Danger Moon

6

IT WASN’T easy, but Templin finally managed to scramble out of the crevasse—after loping nearly half a mile along the bottom of it, to where the sides were less precipitous. Ellen Bishop, following his progress from above, was there to meet him as he clambered over the edge.

Remembering the genuine anxiety in her voice as it had come over the radio, he peered curiously at her face; but behind the shading helmet it was hard to read expressions. He smiled.

“You win another Girl Scout merit badge,” he observed. “Whatever made you show up in the nick of time like that?”

Ellen’s face colored slightly. “I was watching you,” she said defiantly. “There’s a spotting telescope in the Observatory at Hadley Dome and—well, I was worried about you. I went up and watched. I saw Olcott stop and look around, and then hide…so I figured out that he’d seen you. It looked like an ambush. And of course, you were such a big fool that you didn’t take a rocket gun along with you.”

“Couldn’t afford to,” Templin apologized. “Olcott’s still in the Security Patrol—I didn’t want to be caught following him with a gun tucked in my belt. Besides, he didn’t have one himself.”

“He had something,” Ellen said. “Or did you just go down in that crevasse to look for edelweiss?”

Templin coughed. “Well,” he said ambiguously. “As long as you’re here, you might as well come the rest of the way.“ He craned his neck in the direction of the Loonie city, mockingly near now. Olcott was not in sight.

“Come on,” he ordered. “Keep out of trouble, though. Olcott went a little too far when he jumped me. He can’t turn back any more…and that means he’s desperate.”

The girl nodded. Side by side they drove on toward the solitary crater of Linne, alone in the middle of the Mare Serenitatis. Once Templin thought he saw Olcott’s figure on top of a peak, watching them. But it didn’t reappear, and he decided he had been mistaken…

They loped into the ancient city of the long-dead lunar race, Templin in the lead but the girl only a hair’s-breadth behind. In the shadow of a giant ruined tower Templin gestured, and they came to a stop.

He switched off the transmitter of his helmet radio, motioned to the girl to do the same. When, somewhat puzzled, she obeyed, he leaned close to her, touching helmets.

“Keep your radio off!” he yelled, and the vibration carried his voice from his helmet to hers. “This is where Olcott’s outfit hides out, whoever they are. If they hear our radios it’ll be trouble.”

ELLEN NODDED, and the two of them advanced down the broad street of the ravished Lunarian metropolis. Glancing at the shattered buildings all about them, Templin found his mind dwelling on the peculiar tragedy of the Moon’s former inhabitants, who had risen from the animal, developed a massive civilization…and seen it wiped out into nothingness.

Ellen shuddered and moved closer to Templin. He understood her feeling; even to him, the city seemed haunted. The light of the giant sun that hung overhead was blinding; yet he found himself becoming jittery, seeing strange imaginary shapes that twisted and contorted in the utterly black shadows cast by the ruined walls. They circled a shattered Coliseum, looking warily into every crevice, when Templin felt Ellen’s gauntleted hand on his shoulder. He looked at her and touched helmets. Her face was worried. “Someone’s watching us, Temp,” she said positively, her voice metallic as it was transmitted by the helmets. “I feel eyes.”

“Where?”

“How do I know? In that big round building we just passed, I think. It feels exactly as if they keep going around and around the building at the same time we do, always staying on the far side from us.”

Templin considered. “Let’s look,” he said. “You go one way, I’ll go the other. We’ll meet on the other side.”

“Oh, Temp!”

“Don’t be frightened, Ellen. You have your gun—and I can take care of myself with my space knife.”

Her lip trembled. “All right,” she said. Templin watched her start off. She had drawn the gun and was holding it ready as she walked.

Templin went clockwise around the building, moving slowly and carefully, his hand always poised near the dirk at his belt. Almost anything might be lurking in the cavernous hollows in these old buildings. Olcott, he felt quite sure, was lurking somewhere nearby—and so were his mysterious friends. Templin stepped over a fallen carven pillar—strange ornamentation of curious serpentine beasts and almost-human figures straining toward the sky was on it—and froze as he thought he saw a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye. But it was not repeated, and after a moment he went on.

He was clear back to his starting point before he realized that Ellen had disappeared.

TEMPLIN SWORE in the silence. There was no doubt about it. He had travelled completely around the circular building, and Ellen was gone.

He hesitated a second, feeling the forces of mystery gathering about him as they had about Ellen, then grimly dismissed the fantasy from his mind. There had to be a way of finding Ellen again…and at once.

His mind coldly alert, he circled the ancient Lunarian structure once more. Ellen was not in sight.

Templin stood still, thinking it over. Cautiously he retraced his tracks, eyes fixed on the soft Lunarian rock beneath him.

Fifteen yards away, he saw the marks of a scuffle on the ray-charred rock. Heavy space boots had been dragged there, making deep, protesting scars. Ellen.

Templin swore soundlessly and loosened his space knife in its scabbard. He stared up at the ruined Loonie temple. A crumbled arch was before him; inside the structure it disappeared into ultimate blackness. There was a curving corridor, heading downward in a wide spiral. He could see a dozen yards into it… then darkness obliterated his vision.

Templin shrugged and grinned tightly to himself. It looked so very much like a giant rat-trap. Foolish, to go into unknown danger on the chance that Ellen was there—but it was the foolish sort of risk he had always been willing to take.

He snapped on his helmet lamp and stepped boldly in.

Down he went, and down. The corridor was roughly circular in section, slightly flattened underfoot and ornamented with ancient carvings. Templin flashed his light on them curiously as he passed. They were a repetition of the weirdly yearning figures he had seen on the columns outside—lean, tenuous manlike things, arms stretched to the sky. Curious, how like they were to human beings, Templin thought. Except for the leanness of them, and the outsize eyes on the pearshaped head, they could almost have been men.

Templin grimaced at them and went on.

He had walked about a mile in the broad, downward spiral when he saw lights ahead.

Instinctively he snapped off his helmet lamp, stood motionless in the darkness, waiting to see if he had been noticed. But the lights, whatever they were, did not move; he waited for long minutes, and nothing came toward him. Obiviously he had not been seen.

Templin cautiously moved up toward them, watching carefully. They were too bright for helmet lamps, he thought; and too still. But what other lights could be down here in this airless cavern under the Moon? He crept up behind a rock overhang and peered out.

“Good Lord!” Stunned, Templin spoke aloud, and the words echoed inside his helmet. For now he could see clearly—and what he saw was unbelievable.

There were figures moving before the lights. A stocky figure of a man in a pressure suit that Templin knew to be Olcott, and others. And the other figures were—not human!

TEMPLIN stepped out in the open to see more clearly. Abruptly some atavistic sense made the hair on his neck prickle with sudden warning of danger—but it came too late. Templin whirled around, suddenly conscious of his peril. Figures were behind him, menacing figures that he could not recognize in the darkness, closing in on him. He grabbed instinctively for his space knife, but before he had it clear of its scabbard they were on him, bowling him over with the force and speed of their silent attack. He fell heavily, with them on top of him.

He struggled, writhing frantically, but there were too many of them. They held him down; he felt hands running over him, plucking his space knife from its scabbard. Then he felt himself being picked up by a dozen hands and carried face down toward the lights.

Templin made his mind relax and consider, fighting to overcome his rage at being taken so by surprise. He thought desperately of ruses for escape…

Then anger was driven out of his mind. He heard a thin, shrill whistle of escaping air within his helmet. It meant only one thing…his suit had been pierced in the struggle, and his precious air was leaking into the void outside.

He made a supreme, convulsive effort and managed to free one arm, but it was recaptured immediately and he was helpless. Templin groaned internally. He was a dead man, he knew—dead as surely as though the heart had been cut from his body. For his suit was leaking air and there was no way to stop it, no nearby pressure-dome into which to flee, nothing to do but die.

Templin resigned himself for death; he relaxed, allowing his captors to carry him along at a swift, jogging trot. His mind was strangely calm, now that death was so near. For anxiety and fright come only from uncertainty… and there was no more uncertainty… in Templin’s mind.

He felt his captors drop him ungently on a rock floor. They were close to the lights now, he realized…

The hiss of air in his ears was gone. And he was still alive. Templin dazedly comprehended a miracle, for the air in his helmet and suit had leaked out until, somehow, it had established a balance. And that meant—

“Air!” He said it aloud, and the word was a prayer of thanksgiving. It was no less than a miracle that there should be air here, under the surface of the Moon—a miracle for which Templin was deeply and personally grateful.

Someone laughed above him. He scrambled to his feet uncertainly, looking up. It was Olcott, pressure-suited but holding his helmet in his hand, laughing at him.

Olcott nodded in grim humor. “Yes,” he said, his voice coming thinly to Templin through his own helmet, “it’s air all right. But it won’t matter to you, because you aren’t going to live to enjoy it. My friends here will take care of that!”

Olcott jerked a thumb toward the lights. Templin followed with his eyes.

The lights were crude, old-fashioned electrics, grouped in front of a pit that descended into the floor of the cavern. And beyond the lights, standing in a stoic, silent group, were a dozen lean figures, big-eyed, big-headed, wearing brief loin-cloths of some mineral material that glistened in the illumination.

Templin stared. For they were not human, those figures. They were—the lean, questing figures that were carved in the ancient Lunarian stone.

TEMPLIN FORCED himself to turn to Olcott. He glanced at those who had captured him, half-expecting that they would be more of the ancient, supposedly extinct Lunarians. But again he was surprised, for the half-dozen men behind him were as human as himself, though pale and curiously flabby-looking. They wore shredded rags of cloth that seemed to Templin to be the remnants of a military uniform that had disappeared from the face of the Earth years before.

Groping for understanding, Templin turned back to Olcott. Then his mind cleared. There was one question to which he had to know the answer.

“Where’s Ellen Bishop?” he demanded.

Olcott raised his heavy brows. “I was about to ask you that,” he said. “Don’t try to deceive me, Templin. Is she hiding?”

Templin shrugged without replying.

Olcott waved. “It doesn’t matter. She can’t get away. My patrols will pick her up—the Loonies are very good at that.”

Templin looked at the dark man’s eyes. It was impossible to read his expression, but Templin decided that he was telling the truth. There was no reason, after all, for him to lie.

Templin said shortly, “I don’t know where she is.” He pointed to the silent, watching figures beyond the lights. “What are they?”

Olcott chuckled richly. “They’re the inhabitants, Templin. The original Lunarians. There aren’t very many of them left—a thousand or so—but they’re all mine.”

Templin shook his head. Hard to believe, that the ancient race had survived for so long underground—yet he could not doubt it, when his eyes provided him with evidence. He said, “What do you mean, they’re all yours?”

“They work for me,” said Olcott easily. He gestured sharply, and the scarecrow-like figures bowed and began to descend into the pit, by a narrow spiral ramp around its sides. “They’re rather useful, in fact. As you should know, considering how much they’ve helped me at Hyginus Cleft.”

“Sabotage—you mean—these things were—”

Olcott nodded, almost purring in satisfaction. “Yes. The—accidents—to your equipment, the damage to your generators and a good many other things, were taken care of for me by the Loonies. For instance, it was one of them who located your plutonium pile for me.”

Templin scowled. “Wearing one of my miners’ pressure-suits, wasn’t he? I begin to see.” He looked at the group of pallid humans who had captured him. “They Loonies too?” he demanded.

Olcott shook his head. “Only by adoption,” he said. “You see, they had the misfortune to be on the wrong side in the Three-Day War. In fact, they were some of the men who were operating the rocket projectors that were so annoying to the United Nations. And when your—our—compatriots began atom-blasting the rocket-launching sites, a few of them found their way down here.” Olcott gazed at them benevolently. “They are very useful to me, too. They control the Loonies, you see—I think they must have been rather cruel to the Loonies when they first came, because the Loonies are frightened to death of them now. And I control them.”

Templin stiffened. “Rocket projectors,” he repeated. “You mean these are the men who bombed Detroit?”

Olcott waved. “Perhaps,” he said. “I don’t know which targets they chose. This may have been the crew that blasted Paris—or Memphis—or Stalingrad.”

Templin looked at them for a long moment. “I’ll remember,” he said softly. “My family—Never mind. What are you going to do with me?”

“I am very likely to kill you, Templin. Unless I turn you over to the Loonies for sport.”

Templin nodded. “I see,” he said. “Well, I—thought as much.”

Olcott looked at him curiously. Then he issued a quick order to the pale, silent men behind him. It was not in English.

To Templin he said, “You shouldn’t have gotten in my way. I need the uranium that your company owns; I plan to get it.”

“Why?”

Olcott pursed his lips. “I think,” he said, “that we will start the rocket projectors again. Only this time, there will be no slip-ups. As a high-ranking officer in the Security Patrol, I will make sure that we are not interfered with.”

The pale men gripped Templin, carried him to the edge of the pit into which the Loonies had disappeared. Olcott said. “Good-by, Templin. I’m turning you over to the Loonies. What they will do to you I don’t know, but it will not be pleasant. They hate human beings.” He smirked, and added, “With good reason.”

He nodded to the men; they picked Templin up easily, dropped him into the pit.

It was not very deep. Templin dropped lightly perhaps twenty feet, landed easily and straightened to face whatever was coming.

He was surrounded by the tall, tenuous Lunarians, a dozen of them staring at him with their huge, cryptic eyes. Silently they gestured to him to move down a shaft in the rock. Templin shrugged and complied.

He was in a rabbit-warren of tunnels, branching and forking out every few yards. Inside of a handful of minutes Templin was thoroughly confused.

They came to a vaulted dome in the rock. Still silent, the Lunarians gestured to Templin to enter. He did.

Someone came running toward him, crying: “Temp! Thank Heaven you’re safe!”

Pressure-suit off, dark hair flying as she ran to him, was Ellen,

TEMPLIN HELD her to him tightly for a long moment. When finally she stepped back he saw that her eyes were damp. She said: “Oh, Temp, I thought you were gone this time for sure! The Loonies told me that Olcott had captured you—I was so worried!”

Templin stared. “Told you? You mean these things can talk?”

“Well, no, not exactly. But they told me, all the same. It’s mental telepathy, I suppose, Temp, or something very much like it. Oh, they can’t read minds—unless you try to convey a thought—but they can project their own thoughts to another person. It sounds just like someone talking…but you don’t hear it with your ears.”

Templin nodded. “I begin to understand things,” he said. “That miner at Hyginus—I thought I talked to him, and yet my radio was broken, so I couldn’t have. And then, he abandoned his suit. Can the Loonies get along on the surface without pressure suits?”

Ellen looked uncertain. “I—I don’t know. But—I think perhaps they can. They said something about Olcott forcing them to do it. Olcott has them under control, Temp. He’s using them to get the uranium mines away from us—and the Loonies think he wants the uranium to make bombs!”

“I have heard about that,” Templin said. “From Olcott. Which reminds me—how did you get down here without his knowing about it?”

Ellen said, “I was outside that Coliseum-looking place, up on the surface, and suddenly somebody grabbed me from behind. I was frightened half to death; he carried me down and through a bunch of tunnels to here. And then—why, this voice began talking to me, and it was one of the Loonies. He said—he said he wanted me to help him get rid of Olcott!”

Templin asked, “Why can’t they get rid of him themselves? There are a couple thousand Loonies—and Olcott can’t have more than fifteen or twenty men down here.”

Ellen sighed. “That’s the horrible thing, Temp. You see, these men haven’t a thing to lose. When they came down here, they brought part of the warhead of an atom-rocket along. And they’ve got it assembled in one of the caverns, not far from here—right in the middle of a terrific big lode of uranium ore! Can you imagine what would happen if it went off, Temp? All that uranium would explode—the whole Moon would become a bomb. And that’s what they’re threatening to do if the Loonies try to fight them.”

Templin whistled. He looked around the room they were in reflectively. It was a high-ceilinged, circular affair, cut out of the mother-rock, sparsely furnished with pallets and benches. Loonie living quarters, he thought.

He looked back at the hovering Lunarians, staring blankly at them from the entrance to the chamber. “How do you work this telepathy affair?” he demanded.

“Walk up to them and start talking. The effort of phrasing words is enough to convey the thought to them—as nearly as I can figure it out.”

Templin nodded, looked at them again and walked slowly over. The bulbous heads with the giant eyes confronted him blankly. He said uncertainly, “Hello?”

A SENSATION of mirth reached him, as though someone had laughed silently beside his ear. A voice spoke, and he recognized its kinship to that of the “miner” he had stopped at Hyginus. It had the same curious strangeness, the thing that was not an accent but something more basic. It said, “Hello, Steve Templin. We have spared your life. Now tell us what we are to do with you.”

“Why, I thought—” Steve stumbled. “That is, you’re having trouble with these Earthmen, aren’t you?”

“For sixteen of your years.” There was anger in the thought. “We have not come to like Earthmen, Templin.”

Templin said uncomfortably, “These Earthmen I don’t like myself. Shall we make an alliance, then?”

The thought was direct and sincere. “It was for that that we spared your lives.”

Templin nodded. “Good.” Abruptly his whole bearing changed. He snapped: “Then help us get out of here! Get us back to Hadley Dome or Hyginus. We’ll get help—and come back here and wipe them out!”

Regretfully, the Lunarian’s thought came, “That, Templin, is impossible. Our people can go out into the vacuum unprotected, for short periods, but you cannot. Have you forgotten that your suit will no longr hold air?”

Templin winced. But he said, “Ellen’s will. Let her go for help.”

Wearily the thought came, “Again, no. For if you brought men here to help you the Earthmen who enslave us could not be taken by surprise. And if only one of them should live for just a few moments after the first attack…it would be the death of us all. They have hollowed out a chamber in the midst of a deposit of the metal of fire. They have said that if we act against them they will set off a chain reaction—and, in this, I know that they do not lie.”

The Lunarian hesitated. Almost apologetically he went on: “It was from the metal of fire that the greatness of our race was destroyed many thousands of years ago, Templin. Once we lived on the surface, and had atomic power; because we used it wrongly we ravished the surface of our planet and destroyed nearly all of our people. Now—there are so few of us left, Templin, and we must not see it happen again.”

Templin spread his hands. “All right,” he said shortly. “What you say is true. But what do you suggest we do?”

The thought was sympathetic. “There is only one chance,” it said, “If someone could enter the chamber of the bomb—My own people cannot approach, for it is not allowed. But you are an Earthman; perhaps you could reach it. And if you could destroy the men who are in there—the others we can account for.”

Templin gave it only a second’s thought. He nodded reflectively. “It’s the only chance,” he agreed. “Well—lead the way. I’ll try it.”

THE LUNARIAN peeped out into a corridor, then turned back to Templin. He said in his soundless speech, “The entrance to the room of power is to your right. What you will find there I do not know, for none of us have ever been inside.”

Templin shrugged. “All right,” he said. And to Ellen Bishop, “This is it; if I shouldn’t see you again—it’s been worthwhile, Ellen.”

The girl bit her lip. Impulsively she flung her arms around him, hugged him tight for a second. Then she stepped back and let him go.

Templin stepped out into the corridor. No one was in sight. He patted the bulge of Ellen’s rocket pistol where it was concealed under his clothing—he had taken off his pressure suit, torn the stout fabric of his tunic to match the ragged uniforms he had seen on the pale men—and turned down the traveled path to his right.

Thirty yards along, he came to a metal door.

A man was standing there, looking dreamily at the rock wall of the corridor. He looked incuriously at Templin but made no move to stop him. As Templin passed, the man said something rapid and casual to him in the language of the nation that had waged the Three-Day War.

That was the first hurdle. It didn’t sound like a challenge, Templin thought, wishing vainly that he had learned that language at some time in his life. Apparently the fugitives had not considered the possibility of an inimical human being penetrating to this place.

Templin replied with a non-committal grunt and walked on. The skin between his shoulder-blades crawled, expecting the blast of a rocket-shell from the guard. But it did not come; the thing had worked.

Templin found that he was in a room where half a dozen men sat around, a couple of them playing cards with what looked like a homemade deck, others lying on pallets that had obviously been commandeered from the Loonies.

Along one wall was an involved mechanical affair—a metal tube with bulges along its fifteen-foot length, and a man standing by a push-button monitor control at one end of it. That was his target, Templin knew. Built like an atom-bomb, it would have tiny fragments of uranium-235 or plutonium in it, ready to be hurled together to form a giant, self-detonating mass of atomic explosive at the touch of that button. And once the pieces had come together, nothing under the sun could prevent the blast.

The men were looking up at him, Templin saw. It was time to make his play. The thing was too much like shooting sitting ducks, he thought distastefully—yet he dared not warn them, give them a chance to fight back. Too much was at stake.

He gazed stolidly at the men who were looking at him, and his hand crept to where Ellen’s rocket pistol was concealed inside his tunic.

“Templin!”

The shout was like a pistol-crack in his ears. Templin spun round frantically. And in the door stood Olcott, surprise and rage stamped on his face.

TEMPLIN whirled into action. The men in the room, abruptly conscious that something was wrong, were reaching for weapons. Templin made his decision and passed them up for the first shot—blasted, instead, the man at the atomic warhead control, most deadly to his plans. He saw the man’s body disappear in incandescent red mist as the rocket shell hit, then fired at a clump of three who had weapons drawn, fired again and again. Surprise was with him, and he got each of them with his potent shells. Yet—the odds were too much against him. As he downed the last pale-skinned underground man, Olcott was on him!

Templin reeled with the fury of his attack, grunted as Olcott landed vicious stabbing blows on his unprotected body. He lost control of the rocket-pistol in his hand, saw it spin away across the room as Olcott thudded against him with his steel-gauntleted hand. Templin dropped to the floor under the pressure-suited body, rolled and brought his knees up in a savage kick. The chunky man grunted but lashed out and a steel fist caught Templin at the base of the jaw. For a second the chamber reeled around him. Another like that, he knew, and he was done.

Olcott came down on him like a metal and fabric colossus. The gauntleted hands reached for Templin’s throat and found it, circled it and squeezed. Templin, battered and gasping in the thin air, found even that cut off under the remorseless pressure from the other’s hands. He struggled with every trick he knew to break the man’s grip…

Blindly his hands reached out, closed on something, heaved back. There was a sudden yielding, and Templin felt air reach his lungs once more. But it came too late.

Darkness overcame him…

SOMEONE WAS bending over him. Templin surged upward as soon as he opened his eyes. The figure leaped away and emitted a slight shriek. “Temp!” it said reprovingly.

Templin’s eyes swam into focus again; it was Ellen.

He was in bed, in a huge room with filtered sunlight coming in through a giant window. He was on the surface—by the look of it, back at Hadley Dome.

His head throbbed. He touched it inquiringly, and his finger encountered gauze bandage. He stared at the girl.

“We won,” she said simply. “The Loonies and I came in as soon as we could—soon as we heard the shooting. You did a terrific job, Temp. The only live ones in the room were you and Olcott. And, just as we came in—Olcott died.”

“Died? Died how?”

“You broke his neck, Temp. He was strangling you, and you were fighting back, and you caught him under the chin and pushed. The metal collar of his pressure suit snapped his spine. And then, since you had a skull that’s broken in three places, the surgeon says, you went off to sleep yourself.”

Templin shook his head incredulously. “And the Loonies?”

“They’re free. And very grateful to you, too. They—they massacred all the other Earthmen, down under there. They’d been waiting for the chance for years, you see. And—well, you’ve been unconscious for two days, and I’ve been busy. Things are under control now. The mine is back in operation—Culver’s outside, waiting to see you—and you’re free, too, Temp. You can go back to the Inner Planets whenever you like.”

Templin repeated, “The Inner Planets.” He looked at her and grinned. “It will be like a vacation,” he said. “By the way, how about my bonus?”

“Bonus?” Ellen looked puzzled. Then she laughed—but a little strainedly, Templin decided. “Oh, you mean the backing I promised you from Terralune? It’s yours, Temp. Ships, and money, and everything you need. Only—” She hesitated. “That is, I had an idea—”

He interrupted, “That’s not what I mean,” he objected. “My bonus was personnel. You promised me I could have help to settle Venus, if I took care of this mining affair for you. In fact, you said I could take my pick of anybody on the Terralune payroll.”

Ellen’s face clouded. “Yes,” she said. “But, Temp—”

“Don’t argue,” he commanded. “A promise is a promise. And—well, you’re on the payroll, Ellen. My advice to you is, start packing. We leave for Venus in the morning!”

The End.