All the Colors of Darkness

by Lloyd Biggle Jr

  “I think,” Darzek said slowly, “that a friend of yours enjoys a much greater friendship than he realizes.”

  Abruptly he turned away. “The suit,” he said.

  It drooped over him in cumbersome folds, and he swam in it. The helmet was so large that he had to tilt his head forward to see through the visor. The joints were adjustable, as was a beltlike arrangement around the body, but between these points the oversized suit ballooned out alarmingly. The inflated legs rubbed together; the suit’s hands, even under mild pressure, popped away from his hands and dangled free at the ends of the long arms. Darzek removed the helmet, and watched his bulging belly collapse into sagging wrinkles of fabric.

  “I’ll manage somehow,” he said. “How does the outside door work?”

  “It pushes out. Then it opens on—on hinges.”

  “How do I open it from the outside?”

  “There is no way,” Ysaye said. “It is only for emergencies. It must be propped open.”

  “I don’t like that,” Darzek said with a scowl. “But if it must be left open, then I’ll prop it. A rock will do, I suppose. You wait here, just in case it closes on me. If I can’t get back in, I’ll have no choice but to go back to the base and formally introduce myself. Do you understand?”

  “I—yes, I understand.”

  Darzek snapped the helmet into place, and pushed on the circular inner door. It opened easily, closed behind him. Whether it slammed, clicked, or closed noiselessly he could not say, because he now moved in a void of uncanny silence. He could see no door ahead of him, but he pressed on the blank wall. A jagged section moved outwards—moved with stiff resistance, as though strong springs were holding it—and then pivoted. He stepped through, into the bleak shadow that cloaked the eastern end of the crater, and held the door until he could wedge pieces of rock behind it on both sides to prevent its snapping back into place. Then he backed off and spent several minutes studying the barren slope of crater wall. The door matched so perfectly that even with its slight protrusion it was invisible except from close by. He needed a few landmarks, so he would not waste valuable time in looking for it.

  Finally satisfied, he turned and looked about him. As he glanced upwards stars leaped into view, stars by the dazzling thousands and tens of thousands, of startling brightness. Balanced on the rim of the crater was a rakish, glowing crescent—the Earth, either waning or waxing, and whichever it was Darzek couldn’t have cared less.

  He moved off, following the crater wall for a hundred yards or so, awkwardly stumbling over rock debris and circling enormous chunks of rock that had been eroded from the rim in whatever mode of decay afflicted Moon craters. Darzek was not interested enough to speculate, his only reaction being to damn the process for cluttering up his route. On level ground the dust seemed impervious to tracks—his footprints filled immediately behind him—but on irregular ground the dust could be scraped away, and drifts of smaller rock fragments also recorded his passing. Darzek doubted that anyone could have distinguished his tracks from those of the exploration parties that had tramped along the wall and crisscrossed that section of the crater, but he cautiously followed a wide detour, taking no chances on laying down a trail that would lead directly to the aliens’ door.

  Finally he struck off across the crater, heading down the long, almost imperceptible slope towards the base.

  It was only when he lengthened his stride and attempted to take advantage of the low Moon gravity that he realized he was trapped in a deadly struggle with the aliens’ vacuum suit. The contraption possessed a built-in determination to seek its natural shape. His feet slipped easily from the large feet of the suit, and when he took a long stride, a leg, from the knee joint to the foot, would pop out to its full length while he was in mid-air, and become entangled with his feet when he came down. On a particularly long leap both legs popped out, and nearly tripped him up. He kept the sleeves in place with a desperate grip on the huge mittens, though his hands quickly became cramped. The rubbing legs worried him. He began to wonder if the bulging torso would permit him to bend over. His body was uncomfortably warm; his limbs distressingly cold. He floundered and perspired forward.

  The aliens’ viewer had misled him as to the distance. He’d thought the base less than a mile away, but he quickly raised his estimate to three miles. “But what are a couple of miles on the Moon?” he asked himself exultantly.

  Then he crossed the shadow line, and the blast of the sun’s heat struck him.

  For a terrifying instant the heat overwhelmed him. Just as abruptly the suit reacted, and he began to feel almost comfortable. He slowed his pace as he approached the base, but that was only so his awkwardness and inertia would not carry him completely past it. He had already decided that caution would only waste time, and would entrap him as certainly as recklessness. The base had no hiding places—not for a man who was thousands of miles across space from where he had any right to be, and most particularly not for one wearing a misshapen, miscolored, and otherwise designed-to-stand-out-like-a-sore-thumb alien vacuum suit.

  There were no windows in either hut, a fact for which Darzek was profoundly grateful. There were, however, single windows in both doors of the air locks, to prevent collisions, or, more likely, to prevent the two doors from being opened simultaneously. Darzek went directly to the transmitter hut, paused only for a moment to peer through the doors, and resolutely entered.

  The hut was softly lit by the penetrating sunlight. The transmitter stood at the far end, in an open space reached through a narrow alley formed by cases of supplies. Darzek was chiefly interested in two things, an extra space suit and a spare cylinder or two of oxygen, and he saw neither. He pawed at the crates, squinted at the stenciled labels, and found himself at a frantic dead end. He circled the transmitter, looking at it carefully, and then he left the hut.

  The weird silence had so unnerved him that he found himself tiptoeing, though he knew that no sound could reach the sleeping men in the other hut. He turned to the scientists’ vehicle, which stood nearby. It had a large air cylinder clamped to it with metal straps—they used it to inflate their hut and to replenish their suits’ air supply—but even if Darzek could have coped with the bolts holding it, he would not have dared to take it. It would have been no more conspicuous to swipe the whole vehicle.

  An extra suit, on the other hand, might not be missed immediately, and could be presumed lost, mislaid, or borrowed. He opened the vehicle’s storage compartments, one by one. There was no suit. The scientists’ hut was a gleaming speck far off by the crater wall. They could have left their spare suit there, but he would not risk a fruitless trip, and had no time for any kind of trip.

  The gauge on the supply capsule’s last reserve tank still read zero. If Alice or Gwendolyn had come, instead of Darzek, the work on the transmitter could well have been finished by now. But neither of them would have come—not alone. He had to have a suit.

  He went slowly to the second hut, and peered through the air lock. Crates were stacked high at the rear, perhaps to form a partition. He entered the air lock, and slowly, hesitantly, opened the inner door. If they were awake, the slightest noise would trap him.

  The suits hung to the right of the door. A row of them.

  Darzek helped himself to one, and backed away. His confidence returned in a rush. He closed the doors carefully but deliberately, and even paused outside for a glance at the suit; but he could not inspect it, not there, fighting the cumbersome alien suit. He could only hope that it was in working order, and that the air tank was full.

  As he turned away he saw, on the far side of the transmitter hut, a large air cylinder. He loped over to pick it up. With cylinder under one arm, suit under the other, he started back to the supply capsule, making the best stumbling speed that he could manage.

  The alien suit had begun to do strange things to him. His human metabolism was bringing about violent reactions from its delicate mechanisms. At first it merely probed at him in a cautious
puzzlement; then it asserted itself. It blasted him with heat. Just as abruptly it flushed him with cold. A low humming sound replaced the silence of the helmet. As he began to shiver violently, another blast of heat sent him reeling. He dripped perspiration now, and this seemed to infuriate the suit. The hum crescendoed maddeningly.

  He staggered the last few yards alternately shocked by heat and cold. He hauled open the camouflaged entrance, kicked the rocks aside, and dropped the stolen cylinder and suit on the floor of the air lock. Ysaye was waiting inside the inner door. Darzek unsnapped the helmet, and gasped, “Get me out of this thing!”

  Ysaye stripped the suit from him, and Darzek sagged against the wall and brushed perspiration from his forehead. “First it burned me, and then it froze me,” he complained.

  “I hoped you would not wear it long enough for that to happen,” Ysaye said. “We do not perspire, you see, and our body temperature is lower.”

  “So the suit was trying to stop my perspiration and lower my body temperature. I’m glad it didn’t succeed. When that happens, a human is usually dead.”

  He picked up the stolen suit and the cylinder, and led the way back up the tunnel to the capsule.

  Zachary lay on Darzek’s sleeping pad, still unconscious.

  The others were grouped around the viewer. Xerxes’s arm bore a voluminous bandage.

  “Anything stirring?” Darzek asked.

  “We have not noticed anything,” Xerxes said.

  “Good. Who is coming with me? Alice or Gwendolyn?”

  “What exactly do you want of us?” Xerxes asked.

  “I want one of your technicians to use that transmitter to get back to your New York base. From there she can make contact with us here, and rescue all of us. I don’t pretend to understand how she’ll do it, but one of you told me it could be done.”

  “Yes. It could be done. It would require much time, because she would have to build—”

  “Never mind how, or how much time. If it can be done, let’s get moving. There are plenty of tools there in the transmitter hut.”

  Xerxes’s translation brought about another prolonged discussion. Darzek turned his attention to the stolen air cylinder. He twisted the valve—and nothing happened. Ysaye came to assist, and then Alice. “I fear that it is empty,” Ysaye said finally.

  Darzek slumped dejectedly, and pawed at his flourishing growth of beard. “Of course,” he muttered. “Dumped outside the hut until they could get around to sending it back for a refill. Just finished it yesterday, I suppose, and—this obviously isn’t my day.” He got to his feet again, and reached for the stolen suit. “Now that I think about it, there was a whole row of cylinders in the other hut. All I was concerned with was getting out of there with the suit. This time I’ll take a couple of them.”

  “What we do not understand,” Xerxes said, “is what you propose to do yourself.”

  “I propose to mount guard while your technician works on the transmitter. If anyone approaches the hut I intend to waylay him, and delay, divert, or commit mayhem, if necessary, so your technician won’t be interrupted until she finishes whatever it is she has to do, and gets out of there. Then I’ll come back here. With luck, I’ll bring a couple of full cylinders.”

  “You may be captured yourself.”

  “That’s possible,” Darzek said. “I’ll do my damnedest to avoid it, but it’s possible. And if I am captured, I’ll invent a story about sneaking through the transmitter from Earth because I had a long-suppressed passion to see the Moon.”

  “I doubt if such a thing would be possible.”

  “Probably not,” Darzek conceded. “There’d be a tremendous flap, and I’d be third-degreed interminably, but not even the Chinese water treatment would extract the truth from me. And remember this—even though the high brass back on Earth would never understand how I managed it, at least it wouldn’t be unbelievable—as it would be, for example, if I were caught wearing your vacuum suit. I’ll take off this clothing before I start, and if I am caught they won’t find anything about me that wasn’t made in the U.S.A.”

  “We cannot do what you ask,” Xerxes said. “The risk would be too great, and the time too little.”

  “Look. For the moment I’m not questioning your allegation that your darkness is the right color, and I can’t fault your courage. It must have taken a lot of courage to bring off the things you accomplished on Earth. But you certainly lack spunk. Either you make this effort or you die here like rats in a hole, for all your lovely color.”

  Xerxes did not answer. Darzek brushed him aside, took the suit from Ysaye, and offered it to Alice. Their eyes met. Then she spoke a single word, and as the others watched silently she took the suit and put it on. Darzek unwound the strips of alien clothing and struggled into the stolen suit, with Ysaye fussing around him anxiously. His tenseness vanished as he found the control on the air tank and got the helmet into place.

  Ysaye trailed after them faithfully as far as the air lock. Darzek waved a final salute, the inner door closed, and they stepped outside. He wedged the rocks into place again, and they set off on the circuitous route Darzek had used before.

  They moved with incredible swiftness. Darzek’s suit was bulky and primitive when compared with the aliens’, but at least it almost fit him. He took enormous, soaring strides, and had to exert himself to keep pace with the tremendous bounds Alice made.

  When they reached the transmitter hut he pointed at the air lock, and she stooped low to enter. He was about to follow her, to show her the switch on the light that illuminated the instrument board, but she found it immediately. He watched through the windows as she removed her suit and went to work on the transmitter, her enormous, stooped form looking weirdly out of place in the low hut.

  He turned speculatively towards the other hut, wondering if he should try for the air cylinders at once, or wait until Alice had finished. He decided to wait. Then, if he muddled the job, he would have only himself to account for.

  He moved to the side of the hut, and found a place of relative concealment behind the supply crates stacked there. He was beginning to feel excessively warm, and he mentally directed a deluge of corrosive curses at all vacuum suits, their designers and makers. In his rush to get into the suit he hadn’t thought to look for anything as incidental as a thermostat. He clumsily explored some controls without result, and found he’d been fussing with the radio. Eventually it occurred to him to move into the crates’ shadow, and he soon felt comfortable again. And as soon as Alice—

  “Damn!” he exploded, and immediately hoped that he hadn’t broadcast the word.

  He would have no way of knowing when Alice completed her mission. Even now he might be standing guard over an empty hut. His only means of checking on her progress was to move around and look through the air lock, and this exposed him to a sudden exit from the other hut.

  If he’d had an iota of foresight he would have arranged a signal—she had only to bat the side of the hut when she was ready to return to Earth—but now it was much too late. He knew better than to enter the hut and try to get the idea across to her by sign language. It would waste valuable time, and he would probably fail anyway.

  He darted to the air lock for another look. Alice’s huge form was still bent over the transmitter. She did not appear to have moved since he had seen her last.

  He returned to his hiding place, and continued to search for the suit’s thermostat. He watched, and waited. An hour? Two hours? Three?

  He wondered what sort of havoc Alice was working with the transmitter. If none of the base personnel was enlightened in the ways of the gadgets, an engineer would have to be sent from Earth by rocket to untangle the mess she would leave. It struck Darzek as a tolerably good joke, and he might have enjoyed it immensely under less pressing circumstances.

  His terrible fatigue, and the intense strain of suspenseful waiting, had set his nerves to jangling like a misstrung harp. And in the supply capsule, the gauge on the last reserve
tank still stood at zero. He started to his feet for another look at Alice, and sank back again as a silver-suited figure emerged from the other hut.

  Frantically he fumbled with the radio controls.

  “—ready yet?” a voice rasped.

  “We’re coming.”

  A second figure emerged. And a third. Darzek could only pray fervently that their schedule of yesterday would hold, that they would turn to the right.

  They did. They moved off in long leaps, heading towards the far crater wall. It was their after-breakfast constitutional, and if they followed the previous day’s timing they would be back in about thirty minutes to open the base—and the transmitter—for the day’s operations.

  For a few valuable seconds the other hut lay between them and the air lock, and Darzek was able to risk another check on Alice. She was still at work. He took up a position behind the hut and waited, wondering how the radio operated. Did he have to push a switch to talk?

  He clucked his tongue sharply.

  “What did you say?” was the immediate response.

  “I thought that was you.”

  “Your teeth are rattling.”

  The three figures soon separated, one of them heading for the eastern shadow. Darzek had a momentary twitch of uneasiness about the entrance to the supply capsule, but the man moved only a short distance into the shadow, where he seated himself, perhaps to admire the awesome display of stars. Another turned in the opposite direction, and had soon diminished to a rapidly moving, glittering speck. The third, a short figure with a rolling gait whom Darzek had already identified as the transmitter operator, continued straight ahead. Darzek relaxed, and began once more to search for the thermostat. Now that he’d moved into the sun, his suit was heating up rapidly. He had to find the dratted thing, but the gloves transmitted no information to his hands, and he had difficulty examining himself through the visor.

  He glanced up to check on the positions of the wandering Moon men, and instantly forgot about the heat. The transmitter operator was returning.