ON leaving the metal shed which had housed his one-man vehicle, Ted Dustin hovered for a moment to get his bearings—then shot away from the earth at such speed that his exterior thermometer registered a terrific heat from the shell of his craft before five seconds had elapsed. Forced to slacken his speed because of the danger of crippling his machine, he proceeded at a more leisurely pace until his instruments told him he was entirely out of the earth’s atmosphere.
Once assured of this, he set his meteoroid detector—an extremely sensitive magnetic instrument which registered the approach of all meteoric masses, automatically repelling the smaller ones by blasts from the exhaust of the atomotor, and driving the craft away from those of greater mass. He next set his automatic course corrector, which was designed to throw the machine back on its course after each forced deviation. Then he set the motor for full speed ahead.
To his surprise and satisfaction he found, on glancing at the magnetic speedometer, that the little untested motor was driving the craft almost twice as fast as he had anticipated. He would thus, barring accidents, be able to reach the moon in a day and a half instead of the three days he had previously allowed himself for the undertaking. This necessitated the setting of a new course, as he would otherwise have arrived at the moon’s path just a day and a half ahead of that satellite.
Having made his calculations and adjusted his instruments accordingly, he opened his visor, swallowed a concentrated food pellet, drank a cup of hot coffee from the thermos tank, and lighted his black briar. Finding the cabin uncomfortably cold with his visor open, he drew up an extra set of glass panels all around and turned on his atomic heater. Then he studied the translations of the professor, hoping that he might thus learn enough of the Lunite writing to form a basis for intelligent communication.
When the first hour had elapsed he looked back at the earth, which appeared as an enormous, semi-luminous globe set in a black sky, its seas and continents faintly defined by the light of the full moon. The disc of the sun remained hidden behind the earth, but other heavenly bodies were far brighter in appearance, shining from this black sky, than he had ever seen them appear from on earth.
As the hours passed and the apparent size of the earth grew less while that of the moon grew correspondingly greater, he was surprised at not having encountered a single meteor. Presently, after about twelve hours of travel, one caused the craft to swerve, and he noticed with satisfaction that the automatic course corrector functioned perfectly.
He swallowed another food pellet, sipped his coffee, and tried to sleep, but despite the fact that he had trained himself to take rest or go without it as the occasion required, he found sleep out of the question. The excitement of his thrilling race with the earth’s satellite was too much for that. He could scarcely bear to close his eyes for a moment, for looking and wondering.
Before he realized it, twenty-four hours had slipped by. The shrinking shape of the earth was now on his left—the silver disc of the moon, with craters, hills and valleys, was now plainly visible to the naked eye, on his right. He was traveling with his keel in the plane of the ecliptic. As he progressed, the prow leaned more and more toward the moon’s north pole.
The last twelve hours were packed with wonders, thrills, and dangers. Previously he had encountered only a relatively few meteoroids. Now, he found they traveled in swarms in and near the neutral gravity point between moon and earth. His craft swerved this way and that—dropped—or shot suddenly upward, as huge masses of meteoric matter hurtled dangerously near it. He caught fleeting glimpses of these desultory travelers, some of them almost perfectly spherical, others jagged lumps of rock and metal—grim remnants of some planetary or planetoidal tragedy of the past.
With the neutral gravity point well past and the moon directly beneath his keel, the danger from meteoroids was considerably lessened. The delays were more than compensated for by the increasing pull of the moon itself.
His goal almost realized, Ted’s next problem was to decide where to land. Copernicus, plainly visible to the north east with its brilliant yellow ray system, and Tycho, to the south, with its still more dazzling white rays branching out in all directions, were the two most conspicuous objects on the lunar landscape.
Although his purpose was to find the belligerent ruler, P’an-ku, his only hint as to his whereabouts was the probability that the crater, Hipparchus, was somewhere within the limits of that worthy’s empire, which might be as extensive as the moon itself, or confined to a relatively small area. The thing to do, he decided, was to land at Hipparchus and investigate.
As he approached the great ring-mountain, Ted saw no signs of life. The damage wrought by his projectile, however, was evident—for in the center of the huge, enclosed plain, gaped a jagged black hole fully five miles in diameter, while the interior of the crater was strewn with jagged rock debris, some of the larger fragments the size of a terrestrial city block. Of the city of Ur, mentioned in the radio message, he saw no sign whatever. Greatly puzzled, he slowly circled the crater, then crossed the rim and set out in a widening spiral, flying only a few thousand feet above the ground, looking for some sign of a human being or habitation.
Although there had been no sign of vegetation in the enormous crater which had been laid waste by his projectile, Ted now began to notice signs of lunar forests and meadows. Flying slowly at an altitude of two hundred feet, he passed over level areas covered with velvety stretches of gray vegetation that resembled mosses and lichens, and over hills and valleys clothed with forests of weird, grotesque growths.
There were fungi shaped like saucers, umbrellas, cones, spearheads, and even upraised hands, all rusty black in color. There were black stalks, fully fifty feet in height, topped by five-pointed purple stars, huge gray pear-shaped growths from which there curled sinuous branches that resembled the tentacles of cuttle fish, and black trees, some of which were a hundred feet in height, with branches that unrolled like the leaves of sword-ferns.
Disposed to view some of these wonders at closer range, Ted lowered his craft to the ground. A glance at his exterior thermometer showed the outside temperature to be 210 degrees above zero, Fahrenheit, almost the boiling point of water at sea level on earth! He accordingly closed his visor and turned on the valve of his insulated compressed air tank before opening the door of his turret. Slamming this quickly behind him, he stepped down from his craft, sinking ankle deep in the soft, gray moss that coated the forest floor.
As the suit he wore protected him from either extreme heat or cold he was able to maintain a normal body temperature, but the comparatively slight gravitational pull of the earth’s satellite gave him an uncanny freedom of motion. His first incautious step shot him ten feet in the air and landed him, with startling suddenness, face downward in a tangle of black creepers fully twenty feet from where he had started. Instinctively he scrambled erect and was as suddenly precipitated on his back at a distance of fifteen feet in the opposite direction. This time he arose slowly, stepped forward with great care, and found himself able to progress after a somewhat jerky fashion.
Having thus, to a degree, mastered the art of walking on the moon, he took the opportunity to observe the queer vegetation around him. To his intense surprise, he saw that it was growing visibly! Although the rates of growth varied in different plants, he could see that all were swelling and elongating with amazing rapidity. Watching an umbrella shaped fungus which was on a level with his eyes, he calculated that it was growing taller at the rate of a foot an hour! The black, fern-like branches of a great tree unrolled and enlarged before his eyes. Spore pods beneath the leaves, swelled and burst, scattering tiny dust-like particles which floated about, or settled on the surrounding vegetation, rocks and soil. A tall, black and gray fungus opened its gills, releasing a cloud of silver spores that glittered in the sunlight like mica dust.
Ted was attracted by the movements of the tentacles of an octopus-like plant a short distance ahead of him, and walked toward it. They writhed and twisted like the snaky locks of a Medusa, yet the roots which held the pear-shaped trunk showed the vegetable nature of the monstrosity. Prompted by a rash curiosity, he had no sooner arrived beside the grotesque anomaly than he grasped one of the slithering branches, expecting, from its slimy appearance, to find it soft and yielding. To his surprise and dismay it suddenly coiled around his forearm with a grip as firm and unyielding as the loops of a steel cable. He was jerked off his feet, straight toward a black, horny lipped opening of triangular shape, which yawned at the top of the pear-shaped body.
Instinctively, he reached with his free hand for his pistol degravitor, but too late. A score or more of tough, unyielding tentacles bound his arms to his sides and circled his body with such force that his bones would have been instantly crushed and his flesh reduced to pulp had it not been for the metal plates of his protective armor. Even these creaked, and seemed about to give way, as he was drawn, head downward, into the yawning, spike-toothed opening.