City on the Moon

CHAPTER I. THE TRAP

THERE were clankings and motor noises inside the sealed body of the moon-jeep, but these were the only sounds anywhere. The huge metal wheels rolled over stone, and inside the jeep the din was audible, while outside there was utter silence. The great vehicle, with its dangling load, moved with the noiselessness of a phantom so far as the landscape was concerned. There could be no noise whatsoever outside the airtight tube which was the jeep's cabin. This was the moon, a world without air.

The vehicle moved among mountains, crawling on twenty-foot, spidery wheels over the fantastic terrain. The time was night, and the full Earth hung overhead, embedded in a sky of numberless, untwinkling stars. Earthlight poured down, casting shadows, and the moon-jeep glittered faintly as it moved among pinnacles and potholes in a nightmare of violence made real. This was the lunar surface, the scene of an ancient bombardment when meteors and mountains fell from the sky and ravaged the face of a world that was already dead. The moonscape was pure confusion; it was chaos; it was sheer desolation.

But in the jeep's cabin, there was comfort in the sighing sound of the motors. The clankings and clatterings transmitted through the wheels brought a sense of reassurance. There was no feeling of normality, of course. For one thing, weight was only one-sixth of weight on Earth. Joe Kenmore, driving the jeep, would have weighed only thirty pounds on a spring scale here, instead of one hundred and eighty.

He said over his shoulder, "It's strange that one feels at peace here—safer than in the City. But this is restful! People should get away from crowded places once in a while."

The last was irony. Civilian City was three dust-heaps, lying some forty-odd tortuous miles away through the mountains. Moondust, piled untidily over inflated half-balloons, held those giant air bubbles safely confined— by its weight. The same moondust insulated the domes from the unbelievable cold of the two-week-long lunar night, as well as from the furnace heat produced by the succeeding fourteen days of glaring sun, untempered by air or clouds.

A hundred and fifty men lived and worked and squabbled in the City. In addition, there were spotter stations where radar marked the fall of the drone-rockets that brought supplies for the City from Earth. Then there were the military missile bases, which were the first footholds of mankind on any natural celestial body that was not man-made. Their positions were top secret. And beyond farside of the moon, remote in emptiness, was the Space Laboratory. This was the reason for Civilian City, the moon-jeep, the presence and Kenmore and Moreau in it, and for the assorted frantic happenings in the City and outside of it.

Moreau said abruptly, "But I do not feel safe. I have another sort of feeling, and I do not like it. There is no reason behind it, but I find myself thinking of my sins. That is a bad sign!"

Kenmore frowned. Sometimes Moreau was right. He was a member of the French group in the City—which had to be international if it was to exist at all. The American military missile bases on the moon were sources of hysterical distrust among the non-American nations. These bases could direct guided missiles anywhere on Earth, and no one could have the slightest hope of intercepting them. American bases kept peace on Earth, but they hardly produced good will among men. Happenings in Civilian City proved that internationalization of the Space Laboratory project hadn't ended tension.

"I am thinking," Moreau said wryly, "that there have been four jeeps—on missions like ours—which never got back to the City. One of them, certainly, had been sabotaged by some one of our fellow citizens in the City. The breakdown of the second was at least suspicious. And the trails of the other two led into rockslides—somewhat improbable, because those routes had been shaken into stability by explosives. I do not think that any of those things were accidents, and I am uneasy. But I do not know why I am uneasy right now."

Joe Kenmore grunted and drove on. The operation of a moon-jeep really required four or five hands, extrasensory perception, the gift of prophecy, and three-way vision in the driver. Moon-jeeps were extremely exotic vehicles, developed from the straddle trucks of Earth for use in airless frigidity. Each of their four wheels revolved at the bottom of a stalk; each could be separately steered, and separately lifted over obstacles. The tubelike cabin was raised some thirty feet off the surface; it contained an insulated cargo compartment and a vast assortment of apparatus. Crawling among senselessly unflung masses of stone, among craters and debris and the craters-within-craters of the moon, this jeep looked rather like a silvery stick-insect on wheels. Its present load was an unmanned cargo-rocket from Earth, one which had fallen beyond these mountains and which it carried to Civilian City slug underneath its cabin, between its wheels.

"We ought to be all right," said Kenmore. "Were retracing our own trail."

The curious splashed track of jeep wheels in dust was plain to be seen in the headlight-glare. There was, of course, moondust everywhere. The violent alternations of high temperature and low, between day and night, had cracked and splintered the surface stone everywhere, and then had fragmented the shards until almost every level place bore a thick, deep layer of dust that was as fine as talcum. Below some of the slopes there were even lakes of dust—and a dust-lake was a trap for men and all their machines. A jeep would sink into it as in quicksand, without hope of getting out. Any trail should last forever; there was no wind to disturb the least impression.

The moon-jeep trundled on, under a monster jagged monolith and around a pothole that extended down indefinitely. The outward trail was perfectly plain. It had been chosen on the basis of photographs taken from space, and since the jeep had traversed this trail once in safety, it should be perfectly safe for return.

"I am very kind to everyone in the City," added Moreau ruefully. "But still I fear that somebody might kill me as a matter of politics. Do you not feel something of the sort?"

Kenmore grunted again. There was a needle-shaped mass of stone—toppled as long as a hundred million years ago but still unweathered—in the path of the jeep. He worked the vehicle carefully up to the fallen giant. It would have to be stepped over—one wheel at a time must be lifted and carefully put down on the other side.

The jeep stopped, facing the barrier at an angle of some forty-five degress. Directly beyond the obstacle there was a monstrous wall of stone a good half-mile high, gleaming in the earthlight. Partly gleaming; there were shadows of absolute blackness where the outward-leaning portions screened it. The former trail of the jeep approached the cliff and swung off to the right, paralleling it. Kenmore, frowning in concentration, began the lifting of the jeep's right-hand front wheel. It would be raised, the jeep moved forward, the wheel put down, and then the rear swung around to permit a lifting-over of the right rear wheel. Then, sidling for the purpose, the left front and left rear wheels would follow—and the jeep would go on.

There was an intolerable flash of blinding, perfectly white light—brighter than earthshine, brighter than Earth itself overhead, and brighter than the multiple headlights of the jeep. For an instant all the moonscape, all the jagged, tumbled, incredibly harsh and malignant area about the jeep was lighted as brightly as if in daylight. Then night fell again.

There was no sound, but the moon-jeep quivered from an impact transmitted through its wheels. Kenmore snapped levers home, and the jeep's three solidly touching wheels spun at the suddenness with which power reached them. The vehicle itself reeled as it plunged backward; then the partly raised wheel touched surface and the jeep fairly leaped to the rear. Almost instantly it spun about, on a point of pivot underneath itself, and darted away from the fallen monolith.

"You were right," said Kenmore.

The jeep plunged on. Its wheels clanged and bounced on the dust-covered stone beneath them; its headlights glared ahead. But the sensation of the ride was essentially that of a dream. In one-sixth gravity, no object falls fast. Upward bumps were abrupt, but landings were gentle; on the moon, an object falls less than three feet during its first second of free descent. This flight was like a nightmare.

"What . . ."

"Look behind!" Kenmore snapped.

Moreau flung himself to a port, stared, and his breath left him: The half-mile-high, light-streaked precipice was crumbling before his eyes. It bulged; it leaned outward. Swiftly spreading cracks ran everywhere; gigantic masses of stone stirred in movement which was the more horrible because there should not ever be any such motion on the moon—movement which was not the motion of men or their machines.

It seemed that the cliff did not so much crumble downward as outward. It loomed above the fleeing jeep and shut out the stars; then it came down like the paw of some utterly monstrous creature.

But there was enormous deliberation in all save the frenzied flight of the jeep; the stony masses descended in slow motion. Objects on the moon fall approximately two and a half feet in the first second of fall, and roughly five in the next, and a little more than ten in the third. The flying fragments of the cliff seemed almost to float above the racing vehicle; but they descended, too, and their mass was monstrous. Kenmore somehow spared a hand to flip the controls that would close steel shutters over all the ports save those before him. They were meant for use in daylight against the baking heat, but they might protect the plastic ports.

Something hit a wheel; something incredible brushed the rearmost part of the cabin. Stones, rocks, boulders flew on before it, and settled almost deliberately to the ground—and the violence of their impact was proved by their splintering even as they bounced.

The jeep veered to one side to avoid a mass as big as a house, which landed a hundred yards ahead. It was too big to bounce, brittle with the more-than-liquid-air frigidity. The mass disintegrated as it touched, and instants later the jeep jolted crazily as its wheels ran over the spreading fragments.

Then the spotty earthlight itself—filtering through hurtling debris—was blotted out. Kenmore swore as something taller than the jeep hurtled down before the driving-ports, and rolled onward, shedding parts of itself as it rolled. It seemed to waddle and carom between stony walls on either side. The clamor of stones falling on the jeep's steel body rose to an uproar in which one could not hear himself think.

Kenmore braked, his face twisted in a grimace; then he followed the monster closely. And suddenly the drumming of rock-splinters diminished. It almost ended —then there was an outrageous crash as some unseen missile struck. Afterward, there were merely sharp patterings of particles ranging from the size of one's fist to sand grains; then silence. In the sudden quiet a wheel thumped violently; the last impact had been upon it. Kenmore tensed, noting how bad the thump sounded. In any case, repair was impossible. Presently he stopped.