A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Consider my own case, for instance. But a short time previous I had completely lost my nerve because I feared that we were to be buried alive inside our flyer. My fears turned out to be groundless. And now I was facing a far more serious danger and I wasn’t scared in the least. The fact was that I actually joked about my predicament.

  I was still dropping through space when I heard in my earphones the voice of Professor Banning calling my name.

  “Are you hurt? Are you hurt?” he kept repeating in anxious tones.

  “Not yet!” I yelled into my microphone as I plunged downward into the abyss. “I’m O.K. so far!”

  I felt a sharp jolt as the nether portion of my space suit bumped against the steeply sloping walls of the canyon, and again I called out, “All right so far.”

  As I bounced down, now hitting the cliff, now hurtling through space, I clutched desperately at the precipitous rocks with my mechanical hands. Once I caught hold of something, but the force of my descent jerked my grip loose. However, this served to slacken my speed sufficiently so that I was able to hang to the next projection that came in my path. Finally I brought up with a thud and managed to clamber up upon an overhanging ledge.

  You can understand that this feat was all the more difficult because it was performed in Stygian darkness. The instant I had passed over the edge of the canyon the light had been blotted out as suddenly and as completely as if the sun had been totally eclipsed. Considering the fact that the plain I had just left was bathed in dazzling sunshine, it seemed inconceivable that I could be so quickly plunged into darkness so dense that I literally could not see my mechanical fist when I held it in front of my helmet.

  THE explanation was simple enough. Without any air, water vapor, or dust to diffuse the light of the sun there was a total absence of illumination in the shadow of the cliff. On the moon there was no light except in those places which were exposed to the direct rays of the sun, or to light reflected from some illuminated surface.

  Again I heard Professor Banning’s voice calling to me, “Are you all right?”

  “I’m still O.K.,” I radioed to him. “Right now I’m perched on a narrow ledge of rock somewhere between the top and the bottom of this God-forsaken hole.”

  “Stay right where you are!” he said. “We’ll see what we can do about getting you out.”

  “Don’t worry!” was my response. “I’ll stay right where I am until you rescue me. You can absolutely depend on that.”

  I had hardly uttered these words before the ledge on which I was standing crumbled beneath me, and again I resumed my downward journey. Fortunately I didn’t fall far enough to acquire much speed before I landed on a second ledge which felt larger and more secure than the other one.

  As I crouched on that narrow projection shrouded in pitchy blackness I could sympathize thoroughly with Homer’s fabled Cimmerians, whom he described as living in perpetual darkness. It was lucky for me that I had the assistance of a man as ingenious and as resourceful as Professor Banning. Simple and effective as his plan of rescue proved to be, few other men would have thought of it so quickly.

  By way of encouragement and instruction he gave me this explanation via radio: “I have my pocket flashlight fastened to an electric cable. I am now going to lower this light over the edge of the cleft somewhere near the place where I saw you disappear. Watch for the light and let me know if I have it headed in the right direction.”

  I gazed upward and soon saw a tiny point of moving light. “I see it!” I cried. “But you’ll miss me by several feet if you keep on lowering it from where you are.”

  “What direction shall I move it?” he asked.

  “A little to the—” I was going to name one of the four points of the compass but when I tried to figure out my relative position with respect to the light, I found myself hopelessly confused. So I foolishly shouted, “Move it over this way.”

  The Professor must have understood my confusion for he moved the light and then said, “Did I move it closer that time?”

  “Sure!” I yelled into my radio transmitter. “But you didn’t move it far enough.”

  “How is that?” he said after he had altered his position.

  “That’s too far,” I told him. “Back this way about six inches. There! Now it’s directly overhead. Lower away!”

  Closer and closer came that blessed speck of light until I could reach out and grasp the wire in my mechanical fist.

  “I have hold of the cable,” I called out. “Now what shall I do?”

  “Wrap it around your body and fasten it securely, but in such a way that you can slip it off quickly.”

  “What are you going to do? Haul me out?”

  “Why, certainly.”

  “Do you think this wire will hold the weight of my space suit with me inside it?”

  “It ought to. If it doesn’t, we’ll have to figure out some other way.”

  “Figure out some other way!” I yelled. “Don’t you realize that if you start pulling me out and this wire breaks there won’t be enough of me left to do any figuring over?”

  “But I’m telling you that the wire is plenty strong enough to bear your weight. Can’t you take my word for that? At any rate, it’s the strongest material we have on hand—so it’s either the wire or nothing.”

  “All right,” I consented. “But isn’t there another danger? Suppose the rubbing of the cable against the edge of the rocks up there wears it so much that it breaks.”

  “I’ve thought of a way to avoid that,” the Professor said. “I’ll have Berglin pull you out with the aid of the Amundsen.”

  At the time he made this statement I couldn’t see what difference it would make in the wear on the cable whether I was pulled out by a person or a machine, but when I heard Banning’s instructions to Berglin, I understood what he was driving at.

  “I’m going to fasten the wire to the undercarriage of the flyer,” I heard Banning say. “I want you to rise as slowly as you can. There are several hundred feet of slack, but you’ll have to be awfully careful so that you do not bring the wire taut with a jerk.”

  This sounded like a risky thing to attempt but, thanks to Berglin’s superb skill in manipulating the space flyer, it was preformed without mishap. Looking upward I saw the Amundsen circling around, gaining altitude by inches until, with an almost imperceptible tug, I was lifted gently into space. There I dangled, like a fish on the end of a line, while the flyer continued to climb.

  With a suddenness that blinded me, my head popped from the Cimmerian darkness into the dazzling glare of the sunlight. I had sense enough to close my eyes and then open them very gradually.

  When I was clear of the chasm, Berglin slowly descended until my feet were only a few inches from the ground. Then he dived in a steep spiral, thus relieving the tension on the cable. In this manner he deposited _me softly and safely on the sunlit plain.

  A moment later I had disengaged myself from the cable. By this time my eyes had become accustomed enough to the bright light so that I was able to make out the form of the Professor in his space suit a short distance away. I also saw the Amundsen as Berglin set it down nearby.

  Hastening to the beneficent protection of the space ship, I quickly entered the airlock and a few moments later was inside the cabin. This was rather inconsiderate of me, since it left the elderly professor the task of coiling the wire which had been used in my rescue. I divested myself of my cumbersome garment and took several deep breaths of air which seemed to taste much fresher than the atmosphere provided by the space suit.

  When I glanced out of the window and saw Professor Banning laboring along with the heavy coil of wire, I felt very much ashamed and I hastened to apologize to him as soon as he appeared inside the Amundsen.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he said generously. “I understand your mental reactions perfectly. After the experience you had I could hardly expect you to lose any time in getting to a place which you consider safer.”

 
CHAPTER XII

  Our First Night On the Moon

  WHEN I had sufficiently recovered from the effects of my harrowing experience, I remarked to the Professor, “That sure was some gully I got myself into. It must have taken millions of years for a cleft like that to be carved out.”

  “On the contrary,” Banning corrected me. “It is more than likely that your little gully, as you call it, was carved out in a few seconds.”

  “I don’t see how that could be possible.”

  “It wouldn’t be, if it were done by water. But I think we can be absolutely certain that water had nothing to do with the making of that cleft. To be sure there might have been a considerable amount of moisture on the moon at some far distant time, but it would have been frozen solid throughout the lunar night, and would have been in the form of vapor during the periods of terrific heat when the sunlight was streaming down on this part of the moon. Under the circumstances, erosion such as takes place on the earth could hardly dig out such a tremendous gash as that.

  “I’m afraid that—even after your experience in exploring the inside of yonder cleft, you have no conception of its magnitude. It is twenty miles wide and a hundred and eighty-seven miles long.”

  “How in the world—or rather in the moon—can you say it is exactly so long and so wide?” I asked in amazement. “I don’t remember seeing you measure it or even making an estimate of its size.”

  “The measuring was done a long time ago by selenographers who viewed the moon from the earth through their telescopes. In some respects we know more about the geography of the moon than we do about certain portions of the earth. It is a simple problem of triangulation to measure the length and width of any object on the moon. And, thanks to the clearness of the shadows, we can also measure the height of mountains and the depth of most of the valleys with equal exactness without leaving the earth.”

  “But you said a moment ago that the valleys on the moon were not formed by water action, but were carved out in a few seconds. I suppose you mean that the moon must have been hit by another object.”

  “Precisely. Some authorities think it was caused by a comet hitting the moon a glancing blow and plowing right through the surface. Other selenographers attribute it to a similar phenomenon caused by a meteor. I am inclined to hold to the meteor theory myself.”

  “Well, whatever it was that caused that gorge to be formed, I’ve seen all of it I care to, thank you,” was my closing comment.

  “What’s our next move, Professor?” Berglin seemed impatient to keep going.

  “I think the next thing for us to do is to get some rest. Do you realize, boys, that it is over thirty hours since we left the earth and none of us has had a wink of sleep?”

  It was true. What with the excitement occasioned by our incomparable adventures, combined with the brilliant sunlight and the slowness of the sun’s passage across the sky, we had not realized how much time was elapsing.

  The idea of taking a rest was decidedly welcome to me. Though I had not felt the least bit tired before, once the thought had been suggested to me I found myself overcome with profound weariness.

  “Shall we turn in right here?” I asked.

  “If you want to,” the Professor replied. “But I think we will find it easier to sleep if we move over to the night section of the moon.”

  “What!” I cried. “Do you want us all to commit suicide?”

  “What do you mean by suicide?”

  “That’s exactly what we would be doing if we tried to land the flyer in the dark. Believe me, I’ve been in the moon’s darkness and I’m telling you that it’s so dark down there that in comparison with it a lump of coal would look like a snowball.”

  “But you were in a shaded place. My idea was to land in the open but on a portion of the moon where the sun isn’t shining.”

  “Well, if it’s as dark as that in the shadow of a cliff, in the daytime, how much darker will it be at night?”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of light to land by. You seem to have forgotten our old friend the earth will give us earthlight.”

  Instinctively I gazed up at the sky. Hanging there motionless—almost exactly in the zenith—was good old Mother Earth. Though we were still exposed to the brilliant light of the sun, the sky was jet black and was studded with myriads of stars. They seemed to be far more numerous and to shine with much greater brilliancy than when viewed from the earth in their most brilliant display.

  Our mother planet resembled the moon—but what a moon! Its diameter was four times as large as that of luna as seen from the earth. Our position was such that the earth was in what might be called its last quarter. Only half of it was visible and the remaining portion of its disc was like a huge semi-circular hole cut out of the star-studded background of the sable sky.

  The ice caps surrounding the north and south poles were very clearly visible as they reflected the light of the sun with sparkling brilliancy. It was rather difficult to distinguish the conformation of the continents because of the mantle of clouds that hung about the orb, but between patches of the clouds I was able to make out the outlines of the British Isles and of the Scandinavian Peninsula.

  Professor Banning went on with his explanation: “When we get over to the dark side of the moon we’ll find the country bathed in earthlight. The earth, of course, has its phases, just like the moon. When the earth is full, it reflects to the moon about thirteen times as much light as the full moon sends to the earth. Even with only half the earth illuminated as it is now, we will find that it is about six times as light as it is on a clear night on earth when the full moon is directly overhead.”

  As usual, Professor Banning’s predictions were fulfilled with amazing exactness. With Berglin at the controls we hopped off by daylight and within a short time we had flown into the region of lunar night.

  If the scenery of the moon was magnificent in the sunlight’s brilliant glare, it was incomparably beautiful in the soft, bluish light of the earth. There was an abundance of illumination and we could easily distinguish even the small objects below us.

  WITHOUT the slightest difficulty, Berglin set the Amundsen down in the center of the ring mountain, Eratosthenes. It was not until some time later that we learned the reason why Professor Banning had selected this particular spot for our camping ground on our first night on the moon.

  Before retiring, Professor Banning took a reading of the thermometer which was especially designed for registering the temperature of the space outside the Amundsen. It was minus 137 degrees Centigrade. Reduced to the Fahrenheit scale this represented a temperature of 215 degrees below zero.

  For purposes of comparison it may be of interest to mention here that subsequent reading made on the moon ranged from 240 degrees below zero Fahrenheit just after dawn to 218 degrees Fahrenheit at the lunar noon. It will be noted that this maximum temperature is six degrees higher than the boiling point of water at sea level on the earth. In the airless space surrounding the moon, the small amount of water there would change almost instantly from ice to vapor.

  In spite of the hollow walls of the Amundsen and the heavy insulation between them, the bitter cold of the lunar night soon began to make itself felt within the flyer and we were glad to make use of our electric heating equipment.

  Without divesting ourselves of our clothing, we rolled ourselves in our blankets and lay down on our pneumatic mattresses. In a few minutes the labored breathing of my two companions told me that they had quickly fallen asleep. I, too, was physically fatigued, but my mind insisted on staying awake. This was probably due in large measure to the effects of my accident. Through a window in our portable home I could see the earth, hanging there in space like half a gigantic melon. It filled me with the most excruciating pangs of lonesomeness and home-sickness to behold my native planet away out there across that awful stretch of empty space.

  It wasn’t long, however, before my bodily weariness triumphed over my mental alertness. The subtle glue, o
f which Stevenson speaks, slipped beneath my eyelids and I fell into a sound slumber.

  I awoke to gaze in open-mouthed astonishment on one of the most magnificent spectacles that a human being has ever beheld.

  Sunrise on the moon!

  To one who has not seen this incomparable sight with his own eyes no verbal description can convey a clear idea of the splendor of the lunar dawn.

  Long before the uppermost edge of the sun’s disc came into view, its advent was heralded by gorgeously colored shafts of living flame which shot up for enormous distances into the sable and diamond mystery of the star-studded sky. This wonderful phenomenon was caused by the corona of the sun which is visible to observers on earth only at rare moments during a total eclipse of the sun.

  Just before the edge of the sun itself appeared, a number of smaller protuberances, fantastic in shape and brilliant pink in color, shot above the horizon.

  Between us and these astonishing manifestations of cosmic illumination lay the barren plain, the distant walls of our ring mountain, and the other grotesque features of the lunar landscape, wrapped in the weird spell of the clear blue earthlight.

  It was several hours before the entire circumference of the sun was visible to us, yet so wonderful and so diversified was the show put on for our benefit that none of us seemed to tire of looking at it.

  I took enough time to tear my attention away from the eastern horizon and to gaze up at the zenith, where I saw my old friend the earth in exactly the same position as I had observed her the previous evening. At first this astonished me, but a moment’s reflection told me that, since the moon always keeps the same face turned toward its mother planet, there can be very little change in the position of the earth as seen from any particular spot on the moon. Such changes as do occur are very slight and caused by the libration or tilting of the satellite in its journey around the earth.