by Fritz Leiber
"Go on, Janet," the older man prompted harshly. "What does the moon make you think of?"
"A spider," the girl answered instantly. "A bloated white spider hanging just over my head in an invisible web. You see, I have a horror of spiders too, doctor." The last remark she shot as an explanation to the younger man. "Or a re-volverl Yes, that's itl—a nickle-plated revolver with mother-of-pearl grips pointed at my chest—pointed at all of us! -by a drooling, giggling old mad-woman whose face is white with powder and whose cheeks have circles of violet rouge and whose yellowed lace dress—"
"I think that's enough demonstration, Professor McNellis," the younger man interrupted. "Now if we could go inside with your daughter—"
"No! I first want to prove to you, Dr. Snowden, that it's only the nightmares that are any real trouble to Janet, that this moon-fear hasn't in any way seriously cracked her waking nerves."
"No, and we don't want it to, either," the younger man retorted quietly.
"Go on, Janet," the older man repeated, ignoring the implied criticism. "What else do you see in the moon."
"A man, a rabbit, a clown, a witch, a bat, a beautiful lady," the girl answered in rapid sing-song. She seemed to have lost some of her terror, or at least some of her submis-siveness, during the interchange between the two men. She chuckled uneasily and said, "Dad, anyone would think you were the psychiatrist, the way you're using the moon for a Rorschache test!" Then her voice went grave with insight. "The moon is the original Rorschach inkblot, you know. The mares are the faded ink. For thousands of years it's been hanging up there identically the same and people have been seeing things in it. It's the only solid thing you can look at in the heavens that has any shape or parts."
The older man's arm dropped away from the girl a little.
That's quite true," he said in an odd voice. "Yet I never thought of it just that way. In a lifetime of astronomical work I never had just that thought."
The younger man moved in, put his own arm around the girl's shoulders and turned her away from the moon. The older man started to oppose him, then gave way.
"And now, Miss McNellis, since you've made an original contribution to the science of astronomy," the younger man said lightly, "I think that will be enough lunar observation for tonight."
"You're the doctor," the girl told him, managing a little smile. "The Moon Doctor."
"That title's a gross exaggeration, Janet, hung on me by one silly newspaper story," he assured her, smiling back. "Actually I wouldn't go near the place. I'm afraid of space."
"Just the same, Dad got you because you're the Moon Doctor."
"He knows a million times more about the moon than I do. And I'm sure he also knows that it's perfectly normal for a girl whose boyfriend is orbiting around the moon to feel frightened on his account and to view the place he's exploring—or surveying—as an almost supernatural enemy."
"Janet's fear of the moon goes back a lot further than her engagement to Tom Kimbro," the older man put in argu-mentively.
"Yes, Dad, but I am frightened on Tom's account."
"You shouldn't be. Dr. Snowden, I've pointed out to Janet that she's no worse off than a girl engaged to one of the early polar explorers. Better, because polar explorers were away for years."
"Yes, Dad, but their girlfriend couldn't go out in the yard and see Antarctica or the northern icecap hanging in the sky and know that he was up there, invisible, but moving across it." The edge-of-hysteria note had returned to her voice and she started slowly to turn around. "I think the moon looks as if it were made of ice," she said with eerie faintness. "Dirty ice with lots of bubbles in it."
"Janet, that's a crackpot theory!" her father said angrily. "How you could even start looking at those Welt-Eis-Lehre pamphlets when your father's a legitimate astronomer—"
"It's getting cold out here. We can continue inside," Dr. Andreas Snowden said firmly. This time Professor McNellis did not protest.
The living room was quite livable in spite of the way it was crammed with books and glass-fronted shelves of small meteorites and other items of astronomical interest. After they had settled themselves and Prof. McNellis had poured coffee at Dr. Snowden's suggestion, the latter fixed the professor's daughter with a friendly grin for a few moments and then said, "And now I want to hear all about it, Janet. Ordinarily I'd talk to you alone, and tomorrow I will, but this way seems comfortable now. Let's see, your mother died when you were a little girl and so you've spent your life with your father, who is a great student of the moon, although his specialty is meteoritics—and just recently you've become engaged to Lieutenant Commander Tom Kimbro, pilot and crew of America's first circumlunar survey ship and infinitely more the Moon Man than I'm the Moon Doctor."
"I've known Tom for years, though," the girl added, smilingly at ease herself now that there was a roof overhead. "Dad's always been mixed up in the Moon Project."
"Yes. Now tell me about this moon-horror of yours. And please, Prof. McNellis, no professional interruptions no matter what comes up, even Cosmic Ice Theory."
He said it jokingly, but it sounded like a command just the same. The professor, less tense now that he was playing host, took it with good grace.
His daughter glanced gratefully at the young doctor, then grew thoughtful. "The nightmares are the worst part," she said after a bit. "Especially after they got so bad two months ago. I'm afraid of going crazy while I'm having them. In fact, I think I do go crazy and stay that way for ten minutes or so after I wake up. That was what happened two months ago when I reared out of bed and got Dad's revolver and shot off all the bullets in it through the bedroom window straight at the moon., I knew at the time that it was some sort of gesture I was making—I knew I couldn't hit the moon, or at least I was pretty sure I couldn't—but at the same time I knew it was something I had to do to save my sanity. The only other thing I could have done would have been to dive in our bomb shelter and never come out. You know, it was like when something's broken your nerve and made you cower, and if you don't strike out right away, no matter how convulsively ..."
"I understand," the doctor said soberly. There was approval in his voice. "Janet, what happens in these dreams?"
"Nightmares, you mean. Nightmare, really, for it's always about the same. It repeats." Janet closed her eyes. "Well, I'm standing outside and it's night and then the moon comes across the sky very fast, only it's much bigger and brighter. Sometimes it almost seems to brush the trees. And I squinch down as if it were a big silver express train come out of nowhere behind me and I'm terribly frightened. It plunges out of sight and I think I'm safe, but then it comes roaring up over the opposite horizon, even lower this time. There's a hot smell as if the air were being burnt by friction. This keeps on over and over again, faster and faster, though each time I think it's the last. I begin to feel like Poe's man in 'The Pit and the Pendulum,' tied flat on the floor and looking up at the gleaming pendulum that keeps coming closer each whistling stroke until the knife-edge is about to slice him in two.
"But finally I can't help myself, I get curious. I know it's positively the worst thing I can do, that there's some dreadful law against it, that I'm defying some fantastically powerful authority, but just the same I reach up—don't ask me how I manage when the moon's going so fast, I don't know, and don't ask me how I reach so far when it's still in the treetops —sometimes it seems to press its cratered face down into the yard and sometimes I grow an arm long as the magic beanstalk—but anyway I reach up, knowing I shouldn't, and I touch the moon!"
"How does the moon feel to your fingers when you touch it?" Dr. Snowden asked.
"Hairy, like a big spider," Janet answered rapidly. Then she opened her eyes wonderingly. "I never remembered that before. The moon is rock. Why did I say it, doctor?"
"I don't know. Forget it." Then, "What happens next?" he asked matter-of-factly.
Janet hugged her elbows and held her knees tight together. "The moon breaks up," she whispered. "It cracks all over like
a white plate. For a moment the fragments chum around, then they all come hammering down at me. But in the instant before I'm destroyed and the world with me, while the fragments are still streaking down at me like bullets or an avalanche of rocks or a jack-in-the-box upside down, growing mountain-size in a moment—in that instant I feel this dreadful guilt and I know I'm responsible for it all because I touched the moon. That's when I go crazy." She let out a breath.
Dr. Snowden smiled. "You know, Janet, I can't help thinking how two or three thousand years ago your dream would have been regarded as a clear warning from the gods not >to land on the moon—plus a prevision of the dreadful things that would happen to us if we kept on meddling sacrilegiously with the heavenly bodies. No, Prof. McNellis, I don't mean a word of that seriously," he added quickly as he noted that the astronomer's expression had become aggressively disapproving. "It's just that I make it a habit at a session like this of saying whatever comes into my head. I believe in bringing even superstitious thoughts out and looking at them. By the way, I'd say Janet's dream shows some elements of Cosmic Ice Theory, wouldn't you? See, I break my own rules as soon as I make them."
"If you dignify it with the name Theory," the professor replied sardonically. "A Viennese engineer named Hoerbiger started the whole Welt-Eis-Lehre business—a man with no astronomical training. His weird and wonderful notion was that the moon is made of ice and mud, that it came spiraling in from the infinite and will soon get so close to earth that it will cause floods and earthquakes and then break up, showering us with a fiery frigid hail. What's more, according to Hoerbiger earth has had six previous moons, which all broke up the same way. This one we've got now is the seventh. Incidentally, the break-up of the sixth moon is supposed to have accounted for all legends of universal floods, fire-breathing dragons, falling towers of Babel, the Twilight of the Gods, and what have you.
"It's all nothing new, by the way. In the last century Ignatius Donnelly, who even got to be a member of Congress, wrote it all up in his book Ragnarok, except he used comets instead of moons—in those days they thought of comets as more massive. And now Velikovsky's done it again—gone over Hoerbiger once lightly, with comets. Took in some allegedly smart people, too.
"Hoerbiger developed one great set of followers at any rate —the Nazis. Most of them were suckers for pseudo-science. Cosmic Ice suited the Nordic superman perfectly.
"Of course, Janet knows all about this—she's read the junk, haven't you, dear?"
The doctor cocked his head and asked quickly, "Am I mistaken, Prof. McNellis, or isn't there nevertheless some shadow of a real scientific theory behind this notion of moons breaking up?"
"Oh yes. If a satellite with a plastic core gets close enough to its mother planet, the tidal action of the latter tears it apart. That's what's supposed to have produced the rings of Saturn—the break-up of a moon of Saturn that got too close. The crucial distance is called Roche's limit. In the case of earth it's only six thousand miles above the ground—Luna would have to be that close, even if she had the right kind of core, which she hasn't. It has been suggested—by George Gamow—that if everything worked out just right this situation might actually come about—in one hundred billion years!" The professor chuckled. "You can see that none of this stuff applies to our present situation at all."
"Still, it's interesting." The doctor looked back from father to daughter and asked casually, "Janet, do you believe in this Wek-Eis-Lehrer
She shook her head while her father snorted. "But it's interesting," she added with a nervous, almost impish smile.
"I agree," Dr. Snowden said, nodding. "You know, Hans Schindler Bellamy, Hoerbiger's British disciple, had a very vivid childhood dream almost exactly like yours, that later helped convert him to Hoerbiger."
"Then you already knew what I was telling you about the Cosmic Ice farrago?" Prof. McNellis said accusingly.
"Only a bit here and there," the doctor assured him. "One or two of my patients were converts." He did not pursue the point. "Janet," he said, "I gather your own moon dreams go back to childhood, but they weren't so frightening then?"
"That's right. Except for one time when Dad took me on an ocean cruise just after mother died. I'd see the moonlight dancing on the water. The dreams were very bad then."
Prof. McNellis nodded. "We went to the Caribbean. You were just seven. Almost every night you'd wake up whimpering and blurry-eyed. Naturally, Dr. Snowden, I assumed Janet was reacting to her mother's death."
"Of course. Tell me, Janet, where is the real moon when you have these dreams? I mean, do they tend to cluster around the time of the full moon?"
The girl bobbed her head vigorously. "Once—just once— I remember having the nightmare in the daytime and when I woke up I saw the moon out of the window, faint silver in the pale blue afternoon sky."
Again Prof. McNellis nodded confirmation and said, "For years I've kept a record of Janet's dreams. In every instance the moon was above the horizon when the dream occurred. There were none during the dark of the moon—none of the hundred and seventeen Janet reported to me, at any rate."
The doctor frowned quizzically. "That's a rather astonishing circumstance, don't you think? To what do you attribute it?"
The professor shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe moonlight is the stimulus that triggers the dream, or was to start with."
"Yes," Janet said rather solemnly. "Doctor, isn't it an old theory that the moon causes mental upsets? You know, Luna and lunacy. And isn't there supposed to be something very special about moonlight?—something affecting growth and women's monthly cycles and the electrical pressures in the blood and the brain?"
"Don't get off on that track, Janet," her father said sharply. "Another real possibility, Dr. Snowden, is that Janet has a moon-clock in her brain and that her subconscious only sends the dream when the moon is topside. I'm just telling you the facts."
Janet raised her hand. "I just remembered," she said excitedly, "that the exact position of the moon in the sky had a lot to do with my Caribbean dreams being so bad. Dr. Snowden," she continued anxiously, "you know that up north here the moon is never exactly overhead, that even when it's at its highest in the sky it's still south of the zenith?" "Yes, I know that much," he grinned.
"Well, when we sailed to the Caribbean I remember Dad explaining to me that now we were in the Tropic Zone the moon could be directly overhead. In fact, on one night of the cruise it was directly overhead." She shivered.
"I think I remember telling you about that," her father said, "but I don't recall it making any impression on you at the time. At least you didn't say anything to me."
"I know. I was afraid you'd be angry."
"But why? And why should the moon being in the zenith frighten you especially?"
"Yes, Janet, why?" Dr. Snowden echoed.
She looked back and forth between the two men. "Don't you see? If the moon were straight overhead, it could fall straight down on me. Anywhere else, it might miss me. It's the difference between being in the mouth of a tunnel that may collapse at any minute and being in the tunnel."
This time it was the professor who chuckled. "Janet," he said, "you certainly did take this thing seriously when you were a tyke."
"I still take it seriously," she flared at him. "My feelings take it seriously. What holds the moon up? A lot of scientific Iawsl What if the laws should be repealed,J>T broken?"
"Oh Janet," was all her father could say, still chuckling, while Dr. Snowden commented, "Your feelings take it seriously—that's a nice phrase, Janet. But your mind doesn't take it seriously, does it?"
"I guess not," she admitted unwillingly.
"For instance," he pressed, "I don't know if it's possible, but suppose there should be a volcanic eruption on the moon, you know that the chunks of rock thrown up would fall back to the moon, don't you? That they couldn't hit the earth? Even if they were shot out toward the earth?"
"I suppose you're right," she agreed after a moment.
"No, you're not, Dr. Snowden—not exactly," Prof. McNellis interjected, getting up. He was grinning with friendly maliciousness. "You say you're a man who believes in speaking his thoughts and settling for nothing less than reality. Good!
Those are my own sentiments." He stopped in front of one of the glass-fronted cases. "Come over here, I've got something to show you. You too, Janet—I never told you about these. After your nightmares started, I always believed in playing down the moon to you, until Dr. Snowden convinced me of the superior virtue of always speaking all the truth."
"I didn't exacdy say—" Dr. Snowden began and cut himself short. He went over to the case. Janet McNellis stopped just behind him.
Prof. McNellis indicated some specimens of what looked like blackish glass neatly arranged on white cardboard. Most of them seemed to be fragments of small domed disks, but a few were almost perfect buttons a half inch to an inch across.
Prof. McNellis cleared his throat. "Meteorites of this sort are called tektites," he explained. "They are found only in the Tropic Zone or near it—in other words, under the moon. The theory is that when large meteorites hit the moon, some fragments of the moon's siliceous—glassy or sandy—surface are dashed upward at speeds greater than the moon's low escape velocity of a mile and a half a second. Some of these fragments are captured by earth's gravitational field. During their fall to earth they are melted by the heat of friction with the air and take their characteristic button shape. So right here, in all likelihood, you are looking at bits of actual moon-rock, tiny fragments of—Janet, what is it?"
Dr. Snowden looked around. Janet was leaning tautly forward, her gaze hypnotically fixed on the tektites. She was trembling visibly. ". . . like spiders," he heard her say faintly.
Suddenly her face convulsed into a mask halfway between panic and rage. She lifted her fists above her head and lunged at the glass. Dr. Snowden grabbed her around the waist, using his other arm to block her descending fists, and in spite of her struggles wrenched her around so that she wasn't looking at the case. She continued to struggle and he could feel her still shivering too.