One Against the Moon (7 page)

Robin drank in the scene, the view of another world, that world which has dazzled the dreamers of Earth for thousands of years. These might be his last moments, but he could not be denied the saturation of his senses.

The rocket was fast heading down toward a point near the center. The Moon was spreading out, filling the view, and the rocket's slow rotation no longer brought anything into view but moonscape, a constant shifting view, with wonders upon wonders moving into his eye's scope.

Robin drew back a moment, rubbed his arms, scratched his legs. He felt himself tingling, wondered if it were his nerves. He felt itchy, hoped his nerves would not give way. He thought to himself, I may have only minutes now. I shall watch till the end. Then he heard a faint, faint noise.

From somewhere there was a humming. The merest shadow of a hum, and Robin listened to it, startled. The humming rose in pitch, it was no dream, and as he sat, mouth open, amazed, there was a thin, high-pitched screaming outside the rocket and he suddenly began to feel hot.

Robin had but a second in which to think to himself, There's an atmosphere and we're burning up, when there came a new sound. A sort of
bloop
from over his head, a snapping noise, and something seemed to grab the rocket and jerk it upside down violently.

Robin was tossed in a sharp somersault, banging against the original floor of his compartment in a jumble of arms and legs. He sat up and realized that he was sitting—not floating—but actually sitting
against gravity's pull
! He scrambled onto his knees, peeped through his peephole.

The sky was back in view, the Moon was below the falling ship and he could see the edge of a huge, circular orange mass above him, straining and pulling. It was the parachute from the nose of the rocket. It was the orange parachute designed to land the instrument nose and the test animals safely in the New Mexico desert. And it had been set to open automatically upon the pressure of air when falling.

There was an atmosphere around the Moon then ... a thin, thin one, but the delicate detonator of the chute had functioned. The great hemispheric mass of delicate nylon had opened, had found a purchase, and was dragging the rocket back from a disastrous burn-out.

Robin breathed a sigh of relief, strained his eyes to see the moonscape again. The rocket was still falling, mighty fast it seemed. He could see the moonscape rise out, expand to fill the view. The rocket was warm now, definitely still heating from the thin friction. It vibrated and whistled but it swung in no breeze. It was moving too fast. In that almost unnoticeable belt of tenuous air there would be no winds that could deflect it. The parachute was open, but the air was not thick enough to do more than slow it down too gradually for it to be saved.

It would, he realized, still crash into the surface with a deadly force. It would hit like a shell from a cannon, and the explorers of the far future would have their mysterious fragments of tooled metal to speculate on.

Below him Robin saw the jagged mountain peaks reaching up for him into the dark black sky. He scanned it, remembering his Moon books, remembering the cold photos taken by distant Terrestrial cameras and the careful diagrams and names given by men long dead. He was hitting near the center of the Moon, a little above it, and the crater whose walls were reaching up ... why he could even name it. He grinned wryly. It would be Theophilus, and it seemed he would miss it, hit somewhere near it in a bay of the so-called Sea of Tranquillity.

Rushing up toward him, Theophilus was no peaceful Greek ancient. It was a barren, toothed, rocky edge, miles up, without the snow that makes our mountains majestic, without a trace of the forests that conceal a mountain's jagged sides, without even the gentle weathering of rain and water.

And the Sea of Tranquillity—a dark, wrinkled plain that looked as if it had gone through the agonies of torture ages past. The marks of almost-vanished volcanoes on it, pale circular rings like pocks of burst bubbles, rambling ridges, and ugly cracks, and here and there domes rising gray out of the surface, like the tops of giant bubbles working their way out of the dry and flaky crust.

Robin watched in dread fascination. He heard the whistling and shrieking of the rocket like a demon in torment. He himself was burning and itching as he was being baked, although he felt no fever. The rocket was warm but getting no warmer. The topmost peak of Theophilus was rushing up into his sky like a fast-growing stone geyser.

He watched it shoot up, saw it grow, saw the ground become clearer and clearer, each ghastly detail spreading out, assuming three-dimension reality. Now the peak was on a level with his eyes, now it was beyond him, and he was in the last few seconds of his fall.

The rocket seemed to be slowing slightly. The atmosphere was possibly getting a trifle thicker at the surface, enough to prolong the agony a minute or two or three longer. Above him the parachute strained and twisted. But still the rocket was falling too fast. It rushed down, straining to complete its act of affinity with a new gravity, as if tired of its brief period of interplanetary freedom, and anxious to pledge allegiance to a new gravitational master.

Below, the moonscape was coming up fast. Robin could see well enough to begin to speculate where exactly he would hit. There was a small circle that must have been a crater scar. There were several dark lines that might be a network of cracks. And there was a dome.

He remembered those domes. They had been quite a recent discovery too. Not easily seen until latter-day instruments showed the surface of the Moon dotted with these odd bumps. Their nature was still a mystery.

It looked as if Robin would find out the hard way what their construction was. For now he was clearly heading directly for the center of the one below him. A bubble-top pushing out from the plain, hard and shiny like lava, glistening in the sun against the gray and dusty surface of the plain around it.

Theophilus's wall was already on the horizon, high and towering. And now Robin realized how terribly fast the rocket was still falling. The mountain was a measuring stick and it was fearful.

There was a moment of dreadful suspense as the rocket raced to a bull's eye on the upthrust center of the dome. The rounded surface rushed up.

Robin flattened himself against the padding, clutched his head in his hands, and stiffened himself. The rocket hummed against the thin air, it vibrated against the parachute, there was a terrible split second of shock when the bullet-shaped structure of the rocket's cargo nose made its contact with its Lunar target, and then a clap of sound in Robin's ear like a blockbuster going off.

Robin had no time to wonder why he had not been instantly killed by the crash, because the explosion on hitting the surface of the dome was followed instantly by a tremendous roaring sound that surrounded the entire rocket nose. This was in turn accompanied by a powerful pressure on the rocket, which threw Robin against the nose-end cushioning and held him there.

The pressure was not steady, changing as the roaring itself changed, with sudden bursts of sound, convulsive shoves, and changes in pitch. The rocket was being slowed by a terrific outward burst of gases, gases that must have been imprisoned in a huge volcanic bubble whose outermost surface was the dome, so mysterious to Terrestrial observers. By bursting through the thin lava shell, Robin's rocket had released these pent-up gases and was boring its way down on its still rapid momentum against the pressure of this column of gas.

Robin did not know this at the time, though he figured it out later. At the time, he had all he could do to keep himself from being battered black-and-blue by the jolting rocket. He kept his head clutched tightly in his arms, rode with the bumps and roars, and tried to keep his breath from being knocked out of his lungs.

There was another violent shock and crack and again the rocket bounced to a new flow of gases. It had slammed through one huge bubble, breaking through the bottom shell only to burst into a lower pocket of gas. The roaring subsided to a lower pitch as the new gases did not find the near-vacuum of the surface that the first gas bubble had opened upon. The rocket fell steadily, bursting through a third, and then a fourth such bubble. It was clear that the surface of the Moon, at least in that area, was a mass of congealed gas pockets, a honeycomb of thin-walled lava bubbles, perhaps quite deep.

The rocket was almost entirely devoid of its original space momentum by the time it hit the bottom of the last bubble, snapped the thin crust, and fell through it. This time there was a sudden hissing around the battered nose and a warmth began to flow through the body of the rocket. It was enveloped in a belt of hot steam through which it fell several hundred feet and then hit something with a loud splashing noise. The sound vanished as the rocket sank deep into the new substance, came to a halt, and bobbed back upward.

Robin had gotten hold of himself after the third bubble and was hanging on, mentally trying to estimate what had happened. This last sound had been familiar. It must have been water, and the bobbing back of the rocket to the surface confirmed his views. He felt the rocket bounce a couple of times and then subside to a gentle rocking and rolling.

Robin held on for a moment, getting his balance. In some ways the new motion was more disturbing than all that had gone before—the cylindrical body of the rocket, with its blunt end and its rounded nose, was twisting and turning as only can be done by a bottle tossed in a flowing stream. Robin tried to get hold of himself, orient himself to the odd seasick motion, then managed to work his way to the peephole.

He could see nothing. Whatever was outside was without light. But it sounded like water lapping against the sides, it felt like water's forces, and the rocket seemed definitely to be afloat. Robin used his flashlight, tried to direct its beam through the tiny camera outlet. After a little manipulation he succeeded in getting some reflection from outside.

It was water, and the rocket seemed to be floating rapidly along on some sort of dark subterraneous tide. Robin sat back, puzzled. Water—under the Moon?

He held on, still feeling a little dizzy, feeling dirty and itchy, but suddenly beneath it all a little thrilled and pleased. He had survived the crash by some miracle—he was on the Moon and alive! What next?

Next was quick to come. There was a sudden dip in the current and the rocket tilted forward as it shot down a spillway, down a violent decline on a raging torrent, sliding down an unseen waterfall for a surprisingly long time, leveling out at a fast clip, sliding down new tunnels through which the water raced, hitting the side of sharp turns with occasional glancing blows, down more dips and falls, spinning violently around in unseen whirlpools, and finally racing out on a fast stream to gradually slow down and finally come to rest, gently bobbing.

Robin had been knocked around during this breathless ride and only gradually did he realize it was over. Warily he raised his head from where he was sprawled in his tiny closet-compartment and waited. But the gentle bobbing continued.

He put his eye to the peephole and looked. There was a glow outside, a grayish, pale glow, but he could see that the nose of the rocket was somehow grounded on something dry while the tail was still in the water rocking to the current.

He considered his next course of action for a few seconds. It seemed as if he had a chance to escape from his vehicle at last. But escape to what?

Was there air outside, wherever it was that he found himself? If there were air, was it enough to sustain him? Might it not be poisonous or utterly lacking in oxygen?

Well, Robin thought to himself, there isn't really any choice. If I stay here, I'll starve to death or suffocate. If I go out, I may die even sooner. But now or later, if it has to be, it won't make any difference. Whatever the odds in favor of my being able to breathe here, I've got to take them.

He twisted around, found the circular port through which he had originally entered the rocket. He worked at it with his fingers, realizing that it might be quite difficult to open. He worked away the padding that lined the interior, found that it had an arrangement that had automatically sealed it when closed. There was no handle on the inside, for it had never been planned to be opened from that side. However, there were several screws over a small plate, and Robin set to work to unscrew them. He had a Boy Scout knife in his pants pocket—the kind with several blades—and with the back of the biggest blade he worked out the screws.

The panel off, he saw how the sealed gimbals worked, clicked them open and pushed open the door. It held tight for a moment, then popped open. There was a sudden drop in the pressure, Robin's ears popped, and he gasped for breath.

The air outside was lower in pressure than that inside the cargo nose of the rocket, which had been sealed at Earth level. But it was air and it was breathable. Robin drew in several deep lungfuls, savoring it.

It was oddly exhilarating, as if highly charged with oxygen. At the same time there was a smell of mold and dampness and a definite taste of sulfur and phosphorus like that just after a kitchen match has been lighted. Even so, the air was breathable.

Robin worked his head and shoulders through the narrow opening, slid forward and landed on hands and knees on the rocky surface. He got to his feet, looked around.

He was standing on the bank of a rushing stream of water, which was pouring out of a large gap in the side of a cliff. The cliff ran straight up, gently curving to form part of the ceiling several hundred feet overhead. The extent of this ceiling was impossible to determine—it was dark and obscure—but it seemed to Robin almost at once that he was in some sort of gigantic enclosed space—a vast cavern beneath the surface of the Moon, probably several miles beneath it.

The water coming from the underground falls rushed out to form a wide, shallow river which flowed along one side of the cavern and widened out to a few hundred feet clear across to the farther wall. On Robin's side the floor of the cavern rose in a slow slope until it reached its wall perhaps three hundred feet away. Robin could not estimate the length of the cavern. Looking along the river bank, the cave seemed to become veiled in a general mistiness and gathering darkness.