Chapter 1: The Message

In a hospital in Vienna, in a room where sunlight flooded through ultraviolet permeable crystal, the warm rays struck upon smooth walls the color of which changed from hot reds to cool yellow or gray or to soothing green, as the Directing Surgeon might order. An elusive blending of tones now seemed pulsing with life; surely even a flickering flame of vitality would be blown into warm livingness in such a place.

Even the chart case in the wall glittered with the same clean, brilliant hues from its glass and metal door. The usual revolving paper disks showed white beyond the glass. They were moving; and the ink lines grew to tell a story of temperature and respiration and of every heart-beat.

On the identification-plate a name appeared and a date: “Chet Bullard--23 years. Admitted: August 10, 1973.” And below that the ever-changing present ticked into the past in silent minutes: “August 15, 1973; World Standard Time: 10:38--10:39--10:40--”

For five days the minutes had trickled into a rivulet of time that flowed past a bandaged figure in the bed below--a silent figure and unmoving, as one for whom time has ceased. But the surgeons of the Allied Hospital at Vienna are clever.

10:41--10:42--The bandaged figure stirred uneasily on a snow-white bed...

A nurse was beside him in an instant. Was her patient about to recover consciousness? She examined the bandages that covered a ragged wound in his side, where all seemed satisfactory. To all appearances the man who had moved was unconscious still; the nurse could not know of the thought impressions, blurred at first, then gradually clearing, that were flashing through his mind.

Flashing; yet, to the man who struggled to comprehend them, they passed laggingly in review: one picture followed another with exasperating slowness...

Where was he? What had happened? He was hardly conscious of his own identity...

There was a ship ... he held the controls ... they were flying low ... One hand reached fumblingly beneath the soft coverlet to search for a triple star that should be upon his jacket. A triple star: the insignia of a Master Pilot of the World!--and with the movement there came clearly a realization of himself.

Chet Bullard, Master Pilot; he was Chet Bullard ... and a wall of water was sweeping under him from the ocean to wipe out the great Harkness Terminal buildings ... It was Harkness--Walt Harkness--from whom he had snatched the controls ... To fly to the Dark Moon, of course--

What nonsense was that? ... No, it was true: the Dark Moon had raised the devil with things on Earth ... How slowly the thoughts came! Why couldn’t he remember?...

Dark Moon!--and they were flying through space ... They had conquered space; they were landing on the Dark Moon that was brilliantly alight. Walt Harkness had set the ship down beautifully--

Then, crowding upon one another in breath-taking haste, came clear recollection of past adventures:

They were upon the Dark Moon--and there was the girl, Diane. They must save Diane. Harkness had gone for the ship. A savage, half-human shape was raising a hairy arm to drive a spear toward Diane, and he, Chet, was leaping before her. He felt again the lancet-pain of that blade...

And now he was dying--yes, he remembered it now--dying in the night on a great, sweeping surface of frozen lava ... It was only a moment before that he had opened his eyes to see Harkness’ strained face and the agonized look of Diane as the two leaned above him ... But now he felt stronger. He must see them again...

He opened his eyes for another look at his companions--and, instead of black, star-pricked night on a distant globe, there was dazzling sunlight. No desolate lava-flow, this; no thousand fires that flared and smoked from their fumeroles in the dark. And, instead of Harkness and the girl, Diane, leaning over him there was a nurse who laid one cool hand upon his blond head and who spoke soothingly to him of keeping quiet. He was to take it easy--he would understand later--and everything was all right ... And with this assurance Chet Bullard drifted again into sleep...

The blurring memories had lost their distortions a week later, as he sat before a broad window in his room and looked out over the housetops of Vienna. Again he was himself, Chet Bullard, with a Master Pilot’s rating; and he let his eyes follow understandingly the moving picture of the world outside. It was good to be part of a world whose every movement he understood.

Those cylinders with stubby wings that crossed and recrossed the sky; their sterns showed a jet of thin vapor where a continuous explosion of detonite threw them through the air. He knew them all: the pleasure craft, the big, red-bellied freighters, the sleek liners, whose multiple helicopters spun dazzlingly above as they sank down through the shaft of pale-green light that marked a descending area.

That one would be the China Mail. Her under-ports were open before the hold-down clamps had gripped her; the mail would pour out in an avalanche of pouches where smaller mailships waited to distribute the cargo across the land.

And the big fellow taking off, her hull banded with blue, was one of Schwartzmann’s liners. He wondered what had become of Schwartzmann, the man who had tried to rob Harkness of his ship; who had brought the patrol ships upon them in an effort to prevent their take-off on that wild trip.

For that matter, what had become of Harkness? Chet Bullard was seriously disturbed at the absence of any word beyond the one message that had been waiting for him when he regained consciousness. He drew that message from a pocket of his dressing gown and read it again:

“Chet, old fellow, lie low. S has vanished. Means mischief. Think

best not to see you or reveal your whereabouts until our position

firmly established. Have concealed ship. Remember, S will stop at

nothing. Trying to discredit us, but the gas I brought will fix all

that. Get yourself well. We are planning to go back, of course.

Walt.”

Chet returned the folded message to his pocket. He arose and walked about the room to test his returning strength: to remain idle was becoming increasingly difficult. He wanted to see Walter Harkness, talk with him, plan for their return to the wonder-world they had found.

Instead he dropped again into his chair and touched a knob on the newscaster beside him. A voice, hushed to the requirements of these hospital precincts spoke softly of market quotations in the far corners of the earth. He turned the dial irritably and set it on “World News--General.” The name of Harkness came from the instrument to focus Chet’s attention.

“Harkness makes broad claims,” the voice was saying. “Vienna physicists ridicule his pretensions.

“Walter Harkness, formerly of New York, proprietor of Harkness Terminals, whose great buildings near New York were destroyed in the Dark Moon wave, claims to have reached and returned from the Dark Moon.

“Nearly two months have passed since the new satellite crashed into the gravitational field of Earth, its coming manifested by earth shocks and a great tidal wave. The globe, as we know, was invisible. Although still unseen, and only a black circle that blocks out distant stars, it is visible in the telescopes of the astronomers; its distance and its orbital motion have been determined.

“And now this New Yorker claims to have penetrated space; to have landed on the Dark Moon; and to have returned to Earth. Broad claims, indeed, especially so in view of the fact that Harkness refuses to submit his ship for examination by the Stratosphere Control Board. He has filed notice of ownership, thus introducing some novel legal technicalities, but, since space-travel is still a dream of the future, there will be none to dispute his claims.

“Of immediate interest is Harkness’ claim to have discovered a gas that is fatal to the serpents of space. The monsters that appeared when the Dark Moon came and that attacked ships above the Repelling Area are still there. All flying is confined to the lower levels; fast world-routes are disorganized.

“Whether or not this gas, of which Harkness has a sample, came from the Dark Moon or from some laboratory on Earth is of no particular importance. Will it destroy the space-serpents? If it does this, our hats are off to Mr. Walter Harkness; almost will we be inclined to believe the rest of his story--or to laugh with him over one of the greatest hoaxes ever attempted.”

Chet had been too intent upon the newscast to heed an opening door at his back...

“How about it, Chet?” a voice was asking. “Would you call it a hoax or the real thing?” And a girl’s voice chimed in with exclamations of delight at sight of the patient, so evidently recovering.

“Diane!” Chet exulted, “--and Walt!--you old son-of-a-gun!” He found himself clinging to a girl’s soft hand with one of his, while with the other he reached for that of her companion. But Walt Harkness’ arm went about his shoulders instead.

“I’d like to hammer you plenty,” Harkness was saying, “and I don’t even dare give you a friendly slam on the back. How’s the side where they got you with the spear?--and how are you? How soon will you be ready to start back? What about--”

Diane Delacouer raised her one free hand to stop the flood of questions. “My dear,” she protested, “give Chet a chance. He must be dying for information.”

“I was dying for another reason the last time I saw you,” Chet reminded her, “--up on the Dark Moon. But it seems that you got me back here in time for repairs. And now what?” His nurse came into the room with extra chairs; Chet waited till she was gone before he repeated: “Now what? When do we go back?”

Harkness did not answer at once. Instead he crossed to the newscaster in its compact, metal case. The voice was still speaking softly; at a touch of a switch it ceased, and in the silence came the soft rush of sound that meant the telautotype had taken up its work. Beneath a glass a paper moved, and words came upon it from a hurricane of type-bars underneath. The instrument was printing the news story as rapidly as any voice could speak it.

Harkness read the words for an instant, then let the paper pass on to wind itself upon a spool. It had still been telling of the gigantic hoax that this eccentric American had attempted and Harkness repeated the words.

“A hoax!” he exclaimed, and his eyes, for a moment, flashed angrily beneath the dark hair that one hand had disarranged. “I would like to take that facetious bird out about a thousand miles and let him play around with the serpents we met. But, why get excited? This is all Schwartzmann’s doing. The tentacles of that man’s influence reach out like those of an octopus.”

Chet ranged himself alongside. Tall and slim and blond, he contrasted strongly with this other man, particularly in his own quiet self-control as against Harkness’ quick-flaring anger.

“Take it easy, Walt,” he advised. “We’ll show them. But I judge that you have been razzed a bit. It’s a pretty big story for them to swallow without proof. Why didn’t you show them the ship? Or why didn’t you let Diane and me back up your yarn? And you haven’t answered my other questions: when do we go back?”

Harkness took the queries in turn.

“I didn’t show the old boat,” he explained, “because I’m not ready for that yet. I want it kept dark--dark as the Dark Moon. I want to do my preliminary work there before Schwartzmann and his experts see our ship. He would duplicate it in a hurry and be on our trail.

“And now for our plans. Well, our there in space the Dark Moon is waiting. Have you realized, Chet, that we own that world--you and Diane and I? Small--only half the size of our old moon--but what a place! And it’s ours!

“Back in history--you remember?--an ambitious lad named Alexander sighed for more worlds to conquer. Well, we’re going Alexander one better--we’ve found the world. We’re the first ever to go out into space and return again.