He heard Cramm answer—with cocky sharpness: “Too bad, Friend. Should have wired me, first. Now we’ve lost important data. But never mind— I’ll handle matters! Maybe we can take those creatures alive. That’ll be swell!...”
Cliff missed what followed immediately, as his mind blurred again. But later—not much later—he was in on the finale. His viewpoint was that of the hunted, shambling along before the long line of men that pushed their way abreast through the woods, while hounds yammered madly, and moonlight was white on the snow. There was no escape; no cleverness would work anymore, now. The enemy might fight; but the end of the rope had been reached.
And Cliff found himself not altogether glad, in spite of a threat to all people on Earth—one worse than that of lycanthropy. In spite of the stealing of his own form. For there were balancing forces and reasons; he was living the part of the quarry. Cliff knew that they had come to Earth because of fear and desire for defense and not for conquest—remembering this, now.
Yet, being a man, he understood, too, what drove the hunters on so savagely. As a small boy he had lain abed on winter nights, listening to the howling of dogs in these same woods. Wolves were then the palest of his imaginings. The cold chills along one’s spine only tried to measure the extent of unnamed danger lurking in the darkness and the snow.
CHAPTER THREE
THE CLOSING-IN of the men was swift. They were dark shapes among the trees. The forms of Cliff's companions were grotesque blobs that kept in the shadows. Cliff was suddenly aware of the apparatus in his paws: Tin and wire and bits of glass; a weapon, improvised. It was not his own will that controlled those paws any more; but perhaps a little of his own wishes went with their movement, as they raised that crudely-made arm...
Link Pelhof snarled at him, showing his teeth: “I still know yuh by what’s left of your clothes, Cliff Verden! If you are Cliff Verden at all, now! Damn yuh—maybe I’m goin’ the same way—but it’s your fault! Your fault, I say! But now you’ll die! Die!...”
Pelhof’s words were shrieks of rage, and fear, and unreason. He was a stupid lug, unable now to take the responsibility for his own past unwariness even after he had been warned.
Jake Koven’s attitude was scarcely any better; his eyes glowed mad in the moonlight. There were honest tears in them—for Mary. But his grief and rage and terror, and will to destroy, remained speechless. Little Doc Heyward glared with silent fury.
But Frankie Cramm drew Cliff’s greatest notice. He was big, blond, and handsome; his hunter’s costume was melodramatically slick. There was no question about his courage. He spoke now, and that was where the rub came; his diplomacy was of the crudest. He was one of those who call themselves sportsmen—but how often is that name a mere cloak of dignity and self-flattery for sadism?
“Easy,” he crooned. “Easy, you damned things. Be good, and we won’t hurt you! We know where you came from. My robot rocket, circling the moon, brought back pictures of the valley. Easy... Easy...”
His tone dripped honey and insincerity; his eyes glowed like savage coals. His honest excuse, of course, was that he was afraid, and in deadly danger. But now, in this historic moment—this first meeting of the beings of two worlds, heretofore utterly separate and hidden from each other through all their ages of evolution—could any excuse at all be accepted? For this was the beginning of all interworld contact and traffic—not only for the moment but for the future. The implications of this moment were too gigantic; the question of harmony or chaos, for ages to come, were balanced in it. In a larger sense, not just Earth and moon were involved; human dealings with the unknowns of Mars and Venus—and who could tell or knew what other places were involved as well. Perhaps the problem of defeating chaos was beyond human powers; perhaps it called for the skill of a superman. Maybe harmony was impossible.
WITH THE pucker of dread tightening the throat that had been his, the eyes through which Cliff Verden saw glared at Frankie Cramm. Cliff's private feeling was less contempt than regret. Here was the man who probably would be the Columbus of space-travel; he had the means, the leisure, the daredevil nerve. But on the basis of getting along with unknown entities—the most important point of all—he was utterly inadequate. Crude, clumsy, thoughtless, egocentric. A fool. But the worst of it all lay in the doubt whether any other Earthman would be much better.
Did the doubt presage general failure here? Even more on other worlds than the moon? Did it presage not only the futility of the great dream of interplanetary contact—of widened culture and horizons—but grotesque doom as well? Future war of the planets, fought with Lord knew what terrible weapons?
Cliff Verden thought of one other thing: the asteroid belt; the fragments of an exploded planet, theory once claimed. Correct or not, could this be taken as a symbol of interworld traffic ending in conflict that actually destroyed one of the contesting spheres?
Cliff saw the weapon, in the paw that should have been his hand, lift farther, as if to aim. Perhaps this menacing gesture was a glaring error on the lunar side of a difference.
“Get 'em!” Frankie Cramm snapped.
Into the sharp scrape of his order blended old Jake Koven’s anguished yell: “Not—what used to be—my Mary!...” Jake rushed forward, but his words ended in a gasp, as he ran right into a Winchester bullet that tore open his skull....
Many men fired together. For two seconds the winter woods echoed with the crash and snarl of slugs. Cliff Verden felt the body of his present viewpoint falling. His consciousness grew vague, but the picture of what was happening remained starkly vivid. The paw holding the weapon of tin and wire and glass, moved and tightened. The intended target was Cramm; but the aim of a dying mind can easily be poor; the blue flash—probably atomic heat—missed its objective and tore off Link Pelhof’s head and shoulders.
This was an insignificant part of action which lasted but a few seconds more. In the air, mingling with the smell of burnt cordite, there was now the sharp tang of ozone. The dogs, awed almost to silence a moment ago, now went mad with yammering, and rushed forward in a savage wave. Cliff Verden still saw the flash of their fangs, and the hair bristling along their backs. The shouting of the men was of the same quality as the cries of the hounds. Fear and fury went together.
Then silence closed in, but Cliff no longer knew. Three alien forms lay in the trampled snow. The bodies still wore tattered Earthly clothes, from which peeped fur that the night wind rumpled. Their great eyes stared balefully at the moon. Even in death it seemed that they were dangerous. They were children of the unknown; where their powers began or ended, one could not tell. For had they not been men, once; and had not flesh and mind changed slowly, until they were different? It was space travel by some warping of biological law. There was no way to know the truth—now that they were forever dead.
The dogs whined and sniffed, as if puzzled and frustrated, now that the enemy moved no more. The men heaved uneasy sighs of relief at victory that meant uncertain peace of mind.
“Well—that’s that!” Cramm growled grimly, as if to convince himself of a success, which somehow, too, in the depths of his mind, was a defeat—a serious one. He felt sheepish.
But then his cockiness came back. “Got to finish building my two spaceships as fast as I can,” he said.
CLIFF VERDEN had no consciousness at all at that time; and it was the same with his brother, and Mary Koven. Nor was there any definite, clear moment of awakening, for any of them. Perhaps they remained completely unaware, for days. Their emergence was like the emergence of the very sick from delirium—slow and mottled and confused, with blackness often closing in over their minds again.
But they were always in the moon valley, now; little by little the horror of their circumstances grew less, as they adjusted.
Once Mary said, in a birdlike voice: “We have just these lunar bodies, now. I saw the others die; I saw my dad die... You’re here, too, aren’t you, Cliff and Jack?...”
Thus conversation, and understanding
of their position, began.
At an indefinite time later, during an interval of mutual wakefulness, Mary remarked: “We haven’t been harmed, here... But that doesn’t mean that they’re our friends; they want to study us—T'chack and the others.”
She said “T’chack” not as a human being would pronounce the name, but in its correct manner—more as a bird or squirrel chatters. T’chack was their guard, and doubtless a great scientist. The three from Earth, all had their clouded memories of him, his great eyes glowing from shagginess. He was grotesque, and yet, when you were used to his appearance, somehow graceful. Faintly feline—though he did not resemble a cat. The times he had bent over them, touching them with cold paws, as a mother might caress her infant—or as a spider might turn a fly’s head daintily in its mandibles. The times that he had applied strange instruments to their heads, or put sweetish, jelly-like foods into their mouths, as they lay clamped helpless to glassy slabs. The twittering sounds he made.
“He’ll probably kill us when he gets around to it,” Jack commented once, more calmly than usual. “But so what? We’ve seen everything.”
“Maybe he won’t kill us,” Mary murmured. “Sometimes I know what he says; some lunarian words were left in our minds when we made the change. ‘Tutoo’ means something like 'good’. ‘Luleel’ is ‘fear’. And he picked up our names, and a few English words—maybe from our raving, or by instruments, from our brains.”
Mary’s companions knew; their experience matched hers. Cliff thought how brave she was, to seem so hopeful. Especially hard on a pretty girl, this change of forms must be. But deep down she was Mary more than ever, and he loved her.
“T’chack!” she called at last. “Good morning!”
The lunarian, who was busy, then, with a conical apparatus of crystal and metal nearby hardly moved. It was hard to fathom by what dark channels of reason he was prompted to reply in chirping English; “My name is T’chack; my name is T’chack; my name is T’chack.” He was undoubtedly brilliant; yet, though these Earthians had crossed the path of lunar thought intimately, much of it was still an enigma. Part of T’chack’s brain seemed to function like a phonograph record.
“We know a lot more about the moon people than just words of their language,” Cliff said. “More than that was left in our minds by the change...” Jack and Mary knew that this was so.
IT WAS DAWN on the hidden hemisphere of the moon, just then. Through the crystal sides and top of the building in which they were imprisoned, the Earthlings could look all around them. High up on the western wall of the valley, vast mirrors caught the first rays of the sun, and reflected them down on mists turned frigid during a night half a month long. Weird growths began to writhe contentedly in the warmth; ice would soon melt in irrigation ditches crisscrossing cultivated ground. There were scattered buildings, all obviously very old. And many a roof and eerie stone tower had fallen down.
“When you can relax, the scene can be beautiful here,” Mary mused. “But it would be sad, even if we didn’t know the history....”
Like babies only recently born, examining the wonders of life with their eyes, the Earthlings kept looking here and there; and history came to the fore in their thoughts. No other part of the moon had ever been habitable—only this two-hundred-and-fifty mile valley. The lunar race, incalculably older than man, was dying. Even in this pit-like valley, the atmosphere was vanishing. The last water was sinking to the now almost-cold heart of the moon. Advanced science does not admit that a world can age beyond being kept habitable artificially. But science can forget the forces of weariness and fear.
“There are just about three hundred lunarians left,” Cliff said. “They’ve been scared of Earth for a long time, knowing that we’ve been getting smarter—knowing that none of their weapons would be any good against our numbers.”
“Hey—are you goin’ soft, Cliff?” Jack Verden demanded. “Take it easy—brother!”
Cliff Verden considered. Beyond the crystal walls of the building, looking in, were several moon-people, shaggy, forlorn, big-eyed, clad in what looked like coarse-knitted metal fabric. Cliff remembered that he was clamped down helplessly, and remembered all the terrible things that had happened to Mary, Jack, and himself—by lunarian action.
“Perhaps you’re right, Jack,” he answered. “But we got little to lose, ourselves, by thinking with generosity—or not. And thinkin’ like that keeps a guy optimistic. It’s nice to know, in a way, that there are only a few lunarians; makes ’em a lot less dangerous. But another thing reassures me more. Our present bodies belonged to real moon-people, once; but they’re a lot more human now than T’chack’s body, and seem to be getting more so all the time. It’s the same, in an opposite way, to what happened to our own forms on Earth; you guess where the process ends. It’s growth and change under a pattern contained in a controlled life-force. A man to a lunarian, or vice versa—body and brain, cell by cell. Until an ego can feel fully at home in its new and altered habitation. Maybe the force is the thing behind the genes that shape all living things at their beginnings. Who knows? Well, T’chack does. Anyway, the process is still goin on in us. You can feel the aches of it....”
“Oh,” Jack commented, his tone half dry, and half hopeful. “You mean we might be almost human again.”
“Maybe,” Cliff Verden answered at last. “That’s optimism. But by being optimistic I was leading up to the question of what happens when what the lunarians are afraid of takes place—when Earthmen get here, at last. When Mr. Franklin Cramm gets here with his rockets and men. Which won’t be long.”
CLIFF PAUSED, then continued raggedly: “Forget the lunarians; leave sympathy at home with the human race. Even so, when we were kids, Jack, we used to imagine us Earthians making friends across space... Well, we saw what happened, didn’t we, when unknown meets unknown? Fear, fury, hate and murder! So, is space travel just no good for all time? Oh, don’t blame it all on human nature; moon-people will kill, too. One time, they could win—on home ground. Then, on Earth, somebody’d get sore; then, when the rockets came in force—goodbye. Juggernaut.”
“I’m cryin’,” Jack commented dryly. “Hooray for those rocket-ships, and the men to set us poor prisoners free.”
“If they happened to recognize us as men,” Cliff retorted. “Which they are liable not to—right now. So, what we need the optimism for is the one chance of being buffers between two letters X—for unknown and terrible. Nice job for the devil. Let’s not waste time ...”
“We start by talking to T’chack,” Mary said.
“Sure,” Cliff answered. ‘‘Hey, T’chack! Let us loose. Dammit—don’t be a dope! Get this hardware off. You’re scared; bet you know what an H-bomb can do. Yeah—all of a sudden we’re hopeful enough to want to keep on living, ourselves. Maybe we can help you make things all right!...”
The lunarian turned, and approached, with incredible litheness. Momentarily Cliff Verden’s hope held. He had adjusted enough, now, to complete strangeness, to feel an inkling of its charm. An old dream of his brightened in his mind: (Part of it was fulfilled already, in this eerily-beautiful lunar valley.) To go far with the space fleets. Mars, Venus, Mercury. To make interplanetary contacts a success. To live the high romance of infinite frontiers.
But inevitable suspicion won a delay—against time to plan and prepare. The abhorrently graceful T’chack twittered one English word: “Dope.” A paw pressed some control; Mary Koven and the Verden brothers, lost consciousness.
CHAPTER FOUR
AT THEIR next awakening, the Earthlings repeated their pleas, arguing endlessly. When the sun of the lunar noon blazed down into the valley, T’chack unclamped the metal bands that secured the prisoners. Mercy could scarcely have swayed him, and those others of his kind that he must have consulted; but desperation before danger was another thing. Still, he remained wary; a paw held a glinting weapon.
“That way!” he twittered, and the Earthlings tried legs that they had never walked on, befor
e. They followed a path to a crystal dome. The heat of day was terrific. Tiny creatures, seen in the brilliant color of ultra-violet, skipped here and there, like grasshoppers. Great lunarian eyes of passers-by, stared inscrutably at the captives.
Cliff Verden wondered if, in the faces of Mary and Jack, he now saw a slight resemblance to their former selves. A forming of features, a smoothing of skin under fading fuzz. But he felt his own great lungs—smaller than the lunarian norm—rasping dryly as they breathed air in whose rarity an untransformed Earthman would quickly suffocate; and he wondered how he had avoided madness in the change of forms, or how he could accept it almost casually, now. But he wondered also, if it was a means to a broadened understanding—of all the strange, unknown beings in the universe.
He put an arm around Mary. Yes, she still was Mary; yet their present lines made even this gesture of protection, slightly grotesque and embarrassing. After a moment, he desisted.
Inside the crystal dome, which was weirdly and beautifully carven, T’chack showed the Earthians the lunar version of a radio-receiver. It was a deceptively simple thing of crystal, shaped like a tuning-fork—with details of metal. But the fork vibrated—responding to the almost infinitely-weakened waves that managed to find their way from terrestrial stations, to this far side of the moon. The voice of the news commentator, seemed incongruous, here:
“ 'I am grateful for air-force cooperation in granting me the rank of colonel, and full authority and assistance in [1] tered swamp vegetation and animal life has been sampled, and transferred to biological museums. The remainder has been destroyed... On the danger side, it is known that the moon would make a fine firing-platform for action against the Earth, with guided atomic-missiles. It is hardly a comforting thought, in the light of the reported scientific powers of the moon people. As to developments in prospect, I quote from Franklin Cramm’s statements:
Then and Now: Another Collection of Science Fiction Page 27