Lunar Vengeance: A Collection of Science Fiction Stories

by Fearn, John Russell

  “Look, Hart, does it really matter?” she asked him, as he finished his check-up of details on the night before he was due to depart at 10:00 a.m. next day. “I mean why not experiment a little more and maybe you’ll find what really drove Brice insane. There was perhaps some error which — ”

  “Listen, sweet, there was no error!” He caught her slender arms gently, looked into her strained face. “Whatever trouble there is in space I’m going to locate—and it is there and no place else. What’s more, I’ll reach the Moon! I have everything here—radio, provisions, spacesuits, weapons — What’s the matter?” he broke off, as she remained silent.

  “Nothing,” she said very quietly, then detaching herself from his grip she walked away across the tarmac without another word. He wondered if his adamant stance had offended her…

  Next morning he was quite sure she’d taken umbrage for she did not even turn up with her father to see him make his lonely departure.

  “I don’t know where she is,” Mason replied anxiously, as Hart questioned him. “She went off somewhere last night after seeing you. I guess she doesn’t like you risking your life, Hart, and I feel the same way about it. However,” he shrugged, “we can’t make headway without risk. So there it is.”

  He held out his hand and Hart gripped it firmly. There was a rather woeful smile about his lips.

  “Tell Berry I’ll come back a hero,” he said briefly; then went inside the ship and closed the airlock.

  He sat before the control board he knew so well, hesitated for a moment, then switched on the power to the firing cylinders. Instantly the machine jolted under him, flung him flat against the springs of his chair. His breath was forced out of him in a long gasp: little drops of blood trickled from his nose. For a second or two he sat in gasping anguish as the ship hurtled outwards, upwards, and then climbed with dizzying speed.

  Faster he went, cleaving through the stratosphere, the Heaviside Layer. Temperatures outside switched amazingly but in the insulated ship he felt no variations — Then a cry broke on his ears, a cry of pain…

  He twirled round in amazement. Beryl Mason was right behind him, staggering a little, her face as white as a sheet and blood smearing her nostrils. She gave one brief, defiant smile then collapsed her length on the floor.

  “Berry, you loyal little fool—!”

  Hart stumbled towards her, lifted her with an effort to a long bench, bunched up some of his clothing as a pillow. He paused only long enough to put the robot pilot in commission then turned to the job of reviving the girl. It did not take very long. Presently her eyelids fluttered open.

  “The take-off is—is pretty awful, isn’t it?” she muttered.

  “Berry, why did you do this?” Hart tried to sound stern. “Think of the risk! It may mean death!”

  “I know. I’m a bit of a scientist like you. But my place is beside you—and since you wouldn’t see reason I decided to become a stowaway. I’ve always wanted to explore anyway, ever since I climbed trees as a kid. You can’t send me back now,” she finished seriously.

  “But your dad will be frantic!”

  “Not he. I left a letter which he’ll have found by now.”

  Hart sighed. “Okay, you win. But you’ve destroyed my peace of mind for the rest of this trip— Better now?” He helped her to get to her feet, and for a moment they both staggered at the more than normal gravity occasioned by acceleration.

  Slowly they moved to the window. In awed silence they gazed outside. It was breath-taking because it was a complete novelty; it was something which so far had only existed in their imaginations— The dead black void of space gilded with a myriad stars: the Sun with his twirling prominences and ghostly corona. Then the Moon toward which they were heading, her right hand limb beginning to shade off slightly as the full phase waned.

  Clear, uncannily clear, the satellite hung there, her face traced with innumerable mountains and crater-pits, marred with the dead sea bottoms. Then there were those bright streaks and rays sweeping outwards from Ptolomy, Copernicus, and Tycho—more complex than ever when viewed through this perfect vacuum.

  “Those rays—science’s biggest mystery ever,” Hart mused. “So many explanations and none of them convincing…” Pausing, he gazed in different directions with a frown. “Damned if I can see what could have caused Brice to — ”

  He turned, caught the girl in his arms as she swayed dizzily. Her face had gone deathly pale again. Her eyes, formerly filled with interest, were now fixed on the Moon’s inscrutable disk in something like horror.

  “Hart,” she whispered, “I feel something terrible—stifling—trying to—”

  Her senses left her and she became limp in his grasp. He was so stunned with the suddenness of it that he didn’t know what to do for the moment. Gently he laid her down on the floor, and at the same moment a vast wave of dizziness caught him, too, sent him sprawling across her. Whatever had come upon them it had affected the girl’s more sensitive organism first.

  Hart got to his knees with difficulty, but he felt as though he were in hell itself. Fiery darts of radiation—vibration—were hammering and twisting through his skull. It made movement a titanic effort; thinking almost an impossibility. The wildest of delirium sought to blast his agonized brain.

  He was going insane! And subconsciously he was aware of it! Mightily, superhumanly, he battled against it, using every scrap of his will power. He clawed his way to the switchboard, overmastering a desire to burst into peals of hysterical laughter. Reason, all the normal ideas associated with this amazing trip, were fleeing away from him.

  He caught the switches, held onto them like grim death and turned the machine slowly round. As he half crouched, drooling in spite of himself, he saw the Moon apparently spin round in a dizzy half circle. The more he gazed at its dead, inscrutable face the wilder seemed to rage his emotions.

  “I must!” he breathed to himself, doggedly. “I must get free!”

  But how he was to do it he had no idea. He was in a daze. None the less he began to realize as the ship twisted round and moved Earthward that the crushing lunacy was beginning to relax, flowing away from him like an ebbing tide.

  Faster he sent the ship hurtling on the return journey, until all Earth filled the space before his straining eyes. Less racked mentally—though by no means ruled by ordered sanity even now—he had the chance to notice one thing. Earth had turned on its axis so that the Sahara desert now faced the void—and the ship was falling towards it. Obviously then, since he had started from New York and got just about the same distance as Brice Mynak before being overcome, it had been purely law of science which had brought the aviator down in the country of his ancestors…

  Consciousness sought to desert Hart—but he knew that that meant death from a crash landing. He hung on somehow, guiding the ship until it tore through the atmosphere with the fiery trail of a comet… Down and down, faster and faster, until the yellow sand came rushing up to meet him— He blasted the underjets at the last second. A stunning crash and the splitting of tortured air slammed into his senses. He went flying and collapsed into darkness.

  Stiff, bruised, his head aching violently, Hart stirred again. He was in total darkness and silence, seemed to be huddled against the curved padded wall of the machine. He felt around him and unexpectedly gripped Beryl’s hand. Obviously she had been thrown right beside him.

  For a long time he tried to recall what had happened, then as he pieced the hectic last moments together he scrambled to his feet and felt around for the light switch. It operated, and the cool glow showed the machine tilted at a sharp angle. Outside the ports was dead blackness.

  The immediate environment did not concern him. His brain was clear now, thank God, and that terrible madness had gone. He went over to the girl and for ten minutes gave all his attention to reviving her. By degrees he explained matters to her.

  “But—but where are we?” she asked finally, as he helped her up.

  He shrugged. “La
st thing I saw was the Sahara—pretty nearly the same spot where Brice landed. I passed out then and don’t know what happened— But we’ll soon find out!”

  He handed her a torch, took one himself, then opened the airlock. To their surprise they didn’t step out into a night-covered desert or to the friendly voices of the men excavating Tri-Konam. No, they stepped out into the vast deserted reaches of an immense underground cavern, wrapped in the weighted silence of the tomb.

  They were both too surprised to be afraid. Moving slowly away from the ship on rocky floor they presently turned and looked back at it. It was tilted nose down at forty degrees, its tail piled thick with rubble, rocks, and sand. Up above in the cavern roof there was a gaping fissure.

  “I think I get it,” Hart said at length. “We struck the sand nose down and plunged right through a weak seam in this roof into this cavern, bringing in the rocks on top of us. Guess it will take hours for anybody above—granting they saw us—to get us out. Wait a minute; I’ll try the radio.”

  They hurried back into the ship, and to their relief the radio worked. Nor was it long before they made contact. The voice of engineer Freeman came through the loud speaker.

  “Thank God you’re alive, Mr. Dean! But it’s going to take us a bit of time to get down to you, I’m afraid…”

  “Just whereabouts did we hit?” Hart interrupted.

  “You went right through the sand about quarter of a mile south of the Tri-Konam towers. Guess you must have plunged into part of the city which hasn’t yet been excavated…Okay, you hang on. We’ll dig you out with blasters.”

  Hart switched off and looked at Beryl. She seemed relieved.

  “Take them some time anyway,” she said. “Might as well do a bit of looking around while we wait…”

  Again they left the ship, flashing their torches as they went. The cavern seemed endless in extent, cyclopean in its vastness. It receded into shadowy darkness far away—but that it had once been used was clearly obvious for there were the rough outlines of roads; then as they advanced further they beheld shattered stone colonnades which had obviously been the work of intelligent beings at one time. There were even dwellings, queerly designed, smashed amidst a wilderness of boulders.

  “Obviously all part of the still unexcavated Tri-Konam,” Beryl said after a while.

  “Yeah,” Hart acknowledged, and he was obviously pondering. Then he said, “Come to look at it, the walls of this cavern are not solid rock; they’re composed of countless hundreds of rocks piled solidly on top of one another and fused partly together by some vast heat. Suppose this city were originally on the surface but rocks piled so thickly around it that it became buried in a cavern?”

  “Doc Andrews has thought of that,” the girl reflected. “But how did so many boulders get fused round a city…?”

  Hart couldn’t answer that one. They went on, gazing about them fascinatedly. Then they both glanced at each other as ahead of them in pieces of apparatus, age-old, but with their outlines still plainly discernible.

  When they came up to the machines they found them supporting a chimney-like mass of metal each, going up through the cavern roof. To each machine was still linked a maze of stout cables, all leading to a power engine of fantastic design.

  “Doesn’t make sense to me,” Hart muttered. “These things look rather like the special stoves used for making pottery—you know, like an inverted tundish with a squarish chimney — ” He stopped suddenly, catching the same amazing thought as Beryl.

  “We’re at the base of the four square towers!” she exclaimed.

  “Of course!” He stared in wonder. “So far unexcavated — ”

  Immediately they both forgot all about the rest of the ruins and instead concentrated on studying the four machines in front of them. After some searching they discovered there was a way inside the machines. Carefully they entered one of them, found themselves in a sort of square metal chamber, standing on a device of massive springs and complicated switches. Over their heads yawned the cavernous dark of the flue, its outlet obviously blocked since surface testing had shown the chimneys had a stone foundation.

  “I’m going to take a look up here,” Hart said, and catching onto the chinks in the steel he made his way up with comparative ease, stopped finally when he came to solid stone—a mighty block of it barring his way. He puzzled over it in the torchlight, then dropped back to the girl’s side.

  “This isn’t a foundation; it’s jammed half way up the flue,” he said. “Just as though heat had fused it there. Same sort of stone the Pyramids are made from—a great square block of it. No wonder it was mistaken for a foundation stone by those above.”

  Baffled, they looked back at the floor on which they stood.

  Hart said slowly, “This machinery, what’s left of it, is like the stuff they used to use to fire ballistas. You know, those old fashioned catapult things. I wonder — ”

  “If these things are ballistas on a giant scale?” Beryl broke in quickly. “Why not? The Egyptians used to have ’em.”

  “Yeah—but firing blocks weighing countless tons! The power that would be needed!”

  “Maybe they had it. The machines linked to all this spring mechanism—and particularly the big one where the wires join up—are right beyond us anyway. Atomic force perhaps…” The girl gave a hopeless little sigh. “After all, we’re not archaeologists: better turn the problem over to Dr. Andrews and let him worry. Our job is to solve what’s wrong in space. We’re still licked in trying to get to the Moon, remember.”

  Hart nodded gloomily. “But we won’t be! We’ll solve what’s wrong out there in space even if it kills us. ’Least I will.”

  “That means me, too,” she said seriously.

  They gave up their searching and climbed out into the cavern again, spending their journey back to the spaceship studying the city’s remains. Undoubtedly there were endless evidences to show that Hart’s theory had probably been correct—that the whole place had been battered and pounded until the surrounding cavern walls had been made from piled-up rocks.

  “And the rocks would erode into sand under weather conditions,” he summed up. “So we get the Sahara. Once there was a mighty, prosperous city here and a very intelligent race back of it—not necessarily the Egyptians but the ones who built the Sphinx and Pyramids. We’ve no proof the Egyptians ever made those.”

  “And Brice was descended from the Egyptians,” the girl mused. “Remember him saying all that about chariots of fire dropping to the city? Spaceships? Or shells or something? Rocks?”

  “Possibly.” Hart gave a perplexed shrug. “Oh, leave it to Doc Andrews. It’s his job anyway, not ours. We’ll hand him the dope the moment we’re rescued…”

  They had time to get a meal and a sleep before the first sizzling fire of a rock blaster burst through into their underground prison. Then in a few minutes safety ladders began to appear. The rescue party came into view, looking round curiously. Freeman came hurrying over.

  “Say, what kind of a place is this anyway?”

  “Along with Doc Andrews you are going to find out,” Hart said briefly. “Come along to base camp and I’ll tell you all about it…”

  From the base camp radio calls went out for Doc Andrews, and the girl’s father. Fast airplanes brought both of them before dawn was paling the eastern sky. Doc Andrews in particular, the best archaeologist in America, listened interestedly to all that was told him. He was a lean, little man with rimless glasses and a fluffy white head. “Maybe the answer to the whole problem of who built Tri-Konam,” he said finally. “I’ll take charge of excavations right away. Freeman, come with me.”

  “All this is very well,” Mason said gravely, “but what good does it do us? Beyond turning yourself and Berry nearly insane, Hart, you’ve gotten nowhere with this second effort. Don’t you think it’s time you gave up?”

  “No!” Hart retorted. “I’m going to conquer the first space leap somehow. I plan to stay here for the moment and su
pervise the salvaging of the rocket ship from underground. We can get it repaired where necessary and then figure out a new plan of campaign. But that Moon is going to be conquered!”

  CHAPTER III

  Desperate Journey

  While the salvaging of the machine went on, Dr. Andrews went to work with tireless energy in the caverns below, ruling over his army of willing helpers.

  A couple of weeks passed, in which time Hart had had the time to carefully examine the damage sustained by the rocket ship—then one evening as the party sat in their tent at a late supper Dr. Andrews came hurrying in, eyes glinting behind his glasses.

  “I believe I’ve sorted the mystery out!” he cried, plumping down at the table. “It’s a most amazing story, believe me—but from the records we’ve found and deciphered I think it’s right. The place is a continuation of Tri-Konam, by the way, for the hieroglyphics are the same as those already discovered. That made me able to make instantaneous translations. Anyway…

  “There are some ancient charts in the ruins which show the Moon—but it’s not the Moon that we know. This one is covered with clouds and obviously has an atmosphere!”

  The others looked at him sharply. He went on,

  “Other records reveal that the people who built this city originally came from the Moon—and there are a number of still fairly useful spaceships to prove the fact. But from the unsavoury history they possess it seems that they fall into the category of what we’d call gangsters—or else were ostracized from the Moon on account of criminal scientific activity. They came to Earth with various notions of vengeance, it appears. And they were clever—far cleverer than anybody we know today. What they looked like we don’t know, but records seem to show that they were not unlike animal-men…like the Sphinx itself for instance.