by Jerry eBooks
As the ship swung slowly around, Earth would pass from view, and the stars would march across the port—the same stars he had always known, but steady, brighter, and unwinking against a screen of perfect, live black. Then the Moon would swim into view again to claim his thoughts.
He was serenely happy in a fashion not given to most men, even in a long lifetime. He felt as if he were every man who had ever lived, and looked up at the stars, and longed.
At least once he must have fallen into deep sleep, or possibly delirium, for he came to with a start, thinking that his wife, Charlotte, was calling to him. “Delos!” the voice had said. “Delos! Come in from there! You’ll catch your death of cold in that night air.”
Poor Charlotte! She had been a good wife to him, a good wife. He was quite sure that her only regret in dying had been her fear that he would not take proper care of himself. It had not been her fault that she had not shared his dream and his need.
CHARLIE rigged the hammock in such a fashion that Harriman could watch from the starboard port when they swung around the far face of the Moon. He picked out the landmarks made familiar to him by a thousand photographs with nostalgic pleasure, as if he were returning to his own country. McIntyre brought her slowly down as they came back around to the Earthward face, and prepared to land in Mare Imbrium between Aristillus and Archimedes, about ten miles from Luna City.
It was not a bad landing, all things considered. He had to land without coaching from the ground, and he had no second pilot to punch the stadimeter for him. In his anxiety to make it gentle he missed his destination by some thirty miles, but he did his cold-sober best. At that, it was rather bumpy.
As they scooted along to a stop, throwing up powdery pumice on each side, Charlie came up to the control station.
“How’s our passenger?” Mac demanded.
“I’ll see, but I wouldn’t make any bets. That landing stunk, Mac.”
“Damn it, I did my best.”
“I know you did, skipper. Forget it.”
But the passenger was alive and conscious, though bleeding from the nose, and with a pink foam on his lips. He was feebly trying to get himself out of his cocoon. They helped him, working together.
“Where are the vacuum suits?” was his first remark.
“Steady, Mr. Harriman. You can’t go out there yet. We’ve got to give you some first aid.”
“Get me that suit! First aid can wait.”
Silently they did as he ordered. His left leg was practically useless, and they had to help him through the lock, one on each side. But with his inconsiderable mass having a lunar weight of only twenty pounds, he was no burden. They found a place some fifty yards from the ship where they could prop him up and let him look, a chunk of scoria supporting his head.
McIntyre put his helmet against the old man’s and spoke. “We’ll leave you here to enjoy the view while we get ready for the trek into town. It’s a forty-miler, pretty near, and we’ll have to break out spare air bottles and rations and stuff. We’ll be back soon.”
Harriman nodded without answering, and squeezed their gauntlets with a grip that was surprisingly strong.
He sat very quiet, rubbing his hands against the soil of the Moon and sensing the curiously light pressure of his body against the ground. At long last there was peace in his heart. His hurts had ceased to pain him. He was where he had longed to be—he had followed his need. Overhead hung the Earth in third quarter, a green-blue giant moon. The Sun’s supper limb crowned the crags of Archimedes to his left. And underneath—the Moon; the soil of the Moon itself. He was on the Moon!
He lay back still while a bath of content flowed over him like a tide at flood, and soaked into his very marrow.
His attention strayed momentarily, and he thought once again that his name was called. Silly, he thought; I’m getting old—my mind wanders.
BACK in the cabin Charlie and Mac were rigging shoulder yokes on a stretcher. “There. That will do,” Mac commented. “We’d better stir Pop out; we ought to be going.”
“I’ll get him,” Charlie replied. “I’ll just pick him up and carry him. He don’t weigh nothing.”
Charlie was gone longer than McIntyre had expected him to be. He returned alone. Mac waited for him to close the lock and swing back his helmet. “Trouble?”
“Never mind the stretcher, skipper. We won’t be needin’ it. Yeah, I mean it,” he continued. “I did what was necessary.”
McIntyre bent down without a word and commenced to strap on the wide skis necessary to negotiate the powdery ash. Charlie followed his example. Then they swung spare air bottles over their shoulders and passed out through the lock.
They didn’t bother to close the outer door of the lock behind them.
Charlie looked toward the relaxed figure propped up on the bed of Lunar pumice, face fixed toward the Earth. “Well.” he grunted, “he hit the Moon—”
The Professor was a Thief
L. Ron Hubbard
The author of “The Dangerous Dimension” brings forth an even whackier professor than Henry Madge!
FOREWORD
IT was about two o’clock in the afternoon and Sergeant Kelly, having imbibed a bit too much corned beef and cabbage at lunch, was dozing comfortably at his desk. He did not immediately hear the stumbling feet of Patrolman O’Rourke, but when he did, he was, in consequence, annoyed.
Sergeant Kelly opened his eyes, grunted, and sat slowly forward, hitching at his pants which he had unbuckled to ease his ballooning stomach.
His eye was offended at first, by Patrolman O’Rourke’s upset uniform and then, suddenly, interested. And what sergeantly eye would not have been? For Patrolman O’Rourke’s mouth was slack and his eyes could have been used as bowling balls. He ran into a spittoon and heeded its thundering protest and departure not, at all. Bracing his tottering self against the desk without changing his dazed expression, O’Rourke gulped:
“It’s gone.”
“Well!” said Sergeant Kelly. “Don’t stand there like a. jackanapes! Speak up! What’s gone?”
“The Empire State Building,” said Patrolman O’Rourke.
I.
NO ONE knew why he was called Pop unless it was that he had sired the newspaper business. For the first, few hundred years, it appeared, he had been a senior reporter, going calmly about his business of reporting wholesale disaster, but during the past month something truly devastating had occurred. Muttering noises sounded in the ranks.
Long overdue for the job of city editor, lately vacated via the undertaker, Pop had been demoted instead of promoted. Ordinarily Pop was not a bitter man. He had seen too many cataclysms fade into the staleness of yesterday’s paper. He had obit-ed too large a legion of generals, saints and coal-heavers to expect anything from life but its eventual absence. But there were limits.
When Leonard Caulborn, whose diapers Pop had changed, had been elevated to city editor over Pop’s decaying head, Pop chose to attempt the dissolution of gaul in the manufactures of Kentucky. But even the latter has a habit of wearing away and leaving the former friend a mortal enemy. Thus it was, when the copy boy came for him, that Pop swore at the distilleries as he arose and looked about on the floor where he supposed his head must have rolled.
“Mr. Caulborn said he hada see yuh rightaway,” said the copy boy.
Pop limped toward the office, filled with resentment.
Leonard Caulborn was a wise young man. Even though he had no real knowledge of the newspaper business, people still insisted he was wise. Hadn’t he married the publisher’s daughter? And if the paper didn’t make as much as it should, didn’t the publisher have plenty of stockholders who could take the losses and never feel them—much, anyway.
Young and self-made and officious if not efficient, Caulborn greeted Pop not at all, but let him stand before the desk a few minutes.
Pop finally picked up a basket and dropped it a couple inches, making Caulborn look up.
“You sent for me?” sai
d Pop.
“I sent for you—Oh, yes, I remember now. Pending your retirement you’ve been put on the copy desk.”
“My what?” cried Pop.
“Your retirement. We are retiring all employees over fifty. We need new people and new ideas here.”
“Retirement?” Pop was still gaping. “When? How?”
“Effective day after tomorrow, Pop, you are no longer with this paper. Our present social security policy—”
“Will pay me off about twenty bucks complete,” said Pop. “But to hell with that. I brought this paper into the world and it’s going to take me out. You can’t do this to me!”
“I have orders—”
“You are issuing the orders these days,” said Pop. “What are you going to do for copy when you lose all your men that know the ropes?”
“We’ll get along,” said Caulborn. “That will be all.”
“No it won’t either,” said Pop. “I’m staying as reporter.”
“All right. You’re staying as reporter then. It’s only two days.”
“And you’re going to give me assignments,” said Pop.
Caulborn smiled wearily, evidently thinking it best to cajole the old coot. “All right, here’s an article I clipped a couple months ago. Get a story on it.”
When Caulborn had fished up the magazine out of his rubble-covered desk he tossed it to Pop like a citizen paying a panhandler.
Pop wanted to throw it back, for he saw at a glance that it was merely a stick, a rehash of some speech made a long while ago by some physics society. But he had gained ground so far. He wouldn’t lose it. He backed out.
Muttering to himself he crossed to his own desk, wading through the rush and clamor of the city room. It was plain to him that he had to make the most of what he had. It was unlikely that he’d get another chance.
“I’ll show ’em,” he growled. “Call me a has-been. Well! Think I can’t make a story out of nothing, does he? Why, I’ll get such a story that he’ll have to keep me on. And promote me. And raise my pay. Throw me into the gutter, will they?”
He sat down in his chair and scanned the article. It began quite lucidly with the statement that Hannibal Pertwee had made this address before the assembled physicists of the country. Pop, growing cold the while, tried to wade through said address. When he came out at the end with a spinning head he saw that Hannibal Pertwee’s theories were not supported by anybody but Hannibal Pertwee. All other information, even to Pop, was so much polysyllabic nonsense. Something about transportation of freight. He gathered that much. Some new way to help civilization. But just how, the article did not tell—Pop, at least.
Suddenly Pop felt very old and very tired. At fifty-three he had ten thousand by-lines behind him. He had built the World-Journal to its present importance. He loved the paper and now it was going to hell in the hands of an incompetent, and they were letting him off at a station halfway between nowhere and anywhere. And the only way he had of stopping them was an impossible article by some crackbrain on the transportation of freight.
He sighed and, between two shaking hands, nursed an aching head.
II.
A pavement-pounding reporter is apt to find the turf trying—and so it was with Pop. Plodding through the dismal dusk of Jersey, he began to wish that he had never heard the name of Hannibal Pertwee. Only the urgency of his desire to keep going had brought him thus far along the lonely roads. Grimly, if weakly, he at last arrived at a gate to which a. Jerseyite had directed him.
With a moan of relief he leaned against a wire-mesh fence and breathed himself to normalcy. It wasn’t that he was getting old. Of course not! It was just that he should have worn more comfortable shoes.
He looked more observantly about him and became interested. Through this factory fence he could see a house, not much bigger than an architect’s model, built with exactness which would have been painful to a. more esthetic eye than Pop’s.
The fence itself next caught his interest. He fingered the steel-mesh with wonder. At the top the poles bent out to support three strands of savage-looking barbed wire. Pop stepped back and was instantly smitten by a sign which shouted:
3,000,000 VOLTS
Beware!
Pop felt a breeze chill him as he stared at his fingers. But they were still there and he was encouraged. Moving toward the gate he found other signs:
BEWARE OF THE LIONS!
Pop searched anxiously for them and, so doing, found a third:
AREA MINED!
And:
TRESPASSERS BURIED
FREE OF CHARGE!
Uncertain now, Pop again stared at the tiny house. It began to remind him of a picture he had seen of Arizona’s gas chamber.
But, setting his jaw to measure up to the threats around him, he sought the bell, avoiding the sign which said:
GAS TRAPS
And the one which roared:
DEATH RAYS
KEEP OUT!
He almost leaped out of his body when a voice before him growled: “What is your business?”
Pop stared. He backed up. He turned. Suspiciously he eyed the emptiness.
At last, rapidly, he said, “I want to see Hannibal Pertwee. I am a reporter from the New York World-Journal.”
There was a click and a. square of light glowed in a panel. For seconds nothing further happened and then, very slowly, the gate swung inward.
Boldly—outwardly, at least—Pop marched through. Behind him the gate clicked. He whirled. A little tongue of lightning went licking its chops around the latch.
It took Pop some time to permanently swallow his dinner. He glared around him but the strange change in the atmosphere soon registered upon his greedy senses.
Here the walk was only a foot wide, bordered by dwarf plants. What Pop had thought to be shrubbery was actually a forest of perfect trees, all less than a yard tall but with the proportions of giants. Here too were benches like doll furniture and a miniature fountain which tinkled in high key. Sundials, summerhouses, bridges and flowers—all were tiny, perfect specimens. Even the fish in the small ponds were nearly microscopic.
Pop approached the house warily as though it might bite. When he stood upon the porch, stooping a little to miss the roof, the door opened.
STANDING THERE was a man not five feet tall, whose face was a study of mildness and apology. His eyes were an indefinite blue and what remained of his hair was an indefinite gray. He was dressed in a swallow-tail coat and striped pants and wing collar, with a tiny diamond horseshoe in his tie. Nervously he peered at Pop.
“You are Mr. Brewhauer from the Scientific Investigator?”
“No. I’m from the New York World-Journal.”
“Ah.”
“I came,” said Pop, “to get a story on this lecture you handed out a couple months ago.”
“Ah.”
“If you could just give me a few facts, I should be very glad to give you a decent break.”
“Oh yes! Certainly. You must see my garden!”
“I’ve just seen it,” said Pop. “Isn’t it beautiful? Not a bit like any other garden you ever surveyed.”
“Not a bit.”
“Such wholesome originality and such gigantic trees.”
“Huh?”
“Why, over a thousand feet tall, some of them. Of course trees don’t ordinarily grow to a thousand feet. The tallest tree in the world is much less than that. Of course the Aldrich deep is 30,930, but then no trees grow in the ocean. There, now! Isn’t the garden remarkable? I’m so sorry to walk you all over the place this way, but T have recently given my cars to charity.”
“Hey,” said Pop. “Wait. We haven’t been anywhere.”
“No, indeed not. My garden is only a small portion of what I have yet to show you. Please come in.” Pop followed him into the house, almost knocking off his hat on the ceiling. The house was furnished in somewhat garish fashion and, here again, everything was less than half its normal size, even to the oil painti
ngs on the walls and the grand piano.
“Please be seated,” said Hannibal Pertwee.
Somehow Pop squeezed himself into a chair. There was a tingling sensation as though he was receiving a rather constant shock. But he paid it no heed. Determined to get a story, he casually got out his cigarette case and offered Hannibal a smoke.
The little man started to refuse and then noticed the case. “What an unusual design!”
“Yeah,” said Pop, and pressed the music button. “The Sidewalks of New York” tinkled through the room.
“Fascinating,” said Hannibal. “What delicate mechanism! You know, I’ve made several rather small things myself. Here is a copy of the Bible which I printed.” And in Pop’s hand he laid the merest speck of a book.
Pop peered at it and somehow managed to open it. Yes, each page appeared to be perfectly printed. There was a slight tingling which made him scratch his palm after he had handed the volume hack.
“And here is a car,” said Hannibal, “which I spent much time constructing. The engine is quite perfect.” And thereupon he took the inch-long object and poked into it with a. toothpick. There was a resultant pur.
“It runs,” said Pop, startled.
“Of course. It should get about a hundred thousand miles to the gallon. Therefore, if a car would make the trip and if it could carry enough gas, then it could go to the Moon. The Moon is only 238,857 miles from Earth, you know.” And he smiled confidently. He had forgotten about the car and it started up and ran off his hand. Pop made a valiant stab for it and missed. Hannibal picked it up and put it away.
“Now I must show you around,” said Hannibal. “Usually I start with the garden—”
“We’ve seen that,” said Pop.
“Seen what?”
“The garden.”
“Why,” said Hannibal, “I said nothing about a garden, did I? I wish to show you my trains.”