In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

by Hank Davis

  “When a man begins to see rocks moving, it’s time to fire him,” was the unofficial verdict.

  The board of science had coldly said the same thing, though in more dignified language.

  “No form of life as we know it could possibly exist in the high temperature and desert condition of Mercury. Therefore, in our judgment, Benjamin Stuyvesant suffered from hallucination when he reported some rocklike entity moving near Emergency Hangar RC10.”

  Hartigan glanced uneasily toward the workbench on which the odd meteor had rested.

  “No form of life as we know it.”

  There was the catch. After all, this interplanetary travel was less than seventy years old. Might there not be many things still unknown to Earth wisdom?

  “Not to hear the board of science tell it,” muttered Hartigan, thinking of Stuyvesant’s blasted career.

  He thought of the Forbidden Asteroids. There were over two dozen on the chart on which, even in direst emergency, no ship was supposed to land. That was because ships had landed there, and had vanished without trace. Again and again. With no man able to dream of their fate. Till they simply marked the little globes “Forbidden,” and henceforth ignored them.

  “No form of life as we know it!”

  Suppose something savage, huge, invisible, lived on those grim asteroids? Something that developed from egg form? Something that spread its young through the universe by propelling eggs from one celestial body to another? Something that started growth by devouring its own metallic shell, and continued it on a mineral instead of vegetable diet? Something that could live in any atmosphere or temperature?

  “I am going crazy,” Hartigan breathed.

  In something like panic he tried to forget the affair in a great stack of books and magazines brought by the last supply ship.

  The slow hours of another month ticked by. The full Earth waned, died, grew again. Drearily Hartigan went through the monotony of his routine. Day after day, the term “day” being a strictly figurative one on this drear lunar lump.

  He rose at six, New York time, and sponged off carefully in a bit of precious water. He ate breakfast. He read. He stretched his muscles in a stroll. He read. He inspected his equipment. He read. He exercised on a set of homemade flying rings. He read.

  “No human being should be called on to live like this,” he said once, voice too loud and brittle.

  But human beings did have to live like this, if they aspired to one of the big posts on a main planet.

  He had almost forgotten the strange meteor that had fallen into lava ash at his feet a month ago. It was to be recalled with terrible abruptness.

  He went for a walk in a direction he did not usually take, and came upon a shallow pit half a mile from the dome.

  Pits, of course, are myriad on the Moon. The whole surface is made up of craters within craters. But this pit was not typical in conformation. Most are smooth-walled and flat-bottomed. This pit was ragged, as if it had been dug out. Besides, Hartigan had thought he knew every hole for a mile around, and he did not remember ever seeing this one.

  He stood on its edge looking down. There was loose rock in its uncraterlike bottom, and the loose rock had the appearance of being freshly dislodged. Even this was not unusual in a place where the vibration of a footstep could sometimes cause tons to crack and fall.

  Nevertheless, Hartigan could feel the hair rise a bit on the back of his neck as some deep, instinctive fear crawled within him at sight of the small, shallow pit. And then he caught his lips between his teeth and stared with wide, unbelieving eyes.

  On the bottom of the pit a rock was moving. It was moving, not as if it had volition of its own, but as if it were being handled by some unseen thing.

  A fragment about as big as his body, it rolled over twice, then slid along in impatient jerks as though a big head or hoof nudged at it. finally, it raised up from the ground and hung poised about seven feet in the air!

  Restlessly, Hartigan watched, while all his former, almost superstitious fear flooded through him.

  The rock fragment moved up and down in mid-space.

  “Jupiter!” Clow Hartigan breathed hoarsely.

  A large part of one end suddenly disappeared. A pointed projection from the main mass of rock, it broke off and vanished from sight.

  Another large chunk followed, breaking off and disappearing as though by magic.

  “Jupiter!”

  There was no longer doubt in Hartigan’s mind. A live thing had emerged from the egglike meteor twenty-seven days ago. A live thing that now roamed loose over the face of the Moon.

  But that section of rock, which was apparently being devoured, was held seven feet off the ground. What manner of creature could come from an egg no larger than his head and grow in one short month into a thing over seven feet tall? He thought of the Forbidden Asteroids, where no ships landed, though no man knew precisely what threat lurked there.

  “It must be as big as a mastodon,” Hartigan whispered. “What in the universe—”

  The rock fragment was suddenly dropped, as if whatever invisible thing had held it had suddenly seen Hartigan at the rim of the pit. Then the rock was dashed to one side as if by a charging body. The next instant loose fragments of shale scattered right and left up one side of the pit as though a big body were climbing up and out.

  The commotion in the shale was on the side of the pit nearest Hartigan. With a cry he ran toward the hangar.

  With fantastic speed, sixty and seventy feet to a jump, he covered the ragged surface. But fast as he moved, he felt that the thing behind him moved faster. And that there was something behnd him he did not doubt for an instant, though he could neither see nor hear it.

  It was weird, this pygmy human form in its bulky space suit flying soundlessly over the lunar surface under the glowing ball of Earth, racing like mad for apparently no reason at all, running insanely when so far as the eye could tell, nothing pursued.

  But abysmal instinct told Hartigan that he was pursued, all right. And instinct told him that he could never reach the hangar in the lead. With desperate calmness he searched the ground still lying between him and the hangar.

  A little ahead was a crack about a hundred feet wide and, as far as he knew, bottomless. With his oversized Earth muscles he could clear that in a gigantic leap. Could the ponderous, invisible thing behind him leap that far?

  He was in mid-flight long enough to turn his head and look back, as he hurtled the chasm in a prodigious jump. He saw a flurry among the rocks at the edge he had just left as something jumped after him. Then he came down on the far side, lighting in full stride like a hurdler.

  He risked slowing his speed by looking back again. A second time he saw a flurry of loose rock, this time on the near side of the deep crack. The thing had not quite cleared the edge, it seemed.

  He raced on and came to the small air-lock door. He flung himself inside. He had hardly got the fastener in its groove when something banged against the outside of the door.

  The thing pursuing him had hung on the chasm’s edge long enough to let him reach safety, but had not fallen into the black depths as he had hoped it might.

  “But that’s all right,” he said, drawing a great sigh of relief as he entered the hangar through the inner door. “I don’t care what it does, now that I’m inside and it’s out.”

  He got out of the space suit, planning as he moved.

  The thing outside was over seven feet tall and made of some unfleshlike substance that must be practically indestructible. At its present rate of growth it would be as big as a small space liner in six months, if it weren’t destroyed. But it would have to be destroyed. Either that, or Emergency Station RC3 would have to be abandoned, and his job with it, which concerned him more than the station.

  “I’ll call Stacey to send a destroyer,” he said crisply.

  He moved toward the Bliss transmitter, eyes glinting. Things were happening on the Moon, now, all right! And the thing that was happe
ning was going to prove Stuyvesant as sane as any man, much saner than the gray-bearded goats on the board of science.

  He would be confined to the hangar till Stacey could send a destroyer. No more strolls. He shuddered a little as he thought of how many times he must have missed death by an inch in his walks during the past month.

  Hartigan got halfway to the Bliss transmitter, skirting along the wall near the small airlock.

  A dull, hollow, booming sound filled the great hangar, ascending to the vaulted roof and seeming to shower down again like black water.

  Hartigan stopped and stared at the wall beside him. It was bulging inward a little. Startled out of all movement, he stared at the ominous, slight bulge. And as he stared, the booming noise was repeated, and the bulge grew a bit larger.

  “In the name of Heaven!”

  The thing outside had managed to track him along the wall from the airlock, perhaps guided by the slight vibration of his steps. Now it was bindly charging the huge bulk of the hangar like a living, ferocious ram.

  A third time the dull, terrible booming sound reverberated in the lofty hangar. The bulge in the tough metal wall spread again; and the two nearest supporting beams gave ever so little at the points of strain.

  Hartigan moved back toward the airlock. While he moved, there was silence. The moment he stopped, there was another dull, booming crash and a second bulge appeared in the wall. The thing had followed him precisely, and was trying to get at him. The color drained from Hartigan’s face. This changed the entire scheme of things.

  It was useless to radio for help now. Long before a destroyer could get here, the savage, insensate monster outside would have opened a rent in the wall. That would mean Hartigan’s death from escaping air in the hangar.

  Crash!

  Who would have dreamed that there lived anywhere in the universe, on no matter how far or wild a globe, a creature actually able to damage the massive walls of a Spaceways hangar? He could see himself trying to tell about this.

  “An animal big enough to crack a hangar wall? And invisible? Well!”

  Crash!

  The very light globes, so far overhead, seemed to quiver a bit with the impact of this thing of unguessable nature against the vast semisphere of the hangar. The second bulge was deep enough so that the white enamel which coated it began chipping off in little flakes at the bulge’s apex.

  “What the devil am I going to do?”

  The only thing he could think of for the moment was to move along the wall. That unleashed giant outside must not concentrate too long on any one spot.

  He walked a dozen steps. As before, the ramming stopped while he was in motion, to start again as he halted. As before, it started at the point nearest to him.

  Once more a bulge appeared in the wall, this time bigger than either of the first two. The metal sheets sheathing the hangar varied a little in strength. The invisible terror outside had struck a soft spot.

  Hartigan moved hastily to another place.

  “The whole base of the hangar will be scalloped like a pie crust at this rate,” he gritted. “What can I—”

  Crash!

  He had inadvertently stopped near a rack filled with spare power bulbs. With its ensuing attack the blind fury had knocked the rack down onto the floor.

  Hartigan’s jaw set hard. Whatever he did must be done quickly. And it must be done by himself alone. He could not stay at the Bliss transmitter long enough to get New York and tell what was wrong, without giving the gigantic thing outside a fatal number of minutes in which to concentrate on one section of wall.

  He moved slowly around the hangar, striving to keep the invisible fury too occupied in following him to get in more than an occasional charge. As he walked, his eyes went from one heap of supplies to another in search of a possible means of defense.

  There were ordinary weapons in plenty, in racks along the wall. But none of these, he knew, could do material harm to the attacking fury.

  He got to the great inner doors of the main airlock in his slow march around the hangar. And here he stopped, eyes glowing thoughtfully.

  The huge doors had threatened in the early days to be the weak points in the Spaceways hangars. So the designers, like good engineers, had made the doors so massive that in the end they were stronger than the walls around them.

  Bang!

  A bulge near the massive hinges told Hartigan that the thing outside was as relentless as ever in its efforts to break through the wall and get at him. But he paid no attention to the new bulge. He was occupied with the doors.

  If the invisible giant could be trapped in the main airlock between the outer and inner portals—

  “Then what?” Hartigan wondered.

  He could not answer his own question. But, anyway, it seemed like a step in the right direction to have the attacking fury penned between the doors rather than to have it loose and able to charge the more vulnerable walls.

  “If I can coop it in the airlock, I might be able to think of some way to attack it,” he went on.

  He pushed home the control switch which set the broadcast power to opening the outer doors. And that gave him an idea that sent a wild thrill surging through him.

  A heavy rumble told him that the motors were swinging open the outer doors.

  “Will the thing come in?” he asked himself tensely. “Or has it sense enough to scent a trap?”

  Bang!

  The inner doors trembled a little on their broad tracks. The invisible monster had entered the trap.

  “Trap?” Hartigan smiled mirthlessly. “Not much of a trap! Left to itself, it could probably break out in half an hour. But it won’t be left to itself.”

  He reversed the switch to close the outer portals. Then, with the doors closed and the monster penned between, he got to work on the idea that had been born when he pushed the control switch.

  Power, oceans of it, flooded from the power unit at the touch of a finger. A docile servant when properly channeled, it could be the deadliest thing on the Moon.

  He ran back down the hangar to the stock room, and got out a drum of spare power cable. As quickly as was humanly possible, he rolled the drum back to the doors, unwinding the cable as he went.

  It was with grim solemnity that he made his next move. He had to open the inner doors a few inches to go on with his frail plan of defense. And he had to complete that plan before the thing in the airlock could claw them open still more and charge through. For all their weight the doors rolled in perfect balance, and if the unseen terror could make dents in the solid wall, it certainly was strong enough to move the partly opened doors.

  Speed! That was the thing that would make or break him. Speed, and hope that the power unit could stand a terrific overload without blowing a tube.

  With a hand that inclined to tremble a bit, Hartigan moved the control switch operating the inner doors, and instantly cut the circuit again.

  The big doors opened six inches or so, and stopped.

  Hartigan cut off the power unit entirely, and dragged the end of the spare power cable to it. With flying fingers he disconnected the cable leading from the control switch to the motors that moved the portals, and connected the spare cable in its space.

  He glanced anxiously at the doors, and saw the opening between them had widened to more than a foot. The left door moved a little even as he watched.

  “I’ll never make it.”

  But he went ahead.

  Grabbing up the loose end of the cable, he threw it in a tangled coil as far as he could through the opening and into the airlock. Then he leaped for the power unit—and watched.

  The cable lay unmoving on the airlock floor. But the left door moved! It jerked, and rolled open another six inches.

  Hartigan clenched his hands as he stared at the inert cable. He had counted on the blind ferocity of the invisible terror, had counted on its attacking, or at least touching, the cable immediately. Had it enough intelligence to realize dimly that it would be
best to avoid the cable? Was it going to keep working at those doors till—

  The power cable straightened with a jerk. Straightened, and hung still, with the loose end suspended in midair about six feet off the airlock floor.

  Hartigan’s hand slammed down. The broadcast power was turned on to the last notch.

  With his heart hammering in his throat, Hartigan gazed through the two-foot opening between the doors. Gazed at the cable through which was coursing oceans, Niagaras of power. And out there in the air-lock a thing began to build up from think air into a spectacle that made him cry out in wild horror.

  He got a glimpse of a massive block of a head, eyeless and featureless, that joined with no neck whatever to a barrel of a body. He got a glimpse of five legs, like stone pillars, and of a sixth that was only a stump. (“That’s what got caught in the doors a month ago—its leg,” he heard himself babbling with insane calmness.) Over ten feet high and twenty feet long, the thing was a living battering ram, painted in the air in sputtering, shimmering blue sparks that streamed from its massive bulk in all directions.

  Just a glimpse, he got, and then the monster began to scream as it had that first day when the door maimed it. Only now it was with a volume that tore at Hartigan’s eardrums till he scremed himself in agony.

  As he watched, he saw the huge carcass melt a little, like wax in flame, with the power cable also melting slowly and fusing into the cavernous, rocky jaws that had seized it. Then with a rush the whole bulk disintegrated into a heap of loose mineral matter.

  Hartigan turned off the power unit and collapsed, with his face in his hands.

  The shining ball of the full Earth floated like a smooth diamond between two vast, angular mountains. The full Earth.

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

  “RC3, RC3, RC3,” he droned out.

  There was no answer. As usual, Stacey was taking his time about ansering the Moon’s signal.

  “RC3, RC3—”

  There he was.

  “Hartigan talking. Monthly report.”