Collected Short Fiction, page 47
I suppose that Warrington had already given Jenkins his orders. I heard him say nothing to the old scout who was leading us unerringly, however, along a path that carried us into the mountainous region between the three great cities, Theophilus, Colon, and New Boston.
We traveled some ten or twelve hours, in which time we must have covered half that many hundred miles. We were almost upon our destination before I perceived it. We were crossing the floor of a relatively small crater many miles northwest of Hipparchus. Abruptly I saw the outlines of a city’s roof and towers and domes above the flat, white expanse about us, clothed in a silver blanket of frozen air.
The oddly shaped towers and the irregular roof had been cunningly designed to appear to the casual eyes as part of the natural peak in the center of the crater. A hidden city was here, surrounded by towering crater walls. Invisible, even when one looked upon it, unless he knew its odd outlines.
Warrington’s voice rustled in the phones. “Gentlemen, this is Kurrukwarruk. A hidden city. It was built by a patriot who grew tired of the rule of Metals long before the war. He located a mining prospect here, and built this secret city. He has already aided the cause, and he gives us the free use of his location. We have many secret allies.”
Another half an hour found us dismounted and inside the air-lock of the little city on the mountain, removing our cumbersome armor. It was a good-sized community:—the roof covered a hundred acres and the population was about five thousand, of whom nearly two thousand were men who had been employed in the building of the city, and who now constituted its garrison. The whole mountain top was a great fortress; every tower of the city carried a battery of D-rays.
Inside the air-lock we met the builder of Kurrukwarruk. He was of Teutonic extraction; his name was Meyers. A corpulent fellow, he had an absurdly thin, piping voice. It seemed that he had been born on earth, and had inherited a hatred for Metals Corporation. He had come to the moon in youth, located the valuable minerals in this crater, and worked the deposits secretly, accumulating a fortune and building his hidden city, against the day when the moon should revolt. He seemed to have a stubborn love of liberty; he had placed the city, and his entire personal fortune as well, at Warrington’s disposal.
The secret conferences must have been planned weeks before. Men were there from all over the moon. There were bankers and soldiers from Colon—Crompton, Vendome, Wong Kow, and Olaf—scientists and military authorities from New Boston—Leforge, Handley, and others—miners and scouts who owned no particular home. Starling was there—that romantic poet-adventurer who was one of the few who had visited the terrible hidden side of the moon, and whose life was later sacrificed on the ill-starred Venerian expedition of Captain Cord.
The first action of the conference was to choose Kurrukwarruk as the permanent capitol of the moon. The great statesmen were opposed to having it located in any of the large cities, as it would be the object of Tellurian attack, unduly endangering the city’s population. Then Kurrukwarruk was centrally located and rather easily accessible—when one knew its location—from any of the great cities. It was equipped with all the necessities of civilized life. Its fortifications were so carefully planned and so strong that it seemed improbable that it would fall, even if discovered and attacked.
THE meeting went on for several days. Important problems were solved, concerning the military organization of the moon’s forces, and their support. Plans were made for raising reinforcements and supplies about Colon, as that district had hardly been touched by the war.
Apartments had been assigned to all of us in the most desirable quarters of the city. I shared a suite of rooms with a young officer, Captain Benedict, a secretary to the Financial Director. He was handsome in appearance, rather dashing, and noted for several feats of intrepid courage. Early in the war he had led a daring raid on the space-port at New Boston, capturing it in the face of considerable odds, though it was soon lost again to Van Thoren’s fleet. I think he had secured his transfer to the staff of the Financial Director, because he was not satisfied with his preferment in the regular army.
I had known him at the University; in fact, I had felt almost his friend, until I had once seen him in the company of Leroda. I did not like his manner toward her, and I had dropped him. Now I began to think, however, that I had let jealousy obscure the character of a brave and noble patriot.
Slowly the conference got around to the important thing, to the question that was the real purpose of the meeting. Early in the course of the discussions, Gardiner had addressed the assembly, giving the results of the trip to earth, and telling of his meeting with Lafollette in Chicago. He had concluded his talk with what was, for one of his quiet manners, an unusual burst of oratory.
“Gentlemen, Tranco is the hereditary enemy of Metals Corporation. Every man in it, from President Lewis down to the laborers who toil in the factories and ships, feels the strongest antipathy to our oppressors. Openly, publicly, Lewis dares to do nothing.
But this Lafollette is braver than his fellow-directors. He is rich. And he is willing to stake his fortune and his life upon our cause. He is willing to send us money, supplies, and men, if they can be brought to the moon. And while he made his offer as a private man, I know that Lewis is unofficially behind him, with all the vast resources of Tranco.
“It may seem hopeless, gentlemen, to dream of bringing weapons and men from earth to our aid. But due to the generosity of a friend of young Adams, here, we have a solution to that problem. We have Dr. Vardon’s great discovery of twenty years ago—the gold atomic blast. That is the invention with which Tranco vainly tried to throw off the yoke of Metals, failing because her new ships were discovered before they were finished.
“Fellow patriots, we have in our hands the means of building a fleet that can go to earth to bring back Lafollette and his army. We have the means, even, of building a fleet of war-fliers that can sweep the vessels of Metals from space and make us the equal of the greatest corporation on earth.”
There had been a lot of cheering when he finished, but not much else. Men had to take time to think. But a hundred great minds were playing with the idea. It was some days later that Paul Doane arose and proposed definite plans for the construction of a fleet on the moon, with which we could voyage to earth to get Lafollette and his men. There were a thousand difficulties in the way of it, but he had gone over each of them with Gardiner and me and some of the other delegates, and his logical arguments convinced the assembly that it might be possible to collect the thousands of skilled mechanics, to find a secret place for them to work, and to provide them with food, with shelter for the lunar nights, and with the vast supplies of raw material that would be needed.
Two or three more days went by, partly devoted to consideration of routine business, though the great project was never far from our minds. Slowly the plan crystallized, until we came to the selection of a secret workshop fop the building of the fleet. John Adams, Sr., my father, rose at once to suggest that the ships be built at Firecrest.
He set forth its advantages. The mines would furnish all the metal required for the work. The city would shelter the men. There were farms and synthetic food plants to feed them. The locality was so remote that interference was improbable.
As he was talking, I remembered the great cavern at Firecrest—the vast chasm in which I had lost myself as a boy, escaping by the merest accident. I waited impatiently until father was done, then sprang impulsively to my feet and informed the assembly that I could point out a spot where a thousand vessels might be built without discovery, even if searching fleets cruised over a hundred times. I got a little excited; but with a few questions from Gardiner, I told all I knew about the cavern.
I suggested that it could be lit with atomic lights, that a battery of D-rays would soon clear the jungle off the floor, and that the narrow shaft through which I had entered could be widened and cleared to permit the completed ships to leave. And it was near enough to Firecrest so that metal and supplies could be easily brought from there.
With that addition, the program was unanimously approved, and definite plans were laid to carry it out.
It was agreed that Gardiner, father and I should set out at once for Firecrest, to begin making such preparations as clearing the cavern, widening the entrance, and getting a supply of food and metal as fast as the few men now at Firecrest could provide them.
The delegates from other parts of the moon promised us engineers and men as soon as they could be gathered. Warrington was returning to his army at Theophilus, and Doane to his embryonic fleet. It was yet several days to sunrise—there was time in abundance for us to reach our several destinations before the coming of the luminary signalled the resumption of hostilities.
It was the sleeping period before we were to start. As I returned, after the last meeting of the assembly, to the apartment that I shared with Benedict, the dashing secretary to the Director of Finance, I heard something through the closed door that made me burst into the room in sudden fury.
“. . . I shall always think of you, John . . .” Those dear words, in the rich, vibrant voice of Leroda, husky with the depth of her feeling, came ringing sweet and clear from the moon. Someone was playing the record she had given me!
I found Benedict, my handsome fellow lodger, bending over the little phonograph—through some accident.
I had left it on the reading table.
“. . . If you can come back, I will be waiting. . . .” The secretary was intent on that wondrous voice. Startled out of his usual rather haughty dignity, he now jumped up, reddening. I jerked the little instrument out of his hands and stopped it, then reached for his collar. I was almost beside myself; it seemed a sacrilege that he had heard those treasured words.
“Why, what’s the matter, Adams?” he sputtered. “I beg your pardon. I don’t see—What the devil—I thought it was a standard record, a song or something.”
“A standard record with that on the case?”
I pointed fiercely to the words.
“To John Adams. Play this when you wish to think of me,” written on the case in Leroda’s neat characters.
Benedict’s flush of confusion changed to a red flood of anger.
“Adams, if you let word of this out, I’ll slaughter you like a dog!”
“You may name a meeting place—” I had begun, when I recovered myself. “No, as officers, we cannot do that. But on the day that peace is made——”
He turned and strode from the moon.
CHAPTER XVIII
In the Firecrest Cavern
A FEW hours later we were in our space-suits. Most of the delegates were returning to their cities, though enough remained to constitute a permanent corps for the new executive government. Greenville, the Financial Director, was remaining, with Benedict, the strange young man who had become his secretary—I realized, after cooling of my feelings, that the fellow had committed no worse crime than to satisfy a natural curiosity. I should not have left the machine where he could get his hands on it. Before I left, I apologized for my hasty words; and he, smiling, begged my own pardon. We parted on good terms.
Jenkins, with his Selenites, was to convey Gardiner, father, and myself to Firecrest, and would return immediately to take Warrington back to Theophilus. The General had further business connected with the organization of the permanent government, which prevented his leaving Kurrukwarruk for a day yet.
The four of us, with a toast to the liberty of the moon still ringing in our ears, stepped into the great cylindrical air-lock, shut the inner door, and opened the valve. Warrington, Meyers, and Greenville beyond the great transparent door of quartz, waved us a last farewell and hurried away.
The last of the air hissed out, with a dying moan. Jenkins opened the outer door, and once again we were in the fantastic ghostliness of the frozen lunar night. The old scout, squat and silvery in his space armor, signalled to his moon-calves. The scarlet, glistening elephantine monsters came hopping toward us on their enormous grasshopper legs, across the glistening plain of frozen air.
Our guide selected four of the fleetest, which, with only a single passenger, can easily make fifty miles an hour at a time. I leapt into my saddle—for I have always had a curious horror of the feel of a scaly tentacle about my waist—Jenkins and Gardiner and my father allowed the long tentacular limbs to lift them up, and we were off.
Jenkins was in excellent humor, having been well fed and cared for during the week at Kurrukwarruk. He regaled us with an interminable series of droll anecdotes in his rusty voice. His stories related mostly to his childhood. He told us that he had never known his father, that he had been brought up on the moon by a crabbed, old Irish prospector, Tim O’Sullivan.
The old scout’s voice rang endlessly in the phones. In the vacuum of the night, no foreign sounds broke in upon his narrative.
O’Sullivan, it seems, did not claim to be Jenkins’ parent, but said that, while on an expedition in search of a legendary mountain of radium toward the Rook Mountains on the eastern “rim” of the moon, he had come upon a horde of the Ka’Larbah, the most savage of the wild Selenites, about a space flier fallen and wrecked in the desert far south of Kepler.
O’Sullivan had made his way into the ship—it seems that he was on fairly good terms even with those blood-thirsty monsters. He had rescued two living people from the ravenous moon-calves, one of them Jenkins, “thin, a little yaller-headed shaver,” as he said. The other was a man, who gasped out a brief tale of meteoric collision and of a terrible struggle to save the ship, that had ended in that crash on the deserted limb of the moon. The survivors had been there nearly a month, dying of their injuries, of hardship and starvation, and maintaining a hopeless defense against the Selenites. One by one the men had died, but they had saved the life of the boy.
Thus Jenkins knew nothing of his parentage—so far as he was aware, he might have been destined for a life of ease, luxury, and prominence, but for the wrecking of the ship. His fellow survivor had told nothing of the boy’s people, he had died before his terrible story was finished.
O’Sullivan, it seems, had been a curious man, hardly known in the cities, and hardly tolerated even among the wild Ka’Larbah. He had taken the three-year-old boy to Colon with him, and there placed him in the hands of a woman of uncertain social standing. There Jenkins had lived for five or six years, attending school a little and learning far more by roaming the curiously cosmopolitan underworld of the lunar city.
Then the woman had suddenly departed, in the company of a “tall man with whiskers and a glass eye.” The lonely boy, perhaps not much the worse for the loss of his guardian, had roamed the streets for months, earning his bread for a time in one of the secret dens where the forbidden drugs from the lunar forests are sold.
Then O’Sullivan, returning from one of his mad wanderings in the waste places of the moon, had rescued the child, and taken him along on the next trip, which, according to Jenkins’ story, took them due south, to the left of the Doerfels, to a point where the motionless earth set behind him. There they had encountered a new race of moon-calves, who were armed with polished rocks, and who guarded a dead city of white metal. After two years of incredible adventure beyond the pale, they had arrived in Theophilus with, as Jenkins put it, “about a peck of diamonds.” For a brief period they had lived in incredible luxury “with a red-headed woman.” But soon O’Sullivan had squandered or gambled away his fortune, and they had returned to the desert. Three years later, when Jenkins was fourteen, O’Sullivan was executed with the captured crew of a space-pirate, and the boy had escaped only because of his youth and presumed innocence.
To the accompaniment of such a story, which was probably not wholly true—yet which subsequent discoveries show to have been far from altogether falser the nine or ten hours of the trip to Firecrest passed in a few moments, it seemed.
I WAS astonished when I saw the city of my childhood rise before me—a great thick disk of metal and glass, half a mile across and two hundred feet high, resting on the glistening white crater-pitted desert, close against the rim of the two-mile crater in which the mine-shafts are located.
A few more rushing leaps of our red-armored, hurtling mounts brought us to the air-lock. There Gardiner, father, and I dismounted. The stocky, silver-armored figure of the old scout waved us a farewell, and leaped away upon old M’Ob among the shimmering ice-clad spires of the lunar desert until he vanished in the feeble light, with his “God be with ye” ringing in our ears.
We had rung the bell, and the air-lock was quickly opened for us. It seemed very strange to pass so suddenly from the glimmering ghostliness of the lunar desert in the fantastic earth-shine, seen under the weird spell of Jenkins’ narrative, into the warm rich glow of the atomic lights.
The familiar city of my youth seemed queerly deserted. There were thoughtless, happy children enough, and anxious women. But most of the men were gone, to join Warrington’s army or to seek employment elsewhere. Everything was quiet, deserted.
Valence and Tom Dowling greeted us in glad surprise. With motherly love my sister exhibited little Tom Junior, a plump, pink little fellow, just learning to talk. It gave me an odd feeling to think that I was now an uncle.
Gardiner and father and I soon put a different aspect on the quiet town, with Tom’s eager aid. The townsfolk had been enormously glad to see father. They held a great banquet in honor of his return; and they showed themselves willing to perform superhuman feats of toil for him. Soon we were working the mines again. Most of the men were busy there; but even the women showed themselves eager to work in the machine shops and synthetic food plants.
