The Planet Strappers Part 14

"It's big, Les," he said. "It's got to be! An expedition came here to investigate the Moon--it couldn't be any more recently than sixty million years ago, if it was from as close as Mars, or the Asteroid Planet! Two adjacent worlds were competing, then, the scientists know.

Both were smaller than the Earth, cooled faster, bore life sooner. Which sent the party? I saw where there rocket s.h.i.+p must have stood--a gla.s.sy, spot where the dust was once fused!... From all the markings, they must have been around for months. Nowhere else on the Moon--that I ever heard of--is there anything similar left. So maybe they did most of their survey work by gliding, somehow, above the ground, not disturbing the dust... I think the little indentations we saw look Martian. That would be a break! Mars still has weather. Archeological objects wouldn't stay new there for millions of years, but here they would! Rodan is right--he's got something that'll make him famous!"

"Yes--I think I'll have a devil-killer and hit the sack, Frank," Lester said.

"Oh--all right," Frank agreed wearily. "Me, likewise."

Frank awoke naturally from a dreamless slumber. After a breakfast of eggs that had been a powder, Lester and he were at the diggings, sifting dust for the dropped and discarded items of an alien visitation.

Thus Frank's job began. In the excitement of a hunt, as if for ancient treasure, for a long time, through many ten hour s.h.i.+fts, Frank Nelsen found a perhaps unfortunate Lethe of forgetfulness for his worries, and for the mind-poisoning effects of the silence and desolation in this remote part of the Moon.

They found things, thinly scattered in the ten acre area that Rodan meant tediously to sift. The screws and nuts, bright and new, were almost Earthly. But would anyone ever know what the little plastic rings were for? Or the sticks of cellulose, or the curved, wire device with fuzz at the ends? But then, would an off-Earth being ever guess the use of--say--a toothbrush or a bobbypin?

The metal cylinders, neatly cut open, might have contained food--dried leaf-like dregs still remained inside. There were small bottles made of pearly gla.s.s, too--empty except for gummy traces. They were stoppered with a stuff like rubber. There were also crumpled sc.r.a.ps, like paper or cellophane, most of them marked with designs or symbols.

After ten Earth-days, in the lunar afternoon, Frank found the grave. He shouted as his brus.h.i.+ng hands uncovered a gla.s.sy, flexible surface.

Rodan took charge at once. "Back!" he commanded. Then he was avidly busy in the pit, working as carefully as a fine jeweller. He cleared more dust away, not with a trowel, not with his gloved fingers, but with a little nylon brush.

The thing was like a seven-pointed star, four feet across. And was the ripped, transparent casing of its body and limbs another version of a vacuum armor? The material resembled stellene. As in an Archer, there were metal details, mechanical, electronic, and perhaps nuclear.

In the punctured covering, the corpse was dry, of course--stomach, brain sac, rough, pitted skin, terminal tendrils--some coa.r.s.e, some fine, almost, as thread, for doing the most delicate work, half out of protecting sheaths at the ends of its arms or legs.

In the armor, the being must have walked like a toe dancer, on metal spikes. Or it might even have rolled like a wheel. The bluish tint of its crusty body had half-faded to tan. Perhaps no one would ever explain the gaping wound that must have killed the creature, unless it had been a rock fall.

"Martian!" Lester gasped. "At least we know that they were like this!"

"Yes," Rodan agreed softly. "_I'll_ look after _this_ find."

Moving very carefully, even in the weak lunar gravity, he picked up the product of another evolution and bore it away to the shop dome.

Frank was furious. This was his discovery, and he was not even allowed to examine it.

Still, something warned him not to argue. In a little while, his treasure hunter's eagerness came back, holding out through most of that protracted lunar night, when they worked their ten hour periods with electric lamps attached to their shoulders.

But gradually Frank began to emerge from his single line of attention.

Knowing that Lester must soon collapse, and waiting tensely for it to happen, was part of the cause. But there was much more. There was the fact that direct radio communication with the Earth, around the curve of the Moon, was impossible--the Tovies didn't like radio-relay orbiters, useful for beamed, short-wave messages. They had destroyed the few unmanned ones that had been put up.

There were the several times when he had casually sent a slender beam of radio energy groping out toward Mars and the Asteroid Belt, trying to call Storey or the Kuzaks, and had received no answer. Well, this was not remarkable. Those regions were enormous beyond imagining; you had to pinpoint your thread of tiny energy almost precisely.

But once, for an instant, while at work, he heard a voice which could be Mitch Storey's, call "Frank! Frankie!" in his helmet phone. There was no chance for him to get an instrument-fix on the direction of the incoming waves. And of course his name, Frank, was a common one. But an immediate attempt to beam Mars--yellow in the black sky--and its vicinity, produced no result.

His trapped feeling increased, and nostalgia began to bore into him. He had memories of lost sounds. Rodan tried to combat the thick silence with taped popular music, broadcast on very low power from a field set at the diggings. But the girl voices, singing richly, only made matters worse for Frank Nelsen. And other memories piled up on him: Jarviston, Minnesota. Wind. Hay smell, car smell. Home... Cripes...! d.a.m.n...!

Lester's habit of muttering unintelligibly to himself was much worse, now. Frank was expecting him to start screaming at any minute. Frank hadn't tried to talk to him much, and Lester, more introverted than ever, was no starter of conversations.

But now, at the sunrise--s...o...b.., was it possible that they had been here almost a month?--Frank at the diggings, indulged in some muttering, himself.

"Are you all right, Frank?" Lester asked mildly.

"Not altogether!" Frank Nelsen snapped dryly. "How about you?"

"Oh, I believe I'm okay at last," Lester replied with startling brightness. "I was afraid I wouldn't be. I guess I had an inferiority complex, and there was also something to live up to. You see, my dad was here with the original Clifford expedition. We always agreed that I should become a s.p.a.ce-scientist, too. Mom went along with that--until Dad was killed, here... Well, I'm over the hump, now. You see, I'm so interested in everything around me, that the desolation has a cus.h.i.+on of romance that protects me. I don't see just the bleakness. I imagine the Moon as it once was, with volcanoes spitting, and with thundrous sounds in its steamy atmosphere. I see it when the Martians were here--they surely visited Earth, too, though there all evidence weathered away. I even see the Moon as it is, now, noticing details that are easy to miss--the little b.a.l.l.s of ash that got stuck together by raindrops, two billion years ago. And the pulpy, hard-sh.e.l.led plants that you can still find, alive, if you know where to look. There are some up on the ridge, where I often go, when offs.h.i.+ft. Carbon dioxide and a little water vapor must still come out of the deep crack there... Anyhow, they used to say that a lonesome person--with perhaps a touch of schizophrenia--might do better off the Earth than the more usual types."

Frank Nelsen was surprised as much by this open, self-a.n.a.lytical explanation, and the clearing up of the family history behind him, as by the miracle that had happened. Cripes, was it possible that, in his own way, Lester was more rugged than anybody else of the old Bunch? Of course even Lester was somewhat in wonder, himself, and had to talk it all out to somebody.

"Good for you, Les," Nelsen enthused, relieved. "Only--well, skip it, for now."

Two work periods later, he approached Rodan. "It will take months to sift all this dust," he said. "I may not want to stay that long."

The pupils of Rodan's eyes flickered again. "Oh?" he said. "Per contract, you can quit anytime. But I provide no transportation. Do you want to walk eight hundred miles--to a Tovie station? On the Moon it is difficult to keep hired help. So one must rely on practical counter-circ.u.mstances. Besides, I wouldn't want you to be at Serenitatis Base, or anywhere else, talking about my discovery, Nelsen. I'm afraid you're stuck."

Now Nelsen had the result of his perhaps incautious test statement. He knew that he was trapped by a dangerous tyrant, such as might spring up in any new, lawless country.

"It was just a thought, sir," he said, being as placating as he dared, and controlling his rising fury.

For there was something that hardened too quickly in Rodan. He had the fame-and-glory bug, and could be savage about it. If you wanted to get away, you had to scheme by yourself. There wasn't only Rodan to get past; there was Dutch, the big ape with the dangling pistol.

Nelsen decided to work quietly, as before, for a while... There were a few more significant finds--what might have been a nuclear-operated clock, broken, of course, and some diamond drill bits. Though the long lunar day dragged intolerably, there was the paradox of time seeming to escape, too. Daylight ended with the sunset. Two weeks of darkness was no period for any moves. At sunup, a second month was almost finished!

And ten acres of dust was less than half-sifted...

In the shop and supply dome, David Lester had been chemically a.n.a.lyzing the dregs of various Martian containers for Rodan. In spare moments he cla.s.sified those scarce and incredibly hardy lunar growths that he found in the foothills of the Arabian Range. Some had hard, bright-green tendrils, that during daylight, opened out of woody sh.e.l.ls full of spongy hollows as an insulation against the fearsome cold of night. Some were so small that they could only be seen under a microscope. Frank's interest, here, however, palled quickly. And Lester, in his mumbling, studious preoccupation, was no companionable antidote for loneliness.

Frank tried a new approach on Helen, who really was Rodan's daughter.

"Do you like poetry, Helen? I used to memorize Keats, Frost, Shakespeare."

They were there in the dining room. She brightened a little. "I remember--some."

"Do you remember clouds, the sound of water? Trees, gra.s.s...?"

She actually smiled, wistfully. "Yes. Sunday afternoons. A blue dress.

My mother when she was alive... A dog I had, once..."

Helen Rodan wasn't quite a zombie, after all. Maybe he could win her confidence, if he went slow...

But twenty hours later, at the diggings, when Dutch stumbled over Frank's sifter, she reverted. "I'll learn you to leave junk in my way, you greenhorn squirt!" Dutch shouted. Then he tossed Frank thirty feet.

Frank came back, kicked him in his thinly armored stomach, knocked him down, and tried to get his gun. But Dutch grabbed him in those big arms.

Helen was also pointing a small pistol at him.

She was trembling. "Dad will handle this," she said.

Rodan came over. "You don't have much choice, do you, Nelsen?" he sneered. "However, perhaps Dutch was crude. I apologize for him. And I will deduct a hundred dollars from his pay, and give it to you."

"Much obliged," Frank said dryly.

After that, everything happened to build his tensions to the breaking point.

At a work period's end, near the lunar noon, he heard a voice in his helmet-phone. "Frank--this is Two-and-Two...! Why don't you ever call or answer...?"