“Damn shame you can’t chaw in zero-G,” he said.
We strapped in. Ahead, through the quartz windows, it was growing dark. I heard Rogers talking with the ground. Suddenly there was a burst of static. “Hell and damnation,” he cursed. “Cowboy, get on up here.”
Beside me, Cowboy unstrapped himself. “Goddamn engineers.” He went up front and was back in a few minutes. The radio had resumed working.
As Pettis settled himself back into his couch, I said, “What is it you do, Cowboy? After what we’ve been through the last couple of days, I feel I know you like a brother, but where do you fit into all this?”
He gave me a huge ear-to-ear grin. “I’m an engineer.”
My laughter was only interrupted by Jimmy Rogers’s cheery, booming voice up front. “One minute to liftoff, gents.”
A soft silver glow filtered through the darkened quartz windows. Outside, through the thickness of the shuttle walls and the hum of expectant machinery, I heard the snap-snap of a rifle and the thud of mortar fire.
At thirty seconds, the radio crackled with a curse from mission control. “Goddamn, Jimmy, we got a breakthrough at the east end of Kramer, and they’re heading for the Lexington.”
“Can you hold em back?” Rogers inquired.
“No sweat. But we’ll have to put a hold on you.”
“Hell with that. How close are they to me?”
“Three or four hundred feet. Lasers got a couple—”
“Don’t hold. We’ll take care of ‘em from this end.”
“Hey, Jimmy—”
“I said no problem.”
“All right, Jimmy, you’ve got a go.” The mission controller began to count down: “Eight, seven, six—Jesus, Jimmy, they’re up at the base of the booster! They’re climbing up on it!”
“Punch it, damn it!” Rogers yelled.
“One, zero, liftoff—Jesus!”
I felt a dull thump way below me; then there was a sudden roar, and a giant’s hand pushed down invisibly on my chest, trying to pin me to Earth as the Lexington lifted. It was a rocky but inevitable rise. The giant’s hand tried mightily to keep me down, but he was losing to the Big Dumb Booster’s huge engines. We rose, rattling like a cupboard of pots and pans in an earthquake. The Lexington did a long, graceful rollover showing us a tip of the Earth under us. We bore up, away from the sight; a minute and a half later we punched a hole in gravity as the ride smoothed out and the giant’s hand became a caress.
Rogers said to mission control, “How’d we do?”
The voice cackled. “Jimmy, you fried ‘em where they stood. Must have burned close to a hundred of em.”
“How ‘bout the rest?”
“The hole in the fence is closed. Lasers are mopping up the stragglers.”
“Good-o, buddy.”
They talked about what we had to do next, when the engine would burn, about orbit and our second burn, which would throw us toward the Moon. I glanced at my companions. Cowboy seemed to be resting. Wyatt had his eyes closed, a dreamy look on his face. Hartnet was white as a sheet of paper, his hands gripping his armrest, knuckles stiff and bloodless. He wouldn’t even meet my gaze.
Up front, the windows showed blue-black. Rogers caught me looking. “Keep an eye out,” he said. “In a minute you’ll see something interesting. His tobacco was gone, but his tongue pressed into his cheek, feigning the presence of his chew.
I watched. There was only deepening black, then a silver pie-plate edge pushed up into the windows and filled them. The Moon, away from the softening sheen of Earth’s atmosphere, was even colder and harder. It sent a strange, deep thrill through me.
Rogers mimicked a tobacco spit. “Here comes the interesting part,” he said. He cocked his hand like a pistol, firing off an imaginary shot through the windows.
“Bull’s-eye,” he said.
CHAPTER 26
Memory
The Moon.
As the hours went by, as the silver-white vision of it grew in our window, I began to feel a strange sadness, a sense of loss and betrayal at its sight. This was not the Moon I had grown up with, the one I had lain under on summer nights and told my wishes and dreams to; this was not the Moon that lovers throughout the ages of man had made love to and relied on for strength and light in the night, the one we had longed so mightily to reach and, having reached, had found so dead, desolate, and ultimately boring that we had all but turned our backs on it, leaving it once again to lovers and poets. This was not that Moon and never could be again—just as the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima had forever changed that city in the mind of man, metamorphosing it from a quiet, anonymous industrial port to a symbol of the horror that man was capable of unleashing on himself.
The Moon had even changed in physical shape. As we drew nearer, the huge, blasted, pocked area in what had once been the crater Aristarchus became grotesque and ugly—a gaping black evil eye that spewed rock spores from its volcanic interior. Its vile cannon, aimed at Earth, would not be quiet until we silenced it forever.
The Moon had changed; but the Earth, at least from space, had not. It was a beautiful ball, loudly advertising life in the bright blue of its oceans, the swirling white of its water-rich clouds, the soft, edge-on luminescence of its lush oxygen atmosphere. It radiated life, beaconed like an oasis in the surrounding dead darkness of space. I knew now why the men who had seen it this way had been changed by the vision, had become almost evangelical in their descriptions of the preciousness of our planet.
~ * ~
Like the Moon, I too have changed.
The first day, having little else to do, feeling bound by duty, I recorded all that has happened up till now. Most has been composed by moonlight. I don’t know if that has had anything to do with the strangeness I have felt in composing it, and the continuing strangeness I feel. I encounter tearing emotions when I look at the Earth and then at the Moon. I feel the emptiness that will ensue when the Moon is gone. It has been so much of our lives, perhaps. It has been the tides, and lovers’ light, and the beacon to ten thousand fishermen and sailors. It has been something warm in the cold night, a dream held at arm’s length, a promise of other worlds in other places. Until now, when it has become—
What has it become? I look at it now as I write, as Hartnet reads his technical sheets in the chair in front of me, as Wyatt takes remote measurements through the instruments in the open shuttle hold, as our captain curses the lack of his chewing tobacco, and Cowboy acts as engineer, checking and rechecking his lights and computers. I look at Luna through the thick quartz windows, looming, ravaged, reviled, and, always now, growing, becoming our world as blue Earth is left behind. I wonder that we are hating the wrong world for the wrong reasons. What do we know of the wolves? What do we know of their minds? To us they are a superstition come alive, and we have reacted as all men since Cain have reacted to the unknown and different—we have sought to kill what we hate, instead of trying to understand…
~ * ~
Later on the same day. The Moon looms even larger, and Jimmy Rogers, with a dry spit and a mischievous smile, has said that we will arrive in lunar orbit early tomorrow morning. “Heck, we’re gonna do this little job, and land back at Kramer on Christmas Eve,” he stated. “Ain’t that a present from Santa Claus?” There is much preparatory activity and heightened excitement.
I, however, am a little worried. I have looked over the last of what I wrote this morning, and I cannot believe that my pen made those words. I know I have felt rather weak and light-headed since we left Earth, but Hartnet, of all people, told me that it was just aftereffects of my transfusion, combined with the fact that I am probably a victim of space sickness. He himself has not suffered any ill effects since leaving orbit and has begun to enjoy being in his “space truck.” But I am not feeling so fine. My mind has begun to wander.
Feeling sick, I went to the bathroom a little while ago, which in the crowded Lexington provides at least a little privacy. While I was washing my hands i
n the vacuum sink, I noticed a long black hair curling near my left wrist. When I tried to brush it away, I discovered that it was my own. Stretching it out to its length of two or three inches, I then plucked it.
I examined myself for other such hair, but found none. I thought fleetingly of telling Cowboy about it, but some part of me told me not to say anything. I may talk with him later, when I can think clearly.
Just now, I checked myself over again but found no other hair, so perhaps that is the end of it.
I am tired, and must rest.
~ * ~
Later. The lights in the Lexington have been dimmed, simulating the sleep cycle on Earth. I tried to sleep, but after a short nap, I find myself completely awake and unable to sleep any longer. So I have come to sit in my chair again I find myself gazing raptly at the Moon, which now more than fills a window above me. The blown-out section looks like an ugly reddish brown wound on an otherwise tranquil gray surface. It looks not forbidding at all, but peaceful. I have never felt so drawn to it.
I have been writing for a few minutes and have been staring over my right hand at the paper, and only now have I noticed that the ridge over my knuckles is spotted with long, curling brown hairs. I counted seven, and as I pulled the sleeve of my jumpsuit up I saw that my forearm, too, is clustered with them. In some areas they are matted together and seem to be growing as I watch.
I have been feeling very light-headed. In my sleep restraint, I found myself thinking of my son, Richie. Only I saw him in his wolf form, and he didn’t look strange to me. He looked like my son. I find I cannot think of him any other way. And now, as I sit here alternately writing and staring at the coming Moon and looking around at my fellow passengers, I have a strong urge to rise from my chair and scrape my nails across their throats.
I am no fool. I know what is happening to me. Apparently, the good doctor was not successful in eradicating the wolf from my blood. In my case, I have changed very slowly, and not at all unpleasantly. I find that I can very easily accept who I am.
I am looking at my right hand, watching it curl into a beautiful, elongated shape. A soft brown fur has filled in all around it, and my fingernails are pushing slowly out into a new and finer and more useful shape. I will have a little difficulty writing with these long ivory claws, but I will manage, because I want to record all of this.
The wolves are not a barbarian race.
I see with new eyes.
There is something I must do now.
~ * ~
An hour later. I write more slowly, but my thoughts are very bright and lucid. The oxygen in the Lexington tastes wonderful. I feel very strong.
Let me describe what happened.
After putting down my pen, I carefully went from sleep restraint to sleep restraint, quietly binding each of the crew in with the elastic bands that are stored all over the vehicle for securing material to the walls and floors.
Captain Rogers was last. He was not in a sleep restraint but was half dozing up front in his command chair. He heard me approach. When he turned sleepily he began to smile until he stared into my face. Then his eyes widened, and he cursed.
I lashed out at him with my right arm. My claws cut him cleanly across the throat. As he floated back, crying out, I threw myself upon him.
A wonderful, almost spiritual, experience ensued as I tore and devoured his body. For a while, I was not myself. It was as if an entire race of beings worked through me, ages and ages of genes twining into my limbs, seeing through my eyes, singing the song of blood with me. While my flesh feasted, my mind feasted also. I was one with my race. I experienced a kind of joy, a completeness, I have never known. What had once seemed alien seemed whole and right and sacred. I understand everything about my race, now. Mankind seems alien to me.
I sought to stack Rogers’s bones, as the Song of Blood requires, but zero gravity prevented me, holding them in a floating, amorphous mass behind the captain’s chair. The cabin of the shuttle became suffused with tiny portions of tissue and droplets of blood, which I spent some time cleaning up.
Naturally, my activity woke the others. As soon as I was finished with Rogers, I attended to them. I moved from Hartnet to Wyatt, cutting them gently on the arm. I must admit that the sight of blood once again inflamed me, but I fought it off, because there is a higher reason to preserve these two. Without them, I cannot do what I seek to do.
As I stood before Cowboy, my new eyes found the Moon through the windows. I threw back my head and howled. I was filled with joy and strength of purpose.
But so was Cowboy. He had cut his sleep restraint with a knife and pushed his way out. I saw in his face that admirable courage and hatred for the enemy he had shown since I had met him. He floated away, shouting at me to stay away, searching desperately for something to fight me with.
In their restraints, Hartnet and Wyatt screamed and thrashed.
“Damnit!” Cowboy cursed. He had backed into Rogers’s chair, scattering the captain’s bones. This infuriated me. But I did not rush at him, as I wanted to. Pettis was a formidable opponent, the only one who could stop me.
“Jesus damn.” He was not directing this invective at anyone in particular. He was railing at fate, I suppose, or God, or the cosmos, or any combination of them. I think he knew he was about to lose.
But not without a fight. He angled away from Rogers’s chair to the copilot’s couch. Moving around behind it, he used it as a shield between us.
“I’ll let you work with me,” I offered, having difficulty with the human words. In my mind, the Song of Blood sought to overwhelm speech. I held my right paw out, claws up. “I’ll make it painless.”
He looked horrified by the reasonable tone of my voice. “Jesus, Jase, can’t you fight it?”
“I don’t want to fight it,” I explained. “This is what I am now.”
He fumbled in a pocket of his jumpsuit and brought out a book. “What about this? You were going to inscribe it for me.”
My right arm scythed a graceful arc toward him, cutting the book from his hand. Its severed pages floated magically around us.
“Goddamn it, isn’t there anything human left about you? Do you really want to do this to your own people?”
I threw back my head and brayed.
He reached beneath the copilot’s seat and produced his Uzi. I leaped at him, knocking the gun aside before he could fire. It was all over very quickly.
Again, I went into a dream state. My mind traveled back with my ancestors, watched through their eyes the huge blue Earth rising above their Moon. I stared up through their thin, opaque, beautiful atmosphere, where the nights were clear and dark, high breaths of cloud sifting through the palest of blue skies during the day, fragile seas lapping leisurely at the shores of vast brown deserts, where palid rows of pyramids, dwellings in death of our fathers, stretched to the horizon.
The dream changed. I saw through my fathers’ eyes a later time, where I gasped for breath, saw the thinning air above me, felt the gulping gravitational thievery of the blue, rich, huge, fat, jovial, taunting Earth that mocked the sky above. A wave of hatred swelled within me—rage at the slow death of my race, the sucking of air from our betrayed planet, the gasping, bloodless deaths of our children, the dried oceans, the constant upheaval of our planet’s crust, the fiery volcanoes, the shattering of meteors, the triumph of desert and gray dust—
While that hateful blue Earth hung like a smugly smiling, life-bursting lamp over us, as we ready the deep pits of the sleeping, curled upon themselves in stasis, awaiting a day when the air returns and the deserts are once again green with life, and the Song of Blood fills the air…
I awoke from my trance. Pettis’s bones floated from the deck and scattered, victims of their own inertia. I breathed deep oxygen. My eyes focused on what surrounded me.
I heard howling, sounds of struggle.
Proctor thrashed wildly in his sleep restraint. A line of blood was drying on his arm. I controlled an urge to rip him open. Ha
rtnet was sheathed in sweat, transformation taking place in his eyes. They had lightened from brown to dark yellow. His face had begun to shape, the brow pushing out, deepening, snout lengthening. He growled, and even now I sensed communion in his eyes.
“Soon,” I said to him.
~ * ~
Later. I have done everything I could tonight. I wait for orbit tomorrow. I sit in the captain’s chair, staring out at my homeland and feeling as if I am looking into the face of a nearing god. Proctor and Hartnet cry out now and again. They are more birth cries than ones of pain. By morning, they will be with me.
A half hour ago, Mission Control called frantically.
We did not check in when we were supposed to. I let their calls go unanswered.
Let them wonder.
There is nothing to do but wait, and watch the god above.
CHAPTER 27
Genesis
What more to tell?
I must write all of this down, awkward as it is for my hand to use a pen. I want to preserve this for our ancestors.
This morning, the Lexington swung automatically into orbit around our home. I continued to ignore communication with Mission Control. Hartnet said there was no need to contact Kramer until we need them.
I was afraid that Hartnet and Proctor might be uncontrollable when I unbound them this morning. But there were no problems. The light scratches I gave them produced, as I had hoped, a comparatively smooth transition.
Within two hours of their release, Proctor had recalculated the drop points, and Hartnet had recalibrated the timings for the nuclear devices. Wyatt assured me that his new calculations were infallible.
“They were first formulated by Dr. Baines,” he informed me with a glint in his eye.
By the time Hartnet and Proctor had finished their work, we were passing perigee on the near side. We sat in reverential silence, witnessing at close hand the area where the crater Aristarchus had once been. It was now a huge blasted depression, filled with the uncovered remains of our original civilization. Row upon row of tall spires thrust proudly into the sterile atmosphere. Some were broken at the top, chipped at the sides. Deep in the angry, red-eyed center of the volcanic hole, barely visible from our height, were vast stacks of glass storage spores. How right Doc had been—except that he had not made the final leap and deduced that the spores themselves were made of glass and had formed, when fused by volcanic action, the tektites that had so long baffled human astronomers.
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