by Ron Miller
“Get him off her!” cried Thursby, at a loss as to what to do and too short to reach even the hem of the Baudad’s tunic. Rykkla cast about and grabbed the first thing that was close at hand: the now-discarded mechanical phallus. Holding it like an axe, gears, axles, pinions and rachets dangling from the nether end, she swung it over her head and down upon the man’s back. He wheezed and his grip momentarily loosened. Gravelinghe, deathly pale, grasped his wrists and once again held the writhing creature at arm’s length. A disturbingly feral snarl twisted her beautifully sculptured features and Rykkla was afraid for a moment that the amazon intended to tear the man in two like a wishbone. If that happened she wondered what Gravelinghe’s wish might be.
The Baudad was almost incoherent and spittle foamed and blew from his lips. “You’ll all die for this! No you won’t! I’ll see that you’ll wish that you were dead! You’ll pray to be put to death! Put me down! Help! Help!”
“Thursby,” said Rykkla, “find something to tie him up with, and something to gag him with, too, for heaven’s sake. Make sure that you find something strong.” Meanwhile, she turned back to the window and began puzzling out how to remove enough panes to allow them to pass through. Behind her, the Baudad spoke and if the heavy gag had not muffled his words, Rykkla would have heard him say, “One friend asks another, ‘What is a swell affair, Forli?’ To which question Forli replies, ‘Swell affair? lemme see. Ah! yes, I know, a boil.’ But his friend disagrees. ‘Something else, try again.’ ‘No, I give it up.’ ‘A hill, ye know. Don’t ye see, a hill is a swell affair, and besides all hills have crests.’”
CHAPTER TWELVE
UNHAPPY LANDINGS
“There was something very peculiar going on back there on the moon,” said Professor Wittenoom.
“No kidding,” replied Bronwyn.
“No, I don’t mean the seismic activity, I mean the reason for the activity.”
“I didn’t know that you’d had very much time for research.”
“I didn’t, but there were certain suggestive, ah, suggestions indicated by my instruments, just before we took our ill-fated stroll.”
“And?”
“The moon seemed to have been bathed in an unaccountable and powerful electromagnetic field.”
“So?”
“Well, there’s no reason, of course, for the moon to have its own, natural magnetic field, it’s too small to have a molten core . . . even if it had, it would have been incapable of creating anything like this. Everything was all wrong; it was most unusual, even unnatural.”
“By ‘unnatural’ are you suggesting that it was artificial?”
“Well, that may be an unwarrented leap from what I have just said, but, nevertheless, that is just what I was leading up to.”
“I don’t understand. You’re saying that someone is making this, um, electromagnetic field? Who? Whatever for? How?”
“To all three questions: I don’t know.”
“But you think it has something to do with what’s happening to the moon?”
“It would seem reasonable to suppose so; after all, it would be too much of a coincidence to have two incomprehensible things happening to the moon at the same time.”
“I suppose so. I’m just wondering why anyone would want to break up the moon. It seems like such an awful lot of effort to no point. I mean, there are two moons and this is the smaller one. So it can’t be that it’s just some unromantic person who hates moonlight.”
“They could be just practicing, we can’t assume that the breakup of the moon is a final goal. But practicing for what I couldn’t guess. But in any case I’m less interested in why then how. Actually, I’m wondering if perhaps the breakup may just be a side effect and that someone is trying to move the moon.”
“Move it? Whatever for? Move it where? Besides, you told me that the moon weighs a squintillion tons, how could anyone move something that heavy?”
“I haven’t a clue, but I feel certain that it’s happening nevertheless. Besides, have you looked at the specimens I brought back with me?”
“I didn’t know that you had brought back anything.”
“Well, of course I did. After all, that’s why we had gone there. In any case, if you’re looking for motives, you may need look no further than this,” he said, handing her a biscuit-sized rock. It had no weight, naturally, but it had mass. It resisted her attempt to move it more than its size warranted. It was a familiar sensation. She looked at the professor in surprise.
“It’s gold, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is, and there was plenty of it, too.”
“So the moon really is made of gold?”
“Well, not a hundred percent, of course, but a significant fraction of it is.”
“Well, what do you know?” she said, almost to herself. Then: “If it doesn’t exactly explain the why or the how, it certainly sets one to speculating.”
“It does, indeed.”
The spacecraft was nearing the earth, after two days of effortless coasting. There had been very little for the space travellers to do other than eat and float lazily around the cabin, like a pair of overcontent goldfish. After an initial course correction soon after takeoff, accomplished by the peroxide rockets, the ship was in an immutable curve that would intersect the orbit of the earth at the exact moment that the planet occupied it. Since there was nothing external to the ship that could alter this, that is, nothing that wouldn’t also destroy the rocket, there was nothing for the passengers to do but amuse themselves as best they could and allow the ponderous and irrevocable gears of celestial machinery to do their ineluctable work. They played card games, they read, they looked out the portholes, they had conversations.
“Doesn’t this somehow make you feel closer to Musrum?” asked the professor, his chin resting pensively on a porthole rim, his long body lazily waving like a pennant in a gentle breeze.
“Not particularly,” Bronwyn replied.
“No? Then you’re not especially religious, I take it?”
“Not particularly.”
“This is interesting,” observed Wittenoom, twisting around eel--like, in order to face her, “since so many of your countrymen appear to be devout, if not compulsive, believers.”
“That’s true, but it’s probably only because they’re so miserable.”
“I detect an undertone of cynicism.”
“Well, of course you do. The government of Tamlaght has used the Church for centuries to convince the peasantry to accept their wretched lot and in return for this the Church has been allowed to gain enormous wealth and power. And it’s worked, too. Look here, why should some semiliterate fieldhand, more than half starved, barefoot and dressed in rags, looking forward to a brief lifetime of nothing better than hard labor day and night, complain if he can be convinced that a glorious afterlife, where everything that is not milk and honey is plated with gold, is waiting for him once he dies? And worse than that, he’s convinced that the greater his stoicism, the more pain and suffering and poverty he endures in silence, the greater will be his chances of salvation. And what a cheap and easy promise that is to make! After all, who’s going to ever be able to prove the Church wrong since you have to die to get the promised reward?”
“You don’t believe in Musrum, then?”
“I never said that. I said that I don’t believe in religion. Religion and Musrum are two different things. Haven’t you, as a scientist, Professor, ever had any difficulties with the Church?”
“Oh, we used to, though not as much as once. I know that some of my colleagues in the more fundamentalist countries have had their researches heavily interfered with, even banned.”
“See? Anything that threatens the infallible word of the Church has to be quelled. And that brings me to the one, big, main objection that I have against religion.”
“There’s more?”
“Not much. It’s the matter of faith. It’s about making a virtue of blind, unquestioning acceptance of authority. It ab
solutely drives me mad to hear self-righteously ignorant people say ‘I don’t need any proof of this or that, I have faith.’ How can anyone be proud of saying, in effect, that they have abdicated their ability to think and question and decide for themselves? Of saying, in effect, that they believe whatever they are told, just so long as it is told to them by some self-proclaimed authority? I think it’s horrible to see children being raised with that kind of attitude. ‘Faith,’ they are told, ‘is a virtue. Thinking for yourself, questioning what you are told, seeking and demanding proofs, is a sin.’ It really makes me angry.”
“I can see that.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be going on like this. It’s just that it all seems so clear to me, so lucid. I just can’t bring myself to believe that Musrum is anything but an illogical, ill-conceived and inconsistent fiction created originally by overimaginative and ignorant shepherds who had no other way to explain everything that went on in the world around them, from natural disasters to plain bad luck.
“I’m not saying I don’t believe in something. I just have a very hard time looking out this porthole and believing that a being capable of creating planets and stars and galaxies with a snap of his fingers worries day and night about what I do. And you know that whole thing I was taught about Musrum and the Weedking eternally battling over our souls? Well, how utterly conceited that is! It is even sane to think that we could possibly be so important?”
“Well then,” mused the professor, turning back to the window, “at least you must admit that the sheer scale of the universe makes you feel insignificant.”
“Hardly. What are planets and moons but big balls of rock? What are stars and galaxies but flaming masses of incandescent gas? Big deal. And what’s left? vacuum, and I don’t confuse empty space with anything that should make me feel insignificant. It’d take a lot more than umptysquidillion cubic light years of absolutely nothing to do that to me.”
“Calm yourself, my dear.”
Bronwyn had long since learned to enjoy the sensation of weightlessness and had even elected to sleep floating freely in the cabin, rotating slowly under the influence of the little ventilating fans. The interior of the spaceship had been designed by engineers who had not been particular interested in, or even possibly aware of, the gentler amenities. It had been solely due to Bronwyn’s efforts, for example, that the walls had not been left as bare metal and had instead been painted a soft eggshell white trimmed in blue, green and tan. Nevertheless, the interior bristled with sharp-corned instrument consoles, switches, levers, knobs, bolts and other inconvenient whatnots. After once awakening to the painful sensation of a pump handle entering an eye, the princess tethered herself by tying one end of a length of string to a toe and the other end to a brace on the central column, and thereafter slept as peacefully as toy balloon.
After they had fallen nearly fifty-four hours the earth loomed so large in the portholes that it could not be seen in its entirety through any one of them. The rocket had looped around the planet and was now approaching the earth from the daylit side. Bronwyn could not take her eyes away from the spectacular sight; she cursed her long nose as she tried to press her face closer to the polished quartz. She was amazed, as she had been with the moon, at how brilliant the earth looked: it seemed made of light, as self-luminous as one of the electric globes that hung from the ceiling of the cabin. It seemed both unbelievable and ironic that beneath those dazzling clouds there might be people cursing the darkness. The professor was surrounded by a solar system of books and manuals that circled him like bats, or perhaps moths fascinated by his brilliance, as he twiddled a circular slide rule and took notes on a tablet he had tied to the top of one thigh. “Dear, dear . . . “ he murmured.
“‘Dear, dear’ what?” Bronwyn asked, not liking the sound of dear, dear at all, though dear, dear did not approach the ominousness of uh oh.
“We’re not at all where we should be.”
“What do you mean? We’re not going to miss the earth, are we?”
“Oh, no! No, no, no!”
“Are we going to crash into it, then?”
“I certainly hope not.”
“What’s the problem then?”
“Well, returning to the earth is not just a matter of dropping to the ground and hopping out of the rocket. The earth is a big planet, you know. Including the oceans, there are about 200,960,000 square miles upon which we could descend. I’m not sure on which one of those square miles we are going to end up. In other words, there is only one chance in nearly two hundred and one million that we will land where we ought to.”
“I assumed that we were going to land more or less where we took off.”
“We were, but something has changed that.”
“What? Nothing’s happened, has it?”
“That’s just what puzzles me. Nothing has happened so far as I know. Our takeoff was just as it should have been, our course was corrected properly to allow for an earlier departure; all was well. But I’ve taken our position by the stars every hour for the last two days and little by little we have been gradually drawn off our course.”
“Drawn off, you say? Something has been pulling on us?”
“I have no other explanation.”
“Do you think it’s something natural?”
“I have no idea. No one’s ever been out here before. Who know’s what’s natural or not?”
“Well, where do you think we’re going to come down? The earth is thirteen-sixteenths ocean, you know. That means that if we’re descending randomly, we’ve got only three chances in sixteen of coming down on a square mile that’s solid.”
“I know. And, actually, you have to eliminate a disturbingly large amount of even that remaining part of the earth, which contains a lot of deserts, mountains, glaciers, swamps and generally trackless and inhospitable wilderness.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do to put us back on the right track?”
“Hughenden used all of our spare rockets attempting to maroon us. We’ve just enough to brake for our final descent and no more. If I try to correct our orbit now, we won’t have enough left to keep us from entering the atmosphere so fast we’d burn up.”
“Well, damn it all to tiny little pieces! Why did Hughenden try to abandon us, anyway? What was the point of that supposed to have been?”
“I’m at an even greater loss to explain that than you are.”
“This is wonderful. So we’re probably going to land in the middle of an ocean, in some swampy jungle or on the top of some mountain or glacier.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“I wish Hughenden were here so I could blow him through the window again.”
The spaceship bulleted into the earth’s atmosphere, plunging into its tenuous upper reaches like a badly-skipped stone. The professor fired the remaining rockets, jettisoning the empty tubes once they had been spent. The surrounding structure fell away as well, exposing the blunt base of the dome-shaped cabin. At almost the same time, Wittenoom began releasing the first of a series of parachutes that would initially merely retard and then finally slow the plunging spacecraft to a relatively earthly velocity. At this point the big main parachutes, three of them, would blossom above the spacecraft, eventually depositing it to the ground as gently as a descending thistledown. Somewhere.
The first stages of the fall were terrifying. They had both strapped themselves in, prior to the firing of the last braking rockets, and it was a good thing they had done so. The hemispherical cabin bucked and shook as though it were a tin can that had just been kicked down a colossal flight of stairs. Bronwyn wished that she had taken the additional precaution of blocking her ears: the rush of wind, even in what still amounted to a laboratory vacuum, gradually rose from the merest low moan to a piercing, deafening shriek that threatened to emulsify her aqueous humor.
The temperature rose quickly in the cabin until Bronwyn was sure that it must be well over a hundred degrees, exactly how much more she
would have been distressed to learn.
There was a tremendous jolt that shook loosely-attached instruments from the walls and sent flying toward the ceiling all of the loose books, trash and paraphernalia that had accumulated over the last week. It was the shock of the first parachutes being released: the trio of small drogue ‘chutes that would orientate the capsule and begin the retardation of its fall. The heat continued to increase as did the screaming, which now had added to it the parachute cables, through which the wind shrieked like Musrum’s own aeolian harp. Another heavy jolt again pressed Bronwyn into the cushions of her couch as the second set of even larger parachutes were deployed and the vehicle decellerated further. This was shortly followed by a third, slightly lesser jolt.
She heard the professor unfasten his belts and rise from his couch, followed, a moment later, by the sound of one of the ports being cranked open.
Bronwyn had for the last several minutes kept her eyes tightly squeezed shut and now when she opened them, she was surprised and pleased to see that the sharp, actinic glare that she had grown accustomed to seeing stream from the ports had been replaced by a softer, bluer glow. She wanted to rise but felt as heavy as a sack of wet sand. The cabin was rocking gently from side to side and, though there was still a deep thrumming from the cables, she wondered for a moment if they had landed in some ocean.
“Where are we?” she asked. “Are we down yet?”
“We’re at an altitude of about sixty thousand feet, roughly ten miles, and descending rapidly.”
“Why are you looking so worried? Are we going to land somewhere I’m not going to like?”
“I have no idea yet of where we’re going to land. I’m worried about the landing itself: we’re descending far too rapidly. Look!” he gestured toward a large gauge with an ominously swinging needle. “We’ve dropped almost a mile since we began talking!”
