Ten (Stories) to The Stars

by Raymond Z. Gallun

  How he’d managed to survive in that space-chilled compartment, breathing only the air that was locked in with him, might, I think, have baffled a Houdini. He must just have followed some animal instinct when he bundled himself in paper wrappings torn from bundles and packages.

  By the same instinct he must have relaxed and breathed shallowly to consume less oxygen. Something about how he must have done it all reminded me somehow of a stowaway rat—surviving not so much by intelligence as by some wisdom engrained into its whole cussed carcass.

  “Joe!” I gasped. “Joe!” Into my voice was poured all my concern about him—when he must finally realize in some measure where he was, how inconceivably far he had blundered from anything he could call familiar. He would just wither then, I was sure. He was a simple ranch Indian, who had trouble writing his own name and could never understand other worlds.

  Someone growled in my ears, “Oh, you know this fella, eh?” The tone was as official as the gold-braid that went with it—we civilian experts were under military direction, too. The tone bore a heavy load of contemptuous disgust. It blamed me, a greenhorn, for Joe’s super-greenhom presence. I was responsible.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Joe Whiteskunk worked for my Dad.”

  Well, that officer took my words as if they constituted an admission of mortal sin. “Oh—so?” he said with poisonous gentleness. “And what do you think we can do with him, here? Why didn’t you bring a sick baby along? It would be less trouble.

  “Why didn’t you bring an enemy spy? Then we could just shoot him. Back he goes with the first return rocket and you’ll pay his passage! Every last cent of it if I have to take it out of your hide!”

  He said a lot more. He had me wanting to crawl into my space boots until a little glimmer of hope came. I looked at Frank, who hadn’t said anything. Right then I didn’t want any more of the Moon. Maybe Joe was our ticket back home—our way out of a signed contract.

  “Sir,” I told the officer. “With your permission I’ll personally conduct this man back to Earth.”

  Yeah, but that was where Joe entered the conversation. He looked kind of sore but he sounded both obstinate and gentle.

  “I no go back, Dave,” he said. “I come—I stay. You and Frank stay too. No be scared. Sure! You big boys now. Strong—smart. I smart, too. The Big Man back in White Sands tell big fib. He say no job for tracker here. Just now, outside, I see plenty tracks.”

  It burned me up. Joe was patronizing me—treating me as if I were a frightened child who had to be soothed. Treating me the way he had once when a Gila monster had scared me out of my wits.

  And he was rattling on with that crazy illusion of his. “Yeah, I see plenty tracks—old tracks. No wind here. No man tracks. No coyote tracks. Devil tracks.”

  Joe didn’t even look awed. But in his black eyes, beyond the opened view-window of his oxygen helmet, gleamed something from the lore of his forefathers. It seemed to satisfy a question in his mind better than all our scientific sophistication could do for us. What I mean is that it enabled him to adjust better than we did to complete strangeness.

  Right then something happened to our officer friend’s face—presently I was to find out that his name was Colonel Richard Kopplin. He looked sober, puzzled, less grouchy—as if something that had been bothering him for a long time found support in Joe Whiteskunk’s words.

  “Hum-mm—devil tracks,” he muttered.

  No, I won’t say that Kopplin didn’t have plenty of other worries to make him grumpy and officious. Maybe his own nerves were a bit twisted just by his being on the Moon. Then he had a lot of responsibility—handling scared and inexperienced dopes who could go batty easily and throw everything out of kilter. Getting more tunnels dug, more apparatus set up to draw the constituents of air and water out of rocks, riding herd on experts to get mineral tests made.

  And it was his job too to see that the astronomical observatory was finished and the Army fortress. Moreover, he had to deal with civilian interests. Mining companies and their prospecting and planning—companies who wanted to set up huge atomic piles and spaceship factories on the Moon or conduct immense and dangerous experiments that safety interests forced off the Earth.

  But the worst part of his job was the fact that we weren’t the only nation interested in lunar colonization. That name-calling, fist-shaking and blame-passing antedated the first hop into space. Don’t make either party the villain too much. It takes two to fight. But for Colonel Kopplin these facts still made the Moon an additionally unpleasant post.

  Now he cursed under his breath, showing that he was a fairly human and intelligent guy. “Dammit,” he muttered. “When I was a kid I used to wonder if we of Earth would be the first beings of the Solar System ever to take a jump into space. Even though there are no obvious indications of space-travel by extra-terrestrial creatures in modern times, still there might have been such travel, once. Maybe millions of years ago . . .”

  Kopplin’s muttering died away for a moment. Then, after a pause which seemed designed to give his words emphasis, he said quietly, “I figured that a trip to the Moon would give the answer.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He looked at me as if I weren’t so bright. “Because, sooner or later, through the ages, such space-travelers—if they ever existed—would get to our Moon. The Moon’s been dead for at least a billion years. There has been no wind and no weather for that much time here. The lightest touch of anything against the dust on its surface would leave a permanent mark—because there is no force to rub it out.”

  That much was good logic. I nodded. Still, I was skeptical—as to the concrete basis for this reasoning.

  “You’re leaving something out, sir,” I said.

  “Yes, I am. But I can show you. Maybe your man here can really help us. It’s important enough. Lieutenant Briggs—take over.”

  So Colonel Kopplin, Joe Whiteskunk, Frank and I went out there under the bleak stars. We all watched Joe. Odd, but he was top man now—when we had all thought he was going to be more helpless and out of place here than an infant.

  He looked up at the huge blurry blue-green Earth, which hung almost at zenith, near the blazing, corona-fringed sun. There was something like awe in his face for a moment. The low Lunar gravity seemed to bother him some too—his steps were kind of uncertain.

  But quickly facts that he understood as well on the Moon as back home on the ranch drew his attention. Kopplin had pointed to the ground, which wasn’t exactly ashen here but seemed to consist of lava rock that had been pulverized by some terrific force.

  And there, in plain view, were faint scrabbling marks, a little like those of a truck tire or a great millipede. Joe’s eyes moved quickly, and ours followed his gaze. At a little distance there were other marks of a different character. Small round indentations—they could have been made with the end of a pogo stick. They could have been made by a thing with a long stride. For a little way they were spaced evenly, like steps.

  “Nothing to get excited about, I know,” Kopplin growled. “Nothing to draw anybody’s certain attention. Still if—”

  Joe’s eyes were very intent and searching—still I wouldn’t say that he was excited. “Devil tracks,” he said. “Two kinds. We follow, eh? Out across the valley.”

  Joe would have gone at it right then. Maybe that too was part of what made my blood run cold. I had always figured there was something funny about Joe. The now is the only time that exists for him really. For what he does he doesn’t need what we would call determination. He just flows on like a river or a sandstorm.

  I’d hardly call him stupid. But his intelligence is different. Something about it is in tune with natural forces. And what do you call that? Intuition? Instinct? Extra-sensory perception? How should I know! Maybe he has a guardian devil or a terrific stack of luck that keeps him on the right beam.

  Look at those tracks my way—or your way. It comes out the same, I’ll bet. Yeah—I was trying to figure what kinds o
f creatures or things or forces could have made those tracks—and how many million years before. Sure, you and I can make a sort of picture from what we know about science and other worlds. Living monsters, with ages of logical culture behind them—or shining robots.

  But how about Joe Whiteskunk? He had no background with which to construct such a picture—or even to understand its meaning. He just seemed to follow his nose. What thoughts went on in his head were as deep an enigma as those two kinds of tracks themselves.

  Frank said, “We’ve got to go back to shelter, Joe. Too much civilization. We gotta rest up.”

  Well, we did that for several hours. And Joe studied his space-suit the way he used to study his rifle and I tried to help him to understand it.

  Colonel Kopplin got together huge packs of equipment for us to carry. Again he delegated his camp authority to Lieutenant Briggs so that he could go along with us.

  On our shoulders as we started out sat dread. And its companion, curiosity, magnified to the point of fascination. But above and beyond all that was the great spice of life—high romance. Who had been here on the Moon so long before us—and for what basic motive? And why weren’t they here, now? Had they somehow failed, in their vast reaching out, to hold onto what they had attained? And might we not fail for the same reason?

  Skip the details of our progress across the floor of that tremendous lunar crater. We followed the scrabbled tracks—the circular ones soon vanished completely. And sometimes there was no spoor at all. Perhaps a more recent upheaval of dust had blotted them out. But, following Joe, we were always able to pick up the trail again.

  Against the feeble Lunar gravity we climbed that vast crater wall, locating there a string of handholds—that were not quite handholds, since they did not comfortably fit our human hands—chipped out of the glassy rock. We topped the brim of the barrier as the lagging Lunar Sun crept across the sky. We came down in a congealed inferno of tortured rock outside Copernicus.

  Five miles out Joe Whiteskunk found trail’s end. It was a confused circular patch of tracks in the dust—as new as yesterday in appearance. Trampled markings full of violence and drama—an inconceivably ancient arena for two. And at the center of it lay the vanquished.

  The being’s weapon was as new and gleaming as yesterday. A small bright tube, which Colonel Kopplin picked up for us to stare at. And a little of the aura of the physical principles by which it had functioned crept into our minds, leaving deeper enigmas to challenge us, to label our human science the feeble and primitive groping it is.

  The trigger-button—the tiny but terrifically stout pressure-chamber, in which a minute droplet of substance that was like that of the Sun’s heart could be produced to yield energy. Atomic fusion. Four atoms of hydrogen yielding one of helium. And the barrel, which must have been lined with pure force to stave such heat away from weak metal, to direct such a blast of death.

  Yet the being who had owned such a weapon had lost the fight, perhaps to a greater science.

  The eerie corpse lay there. It did not resemble a centipede. Rather, it looked like a blackened old tree-stump with a thousand roots still contorted with agony. The spatial dryness of the Moon had sucked the moisture from ancient tissues, leaving them not only desiccated and harder than oak—but even charred. Beyond that the preservation was perfect.

  “Bad things happen here,” Joe said through his helmet radiophones. Then he just stood stolidly by while the rest of us proceeded to reach the same conclusion in our involved path of reason.

  “The thing with the round tracks left no further spoor from this point,” Frank said. “So it must have flown—moved above the surface.”

  “Sure,” I joined in. “And this fight must have been just a tiny part of something far bigger.” My voice was hoarse with dread and questioning.

  Kopplin had been on the Moon far longer than any of us. So of course he knew far more than we did. “Sure,” he growled. “The Moon is big enough and hard to travel in. It’s easy never even to notice such little details as corpses, tracks, artifacts. But could anyone ever miss the thousands of Lunar craters?

  “Volcanoes, astronomers used to call them. Then the wounds made by vast meteors, crashing down from space. But one thing tests have shown—even their highest walls still show a trace of radioactivity, far above the level of natural uranium deposits. What can that suggest except that they are gigantic bomb-craters?

  “What if the Moon was a battleground for two kinds of beings, from two different worlds—say fifty million years ago? You know that the gradual lessening of radioactivity in rocks provides a clock for calculating the age of a stratum. And that’s the amount of time you get by calculation.”

  Well—I carried the ball from that point. But Kopplin certainly could have done the same. So could Frank. Only old Joe Whiteskunk was left out of it.

  “The Asteroid Belt,” I said. “Long ago it was figured to be the wreckage of an exploded planet. Was that explosion a natural phenomenon or was it part of war—between two planets? And what would be that other planet? It would have to be a planet smaller than the Earth too—cooling faster, supporting life sooner, developing civilization sooner. Mars, most likely. Or maybe a moon of Jupiter.”

  My voice was a whisper. But there wasn’t a thing new in what I said. I’d followed an old track of romancing handed down from stories that had groped at the unknown long ago. Here, however, the hints of truth were plain—that corpse at our feet, and that weapon. And the result was sharpened dread.

  A thing which became the more terrifying, because it was personal—because history was on the same track again, set to repeat itself, for human beings this time. Everybody had read the signs before. But now, pointed out by a harsh and factual example, it was infinitely more vivid. It scared the sweat out of your skin.

  We looked toward the east. And a rocket was tracing an inbound path of fire against the brittle star-curtain. One of their rockets—of that other nation, I mean—our enemy.

  “What do you read in the flight of any such rocket?” Kopplin said. “Beauty, imperialism, the inevitable urge of all life to expand as far as it can go, with not even the stars the limit. It happened before—starting from Mars and from this Asteroid world. But then all the romance and glory turned to death and silence, by fury and its own scientific triumphs. Like some great flowering plant that never blossomed.”

  But then my brother Frank looked a little brighter. “Maybe that’s good,” he said. “For our pals, the enemy—and for us. An example, a lesson, the pointing out of an error in brutal terms. A warning not to do what other hopefuls did before us.

  “Ever think that fear, instead of misplaced courage, could be the key to progress by way of caution and common sense? Lord, it’s the one chance! For us—for them! Otherwise maybe all there’ll be is another bigger and better Asteroid Belt, littered with everything from mountains to bobby pins!”

  “Sure, Frank,” I put in. “The path to future glory is a scary tightrope.”

  We started marching again. It was too late in that two-weeks-long Lunar day to start back to Camp Copernicus. So we went forward. Twice we put up an airtight heat-proof tent in which to eat and sleep. And when sunset came it didn’t stop us. We had our lights for night-work—and the glory of the Earth-shine over that maddening desolation.

  But we didn’t go mad—we were too frightened. With the disappearance of the Sun, the temperature of the surrounding ground dropped from higher than the boiling point of water to something a shade above absolute zero. But what did that matter to us in our insulated space-suits?

  Joe Whiteskunk led us on and finally picked up another trail, which led to a half-buried shelter of metal and a whole bunch of other ancient murders. Stump-like corpses—all except one. That one had belonged to the kind of creature that made the circular tracks. Its skin was black horn, its form was somewhat less human than a two-year-old’s smeary drawing of a man. The prints its fingers—or tentacle-tips—would have made were crosshatched i
nstead of spiral.

  “Which is which, I wonder?” Frank asked.

  I answered as well as anybody could just then. “Mars still exists, at least. It must have won. It must have been stronger. These things with the round feet were stronger. But the Martians must have lost too. Anyway, they haven’t been around for a long time either.”

  We were exploring that shelter. It was hardly what a man could inhabit comfortably. The Asteroidians didn’t have much use for rooms as we understand them. They lived like bugs—in sort of chinks between plates of metal, not ten inches apart.

  That’s other-world stuff—which shows about how close we’d be in physical needs to the people of most alien planets. And there were a thousand different small articles, the uses of which we could never name. Imagine yourself a Martian, mulling over a mess of combs, shaving brushes, boot-polish and the like—maybe you’ll understand what I mean.

  Of course we found treasure. No, I’m not talking about simple stuff like gold and jewels or refined uranium—rather a wealth of ideas. Maybe the best was the little rod the Martian had—it was wonderfully simplified and seemed to be both a weapon of terrible power as well as a means of flying.

  But the Asteroidians had their inventions, too. Wonderful compact calculation machines. A thin filtering fabric that could purify and re-oxygenate air. An automatic control device that would have worked well on our spaceships. And dozens of other things—many more than we could have probed and understood by brief and tentative scrutiny.

  We pitched our tent again. And with our radio we hurled the news of all that we had found and found out, back to Copernicus, and out to that other encampment, of our potential enemies.

  “You’ll see for yourselves,” Kopplin said into the mike, “if you haven’t seen already. These others may have had cities here on the Moon—even on Earth. They might have reached the stars long ago. Instead they worked it wrong—and perished.”