It was a gleaming, almost opaque black, like a vaporous ebony. While the rock was producing it, it smoked. Its golden surface glowed red, as though under its greatest strain yet.
Carter’s body began to suffuse with a series of blackened, wart-like blotches. His skin furrowed and blistered under the black light’s effcct.
“That’s the death light!” Helena shouted, frantically. “Get him under cover!”
Together they began dragging the screaming body of the Eagle pilot out of range of the black ray, to the lee of the bench upon which its awful progenitor rested.
“We’re safe...” Koenig gasped. They lay along the floor, pressed up against the bench. The black beam, finding no flesh to alight on, was swinging bluntly about the room, seeking more.
Helena tended to Carter as best she could. The pilot was groaning and writhing. One side of his costume and face seemed to be affected by the dehydrating property of the ray. Fortunately, now that he had been removed from its direct influence, he was recovering. His skin was smoothing out, and the angry red blotches were fading.
“We were only just in time,” Helena told them.
Koenig gritted his teeth. “In time for our deaths! Helena, we’ve got to keep Reilly from getting more of that rock!” He looked wildly about the laboratory for some way of escape. His eyes followed the roving ebony arm, catching the gleaming reflections of its light off the various surfaces.
Twinges of pain stabbed through him as the reflections bathed him in their light.
“We’re being slowly desiccated!” He cried suddenly. “If we stay here we’ll still die only it’ll take longer!”
He felt his skin. Already it was drying, furrowing, and flaking away.
His horrified mind worked harder, pushed to the limit to make any connections that might be meaningful out of the chaotic series of events that were building up.
“Reflections!” The idea hit him suddenly. “Then why don’t we use a goddamned mirror!”
He began crawling painfully forward in the narrow space that was available, edging toward the end of the bench where the bank of lockers began. He reached the first locker and stopped. The handle lay far above his head, and to reach it he would have to expose himself to the ray.
A long moment of indecision passed while the lights flickered and flashed. Almost unobserved, the computer’s countdown announcement sounded. It told them that they had just thirty minutes to sort themselves out.
Koenig flinched. He waited until the black death ray probed elsewhere. Then he made a lunge at the door handle and pulled himself up. In full view of the rock, he wrenched open the locker and yanked out one of the protective fire suits. The suit was coated with, a silvery, mirror-like finish, and when he pulled it out it shone and sparkled with reflections of the myriad colors and surfaccs in the laboratory. Thankfully, he drew it to him. He dropped back down bcneath the rock’s view...seconds before its arm of execution struck the open locker.
Helped by Helena, he wriggled into the clothing. Like the tunic, the helmet was also silver. Only the tough, see-through visor would let the ray in. To avoid being killed this way he would have to keep his head turned aside while he fired the laser gun.
Awkwardly he clambered to his feet. Almost immediately the black ray was upon him again. He could feel it scorching into his back, tugging at him like a hot sucker. But, as he had suspected, it was unable to wreak its worst damage on him.
“Twenty minutes to lift-off...” the computer announced uncaringly.
With the ray trained mercilessly on him, he strode unsteadily to the weapons rack near the airlock. He selected one of the laser rifles and pulled it toward him. It was longer and four times more powerful than the hand guns they normally carried around with them.
Now he was faced with the problem of aiming the rifle and firing it without looking at his target.
As though sensing his dilemma, the rock increased its desperate assault. The power it had formerly conserved now blazed forth again. Angry reds, audacious greens, flaring yellows, striking blues—they lanced out at him in a mad, reckless attempt to finish him for good.
But the damaging colors bounced harmlessly off his suit, reflected back onto their maker.
The rock glimmered and dimmed on the bench behind him.
All of a sudden he noticed its image in a console surface. He backed slowly toward it, drawing his rifle up to his line of sight. Then he whirled rapidly around, squeezing the fire button as he turned. A line of burning light stabbed out from the nozzle. In the split second of time he had available to him before the deadly rays damaged his exposed face, he aimed.
He felt an explosion of pain in his eyes. A wave of raw, red fire burst over him, but he clung grimly to his senses, keeping his rifle aimed and his finger on the button. At length the numbing pain stopped. His blurred vision cleared; as though waking from an unpleasant dream, he found himself still standing, still firing at the rock.
The laser beam was playing directly on it, cauterizing it. It had ceased to struggle, its rays gone. It was shrinking in size under the fierce heat. Boiling off it in white, angry billows was the Eagle’s water supply.
He played his rifle over it until there was no more steam left to boil off. Then, weakly, he lifted his finger off the button.
Helena, Maya, Verdeschi, and Carter climbed white-faced from their undignified positions on the floor.
“Minus ten minutes to lift-off...”
They panicked, trying to help him out of his sult, but he waved them away. He pulled off his helmet himself and tossed it to the floor. “Get that out of here!” he shouted to Carter, pointing to the smoking rock.
He turned to Verdeschi. “Get Reilly back... Helena, Maya, strap yourselves in your seats.”
He turned wearily and made his way toward his own seat in the pilot section. His muscles ached for release from the agony they suffered keeping him upright. With all his mind and body he longed to rest, to drift once again in weightless space, away from the hellish world they had landed on.
Through dimming, reluctant senses he tested the controls. They were back to normal. All, at last, was as it should be.
While he was waiting for Carter and Verdeschi to return and seal the airlock the seconds ticked tensely by. Five more minutes, and all their struggling would have been done in vain.
He got the Command Center on the console screen.
“John!” The anxious, welcome features of Dr. Vincent floated before him in a haze. “Thank God we’ve found—”
“Don’t thank anyone yet,” he slurred.
Carter appeared beside him and flung himself in his pilot’s seat. The airlock door was closed. Without waiting to be asked, the Eagle pilot began activating the ship’s engines and taking them up.
All contact was lost once more as the crippling pull of the planet, still trying to drag them back as they surged upward, caused them to black out in merciful oblivion.
“Moon Base Alpha to Eagle Four... Moon Base Alpha to Eagle Four...”
The plaintive, pleading voices roused them from their stupor.
“Come in, Eagle Four.”
Koenig groaned, remembered where he was, and once more leaned forward and spoke in the communicator.
“Eagle Four to Moon Base Alpha... this is John Koenig... we’re okay. Repeat, okay.”
The faces in the Command Center reappeared on the screen. It took him some time to realize that they were smiling joyfully.
“We’re making sure we keep track of you this time.” Frazer smiled after they had exchanged news and greetings.
“It’ll sure be good to hear Earth—if it is Earth,” Carter put in, finding his cheerfulness with difficulty. But neither he nor Koenig could find anything to raise their spirits.
“All we want to do now is sleep,” Koenig told them.
He punched more buttons, and the section screen above their heads glowed to life. It showed the massive orb of the brown planet filling nearly the entire screen. The
clouds churned sickly, like never before.
They felt like retching.
“The rock will be dying,” Verdeschi called over the intercom from the laboratory.
“It will die in a matter of seconds unless it gets water,” Reilly’s voice butted in.
There was a pause, then Maya’s voice crackled over. She sounded slightly mournful. “It didn’t want to hurt us. All it wanted was to survive. If only those clouds would give up the water in them.”
Reilly snorted. “It tried to kill us! But if you really wanted to save it,” he softened, “nucleoid active crystals ought to do the trick.”
“You mean sow iodine in the clouds and make them rain?’’ Maya cried happily.
Koenig scowled. He shook his head, disbelieving what he heard. But he knew Maya was right. They had no right to let another life form die just like that. The rock was no danger to them now.
“Okay, stand by to drop a few pounds of crystal,” he ordered.
“Standing by,” Maya reported back eagerly. Koenig nodded to Carter.
The Eagle pilot grinned and took his Eagle in a long, low sweep over the boiling brown surface beneath them. As they skimmed a few hundred miles above the cloud tips they showered them with hundreds of thousands of gleaming; purple iodine crystals, adding one more color to the rock’s ailing repertoire. Then they pulled away, their retro-rockets blazed, and they headed back to Base.
CHAPTER
FIVE
They had been in space for six years and four days precisely.
Six years and four days too long, Koenig thought sardonically as he surveyed the Big Screen in front of him. Once more he was safely ensconced in his command chair on the Moon Base.
In the year 1999, ill-fated mankind had thrown, just a little too much of his own filthy dishwater out of the sink and blown the Moon out of its orbit. God only knew what had happened to mankind after they had left their mother planet so ungracefully and unexpectedly. Violent storms must have raged as the weather patterns stabilized themselves; huge seas must have risen and swamped half of the cities. The Moon, which had been so much a part of the Earth and its life forms, had just been ripped away.
Yet, apparently, mankind had survived—but only just. He had survived on the Moon, still hurtling on its way, propelled by the gargantuan nuclear explosion of the atomic waste buried on its darker side. And he had, apparently, survived on Earth, in a sort of way.
Here, in the voice broadcasts being delivered to them by neutrone transmission, was living proof.
“Gentlemen, you are aware of the warp effect,” the voice of Dr. Charles Logan was telling them. “We on Earth are on the threshold of a fantastic experiment to recover alive our own ancestors.”
He was a bald man in his mid-fifties dressed in a silver tunic. He had an intense, ascetic skull-like face relieved only by a pair of bright, lively eyes. He was addressing his assistant, a beautiful Earth woman called Carla, but the Alphans were being allowed to listen in.
The scene was set in the twenty-second century, almost one and a half centuries after Moon Base Alpha had been blasted on its fateful way. It seemed incredible, and Koenig kept thinking that he was hallucinating—either that or dreaming. But he was not. And he was also quite sure-as sure as he could be-that Dr. Charles Logan was who he claimed to be.
When Eagle Four had returned to its berth and they had alighted and rested up for several hours, the first thing he had done was to devise a series of tests to check whether the futuristic doctor was telling them the truth. He had passed them all with flying colors.
It really did seem, incredibly, wonderfully, that at last their hopes could be raised and their stay on the dead Moon be ended. The six years and four days of survival had not been in vain.
He watched with trembling excitement which he refused to allow to show on his face. They could never be one hundred percent sure of anything... one hundred percent sure that Dr. Logan could do as he claimed and have them all beamed back to Earth by matter transmission.
Carla, the beautiful assistant on the screen, turned to her superior, her face clouding with a troubled look as she reacted to Logan’s delivery. “But we have an education program to get through in the next...” She glanced off-screen, presumably at a clock. “Sixty hours. These people on Alpha must be prepared for the changes that have taken place on Earth since the year 1999.” She held up a sheaf of papers. “I have selected this range of photographs.”
There was a general consenting babble of voices coming from off-screen as the other Earth scientists who were gathered there in the futuristic laboratory made their opinions known.
Logan held up his hands. “I know and you can feed them up to the Alphans right now.” He turned and faced the camera head-on so that he was now addressing the Moon Base. He smiled. “Ready?”
The Alphans crowded in the Command Center chorused their eager reply. The screen went dark and they waited.
The first photograph flashed up, drawing a gasp of astonishment from them. It showed a rocky and deserted world with a dark, sinister sky. Vapors spiralled upward from the Earth. In the center of the picture, tucked between two savage folds in the landscape, were three massive domes covering a breath taking panorama of city buildings. The city was vast—far bigger than anything that had existed on their Earth when they had left it.
“Texas City, where our laboratory is situated, is one of several metropolitan complexes which now comprise the inhabited area of what you used to call the United States,” Carla told them from off-screen. “You might like to see one or two of the others.”
Several more cityscapes, each with protective domes covering them flashed up in quick succession. In each case the land round about was scarred, ruined, devastated beyond repair.
“Pacific City... and...”
Now the biggest and most impressive of all the cities appeared on the screen. Massed glass towers rose almost to the dome roof, vaguely reminding them of how New York had been. Busy thoroughfares connected the towers. Small craft jetted about in the air like tiny insects pollinating an immense garden of geometric, jewel-like flowers.
“Grand Metropolis... what you used to know as Boston, New York, New Jersey... the whole Eastern seaboard. You can see we’ve come a long way.”
A numbed silence fell on the Command Center. The voice of the Earthwoman sounded really proud of future mankinds’ achievements, but many Alphans clearly did not agree. Sandra Benes spoke out in a strained, distracted voice. “The cities are fantastic... but what about the countryside in between?”
Carla was dismissive. “Nobody lives there now. In any case, our personal tele-sensual systems can create the illusion of spring in the Rocky Mountains, fall in old New England simply by the touch of a button.”
“But why?” Sandra asked, upset. “Why not go to the Rockies in the spring or New England in the fall?”
There was a sudden, shocked silence while the transmission from billions of miles away through space was broken momentarily by some distant interference and the screen blacked out. A moment later it lit up again, this time with a picture more startling and horrific than before.
They saw a wasteland of dereliction and ruin. An endless flat sea stretched away to a rocky shore. Its surface was completely unruffled. It was black and sullen and fumed into a dirty-pink haze.
“The pollution of the twenty-first century destroyed everything,” Carla told them. “That and the effects of the Moon being wrenched away.” As she spoke, another series of photographs began, depicting dried-up riverbeds choked with garbage and junk, others boiling with chemicals and foam, shots of dried, gnarled, leafless trees, dust storms and distant explosions. “Those two factors destroyed everything—crops, trees, rivers that’s why we built the metro-complexes and retired to them. Now, of course, who needs nature?”
“Who needs future?” a shocked operative called out from the Command Center.
At length the snapshots ceased. The screen went blank and the lesson was over. K
oenig lifted himself out of his seat and stepped down, shaking his head grimly.
“The question now is—do we want to return to Earth?”
The question ached in their hearts. Mentally, it had the effect of flooring them. For so long they had yearned to return to Earth. It had been their nightly dream. They had always thought of Earth as being the planet they remembered—green and blue and yellow, not brown and black and white and lifeless. The truth was too much to take, and many broke down sobbing and crying.
While a distracted Moon colony of some 250 people bemoaned their lot and decided on the course they wanted to take, Helena, Maya, and a handful of engineers and technicians worked diligently together in the Research Building on the lunar surface.
Following the instructions which Dr. Logan had beamed to them, they were building the transference dome which, when finished, would start materially transporting them back to Earth. They had stopped once, only briefly, to listen to the distressing news of the environmental hell Earth had become, but now they worked on. For them, there was no time to be upset, and they stifled their feelings.
Between Earth, situated at an extremely remote distance from them, and their own Moon Base lay a great gulf of space—most of it thinly populated with stars. The two places were in different galaxies, at the extreme edges of each. They looked out toward one another across an immense rift of vacuum millions of light-years across. That rift, that universal valley, was soon to be occupied by a new constellation of stars, a third galaxy, which was travelling between them. In a mere thirty-five hours of Moon-time, its bulk would sever contact with Earth for a period of more than a century in duration. The neutrone beam, miraculous though it was, would not be able to penetrate. By the time contact would be possible again, most people now alive on Alpha would be dead. Perhaps the Moon Base would no longer exist. It was a now-or-never decision that they had had to make. In the face of it they chose to work on, regardless of the strength of their feelings for polluted Earth.
“No matter how polluted your old planet is,” Maya assured Helena as they busied themselves with the final structure, “it’s bigger than the Moon... and more stable. lt still has a sun. Its cities looked good—it was far better than Psychon in its last days. I know, because Psychon was my planet... and you know how bad we let that one get.” She sighed. “Your Earth is far preferable to either Psychon or a barren old Moon over which you’ve no control.”
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