We came to the main camp.
Nobody around, no sign of Spender or Hamilton.
The chuckwagons—imagine four fat cylinders, each ten feet wide and thirty feet long, like big storm drains—were laid down in a trench, lined up end to end, and covered, very roughly, with lunar dirt, for radiation shielding. In places the dust had drifted off the hulls, and I saw the logos of NASA, and Boeing, and Bell, and a few other suppliers. This was home, for Spender and Hamilton.
At one end of this complex the dirt was much disturbed, and I guessed that was where the missile silo had been dug out. That was for later; we’d check out the base first. We made for the other end.
Here we found a big red wheel that George enthusiastically turned to open a hatch. We clambered through into a poky little airlock that quickly pressurized, and then opened another red-wheel hatch.
And we entered the first chuckwagon.
Dim light. A cluttered space, enclosed by green-painted, curving walls. It was like being in a torpedo tube. And it was crowded with equipment—metal boxes, and trestle tables, and ducts, and pipes, and cables.
The two astronauts were kept supplied from Earth, but they’d had to recycle their air and water. That was what we saw now, the life-support system, with pipes leading from the other compartments into this nest of stuff, where fans and compressors and condensers and filters worked with a steady hum. I knew that the power came from a nuke plant, buried in the dirt somewhere.
The first thing I did was check the little air-quality sensor pack the NASA boffins had attached to the chest of my suit. Then, cautiously, I cracked my helmet seal and lifted it off my head. To my relief the air was warm, and it smelled of nothing worse than oil, and metal, and ozone.
George followed my lead, opening a window in his faceplate. Those big nostrils quivered, and his teeth were bared.
Through another hatch, we came to a kind of locker room.
We picked our way through cautiously. I recognized the basic layout from the engineering diagrams I’d been shown—there was a bunk down one side of the space and a table down the other, and a small sink and a chemical toilet, filthy and gaping open. It was a man’s room, stuffed with a man’s garbage, and it smelled that way—of wet socks and urine. And I quickly figured out this was Spender’s quarters. I saw his name on some of the stuff, old checklists on the table, tags on scattered clothing. On the walls, photographs, taped up—a wife, Spender in college football kit, Playboy centerfolds.
We knew that Spender and Hamilton had taken one chuckwagon each as a private room, separated by a shared facility. So, Spender and Hamilton had lodged in wagons two and four of the row. Logical.
The odd thing was, though the place was evidently in use, the bunk didn’t look slept in. It was covered by heaps of papers, and clothes, and stuff that had been there so long it had collected a decent patina of dust. So where, I wondered, did Spender sleep?
George, huge in this cramped space, seemed nervous. I guessed he had a right to be nervous of being shut up in any enclosure that smelled so bad of human. I took his hand, his gloved palm against mine, and I led him through the wagon to the far end, and another red-wheel hatch.
And, when we opened it, out spilled a stench of decay, a buzz of flies.
And a heap of chimp body parts.
I slammed my helmet down on its seal.
I guessed this chuckwagon, the third of four, had once been a multipurpose space. It had tables, work surfaces, sinks, power outlets, a shower. A mix of kitchen, bathroom, workshop, and radio shack. And, I supposed, a neutral space for two guys cooped up together in here for years.
Now, in one corner, I saw a heap of ape heads, eyes glassy, teeth bared, wrapped in a big plastic sheet. It was like the shop of some idiot butcher. There was blood all over the surfaces, dried to a brown crust.
And on one of the tables we found an unfinished job—a chimp’s body, partly dismembered. The limbs and torsos had been crudely hacked, as if with a meat-cleaver. At first I wondered if this might have been a logical, if cold-blooded, element of a mission plan—if the food runs out, eat the simps. But, looking closer, it really wasn’t much like butchery for food. The chimp was decapitated, its limbs detached from the torso, but there seemed to have been no effort to skin the parts or to cut away the meat.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
But George did, evidently. To my relief, he seemed glacially calm. He just tapped his chest, indicating the electronics inside.
And he lifted an arm, and for the first time I saw it was encased in a kind of frame, metal poles and wires fixed to the hair-covered flesh. Screwed in, and presumably fixed to the bone. When he moved there was a whir of motors, clearly audible in the thick air.
“Cybernetic augmentation,” I said. “My God, George. They made you a cyborg. As if you weren’t strong enough already.”
He tapped his chest. TEST.
“Yes. You, all the simps, were experiments, right? Uplifted cognition, those wires they stuck in your skull. And now this.” I shook my head.
HURTS.
“I bet it does. . . . Oh. I get it. Whoever did this killed the simps for their cyber parts. For their suits. Not their meat.”
HURTS. HURTS. HURTS.
“And I bet it hurt even more when the stuff was taken away.” I took a breath. “Okay, George. We’re done in here. One more chuckwagon to go. And it can’t be any worse than this, right?”
I was wrong. Dead wrong.
When I opened the next hatch, Bob Hamilton came out to kill me.
He—it—just burst out of the doorway.
You could only tell it had once been human at all because of a NASA jumpsuit, blue, stained and scuffed, and ripped open by the swelling of what had once been flesh. And you could only tell it had been Hamilton because of the name tag.
But it had hands, still, one withered to the bone, one bloated and blackened, hands that now grasped me around the neck. I was wearing my pressure suit with the helmet sealed. But even through the suit layers those fingers pressed and pushed, and I felt my throat close, and my lungs strained for air.
Its head was in front of me. The face a distorted mask on a skull that had swollen to the size of a watermelon, like a puffball fungus. Eyes buried deep, glittering. A mouth that could barely open, so distorted was the flesh around it.
And yet it spoke, a guttural sound wrenched from a distorted throat: “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
I knew what this was. I knew what was killing me—not Hamilton, not any more. It had tried to kill me before. This was the Color—that strange, amorphous entity that had once infested a farm in Maine, as Lovecraft described; and a hill in Florida, and a Soviet space station, and locations in England and Russia and other places we will probably never know about. Dyer and the rest had been right. It was here, in Lunarville 1—trapped within the base’s metal walls, maybe even deliberately contained by Spender, who had escaped what it did to Hamilton—until we, inadvertently, released it.
And this was what it did to life, organic, terrestrial life, which it infested, and distorted, and turned, so that it could absorb the life force. It turned humans like this, with body parts swollen or withered, and yet still driven by a kind of life, even by a memory of who they had once been.
Those hands tightened further. I was dying. I was losing the strength to put up any kind of fight. Hamilton opened that awful mouth wide, the jaw dangling slack, as if broken. A kind of mist emerged from his gullet, pulsing into my face. And I saw that Color, the phenomenon for which this entity had been named, that strange elusive shade which has no human label.
I thought the Color would be the last thing I ever saw.
Until George, with one tremendous cyborg punch, took the head off the Hamilton thing.
Even headless, it thrashed and squirmed. Even voiceless, it seemed to scream. But its hands released my throat, arms flapping, one withered, one swollen.
And one flailing leg kicked me in the stomach. I folded over.
I felt George pulling me back, back away from the open hatch. The pain in my belly was extraordinary.
Mercifully or otherwise, I blacked out.
V
When I came to I was back in Melody 7, my Mercury capsule. The hatch was shoved back in place, the cabin unpressurized, my suit still closed.
For a heartbeat I thought I was still in space. Like I’d imagined the whole thing, the whole surface nightmare. But then that gentle lunar gravity settled on my bones.
I pushed at the hatch. It gave; it wasn’t sealed.
Strong gloved hands came down and lifted the whole thing away. I saw the full Earth, a dish of light, and a broad ape face inside a tube of scuffed glass.
“George. You stuffed me in here after the Color attack, right? Like putting me back in the womb. There are worse ideas.”
I lifted up my arms. He bent over, got his enhanced arms under me, and almost tenderly lifted me out of there, and set me down on the lunar ground.
OK, OK, his chest unit flashed. It was a question.
No, I thought. Not okay. My squeezed throat hurt like hell, and my gut ached, and it felt like my back was a mass of bruises.
But when I looked at the Earth again, I saw a clip of shadow at one edge. The eclipse, in progress. Only a couple of hours until it reached its peak.
“What next, George? Do we search for Spender?”
SILO FIRST.
“Yeah. You’re right. The nukes. That’s why we’re here. Spender can wait. Come on.” I began loping over that way. “Let’s hope there’s a way in that doesn’t take us through that damn shelter again . . .”
We stumbled across the surface. I felt dizzy, even in the low gravity. The only time I’d opened my suit since we landed was inside the shelter, briefly. I had a nipple inside my helmet that dispensed water at a disgusting warm temperature. Didn’t make me feel any better, but it was the best I could do.
Turned out there was indeed a way into the silo from outside, just a hatch set in the ground. Maybe the crew had built the silo first, to make the base operational as quickly as possible; hence the independent entrance.
George opened the hatch. I looked down into a wide steel tube, with rungs bolted to the metal wall.
George went down first. Limber as all hell, he just scrambled down that tube and out of sight.
I followed more cautiously. And I lowered that big hatch after us. When it closed over, lights came on, little bulbs illuminating the shaft.
I followed the simp down the ladder. I found it was easier to let myself drop from step to step. The suit was stiff, and it was hard to bend my legs to catch each rung. Also, my stomach still hurt like hell where it had been kicked.
We passed an airlock door. Looking through a small window, I could make out a kind of logistics center: a computer installation, whirring tapes, flashing lights, and screens and keyboards. Everything looked clean and undamaged and functional. I left it alone.
A few yards farther down we came to the missile launch center. It said so on the door.
What puzzled me, though, was that this access shaft went on, farther down. We were already about sixty feet down. The launch center should have been the deepest point of the silo, the design target being to protect the crew from a direct one-megaton nuclear strike. But in the glow of the lights the shaft just went on, the wall rougher, no more steel, just a cut through what looked like broken-up bedrock, with more rungs cemented in.
This was, I reminded myself, a Moon base manned by two stir-crazy, stranded astronauts, and infested by the Color to boot. Anything could be down there. I needed to go take a look.
First things first, though. The control center.
George turned another red wheel to open the airlock door. It took a couple of minutes for us both to pass through.
This was a room made for regular humans. George, bulky in his suit, had to duck under the ceiling. But for me it was a relief to open up my suit at last, and, joy, drink cool water from a spigot on the wall.
Then I looked around.
I had been trained on what to expect. This main chamber was a rough sphere, and in fact, I knew, it was a bubble that had been blown in the rock by a battlefield nuke. The walls were paneled by aluminum and polystyrene. There were bunks, a galley, a bathroom; the design was that a couple of guys could have survived down here for a couple of months, even under attack.
But you know what the main feature was, right? You’ve seen the movies. A couple of consoles set about fifteen feet apart, each with a chair, and buttons, and trigger switches, and a TV monitor, everything duplicated. And there were two keys, on two chains, under two keyholes. To launch the missiles, these keys both had to be turned within a few seconds of each other—the idea being that they were too far apart for one man to reach, so no one crazy guy could launch a strike alone . . .
Of course, all this had been designed to fight a nuclear war, human against human. The whole scheme seemed crazy. Nukes on the Moon? Surely it would take any missile three days to get from the Moon to Earth, just as it had taken us three days to come the other way. But these missiles had been meant as a second strike capability; even if the whole of the United States’ Earth-based forces had been destroyed, still we, or our ghosts, could have hit back with these babies. The insanity of deterrence.
It was almost comforting for me to think that those nukes, a product of human madness, had in the end been turned against the eldritch insanity that seemed to lie under that crater plain.
And today, September 11, might be the day that theory was put to the test, I realized grimly. If I could find Spender. If he was sane enough to work with me on this two-person system to launch the nukes . . . and I might even live, if I could run away fast enough.
I had been given simple system tests to run. I got through that in a few minutes, with George waiting patiently. All was operational.
Then I stood up and faced him. “Okay, George. We need to go find Spender. But first, I think we need to know what’s down below this launch center . . .”
Suits sealed up. Back out to the shaft.
Cautiously, we resumed our climb down. Once we had climbed down past the steel facing, the rough surface under the rungs made climbing harder; I was wary of gashing my suit.
Then I saw light, coming up from below.
We climbed farther down that ladder, and then found ourselves on a kind of shallow ramp, a smooth-cut stone surface—and we walked down that in turn.
And emerged into a tremendous vaulted chamber.
VI
I’ll just describe what I saw next. Jocelyn, if you hear this, make sure Professor Dyer gets to know about it.
Because, you see, he was right. About what he thought he saw in images of Aristarchus.
It was as if we had come down through the dome of some great cathedral. The ramp on which we stood swept down toward a distant floor—distant, but clearly visible. There was light in there, coming from floating glass globes, but there was no air, no obscuring mist.
And as we moved down the ramp, we came out from under that domed “cathedral roof,” and I saw an even more distant ceiling, far above. Titanic pillars of some dark granite were topped by arches. Beneath that roof, buildings hundreds of feet high were set out beside avenues the width of freeways. . . . If the Romans had ever got to the Moon it might have looked like this.
And yet, as well as being awed, I was finding something disturbing about it all.
For a start, I had a feeling the perspective was all wrong. Surely there was no room in the hundred feet or so we had descended from the surface to fit in all this.
And many of the wall surfaces were covered with a kind of hieroglyphic, a graphic lettering that drew my eye yet baffled me, as if I was squinting.
And time seemed to—swim. Or judder, like a film-reel jumping a sprocket. One moment we were on that ramp. The next, we, both of us, were inside one of the buildings, so tall itself that it felt as if we were outdoors. Time-slips, from one
moment to the next.
And suddenly we were both inspecting—stuff. In my hands I had a kind of book, I think, sitting inside a metal case. It was big, like a kid’s picture book, and its pages, some kind of thick paper, were covered by more hieroglyphics. Oddly, the pages opened from the top, not the side.
And George, meanwhile, a bulky ape in his glass suit, was inspecting a kind of machine. It was vaguely box-shaped, a foot or so on either side, a couple of feet tall—a pillar of mirrors, and rods, and wheels, centered on one big convex dish at its middle. A real home-workshop kind of thing. Or a clockmaker’s nightmare.
And, just as suddenly, it was over. We were walking out of that building, with our loot—me with my book, George with his gadget.
That was when I saw the corpse.
An alien corpse. It was a cone maybe ten feet tall, lying on a ramp, bloated in parts, withered elsewhere. It had four big limbs, and trailing tentacles, alternately shriveled or bloated. I recognized the symptoms of a Color infestation, even in these circumstances. Even though I had to think what this was a corpse of.
Peaslee, unwilling time-traveler, would have recognized it. A Yithian.
George looked back at me. I looked back at him.
Then we were on that first ramp that led back up to the silo. Holding our trophies, the machine, the book, and looking at each other. Another time-slip.
H. G. Wells, by the way, Jocelyn. He wrote about a society inside the Moon. Wonder how he knew? And who told him to cover it up? I told you. Never trust a science-fiction writer.
Look, Jocelyn, I’ll tell you what I think. And Professor Dyer will, hopefully, back me up.
The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming Page 21
