The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming

by Stephen Jones

  Hi, Jocelyn! Your honorary Aunt Magnolia here. Yes, the one who killed your flesh-and-blood Aunt Mabel, but that’s all in the past now. I hope.

  Anyhow, I will probably be dead in an hour.

  Jocelyn, if you want to look all this up, the stuff that’s in the public domain at least, go to the library and check out “transient lunar phenomena.” Oh, and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Don’t believe a word they wrote, though. All science-fiction writers are liars and propagandists.

  Why an hour? Well, you see, once we turned those darned missile launch keys we only had an hour, and that’s running out. I thought I’d take the chance to tell you what happened to me up here.

  Although George has a twinkle in his ape eye. I wonder if he’s planning something?

  The date is Thursday, September 11, 1969. My name is Magnolia Jones. I was born on a cotton farm in Atlanta, Georgia. And I flew a Mercury spacecraft to the Moon, in order to save the world. I guess it was the most extraordinary thing I ever did.

  Even more than killing Yuri Gagarin.

  I

  For me it began when Joe Muldoon called me on Tuesday, July 22, this year, 1969, and summoned me to Florida.

  A day after Neil Armstrong didn’t walk on the Moon.

  I had been in Alabama, Marshall Space Flight Center. That same day I got on a flight to Tampa, Florida. Then I hired a car and drove out fifteen miles to a location called Stones Hill.

  You don’t refuse a call from Joe Muldoon. But from the beginning the timing surprised me.

  Look, I was in the space program myself—the dark program, at any rate. At the time I was working on post-Moon military applications of Apollo technology. I was one of the Blue Gemini 21, a bunch of women pilots, like the Mercury 13, who had been covertly trained for spaceflight, initially as a test study. Turned out we had a role to play. The faces of the Mercury 7 men have been on the cover of Time magazine since 1960. Nobody knew who we were. These are dark times. As Cthulhu stirs and various eldritch threats loom, a secret source of pilot-astronauts is useful.

  Anyhow, I was insider enough to know that Joe Muldoon was in the Apollo 11 backup crew. If Buzz Aldrin had broken his ankle a week ago, it would have been Joe supposedly up there on the Moon right now. And during a flight itself, the backup crew is always in demand, as capcoms, or running simulators if anything fouls up. So, in the middle of that supremely historic flight, why was Joe Muldoon wasting his time on me?

  And why had he told me to read Jules Verne on the flight over?

  I parked maybe half a mile from Stones Hill itself. I walked in.

  It was July, and it was hot and wet. But it was quiet. I don’t know Florida, away from the Cape, but the trees looked bare to me, the ground covered by a kind of damp ash. A blasted heath that reminded me of another I had seen, years before, in Arkham, England. Not a reassuring sight.

  The hill itself looked like a pus-filled blister pushing out of the damp Florida ground. The summit had been leveled off across maybe half a mile or more, the ground heavily worked. Waiting for me there were two men, one tall and upright, one short and shambling. They didn’t wave to me, and I didn’t wave back.

  I made my way toward them, scouting out the ground structure as I went. A circular working at the center, mostly concrete and stone, roughly packed, around a ragged shaft maybe nine feet wide that had been plugged with iron.

  This was at the center of a much wider ring of structures I saw five or six hundred yards back. Forges, hundreds of them. The source of all that iron.

  I didn’t go too close to that central shaft. Something about it—a trick of the light, the damp sunlight catching on a kind of mist, an elusive color—dug deep into my memory.

  I recognized the two men as I approached. Joe Muldoon was in a battered USAF leather flight jacket, tall, crewcut blond, a real straight arrow. The other I knew from newspapers and book covers. He was a small man with a mop of black hair cut to a fringe. He wore a grubby red cravat, loud check trousers, and an elderly looking frock coat. This was William Dyer, professor of geology at Miskatonic University. His face deeply lined, he might have been in his late forties, but I knew he had to be older.

  The two of them together were like Clint Eastwood and Mel Brooks.

  It was Dyer who first welcomed me, with a surprisingly strong handshake. “Major Jones.”

  “I’m glad to meet you, professor. I read about the missions you led to the Antarctic and Australia—the alien cities you found there.”

  He grunted. “Some call them cities. Some call them alien. The fact is the Yithians who left those traces in Australia, and some other species, have been around on the Earth for a very long time, major. Perhaps the ‘alien’ is humanity.”

  I knew he had led those famous expeditions over thirty years before. Yet, as I said, he didn’t look over fifty. If he was using a hair dye it was a good one.

  “I did have trouble swallowing the idea that your Yithians could travel in time, professor.”

  He sniffed. “Indiscriminately across time and space. Well, Einstein has shown that time can be reduced to a mere dimension. As for evidence, there are many compelling accounts of ‘possession’ of the classic Peaslee kind in the historical record. And if you had seen the city we exposed—”

  “We can discuss all this later. Thanks for coming out here, Jones.” Muldoon, businesslike, stepped forward for a handshake in turn. “I can tell you’ve boned up on your Lovecraft since the Zarya flight.”

  During which I had mercy-killed an eldritch-possessed Yuri Gagarin. Long story.

  “I take it you read the Verne too. You recognize this place?”

  “From the Earth to the Moon, you told me to read. This is where the Baltimore Gun Club built the Columbiad—the great cannon that fired a crewed projectile to the Moon, right? Impey Barbicane.”

  Dyer smiled, mischievously. “That’s the cover story. What actually happened . . .”

  “There was a natural well here,” Muldoon spoke up, “surprisingly maybe, on this hill. Used by the local Indians, the Seminole. Then, in 1865 . . .”

  Suddenly I got it. A damaged old well. An elusive mist, the strange shades. “There was a Color Incursion,” I said. “An infestation from space. Like the one I dealt with on the Zarya. Right here.”

  The Color—an entity of some kind, amorphous, a thing of mist and elusive spectrum shades. It comes from out in space, delivered by a peculiar form of evaporating meteorite; and then, once landed, it feeds on local life-forms until, replete, it has the energy to fire itself back out to space again. I had encountered an incursion of my own, when a fragment of the Color had gotten lodged in a Soviet space station called Zarya, and consumed what it found within.

  I walked around the rim of the shaft, trying to take this in. “So, for a hundred years, Jules Verne’s most famous book has actually been a cover for a Color event?”

  “The locals stopped up the well with iron,” Dyer said. “In recent times the HPL investigated. Found little. Verne gave the right date, by the way. It began with a meteor strike, like the classic 1880s incursion near Arkham, which Lovecraft described, like others we know of. This may have been one of the earliest incursions, given there was evidence of some kind of interstellar transport behind the 1882 event.

  “This one was poorly observed, since the European population was still so sparse. And given the lack of animal and human flesh for it to feed on, the final eruption may have been a long time coming.”

  “Verne’s book was a cover-up.”

  Muldoon nodded curtly. “A good story will plant an alternative explanation in people’s minds. Works better than a simple denial. Nowadays we have TV and the movies, of course, and you can explain away an eldritch invasion as a special effect. Or fake a cover. Like the Apollo 11 thing.”

  I looked at him sharply. “What Apollo 11 thing?”

  He actually winked at me.

  Dyer nodded. “Of course, all this, the Verne event, was a few years before Lovecraft was even
born. But already it was a reflex of governments to sedate their populations in the face of strangeness.”

  Muldoon looked at me. “Think it through, Jones. Why did Verne write the story up as he did? Why the Moon?”

  I remembered. “The huge ‘cannon shot’ that witnesses must have seen was actually the Color escaping, I guess. But then the projectile was tracked by the telescopes all the way to the Moon. Is that it? Are you saying that from this particular incursion, the Color flew up to the Moon? And Verne covered it all up as some kind of manned shot?”

  Dyer sighed. “You have it. It seems that since then, if not before, the Moon has been infested with the Color, in parts at least. As we should have guessed, perhaps, even before the League researchers uncovered this site. Why, as Lovecraft describes, the meteor casing of the Color has a peculiar affinity for silicate rocks, particularly olivine, and as the Moon is thought to consist of little but silicate rocks—”

  I faced Muldoon. “Where? The Sea of Tranquility?”

  He grinned. “Not there, Jones. But we never sent anybody there. If you looked up transient lunar phenomena like I told you—”

  “Aristarchus,” Dyer said gently. “A magnificent crater in the Imbrium Ocean, the right eye of the man in the Moon. For centuries there have been odd observations of apparent changes there. Even in 1866, a year after Verne’s ‘Moon shot’—”

  “And more recently,” Muldoon cut in, “in 1963. A couple of guys at Lowell in Arizona reported some very odd phenomena in that crater. The Cthulhu Investigation Division quickly concluded that Aristarchus was the site of a major Color infestation.”

  “And not just Color-related,” Dyer said. “Arguably. The infestation, I mean. I myself have analyzed images of the crater floor, which are reminiscent of aerial shots taken of that region of the Great Sandy Desert of Australia where I discovered the Yithian archive-city. This is controversial even in Lovecraftian circles—the idea that there are Yithians on the Moon. . . . But, of course, the Color in the Moon must feed on something.”

  I nodded. “Okay. So what’s this got to do with me?”

  “The fact is, Major Jones, there are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things,” Dyer said grimly. “Things which act against everything that we believe in. They must be fought. And now great Cthulhu himself is restless.”

  “It’s like we’re in some vast mental asylum, Jones,” Muldoon added. “The biggest of the bad guys is rattling his cage, but the rest are stirred up too.”

  “Such as Mabel Peabody’s Azathoth?”

  “I read your debrief. So even while we try to contain Cthulhu, we are securing other flanks.”

  “How do you ‘secure’ Aristarchus?”

  “The Lowell guys reported their anomaly on October 29, 1963. On January 29, 1964, we launched a guy called Francis Spender to the Moon.”

  That was the first time I had heard that name. I just stared. “That’s impossible. Apollo was barely off the drawing board.”

  “We did it anyhow. Officially it was the first uncrewed test of the Saturn I rocket. And a couple of months later we sent up another guy. Robert Hamilton. Another ‘uncrewed test.’”

  “So what do you want of me?”

  “Well, my dear,” Dyer said, not unkindly, “since Aristarchus is evidently not secured—German astronomers are reporting new transient phenomena even as we speak—they, NASA, the government, and the HPL, want to send you up there to find out what went wrong, for Spender and Hamilton. And to fix it.”

  “Why me?”

  Muldoon shrugged. “You’re an astronaut. You survived Zarya. You’re as well qualified as anyone.”

  “I’m afraid the clock is ticking,” Dyer said. “There is to be a solar eclipse. And as you know, the Color seems to become—agitated—during such events.”

  I asked, “When?”

  Muldoon grinned. “You busy in September?”

  II

  We dumped my rental car, and Muldoon drove the three of us back to the Cape.

  Look, if you’re an astronaut, even of the female persuasion, you generally fly yourself in on a T-38 and make straight for the NASA facilities. Now I was at ground level, and I saw a different side to the Cape. In between the bars and hotels with names like The Satellite Bar and The Orbit Room, we drove past withered orange plantations, stunted palms, blighted crops.

  Dyer murmured, “This is the stuff they don’t brag about to the press. Nobody knows if the blight you see is a product of all that noxious rocket exhaust, or—something subtler. The natural order, perhaps, breached.”

  Muldoon, being Muldoon, was waved through security fences until we drove right up to one of the launch control buildings. Generally, once a manned spacecraft has cleared its launch tower, control is handed over to the Manned Spaceflight Center at Houston. But today, Muldoon said, the control rooms were given over to shadowing Houston and their communications with the Apollo astronauts on the Moon.

  “Or not,” he said briskly, as we walked over tarmac.

  “I’m still having trouble believing that the whole Apollo program has been a fake.”

  “Not all of it. Only since it started to fail. Look, the technology was always too complex. The capsule fire in ’67 was only the start of it. We had failures on orbit, failed re-entries, and every crew that ventured beyond the Earth’s magnetic field got zapped by solar flares.” He eyed me. “I know you claim the Brits put a man on Mars back in the 1950s.”

  “Only by accident. Do you read all my mail?”

  He paused before entering the building, and looked up at a sun-blasted sky. “No, we never got Apollo to the Moon. But what we do have is a constellation.”

  “A constellation?”

  “If you know where to look, at a given time of day.” He pointed up at the washed-out sky, to the east. “Merril, Connolly, Woodward. Apollo 6. Stuck up there until their high orbit decays, a century from now.” Point. “Pokrovski, Maiakovski, Brodisnek. A failed Voskhod, similarly.” Point. “Prokrovna, second Soviet woman in space.” He looked at me with those blue eyes like empty windows. “A constellation of dead astronauts. Meantime, come see the real space program.”

  He led me and Dyer into one of the launch control subsidiary suites. Here, big screens designed to carry telemetry from the workings of mighty rockets showed images of two astronauts apparently bouncing around on the Moon. Neil and Buzz, I presumed.

  Evidently this was a raw, unedited recording of yesterday’s “Moonwalk,” and some kind of postmortem was going on. The film kept being paused, and there was a teleconference, with NASA technicians and managers in the room arguing with screen images of chain-smoking guys in suits.

  As we watched, Buzz Aldrin, carrying a sample box, went bounding over a dusty surface.

  “Cut! Take two! Christ, Aldrin is such a ham . . .”

  Buzz stopped, and staggered backward toward his mark, holding the box. But he tripped on something. He bent clumsily to pick it up—it was a Coke bottle. He threw it down, snarled something incomprehensible on the radio link, tripped again—and he turned upside down and hovered in the air, evidently suspended in some harness intended to give the illusion of low lunar gravity.

  “Freeze!” The screen cut to a suited, very tall, very bald man, who was livid with rage—and very English. “After all these years of my shows you can still see the bloody strings!”

  I frowned. “Do I know that guy?”

  Muldoon murmured, “Makes TV puppet shows for kids. On Saturday mornings the astronauts would sit around nursing hangovers, watching one called Fireball . . . something.”

  I stared. “So you’re faking the Moonwalks with a kids’ show producer? Why not use Stanley Kubrick? I mean, 2001—”

  Dyer tutted. “Communist brother.”

  “Not officially,” Muldoon said laconically. “Besides, this guy has cover. Publicly he’s set up in an MGM studio in England, working on a live-action show about organ-legger aliens from space.”

&nbs
p; “Very Lovecraftian,” Dyer said.

  “The final Moonwalk edit was watched by a billion people. Everyone from the Pope to the Queen, from Lapland to Australia. What a snafu.”

  “Let’s hope nobody notices the bloopers,” I said. “But I’m guessing this isn’t what I’m here for.”

  “No.” Muldoon beckoned. “Follow me.”

  You wouldn’t think a modern NASA control facility, all concrete and glass and computers, would have a cellar.

  This one did.

  On the face of it, it was another mission operations control room, just like the setting for the fake upstairs. Big screens, rows of seats, consoles. There were just three people in this big room. One was asleep, another was reading a comic book. I had the impression this place had been here a long, long time.

  On the screens at the front another lunar plain was portrayed, but this one showed no humans, no sign of any movement. The plain was strewn with bits of technology. I strained to see more clearly.

  I made out what looked like a Mercury capsule resting on a big four-legged frame. Cylindrical booster tanks lay on the ground, loosely covered over with lunar dirt. There were plenty of crisp footprints, I saw.

  Over the big screens was an engraved sign:

  BY THE GRACE OF GOD, AND IN THE NAME OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, I TAKE POSSESSION OF THIS PLANET ON BEHALF OF AND FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL MANKIND.

  FRANCIS E. SPENDER, FEBRUARY 1, 1964

  Muldoon grunted. “Welcome to Lunarville 1. That’s what we need you to go fix.”

  It had all come out of the panicky days of the late 1950s, Muldoon explained.

  There had been covert spaceflights pretty much from World War II, from both sides of the Iron Curtain. But from 1957 the Soviets had gone public, and space had started to look like an arena for conflict between the powers.

  “I was around then. In the USAF,” said Muldoon. “We feared the Russians would grab the high ground by reaching the Moon first. The Air Force started talking up plans for a nuclear weapons base on the Moon as early as 1958. Von Braun got involved, and it got bogged down in the usual inter-service infighting.”