Wanderers of Time

by John Wyndham

  But I did not know Luna then. I did not know to the full that desperation with which life strives and clings….

  We made first for the North-East Quadrant, and sank to a gentle landing on the glittering, metallic dust which makes the crater of Aristarchus the brightest spot on the face of the Moon.

  This was to be a preliminary trip. Our object was to survey the ground for future operations rather than make them ourselves. A number of sites were to be examined and reported upon, with a view to deciding which would be the most profitable to excavate. Aristarchus held little of interest for us, save the almost obliterated remains of a small settlement upon the northern side.

  The details of our trip are of little interest here, so I merely record that we moved next, unprofitably, to the Mare Crisium, and thence across the equator to Tycho. Next, Clavius, greatest of all the craters, provided quantities of material, and showed indisputably that a great civilisation had once flourished in what is now only a vast bowl of sand and rock, a hundred and forty miles in diameter. Thus we came at last to the Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity….

  Who named this immense oval plain? I cannot remember, but I do know that he saw it only through a telescope, two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles away. He did not see it as we did—a huge sterile stretch, grey-floored and gloomy. Had he been able to stand upon one of the tortured mountains at its brink and look out across that sombre desolation of sand, he would have called it, not the Sea of Serenity, but the Sea of Foreboding….

  We sailed slowly across to the North-West. Every member of the expedition was at the windows, scanning the featureless floor for any sign the ancient Lunarians might have left.

  Until now we had felt no uneasiness. All the Moon is bare, but the harshness of its vistas had not played upon our nerves; it was only what we had expected and could scarcely affect us, but now the monotony of this great, dry sea-bed seemed to impress us all in greater or lesser degree. Unromantic scientists though we were, we felt a misgiving which none of us was willing to put into words.

  And then, less than twenty miles from the far side of the sea, the steady throbbing of our rockets was interrupted. The firing tubes began to stutter uncertainly. I was with Captain Toft when the chief engineer rang through and reported that it would be necessary to descend for repairs.

  The hasty glance which Toft gave through the control-dome windows told me that he had conceived the same distaste for the locality as had the rest of us. He decided swiftly to make for the cliffs now looming ahead at the sea’s edge. There could be no better landing surface than the level, grey sand beneath us, but he preferred to stop near its confines. With some anxiety, he inquired the extent of the failure, but was told that this could not be ascertained while in flight.

  The Scintilla continued to forge lamely ahead, gradually sinking. She took the sand at length some two hundred yards from those high, perpendicular cliffs which once had stood like the ramparts of giants against a beating sea.

  The Captain left the dome to interview the engineer, and I made my way to the central saloon. A deal of chatter greeted me as I opened the door. My colleagues were peering excitedly at the cliffs; all signs of their depression had vanished. Robson, the leader of the scientific side of the expedition, drew me forward and thrust a pair of field-glasses into my hands.

  ‘Look at those cliffs, man. Just look at them! ’

  I focused eagerly. The sand in the immediate foreground was dotted with rocks of all sizes which had fallen from the heights, and beyond them was a line of darkness which hid the cliff-face in deep shadow. The meagre, reflected light was just enough to show regular markings of some kind. I fancied that I could make out the carved figure of a man.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ cried Robson, as he turned and dashed from the room.

  A moment later, a searchlight was playing a flood of brilliance on to a scene which caused us to gasp incredulously. The surface of the granite-like rock, to the height of some seventy or eighty feet, was covered with carvings in high relief —an involved, ingenious ordering of the figures of men, animals, and conventional forms.

  The first astonished silence was succeeded by a babel of excited talk. Everyone spoke at once, and no one listened. And no wonder; compared to this revelation, our earlier discoveries dwindled to mere nothings. It seemed that we might have found the lunar Book of the Dead carved upon this mighty stone page.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CORPSES OF THE MOON

  Robson came back and started to tow me in the direction of the space-suit lockers. He continued to babble excitedly as he lifted the clumsy garments from their hooks. The suits were essential, for although, contrary to expectation, it had been found that some air still existed upon the Moon, and in the deepest craters was almost breathable during the lunar day, yet the rarity of such as lingered in the beds of the vanished seas compelled artificial aid.

  As we left the ship and drew near the cliffs, I think there was no doubt in any of our minds that the design was picture-writing of some kind. The irregular repetition of certain glyphs practically established the fact. None of us, of course, could yet attempt any translation, but the photographers were already arranging their cameras to provide a record for more leisured study.

  I watched them work with an untraceable sense of uneasiness creeping over me. I have said before, and I repeat, that although I am a hard-headed scientist, I was nevertheless aware of a distinctly unscientific misgiving….

  The rest were too enthusiastic, too occupied with pointing out details and symbols which might, or might not, be analogous with similar symbols on Earth, to share my anxiety; and I did not mention it—it was too irrational, illogical.

  It was Robson who made the great find. He had gone close up to the cliff, and was examining a floridly incised square of the surface. Presently his cry sounded in all our receivers :

  ‘A door,’ he said. ‘There’s a door in the cliff ! ’

  We crowded up to him and found that the square was bordered all around by a narrow crack. Millennia ago, when there had been a wind upon the Moon, the grey sand had drifted up at the foot, but it took only a few moments’ scratching to lay bare the threshold of the stone panel. Already, at the ruins in Clavius, we had established that the luna practice had been to swing a door upon a central pivot so that it turned sidewise through ninety degrees, leaving a passage to either side.

  Accordingly, Robson flung himself upon one side and pushed. Finding it immovable, he transferred his strength to the other. It moved back an inch or so and then stuck. Spurred on, he brought every once of his strength to bear, and slowly the great rock door, which would have defied the efforts of three men on Earth, swung around.

  Without hesitation, he switched on the light at his belt and walked in. We followed him for ten yards; then he stopped.

  ‘Another door,’ he complained irritably. ‘They certainly meant to preserve whatever’s inside. Let’s have some more light on this.’

  The second door was plainer than the outer, and the only sign on it was a deep-graven circle. As I looked at that circle, my premonitions intensified. The circle—the world-wide sign of infinity, eternity—could it be possible that here, on Luna…?

  I almost called upon the others to stop, but realised in time how weakly my warning would fall before their exploring zest.

  ‘It’s sealed,’ someone discovered. He pointed to a dozen or more blobs of black, shiny composition fixed across the jambs. On each of these, too, was impressed the sign of the circle.

  To the non-anthropologist, it may seem strange that I should have attached an Earthly importance to the sign of the circle here on the Moon. But it is, with the possible exception of the cross, the earliest and most widely used of symbols. It was significant of man’s will to immortality in all parts of the globe from far back in pre-history and it remains significant still. It had dominated the lives of many races, and now here it was again—on the Moon!

  I stood unhappily aside and watched
the rest break the seals. But the door still refused to yield, even to the efforts of five men. They drew their knives and fell to scraping out a tight-plugged paste around the edges. They tried again, but still the stone square stood adamant.

  Robson suggested a small charge of explosive. ‘The door has no value,’ he pointed out. ‘There’s no carving on it except the circle.’ The rest agreed, after a momentary hesitation. Ten minutes later, the face of the door was cracked across, and a crow-bar was levering the fragments apart. The barrier soon succumbed, and we scrambled over the ruins to arrive in a large hewn room. Here and there, black openings in the walls suggested corridors to further rooms, but we gave them little attention at present, for our interest was centred in a scatter of long boxes lying on the floor.

  They were made of some grey metal which reflected the rays of our lamps only dully. One, close by the door, had suffered from the explosion. The lid was loosened and lay awry. Through the space it had opened, there hung a human hand….

  Robson laid hold of the battered edge and wrenched the lid clean away. As his eyes fell on the contents, he started back in surprise. We hurried to his side and stared down in astonishment—men of Earth looking for the first time upon a man of the Moon!

  He was perfectly preserved, and we, poor fools, wondered at the artistry which had been able so to conserve an unshrouded corpse that after thousands—perhaps millions—of years, it could have appeared to have lived but yesterday. Not one of us guessed the truth about that body. We were sufficiently conceited to believe that no race could have surpassed us in any branch of knowledge.

  We looked down upon the Moonman, noting his almost unbelievable chest development; remarking his brown pigmentation and the Mongolian slant of his eyes; observing that he was a litle shorter than the shortest of us, and telling one another that he was brachycephalic; classifying him. If any one of us happened to notice that the lips were drawn back in a smile, he did not mention it—of what interest to a scientist is a dead man’s smile …?

  When we returned to the Scintilla for rest and replenishment of our oxygen supplies, Captain Toft greeted us with the information that the wear in our firing tubes was more extensive than had been suspected. It would take, he thought, nearly twenty-four hours to effect the replacements.

  The delay irritated him, for he had meant to follow daylight around the Moon to the invisible side. The present situation would cause night to overtake us, for the flaring Sun was already not far from the horizon, and the dark line of the two weeks long lunar night was crawling towards us, a bare twelve hours away.

  But we did not share his anxiety to be off. Indeed, we welcomed the delay, for it gave us some time for investigation. Night or day would not matter to us in the rock vault.

  A dozen specimen coffins were loaded aboard the Scintilla, after we had opened them to assure ourselves that they contained the bodies of six men and six women. With these safely stowed away, we felt at liberty to examine the vault more thoroughly.

  There was little to repay detailed investigation of the place itself. No carving or decoration graced the interior, but we found that it and the subsidiary chambers contained a surprising quantity of coffins—altogether, more than four hundred of them.

  Each one, when opened, revealed a puzzling device whose purpose we could not guess. As the lid was raised on its hinges, two secondary occurrences took place. At the first loosening of the catches, something inside dropped with a musical tinkle. Investigation revealed the fragments of a small glass globe, smashed to pieces. Then the actual pushing up of the lid thrust, by means of an ingenious arrangement of levers, a slender, hollow glass spike deep into the corpse’s flank. This was automatically withdrawn as the lid passed the perpendicular.

  Robson and I examined the device curiously, but could make nothing of it.

  ‘I guess it’s something to do with preservation,’ he suggested vaguely, and turned his attention to the other contents.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FROM OUT OF THE PAST

  Many of the coffins enclosed not only trinkets and trappings upon the still forms, but also sheets of withered writing material covered with a quasi-pictorial script. This obviously must be collected, but since prolonged work in space-suits is inadvisable, we came to an arrangement of shifts. My turn came some six hours before sunset, and my companions were Jay Royden and Walter Greg, good men both.

  We were not unduly depressed when we left the Scintilla’s lock. My own earlier misgivings had all but disappeared under the cheering influence of the others, and if I thought at all, as we made for the vault entrance, it was of the good luck which had caused the Scintilla to have her misadventure here. But for that, we might never have seen the rock carvings.

  The three of us were soon scrambling once more into the hewn tomb. For an hour or more we worked quietly. Necklaces, bangles, daggers and rings, which would soon be proudly shown in the museums of Earth, were methodically stripped from their owners’ still forms. The Lunarians, it seemed, did not know clothes as we do. What little they wore was not for covering, but for ornament in the way of worked belts, intricate breastplates and the like.

  Very soon our miscellaneous collection began to form a sizeable pile, and I decided that it would be more convenient to remove it from the chamber where we were working to a spot nearer the main entrance. Two journeys were necessary, and as I made the second, I came upon a sight which brought me up with a jerk. One of the coffins by my way lay open, and the inmate’s hand rested on the edge____

  I stared in shocked horror. It had not lain so during my previous journey. I hurried past with a thumping, painful heart. I dropped my burden with the other plunder, and turned to scan the vault with the awful intensity of growing panic.

  My ears strained to listen, though I was cut off from all external sounds. Something seemed to flicker just beyond the rays of my lamp. I jerked stiffly towards it, but the light showed nothing amiss. I turned on, scouring the place with my lamp. Nothing…. Nothing….

  Then I looked back to the first corner. My arms fell weakly; my heart hammered in panic. A corpse sat upright in its coffin!

  I must have cried out, for I heard Walter’s voice in my receiver. ‘What is it?’ he was calling anxiously.

  ‘Come here, quick,’ was all I could manage.

  The urgency in my voice started them without further question. I stood with my back to the main entrance and turned my light on the passage-mouth from which they must emerge. Something moved again outside the circle of light, but I dared not throw the rays upon it.

  The two grotesque, space-suit-clad figures came hurrying into sight. As they saw me, Walter demanded again: ‘What is it?’

  I did not answer him; instead I shouted: ‘Look out ! ’ A dimly-seen shape was moving in the shadow behind them.

  Walter snatched at his knife and made to turn, but swift as he was, he was too late.

  A naked, brown arm came snaking over his shoulder. Its elbow crooked under the front of his helmet and dragged his head back. Another brown hand shot groping for his knife.

  And even as Jay turned to help, another pair of brown arms came twining about him, and I had a glimpse of a slant-eyed face leering beyond.

  The hand which sought Walter’s knife tore it from his grasp. I could hear him grunt as he struggled to keep it. Then clearly through the microphone came a tearing sound, as the knife ripped the space-suit, and the following whistle of exhaling air. Walter gave one choking cry….

  The whole affair had been too sudden for me to give any help. Before I could take more than a step, came a second tearing sound and I knew that Jay, too, was past help.

  I stopped suddenly—no use to go on. Then I saw that the corpse which had caused my fright was no longer sitting—he was climbing out of his coffin, his face leering towards me….

  I turned and sprang for the open, racing for my life across the sea-bottom.

  They didn’t believe it. Already I had shown signs of queer behaviour,
and now I was babbling fantastic nonsense. Dead men coming to life! Dead men fighting the living! Obviously, my brain was turned.

  The doctor attempted to soothe me. Robson vainly attempted to reach Walter and Jay on the radio. There was an odd expression on his face when he turned back to look at me.

  ‘Can’t raise them,’ he said. ‘Something’s certainly wrong. Do you think-?’ He broke off and nodded suggestively towards me. The rest looked serious. They did not put their thoughts into words, but they were plain enough on their faces. Three men alone—and one of them a madman!

  Two volunteered to go out and search. The rest began to help them into their space-suits. I begged and besought them not to go, but they only cursed me for getting in their way. Others dragged me back and held me penned in a corner.

  ‘Good God, you fools,’ I raged at them, ‘wouldn’t they have called you if I’d run amuck like you think? Can’t you see that I’m telling you the truth? If you go over there, they’ll get you, you fools—you bloody fools! They’ll get you! ’

  Nobody gave me a scrap of attention. The men were clad and their helmets affixed. As they left the air-lock, Robson switched on the radio to keep in communication. My anger passed as I helplessly watched them trudge towards the search-lit cliff-face. Nothing I could do would save them now.

  We saw them pause by the open stone door and heard their voices in the speaker as they settled who should take the lead. Then they disappeared. For a few seconds there was nothing but the sound of breathing. Suddenly a voice with a tinge of nervousness spoke.

  ‘What was that? Something moved.’

  ‘Nothing,’ answered the other. For our benefit, he added: ‘We are just climbing over the remains of the second door— now we’re in the vault. There’s—God, what’s that?’

  His voice was suddenly shrill—and then it broke. ‘Quick, out of this, quick, man—back, for Heaven’s sake! ’ After that it was a jumble—hard breathing mingled with odd phrases. ‘—dozens of ’em.’ ‘—got him.’ ‘Keep together.’ Then: ‘Look out, he’s got a knife! ’ Horror-stricken, we heard the sound of stout cloth ripped asunder—gasping cries. After that, all was silent____