That was the one hope. The one notion to cling to, to make life valuable. He treasured it, but even a prospect as enthralling as that of being the Columbus of an alien planet must fight a losing battle against pure ennui.
His chronometer had run down during his sleep. (He might have deduced something from that, but he could not remember, in the recent confusion, when he had last wound it.) He did not bother to rewind it. What were hours and minutes in this temporal vacuum?
He ate when he was hungry, wondering if his stomach obeyed the calculated averages. Supposing he should overeat and be doomed to the death of starvation? But he ate by instinct nonetheless. He read occasionally, he maddened himself with the small stock of cards and puzzles, he slept when he wanted to—which was a great deal of the time. He constructed fantasies of how he would conquer the alien planet single-handed.
Finally, hours or days or weeks after he first awoke, he went back to the brandy bottle which he had hardly touched since that breakfast. He finished it almost at a gulp and threw a magnificent party in which he entertained in his narrow quarters all the most enjoyable people he had ever known and finally retired to the floating couch, where he made some momentously significant discoveries as to the erotic importance of gravity.
Then the repulsion jets automatically blasted and the rocket braked to a safe landing on the alien planet. He donned his breathing suit and, tenderly holding the hand of the swizard girl, he opened the lock and led her forth to be the queen of his alien empire.
The strong, pure oxygen of the suit, headier than the aerous mixture circulated in the rocket, sobered him. The swizard girl vanished, and so did his delusions of conquering magnificence. But drunk or sober, he was indisputably stepping forth from the one-way rocket onto the barren soil of an alien world.
It is reported by one of the older poets that stout Cortez—by whom he doubtless means stout Balboa—with eagle eyes stared at the Pacific, and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise. This is a somewhat more plausible account of the discovery of a new world than that of a composer of much the same period, who represents Vasco da Gama, upon his discovery of India, as bursting into a meltingly noble tenor aria.
Words do not come, let alone song, even if your breathing suit permitted you to utter them. “A wild surmise” is the exactly right phrase for the magnificent bewilderment that seizes you.
Not quite consciously, Gan Garrett checked the readings of the various gauges on his arm. Gravity low, temperature very low, atmosphere nonexistent. He scanned the pitted desert on which he had landed, noted the curious, sharp outlines of the jagged rocks, the complete absence of erosion on an airless world. The bright cold light turned the desert scene into one of those vividly unreal landscapes which the closed eyes sometimes present to the half-sleeping mind, or into a painting by that eccentric twentieth-century master Salvador Dali.
The light—Gan Garrett tilted back his head, and the moon shone so brightly into his visioplate as almost to blind him. It was an enormous, titanic moon, of curiously familiar outlines, and its light, he calculated roughly, was a good twenty times as brilliant as earthly moonlight. He turned to the filing cabinet of his memory and tried to recall a planet that possessed a moon like that. Certainly none in the Solar System. And, therefore—
The thermocells of his suit did not prevent a chill from coursing along his spine. An extrasystemic planet— The men of Earth still wondered if they could accomplish translunar trips, if they could some day safely reach Mars. And he, the outcast, the one-way tripper—
He began the casting up of hasty plans, and wished that he had left just a little of that brandy. This sudden sobriety was uncomfortable.
He knew scientists who would tell him flatly that a planet without atmosphere is incapable of sustaining life, that he must be alone on this cold spinning desert world. But to say that life can only be the carbon-nitrogen-and-oxygen-sustained life which we know had always seemed to him anthropocentric stupidity. There might be intelligent life here which he could not even recognize as such—worse yet, which could not recognize him.
He would have to base himself on the rocket, and from there conduct carefully plotted tours of exploration until he could discover—what? At least he had many many Earth-years yet to do it in. Should he start now, or wait for the sun, which would reduce the wear on his thermocells? Now, at night, he could at least attempt to draw some conclusion as to his whereabouts from a study of the sky. He would need first of all to refresh his memory more accurately from a couple of microbooks. Then—
He was starting back for the lock of the rocket when he saw them. The suit was not wired for sound; he could not hear what must have been their heavily clumping approach. For they were in suits not basically dissimilar to his in principle, as best one could judge, though of fantastically cut design like nothing seen on Earth.
They, or their suits at least, were android. Bipeds with arms. They showed no signs of either hostility or friendliness. They simply advanced, and a detachment of two or three moved between him and the rocket.
His mind raced. Men—or things—in suits on an airless planet meant one of two things: survivors of an elder race, driven to an artificial underground or doomed existence by the deaeration of the planet and venturing forth thus protected on its surface; or explorers, rocket visitants like himself, but from what strange world? Here in the alien void to meet yet other aliens—
He was outnumbered. And worse, he was unarmed, without even his W.B.I. weapon; and it was doubtful if the alien explorers adhered to anything like the code of Devarupa.
But they made no move to harm him. They simply encircled him. Their heavy awkward bodies moved with surprising agility—a clue that they, too, came from a world of heavier gravity. They flowed about him in utter silence, like an ameba engulfing a meal. Then they flowed off again, away from the rocket, and Gan Garrett perforce flowed in their midst.
Garrett had once seen at the museum a showing of the silent flat pictures which were the seed from which epics were to grow. This procession was like that, save that the silent movement was smooth and unjerking, and as unreal as those relics of the past. It was like a continuation of his brandy dream, without its fine exaltation.
He flowed along lightly with the alien creatures, across the barren ground and on into an equally barren but more civilized region. There were roads here, and domes. Survivors of the elder race, then, in all probability, rather than explorers. Somehow that made them more reassuring. Aliens upon the alien world, alienness squared, so to speak, would be too much.
The men under the dome wore no suits. He had thought “men” rather than “creatures” involuntarily. For they were exceedingly like men. Their costumes were strange, their hair was weirdly and—he guessed—symbolically arranged, and the tint of their skins ranged through half a dozen unearthly shades; but men they did seem to be. They talked to each other, and he wished he were adept at lip reading. The sounds looked not unlike earthly ones in formation.
Then he was led through a hall and into a small room, where only half a dozen of his captors followed. And there he decided that this was merely a continuation of the brandy dream after all.
For there, facing him, sat a woman identical in every feature with the girl who used to call them swizards.
She made a calmly efficient gesture and said something. His suited guards withdrew. Numbly, his mind aswirl, he snagged the ring of his right glove on the hook at his belt and jerked off the glove. Now with a hand capable of free manipulation he could undo his other vents.
The gesture had bared his identification bracelet, and the lovestonite plesiosaur dangling from it. His eyes had never left the woman, and now, even with his scant ability at lip reading, he could swear that she exclaimed, “The swizard! It’s you!” and he thought she added, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
When he had got his helmet off, the girl was extending to him what looked like an ordinary bottle of terrene brandy, such as he had had on the tri
p. “Here,” she said in perfectly familiar speech. “Hesketh said you like this. That’s why he had one smuggled into the rocket for you. He tried to smuggle in one of your popguns, but they’re impossible to get hold of. Drink it up. And leave me a drop. But you— I can’t get over it. If it wasn’t for the swizard I’d think you had a double. The nice prim academician—”
“Look,” said Gan Garrett. “This isn’t real. It can’t be.” But the brandy undeniably was. “Will you tell me what’s going on? And while you’re at it, you might please fix that screw at the back. I’m not used to these things.”
“Sure,” said the girl. Her hands were nimble. “Well,” she said from behind his back, “Hesketh told us that a W.B.I. man was being framed into a one-way trip and there wasn’t any legal hope of saving him. So we—”
“Wait a minute. Questions first. Where am I? Or before that—more important question—what’s your name?”
She came back in front of him, and he shucked himself out of the suit. “Maureen Furness. I’m in charge of public relations at Metropolis—and other things.” The skin crinkled around her blue eyes. “I’m glad it’s important.”
“Maureen . . . I like it. We can discuss the Furness part later. Now where am I?”
“On the Moon, of course. Didn’t you recognize it?”
Garrett kicked himself. The relative gravity, the absence of atmosphere, the pitted desert— “But I’ve never been here before, and what with rockets and dormitol and the vanishing of all sense of time, I—”
Maureen laughed. It was a good, clear laugh. “So you thought you were an interplanetary discoverer? Fun. And what on Earth—or off it—did you think we were:
“Things,” he confessed.
“Swell. Maw Riin, the Wicked Queen of Alpha Centauri. I love the role.”
“But the Moon,” he began. “The Moon doesn’t have a satel— Oh—” he ended lamely, remembering the familiar shape of its outlines.
“Of course. When we’re facing away from the Sun, the Earth looks like an enormous moon. Amazing effect, isn’t it?”
“And how did I get here and what are you doing and— I never heard of a one-way trip ending on the Moon before.”
“It never did. This wasn’t any accident. But the engineer who fires off the one-way rockets is one of us. He aimed it here. We not only wanted to save you from the frame-up. We thought a trained W.B.I. man might come in very useful in the next few days on the Moon.”
“You keep saying we. But just who are ‘we’?”
Maureen’s face grew grave. “We started out as a joke, and now it looks as though we may mean the salvation of Earth. We . . . well, I guess you’d call us a secret society. We don’t have a name, and we don’t have a ritual or fancy officers; but that’s what we are. I don’t know if Hesketh ever mentioned or hinted at us?”
“No.” But now Garrett understood Uranov’s several cryptic allusions to “some people he knew,” and the signals with which he had induced Dr. Wojcek to speak freely.
“It was Mig Valentinez who invented us, though he was usually too wrapped up with some artistic or scientific project to take much part. But he felt that the peace was going stale. That people were beginning to accept it as something to wallow in rather than something to keep fighting for. So he founded his crusaders, to keep fighting the little things, to keep alive against the small violations of Devarupa’s thought, the petty inhumanities of man to man—maybe even do a little propaganda and build to where people could finally unite and fight in something like the Martian project.
“Then a little while after Mig went away to be a hermit, we stumbled on something big: the lovestonite business. Hesketh says that’s where you come in, and you know a lot about it. Right?”
“I’ve gathered some. I know what the weapon is and how it works and what Stag Hartle is up to and why Valentinez was killed.”
“You’re sure he was?”
“Hartle admitted it.”
“He was a good guy, that Mig—” Maureen said tenderly. “Well, anyway, you know enough for background now.”
“Except what you’re doing here. Oh, that’s right. S.B. said something about coming up here with Astra Ardless and a shooting company.”
“Yes.” Maureen’s voice was harsh. “And that didn’t sound funny to you?”
“No. Should it have? Oh— What Uranov told me about locations—”
“Exactly. There are in California landscaped locations under dome for every possible type of setting, including lunar. So why should S.B. go to the expense of toting a vast number of extras and all his equipment up here to shoot the picture under less favorable conditions? Except for documentaries, nobody’s made location trips in decades.”
“Then you think—”
“We think this is what it’s all been building up to. He’s ready for his big coup. His first blow is going to be here on the Moon.”
“Then Hartle’s here?”
“Hartle, hell. S.B. Didn’t you realize that Hartle was just a stooge? This whole lovestonite racket has been S.B. from the beginning.”
Garrett took more brandy. “All right,” he said. “S.B. is set to blow the top off of things, and we’re going to stop him. Do I count as one of ‘we’ now?”
“You do,” said Maureen.
“Then what’s my first duty?”
“Look. This takes a little explaining. The boys that brought you in and the ones you saw outside are us. But there’s a lot more extras here, and they’re not here to function as extras. What they are is S.B.’s mercenaries.
“You noticed the fantastic make-up? They’re all supposed to be natives of Mars when the first spaceship arrived, and nobody but a producer would think of shooting a Martian picture on a lunar landscape but the public’ll never know the difference and that’s hardly the point now, anyway. But in that getup there’s no recognizing individuals, and we don’t wear our bracelets most of the time. So a handful of us are going to slip into the dome where S.B. is staying—with Astra installed as empresselect. We ll seem to be just part of his army.”
“And then—”
“We’ll have a council of war tonight and get that straight. Hesketh and I are in the party and two others. Want to make it five?”
“What do you think?”
“Good. That’s settled. Now come and meet us.”
As she rose, Garrett gently thrust her back into the chair. “Just a minute. The Secretary of Allocation gave me this swizard to use in starting conversations about lovestonite. I’m not apt to find that necessary any more. You like swizards. Want it?”
“A Kubicek? You’re giving me a Kubicek swizard? And do I want it?”
He detached the swizard from his identification bracelet and fastened it onto hers. As he leaned over her, her lips met him halfway. There was a little more than gratitude in the kiss.
Maureen eventually leaned back and ran a straightening hand through her rumpled black hair. “And, by the way,” she said, “what’s your name?”
Gan Garrett listened to his fellow extras:
“He’s what we’ve needed all along—one strong man to tell us what’s what.”
“Sure. That’s the hell of the State. There’s a lot of guys running it and who are they and who cares?”
“And what are they running it for? Peace—nuts!”
“What’s peace? Blood and steel, that’s what we need.”
“You don’t draw blood with these pistols, though.”
“But have you ever got to use one full strength? Watch a face shrivel up and burn under it and the eyes go dead?”
“And blood or not, they kill if you use them strong enough. And there’s no power without killing.”
“Power— That’s ours now.”
“Ours under him.”
“Yeah, sure. Under him—”
Hesketh Uranov listened to his fellow extras:
“But, my dear fellow, of course I welcomed this plan. I was simply so unutterably bored—”
“Of course the man’s a fool. But if a fool chooses to provide us with weapons—”
“A world. A whole entire rounded world. The legions of Caesar never held anything like that. Even the Nazis never reached all the way into Asia. And we—”
“It’s farewell to boredom now.”
Maureen Furness listened to her fellow extras:
“—and the way it’s changed the men! Why, everything’s so different it doesn’t feel like the same thing any more.”
“A man really isn’t a man unless he’s killed somebody, I always say.”
“But isn’t that Ardless woman the lucky one, though? To be his woman—”
“When I think of my sister sitting at home with those three children and that wishywashy husband of hers, I could laugh in her face.”
“You know, a friend of mine was studying the old dialects and there used to be a word for just what we are. There used to be women like us, and you know what they called them? Tramp followers.”
They forgathered at the appointed meeting place—Garrett and Maureen and Uranov and the other one of “us,” a dark intense young man named Loewe.
“It’s astounding,” the epic writer exclaimed. “There hasn’t been anything like it since the twentieth century. And for a true analogy you’ve got to go back further than that—the European wars of the seventeenth, or even back to the Roman legions. This dome that’s supposed to house a location company is an armed camp of mercenaries, ready to let loose rapine and destruction upon the world.”
“They’re mad,” Maureen protested. “They can do infinite harm for a little while, but what can this handful hope to accomplish in the long run?”
The Compleat Boucher Page 40
