Assignment Moon Girl

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Perhaps we’re not as alone as I thought.”

  She frowned. “It is not scientific, what you try to do. It is against all logic. What can you hope to accomplish, against this garrison?”

  “Find your father, for one thing.”

  “I think we are both going to die, and soon.”

  “Yes, if we give up now. Somebody will find Mahmoud. It’s only a matter of time, and not much of that.”

  They went back into the mountain. The steps led them up to another level that was not much changed from what it had been in olden times. There was a huge, natural chamber, decorated with mosaics that glinted in anachronistic splendor against a drably modern table and chairs near one wall. Giant maps of Teheran, Isfahan, and other major cities had been posted on the carvings in the rock. Only a few dim lights glowed here. Nobody was in sight. But from somewhere came the jangling of a telephone, quickly answered. The antiquities had been damaged. Some of the faded paintings and columns had been chipped and battered away to fasten electric cables.

  Tanya halted in the door. “Wait. I am not sure—my mind has been confused for so long—but I remember this room.”

  “From when?”

  “I do not know. Perhaps when I was first brought here. There is an apartment near, and I was treated well, that first day. A man questioned me. Several, I think. They wanted to know about my moon flight. I refused to tell them anything.” She arched her fine brows. “After all, it is a matter of state security for my country.”

  “They didn’t like what you told them?”

  “I felt they did not believe me.”

  Durell briefly described Ramsur Sepah. “Was he one of the men who questioned you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I think so.”

  “And when you refused them the technical details?”

  “They put me in the pit, for punishment. If I persisted in behaving like an animal, he said, I would be treated as one. I was not afraid. He considered me a very valuable property.” She gave her close-mouthed smile again, dimpling her chin. “Even when I saw the tiger in the pit, I was not afraid. I thought this—this Sepah?—would not allow me to come to harm. He simply wanted me to talk about the moon flight, my training, and about—about my father.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  She touched her forehead. “I was very confused.”

  “But you’re not confused now?”

  “I think not.”

  “Can you remember where that apartment was, where they first imprisoned you?”

  “It is this way.”

  She walked ahead with sudden assurance, but her face was pale, as if some inner apprehension had taken command of her. From other rooms nearby came more ringing telephones, the murmur of men’s voices. Durell caught snatches of the phrases spoken into the phones.

  “Company D at 1600 hours, course 280°—Lieutenant Ahwad to report to Colonel Mezhabi with duty list—Checkpoint Baker no report—Checkpoint Zed, no report—1500 rounds on the double to Major Harran . . .”

  The girl walked faster. She turned left from the map room, down a dim corridor, and up a flight of iron stairs that looked newly installed. Durell guessed that some emergency had taken place in the rebel command headquarters. He thought he heard the dim crackle of rifle fire, but he couldn’t be sure. At the top of the stairway, the girl paused and hit her lip.

  “I am not sure now.”

  “Where are we?”

  “They took me to a very fine apartment, at first. It must have been General Har-Buri’s personal quarters. Down that way.”

  There should have been sentries on duty here, Durell thought. He heard booted feet running in a cross-corridor and drew the girl back into a shadowed niche. A squad of men trotted across the intersecting corridor. He smelled cigarette smoke and coffee, and heard the distant crash of a tray of crockery being dropped. Somewhere a bell began to ring with an alarming, brazen note.

  “Here. This door,” Tanya said.

  It was a wooden door, and it, too, looked freshly installed. It was locked. The rock wall nearby had been newly tunneled, too, or widened from the chambers of the old fortress made two thousand years ago. Durell tried the knob carefully, then stepped back and hit it with controlled strength. It gave way all at once, and he tumbled forward, with Tanya close behind him.

  The girl began to scream.

  They were back on the moon again.

  Chapter Eighteen

  IT WAS as if they had fallen through some strange doorway in space, from one world into another. They were in the lunar dome. An eerie effulgence came through the plastic windows of the bubble, reflecting on the familiar computers and technical equipment. Durell sucked in a sharp breath. The shock was too great, the transition too sudden. There was Earth, sailing in pale, blue-green beauty, just above the black horizon of outer space. The jagged lunar peaks and craters, the long familiar plain he had studied so hard when he had been here with Professor Ouspanaya, the harness-chairs, suits, helmets, banks of dials and counters—it was all here, untouched, just as it had been at that moment when, seized by madness, he had broken through the airlock and tumbled back—

  To earth.

  Tanya screamed again. She stood with her arms rigid at her sides, her eyes wide and showing white all around the pale irises. Durell jumped for the door and pulled it shut, and managed to drop a lock-bar across the broken knob. It might gain them a few seconds against an assault. Then he spun to Tanya’s paralyzed figure and clapped a hand over her mouth to shut off another scream. Her face reflected pure agony of mind and soul. Her eyes were blinded by the storms sweeping her mind. She struggled with him. Her body was strong with her madness, and he had a hard time holding her. They reeled across the floor of the lunar bubble, crashed into one of the harness chairs, ricocheted oil the bank of computer dials. The control board collapsed with a splintering of flimsy wood and card board. Tanya bit him and clawed at the plastic, curved wall of the dome. Her fingernails ripped at it and it came down in a billowing sheet of Pliofilm and latticework, entangling them in its folds. They fell out onto what had looked like the surface of the moon. The “horizon” was only twelve feet away.

  “Tanya!”

  He slapped her hard and she bit at his hand, her eyes utterly wild, and he hit her again, not wanting to knock her out, but desperate to shock her back into control of herself again.

  “Tanya, look around you!”

  “Let me go!”

  “I will. I want to. But please—”

  He pinned her to the dusty, pebbly floor outside the shattered dome. She twisted under him, and he kept his hand over her mouth; her nostrils flared and the wildness that showed in her eyes went farther beyond reason.

  “Tanya, it was all a fake! Don’t you see? Don’t you understand?”

  She spat at him. He did not know what to do with her. He said quickly, “It‘s a cardboard moon, a plastic dome, a training device that used hypnotic drugs and a few props to convince you that the program was real. . . .”

  He paused. A bell rang loudly somewhere.

  “Tanya, they’ll come in after us soon.”

  As she stared up at him then, the lunatic glare slowly faded from her eyes. She began to shiver under him. And then, astonishingly, great tears suddenly welled up and spilled down her cheeks. She went limp under him.

  “Do you understand what I just said?”

  “Yes . . . it was all false.”

  “Didn’t you suspect it?”

  “Lately. The second time, in the pit, before they brought you, I did some thinking. I tried to apply—scientific principles to what I could recall—of my experience. You can let me up now."

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am all right now. I apologize. It was not rational of me.”

  “You couldn’t help it. I was shocked, too.”

  “But you were prepared for it?”

  “More or less.”

  “You suspected this—-this stage business, from the start?”

&nb
sp; “I thought it had to be something like this.”

  “Then—then I was never on the moon?”

  “Never.”

  “Nor you?”

  “I was here, in this place, with your father.”

  She frowned. “But I couldn’t have been.” She stood up slowly and hugged herself, shivering, and stared at the wreckage caused by their brief struggle. “I was at the Lunar Space Base, in the Turkonian Republic—”

  “I know. This is just a hasty replica, thrown up for my benefit, to put me through the same experience and destroy my ability to cope with what I was learning. Also, to demonstrate the whole thing to Har-Buri.”

  Her voice hardened. “Then I was used as a laboratory animal? A guinea pig? Heartlessly deceived, driven half mad? To what purpose?”

  “To train you for a trip to the moon, originally.”

  “But this-this stage set—would fool no one.”

  “Not without the hypnotic syringes they pumped into both of us.”

  The alarm bell clamored more loudly now through the labyrinth of the mountain fortress. Durell heard the muffled crunch and thud of a mortar shell striking nearby. Dust trickled down from the ceiling where they stood, and even the floor vibrated. Several pieces of lath and plastic slid from the fake control board they had smashed.

  Looking at it now, he saw how cleverly, if hastily, the illusion had been created. The whole effect had been achieved in an area less than a couple of hundred square feet. The cyclorama of the moonscape, as seen from the “lunar dome," was an effective deception in perspective, helped with hidden lights that caused sharp shadow and brilliance on the “set.” The dome itself, except for the solid padded chairs, was flimsy and unreal as he stared at it. Tanya walked across the chamber to the horizon wall and touched the blue-green orb painted there to represent earth, which she had thought once was shimmering at a quarter of a million miles away through space.

  She turned back with cold anger in her eyes. “But why was I so deceived?”

  “I suppose it was necessary. Maybe it was a short cut to train you for a lunar landing. Probably no one, not even your father, who designed this, expected it to have the traumatic effect that it had. Maybe it was the drugs they used on us. You had no idea that it was all a fake?”

  “None at all. I was a dedicated worker in the program . . .” Her voice started to rise in anger. She felt humiliated. “I think I can remember more of it, now. I recall I—thought something had gone wrong in the dome. I suppose it was to study my reaction to an alien environment. I—I’m afraid I was the victim of simple panic.”

  “Not so simple. I did the same, and broke out. But they were ready for me, after their experience with you, and clobbered me and put me in the pit, afterward.”

  “Yes, it must have been so.” She paused. He could have explained it in more detail, but he wanted her to work it out for herself. Tanya walked back to the dome and kicked at its wreckage, and grimaced bitterly. “I truly went out of my mind. I escaped from the base and wandered like a madwoman, going anywhere. I can’t remember those details. I ran and hid and lived in the fields, stealing food where I found it. I could not understand anything. I suppose I wandered across the border that way. Perhaps strangers picked me up, gave me lifts here and there. Somehow, I got to Teheran. And the rest you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Naturally, my government and the space-program managers did not want to release the truth about me to the world press.”

  “They should have. But security becomes a blindfold to bureaucrats,” Durell said.

  “Which made me valuable to others, like Ta-Po and General Har-Buri, who saw me as a commodity to sell to Peking in exchange for aid in this—this rebellion he plans.”

  “It’s started already,” Durell said.

  “Do you hear gunfire?”

  He nodded. “The mountain is under attack.”

  She said calmly, “And we are trapped here?”

  “We’ll find a way out, with luck.”

  “No,” Tanya murmured. “I think we are going to die in this place. We’ll never get out now.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  DURELL unbolted the door. He did not open it at once, but stood listening for several moments. Boots clattered on the spiral stairway. A guttural command rapped against the rock wall. He dried his hands and picked up the machine pistol and made certain he still had the grenade tucked inside his shirt. He looked at Tanya.

  “You still have your grenade?” When she nodded, he said, “I think our best weapon is my colonel’s uniform. Walk out ahead of me, as if you’re my prisoner. I’ll have the gun pointed at you.”

  “And if we are stopped?’

  “We’re going to see General Har-Buri.”

  Another explosion shook dust from the ceiling. It was followed by the muffled whistle and thump of a more distant bomb. Everything went quiet outside the door. Durell opened it. The tunnel and stairs were deserted. He urged Tanya ahead, closed the door behind him, and walked to the steps. There was a smell of dust and explosives in the air.

  “Which way was Har-Buri’s apartment?” he asked Tanya. “Can you remember?”

  “I was taken up, from the map room, the first time.”

  They climbed the steps quickly. There was a confusion of distant shouts, firing, the jangling of phones in the mountain fortress. A white-eyed lieutenant ran toward them at the top of the stairs. He had a bad gash over one eye and blood covered his face.

  “Where is General Har-Buri?” Durell snapped.

  The wounded man jerked his weapon backward. “That way, Colonel.”

  “Good. How big is the assault?”

  “Two battalions, and tanks. Some bombers. We’ve been betrayed, Colonel.” The man looked anguished. “In another hour, we would have moved out.”

  “Then we’d have been caught in the open desert,” Durell said. “They can’t beat us here.”

  “We are all dead men, sir.” The lieutenant looked at Tanya, then back to Durell. “You have a strange accent.”

  “I’m liaison, from Cairo,” Durell said. “Carry on.”

  As the lieutenant went down the stairs, the whole mountain shuddered as heavy shells struck its outer bastions. The lights flickered, went out, then came on again. The corridor sloped upward to a glimmer of light from another gallery opening in the rock. Soldiers with machine guns were posted there, and the guns hammered frantically, firing at invisible targets out in the daylight. Acrid smoke drifted back through the tunnel.

  “The other way,” Tanya murmured.

  He would have liked to look out at the desert to see what was happening, but there was no time. A group of officers came down the tunnel, talking angrily. They saluted Durell’s uniform and went on. There was another corridor here, where more telephones rang. The smell of cigarette smoke and coffee touched him. They went through an anteroom and found themselves in what looked like a large living room. This would be Har-Buri’s private apartment. Durell closed the door, crossed the fine carpet, and opened the next door. A man jumped up, spat a cigarette from his mouth, and started to raise his gun. Durell slammed his machine pistol into the alarmed face, and the guard fell away, arms flailing. Durell jumped over the man to the next door. It was locked. Turning, he saw Tanya kneel beside the unconscious man. She held out a ring of keys.

  “You can be very brutal,” she whispered.

  He didn’t bother to reply. The key worked. He edged ahead, and daylight greeted him. It was a small cave chamber, like a prison cell, with a simple cot, a chair, a bucket of water in a corner. The sunlight came from a very narrow slit in the rock.

  A man on the cot looked at them with haggard eyes.

  “Hello, Professor Ouspanaya,” Durell said.

  Tanya cried out and fell on her knees before the man on the cot. Her words of greeting to her father were half strangled by her sobs. Durell hadn’t thought her capable of such emotion. He turned to the sunlit, narrow opening. The glaring sun on the desert fa
r below blinded him for a moment. Explosions mushroomed on the barren plain down there. Through it, he saw the glint of armored cars and tanks deploying around the mountain. As he watched, a shell from the fortress made a direct hit on one of the old Shermans. It blew up with a blast that shook the air and then began to burn with a black, oily smoke. He saw that the tanks were trying to reach the base of the mountain, where the fortress guns would be unable to bear down on them. He didn’t think they’d make it. From what he could see, he judged that this cell was halfway around the mountain face from the little valley that led to the prison pit and the cisterns. It was the only escape route he knew. Any tunnels or elevators to the vehicle park he had seen before would be too crowded with rebel soldiery.

  “Durell?”

  Ouspanaya stood with his arm around his daughter. Tanya was grave. Her father still was handsome, a big man battered around the edges by recent events, but filled with an angry strength.

  “Tanya says you know what they made me do to you. They are devils, efficient and ruthless. I tried to say it could not be done in this place. But they provided equipment and workmen. I could not help myself. They wanted to see how I had managed the lunar training with Tanya. I warned them of the danger, by reminding them of the effects on Tanya’s mind. It did not matter to them.”

  Durell said curiously, “How did they get you?”

  “It was Ramsur Sepah. Who could suspect that dignified parliamentarian? He came to the Caspian villa to call on me, a gentlemanly, courteous visit. Even Sergei, my KGB guard, was not suspicious. It was done simply and quickly. They got me to Sepah’s car, suddenly forced me in at gunpoint.” Ouspanaya paused grimly. “They killed Sergei.”

  “And they took you here?”

  “Yon were already a prisoner. Before we left the villa, they got my medical kit and drugs—the same used on my poor daughter in our unfortunate attempt to speed up our space program. I had to put you through the same routine. You see, they showed me Tanya in that pit, with the tiger. They made her danger very clear. So I obeyed.” The Russian spread his hands helplessly. “Can you understand?”