by Jimmy Guieu
“Exactly,” the biologist agreed. “When Dr. Kariven hit the Selenite two times, it didn’t try to understand the meaning but simply repeated the five taps. Because for this Selenite five taps means the possibility of absorbing the metal! We’ve just witnessed a kind of reverse Conditioned Reflex or Pavlov Reflex. The question was: if, for example, you get in the habit of ringing a bell every time you give a piece of meat to a dog or cat, after a few days if you ring the bell will the cat or dog come to get its snack. The sound of the bell will condition the animal’s instinctive reflex.
“Here we’re dealing with a more evolved being than a dog or cat. Having associated the five taps with the fact that it’ll get its metal food, the Selenite, on its own, hit the rod to ask for said food. Moreover, if a dog or cat gifted with the Pavlov Reflex was able or knew how to act intelligently following this reflex, there’s no doubt that at the first signs of hunger it would go—if it could—and ring the bell to call its master for some steak.”
Turning to Commander Taylor, fascinated, he concluded, “I have to study these creatures’ physiology, Commander. Could you organize a little hunting party? I’ll need living Selenites. I’m going to start to dissect this one right now.”
“OK, Brown. My men will fish you up three or four of these filthy beasts.”
As he was walking away, Kariven started thinking aloud. “It may be stupid, Brown, but I feel a little bad about the idea that you want to kill this Selenite. Even though fundamentally different from us homo sapiens, doesn’t it represent the thinking form of life on this star? Would you find it normal, for example, if some monstrous (in our eyes), alien being kidnapped Earthlings to study their physiology in some crazy laboratory from some distant planet of the Galaxy?”
The biologist barely shrugged. “This Selenite, unquestionably, has some intelligence. But if we want to establish a permanent base on the Moon, isn’t it indispensable that we know about our ‘neighbors’? I really don’t think I’m committing a crime by killing this creature. Besides, it’s necessary. The lives of future colonists might depend on it.”
“Certainly,” Kariven gave in. “It’s necessary. Man is a wolf to man,” he quoted, “but also to all other forms of life.”
Brown stood up, smiling, and put the box containing the Selenite under his arm. “Forget you scruples, Kariven. I wouldn’t act like this if we landed on a planet full of intelligent beings showing a semblance of technological evolution. There’s nothing of the sort here. At best we could compare these Selenites to troglodytes able to reason in an elementary fashion.”
“Anthropomorphism, Brown,” Kariven shook his head. “A pity for the Selenite. Science sometimes has very unpleasant demands.” He gave him a friendly pat on his air tanks and added, “Don’t worry, I won’t think of you as a murderer.”
The two men separated with smiles. While the biologist headed for the rocket to shut himself into the lab, Kariven and the other astronauts went in the direction of the crater to help hunt down three or four Selenites with Taylor’s men.
When they got up on the summit they took out their binoculars and watched the three American technicians laying out as bait a chrome steel ax at the entrance of one of the Selenite “dwellings”.
From all the holes at the same time a constant flood of brown shells poured into the crater and circled the astronauts in no time. They deftly swung their bags and imprisoned two Selenites each. But this time the circle of lunar creatures closed in fast on them. Some even tried to crawl up their boots.
The three men started kicking right and left to shake off the Selenites that were already glued to their boots made of a special hybrid of plastic, rubber and metal. The astronauts, now on the defense because of this attack—maybe it was just the Selenites’ simple curiosity?—started jumping around without trying to avoid stomping the brown shells. In three bounds they were safe, 30 feet up on the slope of the crater. Down below, under the chalky dust, the Selenites they had trampled did not seem to be affected at all by the punishment. They were twisting around, thrusting out their stalks in all directions and (probably) not sensing any unusual presence. They all went squirming back to their sub-lunar dwellings.
At the top of the summit the three astronauts were examined carefully by Kariven and Professor Harrington. The soles and the legs of their spacesuits showed the pink blotches.
Commander Taylor furrowed his brow and whistled softly. “From now on there has to be at least three of us together down in the crater and armed with a fluoride torch! If one of you gets dizzy down there with the Selenites, the nasty creatures will eat through your spacesuits in no time. You can see here what happened to the poor guy who passed out when attacked by these monsters.” Then he called out, “Lieutenant Clark!”
The lieutenant came running and held out the tube containing the flags of the USA and the United Nations.
The Commander took the tube and radioed the biologist in the ship’s lab. “Dr. Brown, we’re going to proceed with taking possession of this rock. I don’t want to drag you away from your urgent work. You can watch the ceremony through the camera set up on the crater. If you zoom in, it’ll be just like you were there with us.”
“Got it, Commander. I’ll put the Selenite under lock and key for the moment and turn on the camera.”
Commander Taylor unscrewed the lid of the plastic tube and took out the two flags. All the astronauts, bundled up in the spacesuits, lined up at attention. The superior officer unrolled the two rectangles made up special cloth (one the stars and stripes and the other the emblem of the UN) and then turning to face the space explorers, his voice betraying his emotion, he declared:
“By virtue of the powers invested in me, in the name of the United States of America and of the United Nations, I declare the Moon under control of the United Nations of Earth. This ceremony is not intended for exclusive possession. Earth’s satellite belongs to no single nation. The problem of legal ownership comes under the jurisdiction of the United Nations, who will decide what laws and government will rule it. When the day comes, which I hope will be soon, when all peoples of Earth will be united and look upon each other as brothers, every country will be able to contribute to the construction of one or more giant, international bases on the Moon. The representatives of the unified Terrestrial Nations will sit in perfect equality in these permanent bases.”
The Commander planted the two flags in a fissure in the crater, filled it in with rocks and moon dust, then stepped back. Standing stiffly he raised his gloved hand up to his globular helmet and saluted.
The emblems of Earth, in the absence of an atmosphere, stood still, frozen, as if petrified in their folds until the end of time. No breeze would ever flutter them. They would stay there, motionless, mute witnesses to the invincible courage of a handful of Earthly heroes.
Commander Taylor lowered his arm and turned back to his men, “Tonight, my friends, we’ll use the capsules of concentrated champagne for the first time on the Moon.”
Suddenly, the big smiles that had just started to form on the astronauts’ faces were turned into looks of astonishment. Inside their helmets the stuttering voice of Dr. Brown, the biologist, was fading in and out.
“Commander! Commander… The Selenite… can live in our atmosphere. It… it attacked me… when I tried to close the box…I… I thought it would die breathing the air inside the ship…”
“Dr. Brown!” the Commander snapped. “What’s happening? What’s wrong? Dr. Brown!”
The biologist’s voice was fading out. Without waiting for orders Kariven, Lieutenant Clark and some other men scrambled down the outer side of the crater, leaping dangerously high and landing hard.
“The Selenite,” Brown panted, “has absorbed the plastic box. It’s…”
A muffled groan reached the worried astronauts and then the voice resumed, barely audible, “The mineral salts… it feeds on them… and the ones… in humans! Be careful… para…”
“Dr. Brown! Dr. Brown!” the
Commander howled into his mic. “What’s going on?”
No response came back.
The Commander, Professor Harrington and Dr. Streiler ran after the others toward the rocket. When they reached it and entered the decompression chamber, they were sweating bullets. But when they stormed into the ship’s laboratory, they froze in horror.
Kariven was holding a smoking torch in his right hand. Brown was lying on the metal floor, his mouth twisted in pain, his eyes bulging, already empty. He was dead. In his right hand he was still holding the microphone up to his lips.
The Selenite was no longer the small, 8-inch creature they had seen before. Now it was over five feet in diameter and covered the legs, belly and part of the biologist’s chest. Kariven’s fluoride torch had carved a deep groove in the monster’s shell. The bitter smell of quicklime floating in the cabin tickled their throats.
Seeing the Commander’s look of dismay Kariven explained, “The Selenite is dead. The flame from the torch was no match for it.”
“How could it get so big in so short a time?”
“I believe it first fed by absorbing the bottom of the plastic box. Then it must have sucked in the molecules of oxygen, hydrogen and helium in the artificial air after escaping through the corroded box. While Brown was talking with the Commander over the radio or else turning on the camera, the Selenite must have been growing and growing until it attacked him.”
“But Brown was a big guy,” the superior officer objected. “He could have defended himself, pushed it back, run away…”
Kariven shook his head sadly, “No, Commander. Remember our poor friend’s last words. He didn’t finish, only uttered a couple of syllables. Para. That’s what explains why he couldn’t defend himself. Para… he was trying to say paralyzed! In some way that we don’t know, probably electro-chemical, the monster paralyzed Teddy Brown. The paralysis must have worked fast, not instantaneous since he had time to call us. He fell backwards and sent his warning as the first symptoms of catatonia were taking effect.
“His scientific mind and admirable energy compelled him to give us useful information about the dangers of these Selenites rather than just calling out for help. Thus, he revealed that not only can these creatures live in our atmosphere but they can attack a man and feed off his mineral salts… just look at his corpse.”
The Selenite had indeed partly destroyed (by absorption) the biologist’s clothes and was stuck to his skin.
Kariven kicked the monster off and it fell to the side of the corpse. Brown’s legs, belly and chest were veined with weird marks, not bleeding but pinkish, almost shiny. The skin looked saggy on the skeleton, which looked like it had been squeezed hard. The Selenite had absorbed a good portion of the body’s mineral salts through some capillary suction.
Professor Harrington and Streiler were squatting down to examine the corpse of their friend. The skin felt like leather under their fingers.
Streiler grabbed a pyrex stir from the wall of the lab above a table cluttered with instruments and chemical equipment. With this foot-long rod he prodded the monster’s body and dug it into the wound caused by the burning tongue of flame. “Wound” is not the right word because it was more of a groove like a flame would make on a steel plate. Its edges were jagged. Through the gash the inside of the Selenite’s body looked like a bunch of thin metal leaves, shimmering from steel-blue to dark red and all the colors and hues of the spectrum.
“The Selenite,” Streiler observed, “seems to go into rigor mortis like earth bodies. But here rigidity isn’t a relative expression. I’m sure that in a very short time this metallophage monster will turn into a block of metal, composed of many different elements no doubt but mostly this shiny white element we can see in the gash. The Selenite’s body is a kind of collection of different metallic zones separated from one another by these leaves or layers of silvery metal.”
Using some wire cutters he struggled to snap off a piece of the strange, shiny, white metal but it took a while.
“Damn! This stuff is hard. It’s like nickel-chrome.”
He put it in a petri dish, mixed it with different chemicals and dropped some acids on it, all to no effect. Astounded by this, he plunged it into a nitric-hydrochloric solution and the metal bubbled. Kariven, after watching Streiler’s analysis very carefully, cried out, “Why, it’s platinum!”
The engineer nodded and waved it off, “Theoretically and until we’ve done a thorough analysis to evaluate its specific weight, we can consider the Selenites as made of 70% pure platinum.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Platinum,” Professor Harrington echoed while Streiler and Kariven performed a more detailed study of the Selenite. “It’s fantastic! If the lunar craters are full of these metallophage creatures chiefly made up of platinum, this satellite will be of keen interest from the industrial point of view. The troglodyte holes should be overflowing with incalculable riches.”
Commander Taylor, with his helmet tilted onto his back, pinched the bridge of his nose and massaged it. Looking puzzled he said, “This discovery, when it’s made public, will cause a real panic on Wall Street and with all the brokers on Earth. Just imagine the drop in platinum prices and the subsequent crash of mining company stocks. What a mess! And yet, the mining industry will have to exploit these lunar deposits to the full… if we can really call these creatures ‘minerals’!
“On the other hand, this discovery will make the executives of the Corporation for the Exploitation of Minerals and Metals from the Moon18 jump with joy, along with the other private organizations created recently in view of a future mineral exploitation of our satellite.”
“Provided that the relevant nations let private companies do the research and work for their own profit,” Professor Harrington noted quite rightly. “Besides, we’re far from science fiction stories where the first astronauts go wandering off to Phoebe on board rocket ships built secretly on private property thanks to the fabulous wealth of a balding, rich professor. Reality—as we all know—is completely different.
“Building Daisy and Mickey, the remote-controlled ship that we’re expecting tomorrow, cost the trifling sum of ten billion dollars!19 Astronautics is the exclusive responsibility of governments and not some fat cat, genius or not.”
Streiler and Kariven stopped their examination. Kariven informed them, “I believe we’ve found some particularities of these creatures. Alive they’re semi-rigid, their metallic structure being malleable thanks to the instability of their molecular make-up. Their metallic elements in a paste-like state allows them to interact between the different layers of their body, which gives them life. But in a dead Selenite, these interactions stop and hence the solidification. Its constitutive elements stop combining and in a way are purified by the suppression of the interactions.”
“Exactly,” Streiler confirmed. “When dead, these creatures become a kind of mass formed, it seems, of palladium, rhodium, osmium, copper, gold and iron with faint traces of uranium to act as the natural cement. Every layer of these various elements is separated by a thick layer of platinum. All together, as Kariven just said, it’s malleable, semi-rigid, thanks to a continual molecular motion that we have to admit is rather baffling. All their internal elements are, after death, chemically pure. While alive there’s a constant exchange of energy between the layers of metal by a kind of endosmosis, the very foundation of their life.”
“I hope these creatures don’t leave their crater,” Kariven said. “In any case, just to be careful, we should never let any useful material off the base or the ship. These monsters can corrode and digest them in no time.”
“From now on,” Commander Taylor added, “the ship and the base will be guarded by men armed with torches. And when we go out exploring we’ll have to be armed as well.”
Really for the first time the astronauts felt the dread of their total isolation. Alone almost 240,000 miles from their planetary fatherland, they had to struggle not to fall into what the psychologist and p
sychotechnicians at Randolph Field called “Space Fever” or “the astronauts’ blues.” They all looked from the Earth, apparently motionless in the lunar sky, to the two flags that no gust of wind was stirring at the top of the nearby crater.
While they were lost in their dark thoughts, staring at the star and stripes and the emblem of the UN, a strange phenomenon occurred. In the distance, on the dark side of the Moon, beyond the terminator line, a bright light flashed, quick as lightning.
This time Lieutenant Clark was not the only one to see a light on the Moon. The Commander and Kariven had also witnessed the brief illumination.
“What can that be?”
“You saw it, too, Kariven?” Clark asked excitedly, staring at the horizon.
“Maybe you were right, Clark, and you really did see a light in the Aristarchus crater. But the one we just saw didn’t come from the crater; it came from the area that’s veiled in eternal darkness.”
“Do you think the Selenites are able to send light signals?” Clark suggested.
“I don’t think these beings are so evolved. Their stage of evolution is much more primitive than ours. Maybe in the troglodyte dwellings they have some ‘great minds’ capable of organizing them into social groups, nations as it were, but to credit them with technological progress is going a long way.”
“What we just saw,” Clark explained, “is different from what I saw before. In the Aristarchus crater it looked more like a ray of purple light. Oh, it was brief, like a vision, but a rough image that I can’t forget. However, just now it was more of a flash, an explosion. Should we imagine another form of intelligent life on the Moon, higher than what we’ve discovered here?”
Professor Harrington advised, “Let’s not fall into anthropomorphism in speaking about life evolving on the Moon. The two bright lights could, after all, be just natural effects from a volcano, maybe still active on our satellite, or simply a big meteor crashing, which could have kicked up a bunch of chalky dust that looked to us like bright flashes in the sunrays.”