Sprockets

by Alexander Key

  “Oh, yes,” said the doctor. “Very simple indeed. And they are going on to the Moon from here?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sprockets told him. Nor did he have to ask what the doctor was thinking. The doctor, he could tell, was fairly quivering with suppressed eagerness.

  “Sprockets,” said the doctor. “Er, would you, ah—well, what I’m trying to say is—”

  “Yes, sir,” Sprockets answered. “I understand, sir. Leave it to me, sir.”

  He turned to Ilium and sang: “Dr. Barnabas Bailey is one of the greatest scientists of our planet, but he has never visited the Moon. Would it be possible—”

  “We would be delighted,” Ilium hastened to sing in reply. “It would be a purplely glowing pleasure to take all of you to the Moon.”

  “I am told,” said Sprockets, “that it is airless, and dismally cold on the dark side. I would not mind it myself, being only a little robot. But humans would have to have space suits and special atomic lights.”

  “We can furnish those,” Ilium sang back. “Only our space suits are not regular space suits, as your people think of them. We have something much better. They are force globes. You will have to wear one yourself, otherwise you will get Moon dust in your joints, and be in an unpurplish pickle.”

  “Thank you most spectrumly,” said Sprockets, in the polite manner of the Purple People. “I expect you should have some special violet smelling salts handy when I tell Dr. Bailey you will take us to the Moon, for he will be quite overcome.”

  Sprockets was wrong. The doctor was only half overcome, for he was so eager he did not want to miss a thing. But Don José Salazar, who was five times as excitable, was quite overcome and had to be revived with the special violet smelling salts. Jim was too young to be overcome, but he danced all over the saucer.

  By the time Don José was revived, and he and the doctor were beginning to burble with pleasure at the thought of visiting the dark side of the Moon (where not even a space chimpanzee had been), the purple saucer was ninety-seven miles, six hundred and fifty-two feet, and three and three quarters inches above the earth.

  Don José and the doctor looked out, gasped, and the doctor exclaimed: “Bless me, what a sight! What a tantalizing, titillating, terrigenous humdinger of a sight!”

  And before Jim could ask what he meant, or Don José could use his camera, he hastily added: “But we can’t go to the Moon until I’ve seen Miranda. She’ll be terrible worried, and there are some things I simply must get.”

  So it was arranged for the flying saucer to drop down quietly into the Bailey courtyard, which it did.

  It landed just at dusk, which is an excellent time for a flying saucer to land, because anyone seeing it would confuse it with the sunset colors and simply wouldn’t believe it.

  Mrs. Bailey was watching for the helicopter to return. When the saucer landed, and Dr. Bailey stepped out of it, she almost had a tantrum.

  “Barnabas Bailey!” she exclaimed. “What’s got into you? Gadding around willy-nilly in flying saucers! What’s happened? Where’s the ’copter?”

  Dr. Bailey told her.

  “Now, my dear,” he went on, “you mustn’t worry. We’re just going to the Moon—”

  “The Moon!” Mrs. Bailey gasped.

  “Yes, my dear. You are invited too.”

  “Goodness gracious, no! I wouldn’t dream of it. Don’t tell me you are actually considering going there with Jim and Sprockets!”

  “Why, yes, Miranda. Now, you mustn’t worry at all. We’ll pop over, look around a bit, and pop right back.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. Nothing at all to it. Not in a purple saucer. They’re absolutely, positively, incontrovertibly—”

  “Oh, dear.” Mrs. Bailey fought back a tear. “I suppose they are—but all the way to the Moon!”

  “Now, Miranda, we’ll be back in a jiffy. Fix us a bit of lunch so we won’t starve, and I’ll get my things.”

  “Yes, dear. Is—is Sprockets behaving well?”

  “Tolerably,” said the doctor. “Tolerably.” And he dashed into the house to get all manner of unnecessary things he thought he would need.

  By the time they were ready to depart, Mrs. Bailey had a huge lunch basket packed with sandwiches, chicken, sausages, pickles, olives, plums, ice cream, cake, and all manner of special goodies for Ilium and Leli.

  “Now don’t let Jim hog the plums,” she said. “He’s a perfect pig about plums. They are the first of the season, and there are only two apiece. Did you hear me, Jim?”

  “Yes, Mom,” Jim replied, hurriedly stuffing some pebbles from the courtyard into his pockets. “What would you like me to bring you from the Moon?”

  “A moonstone, of course,” she said. “Now take good care of your father, and be a good boy. And, Sprockets, you keep an eye on both of them.”

  She kissed them all good-by and stood waving to them in the courtyard as the saucer rose humming into the night.

  They rose slowly at first, then faster and faster, though actually it didn’t seem that the saucer was moving at all. This was because Ilium had switched on the under-gravity nullifiers. The only way that Sprockets could tell that the saucer was really moving was to see the Earth becoming smaller and smaller on one side, and the Moon growing larger and larger on the other.

  The only way to describe it, he thought, was in the doctor’s words. It really was a tantalizing, titillating, terrigenous humdinger of a sight.

  8

  He Visits the Dark Side

  For a while everyone kept rushing from one side of the saucer to the other to flatten his nose against the transparent wall and stare, first at the retreating Earth, then at the swiftly approaching Moon. As the Moon grew bigger and brighter they forgot the cloudy Earth and peered wonderingly at the great peaks and craters coming closer second by second.

  “Look!” cried Jim, stuffing another plum into his mouth. “We’re flying over the Mare Imbrium. It isn’t really a sea, Sprockets. It’s only a desert that looks like a sea.”

  “Yes,” said Sprockets, who was well informed about Moon matters from his learning tapes. “You are eating entirely too many plums.”

  “I’m not either. Wow! Look at that big crater. It must be Archimedes.”

  “It is,” said Sprockets. “And you are, too, eating too many plums.”

  “No, I’m not! I like plums.” Jim put another pebble and a plum into the atomic transmuter, and dozens of new plums spilled over the transmuter’s tray. He selected one, popped it into his mouth, and bubbled: “What a place! We’re almost there, and I’m going to be the first boy ever to set foot on it!”

  “Not at the piggy rate you’re going,” Sprockets declared.

  “Aw, what’s a plum or two?”

  “If you don’t stop eating them,” Sprockets warned, “you are going to have a terrigenous humdinger of a stomach-ache.”

  “But I’ve only eaten a few!”

  “You have eaten exactly sixty-nine plums in the seventeen and a half minutes since we left home,” Sprockets reminded him. “How are you going to hunt for quantic moonstones with a stomach-ache?”

  “If quantic moonstones will cure purple dimness, they ought to cure a stomachache.” Jim ate three more plums, then exclaimed: “Say, do you suppose there are people on the dark side of the Moon? Why don’t you ask Ilium?”

  “There are no people left on the Moon,” Sprockets told him, after a musical exchange with Ilium. “They flew away a million years ago. But Ilium says there are things.”

  “Huh?” Jim dropped a plum and stared at him. “What kind of things?”

  “They are dark things, because they live on the dark side. Their exact nature is unknown, but Ilium says they are closely related to some life forms of nonmatter.”

  “Huh?” Jim clutched his stomach. “Life forms of nonmatter? That doesn’t sound so good.”

  “I understand it is even worse to see them, especially if one has a stomach-ache.”

  “Ugh.” Jim was turning a l
ittle green. Suddenly he sat down on the floor with his head against the atomic transmuter and clutched his stomach.

  “Sir,” Sprockets said to the doctor, “Jim has a stomach-ache. I think it’s a plum-dinger of a plumdilly.”

  “Naturally,” said the doctor. “But he’ll just have to ache. My degrees are in science, not in medicine. Bless me! It didn’t take us any time to get here—we’re over the Appenine Mountains already. Ask Ilium how fast the saucer can travel, and what makes it go.”

  “It can travel much faster than light,” Sprockets translated. “And, at maximum, it approaches the speed of thought. At the moment we are moving only twenty thousand miles a minute, which Ilium says is a safe speed for you. Otherwise, you might become dreadfully addled, even with the nullifiers on. He says that the hyper-sub-medio space inductors are connected with a thought thingummy, and all he has to do is think for it to go, this way or that way, and as fast as he wants, and that’s the way it goes. Therefore you might say, sir, that we are flying thoughtfully.”

  “Quite simple,” said the doctor. “Quite simple indeed. Ah! We are approaching the dark side. We’d better get our equipment ready.” He was trembling with excitement, his mop of white hair standing out in every direction.

  Even as the doctor spoke, they shot past the mountains, and past the edge of light where awesome craters dipped away into mysterious blackness. Now everything below them was lost in a dreadful expanse of blue-black nothingness—the sort of nothingness where almost anything was likely to be, especially things.

  It was so mysterious that Jim actually forgot his stomach-ache while he stared with open mouth at the dark side’s blackness.

  “I can’t see a thing,” said Don José.

  “I don’t think I want to see a thing,” Jim told him.

  Before Sprockets could adjust his night vision button, Leli pressed something into his hand.

  “Here are the atomic night goggles for your friends,” she sang to him. “And these little belts are really force globes. You fasten one about your waist, press this button, and instantly you are enclosed by a force field that acts like a space suit. It makes air that surrounds you, and keeps the air warm no matter how cold it is outside. Be sure to wear one too, so you won’t get Moon dust in your joints.”

  “Thank you most spectrumly,” Sprockets sang to her.

  “And I hope you have a really purplely time when we land,” she sang back. “We will land very soon and go hunting for quantic moonstones.”

  Sprockets passed the force globe belts and the night goggles around, and everyone fastened them on. There were sudden exclamations as the night goggles disclosed what lay below them. Then there was absolute silence. You could have heard a pin bounce after it was dropped.

  Now Sprockets, who was dutifully picking up all the plum pits that Jim had forgotten, hastily turned on his night vision so he could see what had startled everyone. He was careful, however, not to touch his imagination button, for it took no imagination whatever to imagine things below him that would rattle his cogs and fairly fizzle his circuits.

  Then, timidly, he looked.

  His cogs rattled. It was all he could do not to turn away from the sight, and he wished he had a courage button to help him. He needed it, for the dark side of the Moon was perfectly dreadful.

  It was all up and down and in and out, with deep darkness folding into deeper darkness everywhere. He could see right through the darkness, and every bit of it was broken into jagged canyons, bottomless holes and craters, endless twisting caves, demon bridges and yawning pits blacker than black on black. The worst of it was that you could almost see things moving in the blacker than black on black places. Almost, but not quite, which is far worse than actually seeing them.

  After a few moments Dr. Bailey whispered, “Whew!”

  Don José Salazar whispered, “Whe-e-e-ew!”

  Jim whispered, “Ugh!”

  Sprockets gave several loud tocks.

  “Isn’t it just purplely, glowingly, beautiful?” Leli sang delightedly. “But wait till you see the cave where the quantic moonstones are found. There’s absolutely nothing like it in the galaxy.”

  The saucer dipped down into a tremendous blackness. After it had descended several miles (Sprockets refused to allow himself to compute the distance) into a gorge that seemed to have no bottom, it turned suddenly and shot into a cave. Not just an ordinary cave, because all the ordinary caves on earth could have been crammed into this one, with plenty of room left over for all the tunnels and a subway or two besides. It was miles high, miles wide, and miles and miles long.

  And it was not purplishly beautiful. It was more on the scaryish side.

  It twisted all around and in and out of itself, glowing scaryishly green in places, and scaryishly blue in others; and even the black parts—the most scaryish of all—shone like shiny black velvet. Far inside was an area of bright glinting stretches that looked like lakes of frozen quicksilver, which they were. And all around the lakes were strange black buildings that made everyone think of crumbling castles—curiously spindly crumbling castles.

  “Wow!” cried Jim in an awed voice. “So this is where the Moon people used to live!”

  “Magnificent!” burbled the doctor, his hair beginning to stand straight up, stiff as a brush.

  “Magneeficently dreadful,” said Don José, his mustachios quivering. “Such a place, she gives me the jeebee-heebees. My poor camera, how can she take peectures here?” He shook his head. “I would need an atomic lens, with night vision.”

  “Sprockets,” said the doctor, “ask Ilium where the quantic moonstones are found, and why they don’t make as many as they want in the atomic transmuter?”

  “Sir,” said Sprockets, who had his answers all ready, “quantic moonstones are the the only things in the universe made of quantic atoms, and therefore they cannot be reproduced. Ilium says that only nine have ever been found, and only in this area of the quicksilver lakes. They can be anywhere around here—on the shores of the lakes, in the castles, or even in the nests of the things.”

  “Eh?” said the doctor. “What about these things? Are they dangerous?”

  “Not exactly, sir. But Ilium says they are unpurplishly disconcerting. They are simply huge, sir, and being made of nonmatter, they can fly right through one when they are confused. They live up in the darker and more crumbly parts of the castles and, according to Ilium’s description, I would say they closely resemble certain Earth creatures of the order Chiroptera.”

  “Chiroptera?” said Jim. “Why, that’s bats. They’re nothing but Moon bats!”

  “Bless me!” said the doctor. “Naturally, in a place like this, there would be Moon bats. And naturally, they would be large. Fortunately I brought climbing sticks for all of us, so we can easily chase them off.”

  “But, sir,” Sprockets told him dolefully, “one does not chase them off with sticks. Ilium says they have to be thought away.”

  “Eh? What’s this? You have to think them away?”

  “Yes, sir. Things always have to be thought away.” Sprockets’ little voice was suddenly very solemn. “It seems, sir, that human thought, properly directed, is a very potent weapon. But I am not so sure about positronic thought. It may be, sir, that the thinking of a small robot like myself will be dreadfully ineffectual.”

  Jim said: “I’ll bet if you turn on your cerebration button, you can chase a whole flock of ’em away. Anyway, Sprockets, I’ll stay close to you. And if there’s any trouble—”

  “How can we communicate? The Moon is airless, and sound does not travel in a vacuum.”

  “Oh, Daddy brought wrist radios for us. Better strap yours on. We’re going to land.”

  “I don’t need one,” Sprockets said. “I have a special microscopic positronic one built into my circuits. How is your stomachache?”

  “I’ve been practicing on thinking it away. After all, an ache is only a form of nonmatter, and I’m not going to let it keep me from being t
he first boy to set foot on the Moon. Well—here we are!”

  9

  He Encounters Moon Bats

  The purple saucer floated down and came to a rest a few feet above the shore of one of the quicksilver lakes. On either side rose black crumbling castles with greenishly dark openings where almost anything could be watching.

  “Turn on your wrist radios,” ordered the doctor. “Testing, testing—can everyone hear me?”

  “We hear you,” said Jim and Don José.

  “I hear you, sir,” said Sprockets, adjusting the radio button on the side of his head.

  “Sprockets,” said the doctor, “test with Ilium and Leli. You are our connecting link with them, and we must all remain closely in touch every moment we are on the Moon.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sprockets did as directed, and then replied, “Everything is purplishly well, sir.”

  “Very good,” said the doctor. “Turn on your force globes.”

  Instantly everyone in the saucer was surrounded by a shimmering bubble of protecting force.

  “Now,” said the doctor, his voice tingling with suppressed eagerness, his hair standing up wildly in his force globe, “we will descend upon the Moon. Jim, you and Sprockets stay together, and Don José will stay with me. Never let your partner out of your sight. Test every step you take with your climbing sticks, and report to me every minute on your radios.”

  Ilium thought a command to the saucer, and the slender stairway opened below them and touched the floor of the Moon cave. They all filed slowly, carefully, through the purple veil of light that served as an air lock and down the stairway—all but Jim, who gave a little jump, bounced, and rose several feet before he touched again.

  “Jumping jeepers!” Jim spluttered. “I forgot I don’t weigh anything here!”

  “You weigh one sixth what you do at home,” Sprockets told him. “In spite of the plums.”

  Ilium sang: “I will close the saucer so that things will not enter it while we are absent. I hope you have wonderfully purplish luck and find a quantic moonstone.”

  “Thank you most spectrumly,” said Sprockets with eagerness, “and I hope you find several.”