking in the dust. Seen from the libration zone the sun on the horizon gave off a frugal light, partly hidden behind the mountains and the distant craters. In their spacesuits the astronauts left the individual rockets. Without going too far they examined the terrain using a light fixed to their belts.
On one side was the gray plain, dimly lit by the upper part of the sun emerging timidly from the mountain ridge. In the other direction, on the dark side, perpetual night and the cold of outer space reigned. The only difference between the sky and the black ground was the twinkling constellations.
Kicking the dust off his boots, Kariven loosened a rock on the surface. Using a mineralogist hammer he cut off a few shards to examine them. Streiler and Clark, with a plastic bags hanging from their belts, did the same.
“The libration zone appears to be rich in surface minerals,” Streiler observed. “I just found a chink of galena or at least it looks like lead sulfide.”
“I’ve got some pieces of the same mineral but I think it’s silver sulfide.”
“Every vein of this surface mineral,” Lieutenant Clark noted, “has deep traces of corrosion caused by the giant Selenites.”
“These monsters are luckier than their brothers on the bright side. They’ve got a rich hunting ground here,” Streiler joked.
“Maybe that explains why the brown Selenites are here. The giants are defending their hunting grounds, chasing away any dwarves who set their sights on their territory.”
When they had filled their sample bags, they got back in their rockets and took off. All along the libration line the three astronauts witnessed the same counter-attacks pitting the giant Selenites against the dwarf Selenites who scampered away as fast as their belly rolls allowed. There was one strange fact Kariven could not shake off: not only was the general flow of these creatures from one end to the other of the border zone between the two hemispheres, but now, after almost completing their round-the-Moon flight, they noted that the massive movement were into areas far removed from the libration line. It was more like a vast migration on a lunar scale than a flight from the giant Selenites. Brown or purple, the disc-shaped monsters were advancing quickly in a direction that appeared to lead to the Ptolemaeus crater in the center of the bright side. The direction was only vaguely indicated. The Earthlings had, in fact, observed only a general movement away from the border separating the two hemispheres. Logically, if all the Selenites were heading away from the libration zone then it only followed that at the same time they were getting closer to the center of the bright side of the Moon.
Just before veering east to go back to base the three astronauts were witness to an absolutely incomprehensible phenomenon. Beyond the zone of intermittent light, thus in the heart of shadows invisible from Earth, an extraordinary purple flare lit up a big crater. The explorers thought they were seeing a huge globe of bright red fire rise up. The blinding flash went out as suddenly as it appeared.
“Hey… did you see that?” Clark stammered.
“You’d have to be blind not to have seen that!”
Far beyond the crater where this fantastic phenomenon occurred a bright dot disappeared into starry space at incredible speed, its trajectory carrying it behind the horizon.
“And did you see that too?”
“Yes. Do you have any idea what it could be?” Streiler asked.
“No idea,” Kariven murmured thoughtfully. “In any case, it could not be a meteor. The rocks from the heavens, near the lunar surface lacking an atmosphere, just like in outer space, don’t light up like that.”
“What if we fly over the crater where that ball of light showed up? It’s not too far.”
“OK. Follow me two taxi lengths behind.”
At only 125 mph they neared their goal, a crater over a mile in diameter that they were soon flying over at low speed. They were the first Earthlings to see this “dark side” of the Moon, hidden forever from their fellow men. They circled around the apparently common crater. With their powerful spotlights turned on, the astronauts adjusted the angle of their periscopic sights to get a close-up of the m
oonscape under their rockets.
“Good God!” Streiler exclaimed. “What happened in that ringed formation?”
In the middle of the flat crater surface a gulf around 2,000 feet wide had opened up, perfectly round and over 150 feet deep. Under the three bright beams of light the walls of the gulf glimmered, studded with crystals that the spotlights made sparkle like sunlight on rock crystal.
“It looks like the walls of the hole were vitrified,” Clark observed. “It would take intense heat to melt the rock and dust like this. But what for? And what… or who could have produced such heat?”
In a worried voice Kariven answered, “How would I know? Right now let’s turn around. When we get back to base we’ll make out report. If Commander Taylor authorizes it, we’ll come back tomorrow to inspect the crater up close.”
In triangular formation the three rockets soared away from the darkened crater. On entering the bright side a few minutes later the pilots blinked their eyes in the sudden light that invaded their periscopic sights. Following the signals constantly emitted by the base’s directional transmitter, the space taxis approached the Kepler crater where Daisy and the Bubble Base were stationed.
Past the Montes Hercynii they were flying over the vast plain that would lead them to camp, but in the gloomy moonscape an unpleasant surprise was awaiting them.
An unthinkable gathering of Selenites was moving SSE. As far as the eye could see on every side the plain was covered. It was like a huge, brown carpet, rippling over the hills and sinking into the craters and fissures to come out on the other side and flow relentlessly to the south without anything stopping it.
“They’re… they’re marching south,” Clark stammered with a hint of anguish in his voice.
“At the speed they’re going,” Kariven observed, “it’ll take them 15 or 20 hours at most to reach the Kepler crater. Let’s not kid ourselves, the Selenites, both small and big, are not heading to the center of this hemisphere… but toward our base! When we saw this kind of migration from an area around the South Pole first and then all along the libration line that circles the Moon, we were too hasty to conclude that the monsters were heading for the center. In truth all of them are converging on our camp!”
