by Jerry
“Am I right?”
“You’re right,” sighed Penton, “but God knows why. You can’t get tetanus by swallowing it, and lockjaw doesn’t develop so quickly as ten days.”
“I didn’t know for sure,” grinned Blake. “They were too busy trying to find out what I was doing to follow your mind. Ah—there they go. Will you ray them or shall I?” asked Blake politely, sighting the ion-gun at the nine flapping, rapidly vanishing things scuttling across the red, rusty planet. The ship dipped sharply in pursuit. “There’s one thing—ahhh—” he straightened as the incredible glare died in thin air. “I want to know. How in blazes did you pick me out?”
“To do what you did requires some five hundred different sets of muscles in a beautifully coordinated neuromuscular hookup, which I didn’t believe those things could imitate without a complete dissection. I took the chance it was you.”
“Five hundred sets of muscles! What the heck did I do?”
“You sneezed.”
Rod Blake blinked slowly, and slowly his jaw tested again its supports and their flexibility.
1937
MONSTERS OF THE MOON
Festus Pragnell
A Young Star-Gazer Pits His Strength Against the Colossal Fauna of the Moon, Where Water is More Precious Than Gold
IS Earth’s satellite the cold, dead world that it appears to be through the telescope? The fact that it has no atmosphere is no indication that it does not support life, for astronomers now tell us that some air and warmth—even vegetation—still linger in its deep craters. In these, too, may lurk strange animals, grown to tremendous proportions, which would prove formidable enemies to Earth’s first settlers on the Moon.
Under the Spinning Earth
IT was a place of deathly stillness . . . Harry Johnson, young recruit to the great Lunar Observatory, found the strange silence a little frightening. The Earth, now so far distant, had always been full of noise and movement; but the Moon seemed for ever wrapped in a sombre cloak of lifelessness.
Johnson’s face was covered by a canvas mask and his hands with light gloves, to protect him from sunburn. Beside him the enormous telescope sloped up like some monstrous cannon to the glass dome of the observatory, towering around him like a gigantic soap bubble.
Like a bubble, too, that fragile structure would have burst had it been on Earth; but here on the Moon, where all things weighed less than a sixth of their Earth weight and there were no winds, it was as firm as the rock on which it was built.
The Sun was rising, and making a very slow job of it. For three days Johnson had watched its upward crawl and the gradual shortening of the inky shadows. It would be another four days yet before it reached its highest point in the sky.
Outside the observatory, those jagged rocks which lay in the shade were unthinkably cold—hundreds of degrees below zero—while those in the sunshine were at furnace heat. The Sun itself was blue and twice as bright as it seemed from Earth, while the sky was jet black and the stars glittered with a brightness that hurt the eyes—all because there was so little air.
Earth was half full, looking sixteen times as big as the Sun, steadily spinning in her fixed place in the sky . . .
A telephone bell interrupted Johnson’s thoughts. Glad even of this break in the deadly monotony, he lifted the receiver, placed it to his hooded head.
“Harry Johnson speaking,” he announced, “Look-out at Observatory A, in the Gulf of Dew.”
“Hello, Johnson,” came the reply. “Tycho Crater look-out speaking. I have an urgent message for you. A herd of flying bulls, about ten in number, has been sighted on the plain between us, moving rapidly in your direction. Will you warn the people at the settlement and the mine to watch in case the bulls pass close to them?”
Johnson replied, grimly: “Thanks!
I’ll warn all stations at once. The bulls are not visible from here yet.”
As he promptly passed on the warning to the settlement and the mine, his face wore an anxious look, yet in his eyes was the light of keen curiosity.
When first he set foot on Earth’s satellite he had heard of the “flying bulls,” but up to now he had never actually seen any of them.
Yet he knew that these great lunar monsters, something like the extinct buffalo of Earth, but many times bigger than elephants, were one of the gravest problems the settlers on the Moon had to contend with. Actually, they did not fly, but covered the ground in tremendous leaps, their immense bulk scarcely affected by the slight gravitation.
Ordinarily they lived in the vast lunar craters, where there was air, vegetation and moisture sufficient to sustain them. But like the few other surviving species of lunar life, they were so constituted that they could venture out on the airless plains to seek fresh herbage in other craters.
It was on these mercifully rare occasions that they became a menace to the adventurous souls of Earth who had come to work in the great Moon mines or observatories. For in spite of their reduced weight, the hurtling forms of the massive beasts could smash any flimsy structure that was in their path.
To the Rescue
AFTER entering the warning in his logbook, Johnson went to the eyepiece of the small telescope to see if the approaching herd had yet come into view. The observatory was built high up on the rocks, but he could see for only a comparatively short distance owing to the sharp curvature of the lunar surface.
The landscape was nothing but barren rocks with jagged edges and bottomless ravines. In the Sun they shone dazzlingly, but the shadows were an intense black, softened only by the pale earthlight. As he gazed, it occurred to Johnson that whoever had named this place the Gulf of Dew must have a quaint sense of humour. For, like all the Moon, it consisted of nothing but naked rock; there was no air, no moisture of any sort, except for what lingered at the bottom of the deep craters.
Directly in his line of vision was a small collection of settlers’ houses, built of heat-resisting metal to withstand the pitiless glare of the Sun. Away to his right was the mine which supplied them, not with valuable minerals, but ice. But for that mine none of the settlements could have existed, for the immense frozen underground lake it tapped was the only source of water that had been found on the Moon.
On the near-by horizon, sharp and jagged as the edge of a saw, and so close that he felt he could reach out and touch it, Johnson saw something move. Swinging his telescope, he picked out two moving grey lumps, and realised that he had caught his first glimpse of the dreaded flying bulls.
Then something else caught his eye: a tiny flashing light in a dark shadow. As he swung the telescope round again, the pin-point of light flickered on and off, and with a start he remembered that half an hour before he had seen a clumsy, space-suited figure coming from that direction. Now, apparently, the occupant of the suit was in trouble. There could be no other explanation for the flickering light.
Picking up an electric torch, Johnson flashed an answering signal through the glass wall of the observatory, then gasped as the answer came, in Morse.
“Harry,” the light spelled out. “It’s Mary. Come quick. A big rock has fallen on my leg and I can’t move.”
Johnson crossed the floor of the observatory in two giant strides. Mary Black, daughter of the Chief Engineer at the mine, was among the few women settlers on the Moon who ventured forth in the open more than was absolutely necessary. She often came to visit him at the observatory during his long vigil, for they were firm friends; and the fact that she was in danger made him forget all else, even his duty to guard the great dome.
With a shudder he had realised when he first caught sight of the flashing light that the signaller, whoever it might be, was in deadly peril. But Mary I Her danger was greater than she knew; greater than the slow advance of numbing cold or the possibility of a torn suit allowing her air supply to escape into the vacuum.
For while he was spelling out her message to himself, Johnson had again caught sight of the flying bulls—and they were bearing straight down on the spot where s
he lay helpless in the shadow!
A double door—for all doors on the Moon are double, to prevent loss of air—admitted him to a room where a dozen space-suits hung on the wall. With trembling fingers, he hastily fitted a metal helmet over his head, drew on a suit of fur and rubber, tightened the connections and made the air-tanks secure under his arm-pits. Then, after assuring himself that the supply was working properly, he put thick fur gloves over the only part of himself still exposed.
The Moon Bouncer
WHILE going through this tedious process, which could not be rushed, he was thinking rapidly, trying to decide how he could best get to the girl in time to save her. The ground between the observatory and where she lay was a treacherous mass of high precipices and yawning crevasses. To make this journey on foot was out of the question. He might take a roundabout route in a caterpillarwheeled tractor; but even then he would not get there in time.
There was only one way of covering the distance in anything like the time it would take the flying bulls to get there,; and that was to ride a Moon bouncer. This would enable him to progress in a series of leaps and bounds, just as the monsters did.
The bouncer was a curious contrivance of rubber and air used by the settlers mainly for sport. It required a great deal of practice to become adept in its use and it became an extremely dangerous toy on anything but a fairly level stretch of ground. But Johnson had spent nearly all his time off duty in mastering the art of bouncing; and he was prepared to take risks in a situation like this.
Being so keen on the sport, he always kept his bouncer in one of the buildings near the observatory; and he lost no time in getting there. Out through the four exit doors he went, passing through each one as the others closed behind him. Until, once out in the open, where there was practically no air, his suit billowed out around him, giving him the appearance of a stout, furry animal with a shiny metal globe for a head.
The Moon bouncer rested in its rack in the little out-building, a steel-tipped rubber cylinder ten feet high, which he rolled outside and stood against the Wall. Climbing on the roof, he entered the tiny compartment at the top of the bouncer and set the machine going.
Down he sank as the bouncer compressed itself, ready to take its first leap upward. Johnson thought he had never known these things take so long to start; and all the time those hurtling beasts were drawing nearer . . .
The rubber cylinder shut itself up like a concertina until it was scarcely a yard high. Then suddenly the machine slipped its catch, allowing the rubber to spring back to normal, and Johnson’s body sank deep into the cushion of air as it bore him aloft.
In the slight gravity and airlessness of the lunar surface these bouncers soared to astonishing heights, bounding along like elongated rubber balls. Johnson found himself high above, looking down on the great glass dome of the observatory. For a moment he hung poised up there; then began the downward plunge, and he steeled himself for the sickening drop.
Human bodies are built for earthly conditions; and even practised bouncer-men like Johnson often felt as they looked down from that tremendous height that they could not fall all that way and live. For the beginner it was a frightful ordeal, for one had to lie on one’s face in the little compartment and keep both hands on the controls.
He seemed to fall at a terrific speed, yet the rocky landscape came up beneath him with almost painful slowness. Then there was a grinding concussion as the steel bottom of the cylinder struck the rocks, crushing him into the soft rubber on which he lay.
A moment later he was shooting upwards again, and he noticed that the bouncer was developing a slight tilt. Carefully, he moved the controls, bringing the cylinder upright before it could overbalance. For if a bouncer inverted itself in its flight and struck the ground upside down it meant almost certain death for the occupant.
His first bounce had carried him about three hundred yards. His second bore him a little farther; and with each subsequent leap he so managed the controls that he bounced a greater distance, though not so high. Soon he had left the observatory far behind and was travelling over tumbled rocks in the direction of where Mary lay.
Leaping Juggernauts
THE metal base of the bouncer crashed down on the smooth space in front of the ice mine, then up again, down again a quarter of a mile beyond, and still on . . . and on . . . Not far ahead Johnson could see the grey, hairy forms of the Moon beasts rising and falling as they leaped towards him, travelling like kangaroos, but with bounds as huge as his own.
Somewhere between them was Mary. He could not see her yet; but he kept a watchful eye on the rock in whose shade she was hidden. With each leap, he glanced ahead at the approaching monsters and tried to calculate whether he would reach the girl before those hurtling juggernauts descended upon her. Yes; he could just do it, but there would be no time to stop the bouncer and get out . . .
Then his whole attention was taken up in controlling the bouncer. So rough were the rocks beneath him that he could not find a level stretch on which to descend until he had almost struck the ground. Once he bounded off a, sharp slope and rose again so awkwardly that it took him three more bounces to regain proper control.
It was then that he saw that his next bounce would carry him beyond where Mary lay. Straining his eyes, he managed to catch the gleam of the earthlight on her metal helmet as she lay in the black shadows. How cold she must be as the icy touch of those frigid rocks crept through her protective suit!
He saw that the flying bulls were close upon her; a dozen great forms herded closely together, slowly bobbing up and down as they bounded towards him. For a moment he was stricken with panic at the sight of that headlong dash of many hundred of tons of flesh. It seemed sheer madness for one puny human being, encased in a rubber cylinder, to oppose such tremendous weight.
The first four beasts bounded harmlessly past the spot where the girl lay helpless; but the rest bore down upon her, and Johnson saw that one would land right on her in its next leap. Bitterly he realised that his vague idea of freeing the girl and dragging her to safety had been impossible from the first. Before he could bring the bouncer to a halt the herd would have passed over both of them.
It was a desperate impulse that led him to guide the bouncer to meet the nearest of the remaining beasts, as it rose in a spring that seemed certain to end in awful death for the girl.
The force of the impact knocked him almost senseless as the bouncer struck the monster in the flank, sending it hurtling sideways to the ground. Though the weight of the machine was nothing to that of the great, shaggy beast, its speed was sufficient to give it a severe jolt and change the course of its downward flight.
But Johnson did not see where it landed. He felt the bouncer slip sideways as it fell after the monster. Then it struck a rough rock awkwardly and rose again in a low somersault.
Hazily he was aware of lying on his back with the bouncer falling upside down. The steel tip pointed to the Earth, hanging in the sky, and for a moment he had the curious feeling that he had bounced off the Moon altogether to fall all those hundreds of thousands of miles to the parent planet . . .
There was no way of knowing how high he was above the tumbled rocks, nor how fast he fell. Expert though he was, it was impossible for him to turn the bouncer the right way up before it struck the ground; he had fallen too far for that.
Above him loomed the huge bulk of the last of the flying bulls as it leaped after its fellows. The shock could not be far off. He tensed himself and held his breath.
There came the thud of rubber on rock, and the bouncer changed its course. It had struck a sharp pinnacle of rock a glancing blow which had torn a huge gash in its side.
A moment later, it hit something squarely, yet not with the annihilating crash Johnson expected. Instead, it seemed to meet something soft; then it slowed up and stopped.
All was dark and silent . . .
The Lake of’Ash
AT first he thought he must have fallen into a lake; then he r
emembered that there was no such thing on the Moon. Soon he realised that, by an amazing stroke of luck, he had come down on one of those huge stretches of volcanic ash that dotted the surface of the Moon.
When Earth’s satellite was young, her volcanoes belched forth lava and light ashes like those that buried Pompeii. Without winds to scatter them, great heaps of these ashes still remained, to be disturbed only when some lunar animal burrowed into them to sleep through the long night.
Johnson remembered that some of these lakes of feathery ash were as dangerous as quicksands. Whether he could get out of this one or not depended on the weight of the ash. If the particles were light and loosely packed he might be able to struggle out of the bouncer and reach solid rock.
He tried the door of the compartment. It would only open a little way; but as he scraped the ash into the bouncer with his hands, he found that it had been rammed tight by the impact. Soon he came to where it was loose, enabling him to open the door wide enough to provide an exit.
Hopefully he began to burrow his way through the ash like a mole, pushing it behind him into the compartment, until at length a pale grey light filtered down to where he floundered about beneath the surface. Then he paused awhile to rest. The space-suit was big and cumbersome, and he was very hot inside it.
He did not stop for long. For despite his own perilous position, he had not forgotten the girl’s plight up above. Would he be able to escape this insufferable heat and reach the solid surface before she succumbed to the awful cold?
His renewed struggles were useless, however. For the light above grew dimmer, showing that he was only getting deeper into the ashes. Presently his feet touched something solid; it was evidently the rocky bottom of the lake of ash. He breathed a prayer of thankfulness that at least he could not sink any farther and paused again to recover his breath.
He wondered how much more of this his suit would stand without developing a hole that would let the air out and leave him to suffocate. It was very uncomfortable, he reflected, to be so hot about the head and chest and yet have his feet nearly frostbitten. For the rock beneath seemed as cold as ice, even through his thick, lead-weighted boots.
