I was outside the sphere when I heard Jet call me. I ran back into the globe to hear the Voice saying, “We have decided, against our better judgment, to help you get back to your own time.”
We were immeasurably relieved. “Thank you,” said Jet quietly.
“Wait. We will help you, but there will be a considerable risk.”
“We don’t mind,” Jet spoke for us all, “if there’s a sporting chance.”
“We may not land you back at exactly the same time as we first picked you up. Are you willing to take that chance?” We were.
Two hours later we were aboard a Time Travellers’ saucer-like ship, watching a 3-D reproduction of the country we were travelling over as it passed through the spherical televiewer screen The journey as far as the river was uneventful. Then, just before we were due to land, we saw from the televiewer that our transfer from the time ship to Luna was not going to be easy.
The first intimation of our new peril was a dense cloud of smoke rising above the forest in the direction of the river. A few moments later, as we sped on our course, we saw that the cultivated fields were burning furiously. Lining the river bank were swarms of ape men.
“What the devil are they up to?” asked Jet anxiously.
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” I answered him. “They’ve set fire to the fields, as the Voice said they frequently do.”
“Is it just the fields,” asked Mitch, “or is it something to do with our ship?”
A closer study of the televiewer told us what he meant. There was Luna all right, but a change had come over her. Instead of resting on her undercarriage as we had left her, Luna was standing on her tail. The ladder to the now highly elevated cabin was extended and the main door open.
Clouds of smoke were drifting by her and at first we thought that she, too, was surrounded by the flames. But although an attempt had been made to burn the grass round her, it had not taken well and was now only smouldering. The flames were emanating from the nearby crops.
There were about a dozen ape men and women quite near to Luna, and when they saw us coming they took to their heels and ran--but only for about a hundred yards, then they turned to watch us complete our descent. They must have realised long ago that the time ships never harmed them.
The moment we landed the televiewer picture dissolved and the hatchway in the ceiling slid open.
Jet climbed the ladder first, the rest of us following closely behind. The dome was already open when we reached the upper deck and we paused at the entrance to survey the scene. There wasn’t a great deal to see because of the smoke that was drifting past. So far as we could tell, the group of cave men who had been near the ship when we landed were at least a hundred yards away, but there might be others, much closer.
“If only we had a gun,” said Mitch. “A spear--anything --we would at least have a chance to defend ourselves--if they decide to attack us.”
“You mean you’d kill them?” I asked him.
“If it came to it,” Mitch said, “yes, I would.”
“But you daren’t,” I said.
“Huh?” Mitch looked at me as though I were crazy.
“How can you? These people are our ancestors. For all we know, each of us is directly descended from them. If you kill even one, you might well kill a child as yet unborn and his children and his children’s children, and so on down to the twentieth century.”
“Good Lord,” said Jet. “It hadn’t occurred to me. To kill one of these people might change the whole course of human progress and civilisation, and if we do get back to our own time, we might find the world is a completely different place.”
“We might well,” I said.
“Then what are we to do?” asked Lemmy. “Supposing they kill us?”
“That won’t matter,” said Jet. “We are not the past. Nothing they do to us can affect it. It could only affect the future. But God knows what havoc we might do if at this stage we wipe out something of what has been. There’s nothing for it but to try to reach the ship before they catch up with us. If they do attack, we must try to avoid harming them. I’ll go first, and the moment we’re all safely in the lock, we’ll retract the ladder. Is that clear?”
We all assented and without another word Jet made his way towards the ground. I was the last to go and by the time I’d touched down Jet was already sprinting towards Luna, and had covered half the distance. Close behind him was Mitch and then came Lemmy about twenty yards in front of me. The smoke was still thick. It got into my eyes, making them water and difficult to keep open.
Half choking and half blind, I ran as hard as I could, following the swiftly moving Lemmy.
I think I must have been within ten yards of Luna when it happened. Close to my ear there was a half-roar, half-scream, like the raving of a lunatic, and the next moment I felt a hot, steel-like grip on my shoulder. I tried to wriggle from the thing’s grasp, lost my balance and fell to the ground with the beast on top of me.
I was so terrified that for the first second or two I was completely paralysed. I had fallen on my back and was now staring into the most horrible face a ‘human’ being could have. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot and the creases in his skin were engrimed with dirt. As his mouth opened, drops of saliva fell on to my face and I could see his yellow, decaying, fang-like teeth. His long hair hung about his eyes, and his reddish, bushy beard, which, even then, I could see was full of vermin, hung to within an inch of my own face.
He had the strength of a horse. As soon as I was under him, he reached for my throat as though to tear it apart. I grabbed his wrists and exerted all my strength to deflect them from their savage intent. As I did so, he began to snap at my face like a dog. His breath stank noisomely. I began to yell at the top of my voice for help. At the same time, I brought my knee up and put my feet into the pit of my adversary’s stomach. Then, gathering all the force I could muster, I pushed. This most elementary ju-jitsu must have been a new experience for him. He crashed on his back a good three yards beyond me.
I gave him no time to recover. Even as he was rolling over, I was up on my feet and running towards the ship.
Almost immediately I ran slap into Lemmy who, hearing my cries, had turned round to come to my aid.
“Go back,” I yelled. “It’s all right now. Go back.”
I must have looked terrified, for Lemmy, after one glance at my face, stepped aside shouting: “After you, Doc. You go first.”
I didn’t argue, but made for that ladder as fast as my legs would carry me. I could hear Lemmy panting behind me as my hands grasped the rungs and I began to climb towards the airlock.
“Hurry up, Doc,” said Lemmy. “He’s right behind.” I daren’t turn round until I had climbed the first few rungs and given Lemmy the opportunity to put at least his own height between his feet and the ground. Then I looked back, to see the ape man who had attacked me making a clumsy attempt to follow us up the ladder.
“Don’t stop, Doc,” yelled Lemmy. “Keep going.” I kept going. By now Jet had reached the main door and, holding on to the side, was leaning out of it, yelling encouragement at us in our desperate climb. Mitch wasn’t far behind him. Suddenly I realised that Lemmy was not following me so closely. Again I stopped and looked back. He was some thirty or forty feet above the ground, and the ape man was slowly but surely coming up behind. But to my horror Lemmy, instead of climbing, was now descending.
If Lemmy heard Jet or any of us yelling at him, he took no notice but continued his descent until he was only two rungs or so above the ape man’s head. By now there were three others gathered at the bottom of the ship. Lemmy waited as the ape man advanced another rung, and then another. And then I realised what he was up to. Almost as the thought occurred to me, Lemmy went into action.
Letting himself down almost to full arm’s length he began energetically stamping on the ape man’s fingers. The creature let out a series of cries, like a dumb man trying to talk, and then, with a piercing roar, he
went crashing down on to the heads of his companions below.
Lemmy began to climb again rapidly and less than thirty seconds later we were all in the airlock and Jet was passing through the cabin hatch to the ladder control. There was a whirr as he pressed the switch and the rungs slid back into the ship, leaving the wall smooth and unclimbable. In spite of this, the creatures down below, including the one who had just fallen, still tried to find the rungs and went through the motions of climbing on the spot.
Lemmy and I were breathing very heavily. I turned and put my hand on his shoulder. “Thank you, Lemmy,” I said.
“Forget it, Doc,” he replied. “Let’s get up into the cabin and get away from here.”
We closed the hatch, closed the main door, emptied the airlock, climbed on to our couches and, with our control panels already in position, strapped ourselves in. Soon the televiewer was warm and Jet had Lemmy rotate the forward view towards the sky. As we waited for the Time Travellers to appear, I filled in the last few pages of my diary. A quick check up within Luna had revealed that not only was everything restored to order--in line with the information Jet and Mitch had given the Voice--but we had even been supplied with food and drink for our journey.
“Those Time Travellers certainly must work fast,” said Mitch. “How they ever got the ship into this position, I’ll never fathom out.”
“They must have had dozens of men on this job,” said Lemmy. Then he stopped himself. “Men?” he went on. “What am I saying?”
“I have no idea how they did it without us,” I said, “but I think I know why.”
“Why, Doc?” Jet asked me.
“Because, after the way we reacted, they didn’t want us to see them again.”
“It makes you feel so mean, doesn’t it?” said Lemmy. “We can’t stand the sight of them and yet they do all this for us.”
“They’re an amazing people and no mistake,” said Mitch.
“After this,” Lemmy went on, “I wouldn’t care if I saw a hundred of them. And if I did, I’d shake hands with the lot--if they have hands.”
“See if you can contact them, Jet,” suggested Mitch. “We must thank them.”
“Yes, Jet,” I said. “That’s the least we can do.”
But at that moment there appeared on the screen twenty spots of silvery light. The Time Travellers were waiting.
Perhaps the rate of climb was not as strong as it had been when we first left Earth or perhaps, by now, my body had begun to get used to the varying acceleration rates we had experienced since leaving home. Anyway, I hardly noticed the pressure as we climbed towards the sky.
Eighty seconds later the motor was cut and we were coasting up, out of the atmosphere and into space. On Jet’s order, the rear televiewer was switched in, and we could see the time ships behind us, once again flying in the crescent-shaped formation and peeling off as though to attack. . .
EPILOGUE
That’s all there is, Jet,” I said as I closed my journal. “It stops there.”
“Do either of you remember anything about what Doc has just read?” Jet asked Mitch and Lemmy. Neither of them did.
“But I did have a feeling we’d been round to the other side of the Moon before,” said Mitch.
“I had much the same feeling myself,” I told him, “but as for what’s in this diary, it’s all new to me.”
“But if what you’ve written is true, it would account for the fuel and oxygen shortage.”
“And for the food being all different,” added Lemmy.
“They’ll never believe this back on Earth,” said Jet. “I can hardly believe it myself.”
“They’ll either think we’re plumb crazy,” said Mitch, “or we cooked the whole thing up as a practical joke.”
“Hang on a minute,” said Lemmy. “I’ve got an idea.” And with that he went over to the food locker and began rummaging inside it. A moment later he came back to us, his face beaming.
“Here,” he said, “what about this?” It was the stone knife; the very one described in the diary.
Jet took it from Lemmy and turned it over in his hands. “Good heavens,” he said, “then it must be true, every word of it. We would never have picked up a thing like this on the Moon.”
“But we could have brought it with us from Earth,” said Mitch, “to substantiate our story--or Doc could, anyway.”
“Mitch,” I said slowly, “are you accusing me of fixing the whole thing up?”
“Why not? The newspapers back home would pay a lot of money for this sort of story.”
“Now, wait a minute,” interrupted Jet. “Nobody’s fixed anything.”
“Then how can you prove it?” said Mitch sarcastically.
“I don’t know,” said Jet. “Many strange things have happened in the five weeks since we left Earth. I don’t see what further proof you need.”
“We could start digging under the Mediterranean--see if we can find the ruins of that underground city. Very convenient that where we are supposed to have landed is now covered by thousands of feet of water.”
“Lemmy,” said Jet suddenly, “call up Control.”
“Call up Control?” said Mitch. “What for? To be laughed at?”
“No, Mitch, to tell them we’re short of fuel and may have difficulty landing. We’ll look deeper into that diary and all that’s connected with it before we breathe a word to anybody at home.”
“Now you’re talking sense,” said Mitch. “If we’re not careful, all the reception we’ll get will be from a bunch of psychiatrists.”
At that moment Lemmy contacted base and called Jet to the control table.
“Hullo, Earth,” said Jet, “this is Morgan speaking.”
There was a short pause and then the familiar voice from Luna City replied. “Hullo, Jet. Everything OK? You’re dead on course, we’re plotting you all the way.”
“We’re out of fuel,” said Jet flatly.
“What?”
“Yes, and landing may be a bit tricky. It’s most unlikely that we’ll be able to use the motor.”
“Well, if you handle her right, you can glide in; you’ve got bags of room. The whole Outback is at your disposal.”
“I just can’t guarantee to put her down on the launching ground. You may have to go out into the desert and look for us.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll be ready. We’ll send a fleet of helicopters out the moment we know you’ve touched down.”
“Good,” said Jet.
“Anything else?” asked Luna City.
“No, nothing else--not at present,” said Jet. “What news have you got? Anything big been happening back home?”
“No, Jet. You’re the biggest news we’ve had for years. Oh --until this morning.”
“Why? What happened?”
“There’s been another flying saucer scare. The biggest we’ve had since the 1950’s.” “Saucers?” exclaimed Jet.
“Yes,” came the voice from Earth, “and sighted over Australia, too. By a dozen independent eye-witnesses. They were flying too high for anyone to notice any detail--they always are. But there were supposed to be about twenty of them altogether and flying at tremendous speed in a crescent formation. Only half an hour after being seen from Australia they were sighted over America. So you’d better watch out for them, Jet. Maybe they’re trying to steal your thunder.”
Jet turned from the radio control to glance at Lemmy, Mitch and me who were standing behind him. Then he turned back to the microphone.
“Yes,” he said slowly, “we’ll look out for them. We’ll call you again in a couple of hours. And thanks, Control--thanks a lot.”
It was less than two hours after I had read my diary to the rest of the crew that the news of the saucers came over the radio from Control. It was then that I decided that this account of our adventures, based both on the remembered and ‘forgotten’ events recorded in my diary, should be written. Since then four and a half days have passed and we are now close enough to the Ea
rth to attempt a landing. Already Jet has gone into the pilot’s cabin and taken his place at the controls. Whether our glide landing will be successful is an open question--I think we have a fifty-fifty chance. Meanwhile I shall put this book in the food locker--and place the stone knife on it. It will be safe there and well protected in case the worst should happen.
Jet has ordered us to our posts. I must go. . .
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - SHOCK
Chapter 2 - THE PROJECT
Chapter 3 - LUNA
Chapter 4 - TAKE-OFF FROM EARTH
Chapter 5 - ACTION STATIONS!
Chapter 6 - MEN ON THE MOON
Chapter 7 - THE DEAD SHIP
Chapter 8 - WATCH YOUR STEP, EARTH MEN
Chapter 9 - LOST IN SPACE
Chapter 10 - JOURNEY THROUGH TIME
Chapter 11 - THE VOICE
Chapter 12 - SPACE CRAFT
Chapter 13 - ESCAPE
EPILOGUE
Journey Into Space Page 20
