Collected Short Fiction, page 41
We had no more serious accidents. The sun was still half the breadth of its disk above the horizon when we reached Peacedale. An odd scene, it was, to be the camp of twenty thousand men. Only a rugged, cracked crater-plain, half a dozen miles across, with a few little shaft-houses of metal and glass standing here and there about it, with the white ribbon of the road running from one to another.
We left the machine and were eagerly welcomed by the guards from the shaft-house by us. The black shadow of the crater walls was leaping across the floor, and already we felt chill in the thin bitter wind that blew out of the shadow toward the bright, sunlit mountain on the eastern side, carrying a few fine flakes of snow upon it.
We were conducted down into the shaft. For all their lack of organized discipline, it seemed that the men had been making wise and energetic preparation for the long cruel night. Heavy metal doors had been arranged, where they were not already in place, to confine the precious air in the passages. There were atomic heaters and lighting systems. Equipment had been provided to purify the air by condensation, and there were tanks of liquid oxygen to replenish the vital element. The greatest difficulty had been in the matter of food supplies, but sufficient rations had been obtained for a month at least.
Within an hour after our arrival, the passages had been sealed, and we had begun the long fortnight of complete isolation from the rest of humanity. Warrington worked for long hard days, organizing the men into companies, and teaching them to use the slender D-ray tubes as skillfully as weapons as they had used them as rock disintegrators.
In my capacity as engineer-attaché I was busy enough, superintending the control of the intricate system of machinery that kept our mine-shafts habitable, and as well, working on the details of the changes to be made in the great D-ray rock-borers, to adapt them for use in war.
When the sun went down, it had been a mere rabble of men that crowded into the mine-passages. When the long night was ended and they emerged, it was an army, already whipped into a single unit, responsive to the will of a single man, organized and taught the first lesson in discipline.
As soon as the driving rays of the sun had cleared the sullen mists of evaporating air and frost, Warrington moved the new army out of the mines, and marched on New Boston. For the most part, the men who did not carry the standard D-ray pistols bought during the long wars with the Selenites were equipped with the small portable rock-disintegrating D-rays. Most of the men, too, had been provided with white uniforms, pith helmets, and smoked glasses, so that they would be able to march in the open by day. We had a sufficient number of atomobile trucks to carry the commissariat; and there were two hundred of the great ray-machines, drawn by tractors, that I had been able to convert into terrible instruments of war.
We came in sight of New Boston before the sun was a day high. Its glass walls and towers, flung over hill and valley, were a splendid sight in the sunshine, with the naked black mountains behind them. We located our camp perhaps eight miles east of the city, and cut off from it by the elevation known as Meteor Hill, which rose about midway between us and the city with the space-port beside it. In the little valley where we stopped, the olive-green vegetation was just putting up slender tendrils that in a few hours would grow to the impenetrable spiky thickets of the amazing forests of the lunar day.
Warrington had his plan of siege well worked out. Within a few hours, half his army, with almost a hundred of the great mining tubes, was flung out in a ring, fifteen miles across, that circled city and space-port. His next move, undertaken while the first was yet uncompleted, was the occupation of Meteor Hill.
From this eminence, his rays could sweep the city and the space-port at will. With eight thousand men and the remaining hundred of the huge ray-tubes, we marched up the hill. Some opposition had been expected, but only a few surveyors and engineers, who were apparently planning fortifications upon that strategic point, were encountered.
In full view of the city and the ships, our men fell to work with a will. It was only a matter of a few minutes before the pocket D-rays had cut deep trenches in the hill-top, from which the army was not easily to be dislodged.
It seems that the terrestrial commander had intended to occupy the hill “as soon as temperature had moderated sufficiently.” It is said that he was thrown into a rage of anger to find that Warrington had marched fifty miles to seize a position before he had thought it safe to leave the city walls. This was the first hint that under lunar conditions, Warrington could best the terrestrial generals, even though they were distinguished veterans.
I was with Warrington when we took the hill. I remember standing by him, after we had cut the pits for the tubes and placed the weapons in position, looking down upon the city. It spread over the vast, uneven plain below us, with the vast, towered glass roof blazing diamond-like in the sunlight, enlivened by colored ornaments and gay pennants that hung above the towers. Just below the city was the space-port, where the nine great war-fliers lay, gleaming like nine polished cylinders of silver.
Later in the war, fleets of the more efficient globe-shaped vessels appeared on the moon.
IT was not long before we saw a good deal of activity on the rocky plain below our point of vantage. Scouts reported that great masses of troops were leaving the city and gathering in canyons and ravines below the cliffs at the foot of Meteor Hill.
Our tubes were hardly more than in position when great tongues of blinding light—scarlet and green and yellow—reached up toward us from the walls of New Boston, and from the ships in the port. The color of the D-ray depends on the one of the three metals, platinum, osmium, and iridium, from which it is derived. Slender, flickering fingers of intense livid flame played up and down our lines. Rocks and creeping vegetation, men and weapons, before them burst into momentary incandescence and faded away, disintegrated, melted into nothingness. McRan had gone into action.
Our own tubes replied at once, with a great curtain of wavering light, firing largely upon the space fliers, for to sweep the city was to kill friend with foe.
In a few minutes thin lines of white-clad men were seen below, running up the hill, ray-tubes in hand. The Tellurians were storming our position. Warrington ordered the great tubes to be depressed whenever possible, to cover the infantry advance. As soon as the troops were in range, the hand weapons were put into action.
Meanwhile, the dazzling narrow rays played up and down our lines, sweeping down those caught exposed, and slowly cutting away the solid rock before our trenches. The section of the hill we occupied was slightly crescent-shaped. The Tellurians formed in the hollow of the crescent and charged up the hillside in thin, scattered lines, firing flaming rays of red and green and yellow as they came. It was a heroic attempt—those veterans from earth knew how to advance into certain death, if need be.
In a few minutes the front line of the terrestrials came over the brow of the hill. The fire from our great tube could no longer meet them, and a desperate hand-to-hand conflict raged all along the line.
Our standard—it was merely a blue square of cloth, bearing a white crescent—was cut down by a D-ray. The confidence of our men might have fallen with it, but for a young lieutenant named Andrews. He sprang boldly out of the trench, seized the rude flag, and stood holding it up, exposing himself to the flaming rays, until the tide was turned. As the terrestrials retired to form again, he fell, decapitated. “Remember Andrews” became a rallying cry for the rest of the battle.
Warrington had only a few minutes to reorganize his defense before the attackers had formed their ranks again and returned to the storm. For ten hours the fighting went on. Sometimes the terrestrials won a way even into the trenches, but the cry “Remember Andrews!” seemed to raise even the fallen to drive them back.
At last, a definite retreat was made from the hillside. Exhausted, half our men fell asleep in the trenches. But Warrington went tirelessly about the task of consolidating his position. More trenches were dug, more great D-ray tubes moved up from the camp. And our flaming rays fell in an unbroken storm upon the ships in the space-port, and the batteries that protected that and the town.
Our position commanded the port and the town. On November 17, 2325, General McRan loaded the remnant of his troops on the six of his war-fliers still able to move, blew up the other three, and left New Boston.
The air-locks of the city were opened, and jubilant throngs poured out and up the hillside to welcome the men of the deliverer. The excitement and rejoicing was incredible. In spite of all that Warrington could say, men felt that victory was already won.
And the victory had real value, even if enthusiasts were inclined to over-estimate it. Even sceptics had been shown that the moon-folk could engage the veteran troops from earth on equal terms, that the chance for liberty was at hand. The prestige of Warrington and of the Assembly grew immensely. Supplies and reinforcements began to flow toward New Boston from all inhabited regions.
But, as Warrington said again and again, war had just begun.
CHAPTER XI
The Eagle of Space
IT was October 3, 2326. Nearly a year had passed since the battle of Meteor Hill. Van Thoren’s fleet had come from the earth—half a hundred mighty globe-ships of space; and Humbolt’s army had replaced McRan’s—fifty thousand seasoned veterans from the guards of the Corporation.
For a year, Warrington has matched his inexperienced and poorly armed recruits against that overwhelmingly larger force. He had marched here and there about the moon, from city to city and from mine to mine. He had fought half a dozen battles. None of them were victories, yet he had never been decisively defeated. His greatness had been shown by his skill in avoiding overwhelming forces, in striking when he might demoralize the enemy with but little danger.
With a matchless tactical skill, he had evaded Humbolt’s and Van Thoren’s traps again and again, miraculously contriving to reach a city or a great mining district in which he could find refuge, when they had left him to perish in the night upon a desert.
As a matter of course, the Tellurians controlled the skies; they were the masters of space. That gave them great advantage; they could move their troops easily and at will—and they received a stream of supplies and reinforcements from earth, without which their campaign must quickly have collapsed.
Yet the moon was not without an arm in space. The four small vessels left before Theophilus after the ramming of the Sandoval became the core of the lunarian navy; and a few former pirate or smuggling vessels had been commissioned as privateers. Small ships they all were, and usually obsolescent. But they were manned by skilled and dauntless men, and commanded by a hero—Paul Doane.
Doane had been able to get his little fleet into space before the arrival of terrestrial ships at Theophilus. He had roamed the lanes of space between earth and moon, committing daring raids on the transports bringing supplies. His ships had engaged and destroyed a dozen vessels, and had brought four prizes to the moon, laden with priceless cargoes of arms, chemicals, and munitions of war.
The space-ports at the three great cities, were, of course, occupied or blockaded by the Tellurian fleets; and Doane was obliged to make his bases of operations the lonely craters that once had been pirate strongholds. Landing in such a place, without the complicated machinery of the ports, is always hazardous, and requires the utmost skill on the part of the pilot to bring the vessel down gently enough to keep from wrecking it on the rocks. But Doane had in his fleet men of years of experience in piloting; in his rather romantic career, he had doubtless become familiar with such tricks himself.
The Tellurians had learned of such difficulties, to their cost, when they attempted to trap Warrington’s army in the crater of Hipparchus by landing the fleet and disembarking soldiers in a circle about him. Several fliers were dashed to pieces on the rocks, because their control was not sufficiently delicate, and before Van Thoren had completed the maneuvers that were to bring Warrington’s camp under the rays of his fleet, the general had left the crater by the rock “back door,” a narrow ravine which led him into the rear of the enemy, where he had played havoc generally with supplies and reserves, and captured a score of great D-rays.
At this time, in October, 2326, Warrington occupied Theophilus. The space-port was blockaded; and though the location of Humbolt’s army was not certainly known, it was expected that he would be landed near and attempt to invest the city.
New Boston, after Warrington’s campaigns had led him away from it, had been re-occupied by the Tellurians, after a siege of a week. Colon had been twice assaulted by combined surface and space forces; but her citizens had put up a heroic defense, and she remained free of the terrestrials.
I was with Warrington, of course, in Theophilus. I had hoped to meet father and mother there, but I found that they had both gone back to Firecrest. Why, I did not know at the time. Certainly there seemed no use in working the mine, when the roads were so torn up and blockaded that metal could not be moved in safety.
The Assembly was still in session. There were troubles enough before it. It was becoming difficult to finance the war. Warrington was in sore need of men and supplies. The moon had both in plenty, but the terrestrial control of space had so far disorganized industry and communication that they could not be got to him.
It looked to many as if the war might drag on indefinitely, until the moon was ruined. In the difficulty, the Assembly resolved to call on outside assistance. A few years before, as the reader will recall, the Transportation Corporation had been at the throat of Metals. If it could only be induced to return to the attack, lunar independence might easily be won.
AFTER long debate, the Assembly voted to send a representative to earth to call upon Tranco for assistance in the war. As to who the delegate would be, there was little question. Benjamin Gardiner was known throughout the earth as well as the moon for his additions to scientific knowledge and scientific literature, and for the writings on philosophic subjects that had established him as possessing one of the most brilliant minds the human race has produced.
I have never known just why I was selected to be his private secretary on the trip. Certainly I wanted to go badly enough, and did everything I could to get the appointment; but there must have been a score of other applicants. Perhaps it was my old friendship with both Warrington and Gardiner that won me the place.
Gardiner was a man of above average height, massively built, with a firm, powerfully chisled face, and keen, penetrating, blue eyes beneath shaggy brows. Even the stranger was impressed by the vast, restless power of the man; he carried an aura of dynamic and resistless energy, both of body and mind. At this time, he was well past middle age, but the casual eye saw nothing of senility in his erect, vigorous frame.
On October 3—it was yet in the forenoon of the lunar day—Gardiner and I left Theophilus on our momentous mission. Before we left there had been a dinner at Warrington’s headquarters. In the huge bright room, among massive pieces of furniture scattered with reports and maps and plans, we had eaten a sober meal, talking quietly of what the war had brought and of what it might yet bring. Then, with a smile and a genial handshake, the General had wished us good fortune in our hazardous mission.
Clad in light, white garments and pith helmets, we had left one of the small valves in the city wall. Save for a brief-case of Gardiner’s, that I carried, and our hand-weapons, we had no luggage. In the dazzling blinding glare of a sun that blistered and stung, we crept cautiously away from the city, through the rapidly growing brownish-green spiky vegetation on the great crater floor, keeping hidden in the thorny growth, or in ravines and canyons, out of sight of the five great sphere-ships that hung above the city, to keep the port blockaded.
Our way led us beyond a shining summit, and over the grim, gray, disordered desert-plain, wrinkled into hills and ridges, thickly pocked with crater-lets. Soon we were beyond the sight of the city’s gleaming towers, though the three slender, black peaks still rose behind us. We forced a way through prickly thickets of the olive-green herbage, and clambered over loose mossy rocks, weirdly splotched with green and purple and scarlet lichens. An inconspicuous sign here and there sufficed to keep us on the regular path of Warrington’s intelligence service.
Steadily the sheer, threatening barrier of the crater wall rose before us, ranging up thousands of feet in a rugged wall of naked, black rock. Several times we stopped to rest at one of the little hidden stations, where food and bottles of water were cached. Even after it seemed that the grim dark wall was almost over us, we struggled on for many weary hours. But at last we reached it, crept through the narrow defile that had been cleared with the D-rays. And we walked out of chill shadow into the hot blaze of the sun.
We stopped in a little bare open space, where the very rocks seemed quivering in the sun’s unbroken glare. Out of his pocket Gardiner drew a little flag of yellow and scarlet, which he waved above his head.
In a moment a white-clad man appeared from a mass of thorny, bayonet scrub on the hillside behind us, below the frowning barrier of the black crater-wall, that ragged line of summits in a broken line against the dark blue of the sky. The fellow stood half hidden in the dull-green scrub for a moment, cautiously peering through tinted glasses, with D-ray in his hand. Then suddenly his manner changed, and he came leaping down:
“Gardiner! The great Gardiner! We use your atomic heater, to warm our little post here! But I never thought We are at your command.”
The old scientist smiled genially. “We are going to station K, to meet Paul Doane,” he said. “I need mooncalves to carry myself and my companion, and a guide.”
“Sure,” the fellow grinned behind his green goggles. “Just a minute. And I’ll leave the post to my partner and guide you myself.”
