Danger Moon

5

TEMPLIN jockeyed the little jet-ship down to a stem landing at the entrance to Hadley Dome, so close to the Dome itself that the pressure-chamber attendant met him with a glare. But one look at Templin’s steel-hard face toned down the glare, and all the man said, very mildly, was, “You were a little close to the Dome, sir. Might cause an accident.”

Templin looked at him frigidly. “If anything happens to this rathole,” he said, “it won’t be an accident. Out of my way.”

He mounted the wide basalt stair to Level Nine and pounded Ellen Bishop’s door. A timid maid peeped out at Templin and said: “Miss Bishop is upstairs in the game room, sir. Shall I call her on the Dome phone and tell her you’re here?”

“Tell her myself,” said Templin. He spun around and climbed the remaining flight of stairs to the top of Hadley Dome.

He was in a marble-paved chamber where a gentle fountain danced a slow watery waltz. To his right was Hadley Dome’s tiny observatory, where small telescopes watched the face of the Earth day and night. Directly ahead lay the game room, chief attraction of Hadley Dome for its wealthy patrons and a source of large-scale revenue to the billionaire syndicate that owned the Dome.

For Earthly laws did not exist on Hadley Dome; the simple military code that governed the Moon enforced the common law, and certain security regulations…and nothing else. Grimes of violence came under the jurisdiction of the international Security Patrol, but there was no law regulating drugs, alcohol, morals—or gambling. And it was for gambling in particular that the Dome had become famous.

Templin hesitated at the threshhold of the game room and stared around for Ellen Bishop. Contemptuously, his eyes roved over the clustered knots of thrill-seekers. There were fewer than fifty persons in the room, yet he could see that gigantic sums of money were changing hands. At the roulette table nearest him a lean, tired-looking croupier was raking in glittering chips of synthetic diamond and ruby. Each chip was worth a hundred dollars or more… and there were scores of chips in the pile.

Templin took his eyes off the sight to peer around for Olcott. The man was not in the room, and Templin mentally thanked his gods.

But at the far end, standing with her back to the play and looking out a window on the blinding vista of sun-tortured rock that was the Sea of Serenity, was Ellen Bishop, all alone.

Templin walked up behind her, gently touched her on the shoulder. The girl started and spun round like a released torsion coil.

“Templin!” she gasped. “You startled me.”

Templin chuckled comfortably. “Sorry,” he said. “Have you seen Olcott?”

“Why, no. I don’t think he’s in the Dome. But, Temp—what is the trouble at Hyginus? Culver radioed that the Security Patrol was after you for something! What is it?”

“Plenty of trouble,” Templin admitted soberly. “And I only know one way out of it; Look, Ellen—don’t ask questions right now; there are too many people around here, with too many ears. And I want you to do something.”

He glanced around the room, selected a dice table that had a good view of the door. “Let’s risk a few dollars,” he suggested. “I have a feeling that this is my lucky night!”

TEMPLIN played cautiously, for the stakes were too high for any man on a salary to afford. But by carefully betting against the dice and controlling the impulse to pyramid his winnings, he managed to stay a few chips ahead of the game.

Ellen, scorning to play, was fuming beside him. She said in a vicious whisper, “Temp, this is the most idiotic thing I ever heard of! Don’t you know that the Patrol is after you? Olcott comes here every night; if he sees you—it’s all up!”

Templin grinned. “Patience,” he said. “I know what I’m doing. Give you six to five that the man doesn’t make his eight.”

Ellen tossed her head. “Too bad,” said Templin. “I would have won.” The dice passed to Templin; he made one point, picked up his winnings, threw another and sevened out. He sighed and waited expectantly for the man beside him to bet.

Then—he saw what he was waiting for.

Joe Olcott appeared briefly in the door of the gambling salon. Templin spotted him at once and carefully took the opportunity to light a cigarette, screening most of his down-turned face with his hand. But it was an unnecessary precaution; Olcott was looking for someone else, a chubby little servile-looking man, who trotted up to him as soon as the big man appeared in the door. There was a brief whispered conversation, then Olcott and the chubby one disappeared.

Templin waited thirty seconds after they left. “I knew it,” he exulted. “Olcott said he was coming back here—and I know why! Come on, Ellen—I want to see where he’s going.”

Ellen stuttered protest but Templin dragged her out. They followed the other two into the hall and saw that the elevator indicator showed that the cage was on its way down. “They’re on it,” said Templin. “Come on—stairs are faster.” He led the complaining girl down the long basalt stairways at a precipitous pace. She was exhausted, and even Templin was breathing hard, when they rounded the landing to come to the last flight of stairs. He slowed down abruptly, and they carefully peeked into the lobby of Hadley Dome before coming into sight.

Olcott’s chubby companion had parted from him, was disappearing down a long corridor that led to the Dome’s radio room. Olcott himself was putting on a pressure suit, preparatory to going outside.

Templin halted, concealed by the high balustrade of the stair. He nodded sharply, to himself. “This is it, Ellen,” he said to the girl. “Something has been going on—something so fantastic that I hardly dare speak of it, far beyond anything we’ve dreamed of. But I think I know what it is…and the way Olcott is acting makes me surer of it every minute.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded the girl.

Templin laughed. “You’ll see,” he promised. “Meanwhile, Olcott’s on his way to a certain place that I want very much to see. I’m going after him; you stay here.”

Ellen Bishop stamped a foot. “I’m going along!” she said.

Templin shook his head. “Uh-uh. You’re not—that’s final. When this is over I’ll be working for you again—but right now I’m the boss. And you’re staying here.”

HE LEFT her fuming and went out through the pressure chamber, hastily tugging on the suit he had reclaimed from the attendant. Templin had barely sealed the helmet when the outer door opened, and vacuum sucked at him.

He blinked painfully, staggered by the shock, as he stepped out into the blinding fierce sun. In the days that had passed since last Templin was at Hadley Dome, the Moon’s slow circling of the Earth had brought the Dome into direct sunlight, agonizingly bright—hot enough to warm the icy rock far above the boiling point of water overnight. The helmet of his suit, even stopped down as far as the polarizing device would go, still could not keep out enough of that raging radiation to make it really comfortable. But after a few moments the worst of it passed, and he could see again.

Templin stared around for Olcott, confident that he wouldn’t see him…and he did not. Olcott was not among the ships parked outside the Dome. Olcott was out of sight around the Dome’s bulk; Templin followed and stared out over the heat-sodden Sea of Serenity.

Olcott’s figure, bloated and forbidding-looking in the pressure suit, was bounding clumsily down the long slope of Mount Hadley, going in the general direction of a small crater, miles off across the tortured rocky Sea. Templin stared at the crater thoughtfully for a second. Then he remembered its name.

“Linne,” he said underneath his breath. “Yes!” With a sudden upsurge at the heart he recalled the story of Linne Crater—site of one of the biggest and least-dilapidated Lunarian cities—the so-called “Vanishing Crater” of the Nineteenth Century.

Templin nodded soberly to himself, but wasted no more time in contemplation. Already Olcott was almost out of sight, his bloated figure visible only when he leaped over a crevasse or surmounted a plateau. It would be easy enough to lose him in this jagged, sun-drenched waste, Templin knew…so he hurried after the other man.

Templin remembered the story of Linne, always an enigma to Moon-gazers. It was Linne that, little more than a century before, had been reported by Earthly astronomers as having disappeared…then, a few years later in 1870, it had been discovered again in the low-power telescopes of the period—but with important changes in its shape.

What—Templin wondered abstractly—did those changes in its shape mean?

Obviously, Linne was their goal. It lay directly ahead in the path Olcott had taken, a good thirty miles away—across the roughest, most impassable kind of terrain that existed anywhere in the universe men traversed. A good three-day hike on Earth, it was only about an hour’s time away on foot, on the light-gravitied surface of the Moon. But it would be an hour of sustained, strenuous exertion, and Templin gave all his concentration to the task of getting there.

A mile farther on, Templin glanced up as he cleared a hundred-foot-deep crevasse. Olcott’s figure was nowhere to be seen.

Templin halted, a frown on his lean face. The fat man couldn’t have reached the shelter of Linne crater yet—or could he? Had Linne been a wrong guess, after all—was Olcott’s destination some place between?

Templin shrugged. Certainly Olcott was out of sight; it behooved Templin to get moving, to try to catch up.

He put his full strength into a powerful leg-thrust that sent him hurtling across a ravine and down into a shallow depression on the other side of it. As he balanced himself for the next leap…

Disaster struck.

OUT OF THE corner of his eye, Templin saw a flicker of motion. A sprawling, spread-eagled figure in a pressure suit was sailing down on him from the lee of a small crater nearby; and from one of the outstretched hands glittered a brilliant, diamond-like reflection of sunlight on steel.

It was a spaceman’s knife…and the man who bore it, Templin knew, was Olcott.

Templin writhed aside and out of the way of the knife, but the flailing legs of Olcott caught him and knocked him down. Templin rolled like a ball, landed on his feet facing the other man. Olcott’s face behind the clouded semi-opacity of the helmet was contorted in hatred, and the long knife in his hand was a murderous instrument as he leaped toward Templin again.

Templin paused a moment, irresolute. Olcott didn’t have a gun with him, he saw; if Templin chose, he could take to his heels and Olcott wouldn’t have a chance in the world of catching him. But something within Templin would never let him run from a battle…with scarcely a second’s hesitation, he grabbed for the dirk at his own belt and faced his antagonist. If it was fight that Olcott was after, he would give it to the man.

The two closed warily, eyes alert for the slightest weakness on the other’s part. Strange, deadly battle, these two humans on the seared face of the Moon! In an age of fantastic technological advance, it was to the knife, after all, that humanity had returned for killing. For nothing could be more deadly than a single tiny rent made by one of these razor-sharp space knives in the puffed pressure suit of an enemy. At the tiniest slit the air would flood out, quick as bomb-flash, and the body of the man inside would burst in horrid soundless explosion as the pressures within it sought to expand into the vacuum.

Olcott drove a wicked thrust at Templin’s mid-section, which the bigger man parried with his steel space-gauntlet. He dodged and let the chunky killer jerk free. Templin’s mind was clear, not masked by blinding rage: he would kill Olcott if he had to, yes—but, if possible, Templin would somehow disarm the other and keep him alive.

Olcott feinted to the left, sidestepped and came in with a shoulder-high lunge. Templin shifted lightly away, then seized his chance; he ducked, dived inside Olcott’s murderous thrust, drove against him with the solid shoulder of his pressure suit. The heavy-set man puffed soundlessly, the wind knocked out of him, as he spun away from the blow. Templin followed up with a sledgehammer blow to the forearm; the knife flew out of Olcott’s hand, and Templin pounced.

He bore the other man down by sheer weight and impact, knelt on his chest, knife pressed against the bulge of the pressure suit just where it joined the collar. With his free hand he flicked on his helmet radio and said, “Give up, Olcott. You’re licked and you know it.”

Olcott’s face was strained and suddenly as pale as the disk of the Moon itself. He licked his lips. “All—all right,” he croaked. “Take that knife away, for the love of heaven!”

Templin looked at him searchingly, then nodded and stood up.

“Get up,” he ordered. Olcott sullenly pushed himself up on one arm. Then, abruptly, a flash of pain streaked across his face. “My leg!” he groaned. “Damn you, Templin, you’ve broken it!”

Templin frowned and moved toward him cautiously. He bent to look at the leg, but in the shrouding bulkiness of the air-filled pressure suit there was no way for him to tell if Olcott was lying. He said, “Try and get up.”

Olcott winced and shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “It’s broken.”

Templin bent closer, suspiciously. “Looks all right to me—” he started to say. Then he realized his mistake—but too late to do him any good.

Olcott’s other leg came up with the swiftness of a striking snake, drew back and lashed out in a vicious kick that caught Templin full in the ribs, sent him hurtling helplessly a dozen yards back. He wind-milled his arms, trying to regain his balance…but he had no chance, for at once the ground slid away from under him as he reeled backward into the yawning 500-foot crevasse, and down!

LITHE AS a cat, Templin twisted his body around in space to land on his feet. The fall was agonizingly slow, but he still possessed all the mass, if not the weight, of his two hundred pound body, and if he struck on his helmet it would mean death.

He landed feet-first. The impact was bone-shattering, but his space-trained leg muscles had time to flex and cushion the shock. As it was, he blacked out for a moment, and came to again to looking up into a blinding sun overhead that silhouetted the head and shoulders of Olcott, peering down at him.

They looked at each other for a long moment. Then Templin heard the crackle of Olcott’s voice in his helmet, and realized with a start that his radio was still working. “A hero,” jeered Olcott. “Following after me single-handed. Sorry I couldn’t let you come along with me.”

Templin was silent.

“I’d like to ask you questions,” Olcott continued, “but right now I haven’t got time; I’ve got some urgent affairs to take care of.”

“In Linne,” said Templin. “I know. Go ahead, Olcott. I’ll see you there.”

Olcott’s figure was quite motionless for a second. Then. “No,” he said, “I don’t think you will.” And his head disappeared over the lip of the crevasse.

Templin had just time enough to wonder what Olcott was up to… when he found out.

A giant, jagged boulder, came hurtling down in slow motion from the edge of the chasm.

Slowly as it fell, Templin had just time enough to get out of its way before it struck. It landed with a shattering vibration that he felt through the soles of his feet, sending up splinters of jagged rock that splattered off his helmet and pressure suit. And it was followed by another, and a third, coming down like a giant deadly hail in slow motion.

Then Olcott’s head reappeared, to see what the results of his handiwork has been.

Templin, crouched against a boulder just like the ones that had rained down, had sense enough to play dead. He stared up at Olcott with murder in his heart, disciplining himself, forcing himself not to move. For a long moment Olcott looked down.

Then Templin saw an astonishing thing.

Against the far wall of the crevasse, just below Olcott’s head, a flare of light burst out, and almost at once a second, a few yards away.

Templin could see Olcott leap in astonishment, jerk upright and stare in the direction of Hadley Dome.

Someone was shooting a rocket pistol at Olcott. But whom?

Whoever the person was, he was a friend in need to Steve Templin. Olcott scrambled erect and disappeared; Templin waited cautiously for a long moment, but he didn’t come back. Templin’s unknown friend had driven the other man off, forced him to flee in the direction of the Loonie city at Linne Crater.

Templin, hardly believing in his luck, stood up. For several seconds he stood staring at the lip of the cleft, waiting to see what would happen.

A moment later a new helmet poked over the side of the chasm nearest Hadley Dome. Templin peered up in astonishment. It looked like—

It was.

The voice in his helmet was entirely familiar. “Oh, Temp, you utter idiot,” it said despairingly. “Are you all right?”

It was Ellen Bishop. “Bless your heart,” said Templin feelingly. “Of course I’m all right. Stand by to give me a hand—I’m coming up!”