by Jimmy Guieu
“That’s OK for what Clark saw in the Aristarchus crater,” Kariven admitted, “but for what we just saw it doesn’t hold water because it happened beyond the terminator line and therefore on the side of the Moon not lit by the Sun.”
“Yes, of course, what you say is logical,” Harrington gave in. “The best thing would be to go and check it out after Mickey gets here.”
If our friends had decided to go to the dark side of the Moon—where Kariven, Clark and the Commander had seen a bright flash—no doubt they would have been dumbstruck by the sight to be seen.
Three miles inside the shadow zone of the Moon a huge interplanetary rocket—not so different from Daisy—had just landed and spit out a last blast of ignition fuel that had kicked up a cloud of chalky dust. Everyone knows that without an atmosphere ordinary combustion is impossible. However, for spaceships combustion is entirely possible in empty space because a combustive is mixed with the liquid fuel to allow it to burn. A quick thrust of the reactors while braking increases the exhaust coming out of the rear pipes and makes the glow inside the reactors partially visible. That was what was seen, briefly, 70 miles away by the terrestrial astronauts.
The mysterious rocket, over 300 feet tall and 80 feet wide at the base, had barely set down when a hatch opened in the hull, almost 230 feet high. A metal ladder came out of the side and from the decompression chamber eleven figures wearing spacesuits descended the ladder one by one.
The first of these figures was holding a long, gray tube in its glove that looked like three steel claws. On each of the spacesuits’ chests was a small projector that shot a beam of light 25 feet in front of them.
The man—because these figures did resemble human beings—who was clutching the tube in his claw-glove spoke to his companions who formed a circle around him.
“In spite of the unfortunate accident to our astronavigraph, which made us land almost 200 miles from the chosen crater, this day…”
He paused to look around and realized that instead of day they were in darkness lit only by the twinkling stars. He cleared his throat and continued.
“This day, perhaps not the appropriate word but still, is a great day for our country.”
He popped open the metal tube and pulled out a flag that had in the center the red star of the USSR!
“In the name of the free people of the Soviet Union and by virtue of the powers thereby, I take possession of the Moon, the satellite of Earth and a new republic for our Union! I am full of emotion and pride in planting our flag in the lunar ground. Let’s be thankful to our comrade Professor Obyktchev, the wise astronomer, member of the Moscow Academy, who pronounced these admirable words two years ago: The planets in the immense universe are burning with impatience for a Russian Christopher Columbus to be the first to come and conquer them.20
“Let’s also keep in mind the memorable speech of the President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences that pretty much at the same time declared: The Russians are almost ready to undertake the liberation of the Moon in case it might be occupied by some fascist regime of unknown origin.21
“Luckily this issue won’t arise because we now have the rights of Primo Occupanti and we will assert it if necessary.”
Zavkom, a colonel in the soviet army and Chief of the expedition, after this short speech ordered, “We’ll build a temporary base at the foot of the rocket and when the astronavigraph is fixed we’ll go set up in a crater on the bright side of the Moon. We should only have to stay here a few days…”
At 8 o’clock the alarm echoed through the Bubble Base. Commander Taylor had been ready since seven in the morning. The first night in the airtight, reinforced plastic base had been hell for him and his mood showed it!
Moreover, the tragic death of biologist Teddy Brown had affected all the members of the expedition. After washing in the tiny shower and having breakfast, the nine men drew up the work schedule for the day.
Professor Harrington portioned out the most urgent tasks to his team of handpicked technicians. “We’re going to devote this day to the study of the Moon’s geology and then some astronomical observations that can’t be done at the same time because we’ll be using explosives to create shock waves through the ground to determine the underlying components. In the meantime four men will make a reconnaissance trip in a radius of six miles and will stay in constant radio contact with the base. You won’t split up under any circumstances and… you won’t go inside those craters inhabited by Selenites. Your mission will be to pinpoint the craters with troglodytes and mark them on the selenographic map22. The reconnaissance team will carry individual rations of food and probably won’t be back for at least 12 hours.”
With the schedule set, the different specialists put on their spacesuits, prepared their instruments and one by one left the Bubble Base through the decompression tube after arming themselves with fluoride torches in case they met any Selenites.
Just when they were ready climb up the ladder to leave the gulch that sheltered the base, a shout of surprise made them turn around.
“Who left the base last night?” Commander Taylor looked at each of them.
The astronauts also looked at one another but in bewilderment.
“Come on, fess up!” the Commander barked, furious at seeing his formal orders broken. “Look at the moon dust. Don’t you see those footprints that aren’t the same as the faded ones we left last night before entering the base? Two men walked around the Bubble Base and their boots left prints leading to the ladder. Obviously, after making a tour of the base they climbed back out of the crevasse.”
“But, Commander,” Professor Harrington spoke up, “Look at your men! Do they look like they’re lying? Why would they ‘sneak out’, I ask you! Do you think they’ve got any chance of chasing skirts here? Furthermore, the Selenites don’t wear boots as far as I know.”
“Yeah,” the Commander said arrogantly. “If you’re seeing the same prints as I do in the dust, it’s because we’re victims of a hallucination.”
Kariven bent down to examine the footprints more carefully. Fine grains of chalky dust had trickled over the edges, obscuring and deforming them in part.
“The wisest recourse, instead of suspecting the members of the expedition,” Kariven proposed, “would be to climb up the ladder. We’ll see whether or not these prints belong to us.”
The Commander grumbled something inaudible into his mic and was the first to grab the rungs. Climbing out of the crevasse one by one they saw the footprints in the ground leading away from the ladder.
“Don’t mess up the prints,” the Commander barked, “and follow me. I give you my word that if I find out who snuck out last night they’ll be in my report!”
Behind him Clark and Kariven looked at each other and shrugged. Obviously the Commander was making a reckless judgment.
In the white dust that no atmospheric flurry had disturbed, the footprints went in two directions: one marking the path followed by two men leading up to the crevasse and the other leading away. The prints left around the rocket were mixed with the astronauts who had trampled the ground the night before and dug a grave for the biologist. But between these groups of superimposed prints there were clearly places where the mysterious lunar visitors had strolled.
“Come and see this!” Lieutenant Clark shouted. “The prints are going off behind the rocket.”
Everyone joined him and followed the trail that ended abruptly 50 yards away.
“Well, well! This is… unbelievable,” Commander Taylor said. “Where’d they go? They couldn’t just disappear! Footprints don’t disappear like that on flat ground covered with a thick layer of dust!”
The three or four last footprints were literally swept away as if a strong fan had blown over the dust in which they had formed.
“Unless we’re victims of another collective hallucination,” Kariven remarked ironically, “we have to admit that these prints end here. Our two men evaporated mysteriously.”
“If we
were in a desert on Earth,” Streiler said, “even though mysterious it wouldn’t be so crazy because a helicopter could very well have picked them up by throwing down a rope ladder. But here on this dead planet inhabited only by little round creatures, the deed is truly inexplicable.”
“I’ll go back to my first idea,” Lieutenant Clark offered, “We’ve got no proof that another life form doesn’t exist on the…”
“A life form wearing spacesuits whose boots leave footprints?” the Commander broke in, sounding grumpier and grumpier. “You’re crazy, Lieutenant. If there is another life form on the Moon, I can’t believe that it would need spacesuits to survive here. They would have adapted, like the Selenites, to this airless, waterless wasteland. The Selenites we’ve seen are probably the last representatives of a species that once had an atmosphere and stretches of water and even some kind of vegetation to live with. The last surviving species underwent a transformation, either a slow adaptation or a sudden mutation to absorb the mineral elements of the lunar soil in order to hold out… I see where I went wrong. These prints do not belong to two members of our group, but they don’t belong to any pseudo-evolved Moonmen either. Therefore, they will remain unexplained for the time being.”
“Unless,” Kariven thought aloud, “we’re not the only foreigners on the Moon.”
Commander Taylor scowled inside his helmet. “You mean… The Russians? You really think they’ve reached the same level as us in astronautics?”
Kariven shrugged and looked like he was hiding something. “It’s just a simple hypothesis without naming any specific people or nation…”
“I’m aware,” Taylor recognized, “that dangerous leaks have come out of our atomic physics labs over the past six years. Information about the A-bomb and H-bomb have slipped through the Iron Curtain but concerning Operation Aphrodite I’m sure that it’s the most protected secret that’s ever been.”
“Don’t underestimate the technical abilities of Russian scientists,” Professor Harrington warned. “For at least a decade they’ve worked hard on an artificial satellite, the Red Star, and on plans for an atomic spaceship able to reach astounding speeds23. How can we say that their work hasn’t been accomplished?”
“So, you think they might have already set up on the Moon before we got here?”
“Not at all. How would I know? Maybe they flew over this area while we were sleeping. Seeing no sign of life they would have figured that we were holed up inside the rocket and so come to make an inspection of our camp. Following in our footsteps to find the location of our sub-lunar base was easy as pie.”
“Sure, that sounds logical,” Streiler admitted. “But then we’d have to suppose, to explain the sudden disappearance of their footprints, that the… Russians were waiting, hovering a few feet off the ground, in some sort of miniature rocket that took them away when their visit was over. We’d also have to admit that this miniature rocket could hover in place without any exhaust waste from its reactors, which would have wiped away not three or four prints but a whole stretch of lunar dust for 25 to 30 feet around. Our own reconnaissance rockets, called Space Taxis, are incapable of such a feat. Only a gravito-magnetic booster could explain the absence of exhaust gas. And it would surprise me tremendously that a nation on Earth today could perfect such propulsion!”
“I agree with Streiler,” Professor Harrington said. “If the Russians have set up a base on the Moon and if they’re the ones who came last night to… visit’ us, we have to admit that we can’t explain how they disappeared…”
Around the same time, Colonel Zavkom, Chief of the Russian astronauts, was spitting out a string of curses through the microphone in his spacesuit. The ten members of the expedition around him, 50 yards from their rocket, were staring at the ground in angry confusion. In the chalky dust lit by the beams from their chests, footprints had disappeared inexplicably on the flat surface.
“Damnation!” Zavkom thundered, lifting the two, heavy, ringed arms of his spacesuit to the sky. “Whoever came spying on us during the night certainly can’t levitate!”
A tall, burly guy whose round helmet stood above his comrades, risked, “Couldn’t it be… uh… tracks left by… lunar creatures… beings adapted to this dreadful place?”
“Come on, Dr. Petrov, you’re a great physicist and an excellent rocket pilot but in cosmobiology allow me to doubt your competence. No, there is no life form possible on the Moon. Our spectrum analyses are clear, and we’ve had proof since we got here: no trace of water or atmosphere. Therefore, no life form can exist.
“The only logical theory is to admit that the Americans,” Colonel Zavkom scowled in rage, “have reached the Moon! I, however, am sure that there was no leak in our Kaluga plants24 where our spaceship was built. American agents could not have stolen or micro-filmed our plans…”
The pilot/physicist Petrov was about to say something about the fast, parallel development of American technology, but he changed his mind, preferring not to express an opinion that the Colonel might judge “deviant.”
“The wisest course,” Zavkom concluded, “since we’ve been spied on, is to finish up the repairs to the astronavigraph quickly and go set up in the crater on the bright side as soon as possible. We’ll put an observation post on the nose of the rocket and should be ready to retaliate for any attack.” He mumbled some curses before continuing, “What audacity! To come and spy on us on our own territory! We should have been more serious about the radio message intercepted just before we left Earth. The pauses in the communication really did come from the fact that one of the two transmitters was on the Moon.”
Kariven and Streiler stood speechless at the door of the rocket’s laboratory, not daring to step up through the airtight hatch. They called the other astronauts right away.
“What’s happening?” Commander Taylor asked, raising his helmet at the lab entrance.
“The mysterious visitors who left their footprints behind have entered the rocket,” Kariven said. “All of us, when we come out of the airlock to enter the decompression chamber, are in the habit of carefully wiping our boots against the rolling suction brushes. The dust on our boots is sucked up and destroyed or neutralized by the hard x-rays so they don’t carry God-knows-what micro-organisms or dangerous spores into the ship.
“Now, look at these tracks on the floor of the lab. You’ll find the same ones in every room of the ship. Kurt and I just checked. The tail section of the rocket holding the pumps and atomic generator was particularly interesting to our careless visitors. They examined all the machines very carefully, seeing that traces of dust were also on the generator’s protective plates… one of which they took off to get a good look at the insides. The plate was put back on but the bolts aren’t in the same holes as before. Everything’s in order and nothing’s missing but the ‘strangers’ have inspected our ship from nose to tailpipe. And I have to admit that they did so with unusual mastery and extraordinary skill. We’re not dealing with novices here, if I may say so.”
“This is disturbing,” Professor Harrington mumbled.
“Disturbing? You mean infuriating!” Commander Taylor railed. “To know that we’re being watched, spied on, visited, every nook and cranny inspected and we can’t discover who’s doing this… this act deserving a court martial… it’s more than disturbing… it’s an omen of terrible danger!”
Professor Harrington tried to calm him down, “It’s all very mysterious but it doesn’t mean we’re in ‘terrible danger’, Commander.”
“Maybe. Still, everyone arm yourself with a Colt and six clips. The four men going on reconnaissance will also be taking two Thomson machine guns. The Colts and machine guns have been specially designed to function at extreme temperatures, from absolute zero to 200C, and all parts have been tested for the temperature differences on the Moon. Moreover, we’re setting up a guard tower and installing a heavy machine gun at the top of Daisy. I’ll put the watchtower platform up there.”
“Come now, Comma
nder,” the pacifist Professor exclaimed, “aren’t you going a little overboard?”
“Yeah!” Taylor growled. “If I listened to you, Professor, during our voyage in time and our stay in Shâmali, I wouldn’t have given anyone weapons… and we would’ve ended up in some cyclops monster’s belly.”25
CHAPTER FIVE
Around 7:30 a.m. (Earth time) the four men who had gone on reconnaissance returned to the American base and brought back from their exploration a wealth of mineral samples, three reels of film and a number of highly important observations.
“We visited seven craters,” Haller, the mineralogist, summed up, “and we did some quick digs on the plains or ‘seas’ of the Moon, which produced some weird fossils.”
“Fossils?” Kariven was very interested. “Plant or animal?”
“Both. Apparently when the Moon had an atmosphere—hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years ago—it had only rudimentary fauna and flora. Few trees, mostly shrubs, and some lakes and swamps rather than great oceans. As for the ‘superior’ fauna, it was mainly a kind of monster with tentacles, the size of sheep, resembling lizard, frog and jellyfish or maybe coral all at the same time. We found huge piles of these gruesome creatures fossilized into gray slabs. No doubt they lived in colonies like coral or sea anemones.
“In all likelihood these tentacled animals evolved over the ages or mutated into the metallophage Selenites. And as for them, we’ve become convinced that they inhabit all the big and medium-sized craters. If you figure that the only visible side of the Moon has at least 30,000 craters, you can imagine the average ‘population’! We counted around 10 to 15 thousand creatures in each crater less than a mile in diameter. It’s completely relative and without any scientific value but we made the estimation by launching a little vibrating rocket. As we figured the vibrations on the crater floor attracted the Selenites who came rushing out of their lairs to check it out… So, the Selenite population for this side of the Moon is in the hundreds of millions.”