Moonbane

by Al Sarrantonio

  As I was helped up into the cage I looked down and gasped. At the bottom of the telescope tube I saw my own face, and those of my companions, reflected in the mirror to gargantuan, carnival size.

  I staggered, but a strong arm took hold of me.

  “Hold on there,” Wyatt drawled mildly, as he settled me into a sitting position at the bottom of the observer’s cage we occupied. “Can’t have you falling thirty feet and hurting my mirror. Had a student down at the university a few years ago decided he didn’t like the look of his face in that mirror. He climbed down and took an ax to it. Put four nice chips in it before me and the security man got him out.” He smiled—a lazy, friendly gesture in his bearded face. “Hit him myself with this.” He held up a long dented metal flashlight for my inspection, then switched its red filtered light on and turned away from me.

  “Not gonna have long tonight, Doc,” he said. He turned off the white light bulb clamped to the top of the cage, leaving us in red glow. “Not that it matters much,” he continued wryly, bending over a chart that was unfolded at his feet, “since my night vision’s shot anyway.”

  “We could have left you here alone,” Pettis said.

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought how nice that would be,” Wyatt replied. “But I think you’ll find it interesting enough around here tonight to make you happy you came.”

  He concentrated on his map, and I leaned over to see what the red light revealed. It was a large, finely detailed map of the full Moon. Craters were drawn and identified down to a scale I had never seen before.

  The map was marked up in grease pencil. A huge, roughly triangular section covering the crater Aristarchus stood out boldly.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the marked area.

  Proctor turned his slow, warm smile on me. “You’ve got a treat coming,” he said.

  A few stars had risen; Orion’s hourglass torso was just beginning to thrust itself into the eastern sky.

  Wyatt turned his gaze on Pettis, who was studying the shadowy grounds outside the dome through the open slit. “Don’t worry, Cowboy.”

  Pettis grunted and resumed his vigil. Amy sat curled in one corner, half asleep.

  “Got a little occultation work done last night,” Wyatt said to Doc. “The computers got smashed up the first night, and then I lost power, so I had to do everything by hand. Hell,” he smiled, “it’s like being back in high school with my first six-inch reflector. Got a couple of photos in before the Moon came up last night.” His face partially clouded. “I left the plates downstairs and they got smashed up, though.”

  “Wyatt,” Doc said slowly, a smile spreading across his normally solemn face, “don’t you know what’s been happening?”

  Proctor looked hurt. “I know what happened. You bozos said you’d get me when you needed me. What the hell else was I going to do? You know what it’s like trying to get any time on this telescope?” He grinned. “I’ve had four nights alone with it!”

  “Anybody up here with you the first night?” Pettis inquired.

  “Young kid from Tucson, along with the security guard. The guard ran when the meteorites started coming down. The kid decided to try to make it home in his Fiat. I tried to talk him out of it, but…” His gaze wandered to the slit.

  In the red glare of his flashlight, his face brightened. “There.”

  We followed his level finger.

  Outside, the first curved fringe of the Moon pushed up over the low desert horizon. It resembled a white scythe cutting the night, killing the stars above it with its light. Even proud Orion was dimmed by its brilliance.

  Proctor turned to work the manual controls at the front of the cage, talking as he did so. “The Moon’s beginning to wane. Tonight shouldn’t be as bad as last night.”

  “What was last night like up here?” Doc asked.

  Proctor smiled. “They got a little uppity.”

  “Tonight could be just as bad,” Pettis offered. “That full Moon last night might have given them a jolt that lasts a couple of days. Tonight might just add to it.”

  Proctor nodded thoughtfully, turning back to his levers. “Anyway, we’ll get a look before we batten down the hatches.”

  He worked around the cage, climbing up and down, lowering himself halfway into the telescope, then lowering himself down the ladder. He enlisted Doc and me to help with a couple of huge ancient flywheels.

  Proctor said, “I haven’t had to do any of this manually since I was a student. And even then it was just a kind of initiation rite.”

  The big tube began to move. I took pleasure in the slow swing of the massive mechanism, the steady slide through right ascension and then declination that brought the tube into line with the now-risen Moon.

  “Go on up,” Proctor ordered. He stayed behind.

  We heard him talking to himself at the base of the tube and saw the intermittent flash of his red light. He grunted in satisfaction. The tread of his feet on the metal rungs back up to the cage was subsumed by the soothing sound of a huge clock in motion.

  Tock-tock, tock-tock, it tolled, in ponderous, inevitable tones.

  “The old spring mechanism still works,” Proctor remarked as he pushed past us to set up an eyepiece in the focuser. “The idiot wolves break what they know, or can reach, but so far there hasn’t been a former astronomer among them, and that baby down there’s encased in half-inch-thick iron. Percival Lowell loved this ‘scope almost as much as his own in Flagstaff.” He sighted down into the eyepiece, turned the focusing knob, then grunted in satisfaction.

  “Have a look, Doc.”

  Doc looked. I have described his taciturn demeanor, but now he drew in his breath. “My Lord, Proctor, I had no idea it was this vast.”

  Pettis looked next, and then Amy, and while I waited my turn I looked out through the slit of the dome. Even with the naked eye I could see that something was wrong with the northwest quadrant of the Moon. From my nights at the eyepiece of my own eight-inch Newtonian, I knew where Aristarchus was. I knew its bright appearance in the midst of the Moon’s largest “sea,” Oceanus Procellarum. But now there was a large area, darker than the surrounding mare, roughly triangular, where the famous crater had been prominent.

  “Hurry,” Proctor said, giving the telescope over to me. I looked into the eyepiece of an instrument I had dreamed of using on my many tourist trips up to the observatory, and I gasped. Aristarchus was gone. A huge area in Oceanus Procellarum where it had been was gouged, as if a cosmic spade had dug down into it. All surface features had been blasted aside by a volcanic eruption from within the Moon. Even now, the eruption continued. Tiny flares of red flame dotted the pitted ruins, which reached nearly to the lip of the massive crater Copernicus. An area comprising nearly one quarter of the Moon’s face had been blown out into space.

  “My God,” I said. “My God.”

  It was only when Wyatt took hold of my arm and turned me away that my eyes broke contact with the horrible sight I had witnessed.

  “We have things to do here,” Wyatt said.

  Pettis was already pulling up the metal ladder and locking it into position. Doc helped Amy down into the telescope tube. I watched her descend the metal rungs clamped to the inside of the tube, avoiding my own distorted visage in the mirror.

  Pettis returned, crouching in a corner of the cage. Wyatt had put another eyepiece in the tube and was cursing the fact that we had not had time to slew the telescope away from the Moon and that he would be burdened with study of only its ravaged face for the rest of the night.

  “Climb down if you want,” he said, pointing to the mirrored bottom of the tube. “Your presence will only cut down my light by a fraction. And with the Moon, there’s plenty of light to spare. But don’t chip my mirror,” he said, giving me his smile.

  “I’ll stay up here,” I said. He shrugged and turned back to his viewing.

  Pettis, still crouching, looked as if he wanted to do anything but occupy an open yet confined spot and wa
it for something to happen.

  “It’s perfectly safe where we are,” Wyatt drawled at him. “We’re thirty feet up. That ladder you pulled up provides the only way to get up here. The wolves are fast and strong and can leap pretty well, but,” he smiled, “not that high.” His grin widened in red light. “Believe me, Cowboy, they’ve tried.”

  “What about outside?” Pettis inquired.

  Wyatt answered, still smiling in the red glow, “You’ll see.”

  “I don’t like it,” Pettis complained. He looked down at his daughter, curled miserably at the bottom of the huge mirror, before turning his hard eyes to the outside air through the dome slit, to wait for the wolves to come.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Young Girl

  We heard their howls and then we saw their shapes. There were about twenty, gray shadows in the moonlight, pacing up the road to the observatory. They entered the front door, snarling, knocking over whatever was in their way, and then they were on the stairs, their claws clicking on the steps. They burst through the door into the room, one after another, yellow eyes aglow. They glared up at us, teeth bared. I counted nine, meaning the others had peeled off from the pack.

  Pettis lowered his Uzi to spray them, but Wyatt quietly stopped him. “That’ll just make things worse. I’ve got some work to do, and I’d like it as quiet as possible till I’m finished. If you shoot ‘em, they’ll just make a lot of noise tearing each other up.”

  “Damn it, Wyatt!” Pettis complained.

  “Just watch,” Proctor counseled gently.

  One of the wolves had circled completely around the telescope. It now stopped at the bottom of the platform. It tensed, then ran up the short flight of steps and leaped, trying to catch the bottom rungs of the locked ladder. It failed by a yard and fell yapping to the floor. It circled again, growling in frustration.

  “Let ‘em have fun,” Proctor said, returning to his eyepiece. “The real show’s at the slit, Cowboy.”

  Reluctantly, Pettis turned away from the commotion on the floor below us. Another, larger wolf had tried to reach the ladder and missed. The others were now milling about, pacing in tight circles, snorting.

  Wyatt wheeled from his position at the focuser. “What the—” Pettis said as Wyatt produced a .44 from the inside of his jacket and aimed past Pettis’s ear. Something had appeared at the slit level with us, staring in with a baleful copper glare and then throwing itself across the gulf between dome and cage.

  The sound of Wyatt’s .44 echoed through the dome. The wolf fell screaming to the floor, claws just scraping our cage.

  Instantly, the others were on the wounded beast, tearing it to pieces even as it howled in pain.

  “There goes my peace and quiet,” Proctor sighed. He pointed to the dome slit. “Listen real close; you can hear their claws tapping on the gridwork of the catwalk out there.”

  I heard the tick-tick of claws. A wolf appeared. Pettis, Proctor, and I all hit it before it could leap. It fell away into darkness.

  “Think you fellows can handle things for a while?” Proctor asked mildly, tucking his .44 away. “I’d like to get some work done.”

  “Go on,” Pettis said. There was a slight smile on his face now.

  In the next two hours, as Wyatt studied the Moon, Cowboy and I shot four more wolves. One ignored the initial slugs we put into it and actually reached the cage, grasping it with its claws. Its teeth pulled back in rage as it bashed its open mouth against the metal, trying to break through. It began to climb. We put a few more rounds into it. Still it refused to fall.

  Proctor, chiding us for disturbing him, pulled his .44 and put two shots into the thing’s eyes. Its head thrashing wildly, it fell into the waiting throng below.

  At three in the morning, Pettis nudged me. I must have been dozing because he said, “Why don’t you climb down and sleep?” I protested, until he added, “You’re no good to me anyhow. Relieve me in a couple of hours.”

  I agreed and whirled out of the cage and down into the depths of the telescope. The sound of my descent set off a mad rage in the wolves below. My stomach tightened as I reached the mirror. Though there were two tons of glass and metal between us, I was only a matter of feet from the beasts.

  Amy was nestled against the curve of the tube, asleep. I crawled to the opposite side and lay down. It was more comfortable than I thought it would be, the bow of my back settling against the telescope neatly, if rigidly. Avoiding the mirror, whose funhouse properties still disturbed what little sense of reality I retained after the past few days, I lay, head cradled on one arm, staring up at the dark forms of the three men in the cage above me. Pettis was silent, Doc and Wyatt talking in low tones, arguing as if they were at a seminar instead of in a tiny metal cage suspended above a pack of hungry, vicious devils that would gladly tear them to pieces had they the chance.

  Doc argued reasonably, in his cultured Oxford tones.

  Wyatt answered just as reasonably, “The only way is to put them there and hope for the best.”

  “Let’s make sure there’s no other way,” Doc replied, and then the two of them launched into another discussion that became less and less intelligible to me.

  I stared up at the three men in the cage dreamily, as my eyes began to close…

  “Mr. Blake?”

  I blinked awake and turned my head to find Amy wide awake and staring at me.

  “Am I disturbing you?” She sounded lonely.

  “Not at all. What’s wrong?”

  She had crawled over to sit near me, keeping a respectful distance but obviously craving company. “I miss my mother.”

  “I know how you feel, Amy. I’ve lost two people who were very dear to me.”

  “I loved my mother very much. She had a beautiful garden next to our house; she taught me all the names of the flowers and vegetables. She took care of that garden the way she took care of me. She was always there when I needed her.” She hesitated. “My father…”

  I was curious to hear about her father, and waited until she was ready to speak.

  “My father is a very hard person. He was always busy with his work. When he was there he always demanded so much. My mother didn’t expect me to be anybody but myself.”

  “Did your mother and father get along?”

  She looked surprised at my question. “They loved each other a lot.”

  “All those things your mother said in the bomb shelter—”

  “My mother said those things because she didn’t want him to die. He insisted on doing everything himself. She didn’t see why he couldn’t let someone else be the leader. She was afraid.” Amy looked at me as the wolves raged outside. “I’m afraid, too.”

  “We’re all afraid.”

  “It’s just that…”As she struggled to express herself, a mixture of child and adult, I realized that in the confusion and constant action of the past day there had not been time for her to become a person for me; she had just been one of the players, someone who had come onto my stage, and who might be yanked off at any time. I tried to gauge how old she was: twelve? thirteen? A child who had been forced to grow up overnight.

  “It’s just that”—she sobbed suddenly—“I want things to be the way they were.”

  She tried to be an adult, not to cry. I tried to think of some magical words to say that would make everything all right. But suddenly she was holding me tight around the shoulders, burying her face in my chest.

  “Oh, God, what’s going to happen to us…”

  I held her—and then I held her tighter, imagining she was my own child. I tried to comfort her the way I would have comforted Richie. This was a new world, and from now on, all of us would have to be parents.

  After a while, her sobs became whimpers, and then she slept. I cradled her against me and leaned back. My spine found a comfortable curve in the belly of the telescope, the metal beast, and I rested.

  Up above, Doc and Wyatt still discussed.

  “On the far side,” Doc ins
isted.

  “I can see that. And we can drop them right here,” Wyatt countered gently, in his soothing drawl.

  “Yes.”

  I closed my eyes.

  The two men continued their seminar as I drifted toward sleep. And then, in dreams or out, I heard the first thing that gave me hope since Jimmy Rogers’s voice had lulled me from my home and despair, the first thing since all of this horror had begun that led me to believe, as Pettis’s daughter and I and everyone else so fervently wished, that things might be the way they were again.

  “One thing we know for sure,” Proctor drawled. I could almost see him grinning in red light. “If we get to do this, the wolves are history.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Prognosis

  I awoke to find Pettis looming over me, his gun shouldered. He was framed by morning sunlight blooming through the open dome slit above him. I had gone through a night of rough sleep; snippets of nightmare mixed with the sound of real gunshots, of wolves devouring their mates, and through it all, unimpeded, the careful, slow discussion by Doc and Wyatt of the future of the Moon and Earth.

  “Thanks,” Pettis said softly, indicating the still-sleeping form of his daughter. I had forgotten about her. But now, the stiffness of my body announced itself with gusto.

  “You were supposed to wake me,” I whispered.

  Amy stirred and sat up, rubbing the rough night from her eyes.

  “You were busy.” Pettis crouched next to his daughter, talking to her gently.

  I stretched, then climbed to the cage above. Wyatt was curled in one corner under the focuser, snoring, while Doc stood peering over the side of the cage at the floor below.

  “Remarkable beasts,” he said. The floor was littered with destruction. By the door two dead wolves lay in a fierce embrace, tearing mouths locked onto one another’s necks, claws buried deep into chests. They had obviously been the last, because the rest of the room was dotted with neat mounds of white bones.