The Collection (74 page)

"Yes. Granham told me."

"And she tells the same story you do-or that Major
Granham told me over the phone that you tell."

^"
I suppose,
^"
Carmody said,
"that they used a lie detector on her, too.
^"

"Scopolamine,
^"
said the Eastern
Alliance ambassador. "We have more faith in truth serum than lie
detectors. Yes, her story was the same under scopolamine.
^"

"The other point," the President told Carrnody,
^"
is
even more important. Exactly when, Earth time, did you leave the Moon?
^"

Carmody figured quickly and told him approximately when that
had been.

Saunderson nodded gravely. "And it was a few hours
after that that biologists, who
^'
ve still been working twenty-four
hours a day on this, noticed the turning point. The molecular change in the
zygote no longer occurs. Births, nine months from now, will have the usual
percentage of male and female children.

"Do you see what that means, Captain? Whatever ray was
doing it must have been beamed at Earth from the Moon-from the ship that
captured you. And for whatever reason, when they found that you
^'
d
escaped, they left. Possibly they thought your return to Earth would lead to an
attack in force from here."

"And thought rightly,
^"
said the
ambassador. "We're not equipped for space fighting
yet,
but we
^'
d
have sent what we had. And do you see what this means, Mr. President? We've got
to pool everything and get ready for space warfare, and quickly. They went
away, it appears, but there is no assurance that they will not return.
^"

Again Saunderson nodded. He said, "And now, Captain-
^"

"We both landed safely,
^"
Carmody said.
"We gathered enough of the supply rockets to get us started and then
assembled the prefab shelter. We'd just finished it and were about to enter it
when I saw the spaceship coming over the crater
^'
s ringwall. It was-
^"

"You were still in spacesuit?" someone asked.

"Yes,
^"
Carmody growled. “We
were
still in spacesuits, if that matters now. I saw the ship and pointed to it and
Anna saw it, too. We didn
^'
t try to duck or anything because
obviously it had seen us; it was coming right toward us and descending. We'd
have had time to get inside the shelter, but there didn't seem any point to it.
It wouldn
^'
t have been any protection. Besides, we didn't know that
they weren't friendly. 'We'd have got weapons ready, in case, if we
^'
d
had any weapons, but we didn
^'
t. They landed light as a bubble only
thirty yards or so away and a door lowered in the side of the ship-"

^"
Describe the ship, please."

^"
About fifty feet long, about twenty in
diameter, rounded ends. No portholes-they must see right through the walls some
way-and no rocket tubes. Outside of the door and one other thing, there just
weren't any features you could see from outside. When the ship rested on the
ground, the door opened down from the top and formed a sort of curved ramp that
led to the doorway. The other-"

^"
No airlock?"

Carmody shook his head.
^"
They didn
^'
t
breathe air, apparently. They came right out of the ship and toward us,
without spacesuits. Neither the temperature nor the lack of air bothered them.
But I was going to tell you one more thing about the outside of the ship. On
top of it was a short mast, and on top of the mast was a kind of grid of wires
something like a radar transmitter. If they were beaming anything at Earth, it
came from that grid. Any-way, I'm pretty sure of it. Earth was in the sky, of
course, and I noticed that the grid moved-as the ship moved-so the flat side of
the grid was always directly toward Earth.

"Well, the door opened and two of them came down
the
ramp toward us. They had things in their hands that looked unpleasantly like
weapons, and pretty advanced weapons at that. They
pointed them at us
and motioned for us to walk up the ramp and into the ship. We did.
^"

^"
They made no attempt to communicate?"

^"
None whatsoever, then or at any time. Of
course, while we were still in spacesuits, we couldn
^'
t have heard
them, anyway-unless they had communicated on the radio band our helmet sets
were tuned to. But even after, they never tried to talk to us. They
communicated among themselves with whistling noises. We went into the ship and
there were two more of them inside. Four altogether-"

"All the same sex?"

Carmody shrugged.
^"
They all looked alike to
me, but maybe that
^'
s how Anna and I looked to them. They ordered us,
by pointing, to enter two separate small rooms about the size of jail cells,
small ones-toward the front of the ship. We did, and the doors locked after us.

"I sat there and suddenly got plenty worried, because
neither of us had more than another hour's oxygen left in our suits. If they
didn
^'
t know that, and didn't give us any chance to communicate with
them and tell them, we were gone goslings in another hour. So I started to
hammer on the door. Anna was hammering, too. I couldn
^'
t hear through
my helmet, of course, but I could feel the vibration of it any time I stopped
hammering on my door.

"Then, after maybe half an hour, my door opened and I
almost fell out through it. One of the extra-terrestrials motioned me back with
a weapon. Another made motions that looked as though he meant I should take off
my helmet. I didn't get it at first, and then I looked at something he pointed
at and saw one of our oxygen tanks with the handle turned. Also a big pile of
our other supplies, food and water and stuff. Anyway, they had known that we
needed oxygen-and although they didn't need it themselves, they apparently knew
how to fix things for us. So they just used our supplies to build an atmosphere
in their ship.

"I took off my helmet and tried to talk to them, but
one of them took a long pointed rod and poked me back into my cell. I couldn't
risk grabbing at the rod, because another one still had that dangerous-looking
weapon pointed at me. So the door slammed on me again. I took off the rest of
my spacesuit because it was plenty hot in there, and then I thought about Anna
because she started hammering again.

^"
I wanted to let her know it would be all
right for her to get out of her spacesuit, that we had an atmosphere again. So
I started hammering on the wall between our cells in Morse. She got it after a
while. She signaled back a query, so, when I knew she was getting me, I told
her what the score was and she took off her helmet. After that we could talk.
If we talked fairly loudly, our voices carried through the wall from one cell
to the other."

"They didn
^'
t mind your talking to one
another?
^"

"They didn't pay any attention to us all the time they
held us prisoners, except to feed us from our own supplies. Didn't ask us a
question; apparently they figured we didn't know anything they wanted to know
and didn't know already about human beings. They didn't even study us. I have a
hunch they intended to take us back as specimens; there's no other explanation
I can think of.

"We couldn't keep accurate track of time, but by the
number of times we ate and slept, we had some idea. The first few days-
^"
Carmody laughed shortly-"had their funny side. These creatures obviously
knew we needed liquid, but they couldn't distinguish between water and whisky
for the purpose. We had nothing but whisky to drink for the first two or maybe
three days. We got higher than kites. We got to singing in our cells and I
learned a lot of Russian songs. Been more fun, though, if we could have got
some close harmony, if you know what I mean."

The ambassador permitted himself a smile. "I can guess
what you mean, Captain. Please continue."

"Then we started getting water instead of whisky and
sobered up. And started wondering how we could escape. I began to study the mechanism
of the lock on my door. It wasn
^'
t like our locks, but I began to
figure some things about it and finally-I thought then that we
^'
d
been there about ten days-1 got hold of a tool to use on it. They
^'
d
taken our spacesuits and left us nothing but our clothes, and they'd checked
those over for metal we could make into tools."

"But we got our food out of cans, although they took
the empty cans afterward. This particular time, though, there was a little sliver
of metal along the opening of the can, and I worried it off and saved it. I'd
been, meanwhile, watching and listening and studying their habits. They slept,
all at the same time, at regular intervals. It seemed to me like about five
hours at a time, with about
^.
fifteen-hour intervals in between. If I
^'
m
right on that estimate, they probably come from a planet somewhere with about a
twenty-hour period of rotation.

"Anyway, I
waited till their next sleep period
and started working on the lock with that sliver of metal. It took me at least
two or three hours, hut I got it open. And once outside my cell, in the main
room of the ship, I found that Anna's door opened easily from the outside and I
let her out.

"We considered trying to turn the tables by finding a
weapon to use on them, but none was in sight. They looked so skinny and light,
despite being seven feet tall, that I decided to go after them with my bare
hands. I would have, except that I couldn't get the door to the front part of
the ship open. It was a different type of lock entirely and I couldn
^'
t
even guess how to work it. And it was in the front part of the ship that they
slept. The control room must have been up there, too.

"Luckily our spacesuits were in the big room. And by
then we knew it might be getting dangerously near the end of their sleeping
period, so we got into our spacesuits quick and I found it was easy to open the
outer door. It made some noise-and so did the
whoosh
of air going out
-but it didn't waken them, apparently.

"As soon as the door opened, we saw we had a lot less
time than we
^'
d thought. The Sun was going down over the crater
^'
s
far ringwall-we were still in Hell Crater-and it was going to be dark in an
hour or so. We worked like beavers getting our rockets refueled and jacked up
on their tail fins for the takeoff. Anna got off first and then I did. And that
^'
s
all. Maybe we should have stayed and tried to take them after they came out
from their sleeping period, but we figured it was more important to get the
news back to Earth.
^"

President Saunderson nodded slowly. "You were right,
Captain. Right in deciding that, and in everything else you did. We know what
to do now. Do we not, Ambassador Kravich?
^"

"We do. We join forces. We make one space station-and
quickly-and get to the Moon and fortify it, jointly. We pool all scientific
knowledge and develop full-scale space travel, new weapons. We do everything we
can to get ready for them when and if they come back."

The President looked grim. "Obviously
they
went
back for further orders or reinforcements. If we only knew how long we had-it
may be only weeks or it may be decades. We don
^'
t know whether they
come from the Solar System-or another galaxy. Nor how fast they travel. But
whenever they get back, we
^'
ll be as ready for them as we possibly
can. Mr. Ambassador, you have power to-?"

"Full power, Mr. President. Anything up to and including
a complete merger of both our nations under a joint government. That probably
won
^'
t be necessary, though, as long as our interests are now completely
in common. Exchange of scientific information and military data has already
started, from our side. Some of our top scientists and generals are flying here
now, with orders to cooperate fully. All restrictions have been lowered."
He smiled,
^"
And all our propaganda has gone into a very sudden
reverse gear. It's not even going to be a cold peace. Since we're going to be
allies against the unknown, we might as well try to
like
one
another."

"Right," said the President. He turned suddenly to
Carmody. "Captain, we owe you just about anything you want. Name it.
^"

It caught Carmody off guard. Maybe if he'd had more time to
think, he'd have asked for something different. Or, more likely, from what he
learned later, he wouldn
^'
t have. He said, "All I want right now
is to forget Hell Crater and get back to my regular job so I can forget it
quicker."

Saunderson smiled.
^"
Granted. If you think of
anything else later, ask for it. I can see why you
^'
re a bit mixed up
right now. And you're probably right. Return to routine may be the best thing
for you."

Granham left `with Carmody.
^"
I'll notify
Chief Operative Reeber for you,
^"
he said. "When shall I
tell him you
^'
ll be back?
^"

^"
Tomorrow morning,
^"
said
Carmody. "The sooner the better." And he insisted when Granham
objected that he needed a rest.

Carmody was back at work the next morning, nonsensical as
it seemed.

He took up the problem folder from the top of the day
^'
s
stack, fed the data into Junior and got Junior's answer. The second one. He
worked mechanically, paying no personal attention to problem or answer. His
mind seemed a long way off. In Hell Crater on the Moon.