Assignment Moon Girl

by Edward S. Aarons

  Durell said, “I wasn’t with him at the time.”

  “Ah, yes. So young Hanookh told me. Where were you then, my dear sir?”

  “I think you know,” said Durell. “Have you, too, brought me here to learn how to find Har-Bun?”

  “It is important to know that.”

  “But if I tell you, I’ll be put on the next plane out of Teheran, with deportation orders in my hand.”

  “True. On the other side of the coin, one begins to suspect you of collusion with the rebel Har-Buri,. Since you are determined to protect him. Your intelligence organization has been known to play rather peculiar pranks in other national territories.”

  “You know better than that, Mr. Sepah.”

  “Do you want the girl so desperately, then?”

  “I want her, yes.”

  “And do you judge your value to us in terms of an exchange of information about this Russian cosmonaut?”

  “It’s a big factor.”

  “Very well. Come with me.”

  Ramsur Sepah moved with the grace of a hunting animal out from behind his desk and opened another door to his office and stepped through. Durell tried to stay close behind his tall, rapier figure. The room beyond was dark. Sepah murmured something about the light and stepped ahead. Durell felt a tingling at the nape of his neck. The door closed behind him with a sudden swoop and rush of air. The darkness became absolute. He stood very still for a moment, then put his back against the panel.

  “Mr. Sepah—”

  The silence was thicker than the darkness. Durell was not surprised by what was happening; he had half expected it. On the other hand, he was not quite prepared for the efficiency with which the man operated.

  A light came on overhead.

  He was in a blank-walled filing room. Cabinets filled the area from floor to ceiling. The opposite door was closed. Ramsur Sepah was not in the room with him. Then his voice came from a speaker in the ceiling.

  “You see how fortunate we are, Mr. Durell. We have the girl. Yes, Tanya Ouspanaya is in our hands.”

  Durell spoke to the ceiling. “Let me see her.”

  “Oh, you shall! And so many of your questions will be answered, very soon.” The voice from the loudspeaker laughed softly. “How foolish of you not to have guessed by now, Mr. Durell. Your reputation led me to believe you were more clever than this. You could call me by another name, you see. No one has seen my photograph, I have little or no dossier in poor young Hanookh’s files.”

  Durell spoke abruptly. “Then you are Har-Buri?”

  “Yes. And now, good night, for a time.”

  Durell swung about and tried the door by which he had entered the file room. It was locked. His hands slid rapidly along the edges of the doorway. No hold was available. The knob slipped round and around in his hand. He tried to tear it off. Nothing gave way. It was all solid steel. He crossed the room to the opposite door by which Ramsur Sepah—or Har-Buri—had vanished. He met the same problem. There was no way out.

  Then he heard the hissing of gas from the speaker vent in the ceiling. And the light went out again.

  He smelled nothing. Panic touched him for a moment. He stood very still. He didn’t want to breathe. The hissing grew louder. He felt along the top of the filing cabinet to his left, tested its strength and weight. It seemed to be bolted solidly to the floor and wall. Using the steel drawer handles, he lifted himself up until he could touch the invisible ceiling above, and then stretched as far as he could toward the opening he had spotted there. It was just beyond reach, but his fingertips felt a sudden, moist coolness from the gas pouring into the chamber. He did not know if it was lethal or not. He couldn’t reach it. He turned his head and drew a breath, swinging out with one hand, and shrugged out of his coat. He lost his grip and dropped to the floor, got out of the jacket altogether, and climbed up again. Suddenly he felt nauseated and he swallowed hard. He bailed up his coat and reached out in the darkness with the heavy cloth and tried to stuff it over the opening. The hissing was momentarily muted. But he couldn’t hold his stretched position for long. His arm began to tremble; his scars from Madame Hung’s treatment suddenly screamed in protest. Again nausea racked him. This time he fell harder to the floor, and a stomach cramp doubled him up. He lay prone, face against the cool concrete. The room was literally a vault. He couldn’t get out. It was airtight. He climbed up on the filing cabinet once more. He felt cold, bathed in icy perspiration. He reached out awkwardly for the ceiling vent one last time. He couldn’t make it. When he fell, he did not feel the floor. He seemed to drop forever, into a bottomless black pit.

  Chapter Fourteen

  HE AWOKE and heard voices, but they seemed to come through an echo chamber and the words were garbled; he could not understand them. He was sick, and he shouted into the darkness, but he made no sound. He gathered his trembling muscles and tried to stand up, but there was a void around him and he could not tell which direction was up or down or sidewise, and dizziness took him and spun him around and around. He tried to extend his arms and seemed to fly, with nothing under his feet, soaring and swooping and dipping and diving. All at once he felt a lurching sensation and dropped gratefully into nothing at all.

  Time passed. He slept and awoke. He tried to read the luminous dial of his wristwatch. The figures mocked him. He felt that at least the night had passed, but it was still dark. He no sooner thought of this than he was bathed in an agonizing light that seemed to prick every pore of his body with intense pain. He writhed and tried to roll away from it, and now instead of the soaring freedom he had felt before, he felt bound in iron, unable to move at all.

  More time went by.

  He did not know if it was day or night. It was a long, long time. He awoke to softness under him, a smell of antiseptic, the sting of a needle in his arm. A form loomed over him and he swung feebly at the vague face. He heard Ramsur Sepah-Har-Buri laugh. Or was it Ta-Po? He heard another laugh. He knew that one, and it made his blood grow chill. Madame Hung, no less. They had him properly, he thought. Where was Hannigan? And Lotus? Everything he had arranged so carefully had blown up in his face. He wanted to yell for Hannigan, but he bit oil the name before it came out. He felt cunning and secretive, doing this. Never let your right hand know what the left is doing. Honisoit qui mal y pense.

  “How do you feel, Mr. Durell?”

  The voice came from a long distance. “I feel great,” he whispered. “Out of this world.”

  There was a chuckle, “Ah, yes. We are sorry for the delay. Arrangements must be made. Transport must be laid on, you see. It will be soon.”

  “What will be ‘soon’?”

  “Oh, it will be most remarkable.”

  And there was no further voice to talk to.

  He was aware of cold and heat, light and dark, and always the flow of time going by, sometimes in quick spurts, other times in slow torment, He was carried somewhere and put in a bed. He was walked somewhere else and put in a car or a truck. He felt wind against his face and felt the sting of another needle and felt nothing.

  He knew that more than one day had already gone by. Perhaps two or three. It was taking too long for them to make their “arrangements,” whatever they were. In the moments when he was reasonably lucid, he tried to pinpoint concrete evidence of what was happening to him. But everything was distorted, as if in a nightmare. He wondered what they were pumping into him with their syringes. He wondered at the callous depravity that would permit a man like Ramsur Sepah to see his only son to his death.

  He chewed sand between his teeth. The desert? A cold, mocking sky reeled over him. He heard the hum of a truck motor. Yes, the desert. He lay on his back, watching the moon sail in the heavens. Big, round, luminous old moon, symbol for lovers, eternal mystery, sign of lunacy. He tried to sit up, but he was tied hand and foot, and he couldn’t move. Two figures loomed on benches built lengthwise along the body of the open truck. Their rifles glinted like silver in the moonlight. Their faces were black angle
s against the sky. They said nothing, did nothing, their bodies swaying only to the movement of the truck.

  He wondered why he was not more surprised to have learned that Ramsur Sepah was the legendary Har-Buri. He could not have suspected this, but somehow he felt as if he had made a mistake, a fatal one, and this was one situation from which he could see no way out. No one was perfect. The assignment had been complicated by national cross-currents and interests that should have warned him, from the first. But he didn’t know what else he could have done. He had counted on Hannigan, and he knew he should never depend on anyone else in his business. Your survival was in your own hands.

  Not that he blamed Hannigan. Maybe Hannigan was working on it right now. Maybe Lotus had gotten to him, after all. But Hannigan didn’t know about Ramsur Sepah and the plot for rebellion that came from high places in Teheran. Hannigan didn’t know what Durell knew about Tanya and her father. You play things too close to your chest sometimes, Samuel, he told himself.

  The truck stopped. He heard voices, and smelled charcoal smoke, and the debris and ordure of a desert village. Surprisingly, he was hungry. And suddenly he was tortured by thirst.

  “Hey,” he said to one of the faceless guards.

  The man looked at him with glittering eyes and got up and vanished from the truck. The other just sat and waited, faceless and anonymous. Durell heard the clank of a camel bell, and presently he saw a woman’s figure loom over him. It was Madame Hung. Her face was a witch’s face, blotting out the full moon. He shuddered.

  “How do you feel?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Fine.”

  “Oh, that’s very good.”

  “I'm hungry.”

  “Good.”

  “Do you have any water, Madame Hung?”

  “Oh, plenty of water. But you will not need any, American spy, American killer. You are going on a long, long journey.” She laughed.

  “Listen,” he said. “No more needles.”

  “Just one more.”

  “We can make a deal," he said.

  “Ah. Now you crawl?”

  ”I’m a bourgeois, middle-class, capitalistic businessman. I like to make deals, that’s all.”

  “You have nothing to bargain with. Bon voyage, American.”

  She plunged a syringe into his arm. He could not avoid it. He tried, but his bonds were too tight, and she had no trouble handling him. His last thought was that somehow, in some way, he would kill her.

  If it was the last thing he ever did.

  He was disoriented. His mind was detached from his body, with a floating freedom that was delightful, making him happy and carefree. There was nothing solid about him—no earth, no floor, no walls, no ceiling or sky. He was alone in ecstasy, a revelation of utter detachment. His body did not exist. He felt no pain, no hunger, no thirst, no lust. And no heartbeat.

  But he couldn’t be dead, he told himself. He could not be in eternity, because he knew that time was passing, a lot of time, hours and days, perhaps a week, maybe more. He wondered about this, and sometimes, when he was permitted to return to his body, he was fed, although he was not hungry, and given water, although he was not thirsty. He was always in darkness, except that now and then he saw many colored lights that twinkled and often looked like stars. Often, too, the moon sailed across his vision, enormous, pitted, and hostile. More and more, it seemed to him that the moon was an enemy waiting for him, an entity that was aware of him and even welcoming him to the incredible emptiness of outer space. He thought a lot about the moon, and he thought now and then of Tanya, who said she had been there. He had known something about this once, and he tried to remember what it was; but he could not remember. He tried. He

  told himself it was important. His life depended on it. He did not know how he knew this, but he knew.

  Time went by. Too much time. He should not have been floating in this emptiness so long. Somebody should have come for him by now. Everything was wrong and out of focus. Yet he felt serene.

  At last a voice came to him.

  “You are going to the moon, Durell,” it said.

  “Am I?”

  “Oh, yes. It is all arranged, at last.”

  “I don’t believe it,” he said.

  “You shall see.”

  He was called hack from wherever he had been. His euphoria was gone. He was afraid, and did not want to come back. Little by little, he knew his body again. His heart beat. He breathed. He felt pain in his limbs. He was sorry it was happening. Who needed it? Shadows talked to him. Light came and went. He sat in a chair. The chair enveloped him from all directions, with straps that kept him secure. A helmet was put on his head, and he wore an awkward bulkiness of clothing. The hiss of oxygen made him dizzy for a moment. He could turn his head and he saw the night sky through a tiny, oval port. The moon leered at him and then slowly slid aside, as in a time-lapse motion picture film. Someone sat in a similar seat beside him.

  “Hello, my friend.”

  “Hello, Professor Ouspanaya,” Durell said.

  “We go on a journey.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “It will be perfectly safe. Nothing to fear.”

  “I’d rather not, though.”

  “It is necessary. You are not surprised to see me? I shall be beside you all the time. The trip may take two weeks. You are in fine physical condition for it now. And I shall manage everything. You need only accompany me and observe all there is to see.”

  “Where are we?”

  Ouspanaya smiled. His pale blue Siberian eyes regarded him with scientific detachment. Durell wondered if this was part of the dream he had enjoyed for so long. For days? Was it weeks‘! He was sure of nothing. He looked through the porthole again. Things vibrated. Computers clicked. He couldn’t believe it. Yet he had to. Everything was solid and tangible. It was not part of the drugged hours he had spent, thanks to Madame Hung’s needles. He was out of it. He was in full possession of his faculties. He was in a spacesuit, he was in a space capsule sitting on top of a booster rocket. Voices in Russian came eerily through the headphones built into his helmet. He drew a deep breath. Oxygen. He felt good. He looked through the port. The stars laughed at him. No, no. It couldn’t be. He looked at Ouspanaya.

  The Russian nodded. “Here we go.”

  He had read classified accounts of astronaut launchings. Everything was according to schedule. He wanted to yell to somebody, anybody, that he didn’t belong here, he didn’t know what to do, he couldn’t save himself, and who wanted to go to the moon, anyway? Tanya had been on the moon, and look what it had done to her. If this was fact and not fancy, then everything he had worked on since his arrival in Teheran was based on a false premise.

  It couldn’t be real.

  But it was.

  He felt the trembling of enormous power under his back, a vibration like a malevolent monster wakening and stretching, a pressure in his chest and lungs that for long seconds seemed beyond endurance. The straps bit into his aims and legs and held him flat. All through the ordeal, the laconic voices of Russian technicians called out numbers, coordinates, computerized sums, a space jargon that went beyond his competent command of the language. Ouspanaya replied just as laconically. All of his attention was on the computer flickering and clickings, the maze of dials and needles, tubes and wires, that confronted him.

  Suddenly they were free of the pressure and floating, weightless. The sky swung as the booster tipped into the escape slot in space that would let them leave the worlds gravity. He leaned forward as much as he could and stared through the port. Yes, earth was down there, incredibly beautiful, incredibly far down, beyond reach, torn from him forever, half daylight and halt night. Then the sun swung into sight and Ouspanaya murmured an apology and there was shade from its blinding menace. Durell felt as if there was something wrong with him. He should have been screaming objections; but he felt curiously complacent about it file spoke into the mike strapped to his throat.

  “You are
an illusion, Professor Ouspanaya.”

  The man smiled. “Touch me. I am real.”

  Durell did so. There was solid flesh under the silver spacesuit. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “To prove something to you,” Ouspanaya said.

  “About Tanya?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Listen, where was the space port? I know we were in the desert—”

  “That was last week."

  “Last week?”

  “Do not worry about it. You will he returned safely to earth. Otherwise—” Professor Ouspanaya smiled wryly through his plastic helmet visor. “Otherwise, I would hardly have agreed to go along, would I?”

  “But things just don’t happen like this in space programs—”

  “Ah, you have much to learn about Soviet science

  “Then you were with Tanya on her trip? She said you were with her.”

  “I was beside her, just as I am with you. Now I must ask you not to interfere with my work, for a time. I have much to do.”

  Durell counted the rivets in the capsule’s plates. He counted the dials, he read the Russian printing on their faces, he considered the food packages in their slots, the oxygen bottles, the air scrubber, the waste disposers. Ouspanaya kept muttering reports into his microphone and listening to the dry, matter-of-fact figure that came back to him from earth. All at once, Durell began unbuckling the belts that kept him strapped to his seat.

  “What are you doing?” Ouspanaya asked.

  “I’m getting out of here.”

  “Are you mad? We are weightless—”

  “It’s an illusion,” Durell said.

  “Weightless!” Ouspanaya shouted. “Be careful—”

  Durell drifted from his padded seat, crashed into the instrument panel, caromed floating upside down, caught his chair again, and tried to pull his feet back where they belonged. He was stunned. He was completely astonished.

  “Here, take one of these,” Ouspanaya said.

  “What is it?”

  “A pill, what does it look like? It will help.”

  He swallowed it and managed to buckle himself back into his seat. For a long time afterward, he' stared in dismay at the slowly changing dials, at the receding ball of earth. He could not doubt the evidence of his senses.