In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

by Hank Davis

  (Incidentally, Ernst was obviously trying to get his facts right about the Moon—John W. Campbell was now the editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, after all—at least the facts which were known in 1939, but he made a few scientific mistakes. I’ll leave spotting them as an exercise for the reader.)

  Paul Ernst (1899-1985, though there is some doubt about these dates) was a prolific writer for the pulp magazines, and is best remembered for writing most of the 24 novels detailing the exploits of the pulp hero, The Avenger, in the magazine with the same name. These were written under the Street & Smith house name of Kenneth Robeson (the name also used on Doc Savage magazine, though most of Doc’s adventures were written by Lester Dent). He also wrote the Doctor Satan series for Weird Tales in the 1930s. When the pulp magazines died in the 1950s, he began selling stories to the higher-paying (and supposedly more respectable) slick magazines, but in the heyday of the pulps he turned out stories in many categories: westerns, mysteries, science fiction, and horror. This one’s a twofer of those last two types.

  “NOTHING HAPPENS

  ON THE MOON”

  Paul Ernst

  The shining ball of the full Earth floated like a smooth pearl between two vast, angular mountains. The full Earth. Another month had ticked by.

  Clow Hartigan turned from the porthole beside the small airlock to the Bliss radio transmitter.

  “RC3, RC3, RC3,” he droned out.

  There was no answer. Stacey, up in New York, always took his time about answering the RC3 signal, confound it! But then, why shouldn’t he? There was never anything of importance to listen to from station RC3. Nothing of any significance ever happened on the Moon.

  Hartigan stared unseeingly at the pink cover of a six-month-old Tadio Gazette, pasted to the wall over the control board. A pulchritudinous brunette stared archly back at him over a plump shoulder that was only one of many large nude areas.

  “RC3, RC3—”

  Ah, there Stacey was, the pompous little busybody.

  “Hartigan talking. Monthly report.”

  “Go ahead, Hartigan.”

  A hurried, fussy voice. Calls of real import waited for Stacey, calls from Venus and Jupiter and Mars. Hurry up, Moon, and report that nothing has happened, as usual.

  Hartigan proceeded to do so. “Lunar conditions the same. No ships have put in, or have reported themselves as being in distress. The hangar is in good shape, with no leaks. Nothing out of the way has occurred.”

  “Right,” said Stacey pompously. “Supplies?”

  “You might send up a blonde,” said Hartigan.

  “Be serious. Need anything?”

  “No.” Hartigan’s eyes brooded. “How’s everything in Little Old New York?”

  “Sorry. Can’t gossip. Things are pretty busy around here. If you need anything, let me know.”

  The burr of power went dead. Hartigan cursed with monotony, and got up.

  Clow Hartigan was a big young man with sand-red hair and slightly bitter blue eyes. He was representative of the type Spaceways sent to such isolated emergency landing stations as the Moon.

  There were half a dozen such emergency landing domes, visited only by supply ships, exporting nothing, but ready in case some passenger liner was crippled by a meteor or by mechanical trouble. The two worst on the Spaceways list were the insulated hell on Mercury, and this great lonely hangar on the Moon. To them Spaceways sent the pick of their probation executives. Big men. Powerful men. Young men. (Also men who were unlucky enough not to have an old family friend or an uncle on the board of directors who could swing a soft berth for them.) Spaceways did not keep them there long. Men killed themselves, or went mad and began inconsiderately smashing expensive equipment, after too long a dose of such loneliness as that of the Moon.

  Hartigan went back to the porthole beside the small airlock. As he went, he talked to himself, as men do when they have been too long away from their own kind.

  “I wish I’d brought a dog up here, or a cat. I wish there’s be an attempted raid. Anything at all. If only something would happen.”

  Resentfully he stared out at the photographic, black-and-white lunar landscape, lighted coldly by the full Earth. From that his eye went to the deep black of the heavens. Then his heart gave a jump. There was a faint light up there where no light was supposed to be.

  He hurried to the telescope and studied it. A space liner, and a big one! Out of its course, no matter where it was bound, or it couldn’t have been seen from the Moon with the naked eye. Was it limping in here to the emergency landing for repairs?

  “I don’t wish them any bad luck,” muttered Hartigan, “but I hope they’ve burned out a rocket tube.”

  Soon his heart sank, however. The liner soared over the landing dome a hundred miles up, and went serenely on its way. In a short time its light faded in distance. Probably it was one of the luxurious around-the-solar-system ships, passing close to the Moon to give the sightseers an intimate glimpse of it, but not stopping because there was absolutely nothing of interest there.

  “Nothing ever happens in this Godforsaken hole,” Hartigan gritted.

  Impatiently he took his space suit down from the rack. Impatiently he stepped into the bulky, flexible metal thing and clamped down the headpiece. Nothing else to do. He’d take a walk. The red beam of the radio control board would summon him back to the hangar if for any reason anyone tried to raise RC3.

  He let himself out through the double wall of the small airlock and set out with easy, fifteen-foot strides toward a nearby cliff on the brink of which it was sometimes his habit to sit and think nasty thoughts of the men who ran Spaceways and maintained places like RC3.

  Between the hangar and the cliff was a wide expanse of gray lava ash, a sort of small lake of the stuff, feathery fine. Hartigan did not know how deep it might be. He did know that a man could probably sink down in it so far that he would never be able to burrow out again.

  He turned to skirt the lava ash, but paused a moment before proceeding.

  Behind him loomed the enormous half-globe of the hangar, like a phosphorescent mushroom in the blackness. One section of the halfglobe was flattened; and here were the gigantic inner and outer portals where a liner’s rocket-propelled life shells could enter the dome. The great doors of this, the main airlock, reared halfway to the top of the hangar, and weighed several hundred tons apiece.

  Before him was the face of the Moon: sharp angles of rock; jagged, tremendous mountains; sheer, deep craters; all picked out in black and white from the reflected light of Earth.

  A desolate prospect. . . . Hartigan started on.

  The ash beside him suddenly seemed to explode, soundlessly but with great violence. It spouted up like a geyser to a distance of a hundred feet, hung for an instant over him in a spreading cloud, then quickly began to settle.

  A meteor! Must have been a fair-sized one to have made such a splash in the volcanic dust.

  “Close call,” muttered Hartigan, voice sepulchral in his helmet. “A little nearer and they’d be sending a new man to the lunar emergency dome.”

  But he only grimaced and went on. Meteors were like the lightning back on Earth. Either they hit you or they missed. There was no warning till after they struck; then it was too late to do anything about it.

  Hartigan stumbled over something in the cloud of ash that was sifting down around him. Looking down, he saw a smooth, round object, black-hot, about as big as his head.

  “The meteor,” he observed. “Must have hit a slanting surface at the bottom of the ash heap and ricocheted up and out here. I wonder—”

  He stooped clumsily toward it. His right “hand,” which was a heavy pincer arrangement terminating the right sleeve of his suit, went out, then his left, and with some difficulty he picked the thing up. Now and then a meteor held splashes of previous metals. Sometimes one was picked up that yielded several hundred dollars’ worth of platinum or iridium. A little occasional gravy with which the emergency-landing exiles c
ould buy amusement when they got back home.

  Through the annoying shower of ash he could see dimly the light of the hangar. He started back, to get out of his suit and analyze the meteor for possible value.

  It was the oddest-looking thing he had ever seen come out of the heavens. In the first place, its shape was remarkable. It was perfectly round, instead of being irregular as were most meteors.

  “Like an old-fashioned cannon ball,” Hartigan mused, bending over it on a workbench. “Or an egg—”

  Eyebrows raised whimsically, he played with the idea.

  “Jupiter! What an egg it would be! A hundred and twenty pounds if it’s an ounce and it smacked the Moon like a bullet without even cracking! I wouldn’t want it poached for breakfast.”

  The next thing to catch his attention was the projectile’s odd color, or, rather, the odd way in which the color seemed to be changing. It had been dull, black-hot, when Hartigan brought it in. It was now a dark green, and was getting lighter swiftly as it cooled!

  The big clock struck a mellow note. Tiime for the dome keeper to make his daily inspection of the main doors.

  Reluctantly Hartigan left the odd meteor, which was now as green as grass and actually seemed to be growing transparent, and walked toward the big airlock.

  He switched on the radio power unit. There was no power plant of any kind in the hangar; all power was broadcast by the Spaceways central station. He reached for the contact switch which poured the invisible Niagara of power into the motor that moved the ponderous doors.

  Cr-r-rack!

  Like a cannon shot the sound split the air in the huge metal dome, echoing from wall to wall, to die at last in a muffled rumbling.

  White-faced, Hartigan was running long before the echoes died away. He ran toward the workbench he had recently quitted. The sound seemed to have come from near there. His thought was that the hangar had been crashed by a meteor larger than its cunningly braced beams, tough metal sheath, and artful angles of deflection would stand.

  That would mean death, for the air supply in the dome would race out through a fissure almost before he could don his space suit.

  However, his anxious eyes, scanning the vaulting roof, could find no crumpled bracing or ominous download bulges. And he could hear no thin whine of air surging in the hangar to the almost nonexistent pressure outside.

  Then he glanced at the workbench and uttered an exclamation. The meteor he had left there was gone.

  “It must have rolled off the bench,” he told himself. “But if it’s on the floor, why can’t I see it?”

  He froze into movelessness. Had that been a sound behind him? A sound here, where no sound could possibly be made save by himself?

  He whirled—and saw nothing. Nothing whatever, save the familiar expanse of smooth rock floor lighted with the cold white illumination broadcast on the power band.

  He turned back to the workbench where the meteor had been, and began feeling over it with his hands, disbelieving the evidence of his eyes.

  Another exclamation burst from his lips as his fingers touched something hard and smooth and round. The meteor. Broken into two halves, but still here. Only, now it was invisible!

  “This,” said Hartigan, beginning to sweat a little, “is the craziest thing I ever heard of!”

  He picked up one of the two invisible halves and held it close before his eyes. He could not see it at all, though it was solid to the touch. Moreover, he seemed able to see through it, for nothing on the other side was blotted out.

  Fear increased within him as his fingers told him that the two halves were empty, hollow. Heavy as the ball had been, it consisted of nothing but a shell about two inches thick. Unless—

  “Unless something did crawl out of it when it split apart.”

  But that, of course, was ridiculous.

  “It’s just an ordinary metallic chunk,” he told himself, “that split open with a loud bang when it cooled, due to contraction. The only thing unusual about it is its invisibility. That is strange.”

  He groped on the workbench for the other half of the thick round shell. With a half in each hand, he started toward the stock room, meaning to lock up this odd substance very carefully. He suspected he had something beyond price here. If he could go back to Earth with a substance that could produce invisibility, he could become one of the richest men in the universe.

  He presented a curious picture as he walked over the brilliantly lighted floor. His shoulders sloped down with the weight of the two pieces of meteor. His bare arms rippled and knotted with muscular effort. Yet his hands seemed empty. So far as the eye could tell, he was carrying nothing whatever.

  “What—”

  He dropped the halves of the shell with a ringing clang, and began leaping toward the big doors. That time he knew he had heard a sound, a sound like scurrying steps! It had come from near the big doors.

  When he got there, however, he could hear nothing. For a time the normal stillness, the ghastly phenomenal stillness, was preserved. Then from near the spot he had just vacated, he heard another noise. This time it was a gulping, voracious noise, accompanied by a sound that was like that of a rock crusher or a concrete mixer in action.

  On the run, he returned, seeing nothing all this while, nothing, but smooth rock floor and plain, metal-ribbed walls, and occasional racks of instruments.

  He got to the spot where he had dropped the parts of the meteor. The parts were no longer there. This time it was more than a question of invisibility. They had disappeared actually as well as visually.

  To make sure, Hartigan got down on hands and knees and searched every inch of a large circle. There was no trace of the thick shell.

  “Either something brand new to the known solar system is going on here,” Hartigan declared, “or I’m getting as crazy as they insisted poor Stuyvesant was.”

  Increased perspiration glinted on his forehead. The fear of madness in the lonelier emergency fields was a very real fear. United Spaceways had been petitioned more than once to send two men instead of one to manage each outlying field; but Spaceways was an efficient corporation with no desire to pay two men where one could handle the job.

  Again, Hartigan could hear nothing at all. And in swift though unadmitted fear that perhaps the whole business had transpired only in his own brain, he sought refuge in routine. He returned to his task of testing the big doors, which was important even though dreary in its daily repetition.

  The radio power unit was on, as he had left it. He closed the circuit.

  Smoothly the enormous inner doors swung open on their broad tracks to reveal the equally enormous outer portals. Hartigan stepped into the big airlock and closed the inner doors. He shivered a little. It was near freezing out here in spite of the heating units.

  There was a small control room in the lock, to save an operator the trouble of always getting into a space suit when the doors were opened. Hartigan entered this and pushed home the switch that moved the outer portals.

  Smoothly, perfectly, their tremendous bulk opened outward. They always worked smoothly, perfectly. No doubt they always would. Nevertheless, rules said test them regularly. And it was best to live up to the rules. With characteristic trustfulness, Spaceways had recording dials in the home station that showed by power marking whether or not their planetary employees were doing what they were supposed to do.

  Hartigan reversed the switch. The doors began to close. They got to the halfway mark; to the three-quarters—

  Hartigan felt rather than heard the sharp, grinding jar. He felt rather than heard the high, shrill scream, a rasping shriek, almost above the limit of audibility, that was something to make a man’s blood run cold.

  Still, without faltering, the doors moved inward and their serrated edges met. Whatever one of them had ground across had not been large enough to shake it.

  “Jupiter!” Hartigan breathed, once more inside the huge dome with both doors closed.

  He sat down to try to think t
he thing out.

  “A smooth, round meteor falls. It looks like an egg, though it seems to be of metallic rock. As it cools, it gets lighter in color, till finally it disappears. With a loud bang, it bursts apart, and afterward I hear a sound like scurrying feet. I drop the pieces of the shell to go toward the sound, and then I hear another sound, as if something were macerating and gulping down the pieces of shell, eating them. I come back and can’t find the pieces. I go on with my test of opening and closing the main doors. As the outer door closes, I hear a crunching noise as if a rock were being pulverized, and a high scream like that of an animal in pain. All this would indicate that the meteor was a shell, and that some living thing did come out of it.

  “But that is impossible.

  “No form of life could live throuh the crash with which that thing struck the Moon, even though the lava ash did cushion the fall to some extent. No form of life could stand the heat of the meteor’s fall and impact. No form of life could eat the rocky, metallic shell. It’s utterly impossible!

  “Or—is it impossible?”

  He gnawed at his knuckles and thought of Stuyvesant.

  Stuyvesant had been assigned to the emergency dome on Mercury. There was a place for you! An inferno! By miracles of insulation and supercooling systems the hangar there had been made livable. But the finest of space suits could not keep a man from frying to death outside. Nothing to do except stay cooped up inside the hangar, and pray for the six-month relief to come.

  Stuyvesant had done that. And from Stuyvesant had begun to come queer reports. He thought he had seen something moving on Mercury near his landing field. Something like a rock!

  Moving rocks! With the third report of that kind, the corporation had brought him home and turned him over to the board of science for examination. Poor Stuyvesant had barely escaped the lunatic asylum. He had been let out of Spaceways, of course. The corporation scrapped men suspected of being defective as quickly as they scrapped suspect material.