by Jerry
“Hey, you guys,” Dick Rivero said, and I couldn’t miss the excitement and impatience in his voice, even on the radio. “Seen any little polka-dotted men yet?”
“None.” I said.
“Any green cheese lying around?”
“All right,” I said. “You watch the gauges. We’ll take care or the local sightseeing. Your turn is coming.”
In perhaps ten minutes we were out of the dust fog altogether, standing on the floor of a snow-white lunar valley. It was completely silent, of course, as there was no air to transmit sound, and I have never seen anything so eerie or so lonely. The peaks that rose into the black-velvet sky were like molten bronze in the level sunlight. The stars were like tiny clusters of diamonds. Over the rim of the bronze mountains the earth shone so brightly I had to squint when I looked at it. North America was now in sunlight.
“It’s afternoon at Yankee Stadium,” Doctor Ferris said on the radio at my elbow. “Wonder how Mickey Mantle’s doing at bat?”
“Mantle should hit one here,” I said. “He’d probably drive it into lunar orbit.”
I heard a muffled exclamation—pain and irritation mixed—and looked quickly to see if Doctor Ferris had fallen. He had not. He was looking with concern at me.
I said. “Rivero—that you?”
“Yeah, dammit!” Dick Rivero’s voice snapped.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing—I just tore a little hole in my glove in the space lock.”
“Space lock!” I said, suddenly angry. “What the devil are you doing in the space lock?”
For a moment Rivero did not answer. Then his voice sounded sheepish, like a kid caught with his hand in the cooky jar. “It’s nothing, skipper. I just stuck my hand out to get a sample of this white dust. I’m back inside now,”
“You’re inside now,” I said. “And you are staying inside until we get back. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir!”
“We’ll be back in less than an hour.”
“Yes, sir!”
Doctor Ferris and I got down to business. We dug through the cushion of white dust and brought up some rock samples which looked like limestone. We stowed them in our back packs. We unstoppered our gas-collector bags and left them open while we checked lunar temperatures, both sun and shade. Earth scientists had been dose in their predictions. In the sun the thermometer registered one hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. We were in the twilight zone, near the dark half of the moon, and hence relatively cool. I was glad we had not landed in the glowing heart of the bright side. It might have been too hot to leave the ship. The shadows behind rocks were ink black and very cold; almost two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
Personally, my big moment came when Doctor Ferris took a color movie of me banging an American flag through the lunar crust, with the planet earth hanging beside me as a sort of incidental decoration. Too bad Columbus hadn’t been equipped with color cameras. He’d have had quite a laugh on the boys who were predicting he’d go over the brink of the flat world in a giant waterfall.
“I’ve got a feeling I have to hurry before the sun goes down,” Doctor Ferris said. “I keep forgetting the lunar day is fourteen earth days long.”
Then suddenly I heard Dick Rivero’s voice, “Skipper—this is Rivero. Do you read me?”
“Roger, Dick,” I said. “Go ahead,”
“You guys about through out there?”
“Pretty near. Why?”
“Hurry it up, will you? I—I don’t feel so good.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I took off my helmet and gloves. I felt stuffy, couldn’t seem to breathe right. Now—well—I feel like i might be going to throw up, and there’s a funny rash on my hands.”
“Hold tight, Dick,” I said. “We’re coming in! Right now!”
I didn’t even wait to fool with the gas collector. I began to run. I was scared. I realized now how close to the panic point we all were. We were living on the razor edge of death, and had been ever since we lifted off the pad at Cape Canaveral. We’d done a lot of kidding. We’d put up a good front. But the fear was in every one of us: We took it in and breathed it out with every breath we drew. One slip, one mistake, one miscalculation, that’s all it took on a space mission.
It took us fifteen terrible minutes to get back to the spaceship and another five to get through the space lock into the cabin. When I saw Dick Rivero, sprawled in his contour seat with his helmet off. I knew instantly that it was very bad. His face was bright red, as if he’d spent the day in the broiling sun. His eyes were already hollow, and they burned feverishly. I had on my space helmet and I could not hear his voice, but I could tell by his lips what he was saying. “Dust,” those lips whispered. “Dust—dust. . . .”
I saw the white stuff then. It was all over the cabin, as if somebody had broken open a sack of flour. Doctor Ferris and I were coated with it. Doctor Ferris pushed past me and lifted one of Dick’s hands from below the edge of the contour chair. I had to bite my lips to keep from yelling. That hand was horrible to look at. It was swollen and blackened like the paw of some animal. It looked as if it had been held in a raging fire.
I said, on my helmet radio, “Doc—what is it?”
“I don’t know,” Ferris replied, “Some anaerobic bacteria, possibly. The symptoms are like hemorrhagic fever. I saw it in Korea. Miserable stuff. Broke the blood vessels under the skin.”
“Is there an antidote?”
“I’ve got some serum that might help,” Doctor Ferris said. “There’s one way to find out. Try it.”
“The dust,” I said. “It’s all over the place.”
“Yeah,” Chuck Ferris said, “The place is a bit messy. But we have no choice, have we?” Then he did one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen a man do. He took off his space gloves and began hunting swiftly in his medical locker for his hypodermic and his serum.
I’m inbound now for earth. I was able to blast off alone. Dick Rivero couldn’t help because he was dead. The serum which had relieved hemorrhagic fever in Korea had done him no good at all. Doctor Ferris had given his own life for nothing. A few hours after we left the moon. Chuck’s hands got pink, got red, then blistered, and he knew that he, too. was doomed. On his helmet radio. Chuck told me about the bacteria, or virus, or whatever it was that filled the white dust. It must be almost impossible to kill, Chuck said, or it could never have survived the savage heat and bitter cold of the lunar crust. Obviously it attacked human tissue with frightening and lethal speed. Perhaps it killed animals, too, and plants—any living thing. If it reached the Earth——Chuck stared at me through his space helmet, “If you take it in,” he whispered, “you may turn our earth as white and barren as the moon.” Then he pulled the helmet off—I guess he didn’t want to die with his head in a bottle—and when I looked at his face I had to shut my eyes. . . .
I am the only living person in the X-15F now, I have been in radio contact with the earth for some time. I have explained the danger of the white dust. At first they suggested burning the X-15F immediately after landing. But while they talked, I looked out and saw the dust clinging to the ship in the vacuum of space. If I used reverse rockets to slow down and entered the earth’s atmosphere at a moderate speed, some of that white death might blow off and sift down on the green continents as the X-15F wheeled around in orbit, prior to landing.
The earth is growing fast now. It fills the sky. I have not fired my retrorockets.
I have not turned the X-15F around, so they could not reduce my speed. I am coming in nose first, and the Gulf of Mexico is dead ahead. I have removed the safety cover from the retrorocket firing switch, and now I press it firmly and feel my body sag heavily back in the contour chair as the rockets fire. They do not act as a brake. They increase my speed rapidly: twenty-six thousand miles an hour . . . twenty-eight thousand . . . thirty-three thousand. . . .
It will be quick. A sudden smear of meteor fire—then nothing. But I have beaten the de
adly stuff in the white dust of Luna. None of it—not an atom—will reach the planet earth. Now I am thinking of Hank, my son. I brace myself. I lean forward. I do not shut my eyes. . . .
THE END
SUPERIOR WEAPONS
Douglas & Dorothy Stapleton
This world was so much like the world his people had lost, Garth wondered if time had rolled back. But it hadn’t, of course. And his job was to learn what kind of weapons the inhabitants possessed, for his people dared not come in unless victory was assured . . .
GARTH HATED to retreat; it sickened him, physically—he could feel the nausea welling up in his throat. It was nothing connected with the sudden, violent take-off, the weightlessness of space flight; he was used to those. Years, almost a lifetime, of fleeing through space, hiding among the stars, had inured him to that particular type of space nausea, so that
now he scarcely felt it. This was different; this was the hollow, raw taste of defeat—of defeat without fighting. Retreat. Rout, utter and undignified, without even striking a blow. That his hand had been restrained on specific orders didn’t make defeat and rout any easier.
He glanced at Roth, placidly chewing a synthetic concentrate. The man—boy, really—didn’t seem perturbed. Garth sent out a sensitive probe, touching Roth’s mind to see if the nonchalance was a pose. The young often did that, to hide their real feelings. No, it wasn’t a pose. Roth really did consider this “just another dud,” probably without even knowing that a “dud” was an ineffective weapon, one that had failed. Garth sighed; that’s what he was, himself—a weapon that had failed. And Roth didn’t care. That hurt.
GARTH PULLED in his probe, trying to rationalize his own anger at Roth, trying to explain Roth to himself. Of course, the boy hadn’t known their own beautiful green and blue world, their world of growing things and fragrant odors and wide expanse of blue, blue water. Roth was a spacer, had been born, had grown to manhood aboard the spaceship; he had no memories of their home world. Sometimes Garth himself wasn’t sure he really remembered. That lost world was too much like a legend, too perfect. A gentle, warming sun, a blue sky, fields that were green turning to gold, harvest . . . Too wonderful to have been real. Yet he could remember running barefoot across deep grass and the tangy taste of fruit, sun-warmed and new-picked from the tree.
That was a long time ago, before the vast and cataclysmic wars that had left his beloved world charred, blackened, uninhabitable—before the few remaining thousand of his people had seized the spaceships and taken off, to spend a lifetime hiding among the stars, dodging, fearing. Yet seeking. Always seeking a new world, a green and blue world with land that produced trees and grain and fruit and blue, blue water—meant as much for a boy’s swimming as for the abundance of fish; of refreshing coolness against the skin as for all the myriad products that came from the sea.
Garth shivered, his skin crawling. Swimming! Imagine having enough water in which to immerse his whole body! Surely that had been dream-stuff. He hadn’t seen that much water since—well, since the Great War. Roth had never known it. He probably enjoyed the electronic spray that kept his body clean. Probably even enjoyed the synthetic he chewed. They were producing better flavors these days; almost real. Fruits that tasted sun-warmed and . . . But they didn’t spurt juice lavishly between your teeth, drown your tongue in delicious tartness. Garth swallowed the dryness of his throat, gagging a little.
ROTH BEAMED at him.
“Better get your report ready. Or want me to do it?”
Garth had to restrain his mind from lashing back. He damped it down, merely beaming, “I’ll get to it”, and settled deeper into his misery.
Not even sounds any more. Telepathy! The cosmic rays of outer space had done something to him, to his people, so that they were now telepaths. They no longer needed sound; some of them didn’t even miss it. Particularly those like Roth, born to telepathy, born without the knowledge of a caressing voice, the babbling of a brook, the rustle of wind through the orchard, or the mighty, resounding, terrifying crash of thunder—or the worst sound of all, the shuddering vibrations, too loud for real sound, of a distant nuclear bomb. Vibrations went from your feet up through your head and expanded inside your skull and . . . Garth stopped himself. He musn’t remember those things.
The weapons that had destroyed his world were prodigious. Bombs that could annihilate a city; beams that could sear through metal and stone; ultrasonic waves that could wrack a man with violent, momentary torture before he quivered into pulp. And they had done it to each other. No race of monsters from outer space had blasted and charred their world, so that it was no longer habitable. They had done it to themselves, to each other. No wonder they were afraid of weapons.
NO WONDER his orders had been to learn first of the weapons that the beings—if any—of this alien world might have. The possibilities of the world his people already knew. They had studied it from the world’s one satellite, hiding their ships behind it and setting up telescopic, electronic and spectroscopic observation posts. And the tests had been positive—alluringly positive, yearningly positive. Abundant water—great massive seas of it—and huge areas of land with a changing color that argued vegetation; cloud formations drifting above that could only mean abundant rainfall. Spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere had indicated ample oxygen. Maybe even a trifle rich. With traces of nitrogen and a few inert gases. Nothing that could be construed as lethal. An ideal world. A world so like their own that, except for its location in this corner of the galaxy, might be their own world, restored.
This alien world had intelligent beings, too. They had known that before he and Roth had started this scouting expedition. Electronic analysis of emanations from the alien world had indicated some sort of controlled electrical radiation, judged to be a form of communication. The controlled pattern of lights, clustered in groups, had indicated communities of some sort. Reasoning had told Garth that beings who gathered in communities, possessed some kind of radio communication, and had lights with a detectable electric origin, must at least have some order of intelligence. And he, and the leaders on the three remaining spaceships, had argued reasonably that, if these creatures lived in communal fashion, they must have weapons—weapons of defense against lower orders of beings, if nothing else. It had been Garth’s mission to learn how potent these weapons were.
Now, sickeningly, he knew.
BUT MORE than that, he had seen—if only briefly—a world he hadn’t been too sure existed outside his imagination-distorted memory. In the years before there had been other worlds investigated, only to find them too young in the evolutionary scale, crust still bubbling with procreative fires; worlds too old and tired and worn out, dead or abandoned; worlds too turbulent with violent atmosphere, worlds that looked peaceful and were lethal with poisonous air. But this world . . .
Even before sliding from behind the world’s satellite Garth had set up the shield his people had learned to use, at deadly cost, to divert cosmic rays. It also bent the visible light, so that his ship would be only a shimmering line in the air where the bent rays quivered. No more visible than the wavering light above an old road, something seen more in the imagination than the eye. That had been their protection as they entered the atmosphere of this alien world.
Yet it had not been alien; to Garth it had been home. After the years of insulated silence in the spaceship, the raw, naked noise had been a deafening cacaphony that at first staggered him until he sorted it into remembered patterns—lowing of animals in the field; the rustle of sweet wind in trees; the murmur of a brook; the shattering staccato of some mechanical contrivance moving across the brown field. And his eyes had filled with color, blinding after the dull, eternal gray of metal walls, great masses of brilliant green trees spotted with ripe red fruit, blue-green row on row of some cultivated vegetation, a golden wave of color splashed across a ripening field.
And smells! Garth had trembled with the ecstasy of them. The sweet wind itself and its burden of magic odors
, heady and potent, of fruits and flowers, the deep, satisfying smell of rich, newly-turned loam, the slightly brackish, ammoniated odor from some nearby animals. The violence of memory rather than the assault on his nostrils almost doubled him up.
* * *
ROTH WAS in. The sounds beat at him; the colors shocked him; the violent swirl of odors sickened him. He beamed feebly at Garth and fainted.
* * *
Garth had been furious with him—then. Now he was thankful for the delay Roth had caused. Otherwise he, Garth, in that remembered ecstasy of home, might have rushed out onto that alien world back there and revealed himself—and wrought incredible havoc among his own people. Taking care of Roth, restoring him, getting him slowly accustomed to, if not happy with, the alien sounds and sights and smells—for they were truly alien to spaceship-born Roth—had given Garth time to reflect on his mission and put up the guards that had proved so necessary.
The visibility shield had remained up, so that the two of them had been safe sitting in the ship beside some moderately tall, round structure that emanated waves of decaying vegetable smell. Some sort of storage place, Garth had figured, for surplus food supplies. Behind the shield, Garth had sent out a probe, touching the being out in the field, astride some mechanical contrivance, and thrilled at the contact.
* * *
THIS LIFE was bipedal, dextrous, and smugly satisfied that it was the dominant life of its world. Human. A true human—not like some of the deceptively humanoid shapes he had encountered on methane worlds. And his probe brought him thoughts he could recognize—almost somnolent calculation of planting and growth cycle, a deep appreciation of the producing fields around, a slowly growing hunger—a hunger for physical things that could be chewed and tasted. For an instant, Garth savored with the alien being the taste of a succulent fruit pie and switched away before a wave of homesickness shattered his reason.