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Title: Stay off the Moon!

Author: Raymond F. Jones

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release date: December 5, 2023 [eBook #72337]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1962

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STAY OFF THE MOON! ***





                          Stay off the MOON!

                          By RAYMOND F. JONES

                         Illustrated by FINLAY

              _How do you fill a pipette and measure out
             a half c.c. of hydrochloric acid into a test
               tube--from a quarter million miles away?_

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                    Amazing Stories December 1962.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


The real problem, of course, is not quite that simple. You don't
literally fill a pipette or use a test tube; you activate metering
circuits that force tiny, ground-glass plungers a measured distance
into reagent pumps. You send signals that close some valves and open
others, and apply heat and adjust temperatures, and filter solutions,
and send the product to a spectrometer that determines what you've got
and how much.

Then you have to code it and get the information from the moon to earth.

James Cochran had seen the equipment work through hundreds of checkout
analyses. But he didn't understand it. He was a chemist, and he
had drawn up the specifications for the chemical analyzers of the
Prospector, but it had been the electronic boys who dreamed up the
remote mechanization and the telemetry equipment that would allow him
to sit before a complex panel at the Center and direct his chemical
laboratory on the moon to learn what the moon was made of. Some of
the light-headed technicians who worked on the project had dubbed it
Operation Green Cheese, but Cochran had more respect for the complexity
of the effort.

It was Sunday midnight. The beginning of countdown was forty hours
away. Cochran's crew had finished the chemical checkout, but in the
assembly hangar technicians still swarmed about the Prospector, giving
final-check to the power and telemetry components.

Jim Cochran signed off the last of the check reports and dropped them
in the slot for delivery to the Project Director. He turned off the
lights over his own desk and went out to the hangar. Under the blaze
of fluorescent lights the device looked like some monstrous insect.
The differential housings over the worm-screw drives gleamed like a
red, segmented carapace. The blue appendages of the solar cell boxes
were extended as if in some frantic appeal. The radar dish and the
helical antenna extended mutely upward. And, like a furious proboscis,
the exploratory drill, which would pierce the moon's skin to a depth of
five hundred feet, seemed to gnaw at the concrete floor of the hangar.

Sam Jarvis, supervisor of electronic checkout, saw Jim Cochran enter
and came over to him with a broad, weary grin. "AOK, so far! This
package is going to be perfect. If only the rocket boys will set up a
bird that will take it to the moon--"

"They'd better," said Jim. "I don't think I could ever go through this
again if they dump the Prospector in the drink."

       *       *       *       *       *

Sam turned back to look at the robot machine and the swarming
technicians. "Yes, you could," he said. "All of us have gone through
heartbreak time and again the past five years, watching them blow up,
or fall back and burn in the atmosphere because the motors didn't
ignite. Or seeing them get all the way to the moon and have some
five-dollar transistor conk out. But we always have at it again. You
will, too. You're new, but you're one of us now. You never back out
when you've come this far."

Watching the Prospector, Jim knew Sam was right. It had taken some
persuasion to bring him to this point, however. Until a couple of
years ago he had believed he would be content with ivory-tower plastics
research for the rest of his life. The persuasion had been applied when
Mary's brother, Allan Wright, had made the astronaut team.

Allan and Jim had grown up together. There was no other person Jim felt
closer to except Mary and their two children. Allan had dreamed of
space when they were kids, and when he was fifteen, he said, "I'm going
out there. I don't know how. But, somehow, I'm going out there."

Now, he had been selected to captain the first Apollo voyage. He had
been born for that purpose, he said.

But while he was still in the general pool of astronauts he had opened
his campaign to get Jim into the space program. "They need the best
brains they can get," Allan said. "You haven't got any right to sit in
a musty old plastics lab while guys with half your ability try to get
us into space. NASA will take you tomorrow!"

Jim didn't try to tell him that his plastics lab wasn't exactly musty,
or that he didn't think of himself as one of the best brains in the
country. But Mary sided with Allan; she was almost as excited about
space as he was. In the end, Jim went to NASA. Within days, he had
been assigned to head the development of the Prospector chemical
mechanization.

It had been something of a jolt to pull up all the roots he had so
carefully put down for him and his family, and move to the hectic,
bustling, space-frontier community of the Center. But he wasn't sorry.
It put something new in the blood, something men had never known before.

Space!

The great Saturn lifted slowly, on a vast blossom of fire, with snowy
lox streaming down its sides. Then it was gone, a twinkle of fire high
above, among the stars. That was all.

Mary and Jim Cochran continued to stare at the fading twinkle, and
finally they turned away. Allan had obtained permission to be in the
blockhouse during the firing. It hadn't been necessary for Jim to be
there. He didn't want to know the instant-by-instant telemetry reports
which told whether or not the flight was successful. Sam or Allan would
call him when they knew. That would be soon enough for him.

"Let's drive down to the beach and watch the moon from there," said
Mary. "We can't just turn around and go home, like--like nothing had
happened."

Jim smiled in the darkness. Mary was as eager as he was for the success
of the flight. And she didn't have his fear of failure, that kept
him from wanting to know the maybe-yes, maybe-no indications that the
telemetry would first show.

"Sure," he said, "that's a good place to watch it."

The moon.

       *       *       *       *       *

They watched its reflection thrashing on the water as the breakers
rolled across, under, and around it. It was the same image that men
had watched and wondered about and feared--for a half million years.
The first creatures that had any semblance of manhood had sat on their
haunches on this same shore and watched the same moon and the same
water.

And felt the same fears, Jim thought.

He didn't know whether it was fear or not, but there was some sense of
awesome mystery that filled him when he looked at the moon. It had been
that way all his life. He remembered how it was when he was a boy and
he walked through the fields at night on his way home. He had to pass
Cramer's Pond, and when the moon was up its light from the sky and its
reflection from the pond seemed to fill the whole earth with a cold,
silver light. He always hurried past the pond on such nights.

Mary felt it, too. "I wonder why the moon makes people feel the way
they do."

"How does it make people feel?"

"Oh, kind of--kind of--_you_ know!"

Jim laughed aloud. This was a typical Mary Cochran explanation. But it
told him all he needed to know. What she said was quite true. He _did_
know.

The baying of dogs on a wintery, moonlit night.

The madness called lunacy.

Seeds must be planted just so, in relation to the moon, or the crop
will fail.

Men had always felt strange things about the moon. Would a Saturn
missile and a mechanical monster in its nose be able to destroy all
that?

Jim started the car. "Let's get back. I've _got_ to know how the
flight's going!"

       *       *       *       *       *

They were still in the blockhouse, but the tension was relaxed. They
were talking and watching the meters and cathode ray tubes without the
strain and fear of failure. Jim knew the answer even before Sam and
Allan walked up to him and slapped him on the back.

"Where the devil did you go?" said Sam. "I thought you were going to be
right behind me when we fired, and you weren't here at all!"

"It's like your first baby, you want to be there, and you don't. Was it
a good shot?"

"Was it a good shot?" Allan's face became ecstatic. "We've never had a
better one. On course all the way!"

The Project Director, Emil Hennesey was behind them. His face was
bleak. "I expected you to be here for the firing, Cochran," he said.
"It seems to display little interest in your end of the project that
you didn't feel it necessary to show up."

Jim looked at him steadily and shrugged without answer. Hennesey was
one guy whose presence on the space team Jim couldn't figure out. He
was an ex-Major, and he had no capacity for dreaming. Men, machines,
transistors, rockets--they were all the same thing, merely objects to
be made to obey.

"You are aware of your next sequence of duties, I trust?" said Hennesey.

Jim nodded curtly. "I'll be ready."

       *       *       *       *       *

Sixty-six hours to the moon. That's what it takes with marginal escape
velocity and free-fall conditions. But it was really five hundred
thousand years and sixty-six hours, Jim thought. Surely there hadn't
been a single hour in all that time when someone, somewhere on earth
had not felt the longing to solve the secret mystery of the moon.

Now they were about to find the answer. But what would they have
when they found it? They would know that the surface dust of the moon
consisted of certain percentages of silicates and oxides. They would
know that the under layers were composed of rocks, maybe of granite or
limestone or basalt. They would determine how much of each.

And then it would be over. The quest of the ages would be answered
with a few simple statements that could be obtained in any high-school
chemistry lab--if the lab were on the moon.

Jim Cochran felt there _had_ to be more to it than that.

Why do dogs howl at the moon on winter nights?

Why do men say that madness of the mind is lunacy?

Why must planting be done in the right phase of the moon?

Little sleep was had by any of the crew during the next two nights,
even though the instrument stage of the ship was now completely inert
except for occasional telemetry signals that were fed to the computers
for course checking and correction. The ship was simply falling on its
own momentum.

Six hours before moonfall, activities in the tracking center
accelerated and the tension increased. There was no question of hitting
the moon; the landing had to be made safe for the cargo of instruments.

Jim Cochran watched the operators during this period. He told himself
he didn't understand it, but he had actually learned a great deal of
electronics during the past two years. He had had to in order to design
and operate a chemical laboratory 240,000 miles away.

The television screens came on, showing the pock-marked surface of the
moon as the ship orbited. The thrill and the fear of the great unknown
began to rise in Jim's throat. By the silence in the room, he was sure
the others sensed it, too.

Abruptly, the braking command was given and the ship began to fall
out of orbit towards the planned landing in the Sea of Rains. On the
screens, the images swelled as the ship plummeted faster. In one corner
could be seen the spring-loaded extension legs, like those of some
great spider. It seemed impossible that these could cushion the violent
shock of landing.

The sudden surge of a retro rocket and the blast of moondust blinded
the television eye, but there was a sense of crazy, rocking, rolling
motion. Then the eye went dead.

Jim almost cried out. The ship couldn't have crashed.

       *       *       *       *       *

An operator quickly switched controls and the screens came alive again.
He turned a dial slowly. The camera eye moved. It swept the craggy
horizon and the nearby floor of the Sea of Rains. Others had seen this
before, but it was the first time for Jim. He found himself pushing
forward, drinking in the sight eagerly.

"The moon--the moon--" he said softly to himself. But the others heard
it and they understood.

Signals were sent across space to collapse the landing legs and unfold
the sides of the instrument cone like the leaves of a flower. The
Prospector lay exposed to the environment for which it was built.
Slowly, in response to other signals, the worm-screw drives, which had
been retracted against the body of the vehicle, turned through an arc
and lowered to the surface. Locked in position, the drive screws began
turning slowly. The vehicle moved off the now-useless landing support
and became an entity of its own.

The ungainly arms of the solar cells automatically oriented toward
the sun; the antennas pointed toward earth. The scanning cameras in
the turret of the Prospector took control of the video circuits and
the turret slowly turned as the vehicle moved across the face of the
moon. The landing support remained behind and slowly dwindled like some
useless wreckage.

There was sudden pandemonium in the tracking center control room. The
operators laid down their headsets and began pounding each other on
the back, while ear-splitting Indian yells filled the air. Jim and Sam
found themselves beating each other on the arms and yelling senselessly.

"We made it!" Sam cried. "We made it! We got your little old laboratory
up there for you!"

       *       *       *       *       *

There were hours of testing and calibration yet to be done before
the Prospector could be used for its primary mission. Hundreds of
electronic circuits had to be checked to see that they survived the
takeoff and landing without becoming distorted or inoperative.

Jim went home for the rest of the night. When he returned the next
morning Sam reported that all circuits were go, and the Prospector was
his.

He had operated the laboratory in the Prospector many times, either
on a mock-up or from this control panel while the Prospector was in
the hangar. But he couldn't keep the faint tremor from his hand as he
reached for the first control that would manipulate the machine on the
moon.

The drill had been extended to operating position, but the head had not
yet been energized. Jim touched it to the fine dust of the floor of
the Sea of Rains. The drill went quickly to a depth of eighteen inches
in the dust before it struck something firmer.

"That kills the theory about eighty feet of that stuff, anyway," said
Sam as he read the instruments.

Jim was not interested in depth at this time. He fed some of the
surface material into the laboratory and set the controls to run the
preprogrammed analysis. They waited minutes; then the analysis began to
appear in cryptic symbols on a paper tape.

Jim glanced at it and frowned.

"What's the matter? Isn't it working right?" Sam asked anxiously.

Jim hesitated. "It indicates the presence of several silicates, some
carbonates, and a high percentage of oxides. These are mostly of
sodium, calcium, and iron, as you might expect. But there's something
wrong with your calibration. The atomic and molecular characteristics
aren't coming through right."

"The boys ran checks on the standard samples aboard the Prospector
last night," said Sam. "The results tallied exactly. I'll show you the
tapes."

       *       *       *       *       *

Jim waited, puzzled, while Sam brought up the check tapes. When he saw
them, he shook his head. "There's a standard calcium carbonate sample
carried aboard the Prospector. Here's a calcium carbonate picked off
the surface. You can see the difference yourself. The nominal analysis
is the same, but the atomic weights and the energy levels are just
slightly different. That doesn't make sense unless your circuits are
out of calibration."

"Let's run another standard sample," said Sam.

Within a few minutes the calibration check had been repeated. Jim held
up the tape. Sam peered over his shoulder. "Just like the first one,"
said Sam. "Nothing's wrong with the circuits. Maybe you've got some new
stuff there, that's never been identified before."

"That's hardly possible," said Jim. "There aren't any new elements
in the places where sodium and calcium and silica are supposed to
be. Yet, I don't understand how this can be. If the atomic weights
are different, and the energy levels are different, they have to be
different elements. It doesn't make sense."

"Well, why don't we push on," said Sam, "that is, if you've completed
the surface sampling in this spot. Some samples at lower depths may
give other indications."

Jim agreed. He drove the drill deeper into the face of the moon.
At ten-foot intervals he removed samples and ran them through the
analyzer. The results were the same down to the hundred-foot level.
All results showed common chemical elements with slightly variant
atomic characteristics.

Which made them _different_ chemical elements!

After six hours, Jim stood up from the console and shook his head
wearily. "It's no good, Sam. There's something wrong that I can't put
my finger on. If it isn't in the circuits, I don't know where it is.
But these readings just aren't right. There's no use going deeper until
we find out where the error is."

Sam's face was somber. "There just isn't any error. There can't be.
Unless it was made by whoever put the moon together--"

"Please make a complete check of every analyzer and telemetry circuit
tonight, and we'll try again tomorrow. I want to think about this."

       *       *       *       *       *

He thought about it, and he dreamed about it. And along about three
o'clock in the morning he sat bolt upright in bed and stared at the dim
moonlight on the opposite wall of the bedroom.

It wasn't possible, he told himself audibly. It just wasn't possible!

Mary stirred and leaned on one elbow beside him. "What's the matter.
Are you having nightmares?"

"Yeah--yeah, I guess I am. I'll be back in a minute, honey." He got up
and padded to the door. "I've got to make a phone call."

"At this time of night?"

But Jim was gone. He turned on the hall light and dialed Sam's number.
After a long time Sam answered sleepily.

"Wake up!" said Jim. "I've just figured it out!"

"Who the devil--? Oh, it's you, Jim. Figured out what? Do you know what
time it is."

"Do you know the results of your calibration re-check?"

"How would I know that? I've got the night crew on it, but I didn't ask
them to report to me in the middle of the night. Go back to bed, and
let's talk about it in the morning."

"They're not going to find anything wrong, Sam."

"I could have told you that."

"But the elements of the moon are different--and there's only one
explanation."

"What?"

"Think about it a minute, Sam. We take a spectrograph of the sun, and
we find the same elements that are here on earth. We turn it on Alpha
Centauri and find the same thing. We turn it to the farthest stars we
can find that give enough light to record by. Always the same. Calcium
is calcium, whether it's on the earth or on a star a half billion light
years away."

"So?" Sam's voice was tired, and he sounded as if he was listening only
because Jim was too good a friend to tell to go to hell for calling in
the middle of the night.

"So? So what?" Sam repeated.

"So we go to the moon," said Jim, "and all of a sudden calcium isn't
calcium, and the sodium on the moon isn't the same as the sodium on
earth and on the sun and on Alpha Centauri and the stars a half billion
light years away. Don't you see what that means!"

"No, I guess not," said Sam dully. "Maybe in the morning--"

"It means the moon just doesn't _belong_, Sam! It means the moon is
completely foreign to anything in the Solar System, in the whole
galaxy--in any galaxy we have been able to analyze. It means the moon
has come from somewhere else, from a region of space where atoms and
electrons are not even the same as atoms and electrons here. It must be
a somewhere that's so far away it's beyond the edge of space as we know
it!"

"I'll get dressed and come over," said Sam.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mary made chocolate and toast, and they sat around the kitchen table
thinking and talking of the awesome implications of Jim's theory.

"If what you say is true," said Sam, "it might be that the slightest
contact with any substance of the moon would be sheer poison to a human
being. A returning vessel could never be permitted to enter the earth's
atmosphere, and decontamination would become one of the major branches
of science."

"That's entirely possible. It would complicate enormously the problems
of establishing a moon-base. A speck of moondust inside the base might
be as lethal as an unshielded reactor."

Mary was looking out the kitchen window toward the thin crescent of
moon that was setting over the city. She thought of Allan, who would
soon be voyaging to that alien world. "It's like a trap up there in the
sky. We should never have tried to reach it."

"No--it's not like that at all," said Jim vigorously. "We'll solve
whatever problems we find there. But think of it! We don't have to
build a ship capable of crossing billions of light years of space to
see what's out there. Something from out there has come to us and
parked right in our own front yard. We have a thousand times more
reason to go now!"

Sam toyed with his toast and dunked it in the chocolate. "I think you
ought to keep it quiet--until we really _know_, don't you."

"Why? I'll run some more tests, sure. I'll plug every loophole there
can possibly be. But unless I find something new I'm going to announce
it. Why shouldn't I?"

"I don't think Hennesey will like it, for one thing. Too sensational.
Even when we actually land there and confirm your analyses by
on-the-spot checks--it's still only a theory that the moon doesn't
belong to this galaxy. You'll never be able to prove that."

"What we've found already is proof enough!"

"Not for Hennesey. He'll ask to see the shipping manifest by which the
moon was transferred here. You know Hennesey."

"Sure, I know Hennesey," said Jim bitterly. "And he doesn't count.
Not in something like this. This is big, and important, and I'm going
to announce it. I want the credit for discovering it. It'll be called
Cochran's Theory, and some University will offer me at least an
honorary Ph.D. Is that bad?"

Sam shook his head. "Of course it's not bad. But I wonder what the
public reaction will be like, and how about Congress--especially if
this business about possible poisoning from moondust turns out to be
correct? There might be a lot of pressure to cut funds and maybe cancel
the whole moon project."

"If moondust is lethal, there's no better time to be warned against it
than right now!"

       *       *       *       *       *

He spent the following week, eighteen hours a day, at the chemical
analysis panel in the tracking station. As long as the moon was above
the horizon, day or night, he kept experiments going--checking,
re-checking, calibrating, searching for loopholes.

There were no loopholes. There was no malfunction of equipment. The
atoms of the moon's elements were not the same as those of the rest of
the galaxy.

When Allan next came to visit on leave from his own station, Jim told
him what had been found. Allan's face paled a little as he listened in
awe to the story. He stood up and paced across the room as Jim finished.

"I always knew there would be something--something extra in this," he
said. "You look up at night and you know the moon can't be just another
piece of earth. Now--you've found out what it is!

"How far could it have come? How old can it be? Imagine stepping out
onto a world so old, from so far away!"

"You haven't heard it all," said Mary tensely.

"There's more?"

"They think perhaps the slightest touch of moon substance may be
lethal."

"We don't know," said Jim hastily. "It's a thought that Sam advanced.
But I think it's quite possible. We won't know until we can run animal
tests. But special precautions will have to be taken to decontaminate
the Apollo after you re-enter with your space-suits."

"This will mean engineering changes. Are they under way?"

"I haven't announced my theory yet. But the necessary changes to
provide for decontamination will have to be made."

"I wanted this as much as you," said Mary. "But now it's gone all
wrong. We should have gone on dreaming about the moon and let it be a
dream that never came true. I'm afraid of it now. No man should set
foot on something so alien and so different."

Allan put an arm around her shoulders and shook her gently. "Sis! What
kind of talk is that? You're talking to the guy who's going to be the
first one to put his foot on the moon."

       *       *       *       *       *

From the mountain of data accumulated in his experiments, Jim wrote his
paper. Hennesey could control the publication of any material based on
space experiments to the extent that they affected national security.
But even he could not find a means to extend a security blanket to
cover a theory of extra-galactic origin of the moon.

He raged at Jim, however. "You'll make a laughing stock of us in every
scientific center of the world! You can't publish a ridiculous thing
like this!"

"No one will laugh if he reads the data I've got to present," said Jim.
"Every member of our staff who knows the subject has verified that the
data are correct. The conclusion is inescapable."

"I can't forbid publication, Cochran," said Hennesey, "but I think it
is very unwise for you to go ahead. Very unwise."

"I'll take that risk," said Jim.

He sent the paper to the Journal of Astro-physics. At the same time he
sent an announcement to the major news services.

He had expected some sensationalism in the reporting. There was more
than he bargained for. Some of the headlines that followed were:

"Savant Says Moon is Messenger from Outer Space."

"Moon Will Poison Earth."

"Moon Trip--One Way only."

The reactions in the upper echelons of NASA were almost as bad--in
their own way. No thought had ever been given to a need for complete
decontamination of astronauts and equipment after exposure on the moon.
The requirement, if admitted, would threaten the entire program in
the minds of some of the engineers. Others admitted it was tough, but
thought they could solve it in an extra year or so. Rumblings were
heard echoing down from Congressional halls. Why hadn't the stupid
scientists known in the beginning that this was necessary? Always
bungling things--

In the end, it was Alan himself who came up with a proposal that kept
the project from bogging down and still provided some measure of
protection against the possible menace. He suggested a plastic outer
suit to be fitted over the space-suit and discarded as the astronaut
re-entered the space vehicle. With care, such a procedure could prevent
direct contact with moondust. In the meantime, it was hoped that robot
vehicles could bring back moon samples before the Apollo was sent out.

This rather mild proposal did much to calm the furor in NASA and
contractor engineering circles and soon the press had abandoned it
for other, more sensational stories. But Hennesey and a number of
other officials didn't forget. Some of them believed Jim Cochran was a
charlatan at worse and an incompetent at best. They considered he had
degraded American science with his fantastic theory.

Scientific judgement was being held in abeyance until actual moon
samples were available on earth. For the present, at least one of
Jim's predictions had come true. The hypothesis was becoming known as
Cochran's Theory. That it was also called Cochran's Idiocy by a few
didn't matter.

Jim continued his own sixteen-hour stints at the analyzer controls,
probing in a wide pattern over the floor of the Sea of Rains, and
striking deeper toward the heart of the moon with each probe.

Probing to such great depths was made possible by a development that
didn't even exist when the Prospector design was begun. Then, it was
hoped that penetration to a foot and a half of the moon's surface might
be possible. Five-hundred-foot holes were only a madman's nightmare.
How could you carry such drilling equipment all the way to the moon?

Then, in the last months of Prospector design, laser devices had been
produced, capable of burning holes in a diamond. It was only a small
step, then, to the design of a drilling head which mounted a cluster of
laser beams. These would literally burn their way toward the heart of
the moon.

       *       *       *       *       *

The laser drilling head was lowered on five hundred feet of minute
cable, which had tremendous tensile strength. The vaporized moon
substance boiled out of the hole and condensed above the surface,
settling as fine dust. As the hole deepened, the condensation products
coated the upper portions of the hole and the cable. To keep the hole
from thus being closed, the cable was vibrated at a frequency that
shook loose the condensing rock products, and the laser head was raised
with beams shooting upward to clear the hole.

Jim found that a very special technique was required to raise and lower
the head at the proper intervals to keep the hole clear and prevent
loss of the drilling head. A spare was carried, but he didn't want to
face the loss of even one. After three weeks, he felt confident in his
operation and began lowering the drilling head to depths of two hundred
and three hundred feet.

As he had expected, along with the lunar geologists who were
participating, the moon showed a definite pattern of stratification.
But the differences between the layers seemed slight. Chalky, calcium
compounds were abundant. Some were powdery; others were pressed into
brittle limestone formations. No really hard rocks such as granite were
encountered, however. The boundaries between layers were ill-defined.
No one knew what to make of it. The observations were interesting.
Explanations were wholly lacking.

Then, after five weeks of probing, on the edge of the four-hundred-foot
level, Jim found something new. He sought out Sam at the end of the day.

"A few years ago," he said, "scientists were startled to find chemicals
that were the product of life, inside meteors from outer space."

"I understand they've even found bacteria which they have been able to
bring to life," said Sam.

Jim nodded. "More than four hundred feet deep on the moon I've found
the same kind of chemicals--hydrocarbons that must be the product of
living cells."

"Four hundred feet deep on the moon--" said Sam musingly. "And maybe
the moon came from billions of billions of light years across space. So
wherever it came from there was something living. What is it? Traces of
bacteria, or chemical remains of plant life like our coal mines?"

Jim shook his head. "I don't know yet. I'm not sure we can find out
until we go there. But, as you say, it means the moon was once the
scene of life--wherever it came from."

"One thing I haven't understood," said Sam, "is why the moon stopped
here if it had been traveling through space for so long. Why didn't it
keep on going?"

"It was just a combination of factors," said Jim. "The moon happened
to be traveling at just the right speed. The earth was in just the
right place at the right time. As a result, the moon fell into an orbit
around the earth. Pure accident."

"A lucky accident!" said Sam.

Jim looked up at the pale moon above their heads as they walked toward
the parking lot. "I hope so," he said. "We will soon know whether it
was a lucky or an unlucky accident."

       *       *       *       *       *

The moon laboratory had not been designed for extensive organic
chemical analysis. There were only a few things it could do with
organic compounds. But these were sufficient to convince Jim that the
moon had once been the scene of life.

Why so deep? he wondered. Nothing had been found in the upper levels,
unless he had missed it--he would have to check that out later.

As the drilling head moved slowly downward, the evidence of fossil
hydrocarbons increased. There seemed to be an almost geometric increase
in concentration after he passed the four-hundred-foot level. He was
certain the drill was penetrating a bed of fossil remains of some form
of life that flourished the little planet that the moon must have been
incalculable eons ago.

The more he thought about his theory, however, the more difficult
it became to explain all the factors. If the moon had actually been
a planet of some far distant system, what had torn it loose from its
parent sun and sent it careening through space? Had its sun exploded,
blasting whatever planets the system held into the depths of space?
Such an occurrence might explain the sterility of the moon's surface,
but why was the evidence of life buried so deep? Perhaps the upper
layers of the moon's surface consisted of debris blasted from the
exploding sun. Such debris would have been molten, flowing about the
moon's surface, cremating everything living. Finally, it would have
shrunk in the cold depths of space and wrinkled into the vast mountains
and cracks that laced the moon's surface.

It was one way it could have happened, but it seemed so fantastic that
Jim had difficulty in convincing himself that it was true.

He doubted the accuracy of his analyses. There were so many tenuous
links between the substance on the moon and his own senses that an
error in any one of them could destroy the accuracy of the results. But
he had no reason to doubt.

He began making calibration checks before and after every analysis. It
added scores of hours to his work. Sam sat beside him, checking and
verifying the accuracy of the telemetering circuits constantly. The
operation was as foolproof as their science could make it.

"You've got to believe what you find," said Sam. "There's no other
answer."

And then, one day, Jim found an answer that was utterly impossible to
believe. His mind balked and closed up completely at the thought.

Sam had been watching him for almost three hours, aware that something
had perturbed Jim exceedingly. Sam kept his mouth shut and leaned
quietly against the desk of his own console, keeping check on the
circuits while he watched Jim grow more and more distressed. Sam didn't
understand the processes, but he was aware that Jim had been going over
and over the same analysis for almost two hours. At last Jim's face
seemed to go utterly white, and his hands became motionless on the
console.

Sam waited a long time. Then he asked, "What is it, Jim? What's the
matter?"

Jim continued to stare at the panels of the console, then answered as
if from some far nightmare distance. "Two chemicals, Sam," he said.
"One of them a big molecule, something like hemoglobin. And neither of
them could exist as fossils. Their structure would have broken down
long ago. They could exist only in _live_ tissue!"

He continued staring. Neither of them moved. Sam felt as if he had just
heard something in a nightmare and had only to wait a minute until he
woke up. Then it would be gone.

Jim turned his head at last and faced Sam. He gave a short, harsh bark
of a laugh that sounded half-hysterical.

"We'd be off our rockers, wouldn't we Sam? Clear off our rockers to
believe there could be something alive five hundred feet inside the
moon!"

"Sure--and if it were alive, it wouldn't be sitting still while the
laser beams drilled a hole into it. Besides, we just couldn't be lucky
enough to lower the drill right smack into some cave where a moon bear
was hibernating. All the circuits must have busted down at the same
time. We'll fix it tomorrow. Let's get the girls and have a night on
the town."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a very unsuccessful night on the town. Jim and Mary, and Sam and
his wife went to a show and a nightclub.

"You're moving like a zombie. What's the matter?" said Mary as she and
Jim danced together.

"Feel like a zombie. Why don't we give it up and go home? I want to
get down to the lab by five in the morning."

"That's the trouble. You've done nothing but live in the lab since the
Prospector landed. So we're not going home. Sam and Alice are having
a good time. You dance with Alice next, and make her think you're
enjoying it!"

So Jim didn't go to bed at all, but he _was_ at the lab by five in the
morning. The night crew were still at work. He had steered them away
from the analyses he was doing so they were unaware of the shattering
results he had found.

He took over the controls, and resumed work alone.

There was no doubt about it. If any of the methods they were using were
accurate, then he had discovered almost indisputable proof that some
living tissue existed five hundred feet below the surface of the moon.

Since the laser drilling head sealed the walls of the hole with a
coating of frozen lava, it was necessary to probe horizontally for
samples. Small extension drills, capable of reaching five feet on
either side of the hole, were carried in the head for this purpose.

Jim lowered the head through the last twenty feet of its drilling
limit. Every six inches he sent the horizontal probes to their limits.
The tell-tale chemicals existed at every point. He computed the volume
he had probed, and felt numb.

By the time Sam had shown up, Jim had withdrawn the probe to the
surface and was moving the Prospector slowly across the moon's surface.

Sam saw the motion on the television screen. "Where are you going? I
thought we were going to check out the hole we were in."

"It's been checked," said Jim. He hesitated. His original plan had been
to move the Prospector a distance of fifty feet and probe again to the
five-hundred-foot level. Then, decisively, he pressed the control that
kept the Prospector moving. He stopped it a hundred feet from the
previous hole and began the long, tedious job of drilling again to the
limits of the Prospector's equipment.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sam spelled him off during the day. By evening, they had hit the
four-hundred-and-fifty-foot level. Jim took his first analysis in this
hole. The chemicals were there. In greater concentration than at the
same level in the previous hole.

Jim turned to Sam. "We have circuits for measuring potential
differences on the lunar landscape. Could we make a reading at the
bottom of this hole?"

Sam considered. "It'll take some doing, but I think we can manage it.
What do you expect to find from that?"

Jim didn't dare tell him what was in his mind. "I don't know," he said.
"But it might be worth trying--if there _is_ anything living down
there--"

By the following afternoon, Sam had made the necessary equipment
arrangements so that potential readings could be obtained in the mass
from which the chemical samples were being removed. The telemetered
report was connected to a recorder that plotted the variations against
a time scale.

As soon as the circuit was set up and calibrated, the recording meter
showed a response. A very slow, rhythmic pulsation showed in the inked
line on the paper.

Jim felt as if his breathing must have stopped for an infinite length
of time. "That's what I thought we'd find," he said at last.

"What?" said Sam. "I don't understand what you're talking about. What
do you think those pulsations mean?"

"Did you ever hear of an electroencephalograph?" said Jim, gravely.

"Electro--Sure, brain wave recordings. Jim! You don't think these
waves--!"

In silence, the two men stared at the wavering pen and the sheet of
recording paper that slowly unrolled beneath it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dr. Thomas Banning had been a class mate of Jim Cochran when they were
both in their first couple of years of college. Banning had gone on
into medicine, specializing in brain studies, while Jim had turned to
chemistry. The two had been out of touch for several years.

Tom Banning was the first one Jim thought of, not only because of their
old friendship, but because he had read recent papers describing some
of Tom's new work on the frontier of electroencephalography. He called
first on the phone, then arranged for a personal visit. Sam went with
him. They had closed down all Prospector work while they were to be
away.

       *       *       *       *       *

Tom met them and was introduced to Sam as he ushered them into his own
modest laboratory. "This isn't the plush sort of surroundings you've
become used to," he said as he showed them around. "The Government
isn't spending billions these days trying to find out how the human
mind works."

Jim could well understand Tom's bitterness. Doing research on the
frontiers of the mind, he was forced to spend his own money for much of
his laboratory equipment.

"I can sympathize, but that's about all," said Jim. "I just work here
myself."

"Tell me about your problem. On the phone, that sounded interesting
enough to make a man's day brighter. You said something about an
unknown life form with electrical pulses that might be related to brain
waves?"

Jim nodded. "That's the way it looks to me."

"But where does this life form exist? Surely it can be identified!"

"If I told you, you'd throw me out or call the paddy wagon. Look at
these, first."

Jim and Sam spread out the long folds of chart they had accumulated
through days of recording. "Does it look like anything to you?" asked
Jim.

Tom Banning frowned. "Well, it certainly _could_ be an EEG record of
some kind. The apparatus--"

"The apparatus was nothing but a single electrical probe, and the
signal was transmitted under very unsatisfactory conditions."

"Signal transmitted, you say? Just where did this come from, Jim? You
didn't come all this way just to pull my leg."

"No," said Jim wearily. "If anybody's leg is being pulled, it's mine.
I wanted to see if you could recognize it as having any similarity to
an EEG. Then I wanted to ask about your work you reported in your last
paper. The one on 'EEG as a Brain Stimulus and Communication Medium'."

"Yes? What did you want to know about that?"

"You've had some success in taking the EEG waves of one person and
applying them to the brain of another person so that the latter
understood some of the thoughts of the first person while being
stimulated by his brain waves."

"Yes."

"Would it be possible to do that with this record?"

Tom studied the record silently. "Any cyclic electric impulse can
be applied as a stimulus to the brain. Certainly, this one can. My
question still remains, however, what kind of a creature generated
these pulses? If it is so alien you can't even identify it, we can't
really be sure that these are brain waves. I can only say they may be."

"That's good enough for me," said Jim. "How about setting it up so that
we can see if these tell us anything."

"I think I ought to make you tell me where you got these, first."

"Afterwards, please, Tom."

       *       *       *       *       *

It took the rest of the day to transcribe the record to the format
required by Tom's light-intensity reader. They set the following day
for the experiment.

Both Sam and Jim were to participate. Tom applied eight electrodes to
the skull of each man. They reclined in deep sleep-back chairs, and Tom
suggested they close their eyes.

Jim began to feel a sense of apprehension as he heard the first faint
whine of the equipment. He knew the transcribed tape was unreeling
slowly beneath the photo-electric scanner. The resulting fluctuating
current was being amplified, filtered, gated to the proper level, and
applied to the electrodes on his skull. He felt nothing.

"Just like a ride on the merry-go-round," he said in disappointment.

Then it struck.

Like a fearful, billowing blackness rising out of the depths of Hell
itself, it washed over him. It sucked at his very soul, corroding,
destroying, a wind of darkness where the very concept of light was
unknown.

He was not conscious of his screaming until he heard his own dying
voice and grew slowly aware of the sudden rawness of his throat. He
heard another screaming and it sounded like Sam. Dimly, he wondered
what had happened to Sam.

Tom was bending over him, patting his face with a cold towel and
murmuring, "Wake up, Jim! You're all right now. You're all right."

He opened his eyes and saw Tom, white-faced. He turned and looked at
Sam, whose head lolled sluggishly while a low whimpering came from his
lips.

"I'm all right," said Jim weakly. "Take care of Sam."

Exhausted, he leaned back and closed his eyes another moment. Sweat
oozed from every pore of his skin, cold, fear-inspired sweat.

       *       *       *       *       *

An hour later, he felt completely recovered from the experience, except
that his knees were still a little wobbly when he tried his legs.

"We've got to try it again," Jim said. "Can you cut down the intensity
a little? Better still, how about rigging up an intensity control that
we can operate for ourselves?"

"Nobody is trying that thing again in my lab," said Tom Banning. "Do
you think I want a couple of corpses on my hands? Not to mention the
droves of police that your screaming will bring down."

"We've got to _know_," Jim said. "Listen, Tom, I'll tell you where we
got this record. Then you can judge for yourself."

Rapidly, he told Tom all that had happened since their first experience
with the Prospector. The brain specialist listened impassively until
the end of the story.

"So you conclude there's something monstrous on the moon, and this
experience you've just had would indicate that it's highly inimical to
human life," said Tom.

"That's about it," said Jim.

"What do you expect to do about it?"

"I want to finish what we started here. Then I've got to show the
authorities that the moon project has got to stop. We can't go ahead
with our moon landings now. If we do, that thing will be stirred out
of dormancy into life--and, somehow, it will make its way to earth. I
wouldn't be surprised if it could navigate space alone, its own naked
being."

Tom turned back to his equipment. "All right, let's go. I want to get a
sampling of that before we're through, too."

With a control that he could operate himself, Jim found it endurable.
With the control at minimum intensity, he tensed for that first
terrible impact of the alien impulses pouring into his own mind.

They were weaker, but still he felt as if the shroud of death had
settled over him. He heard a moan from Sam and knew his companion was
experiencing the same sensations.

The impulses of evil poured on through the electrodes into his mind. He
sensed the immensity and purpose of the thing that had generated them.
He sensed that out of some far reach of space, where time and dimension
were not the same, the thing had acquired an eternal nature of a kind
that knew no birth and could experience no death in the dimensions of
man.

He sensed that its nature and its purpose were pure destruction.
Destruction of life in any form. It was a thing of death, and life and
it could not exist in the same universe.

He sensed how it had come and why it had come, and the partial defeat
that had sent it into dormancy because there was no life of the kind it
knew in the universe through which it hurtled.

Now--it was once again aware of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

The three of them went back to the tracking station laboratory
together. Jim managed to obtain a clearance for Tom to see what they
were doing. "I want to move the Prospector a long distance and try one
more hole," he told Sam.

"What do you mean by a long distance?"

"A hundred miles."

"A hun--! You think you'll still find this thing that far away?"

"We'll find out. Can the Prospector travel that far?"

"Sure. If you wait long enough. Its maximum speed is two miles an
hour."

"A little better than two days. Let's pick the direction of the
flattest and lowest terrain. I don't want to get it up into the
mountains."

During the following two days, Jim considered what his next move should
be. He had to present his data and evidence to a conference of men who
mattered, who could make the necessary decisions. It had to be brought
to the attention of the top levels of NASA. The Department of Defense
and the Presidential advisors should be in on it, too.

His thoughts came to a stop and he felt more than a little hysterical.
Who was he? A third-string chemical researcher on one of dozens of
current NASA projects. Who was going to let him call a conference of
the nation's brass and instruct them to close down the moon program?

Nobody.

In the Civil Service hierarchy to which he belonged there was
absolutely no way on earth by which he could bring his story to the
attention of the people who could act on it.

No way at all. But he had to try.

He tried to reach the Director of NASA. The Director's secretary told
Jim the Director was out of town and could not be reached except for
emergency or other top-priority communications. Jim said that was
exactly the nature of his message. The Secretary told him to get his
Project Director to approve the message and an effort could be made to
get it through.

That meant Hennesey.

Hennesey laughed in his face, and told him that one more fantasy like
that would get him fired.

Jim had known that's the way it would be, but he had to try.

By this time, the Prospector had traveled more than ninety miles from
the last probe. It was far enough, Jim decided. They'd put down one
more probe, then--he didn't know where he'd go from there.

Sam saw the bleakness and bitterness on his face when he came into the
tracking station. "No luck?" said Sam.

"What do you think? Have you ever realized that there is no way
whatever for the ordinary citizen to get through with a message that
requires action at the top? Channels, supervisors' approvals, okays by
supervisors' supervisors--the only communication the top level has is
with itself; generals talk to other generals, Bureau Directors talk
to generals and other Bureau Directors, the President talks to his
advisors who talk only to each other. The communication barrier is
complete and absolute."

"I could have told you that," said Sam. "I've been here longer than you
have. But some of them may still read a newspaper now and then."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Call a news conference of the science editors and reporters of the
major press services and big-city newspapers. Your reputation is big
enough that they'll listen to you."

"You saw what they did to me last time!"

Sam shrugged. "Maybe you know a better way."

       *       *       *       *       *

Jim took his seat at the console and watched the slow progress of the
Prospector across the moon's surface. It was winding its way through
an area of small, low crags. Ahead was a smooth, level plain. Jim
determined to halt there and make the next probe.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Hennesey moving toward them. He
could think of nothing that would make the day more unpleasant than
Hennesey's presence.

The Project Director scanned the panels and the meters that showed the
distance traveled by the Prospector.

"Why have you moved the machine so far?" Hennesey demanded. "You've
used up valuable machine time that could have been used in additional
probes. We may be approaching the end of the useful life of the
Prospector very rapidly."

"I am aware of that," said Jim icily. "The stock of reagents aboard is
nearly exhausted. I wanted to make at least one comparison probe at a
considerable distance from our original site."

Hennesey grunted and remained silent, watching. Then, suddenly he cried
out, "Look out! You fool--!"

Jim had seen it, too. At the edge of the crags was a ten-foot wide
fissure spreading darkly on either side of the Prospector. The drives
of the machine were upon it before he realized it was there. In fact,
the crazy thought echoed in the back of his mind that it _wasn't_ there
an instant before.

He slammed his hand against the switches that sent out a reversing
signal to the drives of the Prospector. But it was too late. The worm
drives bit into nothingness as the machine toppled slowly at the edge
of the crevasse. And in that moment, as the image on the television
screen teetered crazily, Jim had the impression that he was looking
into the black depths of utter horror. There was a blackness oozing
and writhing faintly in the depths--that could have been thirty or
a hundred feet deep. But he had seen just such a black horror once
before.

When the EEG signals from the moon first smashed into his brain!

He glanced at Sam. Sam was staring in a kind of intense horror that
told Jim he recognized it, too.

The image tilted abruptly against the black moon sky. Then the screen
went dark. And Jim had the feeling that the blackness had closed over
him.

But Hennesey had sensed nothing of this. He was cursing and raging
beside Jim. "You blind, brainless fool! You wiped out a billion-dollar
experiment because you weren't looking! You're through, Cochran! Get
everything that's yours and be out of here in ten minutes!"

Hennesey whirled and strode away, his rage reeking through the
atmosphere of the room.

Jim stood up and moved to the back of the panel. He opened the plastic
doors and clipped the last ten feet from the spool of TV recording tape
and slipped it in his pocket. When he returned to the other side of the
console, Sam was waiting for him.

"Where are you going?" said Jim.

"With you."

"Where's that?"

"I don't think you know, but I do. I'll tag along and see if I'm right."

"You're crazy. Didn't you just hear Hennesey fire me?"

"Yeah. I quit at the same time."

"You're really crazy."

Jim had a few textbooks and scientific papers in his desk. He arranged
for one of his men to clean them out. He didn't feel that he could
endure remaining in the station any longer.

Tom Banning followed them out into the sunshine of the parking lot.
"I'm sorry," he said, "but it looked as if what happened back there was
rather inevitable."

"It was," said Jim. "I'd have kicked his teeth in sooner or later. It's
better this way."

"What will you do now?"

"Ask Sam. He seems to think he has some crazy idea of what I'm going to
do next. I sure don't."

"The news conference," said Sam. "You'd better call it right away
before news of your dismissal gets out. They may think you just want to
unload some sour grapes if they hear of that first."

"Yeah, I guess you're right. Will you back me up in the conference,
Tom?"

The doctor nodded. "Gladly. It's pretty hard to believe, but you've got
me believing."

       *       *       *       *       *

Jim was personally acquainted with most of the newsmen who showed up
for his conference. He had met them and helped them get stories on the
Prospector during the past two years. They were sympathetic toward him.

He began his story by reviewing his initial discovery of the difference
in moon elements. He explained the analysis and showed them samples of
the telemetry record. Then he eased slowly into his discovery of fossil
hydrocarbons and finally the living hydrocarbons. He watched carefully
as he moved deeper into the story. He didn't want to lose them here.

They stayed with him, incredulous but confident that he knew what he
was talking about. It was when he spoke of the fluctuating potential
measurements, that proved to be interpretable as EEG recordings that
he almost lost them. But he introduced Tom Banning quickly to verify
his statements. And Tom introduced the EEG machine itself. He offered
to demonstrate. A half dozen of the reporters tried it. _They_ had no
doubts, afterward.

"You can almost draw your own conclusions," said Jim in winding up the
conference. "That thing is out there in our sky. There's no doubt about
it. I've shown you what we know. Now let me tell you what I believe:

"There is some form of life in the moon. It is not merely _in_ the
moon. It _is_ the moon. I believe its bulk occupies almost the entire
volume of the moon. I believe this nemesis was spawned incalculable
eons ago in a time and a space that is literally outside our own. It
was driven out of that time and space by intelligent beings who could
not destroy it, but who could at least exile it in a state of dormancy.
Or perhaps they thought they had destroyed it and wanted not even the
remains in their own domain. Perhaps the craters of the moon were
caused by bombardment intended to destroy the thing.

"But it is not dead. It _was_ dormant. Now, our laser probings have
stirred it to feeble life. It made a deliberate effort to capture or
destroy the Prospector by opening a fissure beneath it. My TV film
recording proves that the fissure was not there previously.

"What are we to do about it? That is why I have called you here.
Consider that the science of the intelligences in the domain that
spawned this thing could not destroy it. What chance has our feeble
science and powers against such a force? Hydrogen bombs would probably
serve only to feed it the energy for which it is starved.

"We must cease our lunar exploration program at once. We can hope that
it is not too late. If it is not, this thing may relapse into the
dormancy from which it has been shaken. We can only hope.

"But if we persist in our explorations and our probings of the moon
we are certain to loose upon ourselves a living force that our entire
world of science will be helpless to overcome.

"We must stop the moon program now!"

       *       *       *       *       *

They kept him for another two hours with questions and demands for
further information. He gave them everything he knew, and when they
finally left, he felt that a sane and correct story of his findings
would be published. He waited for whatever results would be published
by the news services the following morning.

He waited.

There was nothing.

Eddie Fry called him two days later. Eddie was the reporter who knew
him best. "They killed the story," said Eddie. "We had to clear it with
government sources, and they persuaded every press association and
newspaper that knew about it to kill it. They said it would destroy the
national economy that was being built up on the space program. We tried
to make them believe it, Jim, but we couldn't do it. It was hard enough
to be convinced when we were listening to you. Second hand, it just
wouldn't go over. You really can't blame them.

"They're doing something else, too. They're really going to nail you
for this thing. A story is being released about your dismissal. It is
said that you were released for fantastic and unreliable theories and
for incompetence that resulted in the loss of the Prospector. I'm sorry
as hell, Jim. I wish we could kill that one, but there's not a thing we
can do for you."

"It's o.k., Eddie," said Jim. "I know how it is."

Crackpot. He was finished.

He called Allan at his base that night. His brother-in-law's voice was
icy as he answered. "What do you want, Jim?"

"Come down over the weekend, can you, Allan? I've got something
important I want to talk to you about."

"Listen, Jim. Stay away from me! Don't call; don't try to see me. Don't
send me letters or telegrams. Nothing! Do you understand that?"

"What the devil--?"

"They're investigating me. Because of you. They want to know how much
I've been listening to your crackpot notions. They're afraid maybe it
will produce an instability that will make me unfit for the moon trip.
If I lose out, it will be because of you!"

"That's what I want to talk to you about. Allan, you've got to listen
to me! You won't get off the moon alive--"

The phone went dead. Jim hung up slowly and went back to the living
room where Mary sat in tense, white fear. She had heard Jim's side of
the conversation. She guessed what Allan had said.

"It's no use," said Jim. "Don't try to reach him. He'll hate you
forever."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was no use to run, but they ran anyway. This was what Sam meant when
he said he knew what Jim was going to do. Jim Cochran was completely
blackballed in his own profession. As he said, he couldn't have gotten
a job stirring with a wooden paddle in a soap factory.

Tom Banning and his family went with them. They went as far north as
they could and finally stopped running on the edge of the Canadian
wilderness. They pooled their funds and bought some wheat land and some
cattle stock and tried to stop thinking beyond the end of each day.

They were grateful for the absence of television, but they kept a
radio. Through it, they learned when the Apollo finally took off with
its three-man crew. They followed its two and a half day journey
through space and heard the voice of Captain Allan Wright announce they
were in lunar orbit.

A few hours later the landing capsule was disengaged from the
spaceship and Captain Wright and William Chambers rode it down. Their
voices were heard in exultation as they announced their first steps on
the surface of the moon.

It was night in northern Canada when the landing was made. Jim and Sam
and Tom and their families were outside watching the full moon, trying
to imagine how it was up there. From the house they heard the radio
relaying the voices of the astronauts. The voices were relayed to earth
through the more powerful transmitter of the orbiting Apollo, but as
the spaceship circled the moon the voices of the men on the surface
were lost. Then they returned once more as the ship came over their
horizon.

For five orbits their voices came and went as they described their
sensations and exulted in the first minutes of their achievement. Then,
on the sixth orbit, there were no voices. There was only the sudden,
shrill cry of the third crewman, Don Anderson, who manned the orbiting
ship.

"Allan! Bill! Apollo to capsule: Come in, please. Bill--where are
you--I can't even see your capsule. I'm passing right over the spot.
Apollo to Base: I can't locate the capsule through the telescope. It
looks like a big crevasse right where the capsule was, but it wasn't
there before. Allan--Bill--Come in! Come in!"

Jim heard the sudden sob that shook Mary. He put his arm about her
shoulders and led her into the house.

Don Anderson remained in lunar orbit for two more days. Then he was
ordered home. He landed safely.

There were expressions of national sorrow over the unexplained loss of
the two astronauts, but plans were renewed for the next voyage. The
President said that sacrifices must be expected if this great goal
were to be achieved, and that it would be a betrayal of those who had
already given their lives if the work were to stop now.

In Canada that winter, Jim was sure the wolves howled on cold, moonlit
nights more than ever before. And something new was happening to the
moon. The silver light was taking on a faint tint of orange. The radio
told of a very learned report by some astronomer who spoke obscurely of
changes in albedo and percentages of atmospheric dust and angstroms of
sunlight. Any fool could see the moon was changing color.

Jim listened to the wolves howling in the forest, and he thought of
Cramer's Pond when he was a boy, and of a machine tumbling into a
crevasse where a terrible darkness lay, and he wondered how long it
would be.


                                THE END





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