50 Short Science Fiction Tales, page 25
Well, we’d covered the unforgivable blunder, though not easily, and now we could get down to the real business of the project. You know, of course, about the A-bomb, H-bomb, and C-bomb because information that they existed had been declassified. You don’t know about the other weapons being devised—and neither did we, reasonably enough, since they weren’t our business—but we had been given properly guarded notification that they were in the works. Project Hush was set up to counter the new weapons.
Our goal was not just to reach the Moon. We had done that on June 24, 1967 with an unmanned ship that carried instruments to report back data on soil, temperature, cosmic rays and so on. Unfortunately, it was put out of commission by a rock slide.
An unmanned rocket would be useless against the new weapons. We had to get to the Moon before any other country did and set up a permanent station—an armed one
—and do it without anybody else knowing about it.
I guess you see now why we on ( damn the name!) Project Hush were so concerned about security. But we felt pretty sure, before we took off, that we had plugged every possible leak.
We had, all right. Nobody even knew we had raised ship.
We landed at the northern tip of Mare Nubium, just off Regiomontanus, and, after planting a flag with appropriate throat-catching ceremony, had swung into the realities of the tasks we had practiced on so many dry runs back on Earth.
Major Monroe Gridley prepared the big rocket, with its tiny cubicle of living space, for the return journey to Earth which he alone would make.
Lieutenant-colonel Thomas Hawthorne painstakingly examined our provisions and portable quarters for any damage that might have been incurred in landing.
And I, Colonel Benjamin Rice, first commanding officer of Army Base No. 1 on the Moon, dragged crate after enormous crate out of the ship on my aching academic back and piled them in the spot two hundred feet away where the plastic dome would be built.
We all finished at just about the same time, as per schedule, and went into Phase Two.
Monroe and I started work on building the dome. It was a simple prefab affair, but big enough to require an awful lot of assembling. Then, after it was built, we faced the real problem—getting all the complex internal machinery in place and in operating order.
Meanwhile, Tom Hawthorne took his plump self off in the single-seater rocket which, up to then, had doubled as a lifeboat.
The schedule called for him to make a rough three-hour scouting survey in an ever-widening spiral from our dome.
This had been regarded as a probable waste of time, rocket fuel, and manpower—but a necessary precaution. He was supposed to watch for such things as bug-eyed monsters out for a stroll on the Lunar landscape. Basically, however, Tom’s survey was intended to supply extra geological and astronomical meat for the report which Monroe was to carry back to Army Headquarters on Earth.
Tom was back in forty minutes. His round face, inside its transparent bubble helmet, was fish-belly white. And so were ours, once he told us what he’d seen.
He had seen another dome.
“The other side of Mare Nubium—in the Riphaen Mountains,” he babbled excitedly. “It’s a little bigger than ours, and it’s a little flatter on top. And it’s not translucent, either, with splotches of different colors here and there—
it’s a dull, dark, heavy gray. But that’s all there is to see.”
“No markings on the dome?” I asked worriedly. “No signs of anyone—or anything—around it?”
“Neither, Colonel.” I noticed he was calling me by my rank for the first time since the trip started, which meant he was saying in effect, “Man, have you got a decision to make!”
“Hey, Tom,” Monroe put in. “Couldn’t be just a regularly shaped bump in the ground, could it?”
“I’m a geologist, Monroe. I can distinguish artificial from natural topography. Besides—” he looked up—”I just remembered something I left out. There’s a brand-new tiny crater near the dome—the kind usually left by a rocket exhaust.”
“Rocket exhaust?” I seized on that. “Rockets, eh?” Tom grinned a little sympathetically. “Spaceship exhaust, I should have said. You can’t tell from the crater what kind of propulsive device these characters are using. It’s not the same kind of crater our rear-jets leave, if that helps any.” Of course it didn’t. So we went into our ship and had a council of war. And I do mean war. Both Tom and Monroe were calling me Colonel in every other sentence. I used their first names every chance I got.
Still, no one but me could reach a decision. About what to do, I mean.
“Look,” I said at last, “here are the possibilities. They know we are here—either from watching us land a couple of hours ago or from observing Tom’s scoutship—or they do not know we are here. They are either humans from Earth—in which case they are in all probability enemy nationals—or they are alien creatures from another planet
—in which case they may be friends, enemies or what-have-you. I think common sense and standard military procedure demand that we consider them hostile until we have evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, we proceed with extreme caution, so as not to precipitate an interplanetary war with potentially friendly Martians, or whatever they are.
“All right. It’s vitally important that Army Headquarters be informed of this immediately. But since Moon-to-Earth radio is still on the drawing boards, the only way we can get through is to send Monroe back with the ship. If we do, we run the risk of having our garrison force, Tom and me, captured while he’s making the return trip. In that case, their side winds up in possession of important information concerning our personnel and equipment, while our side has only the bare knowledge that somebody or something else has a base on the Moon. So our primary need is more information.
“Therefore, I suggest that I sit in the dome on one end of a telephone hookup with Tom, who will sit in the ship, his hand over the firing button, ready to blast off for Earth the moment he gets the order from me. Monroe will take the single-seater down to the Riphaen Mountains, landing as close to the other dome as he thinks safe. He will then proceed the rest of the way on foot, doing the best scouting job he can in a spacesuit.
“He will not use his radio, except for agreed-upon nonsense syllables to designate landing the single-seater, coming upon the dome by foot, and warning me to tell Tom to take off. If he’s captured, remembering that the first purpose of a scout is acquiring and transmitting knowledge of the enemy, he will snap his suit radio on full volume and pass on as much data as time and the enemy’s reflexes permit. How does that sound to you?”
They both nodded. As far as they were concerned, the command decision had been made. But I was sitting under two inches of sweat.
“One question,” Tom said. “Why did you pick Monroe for the scout?”
“I was afraid you’d ask that,” I told him. “We’re three extremely unathletic Ph.D’s who have been in the Army since we finished our schooling. There isn’t too much choice. But I remembered that Monroe is half Indian—
Arapahoe, isn’t it, Monroe?—and I’m hoping blood will tell.”
“Only trouble, Colonel,” Monroe said slowly as he rose,
“is that I’m one- fourth Indian and even that … Didn’t I ever tell you that my great-grandfather was the only Arapahoe scout who was with Custer at the Little Big Horn? He’d been positive Sitting Bull was miles away.
However, I’ll do my best. And if I heroically don’t come back, would you please persuade the Security Officer of our section to clear my name for use in the history books?
Under the circumstances, I think it’s the least he could do.” I promised to do my best, of course.
After he took off, I sat in the dome over the telephone connection to Tom and hated myself for picking Monroe to do the job. But I’d have hated myself just as much for picking Tom. And if anything happened and I had to tell Tom to blast off, I’d probably be sitting here in the dome all by myself after that, waiting …
“Broz neggle! ” came over the radio in Monroe’s resonant voice. He had landed the single-seater.
I didn’t dare use the telephone to chat with Tom in the ship, for fear I might miss an important word or phrase from our scout. So I sat and sat and strained my ears. After a while, I heard “Mishgashu! ” which told me that Monroe was in the neighborhood of the other dome and was creeping toward it under cover of whatever boulders were around.
And then, abruptly, I heard Monroe yell my name and there was a terrific clattering in my headphones. Radio interference! He’d been caught, and whoever had caught him had simultaneously jammed his suit transmitter with a larger transmitter from the alien dome.
Then there was silence.
After a while, I told Tom what had happened. He just said, “Poor Monroe.” I had a good idea of what his expression was like.
“Look, Tom,” I said, “if you take off now, you still won’t have anything important to tell. After capturing Monroe, whatever’s in that other dome will come looking for us, I think. I’ll let them get close enough for us to learn something of their appearance—at least if they’re human or non-human. Any bit of information about them is important. I’ll shout it up to you and you’ll still be able to take off in plenty of time. All right?”
“You’re the boss, Colonel,” he said in a mournful voice.
“Lots of luck.”
And then there was nothing to do but wait. There was no oxygen system in the dome yet, so I had to squeeze up a sandwich from the food compartment in my suit. I sat there, thinking about the expedition. Nine years, and all that careful secrecy, all that expenditure of money and mind-cracking research—and it had come to this. Waiting to be wiped out, in a blast from some unimaginable weapon. I understood Monroe’s last request. We often felt we were so secret that our immediate superiors didn’t even want us to know what we were working on. Scientists are people—
they wish for recognition, too. I was hoping the whole expedition would be written up in the history books, but it looked unpromising.
Two hours later, the scout ship landed near the dome. The lock opened and, from where I stood in the open door of our dome, I saw Monroe come out and walk toward me.
I alerted Tom and told him to listen carefully. “It may be a trick—he might be drugged… .”
He didn’t act drugged, though—not exactly. He pushed his way past me and sat down on a box to one side of the dome. He put his booted feet up on another, smaller box.
“How are you, Ben?” he asked. “How’s every little thing?”
I grunted. “Well? ” I know my voice skittered a bit.
He pretended puzzlement. “Well what? Oh, I see what you mean. The other dome—you want to know who’s in it.
You have a right to be curious, Ben. Certainly. The leader of a top-secret expedition like this—Project Hush they call us, huh, Ben—finds another dome on the Moon. He thinks he’s been the first to land on it, so naturally he wants to—”
“Major Monroe Gridley!” I rapped out. “You will come to attention and deliver your report. Now!” Honestly, I felt my neck swelling up inside my helmet.
Monroe just leaned back against the side of the dome.
“That’s the Army way of doing things,” he commented admiringly. “Like the recruits say, there’s a right way, a wrong way and an Army way. Only there are other ways, too.” He chuckled. “Lots of other ways.”
“He’s off,” I heard Tom whisper over the telephone.
“Ben, Monroe has gone and blown his stack.”
“They aren’t extraterrestrials in the other dome, Ben,” Monroe volunteered in a sudden burst of sanity. “No, they’re human, all right, and from Earth. Guess where.”
“I’ll kill you,” I warned him. “I swear I’ll kill you, Monroe. Where are they from—Russia, China, Argentina?” He grimaced. “What’s so secret about those places? Go on!—guess again.”
I stared at him long and hard. “The only place else—”
“Sure,” he said. “You got it, Colonel. The other dome is owned and operated by the Navy. The goddam United States Navy!”
The Great Judge
A. E. Van Vogt
“Judgment,” said the rad, “in the case of Douglas Aird, tried for treason on August 2nd, last—”
With a trembling movement of his fingers, Aird turned the volume control higher. The next words blared at him:
“—That Douglas Aird do surrender himself one week from this day, that is, on September 17, 2460 A.D. to his neighborhood patrol station, that he then be taken to the nearest converter, there to be put to death—” Click!
He had no conscious memory of shutting off the rad. One instant the sound roared through his apartment, the next there was dead silence. Aird sank back in his chair and stared with sick eyes through the transparent walls out upon the shining roofs of The Judge’s City. All these weeks he had known there was no chance. The scientific achievements that, he had tried to tell himself, would weigh the balance in his favor—even as he assessed their value to the race, he had realized that the Great Judge would not consider them from the same viewpoint as himself.
He had made the fatal error of suggesting in the presence of “friends” that a mere man like Douglas Aird could govern as well as the immortal Great Judge, and that in fact it might be a good idea if someone less remote from the needs of the mass of the people have a chance to promulgate decrees.
A little less restriction, he had urged, and a little more individuality. With such abandon he had spoken on the day that he succeeded in transferring the nervous impulses of a chicken into the nervous system of a dog.
He had attempted to introduce the discovery as evidence that he was in an excited and abnormal state of mind. But the magistrate pronounced the reason irrelevant, immaterial and facetious. He refused to hear what the discovery was, ruling coldly:
“The official science investigator of the Great Judge will call on you in due course, and you will then turn your invention over to him complete with adequate documentation.”
Aird presumed gloomily that the investigator would call in a day or so. He toyed with the possibility of destroying his papers and instruments. Shudderingly, he rejected that form of defiance. The Great Judge’s control of life was so complete that he permitted his enemies to remain at large until the day of their execution. It was a point made much of by the Great Judge’s propaganda department.
Civilization, it was said, had never before attained so high a level of freedom. But it wouldn’t do to try the patience of the Great Judge by destroying an invention. Aird had a sharp conviction that less civilized methods might be used on him if he failed to carry through the farce.
Sitting there in his apartment, surrounded by every modern convenience, Aird sighed. He would spend his last week alive in any luxury he might choose. It was the final refinement of mental torture, to be free, to have the feeling that if only he could think of something he might succeed in escaping. Yet he knew escape was impossible. If he climbed into his hopjet, he’d have to swoop in at the nearest patrol station, and have his electronic registration
“plates” stamped with a signal. Thereafter, his machine would continuously give off vibrations automatically advising patrol vessels of the time and space limitations of his permit.
Similar restrictions controlled his person. The electronic instrument “printed” on his upper right arm could be activated by any central, which would start a burning sensation of gradually increasing intensity.
There was absolutely no escape from the law of the Great Judge.
Aird climbed to his feet wearily. Might as well get his material ready for the science investigator. It was too bad he wouldn’t have an opportunity to experiment with higher life forms but—
Aird stopped short in the doorway of his laboratory. His body throbbed with the tremendousness of the idea that had slammed into his mind. He began to quiver. He leaned weakly against the door jamb, then slowly straightened.
“That’s it! ” He spoke the words aloud, his voice low and intense, simultaneously utterly incredulous and hopeful to the point of madness. It was the mounting hope that brought a return of terrible weakness. He collapsed on the rug just inside the laboratory, and lay there muttering to himself, the special insanities of an electronician:
“… have to get a larger grid, and more liquid and—” Special Science Investigator George Mollins returned to the Great Judge’s Court and immediately asked for a private interview with the Great Judge.
“Tell him,” he told the High Bailiff of the Court, “that I have come across a very important scientific discovery. He will know what is meant if you simply say ‘Category AA.’
”
While he waited to be received, the Science Investigator arranged his instruments for readier transport, and then he stood idly looking around him at the dome-vaulted anteroom. Through a transparent wall, he could see the gardens below. In the profusion of greenery, he caught the glint of a white skirt, which reminded him that the Great Judge was reputed to have at least seven reigning beauties in his harem at all times.
“This way, sir. The Great Judge will receive you.” The man who sat behind the desk looked about thirty-five years old. Only his eyes and his mouth seemed older. From bleak blue eyes and with thin-lipped silence, the immortal, ever-young Great Judge studied his visitor.
The latter wasted no time. The moment the door shut behind him, he pressed the button that released a fine spray of gas straight at the Great Judge. The man behind the desk simply sagged in his chair.
