In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

“NOTHING HAPPENS ON THE MOON” Paul Ernst

The shining ball of the full Earth floated like a smooth pearl between two vast, angular mountains. The full Earth. Another month had ticked by.

Clow Hartigan turned from the porthole beside the small airlock to the Bliss radio transmitter.

“RC3, RC3, RC3,” he droned out.

There was no answer. Stacey, up in New York, always took his time about answering the RC3 signal, confound it! But then, why shouldn’t he? There was never anything of importance to listen to from station RC3. Nothing of any significance ever happened on the Moon.

Hartigan stared unseeingly at the pink cover of a six-month-old Tadio Gazette, pasted to the wall over the control board. A pulchritudinous brunette stared archly back at him over a plump shoulder that was only one of many large nude areas.

“RC3, RC3—”

Ah, there Stacey was, the pompous little busybody.

“Hartigan talking. Monthly report.”

“Go ahead, Hartigan.”

A hurried, fussy voice. Calls of real import waited for Stacey, calls from Venus and Jupiter and Mars. Hurry up, Moon, and report that nothing has happened, as usual.

Hartigan proceeded to do so. “Lunar conditions the same. No ships have put in, or have reported themselves as being in distress. The hangar is in good shape, with no leaks. Nothing out of the way has occurred.”

“Right,” said Stacey pompously. “Supplies?”

“You might send up a blonde,” said Hartigan.

“Be serious. Need anything?”

“No.” Hartigan’s eyes brooded. “How’s everything in Little Old New York?”

“Sorry. Can’t gossip. Things are pretty busy around here. If you need anything, let me know.”

The burr of power went dead. Hartigan cursed with monotony, and got up.

Clow Hartigan was a big young man with sand-red hair and slightly bitter blue eyes. He was representative of the type Spaceways sent to such isolated emergency landing stations as the Moon.

There were half a dozen such emergency landing domes, visited only by supply ships, exporting nothing, but ready in case some passenger liner was crippled by a meteor or by mechanical trouble. The two worst on the Spaceways list were the insulated hell on Mercury, and this great lonely hangar on the Moon. To them Spaceways sent the pick of their probation executives. Big men. Powerful men. Young men. (Also men who were unlucky enough not to have an old family friend or an uncle on the board of directors who could swing a soft berth for them.) Spaceways did not keep them there long. Men killed themselves, or went mad and began inconsiderately smashing expensive equipment, after too long a dose of such loneliness as that of the Moon.

Hartigan went back to the porthole beside the small airlock. As he went, he talked to himself, as men do when they have been too long away from their own kind.

“I wish I’d brought a dog up here, or a cat. I wish there’s be an attempted raid. Anything at all. If only something would happen.”

Resentfully he stared out at the photographic, black-and-white lunar landscape, lighted coldly by the full Earth. From that his eye went to the deep black of the heavens. Then his heart gave a jump. There was a faint light up there where no light was supposed to be.

He hurried to the telescope and studied it. A space liner, and a big one! Out of its course, no matter where it was bound, or it couldn’t have been seen from the Moon with the naked eye. Was it limping in here to the emergency landing for repairs?

“I don’t wish them any bad luck,” muttered Hartigan, “but I hope they’ve burned out a rocket tube.”

Soon his heart sank, however. The liner soared over the landing dome a hundred miles up, and went serenely on its way. In a short time its light faded in distance. Probably it was one of the luxurious around-the-solar-system ships, passing close to the Moon to give the sightseers an intimate glimpse of it, but not stopping because there was absolutely nothing of interest there.

“Nothing ever happens in this Godforsaken hole,” Hartigan gritted.

Impatiently he took his space suit down from the rack. Impatiently he stepped into the bulky, flexible metal thing and clamped down the headpiece. Nothing else to do. He’d take a walk. The red beam of the radio control board would summon him back to the hangar if for any reason anyone tried to raise RC3.

He let himself out through the double wall of the small airlock and set out with easy, fifteen-foot strides toward a nearby cliff on the brink of which it was sometimes his habit to sit and think nasty thoughts of the men who ran Spaceways and maintained places like RC3.

Between the hangar and the cliff was a wide expanse of gray lava ash, a sort of small lake of the stuff, feathery fine. Hartigan did not know how deep it might be. He did know that a man could probably sink down in it so far that he would never be able to burrow out again.

He turned to skirt the lava ash, but paused a moment before proceeding.

Behind him loomed the enormous half-globe of the hangar, like a phosphorescent mushroom in the blackness. One section of the halfglobe was flattened; and here were the gigantic inner and outer portals where a liner’s rocket-propelled life shells could enter the dome. The great doors of this, the main airlock, reared halfway to the top of the hangar, and weighed several hundred tons apiece.

Before him was the face of the Moon: sharp angles of rock; jagged, tremendous mountains; sheer, deep craters; all picked out in black and white from the reflected light of Earth.

A desolate prospect. . . . Hartigan started on.

The ash beside him suddenly seemed to explode, soundlessly but with great violence. It spouted up like a geyser to a distance of a hundred feet, hung for an instant over him in a spreading cloud, then quickly began to settle.

A meteor! Must have been a fair-sized one to have made such a splash in the volcanic dust.

“Close call,” muttered Hartigan, voice sepulchral in his helmet. “A little nearer and they’d be sending a new man to the lunar emergency dome.”

But he only grimaced and went on. Meteors were like the lightning back on Earth. Either they hit you or they missed. There was no warning till after they struck; then it was too late to do anything about it.

Hartigan stumbled over something in the cloud of ash that was sifting down around him. Looking down, he saw a smooth, round object, black-hot, about as big as his head.

“The meteor,” he observed. “Must have hit a slanting surface at the bottom of the ash heap and ricocheted up and out here. I wonder—”

He stooped clumsily toward it. His right “hand,” which was a heavy pincer arrangement terminating the right sleeve of his suit, went out, then his left, and with some difficulty he picked the thing up. Now and then a meteor held splashes of previous metals. Sometimes one was picked up that yielded several hundred dollars’ worth of platinum or iridium. A little occasional gravy with which the emergency-landing exiles could buy amusement when they got back home.

Through the annoying shower of ash he could see dimly the light of the hangar. He started back, to get out of his suit and analyze the meteor for possible value.

It was the oddest-looking thing he had ever seen come out of the heavens. In the first place, its shape was remarkable. It was perfectly round, instead of being irregular as were most meteors.

“Like an old-fashioned cannon ball,” Hartigan mused, bending over it on a workbench. “Or an egg—”

Eyebrows raised whimsically, he played with the idea.

“Jupiter! What an egg it would be! A hundred and twenty pounds if it’s an ounce and it smacked the Moon like a bullet without even cracking! I wouldn’t want it poached for breakfast.”

The next thing to catch his attention was the projectile’s odd color, or, rather, the odd way in which the color seemed to be changing. It had been dull, black-hot, when Hartigan brought it in. It was now a dark green, and was getting lighter swiftly as it cooled!

The big clock struck a mellow note. Tiime for the dome keeper to make his daily inspection of the main doors.

Reluctantly Hartigan left the odd meteor, which was now as green as grass and actually seemed to be growing transparent, and walked toward the big airlock.

He switched on the radio power unit. There was no power plant of any kind in the hangar; all power was broadcast by the Spaceways central station. He reached for the contact switch which poured the invisible Niagara of power into the motor that moved the ponderous doors.

Cr-r-rack!

Like a cannon shot the sound split the air in the huge metal dome, echoing from wall to wall, to die at last in a muffled rumbling.

White-faced, Hartigan was running long before the echoes died away. He ran toward the workbench he had recently quitted. The sound seemed to have come from near there. His thought was that the hangar had been crashed by a meteor larger than its cunningly braced beams, tough metal sheath, and artful angles of deflection would stand.

That would mean death, for the air supply in the dome would race out through a fissure almost before he could don his space suit.

However, his anxious eyes, scanning the vaulting roof, could find no crumpled bracing or ominous download bulges. And he could hear no thin whine of air surging in the hangar to the almost nonexistent pressure outside.

Then he glanced at the workbench and uttered an exclamation. The meteor he had left there was gone.

“It must have rolled off the bench,” he told himself. “But if it’s on the floor, why can’t I see it?”

He froze into movelessness. Had that been a sound behind him? A sound here, where no sound could possibly be made save by himself?

He whirled—and saw nothing. Nothing whatever, save the familiar expanse of smooth rock floor lighted with the cold white illumination broadcast on the power band.

He turned back to the workbench where the meteor had been, and began feeling over it with his hands, disbelieving the evidence of his eyes.

Another exclamation burst from his lips as his fingers touched something hard and smooth and round. The meteor. Broken into two halves, but still here. Only, now it was invisible!

“This,” said Hartigan, beginning to sweat a little, “is the craziest thing I ever heard of!”

He picked up one of the two invisible halves and held it close before his eyes. He could not see it at all, though it was solid to the touch. Moreover, he seemed able to see through it, for nothing on the other side was blotted out.

Fear increased within him as his fingers told him that the two halves were empty, hollow. Heavy as the ball had been, it consisted of nothing but a shell about two inches thick. Unless—

“Unless something did crawl out of it when it split apart.”

But that, of course, was ridiculous.

“It’s just an ordinary metallic chunk,” he told himself, “that split open with a loud bang when it cooled, due to contraction. The only thing unusual about it is its invisibility. That is strange.”

He groped on the workbench for the other half of the thick round shell. With a half in each hand, he started toward the stock room, meaning to lock up this odd substance very carefully. He suspected he had something beyond price here. If he could go back to Earth with a substance that could produce invisibility, he could become one of the richest men in the universe.

He presented a curious picture as he walked over the brilliantly lighted floor. His shoulders sloped down with the weight of the two pieces of meteor. His bare arms rippled and knotted with muscular effort. Yet his hands seemed empty. So far as the eye could tell, he was carrying nothing whatever.

“What—”

He dropped the halves of the shell with a ringing clang, and began leaping toward the big doors. That time he knew he had heard a sound, a sound like scurrying steps! It had come from near the big doors.

When he got there, however, he could hear nothing. For a time the normal stillness, the ghastly phenomenal stillness, was preserved. Then from near the spot he had just vacated, he heard another noise. This time it was a gulping, voracious noise, accompanied by a sound that was like that of a rock crusher or a concrete mixer in action.

On the run, he returned, seeing nothing all this while, nothing, but smooth rock floor and plain, metal-ribbed walls, and occasional racks of instruments.

He got to the spot where he had dropped the parts of the meteor. The parts were no longer there. This time it was more than a question of invisibility. They had disappeared actually as well as visually.

To make sure, Hartigan got down on hands and knees and searched every inch of a large circle. There was no trace of the thick shell.

“Either something brand new to the known solar system is going on here,” Hartigan declared, “or I’m getting as crazy as they insisted poor Stuyvesant was.”

Increased perspiration glinted on his forehead. The fear of madness in the lonelier emergency fields was a very real fear. United Spaceways had been petitioned more than once to send two men instead of one to manage each outlying field; but Spaceways was an efficient corporation with no desire to pay two men where one could handle the job.

Again, Hartigan could hear nothing at all. And in swift though unadmitted fear that perhaps the whole business had transpired only in his own brain, he sought refuge in routine. He returned to his task of testing the big doors, which was important even though dreary in its daily repetition.

The radio power unit was on, as he had left it. He closed the circuit.

Smoothly the enormous inner doors swung open on their broad tracks to reveal the equally enormous outer portals. Hartigan stepped into the big airlock and closed the inner doors. He shivered a little. It was near freezing out here in spite of the heating units.

There was a small control room in the lock, to save an operator the trouble of always getting into a space suit when the doors were opened. Hartigan entered this and pushed home the switch that moved the outer portals.

Smoothly, perfectly, their tremendous bulk opened outward. They always worked smoothly, perfectly. No doubt they always would. Nevertheless, rules said test them regularly. And it was best to live up to the rules. With characteristic trustfulness, Spaceways had recording dials in the home station that showed by power marking whether or not their planetary employees were doing what they were supposed to do.

Hartigan reversed the switch. The doors began to close. They got to the halfway mark; to the three-quarters—

Hartigan felt rather than heard the sharp, grinding jar. He felt rather than heard the high, shrill scream, a rasping shriek, almost above the limit of audibility, that was something to make a man’s blood run cold.

Still, without faltering, the doors moved inward and their serrated edges met. Whatever one of them had ground across had not been large enough to shake it.

“Jupiter!” Hartigan breathed, once more inside the huge dome with both doors closed.

He sat down to try to think the thing out.

“A smooth, round meteor falls. It looks like an egg, though it seems to be of metallic rock. As it cools, it gets lighter in color, till finally it disappears. With a loud bang, it bursts apart, and afterward I hear a sound like scurrying feet. I drop the pieces of the shell to go toward the sound, and then I hear another sound, as if something were macerating and gulping down the pieces of shell, eating them. I come back and can’t find the pieces. I go on with my test of opening and closing the main doors. As the outer door closes, I hear a crunching noise as if a rock were being pulverized, and a high scream like that of an animal in pain. All this would indicate that the meteor was a shell, and that some living thing did come out of it.

“But that is impossible.

“No form of life could live throuh the crash with which that thing struck the Moon, even though the lava ash did cushion the fall to some extent. No form of life could stand the heat of the meteor’s fall and impact. No form of life could eat the rocky, metallic shell. It’s utterly impossible!

“Or—is it impossible?”

He gnawed at his knuckles and thought of Stuyvesant.

Stuyvesant had been assigned to the emergency dome on Mercury. There was a place for you! An inferno! By miracles of insulation and supercooling systems the hangar there had been made livable. But the finest of space suits could not keep a man from frying to death outside. Nothing to do except stay cooped up inside the hangar, and pray for the six-month relief to come.

Stuyvesant had done that. And from Stuyvesant had begun to come queer reports. He thought he had seen something moving on Mercury near his landing field. Something like a rock!

Moving rocks! With the third report of that kind, the corporation had brought him home and turned him over to the board of science for examination. Poor Stuyvesant had barely escaped the lunatic asylum. He had been let out of Spaceways, of course. The corporation scrapped men suspected of being defective as quickly as they scrapped suspect material.

“When a man begins to see rocks moving, it’s time to fire him,” was the unofficial verdict.

The board of science had coldly said the same thing, though in more dignified language.

“No form of life as we know it could possibly exist in the high temperature and desert condition of Mercury. Therefore, in our judgment, Benjamin Stuyvesant suffered from hallucination when he reported some rocklike entity moving near Emergency Hangar RC10.”

Hartigan glanced uneasily toward the workbench on which the odd meteor had rested.

“No form of life as we know it.”

There was the catch. After all, this interplanetary travel was less than seventy years old. Might there not be many things still unknown to Earth wisdom?

“Not to hear the board of science tell it,” muttered Hartigan, thinking of Stuyvesant’s blasted career.

He thought of the Forbidden Asteroids. There were over two dozen on the chart on which, even in direst emergency, no ship was supposed to land. That was because ships had landed there, and had vanished without trace. Again and again. With no man able to dream of their fate. Till they simply marked the little globes “Forbidden,” and henceforth ignored them.

“No form of life as we know it!”

Suppose something savage, huge, invisible, lived on those grim asteroids? Something that developed from egg form? Something that spread its young through the universe by propelling eggs from one celestial body to another? Something that started growth by devouring its own metallic shell, and continued it on a mineral instead of vegetable diet? Something that could live in any atmosphere or temperature?

“I am going crazy,” Hartigan breathed.

In something like panic he tried to forget the affair in a great stack of books and magazines brought by the last supply ship.

The slow hours of another month ticked by. The full Earth waned, died, grew again. Drearily Hartigan went through the monotony of his routine. Day after day, the term “day” being a strictly figurative one on this drear lunar lump.

He rose at six, New York time, and sponged off carefully in a bit of precious water. He ate breakfast. He read. He stretched his muscles in a stroll. He read. He inspected his equipment. He read. He exercised on a set of homemade flying rings. He read.

“No human being should be called on to live like this,” he said once, voice too loud and brittle.

But human beings did have to live like this, if they aspired to one of the big posts on a main planet.

He had almost forgotten the strange meteor that had fallen into lava ash at his feet a month ago. It was to be recalled with terrible abruptness.

He went for a walk in a direction he did not usually take, and came upon a shallow pit half a mile from the dome.

Pits, of course, are myriad on the Moon. The whole surface is made up of craters within craters. But this pit was not typical in conformation. Most are smooth-walled and flat-bottomed. This pit was ragged, as if it had been dug out. Besides, Hartigan had thought he knew every hole for a mile around, and he did not remember ever seeing this one.

He stood on its edge looking down. There was loose rock in its uncraterlike bottom, and the loose rock had the appearance of being freshly dislodged. Even this was not unusual in a place where the vibration of a footstep could sometimes cause tons to crack and fall.

Nevertheless, Hartigan could feel the hair rise a bit on the back of his neck as some deep, instinctive fear crawled within him at sight of the small, shallow pit. And then he caught his lips between his teeth and stared with wide, unbelieving eyes.

On the bottom of the pit a rock was moving. It was moving, not as if it had volition of its own, but as if it were being handled by some unseen thing.

A fragment about as big as his body, it rolled over twice, then slid along in impatient jerks as though a big head or hoof nudged at it. finally, it raised up from the ground and hung poised about seven feet in the air!

Restlessly, Hartigan watched, while all his former, almost superstitious fear flooded through him.

The rock fragment moved up and down in mid-space.

“Jupiter!” Clow Hartigan breathed hoarsely.

A large part of one end suddenly disappeared. A pointed projection from the main mass of rock, it broke off and vanished from sight.

Another large chunk followed, breaking off and disappearing as though by magic.

“Jupiter!”

There was no longer doubt in Hartigan’s mind. A live thing had emerged from the egglike meteor twenty-seven days ago. A live thing that now roamed loose over the face of the Moon.

But that section of rock, which was apparently being devoured, was held seven feet off the ground. What manner of creature could come from an egg no larger than his head and grow in one short month into a thing over seven feet tall? He thought of the Forbidden Asteroids, where no ships landed, though no man knew precisely what threat lurked there.

“It must be as big as a mastodon,” Hartigan whispered. “What in the universe—”

The rock fragment was suddenly dropped, as if whatever invisible thing had held it had suddenly seen Hartigan at the rim of the pit. Then the rock was dashed to one side as if by a charging body. The next instant loose fragments of shale scattered right and left up one side of the pit as though a big body were climbing up and out.

The commotion in the shale was on the side of the pit nearest Hartigan. With a cry he ran toward the hangar.

With fantastic speed, sixty and seventy feet to a jump, he covered the ragged surface. But fast as he moved, he felt that the thing behind him moved faster. And that there was something behnd him he did not doubt for an instant, though he could neither see nor hear it.

It was weird, this pygmy human form in its bulky space suit flying soundlessly over the lunar surface under the glowing ball of Earth, racing like mad for apparently no reason at all, running insanely when so far as the eye could tell, nothing pursued.

But abysmal instinct told Hartigan that he was pursued, all right. And instinct told him that he could never reach the hangar in the lead. With desperate calmness he searched the ground still lying between him and the hangar.

A little ahead was a crack about a hundred feet wide and, as far as he knew, bottomless. With his oversized Earth muscles he could clear that in a gigantic leap. Could the ponderous, invisible thing behind him leap that far?

He was in mid-flight long enough to turn his head and look back, as he hurtled the chasm in a prodigious jump. He saw a flurry among the rocks at the edge he had just left as something jumped after him. Then he came down on the far side, lighting in full stride like a hurdler.

He risked slowing his speed by looking back again. A second time he saw a flurry of loose rock, this time on the near side of the deep crack. The thing had not quite cleared the edge, it seemed.

He raced on and came to the small air-lock door. He flung himself inside. He had hardly got the fastener in its groove when something banged against the outside of the door.

The thing pursuing him had hung on the chasm’s edge long enough to let him reach safety, but had not fallen into the black depths as he had hoped it might.

“But that’s all right,” he said, drawing a great sigh of relief as he entered the hangar through the inner door. “I don’t care what it does, now that I’m inside and it’s out.”

He got out of the space suit, planning as he moved.

The thing outside was over seven feet tall and made of some unfleshlike substance that must be practically indestructible. At its present rate of growth it would be as big as a small space liner in six months, if it weren’t destroyed. But it would have to be destroyed. Either that, or Emergency Station RC3 would have to be abandoned, and his job with it, which concerned him more than the station.

“I’ll call Stacey to send a destroyer,” he said crisply.

He moved toward the Bliss transmitter, eyes glinting. Things were happening on the Moon, now, all right! And the thing that was happening was going to prove Stuyvesant as sane as any man, much saner than the gray-bearded goats on the board of science.

He would be confined to the hangar till Stacey could send a destroyer. No more strolls. He shuddered a little as he thought of how many times he must have missed death by an inch in his walks during the past month.

Hartigan got halfway to the Bliss transmitter, skirting along the wall near the small airlock.

A dull, hollow, booming sound filled the great hangar, ascending to the vaulted roof and seeming to shower down again like black water.

Hartigan stopped and stared at the wall beside him. It was bulging inward a little. Startled out of all movement, he stared at the ominous, slight bulge. And as he stared, the booming noise was repeated, and the bulge grew a bit larger.

“In the name of Heaven!”

The thing outside had managed to track him along the wall from the airlock, perhaps guided by the slight vibration of his steps. Now it was bindly charging the huge bulk of the hangar like a living, ferocious ram.

A third time the dull, terrible booming sound reverberated in the lofty hangar. The bulge in the tough metal wall spread again; and the two nearest supporting beams gave ever so little at the points of strain.

Hartigan moved back toward the airlock. While he moved, there was silence. The moment he stopped, there was another dull, booming crash and a second bulge appeared in the wall. The thing had followed him precisely, and was trying to get at him. The color drained from Hartigan’s face. This changed the entire scheme of things.

It was useless to radio for help now. Long before a destroyer could get here, the savage, insensate monster outside would have opened a rent in the wall. That would mean Hartigan’s death from escaping air in the hangar.

Crash!

Who would have dreamed that there lived anywhere in the universe, on no matter how far or wild a globe, a creature actually able to damage the massive walls of a Spaceways hangar? He could see himself trying to tell about this.

“An animal big enough to crack a hangar wall? And invisible? Well!”

Crash!

The very light globes, so far overhead, seemed to quiver a bit with the impact of this thing of unguessable nature against the vast semisphere of the hangar. The second bulge was deep enough so that the white enamel which coated it began chipping off in little flakes at the bulge’s apex.

“What the devil am I going to do?”

The only thing he could think of for the moment was to move along the wall. That unleashed giant outside must not concentrate too long on any one spot.

He walked a dozen steps. As before, the ramming stopped while he was in motion, to start again as he halted. As before, it started at the point nearest to him.

Once more a bulge appeared in the wall, this time bigger than either of the first two. The metal sheets sheathing the hangar varied a little in strength. The invisible terror outside had struck a soft spot.

Hartigan moved hastily to another place.

“The whole base of the hangar will be scalloped like a pie crust at this rate,” he gritted. “What can I—”

Crash!

He had inadvertently stopped near a rack filled with spare power bulbs. With its ensuing attack the blind fury had knocked the rack down onto the floor.

Hartigan’s jaw set hard. Whatever he did must be done quickly. And it must be done by himself alone. He could not stay at the Bliss transmitter long enough to get New York and tell what was wrong, without giving the gigantic thing outside a fatal number of minutes in which to concentrate on one section of wall.

He moved slowly around the hangar, striving to keep the invisible fury too occupied in following him to get in more than an occasional charge. As he walked, his eyes went from one heap of supplies to another in search of a possible means of defense.

There were ordinary weapons in plenty, in racks along the wall. But none of these, he knew, could do material harm to the attacking fury.

He got to the great inner doors of the main airlock in his slow march around the hangar. And here he stopped, eyes glowing thoughtfully.

The huge doors had threatened in the early days to be the weak points in the Spaceways hangars. So the designers, like good engineers, had made the doors so massive that in the end they were stronger than the walls around them.

Bang!

A bulge near the massive hinges told Hartigan that the thing outside was as relentless as ever in its efforts to break through the wall and get at him. But he paid no attention to the new bulge. He was occupied with the doors.

If the invisible giant could be trapped in the main airlock between the outer and inner portals—

“Then what?” Hartigan wondered.

He could not answer his own question. But, anyway, it seemed like a step in the right direction to have the attacking fury penned between the doors rather than to have it loose and able to charge the more vulnerable walls.

“If I can coop it in the airlock, I might be able to think of some way to attack it,” he went on.

He pushed home the control switch which set the broadcast power to opening the outer doors. And that gave him an idea that sent a wild thrill surging through him.

A heavy rumble told him that the motors were swinging open the outer doors.

“Will the thing come in?” he asked himself tensely. “Or has it sense enough to scent a trap?”

Bang!

The inner doors trembled a little on their broad tracks. The invisible monster had entered the trap.

“Trap?” Hartigan smiled mirthlessly. “Not much of a trap! Left to itself, it could probably break out in half an hour. But it won’t be left to itself.”

He reversed the switch to close the outer portals. Then, with the doors closed and the monster penned between, he got to work on the idea that had been born when he pushed the control switch.

Power, oceans of it, flooded from the power unit at the touch of a finger. A docile servant when properly channeled, it could be the deadliest thing on the Moon.

He ran back down the hangar to the stock room, and got out a drum of spare power cable. As quickly as was humanly possible, he rolled the drum back to the doors, unwinding the cable as he went.

It was with grim solemnity that he made his next move. He had to open the inner doors a few inches to go on with his frail plan of defense. And he had to complete that plan before the thing in the airlock could claw them open still more and charge through. For all their weight the doors rolled in perfect balance, and if the unseen terror could make dents in the solid wall, it certainly was strong enough to move the partly opened doors.

Speed! That was the thing that would make or break him. Speed, and hope that the power unit could stand a terrific overload without blowing a tube.

With a hand that inclined to tremble a bit, Hartigan moved the control switch operating the inner doors, and instantly cut the circuit again.

The big doors opened six inches or so, and stopped.

Hartigan cut off the power unit entirely, and dragged the end of the spare power cable to it. With flying fingers he disconnected the cable leading from the control switch to the motors that moved the portals, and connected the spare cable in its space.

He glanced anxiously at the doors, and saw the opening between them had widened to more than a foot. The left door moved a little even as he watched.

“I’ll never make it.”

But he went ahead.

Grabbing up the loose end of the cable, he threw it in a tangled coil as far as he could through the opening and into the airlock. Then he leaped for the power unit—and watched.

The cable lay unmoving on the airlock floor. But the left door moved! It jerked, and rolled open another six inches.

Hartigan clenched his hands as he stared at the inert cable. He had counted on the blind ferocity of the invisible terror, had counted on its attacking, or at least touching, the cable immediately. Had it enough intelligence to realize dimly that it would be best to avoid the cable? Was it going to keep working at those doors till—

The power cable straightened with a jerk. Straightened, and hung still, with the loose end suspended in midair about six feet off the airlock floor.

Hartigan’s hand slammed down. The broadcast power was turned on to the last notch.

With his heart hammering in his throat, Hartigan gazed through the two-foot opening between the doors. Gazed at the cable through which was coursing oceans, Niagaras of power. And out there in the air-lock a thing began to build up from think air into a spectacle that made him cry out in wild horror.

He got a glimpse of a massive block of a head, eyeless and featureless, that joined with no neck whatever to a barrel of a body. He got a glimpse of five legs, like stone pillars, and of a sixth that was only a stump. (“That’s what got caught in the doors a month ago—its leg,” he heard himself babbling with insane calmness.) Over ten feet high and twenty feet long, the thing was a living battering ram, painted in the air in sputtering, shimmering blue sparks that streamed from its massive bulk in all directions.

Just a glimpse, he got, and then the monster began to scream as it had that first day when the door maimed it. Only now it was with a volume that tore at Hartigan’s eardrums till he scremed himself in agony.

As he watched, he saw the huge carcass melt a little, like wax in flame, with the power cable also melting slowly and fusing into the cavernous, rocky jaws that had seized it. Then with a rush the whole bulk disintegrated into a heap of loose mineral matter.

Hartigan turned off the power unit and collapsed, with his face in his hands.

The shining ball of the full Earth floated like a smooth diamond between two vast, angular mountains. The full Earth.

Hartigan turned from the porthole beside the small airlock and strode to the Bliss radio transmitter.

“RC3, RC3, RC3,” he droned out.

There was no answer. As usual, Stacey was taking his time about ansering the Moon’s signal.

“RC3, RC3—”

There he was.

“Hartigan talking. Monthly report.”

“All right, Hartigan.”

A hurried fretful voice. Come on, Moon; report that, as always, nothing has happened.

“Lunar conditions the same,” said Hartigan. “No ships have put in, or have reported themselves as being in distress. The hangar is in good shape, with no leaks.”

“Right,” said Stacey, in the voice of a busy man. “Supplies?”

“You might send up a blonde.”

“Be serious, please. Supplies?”

“I need some new power bulbs.”

“I’ll send them on the next ship. Nothing irregular to report?”

Hartigan hesitated.

On the floor of the main airlock was a mound of burned, bluish mineral substance giving no indication whatever that it had once possessed outlandish, incredible life. In the walls of the hangar, at the base were half a dozen new dents, but ricocheting meteors might have made those. The meteoric shell from which this bizarre animal had come had been devoured, so even that was not left for investigation.

He remembered the report of the board of science on Stuyvesant.

“Therefore, in our judgment, Benjamin Stuyvesant suffered from hallucination—”

He would have liked to help Stuyvesant. But on the other hand Stuyvesant had a job with a second-hand space-suit store now, and was getting along pretty well in spite of Spaceways’ dismissal.

“Nothing irregular to report?” repeated Stacey.

Hartigan stared, with one eyebrow sardonically raised, at the plump brunette on the pin Radio Gazette cover pasted to the wall. She stared coyly back over a bare shoulder.

“Nothing irregular to report,” Hartigan said steadily.