Moonbane

“I owe her more than that. And I’ll never stop going,” he said. “I just don’t know if we’ll be able to squeeze out of this as a race.”

“I’m still counting on signing that copy of my book for you,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, a little of his frustration and anger subsiding. “No maybes on that.”

We reached the garage. My own despair surfaced at what we found. The door had been bashed in. But once again luck had been on our side; when we cleared the debris and camouflage away we found the van undamaged.

I helped him clear the van and empty our spare gas cans into the tank. This time I checked the back before getting in. Pettis backed it out and brought it around to the front of the observatory.

The others were waiting, Wyatt clutching his charts, Doc his canister of Earl Grey. Pettis rummaged around in the bags we had loaded in Hopkinsville the day before, coming up with the packets of seeds. He pressed them into Amy’s hand. “When we get out of this,” he told her, “I’ll help you grow a garden just like your mother’s. We’ll remember her by it.”

She held him, tearfully. This time it was Amy who broke the embrace.

“Let’s get out of here, Dad.”

He let her go, and we loaded into the van.

“Going to be warm today,” Wyatt remarked, studying the sky as Pettis backed the vehicle out of the garage and pulled it slowly down the mountain.

Pettis nodded, switching on the air-conditioning. “We’ll reach Kramer Air Force Base in a couple of hours.”

Doc echoed quietly, “A couple of hours.”

There was silence. Doc didn’t have to elaborate. In a couple of hours we’d know whether or not the human race stood a chance to continue.

CHAPTER 20

The Harsh Country

Southwest desert is lonely. We saw little but macadam before and behind us; to either side, gray-brown sand spotted with low cactus, an occasional stunted Cottonwood and other trees, and brush barely hanging on. I thought of the cities, the wide suburban streets now empty of people, the remnants of humanity hiding like rats in the four corners of the world. The desert seemed an infinitely better place to be than those lonely places. The desert had retained its nature, had not been transformed into something desolate, had preserved its austere beauty—the occasional flash of blue creek water, the surprising tiny bloom of a bright red desert flower. All of this now was more precious in comparison with what the rest of the Earth must look like. I thought of a haiku I had written:

Water bead on leaf

Drifting green on crystal pool

Bursts white in sunbeam.

When I had written that, years before in the East, I would not have found much beauty in a desert landscape. My heart was in the streams and pond pools of Connecticut, the deep green springs, the cool crisp Halloween autumns, ice-white winters. That was where my blood belonged.

But now, gazing at this new beauty, I felt some of it run into my blood and realized that I had found a new home, finally.

And I realized, suddenly, and with startling clarity, that I did want to work again, that, despite everything, I wanted not only to live, but to continue to experience life.

The landscape hypnotized me; I began to form images in my mind, mesmerized by the desert flower—something that, in effect, the human race had become:

~ * ~

Death owns not even sand,

Life bursts and cries between the rocks…

~ * ~

I was so absorbed that I was barely aware of the discussion going on around me. But, eventually, the conversation grew so interesting, and loud, that it intruded into my thoughts, pushing all hope of poetry aside. I turned from the window to find Wyatt smiling broadly at me.

“We were beginning to wonder if you were still with us, the way you were staring into space,” he drawled.

“Did I hear something about werewolves actually living on the Moon?” I asked innocently.

Doc and Wyatt exchanged glances. “That was about forty minutes ago,” Wyatt laughed. “Doc here thinks there may have been an atmosphere on the Moon at one time.”

“A very tenuous one,” Doc said. “We have to account for the wolves’ presence on the Moon in one way or another. The most logical conclusion is that they evolved there. It’s obvious we’ve been very wrong in our assumptions about the Moon. It must have had a much more active volcanic life than we supposed. And, somewhere in the deep past, the degassing from all of this volcanic activity formed an atmosphere. We can theorize that much the same thing happened on the Moon as happened on Earth, that primitive plant life turned, through photosynthesis, a basically poisonous environment suffused with carbon dioxide into one friendly toward animal life. Eventually, the wolves evolved. It may seem fantastic, but at one time the Moon must have been covered with shallow seas and sparse forests. This was the world the wolves knew. But there was a problem. Due to low gravity, the escape velocity is much lower on the Moon than on Earth, and the atmosphere began to leak away into space. Perhaps the wolves’ civilization lasted thousands, perhaps millions, of years, but, eventually, they saw their doom. Perhaps they even thought of the regal blue Earth, which dominated their night sky, as stealing their life-giving oxygen away.

“What they must have done is gone into a kind of hibernation stage. What then happened is that volcanic activity greatly increased. The atmosphere was gone, and now a new Moon emerged, burying the old. The real seas were filled with lava, the highlands scorched by heat and pocked with meteor impacts. You must remember that all of this happened eons ago, giving us the dead lunar world we know today, and that the deepest any of the Apollo missions probed in the 1970s was four feet. I think the wolves were buried much deeper than that. Their bodily functions were effectively frozen, keeping them perfectly preserved.”

Doc’s face glowed with enthusiasm for his topic. “Now this is where things get interesting. You know we’ve had stories of so-called werewolves throughout history. Some are not very easy to dismiss, and there are very well-documented cases as far back as the 1300s.”

He held one hand away from his body, as if it were cradling his theory. “Here is one mystery, the appearance of werewolves on Earth.” He held his other hand away from his body. “Now we have another mystery. There is a class of non-Earth geologies called tektites that have stumped scientists for two centuries. They’re fused glass, of different colors; they’re found in only a few places on Earth, such as Southeast Asia and the state of Georgia in the United States. It’s been determined that they’ve definitely made a trip through the Earth’s atmosphere. At one time it was a very popular theory that they were volcanic material from the Moon, ejected during meteoric impacts or volcanic eruptions and making their way to Earth. The fact that they were scattered in patches in specific areas tended to support their extraterrestrial origin. But this theory lost its popularity after the Apollo missions, which found no such rocks on the Moon.”

He held his new theory carefully in his open hand. “Now, again, we have to recall that the Apollo missions covered, in total, one one-millionth of the Moon’s surface, down to a depth of forty-eight inches. But if these tektites were formed at the time of the loss of the Moon’s atmosphere and destruction of the wolves’ civilization, and were therefore buried with and around the wolves, well…”

He brought his two hands together with a loud clap and looked at me expectantly.

“Then werewolves came from the Moon.”

“Exactly. There are well-documented lunar events throughout history called TLP—transient lunar phenomena—in which periodic activity, including lights caused by possible volcanic degassing, have been seen in various areas of the Moon.” He stared at me steadily. “The most numerous TLP occurred in the area of the crater Aristarchus.”

“Christ.”

“If we allow that transient lunar phenomena were the result of occasional volcanic activity, then some of these buried tektites, containing wolf spores, have been, throughout history, fired from the Moon to Earth. A wolf spore, or egg, surviving the trip, and finding itself in what, to it, is a superoxygenated atmosphere, would revive and develop into a creature literally mad-drunk with oxygen. This theory would account for the mythical werewolf’s strength and apparent mindlessness. It would also account for its surpassing interest in the Moon. The power they gain from the sight of their home planet may be nothing more than a home-sickness and rage that grows with the apparent growth of the Moon in the Earth’s sky.” Doc rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Perhaps our own Earth wolf was the result of some long ago crossbreeding of Moon wolf and dog—”

The van lurched, went on, then hesitated again. A series of hesitations ended with the van rolling to a stop.

“Shit,” Pettis said.

We had stopped in an area flanked by gently sloping hills covered with files of the kind of tall cactus you see in western movies. Nature had acted like Johnny Appleseed, spacing each plant a couple of yards from its neighbor to share meager water resources. These natural rows of cactus were pleasing to look at. They also provided plenty of hiding places for wolves.

“I’ll cover you, Cowboy,” I said.

We got out. It didn’t take Pettis long to find the trouble. He didn’t even have to open the hood. A wet line of gasoline trailed behind us, turning to a drying trickle under the van about halfway down the body.

“Bastards cut the fuel line,” Cowboy said, yanking the thin, neatly sliced hose from the underside for my inspection. He slammed the side of the van with his palm. “I thought the gas gauge was just stuck on empty,” he said.

“Well?” Doc asked, putting his head out of the rolled-down window and wincing at the heat.

“We walk,” Pettis said. Immediately, he went to the back of the van, opened the doors, and began to unload equipment.

In five minutes we had left the van behind a sloping rise, and the heat had stolen the memory of air-conditioning.

“I estimate eighty degrees. Pretty hot for December, but the humidity’s not too bad,” Wyatt said dryly. “Your turn to estimate, Cowboy. How far to the base?”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask,” Pettis replied. He hefted the pack filled with our food up higher on his back. “We’ve got about thirty miles.” He looked like he wanted to hit something. “Another of my screw-ups. I didn’t check the odometer before we left.”

“When we drove away from the observatory it read twenty-nine thousand, thirty-four,” Doc piped in. “When we left the van just now, twenty-nine thousand, one hundred forty-two.”

Cowboy turned with a big smile. “Thanks, Doc. We’ve got a little more than twenty miles to go.” He looked at his watch. “It’s eleven-fifteen; if we haul our butts we can make it easily by nightfall.”

“What if we don’t haul our butts?” Wyatt grinned.

Cowboy didn’t return the smile. “We die.”

CHAPTER 21

The Apparition

We hauled our butts. It was hot, but the air was so dry that walking wasn’t all that debilitating. We had plenty of water, and stopped every half hour to take one swallow apiece.

By one o’clock, the low hills had thickened and risen. “The Palmera Mountains,” Pettis announced. “It’s a thin ridge, with nothing but flat desert beyond. There could be wolves in there, and I don’t want to stop if we can help it. If we slog through another hour and a half we’ll be back to flat land and can stop to eat.”

Doc was breathing rapidly, wiping his brow with his handkerchief. “I don’t know about another hour and a half, Cowboy.”

“Come on, Doc,” Cowboy gently ribbed. “I’ll even make you some tea for lunch.”

Doc tamped his handkerchief into his pocket. “All right, Cowboy. I’ll try.”

We marched, and the mountains drew together before us. In front, Pettis kept glancing up at a particular ridge. I began to watch it also. I thought I detected movement once or twice, the rise and fall of a head. But I couldn’t be sure.

“You see something up there, Cowboy?” I asked.

He grunted. “Nothing I could pin a medal on.” But he kept looking that way.

An hour into our trek, as the mountains began to thin out and lower to hills, Doc came gasping to a halt.

“Got…to…rest,” he wheezed.

Grudgingly, Pettis agreed. “Will a few minutes do it, Doc?”

Doc shook his head. “Sorry, Cowboy. That won’t…do it.”

“I’m pretty hungry myself,” Wyatt remarked, and Amy nodded in agreement.

Cowboy looked for my vote. I said, “I notice you’ve still got your eye on that ridge up to the right.”

He nodded, scratching his chin. “Still can’t be sure…” He looked at Doc, who hadn’t improved, and added, “All right, we’ll eat now.

We camped near a weak stand of cottonwoods close to the highway. Cowboy opened a can of peach halves for himself, then moved away from us into a clearing. I waited until the can opener came around to me, then joined him.

“What are you so worried about?” I asked, spooning fruit cocktail.

“We’re moving too slow. The first hour we covered pretty good ground, but we’ve been slowing down steadily since. Not only that, but I’m pretty damn sure we’re being followed.”

“Why haven’t we been attacked?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many of them are there?”

“I’m not sure. But however many there are, they’ve been drawing closer.” He finished the last of his peaches and tossed the can away. “I don’t like it.”

We rejoined the others. Doc eyed Cowboy expectantly, a thin smile on his face. He looked much recovered. “I can wait for that tea, Cowboy. Sorry about the delay.”

“I needed a rest myself, Doc. But we’re going to have to pick up the pace if we’re going to get to Kramer before dark.”

“I understand.”

“All right,” Pettis said, “let’s get moving.”

“Dad,” Amy said hesitantly, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“You don’t have to ask permission, Amy.”

“I…need a little privacy.”

“I don’t want you going away,” Cowboy said.

“There’s some brush over there,” she answered, pointing to a spot ten yards up the slope of the mountain.

Reluctantly, Pettis said, “Go on.”

She went. Like the fools all men are, we turned our backs to give her the privacy she wanted. Even her father glanced away for a moment, which was long enough. There was a blur of motion directly above the brush she was utilizing, followed by Amy’s scream.

“Damn,” Cowboy said, starting up the rise.

“That’s far enough.”

Pettis stopped as a human figure stepped away from the brush, holding Amy with a long knife to her throat.

“Let’s everybody stay where we are,” the man said. He was sun-baked, his eyes wildly alert, his voice hysterically loud.

Pettis raised his Uzi to eye level, sighting down the barrel.

“I don’t think you want to do that,” the man said. The blade of the knife was pressed firmly to Amy’s throat. “You shoot me, I’m likely to fall back and cut half this little girl’s head off before I hit the ground.”

“Then let her go,” Pettis stated calmly.

“Not likely, friend,” the man replied. He began to edge up the slope, taking Amy with him. “Truth is, I’m doing you all a favor. Saving my own skin in the bargain.”

“You living up here alone?” Cowboy asked, matter-of-factly. He lowered his gun slightly, at the same time motioning me to move up and around the other side of the man. Slowly, I began to walk.

The stranger eyed me nervously, brandishing the blade under Amy’s chin. “I told you to stay,” he said.

I stopped, but Pettis motioned me on. “You’re up here alone?” he repeated.

The man’s eyes darted back to him. “Sure I’m alone. And long as I give them what they want I’ll stay that way.”

“Who would that be?”

The stranger’s nervous glance went to me, back to Pettis. “Are you crazy, man? Haven’t you seen them?” He turned to me and shouted, “I said stay!”

I kept walking, and Pettis said, “Seen who?”

The stranger turned his attention on Pettis. “The gods, man! Didn’t you see them fall from the sky? Don’t you know they’re here to take what they want?”

“What is it they want?” Pettis continued, reasonably. The man’s attention was split between Pettis and me. I slowly widened my circle around him, prolonging his confusion.

“You people are crazy,” the man said. “I’m trying to do you a favor!”

“What would that be?” Pettis asked. He had raised his gun again.

“Save you, man! If I give them the girl, I can hide, and you can run!” His gaze swiveled wildly from Pettis to me, his hand with the hunting knife clenching and unclenching nervously.

“Where do you hide?” Pettis inquired.

“In the cave, man! I leave the bodies at the mouth, then run to the back and up into the crawl space.” He tittered. “I pull my feet up real tight, and they can’t get at me!” His voice rose to a shout. “And you can get away! You can run!”

“How many have you given them?” Pettis asked calmly.

The stranger concentrated. “There was a man the first day, and three girls the second, then an old man and his wife yesterday. I offered to save one of them, but had to kill them both—”

I raised my shotgun. The man darted a look at me, the knife jerking away from Amy’s throat. Pettis fired.

The stranger cried out and Amy threw herself away from him. Pettis kept firing, walking up the slope, the man’s body twitching in the sand and finally laying still.

Amy stood trembling.

Cowboy came and held her. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said. Suddenly she pushed away from him, pointing up above. “Oh, God.”

The ridge was filled with wolves.

“Back to the road!” Pettis commanded. Doc and Wyatt were already retreating, and we followed, Pettis letting off a burst of fire. A howl went up, followed by the now-familiar bestial feeding sounds.

We backed to the roadway, where Doc and Wyatt were positioned with rifles balanced on the rail guard.

We joined them as the wolves advanced. They were sluggish, but much more active than we had seen them in the daytime. Amy fired her handgun, wounding a closing wolf in the shoulder. It shrieked but continued toward us. Pettis stood and finished it off. As the beasts closest to it leaped upon the corpse, we retreated farther down the road.

“That full Moon last night must have really charged them up,” Pettis said.

Only three of the creatures followed. Pettis turned and fired a volley; two of them turned on the third as a bullet pierced its neck, spraying blood.

“Keep moving,” Pettis snapped. He eyed the hills in front of us, pointing to an outcropping of rocks halfway up a small rise to our right. It hid the area behind. Any wolf adventurous enough could jump us. “They’ll go for us there.”

“They’re going to kill us, and it’s my fault,” Amy wailed.

“Nobody’s going to kill us,” Wyatt drawled.

As we reached the outcropping, wolves seemed to rise out of the ground, surrounding us.

“Maybe I should take that back,” Wyatt amended.

At Pettis’s instruction, we formed a tight circle in the middle of the highway and began to fire. I dropped two wolves in quick succession; the first began to devour the second before a third dropped upon him. The others scored hits; Doc concentrated on picking them off when they leaped the outcropping as Cowboy had predicted.

“To your right, Jase! To your right!” Pettis shouted.

My shotgun was empty. I reached for two shells and discovered my pocket empty. I jammed my left hand into the other pocket and came up with a single shell, slapping it into the barrel as a wolf made his jump. Wyatt, next to me, dropped him with me. He, too, was now out of ammunition.

The smell of blood was thick as mist. There came a momentary halt in the wolves’ assault. But even as those around us contented themselves with picking clean the bones of their dead brethren, more wolves were making their way down the slopes toward us.

“Move!” Pettis ordered. We backed with him through a gap, stepping over partially devoured bodies. “Run, damn it!”

We broke into a trot. I looked at Doc and saw exertion playing across his face. The heat was brutal, drifting down at us from the sky, up at us in waves from the tarmac.

“Move, damn it, move!”

Doc stumbled, went down. Behind us the wolves busily fed on corpses, but one or two were stirring from their frenzy, throwing glances at us. One in particular, which held its arm in a strange position against its side, stared straight at me.

We opened a distance of fifty yards between us and the beasts, but they could close it very quickly.

Wyatt and I supported Doc; he was gasping, trying to speak.

“Don’t worry, Doc,” Wyatt said. “We’ll keep an eye on you.”

Ten yards ahead, Pettis waited impatiently.

“We’ve got to get moving or we’ll die right here.”

“I can…try,” Doc said.

Cowboy brought his face very close to Doc. His eyes turned hard. “You’re not going to try, Doc—you’re going to do it. Because a lot of people at Kramer Air Force Base are counting on you—and because if you don’t, these hairy sons of bitches are going to kill you.”

“I…” Doc nodded. “Yes. I can do it.”

We continued on. Wyatt and I paced Doc. Pettis and his daughter pulled ahead. Pettis fired random rounds into the hills around us. After we passed under a low outcropping of rocks I noted with relief that the hills widened out and began to flatten.

“A little more, Doc,” Wyatt said.

The sight of the flatlands invigorated us all. Soon Doc was walking on his own, mopping his brow with his handkerchief.

Four wolves made a tentative charge behind us. We knelt and fired. One of them went down. Two of the others immediately turned on the body, but the third, the one with the deformed arm I had noticed before, stood regarding us. Again I had the feeling it was singling me out—

Doc groaned, and I turned to help Wyatt support him. “We’re almost out of it,” Wyatt urged.

Doc smiled, weakly. “I’m going to make that fellow make me two cups of tea later.”

“I’ll drink one of them myself,” Wyatt laughed.

Ten minutes later, Cowboy called a halt. We had left the Palmera Mountains behind. Before us stretched a shimmering table of sand, low brush, and straight, heat-hazed highway.

“One swallow of water,” Pettis ordered. As we drank he continued, “We have to make a decision. Either we pick up the pace and make it to the base before nightfall, or we spend the night here.”

“Where?” Wyatt asked.

“That mountain man’s cave. First, we’d have to find it, then fortify it…and even then I don’t know how good we’d be fighting them off once the Moon rises.”

The thought of the grisly place, piles of human bones marking the stranger’s treachery, turned my stomach. The others must have felt the same. The vote was quick and unanimous.

“We have to continue,” Doc remarked. “Anything else would be madness.”

“You heard what I said about picking up the pace,” Pettis said sternly.

“I heard you.”

Pettis studied our faces. “All right. Doc, take another swallow of water. I’m going to set the pace, and we stick to it. Agreed?”

Everyone nodded.

Pettis turned and walked.

His pace was grueling. After five minutes, we were all gasping. But then, gradually, we settled into a rhythm and our breathing evened out. Wyatt, deviously, began to whistle the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai. When no one joined him, he quipped, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you folks. You’d think you’d just been through some sort of catastrophe.”

Doc smiled thinly; he had grown pale once more and was beginning to lag behind.

As I called out for Pettis’s attention, Doc fell and didn’t get up.

“Oh…Lord,” he gasped.

I knelt beside him. He had turned paste-white. I tried to open his collar but he pushed me away. “Look,” he said. He held out his right arm and turned it over, showing me a long, deep red scratch.

“Jesus, Doc,” I said.

“When did it happen?” Pettis said evenly, suddenly standing beside me.

Doc’s eyes were unfocused, but then cleared. “The first rush they made. I thought it…hadn’t broken the skin.” He groaned, indicating the pencil-point-thin line of blood along the length of the wound. “I suppose I was wrong.”

“We can carry him—” Wyatt began.

“You know damn well what’s going to happen to him,” Cowboy cut in. “All of us do.” He turned to Doc. “What do you want me to do?”

“I…don’t want to become one of them,” he rasped.

“Are you sure?”

“Do you think it might be…” He paused, groaning with pain before continuing. “Do you think it might be interesting to undergo the change? I’m doing it now, Cowboy, and it’s not pleasant.” He turned to Proctor. “It’s your show now, my friend. Make sure they do it right.”

“I’ll make sure,” Wyatt said.

“Please make it quick, Cowboy,” Doc groaned.

“The rest of you keep walking,” Cowboy commanded.

“Cowboy—” I said.

“Please go,” Doc said.

We had gone ten yards when I heard Doc say, almost cheerfully, “I wish you would have made me that cup of tea—” and there was a burst of gunfire and then silence.

A few moments later Cowboy had caught up with us. “Let’s go,” he said, walking past us, returning to the pace he had set.

His voice was hard, but he couldn’t hide from us the tears that had tracked his cheeks, like water in a dry desert.

CHAPTER 22

A Field of Light

Night was falling when we saw the lights.

For the last hour it had seemed that we must have gone in the wrong direction, or that our estimate of distance had been in error, or that the desert had swallowed everything including Kramer Air Force Base. We had walked forever. The desert had begun to cool down, but the waves of heat were merely replaced by waves of anxiety, an oppressive feeling that our ascension of the next rise must produce a view of Kramer or we would all go mad. Even Cowboy had begun to show doubt and fatigue. By my own estimate, he hadn’t slept more than a few hours since I had met him. His pace had slackened. When we topped a bluff and discovered that only scrub, rocks, and sand lay before us like the Devil’s table I feared he might collapse.

“Goddamn, it should be there by now.”

After a pause, Wyatt said, carefully, “Maybe it is.”

He pointed, and we all stared across the sandy tableland to the horizon. I saw nothing—and then, the desert darkened imperceptively, and the lights became visible, and Kramer Air Force Base suddenly spread itself across the valley floor below us in the distance like a wash of jewels.

“Jesus, there it is,” I said.

“They’ve got the generators working!” Cowboy said.

He was gazing like a child seeing his first Christmas tree.

“Goddamn, ole Jimmy really did it!” Wyatt shouted.

The three of us, hypnotized by hope, began to run toward the still-distant lights. But suddenly, Pettis came to his senses, calming us to a brisk walk.

“It’s going to get dark fast,” he said, “and we’ve still got another couple of miles to go. I suggest you keep your weapons ready.”

We were moving through a series of low hills, which eventually rolled down to the long flat plate of desert that held Kramer Air Force Base and the miles of shuttle runway backing it.

We walked, occasionally passing a pyramid of bones. It got dark. The stars popped into view overhead. You could feel that the night-Earth no longer belonged to man.

And as we topped the rise that would lead us down to the base, the night gave up the wolves to us.

The Moon began to rise.

They were just in front of us. When the Moon crested the horizon they let up a singular wail of love and blood lust that froze us in place, even as we could see an unattainable grail, our destination, below us.

At that frozen spot in time and space, three sights commingled: first, the magnetic, almost blinding spotlights inside the base, which bathed the most beautiful sight I had ever beheld—the shuttle Lexington, seemingly intact and pointing ruthlessly at the sky atop a monstrous booster. Second, my eye was drawn to the Lexington’s target—the Moon itself, its evil gray light now heartily breaking the horizon beyond the base. And third, a sight that momentarily stopped my heart—there, covering the last hills we had yet to pass like a massive growth on the land and mountains, were thousands of wolves, ranked along a thick line of attack, uncountable numbers of bone piles among them, their mad howling, like that of Zulu warriors, serenading their rising homeland and the enemies they sought to annihilate.

At their back, unnoticed, we stood transfixed, until Pettis finally woke us from our stupor.

“Get behind the rocks,” he whispered fiercely, pulling us off the road into hiding.

“What in hell are we going to do?” Wyatt said.

“We’ll have to circle wide of them, or find a hole in their line farther down, away from the road.”

“And then what?”

“Then we do what we have to.”

“Sounds good to me,” Wyatt said dubiously.

We backtracked a quarter mile, then climbed, unchallenged, into the hills. For once the Moon became an ally; its sharp shadow light, combined with the lights from Kramer, provided us with enough sight to avoid pitfalls.

We followed Cowboy closely, and, after a half hour of lateral movement, he halted.

“Let’s cut back toward the base and see what it’s like,” he said.

As we made our way around a sharp outcropping of rock the landscape broadened before us. The road we had followed was far to the left.

“The wolves thin out over there.” Pettis pointed to a spot directly below us, in a line with the northeast corner of the fence bordering the air base. Even from our distance I could make out twisted portions of the fence where holes had been patched or blocked with machinery.

“How can we get down without them seeing us?” Wyatt asked.

“We’re going to run like hell,” Cowboy replied humorlessly.

“How—” Wyatt began, but Cowboy cut him off by standing up.

“If we wait any longer,” he said, staring into the rising Moon, “they’re going to charge and we’ll get lost in the middle of it. If we do that we’ll have both the wolves and Kramer trying to kill us.” He looked hard at Wyatt. “Sorry, but you stay between us, Wyatt. No heroics. They need you more in there than the rest of us put together.”

Wyatt began to protest.

“Just do it,” Pettis growled.

Wyatt hesitated, then said, “All right.”

“Let’s go.”

We started at a soft trot, pounding down the soft slope in front of us, and worked up to a full-blown run as we hit the valley floor. There was something exhilarating and primal about it: an all-out race in the night with the cool desert air blowing across the face; adrenaline, despite a whole day of our walking in the heat, pumping through the entire system. This is the way racehorses must feel, or lions in full hunt, as the entire force of creation shoots through the body in this, the most vital moment of existence. This is what men in battle must feel when there is no choice and no turning back.

I found myself screaming, amid the horrid howls of the wolves, screaming not in fright but in self-declaration—“I am me! I am alive!”—and I turned my head to see my companions running as fast and as recklessly beside me, their open mouths betraying their own abandon. Man, too, is an animal; perhaps at that moment we were closer to our enemy than at any other.

We broke through the line of wolves at a dead run as they concentrated on the Moon and the hated base before them. Kicking pyramids of bones aside as we ran, we were twenty yards past them before there was any reaction.

Ahead of us, a mere hundred and fifty yards away, I heard faint cries that I assumed were for our benefit.

They were not.

Behind us, the wolves had charged.

From a vehicle, I had seen the hypnotizing grace of the wolf in flight, but from the ground, it was terrifying in a new way. I felt what the zebra or gazelle must feel when chased by the lion. I have already mentioned the lion. It is a most terrible machine to watch. Seemingly lazy, sleeping twenty hours of the day, it is, when hunting or angered, God’s most fearful creature. It did not garner its title as King of the Beasts through whimsy. Its body in flight is a smooth, sleek piston flow of muscle crowned with the cool eyes and visage of an emotionless killer.

Subtract from the lion his sloth, his easily satisfied gluttony, his flaccid temper unless aroused, and you understand the werewolf completely.

“Run, damnit, run!” Cowboy shouted. He fired his Uzi wildly into the air and then behind. We fought to keep Wyatt between us. The fence grew closer, and we began to angle over toward the front gate.

“Run! Run!”

A hundred yards to go.

The front line of wolves, burning eyes like lamps from hell, tongues hanging from the sides of open mouths that glowed with long white teeth, closed to within ten yards of us. Pettis whirled, spraying bullets into the nearest, holding their progress up as those around the wounded fell upon them.

“Goddamnit, run!”

Fifty yards. The gate grew near; I could make out figures, some of them pointing at us. A spotlight flared on, lighting our distance, illuminating the dented but still intact sign that said kramer air force base. Now the shouts from within the base were spurring us on.

The wolves closed on us. One, four legs fluid, beautiful in balletic motion, drew up beside me. His lamp eyes locked onto mine, rear legs tightened for his spring—

The night was filled with the mad wails of wolves, and something else.

The wolf beside me, in mid-leap, was cut neatly in half by a searing green pencil beam of light. I could not see momentarily because of its brilliance. I smelled the sizzle of burned flesh, a barbeque smell. The green light flashed again; three wolves that had been cutting the distance between us instantly went down.

All around us, the night was severed by pencils of green brilliance. They fired and were gone, leaving death behind. I heard the boom of rockets and mortars, the popping crack of rifles. Kramer Air Force Base erupted like a Fourth of July celebration. Behind us, the howls of hate and lust turned to wails of pain.

Through all the noise, someone shouted at me through the gate. I was close enough now to see his waving arms and hear him shouting, “Come on! Come on!” I glanced behind me. I had outdistanced the others by ten yards. As Cowboy stopped to pick off any wolves that strayed too close, Amy and Wyatt closed the distance between us. The night roared; overhead, rockets screamed out of the base into the line of beasts; the dull thump-thump of mortar launchings mingled with the snap of rifles and machine guns.

Over and through it all, flitting darts of deadly green light were emitted from thin, long cannons which, I now saw, were emplaced every forty or fifty feet along the inside perimeter of the base.

“Move it!” the man behind the gate shouted. He wore a torn and dirty NASA technician’s uniform. He pulled the gate open for our entrance.

Pettis fired wildly into the air. Amy threw her empty handgun to the ground and ran on. Wyatt, between the two of them, ran desperately, gulping for air, a man at the end of his race straining for the finish line.

Through tears of exhaustion and relief I saw the open gate; saw the encouraging, dirty face of the NASA technician; saw his hand reaching out for me—and, as my own hand stretched out for his saving hold, I saw out of the corner of my eye a wolf tearing wildly along the fence toward me, legs pushing it like a jet over the ground and then into the air—

The world exploded in color and light. Green streaks of flame, three at once, intersected just above the wolf’s head, outlining it in lime fire. Its leap continued. As it raised its scythe-like claws I saw the badly healed wound in its shoulder and recognized the deformed limb of the wolf I had seen on the road twice since I had left my home. It angled its twisted front limb to slash at me, and I saw the single missing claw in its ravaged paw. Full recognition bloomed.

“Richie!” I cried.

A cannon boomed. I heard the staccato crack of Cowboy’s Uzi—and then my son fell upon me, his eyes madly yellow, his mouth open and hungry. And then I screamed his name again, and knew no more.

CHAPTER 23

The Waking

There were many voices. Somewhere far off, I heard laughter.

Laughter. More than anything, that spurred me to life, made me swim up from the formless dreams, the nightmares, the snippets of false existence that had been my life for—how long? I remembered wolf faces in my dreams, snapping at me, laughing a different kind of laughter, my torn flesh sprouting wild hair even as it was ripped living from my body.

I opened my eyes. There was laughter, and faces around me, but they were human faces, Wyatt and Amy among them, and a man in a white coat who looked like a doctor, and a man in a NASA jumpsuit with a huge mustache and the bluest, steadiest eyes I have ever seen. I knew that face from television commercials, magazine ads, from the stereo in my living room days ago, telling me to come to Kramer Air Force Base, saving my life. I knew that face. Jimmy Rogers.

“Jeez, he ain’t one of ‘em after all,” Rogers said, spitting tobacco juice. I heard it hit the floor somewhere.

“Good to see you, Jase,” Wyatt Proctor said, helping me sit up.

I tried to stay but felt dizzy and eased back down again.

“You’ll feel fine in a little while,” the doctor said.

“What happened to me?”

The doctor answered with a grim smile. “You were cut by a wolf. He pointed to a long thin gash on my left forearm. “You were lucky that this was the only mark you received. The wound was superficial and drew a tiny amount of blood. We cleaned and sterilized it immediately. Then we gave you a transfusion. In effect, we replaced all of your blood. Then…”

“Heck,” Wyatt finished with mock cheerfulness, “then we waited all night to see if you were a wolf or a poet.” His smile faltered as my gaze fell on Cowboy, still cradling his Uzi.

Cowboy reached out and gripped my shoulder. “I still have that book of yours with me,” he said quietly.

“I’ll get to sign it, yet.”

I sat up straight, as sudden, full remembrance came to me. “What about my son?”

The look that passed between Pettis and the doctor sank my heart.

“He’s…alive—” the doctor began.

“He got cut up pretty bad,” Pettis said. “They think they can save him. He hasn’t exactly been cooperative.” Pettis studied me closely. “You’re sure he’s your son?”

“Yes.” I turned to the doctor. “Can I see him?”

“Later, possibly. If he stabilizes, we may be able to try something along the lines of what we did to you, though on a massive scale. We’ve had partial success with it so far. We think we’re close to perfecting it. The fact that you’ve recovered is extremely encouraging—”

Even I noted the edge of hysteria in my voice. “You’ll be able to reverse it? To turn him back into my son?”

“I don’t want to raise your hopes, but, yes, possibly,” the doctor said.

My hopes soared. I felt suddenly strong.

Pettis said, “There’s more good news, Jase. The Lexington is going up tonight and—”

“Let me tell him,” Wyatt interrupted. He smiled at me. “We want you to go with us, if you can handle it. Seems you’re the only writer around, and we want you along as a historian, to put it all down for the record.”

Jimmy Rogers, who had been listening quietly all this time, spat another line of brown tobacco juice at the floor. “Hell, he deserves it. Without him, we wouldn’t have gotten our hands on ole Wyatt here and would have missed our chance at blowing the Moon into little bitty pieces.”

My jaw must have dropped five inches. “You’re going to blow up the Moon?”

Rogers smiled, his mustache lifting over teeth stained tobacco brown. “Hell, son, now we can clean up this whole mess. We had the shuttle and Big Dumb Booster to get us to the Moon; we had all the nukes we need. All we had to have was Doc Bates, or Mr. Proctor here, to tell us where to drop ‘em. We put the bombs in the right place, we blow the Moon to little pieces and get a pretty ring around the Earth like Saturn. The ole Earth here will hardly feel a thing. No more wolves get to Earth. No more full Moon to power the wolves already here. We get this transfusion thing going, fix up the wolves we can, wipe out the rest.” He spat tobacco juice and smiled. “End of problem.”

“So what do you say?” Cowboy asked. “If you trust the goddamn engineers that strapped the shuttle to that booster, there’s a lot you have to learn about the Lexington before tonight.”

The doctor added, “I’ll give you the okay to go.”

“Hell,” Jimmy Rogers said, his blue eyes twinkling, “it won’t be the safest trip in the world, and I can’t even promise it won’t be a little bumpy along the way.”

“Well?” Wyatt asked.

“When do we start?” I answered.

CHAPTER 24

Poetaster

There was a lot to learn. But I was disappointed with how pedestrian our training was. Basically, they told us how to strap ourselves into our seats, how to go to the bathroom, and how to eat. Everything else, including the donning of space suits if necessary, was left to Jimmy Rogers and a thin, thoughtful-looking man named Hartnet, whose thin mustache made Rogers’s look huge by comparison. Hartnet, it turned out, was the detonation man in charge of the nuclear weapons in the shuttle bay. He looked a little nervous about the whole business.

After our training session, we ate dinner in a huge hangar-like cafeteria with a long line of windows set in the side. Pettis drew me to a table where we could be alone. Through the windows I could see the Lexington, technicians swarming around it like hornets, jets of liquid oxygen puffing from the main tank of the huge booster. It looked cleaned and ready to go. Beyond it, another group of technicians worked on reinforcing the perimeter of the base, awaiting the coming of night.

“You know the one thing about all this that makes me mad?” Pettis asked me. “We have to make a night landing on return. We’re gonna blow up the wolves’ home planet and then land in the middle of them when we come back. I don’t think they’ll be too happy with us.” He smiled wryly. “Goddamn engineers.”

My gaze drifted out to the shuttle again, and Cowboy was silent, staring also.

“In my wildest dreams,” I said, “I never thought I’d ride one of those things. I certainly never thought I’d get to the Moon. That was one of the things I hoped for my son, that he would get a chance to go to the Moon. When I was growing up, I used to go out alone in the back field, lie down, and watch it come up. It seemed like it was close enough to pluck out of the sky, like a peach.”

“I used to like the Moon myself,” Cowboy said. “I remember in one of your poems, there was something about a tree—”

“‘The tree of night, hung white with fruit,’” I quoted.

“Well,” Cowboy nodded, looking out at the huge shuttle waiting for us outside, “we’re about to pluck the fruit from the night.”

“Yes, we are,” I said.

“Come with me,” said Cowboy.

~ * ~

Richie was strapped to a table in a small white room. He looked less like my son than he ever had. Nearly one whole side of his body was covered in roughly applied bandages; the right side of his face was a mass of scar tissue, dried blood and hurriedly applied dressings. A catheter tube swung lazily next to the table, ripped from an entrance point in his arm. He thrashed against his bindings, growling low in the back of his throat.

When he saw me his thrashings turned wild; his claws strained desperately to curl toward the straps to cut them, and his eyes glowed yellow-bright with hate. Now, suddenly, I was unsure if he was my son. He looked like any other of the mad creatures I had seen these past days—a raving, murderous animal with nothing but the extinction of the human race in its thoughts. There was none of the human glow I had seen once behind the lamp eyes; no remnant of the Richie who had saved my life and run off howling into the new world. There was only a lust to kill.

“They tried everything to sedate him,” Pettis said. “Nothing works on them. They barely got him in here and strapped down and got the bleeding stopped before he came awake. He came very close to cutting up one of the nurses.”

I edged closer, stirring the creature’s wrath, but now seeing clearly the marks of my ax on his shoulder, the missing claw on the middle finger of his left paw.

“He’s my son,” I said quietly. “Somewhere deep inside, my son is still in there. I can’t believe he followed me here only out of hate.”

Pettis put his hand on my arm. “We’d better go.”

“I’ll be back for you,” I said to Richie. “I promise, I’ll be back.”

I went back with Pettis to the cafeteria, where there were other good-byes to be made. I watched Cowboy embrace Amy. She pulled a clutch of opened seed packets from her pocket. “I planted these outside this afternoon,” she said. “There’s a little plot next to where I’m staying. When you get back we’ll watch them grow together, for Mom.”

“We will,” Cowboy said, holding her close.

They looked out the big windows, and I followed their gaze to the Lexington, which stood tall, waiting for us.

“Shouldn’t you be saying something profound?” Cowboy asked me.

“I know what you mean.” The moment was ripe with allusions: the parting of families, humanity on the threshold of a great and dangerous adventure, a bold last attempt at salvation of the human race—the very apex of human endeavor. But I had nothing. My brain was dry. Perhaps at no other moment in human history was a statement so necessary, a word or phrase that would capture this supreme moment for future generations. I felt Cowboy waiting for me—in a way I felt all of mankind waiting for me—

And then, across the room, Jimmy Rogers did my work for me. He called for attention, and, spitting a wad of tobacco juice, he grinned under his huge mustache, pointed out the long windows at the shuttle waiting for us, and shouted, “Showtime!”

CHAPTER 25

The Light Comes Brighter

I watched the Lexington in awe as we neared it. It resembled an arrogant yet fragile bird. Yet it would soon rise as no bird flew, straight up out of Earth’s grasp under the power of the largest rocket ever made by man. The Big Dumb Booster, a huge bottom bulge of rockets resembling a cluster of Saturn V’s strapped together, was frightening: a manmade Zeus, or, possibly, a Trojan Horse, filled with tons upon tons of deadly explosive rocket fuel.

A knot formed in my stomach; in essence, we would be sitting in a winged toy, on top of the largest stick of dynamite ever made.

Hartnet, the nuke man, who walked beside me in his shuttle jumpsuit, was as pale as I was.

“Hell,” he muttered, “I don’t even like riding in cars.”

“I’ll help you through it,” I said.

He grinned. “And who’s gonna help you?”

We stopped at the base of the launch pad and marched to the gantry like any other shuttle crew. Someone took pictures. Someone else said, “Go get ‘em.”

“You betcha,” Jimmy Rogers said, firing a long stream of tobacco juice to the ground.

We followed Rogers into the elevator, which rose along the tiled white flank of the shuttle. The American flag on the Lexingtons side, which had looked so small from the ground, was the height of a man.

The elevator snapped to a halt, and Rogers ushered us in. He stayed behind, spitting one last stream of tobacco juice off the gantry before ejecting his chewing tobacco after it.

“Damn shame you can’t chaw in zero-G,” he said.

We strapped in. Ahead, through the quartz windows, it was growing dark. I heard Rogers talking with the ground. Suddenly there was a burst of static. “Hell and damnation,” he cursed. “Cowboy, get on up here.”

Beside me, Cowboy unstrapped himself. “Goddamn engineers.” He went up front and was back in a few minutes. The radio had resumed working.

As Pettis settled himself back into his couch, I said, “What is it you do, Cowboy? After what we’ve been through the last couple of days, I feel I know you like a brother, but where do you fit into all this?”

He gave me a huge ear-to-ear grin. “I’m an engineer.”

My laughter was only interrupted by Jimmy Rogers’s cheery, booming voice up front. “One minute to liftoff, gents.”

A soft silver glow filtered through the darkened quartz windows. Outside, through the thickness of the shuttle walls and the hum of expectant machinery, I heard the snap-snap of a rifle and the thud of mortar fire.

At thirty seconds, the radio crackled with a curse from mission control. “Goddamn, Jimmy, we got a breakthrough at the east end of Kramer, and they’re heading for the Lexington.”

“Can you hold em back?” Rogers inquired.

“No sweat. But we’ll have to put a hold on you.”

“Hell with that. How close are they to me?”

“Three or four hundred feet. Lasers got a couple—”

“Don’t hold. We’ll take care of ‘em from this end.”

“Hey, Jimmy—”

“I said no problem.”

“All right, Jimmy, you’ve got a go.” The mission controller began to count down: “Eight, seven, six—Jesus, Jimmy, they’re up at the base of the booster! They’re climbing up on it!”

“Punch it, damn it!” Rogers yelled.

“One, zero, liftoff—Jesus!”

I felt a dull thump way below me; then there was a sudden roar, and a giant’s hand pushed down invisibly on my chest, trying to pin me to Earth as the Lexington lifted. It was a rocky but inevitable rise. The giant’s hand tried mightily to keep me down, but he was losing to the Big Dumb Booster’s huge engines. We rose, rattling like a cupboard of pots and pans in an earthquake. The Lexington did a long, graceful rollover showing us a tip of the Earth under us. We bore up, away from the sight; a minute and a half later we punched a hole in gravity as the ride smoothed out and the giant’s hand became a caress.

Rogers said to mission control, “How’d we do?”

The voice cackled. “Jimmy, you fried ‘em where they stood. Must have burned close to a hundred of em.”

“How ‘bout the rest?”

“The hole in the fence is closed. Lasers are mopping up the stragglers.”

“Good-o, buddy.”

They talked about what we had to do next, when the engine would burn, about orbit and our second burn, which would throw us toward the Moon. I glanced at my companions. Cowboy seemed to be resting. Wyatt had his eyes closed, a dreamy look on his face. Hartnet was white as a sheet of paper, his hands gripping his armrest, knuckles stiff and bloodless. He wouldn’t even meet my gaze.

Up front, the windows showed blue-black. Rogers caught me looking. “Keep an eye out,” he said. “In a minute you’ll see something interesting. His tobacco was gone, but his tongue pressed into his cheek, feigning the presence of his chew.

I watched. There was only deepening black, then a silver pie-plate edge pushed up into the windows and filled them. The Moon, away from the softening sheen of Earth’s atmosphere, was even colder and harder. It sent a strange, deep thrill through me.

Rogers mimicked a tobacco spit. “Here comes the interesting part,” he said. He cocked his hand like a pistol, firing off an imaginary shot through the windows.

“Bull’s-eye,” he said.

CHAPTER 26

Memory

The Moon.

As the hours went by, as the silver-white vision of it grew in our window, I began to feel a strange sadness, a sense of loss and betrayal at its sight. This was not the Moon I had grown up with, the one I had lain under on summer nights and told my wishes and dreams to; this was not the Moon that lovers throughout the ages of man had made love to and relied on for strength and light in the night, the one we had longed so mightily to reach and, having reached, had found so dead, desolate, and ultimately boring that we had all but turned our backs on it, leaving it once again to lovers and poets. This was not that Moon and never could be again—just as the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima had forever changed that city in the mind of man, metamorphosing it from a quiet, anonymous industrial port to a symbol of the horror that man was capable of unleashing on himself.

The Moon had even changed in physical shape. As we drew nearer, the huge, blasted, pocked area in what had once been the crater Aristarchus became grotesque and ugly—a gaping black evil eye that spewed rock spores from its volcanic interior. Its vile cannon, aimed at Earth, would not be quiet until we silenced it forever.

The Moon had changed; but the Earth, at least from space, had not. It was a beautiful ball, loudly advertising life in the bright blue of its oceans, the swirling white of its water-rich clouds, the soft, edge-on luminescence of its lush oxygen atmosphere. It radiated life, beaconed like an oasis in the surrounding dead darkness of space. I knew now why the men who had seen it this way had been changed by the vision, had become almost evangelical in their descriptions of the preciousness of our planet.

~ * ~

Like the Moon, I too have changed.

The first day, having little else to do, feeling bound by duty, I recorded all that has happened up till now. Most has been composed by moonlight. I don’t know if that has had anything to do with the strangeness I have felt in composing it, and the continuing strangeness I feel. I encounter tearing emotions when I look at the Earth and then at the Moon. I feel the emptiness that will ensue when the Moon is gone. It has been so much of our lives, perhaps. It has been the tides, and lovers’ light, and the beacon to ten thousand fishermen and sailors. It has been something warm in the cold night, a dream held at arm’s length, a promise of other worlds in other places. Until now, when it has become—

What has it become? I look at it now as I write, as Hartnet reads his technical sheets in the chair in front of me, as Wyatt takes remote measurements through the instruments in the open shuttle hold, as our captain curses the lack of his chewing tobacco, and Cowboy acts as engineer, checking and rechecking his lights and computers. I look at Luna through the thick quartz windows, looming, ravaged, reviled, and, always now, growing, becoming our world as blue Earth is left behind. I wonder that we are hating the wrong world for the wrong reasons. What do we know of the wolves? What do we know of their minds? To us they are a superstition come alive, and we have reacted as all men since Cain have reacted to the unknown and different—we have sought to kill what we hate, instead of trying to understand…

~ * ~

Later on the same day. The Moon looms even larger, and Jimmy Rogers, with a dry spit and a mischievous smile, has said that we will arrive in lunar orbit early tomorrow morning. “Heck, we’re gonna do this little job, and land back at Kramer on Christmas Eve,” he stated. “Ain’t that a present from Santa Claus?” There is much preparatory activity and heightened excitement.

I, however, am a little worried. I have looked over the last of what I wrote this morning, and I cannot believe that my pen made those words. I know I have felt rather weak and light-headed since we left Earth, but Hartnet, of all people, told me that it was just aftereffects of my transfusion, combined with the fact that I am probably a victim of space sickness. He himself has not suffered any ill effects since leaving orbit and has begun to enjoy being in his “space truck.” But I am not feeling so fine. My mind has begun to wander.

Feeling sick, I went to the bathroom a little while ago, which in the crowded Lexington provides at least a little privacy. While I was washing my hands in the vacuum sink, I noticed a long black hair curling near my left wrist. When I tried to brush it away, I discovered that it was my own. Stretching it out to its length of two or three inches, I then plucked it.

I examined myself for other such hair, but found none. I thought fleetingly of telling Cowboy about it, but some part of me told me not to say anything. I may talk with him later, when I can think clearly.

Just now, I checked myself over again but found no other hair, so perhaps that is the end of it.

I am tired, and must rest.

~ * ~

Later. The lights in the Lexington have been dimmed, simulating the sleep cycle on Earth. I tried to sleep, but after a short nap, I find myself completely awake and unable to sleep any longer. So I have come to sit in my chair again I find myself gazing raptly at the Moon, which now more than fills a window above me. The blown-out section looks like an ugly reddish brown wound on an otherwise tranquil gray surface. It looks not forbidding at all, but peaceful. I have never felt so drawn to it.

I have been writing for a few minutes and have been staring over my right hand at the paper, and only now have I noticed that the ridge over my knuckles is spotted with long, curling brown hairs. I counted seven, and as I pulled the sleeve of my jumpsuit up I saw that my forearm, too, is clustered with them. In some areas they are matted together and seem to be growing as I watch.

I have been feeling very light-headed. In my sleep restraint, I found myself thinking of my son, Richie. Only I saw him in his wolf form, and he didn’t look strange to me. He looked like my son. I find I cannot think of him any other way. And now, as I sit here alternately writing and staring at the coming Moon and looking around at my fellow passengers, I have a strong urge to rise from my chair and scrape my nails across their throats.

I am no fool. I know what is happening to me. Apparently, the good doctor was not successful in eradicating the wolf from my blood. In my case, I have changed very slowly, and not at all unpleasantly. I find that I can very easily accept who I am.

I am looking at my right hand, watching it curl into a beautiful, elongated shape. A soft brown fur has filled in all around it, and my fingernails are pushing slowly out into a new and finer and more useful shape. I will have a little difficulty writing with these long ivory claws, but I will manage, because I want to record all of this.

The wolves are not a barbarian race.

I see with new eyes.

There is something I must do now.

~ * ~

An hour later. I write more slowly, but my thoughts are very bright and lucid. The oxygen in the Lexington tastes wonderful. I feel very strong.

Let me describe what happened.

After putting down my pen, I carefully went from sleep restraint to sleep restraint, quietly binding each of the crew in with the elastic bands that are stored all over the vehicle for securing material to the walls and floors.

Captain Rogers was last. He was not in a sleep restraint but was half dozing up front in his command chair. He heard me approach. When he turned sleepily he began to smile until he stared into my face. Then his eyes widened, and he cursed.

I lashed out at him with my right arm. My claws cut him cleanly across the throat. As he floated back, crying out, I threw myself upon him.

A wonderful, almost spiritual, experience ensued as I tore and devoured his body. For a while, I was not myself. It was as if an entire race of beings worked through me, ages and ages of genes twining into my limbs, seeing through my eyes, singing the song of blood with me. While my flesh feasted, my mind feasted also. I was one with my race. I experienced a kind of joy, a completeness, I have never known. What had once seemed alien seemed whole and right and sacred. I understand everything about my race, now. Mankind seems alien to me.

I sought to stack Rogers’s bones, as the Song of Blood requires, but zero gravity prevented me, holding them in a floating, amorphous mass behind the captain’s chair. The cabin of the shuttle became suffused with tiny portions of tissue and droplets of blood, which I spent some time cleaning up.

Naturally, my activity woke the others. As soon as I was finished with Rogers, I attended to them. I moved from Hartnet to Wyatt, cutting them gently on the arm. I must admit that the sight of blood once again inflamed me, but I fought it off, because there is a higher reason to preserve these two. Without them, I cannot do what I seek to do.

As I stood before Cowboy, my new eyes found the Moon through the windows. I threw back my head and howled. I was filled with joy and strength of purpose.

But so was Cowboy. He had cut his sleep restraint with a knife and pushed his way out. I saw in his face that admirable courage and hatred for the enemy he had shown since I had met him. He floated away, shouting at me to stay away, searching desperately for something to fight me with.

In their restraints, Hartnet and Wyatt screamed and thrashed.

“Damnit!” Cowboy cursed. He had backed into Rogers’s chair, scattering the captain’s bones. This infuriated me. But I did not rush at him, as I wanted to. Pettis was a formidable opponent, the only one who could stop me.

“Jesus damn.” He was not directing this invective at anyone in particular. He was railing at fate, I suppose, or God, or the cosmos, or any combination of them. I think he knew he was about to lose.

But not without a fight. He angled away from Rogers’s chair to the copilot’s couch. Moving around behind it, he used it as a shield between us.

“I’ll let you work with me,” I offered, having difficulty with the human words. In my mind, the Song of Blood sought to overwhelm speech. I held my right paw out, claws up. “I’ll make it painless.”

He looked horrified by the reasonable tone of my voice. “Jesus, Jase, can’t you fight it?”

“I don’t want to fight it,” I explained. “This is what I am now.”

He fumbled in a pocket of his jumpsuit and brought out a book. “What about this? You were going to inscribe it for me.”

My right arm scythed a graceful arc toward him, cutting the book from his hand. Its severed pages floated magically around us.

“Goddamn it, isn’t there anything human left about you? Do you really want to do this to your own people?”

I threw back my head and brayed.

He reached beneath the copilot’s seat and produced his Uzi. I leaped at him, knocking the gun aside before he could fire. It was all over very quickly.

Again, I went into a dream state. My mind traveled back with my ancestors, watched through their eyes the huge blue Earth rising above their Moon. I stared up through their thin, opaque, beautiful atmosphere, where the nights were clear and dark, high breaths of cloud sifting through the palest of blue skies during the day, fragile seas lapping leisurely at the shores of vast brown deserts, where palid rows of pyramids, dwellings in death of our fathers, stretched to the horizon.

The dream changed. I saw through my fathers’ eyes a later time, where I gasped for breath, saw the thinning air above me, felt the gulping gravitational thievery of the blue, rich, huge, fat, jovial, taunting Earth that mocked the sky above. A wave of hatred swelled within me—rage at the slow death of my race, the sucking of air from our betrayed planet, the gasping, bloodless deaths of our children, the dried oceans, the constant upheaval of our planet’s crust, the fiery volcanoes, the shattering of meteors, the triumph of desert and gray dust—

While that hateful blue Earth hung like a smugly smiling, life-bursting lamp over us, as we ready the deep pits of the sleeping, curled upon themselves in stasis, awaiting a day when the air returns and the deserts are once again green with life, and the Song of Blood fills the air…

I awoke from my trance. Pettis’s bones floated from the deck and scattered, victims of their own inertia. I breathed deep oxygen. My eyes focused on what surrounded me.

I heard howling, sounds of struggle.

Proctor thrashed wildly in his sleep restraint. A line of blood was drying on his arm. I controlled an urge to rip him open. Hartnet was sheathed in sweat, transformation taking place in his eyes. They had lightened from brown to dark yellow. His face had begun to shape, the brow pushing out, deepening, snout lengthening. He growled, and even now I sensed communion in his eyes.

“Soon,” I said to him.

~ * ~

Later. I have done everything I could tonight. I wait for orbit tomorrow. I sit in the captain’s chair, staring out at my homeland and feeling as if I am looking into the face of a nearing god. Proctor and Hartnet cry out now and again. They are more birth cries than ones of pain. By morning, they will be with me.

A half hour ago, Mission Control called frantically.

We did not check in when we were supposed to. I let their calls go unanswered.

Let them wonder.

There is nothing to do but wait, and watch the god above.

CHAPTER 27

Genesis

What more to tell?

I must write all of this down, awkward as it is for my hand to use a pen. I want to preserve this for our ancestors.

This morning, the Lexington swung automatically into orbit around our home. I continued to ignore communication with Mission Control. Hartnet said there was no need to contact Kramer until we need them.

I was afraid that Hartnet and Proctor might be uncontrollable when I unbound them this morning. But there were no problems. The light scratches I gave them produced, as I had hoped, a comparatively smooth transition.

Within two hours of their release, Proctor had recalculated the drop points, and Hartnet had recalibrated the timings for the nuclear devices. Wyatt assured me that his new calculations were infallible.

“They were first formulated by Dr. Baines,” he informed me with a glint in his eye.

By the time Hartnet and Proctor had finished their work, we were passing perigee on the near side. We sat in reverential silence, witnessing at close hand the area where the crater Aristarchus had once been. It was now a huge blasted depression, filled with the uncovered remains of our original civilization. Row upon row of tall spires thrust proudly into the sterile atmosphere. Some were broken at the top, chipped at the sides. Deep in the angry, red-eyed center of the volcanic hole, barely visible from our height, were vast stacks of glass storage spores. How right Doc had been—except that he had not made the final leap and deduced that the spores themselves were made of glass and had formed, when fused by volcanic action, the tektites that had so long baffled human astronomers.

The scene glided all too swiftly beneath us. Even as we watched, there was a silent flare of the red eye, and another mass of fused spores flew up and past us toward Earth. I knew the others were affected as I was, knowing that some of those spores had been inevitably destroyed during the immense volcanic explosion that had shot them out of the dead planet to the living one.

As the scene passed away beneath us, and we eclipsed the sunlit limb of the Moon and passed into the far side, I studied Hartnet and Proctor carefully, looking for reassurance.

“It will work,” Wyatt said thickly. “Don’t worry.”

I still wasn’t sure. “Perhaps we should leave things as they are—”

“They won’t give up as long as there’s a chance,”Hartnet growled. His amber eyes glowed. “We have to make sure they’re overwhelmed.”

Wyatt added, “And if it works—”

“Yes,” I said.

~ * ~

Two hours later. Hartnet went to work arming the bombs a little while ago, while I assisted Wyatt in opening the massive, long doors in the shuttle cargo bay. When Hartnet assured us that all was ready, we watched through the windows as Hartnet launched the bombs. We felt a slight bump as they were ejected from the bay. They spun off below us, the tiny jets of their rockets flaring into life after a count of twenty, spreading them like a formation of dancers. In a short while, their retro-rockets landed them as soft as cotton at their points around the far side.

In thirty hours, they will detonate, and then we will know.

~ * ~

Later. I have just finished speaking with Earth. I had to look away from Luna while I spoke with Mission Control; a sense of victory had inflamed me, and I wanted to howl and tell them their own destruction was imminent.

“What in hell has been going on?” Mission Control asked.

I struggled to keep my voice human. “Rogers and Pettis are dead.”

There was shock in the reply. “What in God’s name happened?”

“An oxygen tank blew while they were working on it.”

“Jesus.”

I asked them if they could guide us home.

“We can do that from the ground.” There was a pause. “What about the bombs?”

“We got them off,” I said. “Hartnet did his job well.”

I heard a relieved cheer go up in the background. “You fellas don’t worry about a thing. We’ll get you home safe and sound. You’re heroes. You hear?”

“I hear,” I said.

Another pause. “They want me to tell you that your son stabilized, and they’ll be able to try the transfusion on him after you get back.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“We’re all praying for you,” Mission Control said.

“We’re praying, too,” I answered.

~ * ~

Thirty hours later. What more to tell? We left orbit more than twenty-nine hours ago. We are aimed straight at Earth. Since leaving the strong influence of the Moon, we have felt very sluggish. Hartnet and Wyatt are asleep, curled in their sleep restraints. I have slept myself.

But now I am awake. Hartnet told me that a wondrous thing will happen soon. I want to record this moment of history.

I keep thinking of the new life we will have on Earth. When we land at Kramer Air Force Base later tonight, our brethren will swarm around us in triumph. With the unwitting help of Mission Control, we will open the base to attack, and the sacred Song of Blood—for blood gives life, even in death, and in this way death is life—will fill the air.

I want to record that, too.

There are many things I wish to do. I will trample Amy Pettis’s garden. I will free my son. I will help in any way I can to destroy the human race—

There is a barely perceptible flash of light outside. I rise from my couch. Wyatt and Hartnet have awakened, as if summoned to witness the event.

A horrible and wondrous sight meets our eyes. Through the top windows, I see the convulsive shattering of the Moon. It begins as a shudder, and then suddenly the world of our fathers is rent apart, like a toy, bellowing into a billion shards. The area around Aristarchus disintegrates. Howling, I salute those who have perished in the cataclysm, but I know that they would gladly have given their consent, knowing of the millions and millions of their brothers to whom they have given back life.

Mission Control is calling. We are forced to listen while they thank us in tears for the job we have done. “Merry Christmas!” they shout. “Merry Christmas!”

Once again, they call us heroes for turning the Moon into a harmless ring of debris that will settle far from Earth.

They are wrong, of course. With Wyatt and Hartnet’s revision of the detonation, most of the top hundred-foot layer of lunar soil, containing the entirety of our buried civilization, will fall to Earth, leaving the rest of the pulverized core to form a close, bright ring to act with the power of a permanent full Moon upon our new civilization. Soon the Song of Blood will fill the air, and Earth—the new Moon, as of this Christmas—will be free of humanity forever.

It occurs to me that we are heroes, after all. And, as I gather the papers of this record together to prepare for landing, I notice the poem that opened it. Immediately, I understand why I have never been happy with the last lines. I am happy now. Slight revision has brought the poem to perfection. I am filled with a new sense of dedication, and I know that this is but the first of many new poems I will write for my people:

~ * ~

Man of shadows and cratered light:

Alabaster plains,

Seas of tranquil dust—

You know a secret.

What word would you tell

Had you a single cold breath?

What word would it be?

Would it be Death?

Author’s Note

~ * ~

The chapter titles of this book are the titles of poems by Theodore Roethke, to whose work the reader of this book, or any other book for that matter, is directed with enthusiasm.

More obvious inspiration was derived from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, to which the present author bows in gratitude.

For those interested in fact behind fiction, source information on transient lunar phenomena (TLP) can be found in The Moon and the Planets: A Catalog of Astronomical Anomalies compiled by William R. Corliss (The Source Book Project, 1985). Page 129 of that volume reproduces an 1878 sketch of a reported volcanic eruption on the Moon. A good article on Big Dumb Boosters appeared in the August 17, 1987, issue of Newsweek, page 46. A comprehensive, if ultimately dogmatic, discussion of tektites is found in one of the best textbooks the author has ever encountered, Introduction to Planetary Geology by Billy P. Glass, a leading expert on the subject. Carl Sagan has pointed out the pleasing suitability of Glass’s name.

Contrary to popular perception, the Apollo program did not tell us everything we want to know about the Moon. As with any beginning, it created more questions than it answered. The literature on the Moon is vast but uninspiring; a good recent overview is The Book of the Moon by Thomas A. Hockey. The University of Arizona has published a comprehensive set of lunar quadrant maps, available from Sky and Telescope magazine; anyone with access to a well-made telescope might spend a pleasant evening studying the area around Aristarchus for TLP.

As for werewolves…