The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 01

by Anthology

  If only the exit locks would operate! We must find Snap and get out of here. Good old Snap! Would we find him lying dead?

  We climbed from the slanting, fallen turret, over the wreckage of the littered deck. It was not difficult. A lightness was upon us. The Planetara's gravity-magnetizers were dead; this was only the light Moon gravity pulling us.

  "Careful, Anita. Don't jump too freely."

  We leaped along the deck. The hiss of the escaping pressure was like a clanging gong of warning to tell us to hurry. The hiss of death so close!

  "Snap--" I murmured.

  "Oh, Gregg, I pray we may find him alive!"

  With a fifteen foot leap we cleared a pile of broken deck chairs. A man lay groaning near them. I went back with a rush. Not Snap! A steward. He had been a brigand, but he was a steward to me now.

  "Get up! This is Haljan. Hurry, we must get out of here The air is escaping!"

  But he sank back and lay still. No time to find if I could help him: there was Anita and Snap to save.

  We found a broken entrance to one of the descending passages. I flung the debris aside and cleared it. Like a giant of strength with only this Moon gravity holding me, I raised a broken segment of superstructure and heaved it back.

  Anita and I dropped ourselves down the sloping passage. The interior of the wrecked ship was silent and dim. An occasional passage light was still burning. The passage and all the rooms lay askew. Wreckage everywhere but the double dome and hull shell had withstood the shock. Then I realized that the Erentz system was slowing down. Our heat, like our air, was escaping, radiating away, a deadly chill settling on everything. The silence and the deadly chill of death would soon be here in these wrecked corridors. The end of the Planetara.

  We prowled like ghouls. We did not see Coniston. Snap had been by the shifter pumps. We found him in the oval doorway. He lay sprawled. Dead? No, he moved. He sat up before we could get to him. He seemed confused, but his senses clarified with the movement of our figures over him.

  "Gregg! Why, Anita!"

  "Snap! You're all right? We struck--the air is escaping."

  He pushed me away. He tried to stand. "I'm all right. I was up a minute ago. Gregg, it's getting cold. Where is she? I had her here--she wasn't killed. I spoke to her."

  Irrational!

  "Snap!" I held him. Shook him. "Snap, old fellow!"

  He said normally, "Easy, Gregg. I'm all right."

  Anita gripped him. "Who, Snap?"

  "She--there she is...."

  Another figure was here! On the grid floor by the door oval. A figure partly shrouded in a broken invisible cloak and hook. An invisible cloak! I saw a white face with opened eyes regarding me.

  "Venza!" I bent down. "You!"

  Venza here? Why ... how ... my thoughts swept on. Venza here--dying? Her eyes closed. But she murmured to Anita, "Where is he? I want him."

  I murmured impulsively, "Here I am, Venza dear." Gently, as one would speak with gentle sympathy to humor the dying. "Here I am, Venza."

  But it was only the confusion of the shock upon her. And it was upon us all. She pushed at Anita. "I want him." She saw me; this whimsical Venus girl! Even here as we gathered, all of us blurred by shock, confused in the dim, wrecked ship with the chill of death coming--even here she could jest. Her pale lips smiled.

  "You, Gregg. I'm not hurt--I don't think I'm hurt." She managed to get herself up on one elbow. "Did you think I wanted you with my dying breath? What conceit! Not you, Handsome Haljan! I was calling Snap."

  He was down to her. "We're all right, Venza. It's over. We must get out of the ship. The air is escaping."

  We gathered in the oval doorway. We fought the confusion of panic.

  "The exit port is this way."

  Or was it? I answered Snap, "Yes, I think so."

  The ship suddenly seemed a stranger to me. So cold. So vibrationless. Broken lights. These slanting wrecked corridors. With the ventilating fans stilled, the air was turning fetid. Chilling. And thinning, with escaping pressure, rarefying so that I could feel the grasp of it in my lungs and the pin-pricks in my cheeks.

  We started off. Four of us, still alive in this silent ship of death. My blurred thoughts tried to cope with it all. Venza here. I remembered how she had bade me create a diversion when the women passengers were landing on the asteroid. She had carried out her purpose! In the confusion she had not gone ashore. A stowaway here. She had secured the cloak. Prowling, to try and help us, she had come upon Hahn. Had seized his ray cylinder and struck him down, and been herself knocked unconscious by his dying lunge, which also had broken the tubes and wrecked the Planetara. And Venza, unconscious, had been lying here with the mechanism of her cloak still operating, so that we did not see her when we came and found why Hahn did not answer my signals.

  "It's here, Gregg."

  Snap and I lifted the pile of Moon equipment to which she referred. We located four suits and helmets and the mechanisms to operate them.

  "More are in the chart room," Anita said.

  But we needed no others. I robed Anita and showed her the mechanisms. Snap was helping Venza. We were all stiff from the cold; but within the suits and their pulsing currents, the blessed warmth came again.

  The helmets had ports through which food and drink could be taken. I stood with my helmet ready. Anita, Venza and Snap were bloated and grotesque beside me. We had found food and water here, assembled in portable cases which the brigands had prepared. Snap lifted them, and signaled to me he was ready.

  My helmet shut out all sounds save my own breathing, my pounding heart, and the murmur of the mechanism. The warmth and pure air were good.

  We reached the hull port locks. They operated! We went through in the light of the headlamps over our foreheads.

  I closed the locks after us: an instinct to keep the air in the ship for the other trapped humans lying in there.

  We slid down the sloping side of the Planetara. We were unweighted, irrationally agile with this slight gravity. I fell a dozen feet and landed with barely a jar.

  We were out on the Lunar surface. A great sloping ramp of crags stretched down before us. Gray-black rock tinged with Earthlight. The Earth hung amid the stars in the blackness overhead like a huge section of a glowing yellow ball.

  This grim, desolate, silent landscape! Beyond the ramp, fifty feet below us, a tumbled naked plain stretched away into blurred distance. But I could see mountains off there. Behind us, the towering, frowning rampart-wall of Archimedes loomed against the sky.

  I had turned to look back at the Planetara. She lay broken, wedged between spires of upstanding rock. A few of her lights still gleamed. The end of the Planetara!

  The three grotesque figures of Anita, Venza and Snap had started off. Hunchback figures with the tanks mounted on their shoulders. I bounded and caught them. I touched Snap. We made audiphone contact.

  "Which way do you think?" I demanded.

  "I think this way, down the ramp. Away from Archimedes, toward the mountains. It shouldn't be too far."

  "You run with Venza. I'll hold Anita."

  He nodded. "But we must keep together, Gregg."

  We could soon run freely. Down the ramp, out over the tumbled plain. Bounding, grotesque, leaping strides. The girls were more agile, more skillful. They were soon leading us. The Earth shadows of their figures leaped beside them. The Planetara faded into the distance behind us. Archimedes stood back there. Ahead, the mountains came closer.

  An hour perhaps. I lost track of time. Occasionally we stopped to rest. Were we going toward the Grantline camp? Would they see our tiny waving headlights?

  Another interval. Then far ahead of us on the ragged plain, lights showed! Moving, tiny spots of light! Headlights on helmeted figures!

  We ran, monstrously leaping. A group of figures were off there. Grantline's party? Snap gripped me.

  "Grantline! We're safe, Gregg! Safe!"

  He took his bulb light from his helmet; we stood in a grou
p while he waved it. A semaphore signal.

  "Grantline?"

  And the answer came, "Yes. You, Dean?"

  Their personal code. No doubt of this--it was Grantline, who had seen the Planetara fall and had come to help us.

  I stood then with my hand holding Anita. And I whispered, "It's Grantline! We're safe, Anita, my darling!"

  Death had been so close! Those horrible last minutes on the Planetara had shocked us, marked us. We stood trembling. And Grantline and his men came bounding up, weird, inflated figures.

  A helmeted figure touched me. I saw through the helmetpane the visage of a stern-faced, square-jawed young man.

  "Grantline? Johnny Grantline?"

  "Yes," said his voice at my ear-grid. "I'm Grantline. You're Haljan? Gregg Haljan?"

  They crowded around us. Gripped us, to hear our explanations.

  Brigands! It was amazing to Johnny Grantline. But the menace was over now, over as soon as Grantline realized its existence.

  We stood for a brief time discussing it. Then I drew apart, leaving Snap with Grantline. And Anita joined me. I held her arm so that we had audiphone contact.

  "Anita, mine."

  "Gregg--dear one!"

  Murmured nothings which mean so much to lovers!

  As we stood in the fantastic gloom of Lunar desolation, with the blessed Earthlight on us, I sent up a prayer of thankfulness. Not that the enormous treasure was saved. Not that the attack upon Grantline had been averted. But only that Anita was given back to me. In moments of greatest emotion the human mind individualizes. To me, there was only Anita.

  Life is very strange! The gate to the shining garden of our love seemed swinging wide to let us in. Yet I recall that a vague fear still lay on me. A premonition?

  I felt a touch on my arm. A bloated helmet visor was thrust near my own. I saw Snap's face peering at me.

  "Grantline thinks we should return to the Planetara. Might find some of them alive."

  Grantline touched me. "It's only human--"

  "Yes," I said.

  We went back. Some ten of us--a line of grotesque figures bounding with slow, easy strides over the jagged, rock-strewn plain. Our lights danced before us.

  The Planetara came at last into view. My ship. Again that pang swept me as I saw her. This, her last resting place. She lay here, in her open tomb, shattered, broken, unbreathing. The lights on her were extinguished. The Erentz system had ceased to pulse--the heart of the dying ship, for a while beating faintly, but now at rest.

  We left the two girls with some of Grantline's men at the admission port. Snap, Grantline and I, with three others, went inside. There still seemed to be air, but not enough so that we dared remove our helmets.

  It was dark inside the wrecked ship. The corridors were black. The hull control rooms were dimly with Earthlight straggling through the windows.

  This littered tomb. Cold and silent with death. We stumbled over a fallen figure. A member of the crew. Grantline straightened from examining it.

  "Dead," he said.

  Earthlight fell on the horrible face. Puffed flesh, bloated red from the blood which had oozed from its pores in the thinning air. I looked away.

  We prowled further. Hahn lay dead in the pump room. The body of Coniston should have been near here. We did not see it. We climbed up to the slanting, littered deck. The air up here had all almost hissed away.

  Again Grantline touched me. "That the turret?"

  No wonder he asked me! The wreckage was all so formless.

  "Yes."

  We climbed after Snap into the broken turret room. We passed the body of that steward who just at the end had appealed to me and I had left dying. The legs of the forward lookout still poked grotesquely up from the wreckage of the observatory tower where it lay smashed down against the roof of the chart room.

  We shoved ourselves into the turret. What was this? No bodies here! The giant Miko was gone! The pool of blood lay congealed into a frozen dark splotch on the metal grid.

  And Moa was gone! They had not been dead. Had dragged themselves out of here, fighting desperately for life. We would find them somewhere around here.

  But we did not. Nor Coniston. I recalled what Anita had said: other suits and helmets had been here in the nearby chart room. The brigands had taken them, and food and water doubtless, and escaped from the ship, following us through the lower admission ports only a few minutes after we were gone.

  We made careful search of the entire ship. Eight of the bodies which should have been here were missing: Miko, Moa, Coniston and five of the crew.

  We did not find them outside. They were hiding near here, no doubt, more willing to take their chances than to yield to us now. But how, in all this Lunar desolation, could we hope to locate them?

  "No use," said Grantline. "Let them go. If they want death, well, they deserve it."

  But we were saved. Then, as I stood there, realization leaped at me. Saved? Were we not indeed fatuous fools?

  In all these emotion-swept moments since we had encountered Grantline, memory of that brigand ship coming from Mars had never once occurred to Snap and me!

  I told Grantline now. He stared at me.

  "What!"

  I told him again. It would be here in eight days. Fully manned and armed.

  "But Haljan, we have almost no weapons! All my Comet's space was taken with equipment and the mechanisms for my camp. I can't signal Earth! I was depending on the Planetara!"

  It surged upon us. The brigand menace past? We were blindly congratulating ourselves on our safety! But it would be eight days or more before in distant Ferrok-Shahn the nonarrival of the Planetara would cause any real comment. No one was searching for us--no one was worried over us.

  No wonder the crafty Miko was willing to take his chances out here in the Lunar wilds! His ship, his reinforcements, his weapons were coming rapidly!

  And we were helpless. Almost unarmed. Marooned here on the Moon!

  XXIII

  "Try it again," Snap urged. "Good God, Johnny, we've got to raise some Earth station! Chance it! Use the power--run it up full. Chance it!"

  We were gathered in Grantline's instrument room. The duty man, with blanched grim face, sat at his senders. The Grantline crew shoved close around us. There were very few observers in the high-powered Earth stations who knew that an exploring party was on the Moon. Perhaps none of them. The Government officials who had sanctioned the expedition and Halsey and his confrères in the Detective Bureau were not anticipating trouble at this point. The Planetara was supposed to be well on her course to Ferrok-Shahn. It was when she was due to return that Halsey would be alert.

  Grantline used his power far beyond the limits of safety. He cut down the lights; the telescope intensifiers and television were completely disconnected; the ventilators were momentarily stilled, so that the air here in the little room crowded with men rapidly grew fetid. All, to save power pressure, that the vital Erentz system might survive.

  Even so, it was strained to the danger point. Our heat was radiating away; the deadly chill of space crept in.

  "Again!" ordered Grantline.

  The duty man flung on the power in rhythmic pulses. In the silence, the tubes hissed. The light sprang through the banks of rotating prisms, intensified up the scale until, with a vague, almost invisible beam, it left the last swaying mirror and leaped through our overhead dome and into space.

  "Enough," said Grantline. "Switch it off. We'll let it go at that for now."

  It seemed that every man in the room had been holding his breath in the chill darkness. The lights came on again; the Erentz motors accelerated to normal. The strain on the walls eased up, and the room began warming.

  Had the Earth caught our signal? We did not want to waste the power to find out. Our receivers were disconnected. If an answering signal came, we could not know it. One of the men said:

  "Let's assume they read us." He laughed, but it was a high-pitched, tense laugh. "We don't dare even
use the telescope or television. Or electron radio. Our rescue ship might be right overhead, visible to the naked eye, before we see it. Three days more--that's what I'll give it."

  But the three days passed and no rescue ship came. The Earth was almost at the full. We tried signaling again. Perhaps it got through--we did not know. But our power was weaker now. The wall of one of the rooms sprang a leak, and the men were hours repairing it. I did not say so, but never once did I feel that our signals were read on Earth. Those cursed clouds! The Earth almost everywhere seemed to have poor visibility.

  Four of our eight days of grace were all too soon passed. The brigand ship must be half way here by now.

  They were busy days for us. If we could have captured Miko and his band, our danger would have been less imminent. With the treasure insulated, and our camp in darkness, the arriving brigand ship might never find us. But Miko knew our location; he would signal his oncoming ship when it was close and lead it to us.

  During those three days--and the days which followed them--Grantline sent out searching parties. But it was unavailing. Miko, Moa and Coniston, with their five underlings, could not be found.

  We had at first hoped that the brigands might have perished. But that was soon dispelled! I went--about the third day--with the party that was sent to the Planetara. We wanted to salvage some of its equipment, its unbroken power units. And Snap and I had worked out an idea which we thought might be of service. We needed some of the Planetara's smaller gravity plate sections. Those in Grantline's wrecked little Comet had stood so long that their radiations had gone dead. But the Planetara's were still working.

  Our hope that Miko might have perished was dashed. He too had returned to the Planetara! The evidence was clear before us. The vessel was stripped of all its power units save those which were dead and useless. The last of the food and water stores were taken. The weapons in the chart room--the Benson curve lights, projectors and heat rays--had vanished!

  Other days passed. Earth reached the full and was waning. The fourteen day Lunar night was in its last half. No rescue ship came from Earth. We had ceased our efforts to signal, for we needed all our power to maintain ourselves. The camp would be in a state of siege before long. That was the best we could hope for. We had a few short-range weapons, such as Bensons, heat-rays and projectors. A few hundred feet of effective range was the most any of them could obtain. The heat-rays--in giant form one of the most deadly weapons on Earth--were only slowly efficacious on the airless Moon. Striking an intensely cold surface, their warming radiations were slow to act. Even in a blasting heat beam a man in his Erentz helmet-suit could withstand the ray for several minutes.