City on the Moon

by Murray Leinster

  CITY ON THE MOON

  by

  MURRAY LEINSTER

  Further progress in atomic power could now come about only as a result of experiments so dangerous that they could only be carried on in an isolated space station hanging near the far side of the moon. If these experiments succeeded, they could open the way to the stars . . .

  To supply this space laboratory was the duty of the CITY ON THE MOON. And when Joe Kenmore, moon-colonist, realized that there were agents working actively to sabotage the city, he knew that he was up against a supreme crisis of humanity—one in which his own life and those of his fellow colonists were mere pawns to be sacrificed ruthlessly by that hidden foe—unless he personally could block their super-atomic deviltry.

  The Author:

  Will F. Jenkins, better known to readers under his popular pen-name of Murray Leinster, has been entertaining the public with his exciting fiction for several decades. Called the dean of modem science-fiction, he was writing these amazing super-science adventures back in the early twenties before there ever was such a thing as an all-fantasy magazine. His short stories, novelettes, and serial novels have appeared in most of the major American magazines, both slick and pulp, and many have been reprinted all over the world. He has made a distinguished name for himself (or rather two names!) in the fields of adventure, historical, western, sea and suspense stories.

  Ace Books have published the following Murray Leinster novels: GATEWAY TO ELSEWHERE (D-53), THE BRAIN-STEALERS (D-79), THE OTHER SIDE OF HERE (D-94), and THE FORGOTTEN PLANET (D-146).

  ACE BOOKS, INC.

  23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

  CITY ON THE MOON

  Copyright ©, 1957, by Murray Leinster An Ace Book, by arrangement with Thomas Bouregy & Co.

  CHAPTER I. THE TRAP

  THERE were clankings and motor noises inside the sealed body of the moon-jeep, but these were the only sounds anywhere. The huge metal wheels rolled over stone, and inside the jeep the din was audible, while outside there was utter silence. The great vehicle, with its dangling load, moved with the noiselessness of a phantom so far as the landscape was concerned. There could be no noise whatsoever outside the airtight tube which was the jeep's cabin. This was the moon, a world without air.

  The vehicle moved among mountains, crawling on twenty-foot, spidery wheels over the fantastic terrain. The time was night, and the full Earth hung overhead, embedded in a sky of numberless, untwinkling stars. Earthlight poured down, casting shadows, and the moon-jeep glittered faintly as it moved among pinnacles and potholes in a nightmare of violence made real. This was the lunar surface, the scene of an ancient bombardment when meteors and mountains fell from the sky and ravaged the face of a world that was already dead. The moonscape was pure confusion; it was chaos; it was sheer desolation.

  But in the jeep's cabin, there was comfort in the sighing sound of the motors. The clankings and clatterings transmitted through the wheels brought a sense of reassurance. There was no feeling of normality, of course. For one thing, weight was only one-sixth of weight on Earth. Joe Kenmore, driving the jeep, would have weighed only thirty pounds on a spring scale here, instead of one hundred and eighty.

  He said over his shoulder, "It's strange that one feels at peace here—safer than in the City. But this is restful! People should get away from crowded places once in a while."

  The last was irony. Civilian City was three dust-heaps, lying some forty-odd tortuous miles away through the mountains. Moondust, piled untidily over inflated half-balloons, held those giant air bubbles safely confined— by its weight. The same moondust insulated the domes from the unbelievable cold of the two-week-long lunar night, as well as from the furnace heat produced by the succeeding fourteen days of glaring sun, untempered by air or clouds.

  A hundred and fifty men lived and worked and squabbled in the City. In addition, there were spotter stations where radar marked the fall of the drone-rockets that brought supplies for the City from Earth. Then there were the military missile bases, which were the first footholds of mankind on any natural celestial body that was not man-made. Their positions were top secret. And beyond farside of the moon, remote in emptiness, was the Space Laboratory. This was the reason for Civilian City, the moon-jeep, the presence and Kenmore and Moreau in it, and for the assorted frantic happenings in the City and outside of it.

  Moreau said abruptly, "But I do not feel safe. I have another sort of feeling, and I do not like it. There is no reason behind it, but I find myself thinking of my sins. That is a bad sign!"

  Kenmore frowned. Sometimes Moreau was right. He was a member of the French group in the City—which had to be international if it was to exist at all. The American military missile bases on the moon were sources of hysterical distrust among the non-American nations. These bases could direct guided missiles anywhere on Earth, and no one could have the slightest hope of intercepting them. American bases kept peace on Earth, but they hardly produced good will among men. Happenings in Civilian City proved that internationalization of the Space Laboratory project hadn't ended tension.

  "I am thinking," Moreau said wryly, "that there have been four jeeps—on missions like ours—which never got back to the City. One of them, certainly, had been sabotaged by some one of our fellow citizens in the City. The breakdown of the second was at least suspicious. And the trails of the other two led into rockslides—somewhat improbable, because those routes had been shaken into stability by explosives. I do not think that any of those things were accidents, and I am uneasy. But I do not know why I am uneasy right now."

  Joe Kenmore grunted and drove on. The operation of a moon-jeep really required four or five hands, extrasensory perception, the gift of prophecy, and three-way vision in the driver. Moon-jeeps were extremely exotic vehicles, developed from the straddle trucks of Earth for use in airless frigidity. Each of their four wheels revolved at the bottom of a stalk; each could be separately steered, and separately lifted over obstacles. The tubelike cabin was raised some thirty feet off the surface; it contained an insulated cargo compartment and a vast assortment of apparatus. Crawling among senselessly unflung masses of stone, among craters and debris and the craters-within-craters of the moon, this jeep looked rather like a silvery stick-insect on wheels. Its present load was an unmanned cargo-rocket from Earth, one which had fallen beyond these mountains and which it carried to Civilian City slug underneath its cabin, between its wheels.

  "We ought to be all right," said Kenmore. "Were retracing our own trail."

  The curious splashed track of jeep wheels in dust was plain to be seen in the headlight-glare. There was, of course, moondust everywhere. The violent alternations of high temperature and low, between day and night, had cracked and splintered the surface stone everywhere, and then had fragmented the shards until almost every level place bore a thick, deep layer of dust that was as fine as talcum. Below some of the slopes there were even lakes of dust—and a dust-lake was a trap for men and all their machines. A jeep would sink into it as in quicksand, without hope of getting out. Any trail should last forever; there was no wind to disturb the least impression.

  The moon-jeep trundled on, under a monster jagged monolith and around a pothole that extended down indefinitely. The outward trail was perfectly plain. It had been chosen on the basis of photographs taken from space, and since the jeep had traversed this trail once in safety, it should be perfectly safe for return.

  "I am very kind to everyone in the City," added Moreau ruefully. "But still I fear that somebody might kill me as a matter of politics. Do you not feel something of the sort?"

  Kenmore grunted again. There was a needle-shaped mass of stone—toppled as long as a hundred million years ag
o but still unweathered—in the path of the jeep. He worked the vehicle carefully up to the fallen giant. It would have to be stepped over—one wheel at a time must be lifted and carefully put down on the other side.

  The jeep stopped, facing the barrier at an angle of some forty-five degress. Directly beyond the obstacle there was a monstrous wall of stone a good half-mile high, gleaming in the earthlight. Partly gleaming; there were shadows of absolute blackness where the outward-leaning portions screened it. The former trail of the jeep approached the cliff and swung off to the right, paralleling it. Kenmore, frowning in concentration, began the lifting of the jeep's right-hand front wheel. It would be raised, the jeep moved forward, the wheel put down, and then the rear swung around to permit a lifting-over of the right rear wheel. Then, sidling for the purpose, the left front and left rear wheels would follow—and the jeep would go on.

  There was an intolerable flash of blinding, perfectly white light—brighter than earthshine, brighter than Earth itself overhead, and brighter than the multiple headlights of the jeep. For an instant all the moonscape, all the jagged, tumbled, incredibly harsh and malignant area about the jeep was lighted as brightly as if in daylight. Then night fell again.

  There was no sound, but the moon-jeep quivered from an impact transmitted through its wheels. Kenmore snapped levers home, and the jeep's three solidly touching wheels spun at the suddenness with which power reached them. The vehicle itself reeled as it plunged backward; then the partly raised wheel touched surface and the jeep fairly leaped to the rear. Almost instantly it spun about, on a point of pivot underneath itself, and darted away from the fallen monolith.

  "You were right," said Kenmore.

  The jeep plunged on. Its wheels clanged and bounced on the dust-covered stone beneath them; its headlights glared ahead. But the sensation of the ride was essentially that of a dream. In one-sixth gravity, no object falls fast. Upward bumps were abrupt, but landings were gentle; on the moon, an object falls less than three feet during its first second of free descent. This flight was like a nightmare.

  "What . . ."

  "Look behind!" Kenmore snapped.

  Moreau flung himself to a port, stared, and his breath left him: The half-mile-high, light-streaked precipice was crumbling before his eyes. It bulged; it leaned outward. Swiftly spreading cracks ran everywhere; gigantic masses of stone stirred in movement which was the more horrible because there should not ever be any such motion on the moon—movement which was not the motion of men or their machines.

  It seemed that the cliff did not so much crumble downward as outward. It loomed above the fleeing jeep and shut out the stars; then it came down like the paw of some utterly monstrous creature.

  But there was enormous deliberation in all save the frenzied flight of the jeep; the stony masses descended in slow motion. Objects on the moon fall approximately two and a half feet in the first second of fall, and roughly five in the next, and a little more than ten in the third. The flying fragments of the cliff seemed almost to float above the racing vehicle; but they descended, too, and their mass was monstrous. Kenmore somehow spared a hand to flip the controls that would close steel shutters over all the ports save those before him. They were meant for use in daylight against the baking heat, but they might protect the plastic ports.

  Something hit a wheel; something incredible brushed the rearmost part of the cabin. Stones, rocks, boulders flew on before it, and settled almost deliberately to the ground—and the violence of their impact was proved by their splintering even as they bounced.

  The jeep veered to one side to avoid a mass as big as a house, which landed a hundred yards ahead. It was too big to bounce, brittle with the more-than-liquid-air frigidity. The mass disintegrated as it touched, and instants later the jeep jolted crazily as its wheels ran over the spreading fragments.

  Then the spotty earthlight itself—filtering through hurtling debris—was blotted out. Kenmore swore as something taller than the jeep hurtled down before the driving-ports, and rolled onward, shedding parts of itself as it rolled. It seemed to waddle and carom between stony walls on either side. The clamor of stones falling on the jeep's steel body rose to an uproar in which one could not hear himself think.

  Kenmore braked, his face twisted in a grimace; then he followed the monster closely. And suddenly the drumming of rock-splinters diminished. It almost ended —then there was an outrageous crash as some unseen missile struck. Afterward, there were merely sharp patterings of particles ranging from the size of one's fist to sand grains; then silence. In the sudden quiet a wheel thumped violently; the last impact had been upon it. Kenmore tensed, noting how bad the thump sounded. In any case, repair was impossible. Presently he stopped.

  CHAPTER II. EMERGENCY LANDING

  MOREAU crawled from where he had been flung by the gyrations of the jeep and stared at the dimly glowing instrument board, where Kenmore's eyes, also, were fixed. In the back of the jeep something clicked; there was a sighing as the air apparatus worked briefly. But the air pressure indicator did not stir; incredibly, the jeep was not losing its air to the vacuum outside. The plastic-glass-wool layers between inner and outer hulls had sealed off any cracks that may have come in the outside plating.

  "That blast was fired too soon," said Joe Kenmore. 'If we'd had one wheel all the way over the rock we stopped at, we'd be buried now."

  Moreau swallowed. "A wheel—is bent," he said thinly. "Do you think we can return to the City on it?"

  "No use even looking," Kenmore told him. "Well run on it until it collapses—if it does. If the wheel falls off, that's that."

  Moreau swallowed again. "That flash could have been a meteor. A meteor could have struck the top of the cliff . . ."

  "Only it didn't," said Kenmore, savagely. "Vaporized iron wouldn't give a pure white light. That was magnesium marking-powder in liquid oxygen; we could make blasts like that!"

  He had named the explosive which was at once the safest to ship by rocket—it is utterly harmless unless the ingredients are mixed—and the one whose constituents were normal supplies for Civilian City. Oxygen, of course, was for breathing; magnesium powder for a stalled jeep to spread over square miles of moondust by airjet, to mark its position so that it could be seen from space. No jet had thus been helped yet—before its crew was dead—but there was still hope.

  "Then it was . . ." Moreau lapsed into infuriated syllables in his own language. If somebody had blasted down a cliff to destroy this jeep and murder its crew, some profanity was justified.

  "That was meant to kill us, yes," said Kenmore. "It'll be interesting to find out who, besides us, was roaming around outside in a jeep. They'll be our would-be assassins."

  He opened a drawer and took out the large-scale, space-photographs which were at once the maps and the surveys of this general area of the moon's surface.

  After a time, Moreau said slowly, "Of course it could be that there are enemies of Civilian City who do not live in the City itself."

  Kenmore said nothing. He clipped a photo to the map rack, where he could see it clearly, and began to edge the jeep out of its still-unpleasant situation. The gigantic stone directly before them was surrounded by debris; boulders of all possible dimensions encircled it. The jeep could ride, lurching violently, over the smallest of these; it could get around some, and a few could be crossed by straddling. The rest had to be avoided altogether, if possible.

  "Our would-be murderers," said Moreau unhappily, "could be fellow citizens of the City who disapprove of the entire project of which they are a part. Or they could be from Earth, secretly landed and operating from a base somehow established without the radars having detected them. But there are still some who say that the United States does not enjoy having people of other nations on the moon. They say that your—ah—military men may contrive accidents to be discouraging."

  "You don't believe that!" snapped Kenmore.

  "No," admitted Moreau, "I do not. Nor do I believe in a secret base established by
our enemies. But some will say that the United States works covertly to sabotage the project to which it admitted other countries. The proposition is foolish, but it is believed."

  Kenmore grunted. There was a crisis on Earth, which it was hoped the moon project would conquer. There had been twenty-odd known civilizations on Earth in the past, he recalled, and everyone had reached a point of crisis and collapsed. China and Babylonia, Greece and Rome rose and fell—and they were at least as much civilizations as nations. Current, Western civilization was built on mechanical power rather than on human muscles; it had risen higher than any others. With power enough, men could make Earth a garden, and colonize the stars. Man not only can do this, Kenmore thought; man must do it, or this civilization will decay. Civilization must climb, or die!

  But there was the question of power—its foundation. Coal and oil were limited; only atomic energy promised to let progress continue. Only atomic power involved radioactivity, and radioactivity meant danger. Already the background-count of splitting atoms in the atmosphere had multiplied eight times from the relatively trivial power-reactors in use. No matter how careful the screening, or how painstaking the disposal of atomic wastes, a steady trickle of atomic poison seeped into the air. There was a limit to the power that could be produced without destroying all life on Earth, and that limit had nearly been reached—without releasing enough power so that human civilization could continue to rise.

  That was the reason for the Space Laboratory—to try to work out a new principle of releasing atomic energy. For the men in it, this was the most hazardous enterprise ever undertaken. The best brains of the human race worked feverishly amid atomic explosives more terrible than fusion bombs; every breath was peril; every heartbeat was likely to be their last. They did research too dangerous to attempt on Earth, or even on the moon; it had to be done forty thousand miles out in space, with the moon as a shield for Earth against what might happen in the Laboratory. Civilian City itself existed as a supply base for the Laboratory, as a place where men from the Lab might relax from time to time.