Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  “Just remember, Dorothy—Deni isn’t the only person who didn’t volunteer.”

  MOON DUEL

  Fritz Leiber

  With a fifty-year career that stretched from the “Golden Age” Astounding of the 1940s to the beginning of the nineties, the late Fritz Leiber was an indispensable figure in the development of modern science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It is impossible to imagine what those genres would be like today without him, except to say that they would be the poorer for it. Probably no other figure of his generation (with the possible exception L. Sprague de Camp) wrote in as many different genres as Leiber, or was as important as he was to the development of each. Leiber can be considered to be one of the fathers of modern “heroic fantasy,” and his long sequence of stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser remain one of the most complex and intelligent bodies of work in the entire subgenre of “Sword & Sorcery” (which term Leiber himself is usually credited with coining). He may also be one of the best—if not the best—writers of the supernatural horror tale since Lovecraft and Poe, and was writing updated “modern” or “urban” horror stories like “Smoke Ghost” and the classic Conjure Wife long before the work of Stephen King engendered the Big Horror Boom of the middle 1970s and brought that form to wide popular attention.

  Leiber was also a towering Ancestral Figure in science fiction as well, having been one of the major writers of both Campbell’s “Golden Age” Astounding of the forties—with works like Gather, Darkness—and H.L. Gold’s Galaxy in the fifties—with works like the classic “Coming Attraction” and the superb novel The Big Time, which still holds up as one of the best SF novels ever written—and then going on to contribute a steady stream of superior fiction to the magazines and anthologies of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, as well as powerful novels such as The Wanderer and Our Lady of Darkness. The Big Time won a well-deserved Hugo in 1959, and Leiber also won a slew of other awards: all told, six Hugos and four Nebulas, plus three World Fantasy Awards—one of them the prestigious Life Achievement Award—and a Grandmaster of Fantasy Award.

  Here he takes us to the bleak, airless surface of the Moon for a battle of wits and weapons among strange antagonists—one that proves that, in combat, even the smallest and most seemingly inconsequential of actions can have very large (and unforeseen) consequences . . .

  Fritz Leiber’s other books include The Green Millennium, A Spectre Is Haunting Texas, The Big Engine, and The Silver Eggheads; the collections The Best of Fritz Leiber, The Book of Fritz Leiber, The Change War, Night’s Dark Agents, Heroes and Horrors, The Mind Spider, and The Ghost Light; and the seven volumes of Fafhrd-Gray Mouser stories, now being reissued in massive omnibus trade-paperback editions; the most recent such volume is Farewell to Lankhmar.

  ###

  First hint I had we’d been spotted by a crusoe was a little tick coming to my moonsuit from the miniradar Pete and I were gaily heaving into position near the east end of Gioja crater to scan for wrecks, trash, and nodules of raw metal.

  Then came a whish which cut off the instant Pete’s hand lost contact with the squat instrument. His gauntlet, silvery in the raw low polar sunlight, drew away very slowly, as if he’d grown faintly disgusted with our activity. My gaze kept on turning to see the whole shimmering back of his helmet blown off in a gorgeous sickening brain-fog and blood-mist that was already falling in the vacuum as fine red snow.

  A loud tock then and glove-sting as the crusoe’s second slug hit the miniradar, but my gaze had gone back to the direction Pete had been facing when he bought it—in time to see the green needle-flash of the crusoe’s gun in a notch in Gioja’s low wall, where the black of the shadowed rock met the gemlike starfields along a jagged border. I unslung my Swift* as I dodged a long step to the side and squeezed off three shots. The first two shells must have traveled a touch too high, but the third made a beautiful fleeting violet globe at the base of the notch. It didn’t show me a figure, whole or shattered, silvery or otherwise, on the wall or atop it, but then some crusoes are camouflaged like chameleons and most of them move very fast.

  *All-purpose vacuum rifle named for the .22 cartridge which as early as 1940 was being produced by Winchester, Remington, and Norma with factory loads giving it a muzzle velocity of 4,140 feet, almost a mile, a second.

  Pete’s suit was still falling slowly and stiffly forward. Three dozen yards beyond was a wide black fissure, though exactly how wide I couldn’t tell because much of the opposite lip merged into the shadow of the wall. I scooted toward it like a rat toward a hole. On my third step, I caught up Pete by his tool belt and oxy tube while his falling front was still inches away from the powdered pumice, and I heaved him along with me. Some slow or overdrilled part of my brain hadn’t yet accepted he was dead.

  Then I began to skim forward, inches above the ground myself, kicking back against rocky outcrops thrusting up through the dust—it was like fin-swimming. The crusoe couldn’t have been expecting this nut stunt, by which I at least avoided the dreamy sitting-duck slowness of safer, higher-bounding moon-running, for there was a green flash behind me and hurtled dust faintly pittered my soles and seat. He hadn’t been leading his target enough. Also, I knew now he had shells as well as slugs.

  I was diving over the lip three seconds after skoot-off when Pete’s boot caught solidly against a last hooky outcrop. The something in my brain was still stubborn, for I clutched him like clamps, which made me swing around with a jerk. But even that was lucky, for a bright globe two yards through winked on five yards ahead like a mammoth firefly’s flash, but not quite as gentle, for the invisible rarified explosion-front hit me hard enough to boom my suit and make the air inside slap me. Now I knew he had metal-proximity fuses on some of his shells, too—they must be very good at mini-stuff on his home planet.

  The tail of the pale green flash showed me the fissure’s bottom a hundred yards straight below and all dust, as ninety percent of them are—pray God the dust was deep. I had time to thumb Extreme Emergency to the ship for it to relay automatically to Circumluna. Then the lip had cut me off from the ship and I had lazily fallen out of the glare into the blessed blackness, the dial lights in my helmet already snapped off—even they might make enough glow for the crusoe to aim by. The slug had switched off Pete’s.

  Ten, twelve seconds to fall and the opposite lip wasn’t cutting off the notched crater wall. I could feel the crusoe’s gun trailing me down—he’d know moon-G, sticky old five-foot. I could feel his tentacle or finger or claw or ameboid bump tightening on the trigger or button or what. I shoved Pete away from me, parallel to the fissure wall, as hard as I could. Three more seconds, four, and my suit boomed again and I was walloped as another green flash showed me the smooth-sifted floor moving up and beginning to hurry a little. This flash was a hemisphere, not a globe—it had burst against the wall—but if there were any rock fragments they missed me. And it exactly bisected the straight line between me and Pete’s silvery coffin. The crusoe knew his gun and his Luna—I really admired him, even if my shove had pushed Pete and me, action and reaction, just enough out of the target path. Then the fissure lip had cut the notch and I was readying to land like a three-legged crab, my Swift reslung, my free hand on my belted dust-shoes.

  ###

  Eleven seconds’ fall on Luna is not much more than two on earth, but either are enough to build up a velocity of over fifty feet a second. The dust jarred me hard, but thank God there were no reefs in it. It covered at least all the limbs and front of me, including my helmet-front—my dial lights, snapped on again, showed a grayness fine-grained as flour.

  The stuff resisted like flour, too, as I unbelted my dust-shoes. Using them for purchase, I pulled my other arm and helmet-front free. The stars looked good, even gray-dusted. With a hand on each shoe, I dragged out my legs and, balancing gingerly on the slithery stuff, got each of my feet snapped to a shoe. Then I raised up and switched on my headlight. I hated that. I no more wanted to do it than a hunted animal wants to bre
ak twigs or show itself on the skyline, but I knew I had exactly as long to find cover as it would take the crusoe to lope from the notch to the opposite lip of the fissure. Most of them lope very fast, they’re that keen on killing.

  Well, we started the killing, I reminded myself. This time, I’m the quarry.

  My searchlight made a perverse point of hitting Pete’s shimmering casket, spread-eagled, seven-eighths submerged, like a man floating on his back. I swung the beam steadily. The opposite wall was smooth except for a few ledges and cracks and there wasn’t any overhang to give a man below cover from someone on top.

  But a section of the wall on my side, not fifty yards away, was hugely pocked with holes and half-bubbles where the primeval lava had foamed high and big against the feeble plucking of lunar gravity. I aimed myself at the center of that section and started out. I switched off my headlight and guided myself by the wide band of starfields.

  You walk dust-shoes with much the same vertical lift and low methodical forward swing as snow-shoes. It was nostalgic, but hunted animals have no time for memory-delicatessen.

  Suddenly, there was more and redder brightness overhead than the stars. A narrow ribbon of rock along the top of the opposite wall was glaringly bathed in orange, while the rim peaks beyond glowed faintly, like smoldering volcanoes. Light from the orange ribbon bounced down into my fissure, caroming back and forth between the walls until I could dimly see again the holes I was headed for.

  The crusoe had popped our ship—both tanks, close together, so that the sun-warmed gasses, exploding out into each other, burned like a hundred torches. The oxyaniline lasted until I reached the holes. I crawled through the biggest. The fading glow dimly and fleetingly showed a rock-bubble twelve feet across with another hole at the back of it. The stuff looked black, felt rough yet diamond-hard. I risked a look behind me.

  The ribbon glow was darkest red—the skeleton of our ship still aglow. The ribbon flashed green in the middle—a tiny venomous dagger—and then a huge pale green firefly winked where Pete lay. He’d saved me a fourth time.

  I had barely pushed sideways back when there was another of those winks just outside my hole, this one glaringly bright, its front walloping me. I heard through the rock faint tings of fragments of Pete’s suit hitting the wall, but they may have been only residual ringings, from the nearer blast, in my suit or ears.

  I scrambled through the back door in the bubble into a space which I made out by crawling to be a second bubble, resembling the first even to having a back door. I went through that third hole and turned around and rested my Swift’s muzzle on the rough-scooped threshold. Since the crusoe lived around here, he’d know the territory better wherever I went. Why retreat farther and get lost? My dial lights showed that about a minute and a half had gone by since Pete bought it. Also, I wasn’t losing pressure and I had oxy and heat for four hours—Circumluna would be able to deliver a rescue force in half that time, if my message had got through and if the crusoe didn’t scupper them too. Then I got goosy again about the glow of the dial lights and snapped them off. I started to change position and was suddenly afraid the crusoe might already be trailing me by my transmitted sounds through the rock, and right away I held stock still and started to listen for him.

  No light, no sound, a ghost-fingered gravity—it was like being tested for sanity-span in an anechoic chamber. Almost at once dizziness and the sensory mirages started to come, swimming in blue and burned and moaning from the peripheries of my senses—even waiting in ambush for a crusoe wouldn’t stop them; I guess I wanted them to come. So though straining every sense against the crusoe’s approach, I had at last to start thinking about him.

  It’s strange that men should have looked at the moon for millennia and never guessed it was exactly what it looked like: a pale, marble graveyard for living dead men, a Dry Tortuga of space where the silver ships from a million worlds marooned their mutineers, their recalcitrants, their criminals, their lunatics. Not on fertile warm-blanketed earth with its quaint adolescent race, which such beings might harm, but on the great silver rock of earth’s satellite, to drag out their solitary furious lives, each with his suit and gun and lonely hut or hole, living by recycling his wastes; recycling, too, the bitter angers and hates and delusions which had brought him there. As many as a thousand of them, enough to mine the moon for meals and fuel-gases and to reconquer space and perhaps become masters of earth—had they chosen to cooperate. But their refusal to cooperate was the very thing for which they’d been marooned, and besides that they were of a half thousand different galactic breeds. And so although they had some sort of electronic or psionic or what-not grapevine—at least what happened to one maroon became swiftly known to the others—each of them remained a solitary Friday-less Robinson Crusoe, hence the name.

  I risked flashing my time dial. Only another thirty seconds gone. At this rate it would take an eternity for the two hours to pass before I could expect aid if my call had got through, while the crusoe—As my senses screwed themselves tighter to their task, my thoughts went whirling off again.

  Earthmen shot down the first crusoe they met—in a moment of fumbling panic and against all their training. Ever since then, the crusoes have shot first, or tried to, ignoring our belated efforts to communicate.

  ###

  I brooded for what I thought was a very short while about the age-old problem of a universal galactic code, yet when I flashed my time dial again, seventy minutes had gone somewhere.

  That really froze me. He’d had time to stalk and kill me a dozen times—he’d had time to go home and fetch his dogs!—my senses couldn’t be that good protection with my mind away. Why even now, straining them in my fear, all I got was my own personal static: I heard my heart pounding, my blood roaring. I think for a bit I heard the Brownian movement of the air molecules against my eardrums.

  What I hadn’t been doing, I told myself, was thinking about the crusoe in a systematic way.

  He had a gun like mine and at least three sorts of ammo.

  He’d made it from notch to fissure-lip in forty seconds or less—he must be a fast loper, whatever number feet; he might well have a jet unit.

  And he’d shot at the miniradar ahead of me. Had he thought it a communicator?—a weapon?—or some sort of robot as dangerous as a man . . . ?

  My heart had quieted, my ears had stopped roaring, and in that instant I heard through the rock the faintest scratching.

  Scratch-scratch, scratch-scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch it went, each time a little louder.

  I flipped on my searchlight and there coming toward me across the floor of the bubble outside mine was a silver spider as wide as a platter with four opalescent eyes and a green-banded body. Its hanging jaws were like inward-curving notched scissor blades.

  I fired by automatism as I fell back. The spider’s bubble was filled with violet glare instantly followed by green. I was twice walloped by explosion-fronts and knocked down.

  That hardly slowed me a second. The same flashes had shown me a hole in the top of my bubble and as soon as I’d scrambled to my feet I leaped toward it.

  I did remember to leap gently. My right hand caught the black rim of the hole and it didn’t break off and I drew myself up into the black bubble above. It had no hole in the top, but two high ones in the sides, and I went through the higher one.

  I kept on that way. The great igneous bubbles were almost uniform. I always took the highest exit. Once I got inside a bubble with no exit and had to backtrack. After that, I scanned first. I kept my searchlight on.

  I’d gone through seven or seventeen bubbles before I could start to think about what had happened.

  That spider had almost certainly not been my crusoe—or else there was a troop of them dragging a rifle like an artillery piece. And it hadn’t likely been an hitherto-unknown, theoretically impossible, live vacuum-arthropod—or else the exotic biologists were in for a great surprise and I’d been right to wet my pants. No, it had most likel
y been a tracking or tracking-and-attack robot of some sort. Eight legs are a useful number, likewise eight hands. Were the jaws for cutting through suit armor? Maybe it was a robot pet for a lonely being. Here, Spid!

  The second explosion? Either the crusoe had fired into the chamber from the other side, or else the spider had carried a bomb to explode when it touched me. Fine use to make of a pet! I giggled. I was relieved, I guess, to think it likely that the spider had been “only” a robot.

  Just then—I was in the ninth or nineteenth bubble—the inside of my helmet misted over everywhere. I was panting and sweating and my dehumidifier had overloaded. It was as if I were in a real pea soup of a fog. I could barely make out the black loom of the wall behind me. I switched out my headlight. My time dial showed seventy-two minutes gone. I switched it off and then I did a queer thing. I leaned back very carefully until as much of my suit as possible touched rock. Then I measuredly thumped the rock ten times with the butt of my Swift and held very still.

  Starting with ten would mean we were using the decimal system. Of course there were other possibilities, but . . .

  Very faintly, coming at the same rate as mine, I heard six thuds.

  What constant started with six? If he’d started with three, I’d have given him one, and so on through a few more places of pi. Or if with one, I’d have given him four—and then started to worry about the third and fourth places in the square root of two. I might take his signal for the beginning of a series with the interval of minus four and rap him back two, but then how could he rap me minus two? Oh why hadn’t I simply started rapping out primes? Of course all the integers, in fact all the real numbers, from thirty-seven through forty-one had square roots beginning with six, but which one . . . ?