Collected Short Fiction, page 46
I flushed with pride at such a mention of my father.
Doane read on: “I have been forced by lack of supplies to give up the advance on New Boston. We have spent two lunar nights camped in the mountains about midway between Theophilus and New Boston, quartered in mine-shafts and passages cut with the D-rays. We lack sufficient food, as well as munitions and equipment. There are not even enough atomic heaters and liquid air cylinders to make our improvised barracks habitable. Half the men are sick from the malady due to the lack of vitamine J in the synthetic air they have been forced to breathe in the barracks during the nights. Hundreds are dying; and there have been thousands of desertions—men have left in whole companies, after each terrible night, to try to find a way back to the city or to one of the smaller mining communities, some even going toward New Boston to throw themselves upon the mercy of Humbolt. I can hardly blame them.
“Those still able to answer the roll-call are starved, ragged, poorly equipped. Humbolt’s army would not hold together an hour under such conditions; I must praise the loyalty and devotion of these poor fellows.
“The matter is coming to a climax soon. Humbolt has left New Boston, and is marching upon us. He is reported to have nearly forty, thousand men, about four times as many as I can muster. They are mostly negro infantry, who have proved that they can stand the intense heat of the lunar day much better than unacclimated whites. . . .
“I am preparing to retreat, for we cannot hope to hold this position against such an overwhelming force. Gardiner, and Adams, the engineer, will return with Jenkins and meet me in the vicinity of Smith’s crater. Doane will take to space, collect the other ships, and try to keep our movements from being watched by the Metals fleet.”
In his own words, Doane added: “I imagine his plan is merely to evade Humbolt for a few days. It will be impossible, of course, for the Tellurians to spend the night away from New Boston, and if the battle is delayed a week or so, the terrestrial general will be forced to retreat to the city for protection against the night. But our general may have something more in mind; this is the way he closes the dispatch:
“ ‘We must take a decisive step, or soon we can take none at all. We have discouragement to fight—a deadlier enemy than Humbolt’s D-rays. Warrington.’ ”
An hour later, Gardiner and I had set out with Jenkins for Smith’s crater. Jenkins rode in front, upon his great, green-eyed, scarlet beast, M’Ob. The tremendous leaps of the vast, long-legged creatures were well timed, so that the half dozen of them rose and fell as one, sweeping through the air only a few yards apart on the leaps of a hundred yards or so.
So close together we sped that Jenkins, mellowed perhaps, by the long pull at Doane’s bottle, grew very talkative. He had to shout in a shrill tone, and even then half of his words were swept away in the wind of our swift flights, or lost in the rattle of stones and the crashing in the brittle yellow scrub as the monsters landed and leapt again.
He began with remarkable accounts of his affairs with women in the cities. But soon he was boasting of his former exploits in the lunar wilderness, of fabulously rich mines he had discovered, of impossible adventures with the Ka’Larbah and other tribes of wild moon-calves. He went even as far as to begin a story of how he had been captured, some years before, by the M’Dawils, that half-mythical band of monsters, and carried prisoner to the other side of the moon, to a low crater valley of warm and equable climate and marvelous vegetation, where there was a tribe of mooncalves having a civilization far above that of the Ton’Kapl empire in the great crater Tycho, crushed by the first expeditions from earth.
But while the old scout was in the very middle of his extravagant description of this marvelous place, with its strange inhabitants and its incredible wealth in precious minerals, his tongue became unmanageable. For a time he struggled on manfully, stumbling over the more difficult words.
“Then theysh took me to a palish—pa—palace of purple cryshtal—distal——”
With a final hiccup, he dropped his head forward on his breast, and presently went to sleep. The intelligent creatures that carried us leapt on as he slept, obedient to his last uncertain gestured orders. Hours later he woke again, grumbling and sullen, and took a great pinch of wiz-wiz, that strange stimulating drug of the lunar forests. Despite my eager questions, he would reveal no more of his adventures back of the moon. I was never really certain whether it was all a flight of imagination, which his headache killed, or whether it had been half true, and he did not wish to share his secret.
We had vacuum bottles of hot coffee, and bags of sandwiches; and Gardiner and I ate and drank and slept as we went . . . leap . . . leap . . . leap.
IT was thirty-six hours after leaving the ship when we arrived at Warrington’s camp. We found it by the rough grim walls of Smith’s Crater—a ring of impassable black granite walls, twenty miles across, encircling a torrid, arid waste. Warrington had pitched his camp outside those sheer, unelimbable walls, behind a little ridge that offered some protection against the army in the rear.
Humbolt, with his 40,000 negro infantry, was also camped along the crater wall, four or five miles behind Warrington. He had outdistanced our general in the last march, and caught up. He evidently intended to rest his troops, advance again, and score an easy victory.
The sentries evidently were expecting us; we passed the lines unchallenged, and soon were at Warrington’s little tent. He was away, however, visiting the little squad of men who were cutting trenches on the hill behind us, a white cloud of dust rising from their D-rays to mark their location.
We dismounted and waited under the fly of the little white tent, out of the driving heat of the sun. In a few minutes Warrington was back, heavy-eyed, with the face beneath his white topi drawn with fatigue and worry. He took scant time to greet us, or to learn of the results of our expedition. Even as he listened to Gardiner’s report on the new gold atomic blast, he frequently turned away to give orders to hurrying aides. Evidently something was afoot.
In a few minutes we left the tent. I saw that the exhausted and half-sick men were being roused from the crude shelters where they had sought relief from the cruel sun while they ate their scanty rations and tried to sleep in the furnace-like air.
With a good deal of wonderment, I saw that camp was being broken, that the men were making ready for a march, while the work of fortification was going on busily behind them. Soon the whole army, except for a few score of men at work on the hill, was marching off down the crater wall, away from the enemy.
I could not understand the maneuver—it looked like a mad and precipitate flight, with disaster and annihilation at the hands of the pursuing Humbolt as the inevitable outcome.
The men were hardly able to march. Half of them had white rags bound around their heads, in place of the pith helmets that were needed to protect them from the scorching, blistering radiation of the sun. Uniforms were tattered and patched, with red-sun-cooked bodies beneath them. And from sickness and hunger, men staggered as they walked, threw away blankets, canteens, trinkets—everything but arms and pitiful hoards of food.
How wonderful the courage, the devotion to their commander, that led them on under such conditions!
On and on we went around the rim of the crater. At last we had covered thirty miles; we were half way around, and still Warrington kept by the wall. We stopped for a brief rest; the stumbling men threw themselves down in scraps of shadow offered by boulders and patches of dense spiky scrub, to consume their last treasured bits of food.
After an hour or so, we went on around the crater.
At last I understood. It was late in December; no doubt Humbolt’s negro soldiery, certain of an easy victory over Warrington’s ragged troops, were indulging in a Christmas celebration. Warrington meant to come upon them by surprise and in the rear—by a march all the way around the crater!
And that is exactly what he did do. His maneuver was as simple as it was daring and brilliant. Doubtless the Tellurian commander had guarded his other flank; but he could not have expected the war-worn troops of the moon to encircle the crater and take him from behind.
Our desperate, half-starved troops, exhausted as they were by that sixty-mile march about the crater’s rim, took the terrestrials completely by surprise. They fought with demoniac, insane energy. There was no forewarning of our attack. The few sentries in the rear were dozing in the shade. The sultry heat of the lunar sun, with the effects of celebrating the Christmas season with the fiery spirits distilled in the craters, had been too much for them.
Our men dashed forward in thin, ragged lines; but they were determined, desperate, intent on victory; they knew that their sole chance of life depended on winning. Humbolt and his officers tried to rouse the negroes and to rally them; for a few minutes the resistance was spirited.
But they failed to withstand the impetuosity of our onrush. Their ranks collapsed and the blacks fled screaming, almost in supernatural fear. They distrusted the wild life of the moon—regarding the wild moon-calves with superstitious horror.
Humbolt and his officers escaped; indeed, they got back to New Boston with more than five thousand men, but those five thousand were without morale and without equipment.
The results of the victory were far-reaching.
Warrington took twenty thousand prisoners. He captured a vast amount of stores, arms, equipment of all sorts, including three hundred field D-ray tubes, and twenty-seven thousand hand rays.
When our men slept again, it was with full stomachs and in new uniforms, sheltered from the sun by captured tents. By the time the sun set, a few days of hard marching had brought us back to Theophilus, with all that vast amount of new equipment, and captives that outnumbered our troops two to one.
I was with father and mother again. It was a gala day when I came home. We had a glorious Christmas dinner in honor of the reunion, and talked for a long time afterward in the gay little drawing-room. I told about my trip to earth. Finally, I told them of Leroda, and as a climax, played the magnetic record of her voice. My parents were properly delighted—though I believe mother cried a little afterward.
The victory at Smith’s Crater sent a wave of new courage over the moon. In every city and in every community, men freshly pledged themselves to the cause; money, food, and recruits began to flow toward the camp of Warrington again, while the Assembly had regained its position of authority.
In the enthusiasm of the hour, even the people of New Boston rose against the soldiers Humbolt had left in the city, and expelled them before the defeated general had found his way back; though of course the fleet remained in possession of the space-port and the buildings about it.
I had at once resumed my old position as Warrington’s engineer-attaché. Some two days after the setting of the sun, he called me from my work (I had been designing cradles and equipment that would be needed in the building of the fleet).
“John,” he said, “I want you to prepare to leave with me in twelve hours. We are going outside the city. Jenkins will carry us on his moon-calves. Space suits have been provided.
“Very good, sir. And where——” I stopped short, abashed, realizing I had no right to ask the question.
He smiled, clapped me warmly on the shoulder. “That’s all right, John. It is to be a secret conference,” he said. “A meeting of men from all parts of the moon.”
CHAPTER XVII
The Conference at Kurrukwarruk
FATHER and mother were still in Theophilus; they had been there since the trouble that had brought on the war. The Firecrest mine had been left in the care of Valence and her young husband, Tom Dowling. The settlement was so isolated that it would have been difficult indeed to transport its production of metals from its mines to Theophilus. Since the end of commerce with the earth, the only demand for metals came from the quickening industries of the moon, which was easily satisfied from works nearer at hand. And father was prominent in the Assembly; he would not have been willing to leave the center of activity even if the mine had been in operation.
After my meeting with Warrington, I went home, to find that father, too, was preparing to attend the secret conclave. He retired early, to rest for the long trip. But mother and I sat late in the tiny but rather luxurious living-room of their apartments in the great south wing of the roofed city.
She had me play again the sound record Leroda had given me. My eyes filled with tears as I listened to the vibrant silver tones of the girl who was now a quarter of a million miles away. Mother smiled mistily. “She has the grandest voice,” she said.
She had a little “stereo” movie camera, with sound recorder, that had been a childhood gift to her from my grandfather. Now we darkened the little room, and I hung up the screen while she found the cans of film. For a long hour we sat there, in the warm golden glow of the atom-disrupter heater, talking a little in low tones, as we watched scenes from mother’s childhood and youth. I cried out in pleasure when father first came into the scenes, as a gay slender boy at a party. Then there was the wedding, and the scenic story of a trip around the earth. And presently I saw dimly remembered events of my own childhood, and heard long-forgotten voices ringing fresh and clear from the screen.
The picture followed our voyage to the moon, with its fear, and the sorrow of little Fay’s death. It showed the hardship and the adventure of our first years on the moon, and brought vividly back to me the delights of my romantic boyhood about Firecrest.
When we had come to the end of the film—the last few scenes showed the wedding of Valence, and then her bouncing child, and a view of the city of Firecrest taken as mother had last left it—we did not turn on the lights, but sat in the gloom. I had fallen into a curious revery of the past. It was the sleeping period of the city, and without all was darkness. (The atomic lights have always been turned off for eight hours of every twenty-four, for the over-stimulation of constant light is as destructive to terrestrial plants as it is to humans.)
Suddenly I heard a suppressed sob from mother’s chair. With an odd tightening in my throat, I got up and went over to her and knelt beside her, with my arm about her dear, slight shoulders. I had hardly thought, before, of what it must mean to her for father and me to go away. She took my hand, and patted it, and clung to it for a little time. Then she spoke, in a dry, husky little voice:
“I understand, John. I’m glad you feel it. But I want to do my part. I have faith. And if anything happens—we”—she faltered a little, finished pluckily—“we have such good times to remember.”
And suddenly she stood up, as vigorous as a girl, and turned on the light. “Now John,” she said practically, “you must be off to bed. You’ve a hard trip before you.”
I kissed her, and went obediently, leaving her standing in the room, looking after me with a tear, I think, in her eye. But I could not sleep, for thinking of the golden time of peace. If it had lasted, I might have found Leroda, and brought her back to a happy world, to live near father and mother.
More than a dozen men were gathered at the airlock at the appointed time. Warrington was there, Gardiner, and my father, with two or three of the other leaders of the Assembly, a few of the engineers who had been working with Gardiner and me on the problems of the new fleet, and two or three of Warrington’s officers.
A score of soldiers were there, in space-suits, with sets of armor for us. Soon we were all grotesque creatures in the strange suits of metal, quartz glass, and impregnated fabric, shoulders bulging with oxygen tanks. The thick helmets of metal and quartz were screwed down; and we were in communication with one another only through the short-wave radio sets that each suit carried.
WHEN all of us were ready—there were thirty-nine, counting the guard;—the inner door of the lock was opened, and we filed into the great cylinder that extends through the city’s wall. It was closed and sealed behind us, and Gardiner opened the valve that let the air about us hiss out into the frigid vacuum of the night.
The air in our suits expanded until we were squat, thick-limbed monstrosities. All the sounds of the city faded, until everything I could hear was the quiet hum of the little motor that kept the air circulating between my double-walled helmet and the coils where it was purified and re-oxygenated, and the occasional ghostly voice in the phones.
At last the pressure was equalized, the outer door was opened, and we walked out into the lunar night. The sky was a void of intensest blackness, sprinkled with a million cold, many-colored stars, and richly powdered with the luminous silver dust of nebula and galaxy. In the bright-flecked darkness of it swung the earth, near the full, a vast globe of liquid emerald, alight with misty splendor. The radiance of the green planet fell in a flood of ghostly argent upon the silent crust of snow and frozen air that blanketed the weird rough wilderness before us, shimmering fantastically upon the three sheer peaks beyond the city.
In all that world of night, everything was white, still, lying in death or frozen sleep until the sun would bring the spark of life—all save the moon-calves, the natural masters of the planet.
In a few moments we saw a score of the great fantastic beasts leaping swiftly toward us through the earth-light, vast scarlet bodies a-glitter against the still white mountains, huge green eyes glowing with pale phosphorescence.
Jenkins was upon their leader, hardly recognizable in his gleaming silver space-armor. But his voice sounded familiar enough in the phones when he spoke.
“Good evening, gintlemen, and the best av wishes to ye!”
He flung out ludicrously thick arms in the gestured command that sent his score of weird beasts to their knees before us. In a few moments we were mounted, two to an animal. Another, and we were off through the silent, frozen night, upon scarlet monsters that leapt swiftly and surely from snow-covered boulder to peak encrusted in frozen air, beneath the white light of the motionless earth.
