Collected Short Fiction, page 40
Just as the sun was sinking, and the black shadows of the mountains, chill forerunners of night, were racing across the desert, a band of men suddenly appeared out of a marching shadow and rushed upon the vessel. They were grotesque figures, unrecognizable in the metal armor of space suits.
The air-locks and hatches of the vessel had been open and unguarded. The vastly outnumbered crew of the flier was taken by surprise, just as the last drums of radium were being stowed in place. In a few minutes the raiders had over-run the ship. The crew was disarmed, herded into the strong-rooms, and locked up.
The cylinders of radium salts were speedily unloaded. Just what became of them is not historic certainty. It seems that outside the vessel they were given to a band of moon-calves who vanished with them into the chill mystery of the gathering night.
A few hours later, when the irate commander of the ship had forced a way out of the strong-room, radium and raiders alike had vanished. The ship rose at once, and got into communication with the patrol fleets. The surface of the moon about New Boston was combed, but all efforts to recover the lost metal proved in vain.
News of this daring act on the part of a few, determined citizens of New Boston spread like wildfire over the moon. The whole planet waited tense for the reply of Metals.
CHAPTER IX
The Declaration of Independence
AT the time of the “Radium Raid,” father and mother and I were in Theophilus. We had been there, in fact, since the convening of the Assembly early in the year. The mine was shut down, since the boycott had stopped the sale of metal.
Father regularly attended the Assembly meeting in the great hall. To the influence of his great wealth was added men’s respect for his sturdy character, lofty honor, and ideals based upon deep human feeling. He was among the leaders of the Assembly.
It was my privilege to go with him daily to the meeting place, as a sort of confidential clerk and stenographer. I shall never forget the long sessions in the dark, cool hall, when its lofty vault rang with impassioned pleas for liberty and right, or whispered an echo to the calm, sober opinions of such men as Warrington and Gardiner.
During my university course I had done extensive work in science, and a few things I had done during my graduate year had attracted a little attention outside the institution. I was pleased beyond measure to find that Dr. Gardiner had read of my work. Several times I met him, to talk over scientific topics—for the brilliant physicist never let such trivial things as politics or wars stop his work. I was among the honored three whom he chose to have present when he first performed his famous experiment with the focusing of the shorter Hertzian waves—from which he later developed such momentous results.
Toward the end of August, disquieting news came from New Boston. A fleet of nine great warships, of the cylindrical type chiefly used in the earth’s atmosphere, had arrived from Pittsburgh, under the command of General McRan. The fliers had landed at the space-port, and disembarked an army of some ten thousand men, which had taken possession of the city.
The General—a crabbed, autocratic old fellow, according to reports—set up his headquarters in the Diamond Gardens in the middle of the city, shutting the citizens out of that famous museum and amusement place. His men patrolled the streets, rode the ways, and stood guard at the air-locks and roof doors. Guards were placed about factories and places of business. New Boston was under martial law, and warnings had been posted that anyone denouncing the administration of Metals, or expressing sympathy with the Assembly of the Moon Company, would be arrested on charge of treason.
The city was compelled to quarter McRan’s troops, and to feed them as well as the five thousand men on the space ships. The protest of citizens and directors only evoked the old general’s opinion that martial law was too light a punishment for the city of the Radium Raid.
Yet, McRan had not come to pacify the planet by force. One of his first acts after seizing New Boston was to send messengers to Colon and Theophilus with orders for the agents of the Metals Corporation to raise the schedule of prices to the former level, and even to offer premiums to compensate the miners for losses suffered during the boycott.
But these advances were met with scorn. Such methods might have been effectual even a year before, for the cities of the Moon had had little life in common. But the events of the past few months had crystallized a moon-wide spirit of self-dependence that was not to be broken by such an attempt at bribery.
When he learned that this move had failed, McRan’s next step was to threaten that if the moon-folk did not yield and resume shipment of metal to the earth, he would bring enough ships and men to the moon to seize all the cities and starve the inhabitants into working the mines.
The choleric old fellow’s threat was a match to powder. Men who had before talked only of just prices and charter rights now talked of liberty and independence. The militia began to repair the old weapons used in the endless wars with the moon-calves, and to devise new machines of destruction. The city governments of Theophilus and Colon ordered the great D-ray boring machines used in the nearby mines brought up and put in position for defense against space ships.
During that time the Assembly of Directors was meeting daily at Theophilus. There were many among the members anxious to declare the independence of the moon and begin a war with Metals. But older and wiser men—among them such distinguished statesmen as Gardiner, Warrington, and my father—realizing more clearly the terrible cost in human life and human pain that war would mean, were determined not to take the fateful step until the earth should force them to do so.
McRan had lost no time in seizing the machinery in the mines under and near New Boston. A part of the ray machines had been brought up and placed in strategic positions about the city, to forestall a possible rising of the citizenry. He also attempted to work the mines with his troop, though their ignorance and clumsiness brought on so many accidents that he gave that up.
He had been on the moon nearly a month before the first battle was fought in the long and terrible war to come. On September 23, 2325, when the sun was near the zenith, five hundred of McRan’s men left New Boston to seize the machinery in the Peacedale mine, which is located fifty miles west of the city, near the edge of the crater of Hipparchus. Most of the force was infantry, though there were a dozen great ray tubes, drawn by tractor tanks.
The plan had been known to the citizenry several hours before the troops left the city. Some loyal and fervent patriot, whose name seems not to have been recorded, succeeded in getting out of the city through the ventilator tubes—the air-locks being guarded.
HE reached the Peacedale mining district a dozen hours ahead of Major Harley and his Tellurian soldiery, with news of their advance. To the miners, long used to being called upon to defend their possessions from moon-calves or space pirates at a moment’s notice, there could have appeared but one course of action.
What that course was, Harley found, when his troops met half a hundred grimy miners drawn up in a line, behind a row of atomic boring machines, on the steel bridge that had been erected across the great crack, or rille, three miles from the mines.
Harley tramped out before his men, and ordered the miners to disperse. They refused, stood calm before his threats—his language seems to have been of a rather violent tenor. Fuming with rage, he got back behind his caterpillar tanks, and ordered his troops to fire.
The first burst of flaming rays killed half the miners upon the bridge. Their weapons were not ready; the focusing of a D-ray is rather a delicate process. But the survivors stood calmly adjusting their weapons after their companions had fallen under that pitiless volley. But at last, when the vivid streaks of red and green and yellow leapt from their rude weapons, nearly seventy-five of the close-ranked terrestrials fell. By that time, Harley had his tanks ready for action. They replied with a fiery burst of narrow rays that left hardly a score of the ragged miners on the bridge—and most of them wounded.
Still the little band refused to give way, though they might have found easy shelter in the rocks behind the rille. They kept the great rays flaming from their clumsy machines. Harley was actually forced to fall back a little. Finally his lumbering tanks forced a way across the bridge—but not until the last of those miners had fallen behind his improvised weapon.
The troops had sustained a loss of more than 150 men; and three of the tanks had been wrecked. But Harley pressed on without delay. As he went, he found himself exposed to a continual bombardment of atomic rays. Enraged miners and farmers, hiding in crack and rille and crater-pit, were using their familiar tools to a deadly end in the new trade of war.
The Tellurians marched on to Peacedale, but reached it in a very much demoralized condition. One of the shafts was taken after a hot and bloody encounter, that convinced Harley that the miners could fight in earnest. A little machinery was destroyed, but the retreat began almost at once.
That retreat ended in becoming a mad flight. Again and again the harried and demoralized troops fell into an ambush or were swept by D-rays from a peak or cliff that rose beside their route. The remaining tanks and the heavy tubes had to be left by the way; and Harley reached the air-locks of New Boston with little over a hundred men.
Before the sun had set, an atomobile had arrived in Theophilus with news of the battle. That night, there was a long debate in the Assembly chamber. Before the meeting adjourned, it had taken the most momentous step in the history of the moon.
The assembled Directors of the Moon Company voted that the moon was now, and by right, a free and independent Corporation, to whose liberties the presence of McRan in New Boston was an insult inexcusable. That declaration of independence marked the birth of a new nation. Before the moon had been merely petitioning justice. Now it demanded it.
On the following day, the Assembly met again, made an appropriation of five million credit units to defray the expenses of the war, and issued a call for volunteers to fight for the freedom of the planet.
By the middle of October, bodies of men were gathering in Colon and Theophilus, as well as in the dozen smaller places, such as Firecrest, where there were permanent populations, to go to the relief of New Boston.
On the first day of November nearly twenty thousand men were assembled in the vicinity of Peacedale. That horde of raw recruits, without officers, without discipline, without arms and equipment, without military training, even without adequate shelter against the lunar night, was far indeed from an army. But it did have the single vital quality—unfaltering devotion to the cause of liberty.
On that day, the Assembly made Warrington the Commander-in-Chief of the armies of the Moon Company. The day after, my old friend left Theophilus on the lonely road toward Peacedale, confidentially facing a terrific task—the organization of an enthusiastic mob of miners and farmers into an army, with which to face the well armed, battle-seasoned veterans of McRan.
My own fortune was bound up with his. At his request, and with the permission of my aging father, I had become his “engineer-attaché”—a sort of confidential private secretary and scientific adviser, rather than a military man.
I wrote a letter of farewell to Valence. Three years before she had married Tom Dowling, a brilliant young fellow who had risen—and before his marriage at that—to be general manager of the Firecrest mines. They had stayed there when I came with my parents to Theophilus; my last view of my sister had been as a young matron, with a red-headed child at her knee.
I pillowed the silver-haired head of my mother upon my shoulder. For the last time, I feared, I held her dear slight form in my arms. Tears were rolling down her faded cheeks; but her eyes were brave and bright as she kissed me farewell.
And I left her—my last memory is of a slight whiff of the faint lilac perfume she had always used, that is associated with so many of my dearest recollections.
Father gave me a crushing handshake, a sincere kiss, and a few heartfelt words of parting.
That night a swift closed atomobile left Theophilus, on the long lonely road to the meeting-place of the mountaineers at Peacedale. I was at the wheel. Beside me was Warrington. We were setting out on a great task, that was to lead us many times into hardship and peril, into sorrow and pain, into strange adventures and terrible situations.
CHAPTER X
The Battle of Meteor Hill
THE sun was low over the black mountains that ring the Theophilus crater, when Warrington and I left the city. It was only a matter of some twelve hours until sunset would bring its killing cold; and we had seven hundred miles to go. Warrington had been urged to pass the lunar night in the comfort and safety of the city, but he wished to be with his army. It was a dangerous choice he took, for we had been able to get no space suits; the slightest accident or delay would be fatal; if we did not reach our destination by the time the sun left the sky, we would never reach it.
The atomobile in which we drove somewhat resembled the ancient vehicle propelled, not by efficient and certain atomic power, but by the old clumsy and unreliable internal combustion engine, the motor car called the “automobile.”
That is, our machine had four wheels, with flexible tires, supporting a narrow, tapering, cigar-shaped body. The space within the little shell was rather cramped, but luxuriously fitted. There were seats, storage space, and the little white panel with the buttons which controlled the motor. The engines were little devices in the hubs of the wheels, hardly the size of a man’s fist. The outside of the shell had been silvered, and it was lined with a non-conductor, making for comfort during a wide range of temperature.
Nevertheless, it would be fatal to be caught out in the lunar night. Not only would the unbelievable cold penetrate the machine, but the freezing of the air would leave one to suffocate, even if he could keep warm.
For that reason, I made the best speed I could down the long white road. Built of fused rock cast in place, it was level and hard. But owing to the extreme irregularity of the moon’s surface, it was far from straight. It curved about peaks and craters, zig-zagged up mountain slopes, dropped into valleys.
It was a lonely road. We might travel a dozen miles, or a hundred, between the scattered mines. Once we stopped at a little settlement. It stood on a low hill—a serried row of glass-armored towers and domes, with squat metal shaft-houses below. A great D-ray mining machine was being dragged across the plain toward the town—to be set up for defense, I suppose. A motley group of people were assembled about the tractors that were pulling it. And a hundred men or so, in ragged nondescript uniforms, were being drilled below the walls, marching and wheeling enthusiastically.
We got a bit of lunch, and had the waiting mechanic oil and inspect the machine. The genial keeper of the little inn recognized Warrington. He refused any pay, and ran out to spread the news. We departed with a cheering throng of miners speeding us on.
As the silent, racing machine shot swiftly over the winding road, the scenery changed rapidly about us. Cruel slender mountains and grim mysterious craters flashed into view as we topped a ridge or rounded a curve, and grew swiftly, swung and wheeled about us, dwindled, vanished behind. The moonscape changed, yet it was always the same—lofty, ragged mountains, broad, black volcanic deserts of twisted lava streams, burned, cracked and rugged, strange circular craters, walled with sheer grim cliffs—all intensely bright where the sun’s rays struck it, or hidden in a startling, rayless obscurity of shadow.
To drive was an exhausting task, to sit there alert, forcing the machine to the limit of speed the road permitted, sometimes, it seemed, escaping disaster only by the narrowest of margins. But I rather enjoyed it—the perfection of the machine, the ease of its answer to the wheel, the intoxication of boundless power at my fingertips. Even the danger added zest.
An hour after we had left the mining town, we had a near catastrophe. At one point, at the foot of a long slope, the road passes through a narrow gorge. As we entered, we came suddenly upon a rough wall of boulders piled across the roadway. Instinctively, I pressed the brake-button. The machine checked its speed, but still maintained momentum enough to pile us in the front end of the car when it struck.
We clambered back to the seat and took stock of the situation. We were both bruised somewhat; Warrington had an ugly contusion on his temple with blood oozing from it, and I had a skinned side. But we were not seriously hurt. The machine refused to respond when I pressed the buttons; it seemed to have been injured the most.
“Look there,” cried Warrington, who had been looking out as I tried the controls. “The Moon-calves!”
I looked through the broad round windows. A half-dozen great scarlet monsters were approaching, hopping like colossal fleas through the yellow, spiky scrub that covered the mountainside—moving like red fleas the size of elephants. It was a band of wild moon-calves, whose elementary cunning had led them to try this method of wrecking machines in the hope of spoil—of which human bodies would have been the most attractive item.
Fortunately, we carried pocket D-ray tubes. They were light weapons, their focal range limited to two hundred yards; but serviceable in such a case as this. Warrington covered the Selenites on one side, I covered those on the other. He gave the word, we pressed the contact levers. The narrow red rays reached out, intense and brilliant.
And the great creatures fell as the scarlet fingers touched them.
We must have killed four or five. There were a score in all, or more. The others leapt away into the endless thicket of brown, thorny scrub, now dry and sere in the lunar evening, and were lost to view. We got out. Warrington kept watch and cut the boulders out of the way with his ray, while I tinkered with the injured motors.
In an hour we were on the way again.
DURING the latter course of the war, the roads were hardly passable at all, due to such barricades and ambushes. Military dispatches were carried mostly on friendly Selenites, the lightest tractor tanks being used when the moon-calves were riot available, though they were not half so rapid.
