by J. T. Wilson
“Selenites have seen gooddoctor recently, yes,” K’chuk confirmed. “He was heading for the Heart.”
“Well, surely this presents no problem?” said Annabelle. “We’ll simply take the lift. If memory serves, the journey is no more complicated than that.”
K’chuk shook his head. “Heart everywhere. Friend Annabelle has seen only one piece. Gooddoctor can learn from Heart here but…” He seemed to strain for the right words. “Different part of Heart, different learning.”
“Certainly we must give chase immediately, if he seeks the Heart,” Folkard said at once. “A part of the Heart which we have never explored, however, is a danger indeed. K’chuk, do you know in which direction the good doctor was going?”
“Yes, Selenites know where Grant went,” replied K’chuk, “but route is bad one. Much danger. Many of your enemies, many of ours. Things that you have not seen.”
“What do you mean?” asked Nathanial, but received no reply.
“Will you take us in that direction?” asked Folkard. “It really would be most appreciated. If you’re concerned as regards safety, I should note that we have some of our best men accompanying us, and well-armed.”
K’chuk displayed a marked reticence in spite of Folkard’s assurances and, at a gesture from Nathanial, the latter turned to Annabelle in appeal. Annabelle, in turn, addressed Professor George.
“Director, if I might be permitted to have a word with K’chuk in private? K’chuk, would you mind awfully?” George nodded, and led the two to a smaller room which served as an office. The room boasted all the spaciousness of a funicular railway carriage.
“Now, K’chuk,” Annabelle began once they were alone, “I know that your people do not tell lies, but I do know when you’re not telling us the entire truth. What is happening here on Luna? Are these people mistreating you?”
K’chuk pondered a moment, which Annabelle took to mean that he was seeking the most diplomatic way to say his piece. So difficult to tell, though, with that inexpressive face!
“Earth men as one to us, friend Annabelle,” he said at last. “We know no difference in Britain village and Russia village. One group hurts Selenites, one does not. That is all. British Research Base men not harm Selenites. They are not baddoctor. But the gooddoctor has left us, friend Annabelle. He not friend of Selenites as he was. He not remember himself.”
“Are you worried about meeting him like this?” Annabelle asked. “Surely you are not saying that my uncle is an enemy of the Selenites?”
“No enemy. But he does things that say he does not want Selenite friends. Selenites not talked with gooddoctor,” K’chuk admitted. “He has…other friends now. He is interested in things Selenites do not have interest in. K’chuk not seen him for some months.”
It seemed to Annabelle as if K’chuk was lamenting a friendship that had come unstuck due to interests becoming incompatible. This was hardly the end of the world for a human, of course, particularly not one with the endless stream of loose connections and travelling companions of Annabelle Somerset; however she could well imagine that it was a new experience for a Selenite, whose closest friends remained so from larva to death.
“You’re worried that he might have no time for you, or view you differently from before? I can well understand this, K’chuk. Look at this.” At this remark, she pulled up her skirt, revealing the hitherto concealed wooden leg, carved to look like a riveted and pistoned mechanical appendage.
“You are turning into a machine?” asked K’chuk, at which Annabelle had to smile.
“No, although I see it appears so. This wooden carving must serve as a leg for me temporarily.”
“Where is your normal leg?”
“Gone, alas. There was…” Annabelle thought of how best to explain it. “A fight between some humans on a space station in which I was injured. The wound became a problem and my leg couldn’t be saved. It was that or death: hardly a choice offering much luxury. Now I am to be presented to my uncle with less body parts than he remembers me having. I fear that he will think less of me for that. Perhaps we both have our reasons why we would not wish to meet my uncle, K’chuk. But really we must, or at least I must. Some things are more important than foolish pride.
“We find ourselves in a research base which has already attracted some interest. It has surely occurred to our enemies to find out quite what is being researched here. If we don’t reach the Heart first, there is every chance that another party on Luna will find it. Perhaps the Russians…” she remembered a curious word from her last visit to Luna “…or Drobates, I know not. I do know, however, that it would be a sorry day for both of us if they do.”
“Friend Annabelle, we help you go to Grant. But it is a dangerous journey. Need to be careful. We come with you and help. Maybe even best British men no use there.”
Chapter Three
“Spies!”
1.
THEY COULD ill afford to waste time. Grant’s tracks were already over a month old and with each passing hour, they risked turning as cold and unfathomable as the lunar surface above them. A lift led deeper, beneath Otterbein Base, so Folkard decided the group would descend to the caverns from there. Professor George guided the group to the lift, but could not accompany them further due to his responsibility for the base, particularly in Colonel Harrison’s absence. Folkard sent a message with a Sikh private instructing Ainsworth to take the cutter to Sovereign in order to notify Bedford of the amended plan. Bedford should send armed reinforcements at once; Folkard saw no value in keeping the military profile low at this point.
The base personnel provided them with several cans of yellow paint with which to mark their passage so Bedford could follow. Folkard gave these to Gibbs with instructions to mark every passageway entrance and every fork in the tunnels. He would have requested the loan of a section of Sikh infantry from the base’s garrison as well, but Colonel Harrison, their commander, had still not returned and Folkard lacked authority to order the men in his absence. He did demand an additional two hundred rounds of .476 Enfield ammunition from the base’s armoury, and protocol be damned. The six rounds in the chamber of each of the men’s revolvers might not suffice if they ran into serious trouble, but thirty more rounds in each of their pockets should do the trick. If not, ammunition was probably the least of their worries.
The party did have some reinforcements, however. Two of K’chuk’s Selenites, and K’chuk himself, joined the group as guides. Two scientists from the base also expressed a desire to accompany the Sovereign’s shore party: Staples, the closest of the group to Grant, and Phillips, whose biological interest in the Selenites now found itself with the opportunity to develop further with a rare piece of field research—the potential of seeing the Selenites in combat. Folkard had reminded both men of the potential danger, but Phillips countered with the example of Benjamin Franklin and his kite; the best scientists, he had said, like the best captains, always took risks. Folkard was of the opinion that any trouble they encountered would be a deal more dangerous than flying a kite in a storm, but their numbers were so slight as it was he willingly accepted any accretion of strength. As to that, the Selenites certainly made for robust-looking guardians, and Folkard had seen them in battle—formidable warriors when provoked.
With all in order, the only thing left was to identify the whereabouts of Grant. Conversation with the geologists working in the caverns yielded little: they remembered seeing Grant stride in a direction away from the base into the depths of the caves but had no idea where he went from there. The problem was Grant’s wanderings had become commonplace and consequently went largely unnoticed. The Selenites, on the other hand, positively reported having seen Grant passing through “long crooked cavern down below, where seven big spiders lived before it flooded”. Since Luna had no magnetic poles, compasses were useless, and so these sorts of vague landmarks were all they had to go by. Folkard had expected more mapping of the caverns to have been completed by this time, with a rationali
sed system of designating passages and chambers, some clear markings on the walls near the station at least, and a chart or two prepared. Survey work was part of the charge of the military garrison, after all, but as near as he could tell very little had been done in that regard.
The early stages of the expedition required the group to descend at a steep angle which they did with care. The Selenites made the descent using all six of their limbs, crawling down with ease and occasionally returning to offer assistance to Miss Somerset, clambering at an awkward angle with the assistance of Seaman Henry. Eventually the descent became more gradual, allowing the group to relax somewhat.
McKittrick, enthused by the opportunity to show off in front of the new arrivals, coaxed Stone along with a veritable deluge of antiquated jargon, which singularly failed to impress anyone. The acoustics in the cavern only served to encourage McKittrick further. Folkard was about to have a word with him when Henry turned to Leading Machinist O’Hara.
“Paddy, did I ever tell you about the terrible accident I witnessed at Newgate Prison?” he said.
“Why no, Howie, but I’d love to hear,” the short, wiry Irishman answered.
“There was this prison warder, a right tyrant he was, always shouting orders and saying very hurtful things about the prisoners.”
“Ah, hurtful was he?” O’Hara asked.
“He was. Then one day a brick fell out of the ceiling and cracked his skull open. Killed ’im! It was terrible to see.”
“I imagine it was at that,” O’Hara agreed, “although a man that hurtful—you have to think God’s justice had something to do with it as well.”
McKittrick turned and glared at them, but with a hint of nervousness as well.
“That’s enough idle chatter,” Folkard ordered.
“Aye-aye, sir,” Henry and O’Hara piped.
Folkard frowned at them to make sure they understood him, although Stone shot Henry a grateful look, and Folkard smiled inwardly himself. It wouldn’t do McKittrick any harm to keep his gaoler slang to himself for the balance of the trip, and with Henry along, Folkard expected he would do exactly that.
After perhaps half an hour of silence, Folkard heard Miss Somerset try to engage Seaman Henry in quiet conversation, but without much success. Henry was a naturally taciturn man and his dialogue with O’Hara was the most verbiage Folkard could recall issuing from him. Folkard had to smile at Miss Somerset’s attempts to amuse him with observations concerning the stalactites in the caverns or the curiously albino lunar bats. She noted his tattoos—to Folkard’s eyes, an unremarkable collection of self-applied prison tattoos and dockland ink—and angled for some autobiographical details on this front; she found that he had little interest in explaining them beyond “it looked good” or “I liked it”. Nor did she find much detail lurking behind the scar on Henry’s face, which reached from his ear to his nose. Folkard had always been too decorous to ask about the scar, so was interested in his reply. “Prison fight,” he muttered, and said no more, to the disappointment of Folkard and Miss Somerset both.
She tried to press him further by drawing his attention to her own disfigurement, the absent leg, before going on to give her opinion that the geologists giving their testimonies to Folkard were rather more interested in her prosthetic than in their own memories. “I suppose, after all, they are scientists. I do fear, Mister Henry, that I am becoming medically interesting!” she remarked, which drew only a nod from the dour sailor.
When she finally lost her patience and noted that her colleague was not the most garrulous of men, Henry remarked, “a wise man with nothing to say is silent.” This comment, practically a speech by his standards, was enough to silence Miss Somerset for some minutes.
Folkard, at the head of the party with K’chuk, soon also found that his attempts at conversation were not progressing in the manner he wished. He attempted to work out some preliminary tactics with the Selenites in the event of an attack by Russians or others, but found, not entirely to his surprise, that they were talking a different language. Folkard gravitated towards the language of conflict and battle, K’chuk preferred the discourse of discovery and understanding. There was also the dark allusion by K’chuk that there were forces of which Folkard knew nothing, which confounded him.
“Why, whatever do you mean, man?” he asked, carefully walking down an incline and straining to avoid a deadly slip on a loose rock.
“Not holy. Not peace. Enemy of Selenites,” K’chuk replied in his stridulous voice and would say no more.
After a time of looking at little more than rock, the group became aware of the sound of running water. Presently, a short corridor ended with a sharp increase in height and what was little more than a pot-hole became a great chamber, at which point they came upon the source of the sound. It was a great river, larger than anticipated and boasting a current heading broadly to their right. They were deep beneath the surface of Luna, but the river flowed downwards, further into the depths of the world.
“If Doctor Grant came this way,” said Folkard, “I see no alternative but for him to have moved down-river. The bank disappears into a canyon wall up-river, and this current is too strong to swim against for long.”
“Staples, Phillips, do you know this water?” asked Stone.
“I believe so, or at any rate have heard rumours of it,” said Staples. “This is what I warrant the Selenites call the River of Life, understood to be the largest underground river on the planet, this side of Luna at least. It is held to have regenerative qualities, which―”
“Come now, no need for local mumbo-jumbo,” Phillips interjected. “Best we restrict ourselves to the facts. Although we are yet to map it ourselves, it is believed that the river leads to the very centre of Luna.”
Folkard knew something of water, and he doubted a river just started somewhere and ended up in the centre of the planet, or by now all the water would have got there, filled it up, and stopped running. From where did the water come? There had to be a water cycle at work here, a regular system of exchange; but that was for the geologists to sort out.
“Grant has contacted the Heart before, and he sought it in this latest trek,” Folkard said. “And the Heart, as its name suggests, resides in the centre of Luna.” He nodded. “We will search down-river.”
There was some animation among the Selenites, as though Folkard’s words upset them.
“Some problem, K’chuk?” Miss Somerset asked.
“Danger downriver, friend Annabelle,” said K’chuk, although he appeared to be restraining his thoughts somewhat. K’chuk was looking to the banks of the river and Folkard followed his gaze, attempting to identify what had inspired him to raise this caution.
“Danger indeed,” muttered Seaman Henry darkly, indicating the remnants of a recently vacated campsite among the unusually lush vegetation.
Folkard, taking McKittrick and Henry with him, made his way to the campsite to inspect the remains. There were some discarded food cans among the detritus, which attracted the particular interest of the men.
“Written in Russian, sir,” reported McKittrick, yet Folkard did not respond immediately.
Indeed, he had stopped as if suddenly touched by an unseen force. “Did you feel that?” he murmured.
“Feel what, sir?” asked McKittrick.
“Felt almost as if…as if someone was breathing down my neck,” said Folkard. He felt as if he had temporarily taken leave of his senses.
“Perhaps a breeze from the river, sir,” McKittrick suggested.
“Yes, perhaps nothing more than that,” Folkard replied. He was far from convinced; still, one must keep up appearances in front of the men. “Russian, you say? Well, stands to reason. We know there are Russian stragglers who took refuge deeper in the caves after the station was taken. We rounded up several and repatriated them, but some die-hards hung on, God only knows why. “
“Clearly much has changed since we were on Luna last, Captain Folkard,” said Stone, as he struggled d
own the riverbank to join the men, “but I fear K’chuk was referring to this.”
He indicated a skeleton, easily overlooked in the shadow of the cliff wall, that looked quite unlike anything Folkard had seen before. It was a blasphemous approximation of human physiology, yet the proportions were all wrong and the skull strangely shaped—flat-faced in front but with an elongated back. The skeleton was picked clean of any flesh or viscera yet had an unpleasantly fresh air about it, as if the original bearer had only lately stumbled upon the misfortune which caused him to perish here.
The naval ratings removed themselves from the site of the skeleton at once. While they had encountered skeletons before, of course, Folkard imagined combining association with ant-people with proximity to this ghoulish relic was simply too much. Folkard and Nathanial remained, however, and were presently joined by Staples and Phillips, who evidenced with Nathanial a scientific interest in the mysterious entity.
“Remarkable specimen, is it not, gentlemen?” asked Stone to his fellow scientists. “Something of both the Selenite and of the human, I’d say.”
“I must say, that caught my eye, too,” said Phillips. “With alien species I frequently find myself drawn less to the differences to the anatomy of man and more to the similarities. This is an unusual specimen indeed. Almost a prehistoric version of the Selenite. Perhaps an ancestor?” he wagered, to the derision of Folkard, the evolution cynic.
“If this were to be Selenite, Doctor Phillips, we would surely find six limbs rather than four. The bones seem somewhat too fresh to be an ancestor,” said Stone, crouching down to peer at the find. “In any case, I would expect evolution to proceed from an insect form to a man-like form, not vice versa. Perhaps this is some distant relation? A different branch of the lunar tree of life?”
“This skeleton does look familiar,” said Staples. “It is reminiscent of something I once saw in Doctor Grant’s laboratory, although he was evasive about its identity and I never learned a name for it. Either way, it is certainly no Selenite.”