Murray Leinster

by The Best of Murray Leinster (1976)

  It was just barely past lunar sunrise on the far side of the Moon. Incredibly long and utterly black shadows stretched across the plain, and half the rocketship was dazzling white and half was blacker than blackness itself. The sun still hung low indeed in the black, star-speckled sky. Pop waded through the moondust, raising a trail of slowly settling powder. He knew only that the ship didn’t come from Lunar City, but from Earth. He couldn’t imagine why. He did not even wildly connect it with what - say - Sattell might have written with desperate plausibility about greasy-seeming white crystals out of the mine, knocking about Pop Young’s shack in cannisters containing a hundred Earth-pounds weight of richness.

  Pop reached the rocketship. He approached the big tail-fins. On one of them there were welded ladder-rungs going up to the opened airlock door.

  He climbed.

  The airlock was perfecdy normal when he reached it. There was a glass port in the inner door, and he saw eyes looking through it at him. He pulled the outer door shut and felt the whining vibration of admitted air. His vacuum suit went slack about him. The inner door began to open, and Pop reached up and gave his helmet the practiced twisting jerk which removed it.

  Then he blinked. There was a redheaded man in the opened door. He grinned savagely at Pop. He held a very nasty hand-weapon trained on Pop’s middle.

  ‘Don’t come in!’ he said mockingly. ‘And I don’t give a damn about how you are. This isn’t social. It’s business! ’

  Pop simply gaped. He couldn’t quite take it in.

  ‘This,’ snapped the redheaded man abruptly, ‘is a stickup!’

  Pop’s eyes went through the inner lock-door. He saw that the interior of the ship was stripped and bare. But a spiral stairway descended from some upper compartment. It had a handrail of pure, transparent, water-clear plastic. The walls were bare insulation, but that trace of luxury remained. Pop gazed at the plastic, fascinated.

  The redheaded man leaned forward, snarling. He slashed Pop across the face with the barrel of his weapon. It drew blood. It was wanton, savage brutality.

  ‘Pay attention!’ snarled the redheaded man. ‘A stickup, I said! Get it? You go get that can of stuff from the mine! The diamonds! Bring them here! Understand?’

  Pop said numbly: ‘What the hell?’

  The redheaded man hit him again. He was nerve-racked, and, therefore, he wanted to hurt.

  ‘Move!’ he rasped. ‘I want the diamonds you’ve got for the ship from Lunar City! Bring ’em!’ Pop licked blood from his lips and the man with the weapon raged at him. ‘Then phone down to the mine! Tell Sattell I’m here and he can come on up! Tell him to bring any more diamonds they’ve dug up since the stuff you’ve got!’

  He leaned forward. His face was only inches from Pop Young’s. It was seamed and hard-bitten and nerve-racked. But any man would be quivering if he wasn’t used to space or the feel of one-sixth gravity on the Moon. He panted:

  ‘And get it straight! You try any tricks and we take off! We swing over your shack! The rocket-blast smashes it! We bum you down! Then we swing over the cable down to the mine and the rocket-flame melts it! You die and everybody in the mine besides! No tricks! We didn’t come here for nothing!’

  He twitched all over. Then he struck cruelly again at Pop Young’s face.He seemed filled with fury, at least partly hysterical. It was the tension that space-travel - then, at its beginning

  - produced. It was meaningless savagery due to terror. But, of course, Pop was helpless to resent it. There were no weapons on the Moon and the mention of Sattell’s name showed the uselessness of bluff. He’d pictured the complete set-up by the edge of the Big Crack. Pop could do nothing.

  The redheaded man checked himself, panting. He drew back and slammed the inner lock-door. There was the sound of pumping.

  Pop put his helmet back on and sealed it. The outer door opened. Outrushing air tugged at Pop. After a second or two he went out and climbed down the welded-on ladder-bars to the ground.

  He headed back toward his shack. Somehow, the mention of Sattell had made his mind work better. It always did. He began painstakingly to put things together. The redheaded man knew the routine here in every detail. He knew Sattell. That part was simple. Sattell had planned his multi-million-dollar coup, as a man in prison might plan his break. The stripped interior of the ship identified it.

  It was one of the unsuccessful luxury-liners sold for scrap. Or perhaps it was stolen for the journey here. Sattell’s associates had had to steal or somehow get the fuel, and somehow find a pilot. But there were diamonds worth at least five million dollars waiting for them, and the whole job might not have called for more than two men - with Sattell as a third. According to the economics of crime, it was feasible. Anyhow it was being done.

  Pop reached the dust-heap which was his shack and went in the air lock. Inside, he went to the vision-phone and called the mine-colony down in the Crack. He gave the message he’d been told to pass on. Sattell to come up, with what diamonds had been dug since the regular cannister was sent up for the Lunar City ship that would be due presently. Otherwise the ship on the landing strip would destroy shack and Pop and the colony together.

  ‘I’d guess,’ said Pop painstakingly, ‘that Sattell figured it out. He’s probably got some sort of gun to keep you from holding him down there. But he won’t know his friends are here -not right this minute he won’t.’

  A shaking voice asked questions from the vision-phone.

  ‘No,’ said Pop, ‘they’ll do it anyhow. If we were able to tell about ’em, they’d be chased. But if I’m dead and the shack smashed and the cable burnt through, they’ll be back on Earth long before a new cable’s been got and let down to you. So they’ll do all they can no matter what I do.’ He added, ‘I wouldn’t tell Sattell a thing about it, if I were you. It’ll save trouble. Just let him keep on waiting for this to happen. It’ll save you trouble.’

  Another shaky question.

  ‘Me?’ asked Pop. ‘Oh, I’m going to raise what hell I can. There’s some stuff in that ship I want.’

  He switched off the phone. He went over to his air apparatus. He took down the cannister of diamonds which were worth five millions or more back on Earth. He found a buckct. He dumped the diamonds casually into it. They floated downward with great deliberation and surged from side to side like a liquid when they stopped. One-sixth gravity.

  Pop regarded his drawings meditatively. A sketch of his wife as he now remembered her. It was very good to remember. A drawing of his two children, playing together. He looked forward to remembering much more about them. He grinned.

  ‘That stair-rail,’ he said in deep satisfaction. ‘That’ll do it!’

  He tore bed linen from his bunk and worked on the emptied cannister. It was a double container with a thermware interior lining. Even on Earth newly-mined diamonds sometimes fly to pieces from internal stress. On the Moon, it was not desirable that diamonds be exposed to repeated violent changes of temperature. So a thermware-lined cannister kept them at mine-temperature once they were warmed to touchability.

  Pop packed the cotton cloth in the container. He hurried a little, because the men in the rocket were shaky and might not practice patience. He took a small emergency-lamp from his spare spacesuit. He carefully cracked its bulb, exposing the filament within. He put the lamp on top of the cotton and sprinkled magnesium marking-powder over everything. Then he went to the air-apparatus and took out a flask of the liquid oxygen used to keep his breathing-air in balance. He poured the frigid, pale-blue stuff into the cotton. He saturated it.

  All the inside of the shack was foggy when he finished. Then he pushed the cannister-top down. He breathed a sigh of relief when it was in place. He’d arranged for it to break a frozen-brittle switch as it descended. When it came off, the switch would light the lamp with its bare filament. There was powdered magnesium in contact with it and liquid oxygen all about.

  He went out of the shack by the air lock. On the way, thinking about S
attell, he suddenly recovered a completely new memory. On their first wedding anniversary, so long ago, he and his wife had gone out to dinner to celebrate. He remembered how she looked: the almost-smug joy they shared that they would be together for always, with one complete year for proof.

  Pop reflected hungrily that it was something else to be made permanent and inspected from time to time. But he wanted more than a drawing of this! He wanted to make the memory permanent and to extend it—

  If it had not been for his vacuum suit and the cannister he carried, Pop would have rubbed his hands.

  Tall, jagged crater-walls rose from the lunar plain. Monstrous, extended inky shadows stretched enormous distances, utterly black. The sun, like a glowing octopod, floated low at the edge of things and seemed to hate all creation.

  Pop reached the rocket. He climbed the welded ladder-rungs to the air lock. He closed the door. Air whined. His suit sagged against his body. He took off his helmet.

  When the redheaded man opened the inner door, the hand-weapon shook and trembled. Pop said calmly:

  ‘Now I’ve got to go handle the hoist, if Sattell’s coming up from the mine. If I don’t do it, he don’t come up.’

  The redheaded man snarled. But his eyes were on the cannister whose contents should weigh a hundred pounds on Earth.

  ‘Any tricks,’ he rasped, ‘and you know what happens!’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Pop.

  He stolidly put his helmet back on. But his eyes went past the redheaded man to the stair that wound down, inside the ship, from some compartment above. The stair-rail was pure, clear, water-white plastic, not less than three inches thick. There was a lot of it!

  The inner door closed. Pop opened the outer. Air rushed out. He climbed painstakingly down to the ground. He started back toward the shack.

  There was the most luridly bright of all possible flashes. There was no sound, of course. But something flamed very brightly, and the ground thumped under Pop Young’s vacuum boots. He turned.

  The rocketship was still in the act of flying apart. It had been a splendid explosion. Of course cotton sheeting in liquid oxygen is not quite as good an explosive as carbon-black, which they used down in the mine. Even with magnesium powder to start the flame when a bare light-filament ignited it, the cannister-bomb hadn’t equalled - say - T.N.T. But the ship had fuel on board for the trip back to Earth. And it blew, too. It would be minutes before all the fragments of the ship returned to the Moon’s surface. On the Moon, things fall slowly.

  Pop didn’t wait. He searched hopefully. Once a mass of steel plating fell only yards from him, but it did not interrupt his search.

  When he went into the shack, he grinned to himself. The call-light of the vision-phone flickered wildly. When he took off his helmet the bell clanged incessandy. He answered. A shaking voice from the mining-colony panted:

  ‘We felt a shock! What happened? What do we do?’

  ‘Don’t do a thing,’ advised Pop. ‘It’s all right. I blew up the ship and everything’s all right. I wouldn’t even mention it to Sattell if I were you.’

  He grinned happily down at a section of plastic stair-rail he’d found not too far from where the ship exploded. When the man down in the mine cut off, Pop got out of his vacuum suit in a hurry. He placed the plastic zestfully on the table where he’d been restricted to drawing pictures of his wife and children in order to recover memories of them.

  He began to plan, gloatingly, the thing he would carve out of a four-inch section of the plastic. When it was carved, he’d paint it. While he worked, he’d think of Sattell, because that was the way to get back the missing portions of his life - the parts Sattell had managed to get away from him. He’d get back more than ever, now!

  He didn’t wonder what he’d do if he ever remembered the crime Sattell had committed. He felt, somehow, that he wouldn’t get that back until he’d recovered all the rest.

  Gloating, it was amusing to remember what people used to call such art-works as he planned, when carved by other lonely men in other faraway places. They called those sculptures scrimshaw.

  But they were a lot more than that!

  IF YOU WAS A MOKLIN

  Entertainment. For what more can you say of the last offering in this collection? After all, when you get right down to it that’s what Leinster aimed for, first, foremost, and all the time. This item contains most of the ingredients that made Leinster’s stories tick - a little science, a pinch of humor, a garnishing of feminine interest, a soupcon of O’Henry.

  Up to the very last minute, I can’t imagine that Moklin is going to be the first planet that humans get off of, moving fast, breathing hard, and sweating awful copious. There ain’t any reason for it. Humans have been on Moklin for more than forty years, and nobody ever figures there is anything the least bit wrong until Brooks works it out. When he does, nobody can believe it. But it turns out bad. Plenty bad. But maybe things are working out all right now.

  Maybe! I hope so.

  At first, even after he’s sent off long reports by six ships in a row, I don’t see the picture beginning to turn sour. I don’t get it until after the old Palmyra comes and squats down on the next to the last trip a Company ship is ever going to make to Moklin.

  Up to that very morning everything is serene, and that morning I am sitting on the trading post porch, not doing a thing but sitting there and breathing happy. I’m looking at a Moklin kid. She’s about the size of a human six-year-old and she is playing in a mud puddle while her folks are trading in the post. She is a cute kid - mighty human-looking. She has long whiskers like Old Man Bland, who’s the first human to open a trading post and learn to talk to Moklins.

  Moldins think a lot of Old Man Bland. They build him a big tomb, Moklin-style, when he dies, and there is more Moklin kids bom with long whiskers than you can shake a stick at. And everything looks okay. Everything!

  Sitting there on the porch, I hear a Moklin talking inside the trade room. Talking English just as good as anybody. He says to Deeth, our Moklin trade-clerk. ‘But Deeth, I can buy this cheaper over at the other trading post! Why should I pay more here?’

  Deeth says, in English too, ‘I can’t help that. That’s the price here. You pay it or you don’t. That’s all.’

  I just sit there breathing complacent, thinking how good things are. Here I’m Joe Brinkley, and me and Brooks are the Company on Moklin - only humans rate as Company employees and get pensions, of course - and I’m thinking sentimental about how much humaner Moklins are getting every day and how swell everything is.

  The six-year-old kid gets up out of the mud puddle, and wrings out her whiskers - they are exactly like the ones on the picture of Old Man Bland in the trade room - and she goes trotting off down the road after her folks. She is mighty human-looking, that one.

  The wild ones don’t look near so human. Those that live in the forest are greenish, and have saucer eyes, and their noses can wiggle like an Earth rabbit. You wouldn’t think they’re the same breed as the trading post Moklins at all, but they are. They crossbreed with each other, only the kids look humaner than their parents and are mighty near the same skin color as Earthmen, which is plenty natural when you think about it, but nobody does. Not up to then.

  I don’t think about that then, or anything else. Not even about the reports Brooks keeps sweating over and sending off with every Company ship. I am just sitting there contented when I notice that Sally, the tree that shades the trading post porch, starts pulling up her roots. She gets them coiled careful and starts marching off. I see the other trees are moving off, too, clearing the landing field. They’re waddling away to leave a free space, and they’re pushing and shoving, trying to crowd each other, and the little ones sneak under the big ones and they all act peevish. Somehow they know a ship is coming in. That’s what their walking of! means, anyhow. But there ain’t a ship due in for a month, yet.

  They’re clearing the landing field, though, so I start listening for a ship’s drive, even
if I don’t believe it. At first I don’t hear a thing. It must be ten minutes before I hear a thin whistle, and right after it the heavy drone that’s the ground-repulsor units pushing against bedrock underground. Lucky they don’t push on wet stuff, or a ship would sure mess up the local countryside!

  I get off my chair and go out to look. Sure enough, the old Palmyra comes bulging down out of the sky, a month ahead of schedule, and the trees over at the edge of the field shove each other all round to make room. The ship drops, hangs anxious ten feet up, and then kind of sighs and lets down. Then there’s Moklins running out of everywhere, waving cordial.

  They sure do like humans, these Moklins! Humans are their idea of what people should be like! Moklins will wrestle the freight over to the trading post while others are climbing over everything that’s waiting to go off, all set to pass it up to the ship and hoping to spot friends they’ve made in the crew. If they can get a human to go home with them and visit while the ship is down, they brag about it for weeks. And do they treat their guests swell!

  They got fancy Moklin clothes for them to wear - soft, silky guest garments - and they got Moklin fruits and Moklin drinks

  - you ought to taste them! And when the humans have to go back to the ship at takeoff time, the Moklins bring them back with flower wreaths all over them.

  Humans is tops on Moklin. And Moklins get humaner every day. There’s Deeth, our clerk. You couldn’t hardly tell him from human, anyways. He looks like a human named Casey that used to be at the trading post, and he’s got a flock of brothers and sisters as human-looking as he is. You’d swear—

  But this is the last time but one that a Earth ship is going to land on Moklin, though nobody knows it yet. Her passenger port opens up and Captain Haney gets out. The Moklins yell cheerful when they see him. He waves a hand and helps a human girl out. She has red hair and a sort of businesslike air about her. The Moklins wave and holler and grin. The girl looks at them funny, and Cap Haney explains something, but she sets her lips. Then the Moklins run out a freight-truck, and Haney and the girl get on it, and they come racing over to the post, the Moklins pushing and pulling them and making a big fuss of laughing and hollering - all so friendly, it would make anybody feel good inside. Moklins like humans! They admire them tremendous! They do everything they can think of to be human, and they’re smart, but sometimes I get cold shivers when I think how close a thing it turns out to be.