Moonbane

by Al Sarrantonio

  “Wyatt shot those two as they were slinking off at dawn,” Doc said. “As soon as they were wounded they went berserk and tried to rip each other to shreds. Blood sends them into a feeding frenzy. And yet, their mindlessness lasts only as long as the blood. After devouring a victim, they reverently stack its bones. Wyatt thinks it has something to do with religious belief, or fetishism. It’s an intriguing thought.”

  He lapsed into silence. “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  “Tea, actually.” He gave me his wry smile. “It’s been four days since I’ve had a cup of tea. They had none of it in that bomb shelter. Only coffee. I don’t know what you Yanks see in the beastly stuff. Ground-up beans.” He made a face.

  “Why didn’t you tell me there was a plan to get us out of this mess?”

  “You didn’t ask,” he answered. “As a matter of fact, whether there is one depends very much on how much of Kramer Air Force Base is intact. If—”

  “If any of a thousand things went wrong, we’re dead,” Pettis completed, reaching the cage ahead of his daughter. “I didn’t tell you, or anyone else, because first, it was a national security matter, and second, I couldn’t see any use in getting anyone’s hopes up. And anyway, we still don’t know it’ll work.”

  “We’re going to try, aren’t we?” Amy asked him.

  “I sure hope so,” Wyatt drawled from his corner, yawning. “If not, all those brilliant ideas of mine last night went to waste. Anybody hungry?” He looked at Doc and grinned. “It just so happens there’s some tea, if you’re interested.”

  “Bless you!” Doc said. “Even if your ideas were all wasted.”

  They revived their symposium as Pettis unlocked the ladder and we descended.

  Proctor was better than his word about breakfast. There was a commissary stocked with a hidden hoard of untouched food. The eggs were powdered, but there was marmalade, biscuit mix, and tins of canned fruit. Wyatt was a good cook, and with Amy’s help, we soon were eating a hot, rejuvenating breakfast.

  “I might as well tell you,” Doc said, his fingers caressing a cup of Earl Grey, “what we have in mind at Kramer Air Force Base. The shuttle Lexington, which has been docked at Kramer for the past seven months, is more than capable of making a round trip to the Moon in its modified form. You may have read something about it in the popular journals, though the military has tried to keep a tight lid on it.” He looked at Pettis. “I can’t imagine there’s much in the way of national security left.”

  Pettis waved a hand. “I’ll tell you when to stop, Doc.”

  Doc looked at me. “Have you ever heard of Big Dumb Boosters?”

  The term rang a bell, but not a loud one.

  “On the drawing board,” Doc continued, “Big Dumb Boosters, which were designed in the 1960s, would have made the space shuttle unnecessary. They were to have been massive launch vehicles, quite similar to the Energia rocket that the Russians have developed and utilized so effectively. Quite simply, they would have been giant, unsophisticated first-stage rockets to lift great weights into space.

  “But NASA, with the military behind it, decided on the much more complex and technologically showy space shuttle to exclusively perform the tasks that the BDBs would have, and since the shuttle would get all the money and attention, most other plain booster research was abandoned.”

  Doc sipped his tea. “After the shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986, NASA, and especially the Pentagon, realized just how vulnerable the space objectives of the United States were with all of its eggs in the shuttle basket, and the Big Dumb Booster concept was revived. It was all done quietly, through the Air Force, because the NASA budget just wasn’t there for it.”

  He finished his tea and looked longingly at the empty cup. “To make a rather long story brief, there’s a Big Dumb Booster at Kramer Air Force Base, with the space shuttle Lexington attached, capable of reaching the Moon. It was to have delivered a retooled lunar excursion module to the Moon to defuse the public relations impact of the Soviet Mir space station, and to monitor recent Soviet lunar activity. The plan now is to strip all that military spy junk out and pack a good load of nuclear weapons, which they just happen to have at Kramer, on board, and—”

  “That’s enough, Doc,” Pettis said.

  Doc frowned. “I can’t really see that it matters if we tell him—”

  “Maybe later.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that last calculation we came up with…” Proctor said, wandering into the conversation.

  Wyatt and Doc resumed their discussion.

  “We’d better check our transportation,” Pettis said, motioning for me to come with him as Amy cleared the table.

  “I want you to understand something,” Pettis said when we got outside. “I saw how bright your face got while you were listening to Doc’s bullshit. That’s exactly the reason I didn’t want to say anything about this.”

  “You don’t think we can get out of this?” I asked.

  “We might. But probably not. I’ve never been much of a pessimist, but I think we may already be finished as a race. Have you thought about how quickly things fell apart? Use what happened in Hopkinsville as an example. If the wolves landed everywhere on the planet, you’ve got half the human race dead or metamorphosed the first night. By the second night, three quarters of those remaining are gone. By the third, nearly all the rest. We started out with seven hundred in Hopkinsville. We barely got out with four. Those are bad odds. Couple that with the fact that the first thing the beasts destroyed was the technology, especially communications, and I don’t see much to sing about.”

  “But maybe—”

  His anger flared. “I don’t like maybes. They only make you think too much. It’s either yes or no.”

  “What about Amy? Don’t you think she needs you now a lot more than she ever did? Don’t you owe it to her to keep going?”

  “I owe her more than that. And I’ll never stop going,” he said. “I just don’t know if we’ll be able to squeeze out of this as a race.”

  “I’m still counting on signing that copy of my book for you,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, a little of his frustration and anger subsiding. “No maybes on that.”

  We reached the garage. My own despair surfaced at what we found. The door had been bashed in. But once again luck had been on our side; when we cleared the debris and camouflage away we found the van undamaged.

  I helped him clear the van and empty our spare gas cans into the tank. This time I checked the back before getting in. Pettis backed it out and brought it around to the front of the observatory.

  The others were waiting, Wyatt clutching his charts, Doc his canister of Earl Grey. Pettis rummaged around in the bags we had loaded in Hopkinsville the day before, coming up with the packets of seeds. He pressed them into Amy’s hand. “When we get out of this,” he told her, “I’ll help you grow a garden just like your mother’s. We’ll remember her by it.”

  She held him, tearfully. This time it was Amy who broke the embrace.

  “Let’s get out of here, Dad.”

  He let her go, and we loaded into the van.

  “Going to be warm today,” Wyatt remarked, studying the sky as Pettis backed the vehicle out of the garage and pulled it slowly down the mountain.

  Pettis nodded, switching on the air-conditioning. “We’ll reach Kramer Air Force Base in a couple of hours.”

  Doc echoed quietly, “A couple of hours.”

  There was silence. Doc didn’t have to elaborate. In a couple of hours we’d know whether or not the human race stood a chance to continue.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Harsh Country

  Southwest desert is lonely. We saw little but macadam before and behind us; to either side, gray-brown sand spotted with low cactus, an occasional stunted Cottonwood and other trees, and brush barely hanging on. I thought of the cities, the wide suburban streets now empty of people, the remnants of humanity hiding like rats in the four co
rners of the world. The desert seemed an infinitely better place to be than those lonely places. The desert had retained its nature, had not been transformed into something desolate, had preserved its austere beauty—the occasional flash of blue creek water, the surprising tiny bloom of a bright red desert flower. All of this now was more precious in comparison with what the rest of the Earth must look like. I thought of a haiku I had written:

  Water bead on leaf

  Drifting green on crystal pool

  Bursts white in sunbeam.

  When I had written that, years before in the East, I would not have found much beauty in a desert landscape. My heart was in the streams and pond pools of Connecticut, the deep green springs, the cool crisp Halloween autumns, ice-white winters. That was where my blood belonged.

  But now, gazing at this new beauty, I felt some of it run into my blood and realized that I had found a new home, finally.

  And I realized, suddenly, and with startling clarity, that I did want to work again, that, despite everything, I wanted not only to live, but to continue to experience life.

  The landscape hypnotized me; I began to form images in my mind, mesmerized by the desert flower—something that, in effect, the human race had become:

  ~ * ~

  Death owns not even sand,

  Life bursts and cries between the rocks…

  ~ * ~

  I was so absorbed that I was barely aware of the discussion going on around me. But, eventually, the conversation grew so interesting, and loud, that it intruded into my thoughts, pushing all hope of poetry aside. I turned from the window to find Wyatt smiling broadly at me.

  “We were beginning to wonder if you were still with us, the way you were staring into space,” he drawled.

  “Did I hear something about werewolves actually living on the Moon?” I asked innocently.

  Doc and Wyatt exchanged glances. “That was about forty minutes ago,” Wyatt laughed. “Doc here thinks there may have been an atmosphere on the Moon at one time.”

  “A very tenuous one,” Doc said. “We have to account for the wolves’ presence on the Moon in one way or another. The most logical conclusion is that they evolved there. It’s obvious we’ve been very wrong in our assumptions about the Moon. It must have had a much more active volcanic life than we supposed. And, somewhere in the deep past, the degassing from all of this volcanic activity formed an atmosphere. We can theorize that much the same thing happened on the Moon as happened on Earth, that primitive plant life turned, through photosynthesis, a basically poisonous environment suffused with carbon dioxide into one friendly toward animal life. Eventually, the wolves evolved. It may seem fantastic, but at one time the Moon must have been covered with shallow seas and sparse forests. This was the world the wolves knew. But there was a problem. Due to low gravity, the escape velocity is much lower on the Moon than on Earth, and the atmosphere began to leak away into space. Perhaps the wolves’ civilization lasted thousands, perhaps millions, of years, but, eventually, they saw their doom. Perhaps they even thought of the regal blue Earth, which dominated their night sky, as stealing their life-giving oxygen away.

  “What they must have done is gone into a kind of hibernation stage. What then happened is that volcanic activity greatly increased. The atmosphere was gone, and now a new Moon emerged, burying the old. The real seas were filled with lava, the highlands scorched by heat and pocked with meteor impacts. You must remember that all of this happened eons ago, giving us the dead lunar world we know today, and that the deepest any of the Apollo missions probed in the 1970s was four feet. I think the wolves were buried much deeper than that. Their bodily functions were effectively frozen, keeping them perfectly preserved.”

  Doc’s face glowed with enthusiasm for his topic. “Now this is where things get interesting. You know we’ve had stories of so-called werewolves throughout history. Some are not very easy to dismiss, and there are very well-documented cases as far back as the 1300s.”

  He held one hand away from his body, as if it were cradling his theory. “Here is one mystery, the appearance of werewolves on Earth.” He held his other hand away from his body. “Now we have another mystery. There is a class of non-Earth geologies called tektites that have stumped scientists for two centuries. They’re fused glass, of different colors; they’re found in only a few places on Earth, such as Southeast Asia and the state of Georgia in the United States. It’s been determined that they’ve definitely made a trip through the Earth’s atmosphere. At one time it was a very popular theory that they were volcanic material from the Moon, ejected during meteoric impacts or volcanic eruptions and making their way to Earth. The fact that they were scattered in patches in specific areas tended to support their extraterrestrial origin. But this theory lost its popularity after the Apollo missions, which found no such rocks on the Moon.”

  He held his new theory carefully in his open hand. “Now, again, we have to recall that the Apollo missions covered, in total, one one-millionth of the Moon’s surface, down to a depth of forty-eight inches. But if these tektites were formed at the time of the loss of the Moon’s atmosphere and destruction of the wolves’ civilization, and were therefore buried with and around the wolves, well…”

  He brought his two hands together with a loud clap and looked at me expectantly.

  “Then werewolves came from the Moon.”

  “Exactly. There are well-documented lunar events throughout history called TLP—transient lunar phenomena—in which periodic activity, including lights caused by possible volcanic degassing, have been seen in various areas of the Moon.” He stared at me steadily. “The most numerous TLP occurred in the area of the crater Aristarchus.”

  “Christ.”

  “If we allow that transient lunar phenomena were the result of occasional volcanic activity, then some of these buried tektites, containing wolf spores, have been, throughout history, fired from the Moon to Earth. A wolf spore, or egg, surviving the trip, and finding itself in what, to it, is a superoxygenated atmosphere, would revive and develop into a creature literally mad-drunk with oxygen. This theory would account for the mythical werewolf’s strength and apparent mindlessness. It would also account for its surpassing interest in the Moon. The power they gain from the sight of their home planet may be nothing more than a home-sickness and rage that grows with the apparent growth of the Moon in the Earth’s sky.” Doc rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Perhaps our own Earth wolf was the result of some long ago crossbreeding of Moon wolf and dog—”

  The van lurched, went on, then hesitated again. A series of hesitations ended with the van rolling to a stop.

  “Shit,” Pettis said.

  We had stopped in an area flanked by gently sloping hills covered with files of the kind of tall cactus you see in western movies. Nature had acted like Johnny Appleseed, spacing each plant a couple of yards from its neighbor to share meager water resources. These natural rows of cactus were pleasing to look at. They also provided plenty of hiding places for wolves.

  “I’ll cover you, Cowboy,” I said.

  We got out. It didn’t take Pettis long to find the trouble. He didn’t even have to open the hood. A wet line of gasoline trailed behind us, turning to a drying trickle under the van about halfway down the body.

  “Bastards cut the fuel line,” Cowboy said, yanking the thin, neatly sliced hose from the underside for my inspection. He slammed the side of the van with his palm. “I thought the gas gauge was just stuck on empty,” he said.

  “Well?” Doc asked, putting his head out of the rolled-down window and wincing at the heat.

  “We walk,” Pettis said. Immediately, he went to the back of the van, opened the doors, and began to unload equipment.

  In five minutes we had left the van behind a sloping rise, and the heat had stolen the memory of air-conditioning.

  “I estimate eighty degrees. Pretty hot for December, but the humidity’s not too bad,” Wyatt said dryly. “Your turn to estimate, Cowboy. How far to the base
?”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask,” Pettis replied. He hefted the pack filled with our food up higher on his back. “We’ve got about thirty miles.” He looked like he wanted to hit something. “Another of my screw-ups. I didn’t check the odometer before we left.”

  “When we drove away from the observatory it read twenty-nine thousand, thirty-four,” Doc piped in. “When we left the van just now, twenty-nine thousand, one hundred forty-two.”

  Cowboy turned with a big smile. “Thanks, Doc. We’ve got a little more than twenty miles to go.” He looked at his watch. “It’s eleven-fifteen; if we haul our butts we can make it easily by nightfall.”

  “What if we don’t haul our butts?” Wyatt grinned.

  Cowboy didn’t return the smile. “We die.”

  CHAPTER 21

  The Apparition

  We hauled our butts. It was hot, but the air was so dry that walking wasn’t all that debilitating. We had plenty of water, and stopped every half hour to take one swallow apiece.

  By one o’clock, the low hills had thickened and risen. “The Palmera Mountains,” Pettis announced. “It’s a thin ridge, with nothing but flat desert beyond. There could be wolves in there, and I don’t want to stop if we can help it. If we slog through another hour and a half we’ll be back to flat land and can stop to eat.”

  Doc was breathing rapidly, wiping his brow with his handkerchief. “I don’t know about another hour and a half, Cowboy.”

  “Come on, Doc,” Cowboy gently ribbed. “I’ll even make you some tea for lunch.”

  Doc tamped his handkerchief into his pocket. “All right, Cowboy. I’ll try.”

  We marched, and the mountains drew together before us. In front, Pettis kept glancing up at a particular ridge. I began to watch it also. I thought I detected movement once or twice, the rise and fall of a head. But I couldn’t be sure.

  “You see something up there, Cowboy?” I asked.

  He grunted. “Nothing I could pin a medal on.” But he kept looking that way.