Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  I looked at the shelves dubiously. Sure. I know, the adults were always saying “things don’t weigh that much on the moon” which was usually a ploy to make one of us go fetch something. It was second only to “your knees aren’t as old as mine.” But even if we could move the shelves, they were like six feet long each and ten feet tall, and they were modular. Parts of them could detach and fall. Not to mention the stuff on them could detach and fall.

  “We don’t have time,” I said. “And it risks attracting attention before we’re ready.”

  But we were putting the tent over three sets of shelves. Six shelves, side by side, with about three feet space between them. And we had five sets of those shelves. Ten shelves in all. “I know,” I said. I managed to stop Colton before he opened the tent and possibly ripped the side walls against one of the shelves. Fortunately we had space above, about ninety feet or so.

  “I climb on the front right shelf, all the way to the top, and Colton on the front left shelf. Laura, you take one of the back shelves. I wish we had four people.”

  Laura looked dubious. “What if I kick something down from the shelves?”

  “Try not to,” I said. I was scared too, but it was the only thing I could think to do. I took the tent. It was going to be a trick and a half to open it atop the rickety shelves, and get a corner to each of the others, but that’s what we had to do.

  We climbed the shelves. I opened the tent and it sprang free, like jelly fish in water, floating around in the tank in the lab. Colton leaned so far forward, I thought he was going to fall off the shelf, but he didn’t, and he got hold of it, and Laura got hold of the back corner.

  Since the entire structure was super fine and light, it wasn’t heavy. It was merely unwieldy, like trying to walk in a pressure suit the very first time.

  We lowered the tent slowly over the six central shelves. I swear I was holding my breath for fear it wouldn’t be quite wide enough or would snag on one of the corners of the shelf, or something on it, as we shifted our hold on it and lowered it, slowly, slowly.

  It was hard enough, and we came so close to tearing the walls that I almost offered to go get another tent, and then we’d move everything out of the way and open it, then fill it.

  Two things stopped me: I had a gut feeling we didn’t have that kind of time, and I didn’t know if I could make myself go into the lab again, with all those soldiers around and my father’s voice droning on in a dispirited way.

  So, we shoved and angled and maneuvered the tent into position, each of us perched unsteadily on a set of storage shelves, while the fourth corner of the tent wasn’t held up by anyone and threatened to drag the whole thing out of position. It would have too, if the tent were even slightly heavy.

  Even when we got it down over the shelves, I had to face climbing down from the shelves. I’m not afraid of heights, and normally I’d simply have jumped down. But now, I was afraid suddenly that the shelves would tumble under me and bring vengeance on us before we had our trap set up.

  I guess the others went through the same hesitation, because by the time we all got down, we were all looking pale and shaken, and Laura, who normally jumped and moved with uncaring grace, took almost as long to get to the ground as I did.

  We walked around the tent in silence, sealing it to the floor. It had a strip on the bottom of the walls that you could seal to the floor by walking on it.

  Then it was a matter of walking in and setting up the pile of leaves on one of the front shelves in front of where the flaps opened when pressed. I put recording on my screen, with twenty minutes delay and we opened the valves on the oxygen tanks.

  I was sure there was an apparatus, probably more than one, in the lab that would allow me to start a fire on a timer. There were two problems with that: I didn’t know what it was or what it looked like and I didn’t know what time it would take, from the moment the sounds started to having the maximum number of invaders in the tent.

  I mean, it could all backfire. We might only get two or three of them.

  But at least we had to try. And the best way to get the most effect was that balance between the most invaders in the tent and the repeated openings of the front flaps—which were designed to seal between passages, by overlapping and having some kind of quality that made them stick together but give way at push or force—letting too much oxygen out so that the mixture inside wouldn’t explode.

  Unfortunately as in such things, someone needed to do it, and the someone was me. I’d have to shove the self-sealing tent flap open and throw the lighter at the leaves.

  I led Colton and Laura into the centrifuge room, and then pointed them at the long cavern. “Go there,” I said. “As far deep as you can. I have no idea how far the explosion will go. There could be a fire ball. Use your screens for light.”

  Laura grabbed my arm. “Don’t you sacrifice—”

  “I’m not going to sacrifice myself,” I said. “Just going to try to blow it up and get away as fast as possible.”

  The gunfire sounds had started. We’d put the screen on a shelf, in an empty area, and hoped it would echo. It did. It sounded like there were several people firing weapons inside the tent.

  I guess if they’d thought about it, they wouldn’t fall for it. But the invaders thought they’d secured the area, that there were no hidden people on the loose. They were in the middle of making their victory broadcast and then suddenly gunfire.

  I heard them running down the hallway outside, and risked a peek in time to see a handful of them go into the tent, followed by more of them.

  I was very afraid that as I thrust my arm in there to set fire to the leaves, one of them would grab me. Or that I’d be caught in the fire. But it had to be done.

  There were sounds of gunfire, again, from the lab, but I had no time to worry or think about who might be getting hurt or which side. There were screams too, but I couldn’t tell whose voices they might be.

  The last straggler of the invaders to come down the hallway hesitated and looked puzzled. I thought he was the guy who had come down there before, and he was probably trying to figure out where the tent had come from. He’d looked at those storage shelves and there wasn’t a tent over them.

  He opened the flap of the tent, put his head in and started shouting something, urgently. I couldn’t risk it. Also, his head and upper body were thrust into the flap, unsealing the space above him, and leaving a triangular space over his head.

  I was taller than him. I wasn’t the world’s best at throwing things, but we kids played ball in the long cavern, and I wasn’t the world’s worst, either.

  One good throw. I needed one good throw.

  I took the lighter from my pocket, wedged it open, and ran, hell for leather out of the centrifuge room, and past the tent, flinging the lighter hard. It went sailing into the triangular opening above the soldier’s head and, I thought, straight into the pile of leaf litter on the shelf on the right.

  I wanted to know if it worked, but it if worked, I couldn’t stick around. I ran on, down the living quarters corridor as fast as I could, not knowing if my plot had worked, or if there were now several invaders on my heels. I thought I saw a flash behind me, illuminating everything, suddenly, and I swear I smelled burning, but then, I was so scared I couldn’t be sure.

  The only thing I knew for sure was that there was an art to running on the Moon and that those of us who had been born and raised on it were much better at it than even our parents who had lived here for decades, and always better than any visitors.

  I half slid, half dove into the laboratory, and—

  And met with the people of the colony. Bedraggled, a few of them crying, and Mom with blood trickling down her arm.

  Only after that did I take in that there were four, no, five dead invaders on the floor, one of them half in half out of the com room. There was one who might be dead or unconscious by the animal cages.

  And dad, with a blood smear on his forehead, was holding one of the inv
aders’ machine guns. He looked at me, and you could see tension leaking out of him. “Robert,” he said. “Oh, thank God.”

  Mrs. Jones pushed from between the group, “Where is Mary? The explosion . . . Is she all right?”

  As though on cue, Mary’s cry came from the direction of the hallway, and moments later Colton walked in with Laura. Laura was carrying Mary in full screaming fit.

  “It worked?” I asked, turning around, remembering having heard an explosion while I was running, even though I hadn’t really noticed it in my mad dash. Okay it wasn’t really an explosion, more of a fwoosh, but same thing.

  Laura nodded. “It worked. They’re either dead or too burned to do much.”

  The Jones, the Lis and the Cordovas came from the crowd to embrace their kids. Mom just held me and started crying, even though her shirt was the one soaked in blood.

  Dad and a few other men went out the door, carrying machine guns.

  Turns out they’d thought we were dead, since the invaders never made any references to us. They thought they’d found us and killed us.

  I really thought Mom would be upset we’d done something that led to the death of people. But she wasn’t. Even though she always tried to get us kids to solve our problems by non violent means, and flinched a little when dad told war stories.

  She said that there was nothing to be ashamed of in defending yourself, then cried over me again, until Doctor Marston, who is our medic and also animal experimenter, dragged her away to take care of her wound. It turned out it was only a graze, and she didn’t have any problems recovering from it.

  It also turned out that the Chinese had decided to take this laboratory as a publicity coup aimed, mostly, at quelling internal dissension in China, by showing that not only could China make a Moon shot, but it could take over a private, capitalist base and win. They’d made their shot disguised as the testing of an anti-satellite weapon, which in turn was announced as a satellite launch. The people who’d observed an explosion in orbit thought the Chinese were being sneaky by testing anti-satellite weapons, not by firing a capsule full of soldiers at the Moon.

  They had forced open our skylight and pressure lock, and invaded through the laboratory, where they’d caught the adults unawares. Except poor Mr. McGowan who had gone to the living quarters for something, and come out of his lodging to meet a soldier who’d shot him, probably out of reflex.

  As it turned out the attempt on the colony was the last of a long list of blunders, and the one that caused a revolution in China. I asked dad if that meant they’d now get a better government. He said one could only hope, but history indicated it was unlikely.

  And then he said, “I feel better about you going to Earth now, Robert. I’ve been afraid you’d been raised too protected, because of how small the colony is, and how you’ve known everyone since birth. But now I know you can and will do what it takes to survive, and to protect those who depend on you.” He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You’ve nothing to be afraid of, son. You’re a survivor.”

  INCIDENT ON CALYPSO

  by Murray Leinster

  The rocket pilot hadn’t planned on being an explorer or pioneer until mechanical failure stranded his ship on a moon of Jupiter. And then he discovered a group of explorers who weren’t human but who were in the same predicament and had been for long, long time.

  Interestingly, there is no moon of Jupiter named Calypso, though a very tiny moon or moonlet of Saturn now has that name. Since Mr. Leinster was well up on scientific knowledge, I can only conjecture (since he isn’t around to be asked) that perhaps he liked the name and decided to put one there, back in the days when the best equipment we had to find moons were telescopes operating under a murky atmosphere, and such a moon might be there awaiting discovery.

  Steve Baring didn’t expect to find human—well, call them humanoid—footprints on Calypso. He didn’t expect to find anything. He’d expected to land there and die when his air gave out. The automatic pilot of his space-cruiser had jammed on four-gravities acceleration when a short-circuit developed somewhere in its innards, and when the main fuel tanks were empty and Steve could stir from the flat of his back, he had only his emergency fuel left.

  He was then well past the main asteroid belts—he’d been heading for Mars, originally—and speeding for outer space like a bat out of hell. He simply didn’t have enough fuel to stop and come back. So he edged over to use Jupiter’s mass as a brake, spent lavishly what fuel he did have left, and came in for a landing on Calypso with just twelve hours’ drive at one-gravity acceleration left to him. Which was just about enough to enable him to take off again and be sure of falling into Jupiter itself. As a matter of purely illogical preference, he decided to stay and die on Calypso.

  He had no hope of any sort. Calypso had been surveyed back in 1982 and offered no inducements for further exploration. It is four hundred million miles out from Earth, it is in Jupiter’s gravitational field, and it is airless. Which last means that its surface is all pock-marked with ring-mountains made at the same time as those on Luna and Io by that unthinkable mass of stuff that barged through the solar system a hundred-odd-million years ago. Nobody else would be turning up on Calypso to rescue him. He was through when his air gave out. Finished. Period.

  But then he saw the footprints.

  His cruiser was lying slightly askew not far from the riven cliffs of a ring-mountain’s outer perimeter. Steve had settled down, eaten a fairly hearty meal—he had more food than air—and tried to savor the fact that he was just as dead as if he’d hit a planet head-on at one hundred miles a second and was already reduced to his constituent atoms.

  He found himself stonily calm. He even smoked. But time passes slowly when you’re newly quick and dead at the same time. He went restlessly to the ports of the cruiser to stare out.

  He saw the monstrous disk of Jupiter, coming up past Calypso’s irregular horizon. Opposite was the high wall of the nearby ring-mountain. Other ring-mountains in other directions. Pits, where smaller things had struck. Craters within craters, and desolation as complete as that of Luna itself.

  The sun was a small, fiercely flaring spot of light. Stars were clearly visible. The ground was simply shattered talus, loosely filled in with the dust which had settled slowly in airlessness after that insensate, incredible bombardment from the farther rim of space.

  But then, in the dust at the very base of the ring-mountain cliffs, he saw a single line of regularly spaced depressions. They were regular footprints, as of somebody walking. But humans do not walk on low-gravity terrain! The odd, skating gait which men use on Luna and the other lesser satellites does not leave tracks like that.

  Steve stared blankly, smoking. Once he made an irresolute movement as if to turn a scanning telescope upon them. But it is hard to think of any action as worthwhile when everything is futile, when you’re simply waiting until your air gives out and you die.

  When his cigarette was finished, he shook himself and got into a spacesuit. He went out the airlock, stared about him for a moment, and loneliness hit him like a blow. He was actually the only human being in two hundred million miles. But he swallowed and went toward the cliff-wall. He moved with the finicky skating motion appropriate to Calypso’s low gravity, it is not a series of bounding hops, but something much more practical. He made the necessary gradual halt and the tippy-toe approach to the line of depressions.

  They were footprints. They were narrow, and they were arched, and they had not been made by any spaceboots that humans ever wore. There were no toes, but there was a heel, and they looked as if they had been made by something very like a human shoe, only of course they hadn’t. They were absolutely distinct. They looked perfectly fresh. Steve felt a moment’s wild flare of emotion before common sense told him that in airlessness a footprint will remain fresh forever.

  Then he shrugged. He could tell the direction of motion by the sidewalls. He followed it. He had nothing to lose but his sanity. His life was a
lready gone. He set off in the direction the footprints led.

  They went on sturdily for miles. Once Steve looked up and realized that he was out of sight of the cruiser. There was no familiar formation in view. He felt a little flicker of apprehension. Then he grinned wryly. His own tracks and the ones he followed would be a guide back. And if he didn’t get back it wasn’t important.

  The footprints rounded a place where a column of rock—thrown out in the formation of a crater—had fallen upright without breaking. It made a sixty-foot, irregular monolith. The footprints skirted it. Other footprints of precisely the same sort came from a new direction and joined the first set. They took a new line and headed for the monstrous wall of a mountain. A third set came in a mathematically straight line and joined them. The three went on. An opening loomed in the cliff. Yet more footprints came along the cliff-face and entered. There was darkness within.

  Steve hesitated. He looked at the sky. Jupiter was still only a quarter-way across the horizon, though the sun was low down against a jagged mountain-scarp. He turned on his helmet-light and went doggedly inside.

  Before he was actually within the cliff he saw everything that he ever discovered in this spot. There were six things in the shallow cave. They were metal, and they were the things which had made the footprints, and they were utterly motionless. There was no dust here, of course. There had been no air to swirl it in. The six things sat—there is no other word for it—in something like a circle. And that was absolutely all there was in the cave.

  The things themselves were plainly robots with curiously android bodies, two legs which ended in gracefully formed feet, and two arms. There was a head with a small, gracefully curved rod bent above it, like a receiving or transmitting antenna for very short radio waves. There were eye-spaces which were definitely not fitted with scanners. And the robots in their entirety had the peculiar, satisfying cleanness of line of an object which is perfect engineering. Like a suspension bridge or a race horse, or a perfectly streamlined atmospheric plane.