by Jerry
Kost nodded; Bozemann picked up another machine pistol and loaded it, and they went to the airlock and down the ladder to the ground, which was scorched in a great circle by the blast that eased them down. Beyond this charred circle the ground was covered with a sort of pinkish-gray giant moss as high as a man’s knees. Here and there great leafy plants grew out of it, bearing strawberrylike fruits as big as automobiles. They had landed on a height of land within a sort of huge cup; at its edges, falling away to a great distance except where the woods they had first seen thrust out toward them, the country rose up covered with the great trees and was finally lost, cut off by the mist. There was a high, faintly tinted thin overcast which hid the sky, and the air, scented with a strawberry fragrance, was so winy and light that it almost seemed to sparkle in the nose.
Looking over the lovely wide view, filling his lungs with the wonderful air, Bozemann stood bemused by the dreaming calm beauty of this world and wished that he could bring his girl here and slay forever. He was well aware that idyls don’t last, but he would be very willing to chance starting over here rather than fill out his life on the crammed and hurried and frightened earth.
Moncrief had been carefully looking over the whole wide circle of their view with binoculars and had seen nothing; not an animal, no! an indication of habitation. He turned to Bozemann. “Dreaming again, Bozy?” he asked. “There’s nothing here but vegetation that I can see, and it’s time to go. Try the walkie-talkie from a hundred yards out or so.”
“We can look as we walk,” Kost murmured on the other side of him. “I, too, would like to stay in this place.”
They started out through the moss, which was springy but firm enough to make walking not too difficult and which had a faint, unusual fragrance of its own. Moncrief watched them go. At a hundred yards or so they stopped and signaled that they were trying the radio, but he couldn’t hear anything; when he tried to talk to them Bozemann threw his hands into the air to indicate that it was useless, and they went on. He watched them stop at one of the plants and try the fruit; they ate more, and he knew by their gestures to him that it was delicious.
It took them quite a while to cover the five or six hundred yards to the trees; and after they had reached them and Kost had gone in, he watched Bozemann move calmly up and down at the wood’s edge for a while and went into the rocket to get his camera and another pistol.
When he came out again Bozemann wasn’t there; he had gone. A feeling of irritation took hold of Moncrief. He had planned to wait a few minutes, walk casually across the meadow to Bozemann, cut him down with a surprise burst from the machine pistol and dispose of his body under the moss. Neither Bozemann nor Kost could be left alive on the planet; it would be too awkward if they survived until the next rocket landed. Kost, when he came out of the trees again, would be no problem; the problem was where Bozemann had gone.
Moncrief’s irritation, fed by his nervous distaste over what he intended to do, began to mount. He coldly controlled it by telling himself that Bozemann would soon reappear, but time began to draw out and there was no sign of him. An hour went by, and at the end of it Moncrief had grown puzzled and apprehensive. He couldn’t decide what to do. Their agreement had been so simple that neither of them could have misunderstood it; Bozemann had stood in the open, and if any sort of trouble had appeared he would have come back or fired a burst with the pistol. He had his dreamy moments, but even when he was having them his awareness was always on a hair trigger and his reflexes were extraordinarily fast; Moncrief had been in enough tight spots with him to be completely confident about that. If there was something intangible and malign in this place, an influence unknown to man, a thought that had power to reach out and pluck a man out of sight——
Moncrief shuddered and cursed and steadied himself; he realized that the lovely world about him had not changed except in his mind, and he brought his mind back to sanity. If anything had got hold of them it would have got hold of him too; anything, he thought suddenly, except the fruit they had eaten and he had not. Perhaps it had contained a poison slow enough so that it had not felled Bozemann until he had returned to the rocket, and Bozemann was lying doubled up on the moss now where he couldn’t see him. There was no other answer, or Bozemann would have signaled. He raised the binoculars and studied the woods. He couldn’t see very far into them; they were shadowed and leafy and there was undergrowth; but nothing moved in it.
Then he recalled that he had set a two-hour limit. Perhaps, he thought, he should wait that long. It could be that Kost had found something he wanted help with not very far in and had called Bozemann to give him a hand. But wouldn’t Bozemann have waited for him to come out of the rocket and indicated what he was going to do? It wasn’t like Bozemann to act against the agreement.
Moncrief was a steady man—in any mundane circumstance too sardonic and cynical to be upset—but the circumstances weren’t mundane. He was alone and very far from home, in a world completely unknown and unfathomed, and he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t blast off at once and return to report that he had been on a lovely, empty world with mist on the hills into which two men had vanished and that he hadn’t investigated; he couldn’t go off and leave them. How long should he wait? Should he leave the rocket and cross the meadow to see if Bozemann was lying on the moss? It would be a much better solution if he was; but what if he wasn’t?
He had so far kept a light bold on his mind, but in his dilemma the terror that lies in the unknown crept in upon him. He held off with great difficulty the feeling that there was—something—in the great towering woods, watching him. The hair on his neck stirred, and he realized that his breathing had become more rapid. It had the effect of filling him with a sudden, consuming rage.
He started across the field toward the spot where he had last seen Bozemann. After a few steps he began to trot. He had gone about fifty yards when a gray shape emerged from the woods, and then another. From the right and the left others came out, suddenly appearing. Some were white, like laboratory mice, and some were piebald. They were mice, and for a moment his startled mind, confused by the great size of the trees, didn’t realize that they were as big as dinosaurs.
As he turned to run, however, his mind became cool and practical again and corrected their scale—and he realized their size. He saw by a snatched glance over his shoulder as he ran that they were all making for him at great speed and that it would require half an hour at least to prepare the jets to warm and fire and that surely would not be enough; for the ruinous gift that he and his grandfather in their ignorance had given this planet had so increased in size through mutations and the growth rules of the place that it—they—wouldn’t be long held off by the rocket’s thin shell.
He panted up the ladder and touched the switch to close the airlock door and ran over to the switch that started the jets warming and touched that. He had just got himself braced into the corner where the radio was and switched it on and started to speak into it when the first creature struck. The rocket quivered and great claws scratched upon it, and then there were increasing shocks and clawings as they swarmed over it and overbalanced it and knocked it down, and then their teeth went to work on it.
The two men monitoring the rocket’s channel leaped to their feet and stood aghast as Moncrief’s voice came in over the speaker, across empty space, desperately fast against a shattering metallic clamor that filled the radio room . . . world of a dream, do not try to reach it . . . grandfather . . . they were in too much of a hurry, they didn’t . . . His voice ended in a thunderous crash and a roar of shrill and blood-curdling squealing, and then even the carrier wave went dead.
The two men stood staring at each other, white-faced in the sudden silence.
THE END
A MAN FOR THE MOON
Leland Webb
the trick was to find a guy who wanted to get back to earth
“TO THE MOON?” I SAID. I felt the Earth move out from under me and settle on my shoulders. It was
heavy.
“To the Moon,” Marco Garda said. His voice was thick with disappointment. “Congratulations, Abner.”
Johnny Ingraham exploded. “To the bloody Moon!” he shouted. “Abner, my boy, my beamish boy, you’ll be in all the history books!”
But I sat and stared bleakly across the desk at Old Hard Nose Hanrahan. Navy Regs make it plain that an admiral can’t possibly talk bilge to a lieutenant commander, but he was blowing through a paper bugle.
“To the Moon, Mr. Evans,” he said. He slapped the foot high stack of manila envelopes, all marked top secret, with a slender, bony hand. “The Screaming Mimi has been ready for two years. It took us almost a year to pick three men, you, Garcia and Ingraham. We’ve spent over a year, watching, weighing, measuring, studying the three of you. But it was not until this morning that we picked our man. You kept us waiting a long time, Mr. Evans.”
“Sir, I feel very earthy,” I said. “I think I always have. If I could choose I would choose not to go. But I suppose that makes no difference?”
He shook his head. “The Navy is filled with men who would jump at the chance to go, Mr. Evans,” he said. “But a daredevil would never make it. Flying the Mimi there is only half of it; the man who takes her there has got to bring her back. This is a new kind of beachhead and it takes another kind of man. Quiet, steady, no dash, no flash. A man, Mr. Evans, who may not want to go, but who damned well will want to get back.”
He stood up and we scrambled to our feet. He turned his back on us and walked to the window.
“Final briefing will be in one hour,” he said. “We feel that it is best for you not to have too much time to think. We also feel, Mr. Evans, that for security reasons, it is best to keep you under close guard. Garcia and Ingraham will be responsible to me for your safety and for the Navy’s security.”
He turned and faced us. The friendliness was gone from his face, and he was Old Hard Nose again. “It’s in the Navy tradition to be first,” he said. “Sail us to the Moon, mister. And then sail us back.”
Before he dismissed us, I spoke one more time. “I presume I will be permitted to call my wife?”
“You may not,” he said. “Mrs. Evans, I am sure, has accustomed herself to your absence from home, and this will simply Ire one more time.”
“Very well, sir,” I said. And thanks, I thought, for God knows I have no idea of how to call a wife and tell her that I am off for the Moon.
We left Old Hard Nose, who had returned to staring out his window. At the entrance to the Administration Building, I stopped and looked at the telephone booths.
“Gentlemen and fellow officers,” I said. “I have things to say to my wife that can be of no possible interest to officers and gentlemen.”
They both shook their heads. We walked on out of the building and cut across the quadrangle. The sun was hellish bright and everything seemed more real, more actual, than usual. Along the way I saw a bird on the lower limb of a mimosa tree. He was a small, ordinary brown fellow and so still I had to look twice to be sure he wasn’t plastic. He was not singing and I nodded to him in appreciation of his tact.
Marco and Johnny also held their tongues. The three of us had been together for two years, putting the Mimi through her paces, and in two years you learn when a man wants nothing from you hut silence. And because it was me, and not them, I was in a sullen, senseless rage, as if somehow they had connived against me.
If you were to say to Marco Garcia, “Take the Screaming Mimi to the Moon, and blow it up,” he would have looked at you out of unblinking, sloe-black eyes, and said, “When do I leave?”
And if you were to say to Johnny Ingraham, “Kid, take this damned crate and head for the Moon,” he would let out a squall of laughter you could have heard for a mile. Johnny never objected to a joke simply because he was the victim of it.
And neither of them was married to Della. Johnny had never gotten around to marrying, and Marco was tied to a dyed-in-the-wool, pluperfect bitch. Neither one of them knew what it was like to have Della walk up to him and say “I love you,” in her special way of saying it, as though it was something she had invented just for you.
When we reached the Senior BOQ, I was in a cold sweat. There was a buzzing confusion in my ears. If I had been asked right then and there if Lincoln had been shot or run to death, I couldn’t have answered. At the door to their room I turned and said, “I don’t care what you men do, so long as I don’t see you or hear you.”
Marco nodded, and Johnny said, “OK, Ab, but please don’t close the door.”
I went and lay down on the bunk. I made myself stop thinking about Della. I thought about the Moon. In less than sixty minutes, I would have my final briefing, and then they would seal me into the Screaming Mimi. The time element was sound. If you are going to do it, it’s a good idea not to have much time to think about it.
But the more I thought of it, the less I thought of it. Unless science is wrong, and instead of rock and rubble the Moon was a big green cheese, highly nutritious and an effective cure for coughs and colds and tightness around the chest, it was no good to anybody.
Not even for romance, especially not for romance. The first real date I had with Della, we parked the car out on Dame’s Point. There was no moon and the inside of the car was a dark and cozy cave. Inside of fifteen minutes matters had progressed to where no further progress could be made—not without a marriage license. And on our honeymoon, not only was the Moon away on a seventy-two-hour pass, but the rain beat softly on the roof, the lovingest sound a newlywed couple ever heard.
The Moon and Della, then Della and the Moon, my mind swung from one to the other, and there was no way out. There are only two things I know to do about a problem—solve it or take a snooze and forget it. There was no solution to this one, so I closed my eyes and began the long, sweet dive into the great big nothing where there are no problems.
And I heard somebody somewhere say, clearly and distinctly, “Friend, remember Peralonzo Niño.”
“I don’t see how in hell I can,” I said. “How can I remember somebody I never heard of?”
I opened my eyes. The room was much dimmer—a rain cloud obscuring the sun, I figured. Marco or Johnny was sitting in the easy chair by the window, and I started to say “I told you to stay the hell out of here.” and then I saw the beard and knew it wasn’t either of them.
He spoke before I did. “I am Peralonzo Niño,” he said.
“By golly, you certainly are,” I said. I saw no reason to doubt him. He was a small, spare fellow, with eyes as sad as a jilted spaniel.
He leaned forward. “Today we sail,” he said. “We sail on an ocean of nothing, toward nothing, on the word of a fool whose arithmetic is poor beyond belief.”
“What are you talking about, buddy?” I said. “And how in hell did you get past the guards?”
He shrugged and spread his hands. “We sail on the hour,” he said. “On the hour, I kiss Mercedes farewell, and already she is big with child. If I could choose I would choose not to go, but I am not given the choice. My mind was troubled and I went to sleep and I heard a voice say, ‘Think of Abner Evans,’ and I woke up.”
I raised up on one elbow. “What do you do, Peralonzo, when you’re working?” I asked and knew the answer before he told me.
“I am Peralonzo Niño of Palos,” he said with great dignity. “And against my will and better judgment, I am the pilot of the Santa Maria.”
“Well, hell, buddy,” I said. “I used to have an old bat of a history teacher, Miss Dunstable, and she used to yap about how brave and absolutely fearless you guys were to sail those little beat-up cockleshells across an unknown ocean.”
He spat. “Miss Dunstable, then, is a bigger fool than Colón. And the Santa Maria is no cockleshell, but the finest ship afloat. But I am not brave. I am a sailor, and this ocean is beyond my knowledge and I am afraid I will never return to Mercedes, who is my life, my soul.”
I started in to tell him that he had no
problem, that voyage across the Atlantic was a big success, but stopped.
“Peralonzo, buddy, I’m sorry but I don’t know,” I said. “I was just in the middle third of my class at John Gorrie Junior High, and I’ve forgotten nine tenths of the little bit I learned.”
I was ashamed. He was a nice guy, fouled up with History with a capital H, just like I was, and I couldn’t help him any more than he could help me. I knew that Columbus had made it across the Atlantic and back, but for all I knew Peralonzo’s bones were buried on San Salvador or on the bottom of the ocean.
So I did the only thing I could do. I told him where I was going. I told him to help him, to show him that compared to my voyage, his was just nothing, just nowhere at all. When I had finished he nodded his head.
“We stew in the same pot,” he said. “But you have the advantage. You know where you are going and what you will encounter. And Hanrahan’s arithmetic is better.”
“Well, hell, it’s no lead-pipe cinch,” I said, but I couldn’t argue with this guy. “You’re right, Peralonzo, it’s the same damned mess.”
“Because there is Della,” he said, and yawned. “Señor, if you return, kiss her for me, and call her Mercedes.”
“And if you return, give Mercedes a smooch, and call her Della,” I said. The yawn was contagious. “So long, Peralonzo, and good luck, kid.”
From a long way off, I heard him sigh and say, “Vaya con Dios, señor.”
I was not sorry to go back to sleep. Peralonzo was a good egg, I enjoyed talking to him, and I wondered how he made out back there in 1492. But everything was getting fuzzy and blurry and I let it go.
Then Della said, “Why don’t you bring me a bunch of flowers from the Moon? You know I like flowers.”
“Della, there ain’t any damned flowers on the Moon,” I said. “It’s just a bunch of rock and rubble and green cheese.”