Project Hush

by William Tenn

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  PROJECT HUSH

  By WILLIAM TENN

  Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS

  [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science FictionFebruary 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that theU.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

  [Sidenote: The biggest job in history and it had to be done withcomplete secrecy. It was--which was just the trouble!]

  I guess I'm just a stickler, a perfectionist, but if you do a thing, Ialways say, you might as well do it right. Everything satisfied me aboutthe security measures on our assignment except one--the official Armydesignation.

  Project Hush.

  I don't know who thought it up, and I certainly would never ask, butwhoever it was, he should have known better. Damn it, when you want aproject kept secret, you _don't_ give it a designation like that! Yougive it something neutral, some name like the Manhattan and Overlordthey used in World War II, which won't excite anybody's curiosity.

  But we were stuck with Project Hush and we had to take extra measures toensure secrecy. A couple of times a week, everyone on the project had toreport to Psycho for DD & HA--dream detailing and hypnoanalysis--insteadof the usual monthly visit. Naturally, the commanding general of theheavily fortified research post to which we were attached could not askwhat we were doing, under penalty of court-martial, but he had to begiven further instructions to shut off his imagination like a faucetevery time he heard an explosion. Some idiot in Washington was actuallygoing to list Project Hush in the military budget by name! It took fastaction, I can tell you, to have it entered under Miscellaneous "X"Research.

  Well, we'd covered the unforgivable blunder, though not easily, and nowwe could get down to the real business of the project. You know, ofcourse, about the A-bomb, H-bomb and C-bomb because information thatthey existed had been declassified. You don't know about the otherweapons being devised--and neither did we, reasonably enough, since theyweren't our business--but we had been given properly guardednotification that they were in the works. Project Hush was set up tocounter the new weapons.

  Our goal was not just to reach the Moon. We had done that on 24 June1967 with an unmanned ship that carried instruments to report back dataon soil, temperature, cosmic rays and so on. Unfortunately, it was putout of commission by a rock slide.

  An unmanned rocket would be useless against the new weapons. We had toget to the Moon before any other country did and set up a permanentstation--an armed one--and do it without anybody else knowing about it.

  I guess you see now why we on (_damn_ the name!) Project Hush were soconcerned about security. But we felt pretty sure, before we took off,that we had plugged every possible leak.

  We had, all right. Nobody even knew we had raised ship.

  * * * * *

  We landed at the northern tip of Mare Nubium, just off Regiomontanus,and, after planting a flag with appropriate throat-catching ceremony,had swung into the realities of the tasks we had practiced on so manydry runs back on Earth. Major Monroe Gridley prepared the big rocket,with its tiny cubicle of living space, for the return journey to Earthwhich he alone would make.

  Lieutenant-colonel Thomas Hawthorne painstakingly examined ourprovisions and portable quarters for any damage that might have beenincurred in landing.

  And I, Colonel Benjamin Rice, first commanding officer of Army Base No.1 on the Moon, dragged crate after enormous crate out of the ship on myaching academic back, and piled them in the spot two hundred feet awaywhere the plastic dome would be built.

  We all finished at just about the same time, as per schedule, and wentinto Phase Two.

  Monroe and I started work on building the dome. It was a simple pre-fabaffair, but big enough to require an awful lot of assembling. Then,after it was built, we faced the real problem--getting all the complexinternal machinery in place and in operating order.

  Meanwhile, Tom Hawthorne took his plump self off in the single-seaterrocket which, up to then, had doubled as a lifeboat.

  The schedule called for him to make a rough three-hour scouting surveyin an ever-widening spiral from our dome. This had been regarded as aprobable waste of time, rocket fuel and manpower--but a necessaryprecaution. He was supposed to watch for such things as bug-eyedmonsters out for a stroll on the Lunar landscape. Basically, however,Tom's survey was intended to supply extra geological and astronomicalmeat for the report which Monroe was to carry back to Army HQ on Earth.

  Tom was back in forty minutes. His round face, inside its transparentbubble helmet, was fish-belly white. And so were ours, once he told uswhat he'd seen.

  He had seen another dome.

  "The other side of Mare Nubium--in the Riphaen Mountains," he babbledexcitedly. "It's a little bigger than ours, and it's a little flatter ontop. And it's not translucent, either, with splotches of differentcolors here and there--it's a dull, dark, heavy gray. But that's allthere is to see."

  "No markings on the dome?" I asked worriedly. "No signs of anyone--oranything--around it?"

  "Neither, Colonel." I noticed he was calling me by my rank for the firsttime since the trip started, which meant he was saying in effect, "Man,have you got a decision to make!"

  "Hey, Tom," Monroe put in. "Couldn't be just a regularly shaped bump inthe ground, could it?"

  "I'm a geologist, Monroe. I can distinguish artificial from naturaltopography. Besides--" he looked up--"I just remembered something I leftout. There's a brand-new tiny crater near the dome--the kind usuallyleft by a rocket exhaust."

  "Rocket exhaust?" I seized on that. "_Rockets_, eh?"

  * * * * *

  Tom grinned a little sympathetically. "Spaceship exhaust, I should havesaid. You can't tell from the crater what kind of propulsive devicethese characters are using. It's not the same kind of crater ourrear-jets leave, if that helps any."

  Of course it didn't. So we went into our ship and had a council of war.And I do mean war. Both Tom and Monroe were calling me Colonel in everyother sentence. I used their first names every chance I got.

  Still, no one but me could reach a decision. About what to do, I mean.

  "Look," I said at last, "here are the possibilities. They know we arehere--either from watching us land a couple of hours ago or fromobserving Tom's scout-ship--or they do not know we are here. They areeither humans from Earth--in which case they are in all probabilityenemy nationals--or they are alien creatures from another planet--inwhich case they may be friends, enemies or what-have-you. I think commonsense and standard military procedure demand that we consider themhostile until we have evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, we proceedwith extreme caution, so as not to precipitate an interplanetary warwith potentially friendly Martians, or whatever they are.

  "All right. It's vitally important that Army Headquarters be informed ofthis immediately. But since Moon-to-Earth radio is still on the drawingboards, the only way we can get through is to send Monroe back with theship. If we do, we run the risk of having our garrison force, Tom andme, captured while he's making the return trip. In that case, their sidewinds up in possession of important information concerning our personneland equipment, while our side has only the bare knowledge that somebodyor something else has a base on the Moon. So our primary need is moreinformation.

  "Therefore, I suggest that I sit in the dome on one end of a telephonehookup with Tom, who will sit in the ship, his hand over the firingbutton, ready to blast off for Earth the moment he gets the order fromme. Monroe will take the single-seater down to the Riphaen Mountains,landing as close to the other dome as he
thinks safe. He will thenproceed the rest of the way on foot, doing the best scouting job he canin a spacesuit.

  "He will not use his radio, except for agreed-upon nonsense syllables todesignate landing the single-seater, coming upon the dome by foot, andwarning me to tell Tom to take off. If he's captured, remembering thatthe first purpose of a scout is acquiring and transmitting knowledge ofthe enemy, he will snap his suit radio on full volume and pass on asmuch data as time and the enemy's reflexes permit. How does that soundto you?"

  They both nodded. As far as they were concerned, the command decisionhad been made. But I was sitting under two inches of sweat.

  "One question," Tom said. "Why did you pick Monroe for the scout?"

  "I was afraid you'd ask that," I told him. "We're three extremelyunathletic Ph.D.s who have been in the