Jeff Sutton (29 page)

He
looked at the fallen form for a long time. Richter had crossed his frontier. At
last he turned and started toward Red Dog. Adam Crag, the Man in the Moon. Now
he was really the Man in the Moon.
The only Man. Colonel
Crag, Commanding Officer, Pickering Field.
General
Crag of the First Moon expeditionary Force.
Adam Crag, Emperor of Luna.
He laughed—a mirthless laugh. Damned if he couldn't be anything he wanted to
be—on the Moon.

The sun climbed above the rim of Arzachel
transforming the vast depressed interior of the crater into a caldron of heat
and glare. In the morning of the lunar day the, rock structure^ rising from the
plain cast lengthy black shadows over the ashy floor—a mosaic in black and
white. Crag kept busy. He stripped the drones of their scant amount of usable
supplies—mainly oxygen cylinders from Baker—and set up a new communication post
in Red Dog. In the first hours of the new morning Cotch named the saboteur.
Crag listened, wearily. Just then he wasn't interested in the fact that an
alert intelligence agent had doubted that a man of 5' 5" could have been a
star basketball player, as the Superintendent of the Maple Hill Orphanage had
said. He expressed his feelings by shutting off the communicator in the middle
of the Colonel's explanation.

The
sun climbed, slowly, until it hung overhead, ending a morning which had lasted
seven, earth days in length. At midday the shadows had all but vanished. He
finished marking the last of three crosses and stepped back to survey his
work. He read the names at the head of the mounds: Max Prochaska, Gordon NageL
Otto Richter. Each was followed by a date. Out on the plain were other graves,
those of the crewmen of Bandit and Red Dog. He had marked each mound with a
small pile of stones. Later it struck him that someday there might be peace.
Someday, someone might want to look at one of those piles of stone. He returned
and added a notation to each.

The sun moved imperceptibly across the sky.
It seemed to hover above the horizon for a long while before slipping beyond
the rim. Night seemed eternal. Crag worked and slept and waited. He measured
his oxygen, rationed his food, and planned. He was tough. He'd survive. If only
to read Cotch off, he promised himself savagely.

The sun came up again. In
time it set Rose and set.

Crag waited.

He
watched the silvery ship let down. It backed down slowly, gracefully, coming to
rest on the ashy plain with scarcely a jar. Somehow he didn't feel jubilant He
waited, gravely, watching the figures that came from the ship. He wasn't
surprised that the first one was Colonel Michael Cotch.

Later
they gathered in the small crew room of the Astronaut, the name of the first
atom-powered spaceship. They waited solemnly—Cotch and Crag, the pilot, and two
crewmen—waiting for the thin man to speak. Just now he was sitting at the small
pulldown chow table peering at some papers, records of the moon expedition.
Finally he looked up.

"It
seems to me that your Nation's claim to the Moon is justified," he said.
The words were fateful. The thin man's name was Fredrick Cunter. He was also
Secretary-General of the United Nations.