Part 2

"Why--by the two attempts that have been made! You know the story. Two hundred years ago, at the time we had the last war on Earth, that group of defeated outlaws stole the giant transport _Mercury_ and started for the Moon and vanished. Then, it was only thirty years ago that Professor Lester Staunton made his attempt in the rocket cruiser _Orestes_, and he vanished."

"You're like all the rest," Ripon grumbled. "Always jumping to conclusions based on a few scraps of evidence. No man on Earth really knows how a rocket-ship would behave in interplanetary travel, because it hasn't yet been done. There is a great mass of unproven theories that are generally accepted as true--but those are not facts. It was once generally accepted that the Earth was flat. However--I have a new method of propulsion for this ship, by means of the amplification of magnetic currents, and I expect to supplement the rockets with that new equipment."

"I think you're crazy," Larry said, "but I'll go along with you anyway."

"Now you show the proper spirit, even if not good sense," Ripon said cheerfully.

It was after midnight that night before the _Sky Maid_ was ready to go. The crew were at launching stations, and the ship's old-fashioned Diesels were rumbling as they were warmed up. Larry was standing under the dome of duralite glass that covered the upper observation platform when Colton came up to stand beside him.

"Well--we'll be off in a few minutes!" the swarthy second officer said.

"Wonder if we'll ever come back."

"Lord knows!" Colton shrugged, and his dark eyes were somber. "The police of half a dozen countries are looking for me anyway. I've had my fingers crossed the whole time we've been refitting this craft."

"Why tell me all this?" Larry asked. Colton shrugged again, and his smile was half a sneer.

"Your own reputation isn't much better, Gibson. I figure that if this trip works out it may give us both a chance to square ourselves, and if it doesn't we're not much worse off than we are now."

"You may have something there," Larry admitted.

Then Ripon shouted a command, and the helicopters started to spin. Only a handful of loafers watched the _Sky Maid_ take off. A few waved. Others tapped their heads derisively. Man's third attempt to navigate the 239,000 empty miles to the Moon had begun!

* * * * *

The old ship's rickety helicopters and creaking Diesels could hardly lift her high enough to reach the level required by law before the rockets could be started. High clouds veiled the stars, but the many lights of New York were still visible below them when Ripon at last cut in the rocket motors. The _Sky Maid_ shivered all along her length as their blasting roar began, and then she started to shoot upward at a steep angle. Her whole fabric creaked and groaned, and Larry Gibson shook his head dubiously. A few air-leaks would be all they would need to make their situation utterly hopeless.

The drive of the rockets carried them into the belt of clouds. For a few seconds the glass ports were veiled by gray mist. Then they were above the clouds and zooming upward in the cold light of the Moon. The crew were released from their launching stations as the ship settled down to a smooth routine, and Larry took over the watch. A minute later he was alone in the darkened control room with the dim glow of the varied instrument panels to keep him company. Already the air was starting to thin out, so he closed the ports and turned on the vessel's air-conditioning system. The atmosphere took on the faintly chemical odor characteristic of travel in a sealed ship in the high places.

From somewhere nearby Larry could hear a deep voice lifted in song, a voice that rose above the pulsating throb of the rockets. The words were familiar:

"There's only a few of us left, And we never were worth a damn, But I'll follow my vagrant star...."

Larry wondered if Ripon was hitting the bottle again. They were in a bad spot if he was, for certainly no one else on board understood the new equipment that Ripon had installed to solve the difficulties that had blocked previous attempts at interplanetary travel.

In Larry's mind there was a steadily strengthening conviction that this whole expedition was destined to failure from the start. It was too makeshift. Too poorly organized and planned, too lightly financed. Ill-manned and poorly equipped, led by a drunken genius on a rickety ship that wasn't really fit to navigate at all, they were probably sailing to their doom somewhere in the cold reaches of outer space. If they reached the Moon at all, it would likely be as a twisted wreck dropped on the cold slope of one of that body's barren craters. Larry shrugged. He had made his decision, and he did not regret it.

And then, leaning beside one of the control room's glass ports while he kept an eye on the slowly climbing needle of the speed indicator, Larry suddenly realized that he had found the peace of mind he had so long been seeking. The clouds were a silvery ocean far below, the Moon was a glowing disc ahead. The _Sky Maid_ snored onward through the night with her rockets pounding. He was again back where he belonged, standing a watch in a vessel's control room. Nothing else seemed to matter very much at the moment.

Ripon came out into the control room a little later, a faded uniform cap pushed to the back of his graying head and his empty pipe clenched in his teeth.

"It's tough not to smoke," he rumbled glumly, "but I don't want to put a strain on our none too good air-conditioning equipment. How are things going?"

"Not so well," Larry said, "The rockets aren't balanced, and we have a drift to starboard. Three micro-units in every fifteen minutes. I have to keep cutting down the port rocket tubes for short periods to equalize it."

"How's the speed?"

"Not what it should be." Larry looked dubiously at the indicator needle. "Even with as much rocket power as she's got, we've only built our speed up to a thousand miles an hour even though the atmosphere is greatly thinned. I don't think that we can build up the necessary velocity, Chief. I'm afraid it just can't be done."

"Okay, friend Pinzon," Ripon said. Catching Larry's look of puzzled surprise, the gaunt scientist smiled faintly. "There was once a man named Columbus who thought he could sail the Atlantic, which had not been done before. He was a bit of a faker and a bluff, that Genoese adventurer, and there was more than a touch of the charlatan in him. The Pinzon brothers who commanded the other two ships of his fleet knew from the start that the voyage could never succeed. I'll admit that Columbus didn't find just what he expected to find, but he did cross the Atlantic!" Ripon laughed, and dropped a hand on Larry's shoulder. "Hold her on to the course a while, my friend. We're not licked quite so soon!"

V

Ripon was still staring out the control room window at the disc of the Moon ahead of them. His voice came somberly as he spoke without turning around.

"What's the speed now?"

"Eleven hundred. Velocity of escape is twenty-five hundred."

"Y'know, Larry, it seems one of Fate's little ironies that the only hope of saving the people of Earth from the Gray Death lies with this creaking ship and her polyglot crew! Oh--I have no illusions about the forlornness of our hope! We have no right to get through. But I'm not entirely a fool, and I have a few aces in my sleeves. I guess it's time to try out my magnetron controls. Stand by to cut rocket motors!"

Ripon moved to several strange-looking control boxes that had been set up at one side of the room. Instrument dials glowed into light as he threw a switch, and there came a faint hum.

"These tubes are the Magnetron Oscillators," Ripon said. "These switches control the magnetic converters. This other bank governs the selectors."

"But I don't get the general principle," Larry said.

"It's simply a selective utilization of the lines of magnetic force that fill outer space. This ship is naturally para-magnetic, so that she is easily permeable by the lines of force. By charging the wires outside the hull I can make all or part of the ship diamagnetic. Furthermore, I can change its charge so that the lines will draw in either direction."

"I know enough of the general principles of magnetism to understand that," Larry said. "You can vary the direction of the effect, and perhaps vary the dynes. But...."

"This indicator shows the hysteresis loop, the lag of magnetic indication behind the magnetizing force at any particular time," Ripon continued. "The heart of my system is the group of selectors and amplifiers set up in the compartments directly below us. With them I can select the magnetic currents suited to our course, and amplify them till they move the ship along with them just as the lines of magnetic force move iron filings about a bar magnet. At least," he said with a sudden flash of his reckless smile, "that's what I think I can do. If not, we'll probably never be heard of again. You'd better hope I'm right, young feller!"

Ripon's craggy profile with its jutting beard was silhouetted against the moon as he bent over his dials and switches. Twice he checked them, then he lifted one hand.

"Ready--cut rockets!" he snapped. Larry threw over the lever of the engine room indicator, and the roar of the rockets abruptly ceased.

The sudden silence was strangely startling to ears that had become accustomed to that steady pounding astern. Running feet sounded in the passage as Colton came charging into the control room to find what had gone wrong. For a moment Larry had a sensation of falling, and then the _Sky Maid_ danced about like a leaf in a wind. He steadied himself by clinging to a stanchion and anxiously watched Ripon. The gaunt scientist was hunched above his control boards like a gnome, his hands leaping from switch to dial and back again at furious speed.

Then the motion abruptly ceased. The _Sky Maid_ became steady as a rock, with the bright disc of the Moon dead ahead through the forward port. There was a faint singing sound from one of the control boxes, but otherwise everything was so quiet and still that it seemed as though the ship lay motionless in space. Then Larry looked at the speed indicator, and saw the needle moving steadily upward. The _Sky Maid_ was shooting through the heavens at a speed faster than she had ever traveled when she was new and in good condition!

* * * * *

"Gentlemen," said Ripon, solemnly shaking hands with both Larry and Colton, "this is an historic moment! This is a prelude to that day when interplanetary travel becomes as commonplace as are rocket ship flights through the strathosphere nowadays! No longer will the name of Crispin Gillingwater Ripon be a thing of scorn and derision. And just wait till I get a chance to spit in the faces of some of those living fossils back at the National University...."

"If the ship holds together!" Larry said. Ripon sighed.

"You _would_ bring that up, young feller. But maybe our luck will hold good. At least this method of travel is less hard on an old craft than the steady strain of a rocket blast. If the ship holds together, we'll be on the Moon in forty-eight hours!"

Colton was grinning broadly as Ripon left the control room a minute later. The second officer gave the points of his mustache an added twist, and then rubbed his hands together.

"Looks like the old goat really came through with something after all," he said. Larry looked at him grimly. For all Ripon's eccentricities, he was an able man in a great many things. It annoyed Larry to hear somebody like Colton, a confessed thief and an indifferent officer, speak of him in quite that tone of disrespect.

"Don't speak of Doc Ripon in that way when you're with me, Colton!" he snapped. The other man's thin mouth twisted in a sneer.

"Trying to go high hat on me, Gibson? You're no better than I am."

"If we go into that I'm likely to throw you through the bulkhead," Larry said evenly. "So we'll just let it go that I have some gratitude and respect for the man who picked me up out of the gutter--even if you haven't. Now clear out of here till it's time for you to take over the watch."

For two days and nights the _Sky Maid_ moved steadily forward on her way. There was, of course, neither day nor night in the airless emptiness of outer space, but they kept routine hours on board. The whole atmosphere of the ship had brightened and changed since Ripon's utilization of magnetic force had proven practical. Even the slovenly crew went around with their shoulders straighter. The feeling of gloom and failure had been succeeded by one of optimism. Now the talk was of whether or not they would really get the desired radium salts on the Moon, and of what reward they would all receive when they got back to Earth. The watch off duty started a poker game based on notes against the rewards they all expected to get.

Ahead of the _Sky Maid_, the Moon was now a vast disc that filled half the sky when seen from the control room ports. The bigger peaks and craters were visible to the naked eye now. Back in the after observation room, the dwindling but still vast profile of Earth had taken on a strange and unfamiliar appearance. It was a lonely feeling, to be so far from that friendly planet. Larry wondered how things were now going there, and what had caused the spread of the Gray Death in the first place. Probably a virus brought in on a meteor from some unknown and unhealthy planet.

The hope of mankind resting within her rusty hull, the _Sky Maid_ slogged onward. By Earthly standards she was moving at a terrific speed, but compared with the velocity of heavenly bodies and the vastness of interplanetary space she crawled slowly across a small corner of the solar system.

VI

At last there came the hour when the ship hovered a few hundred miles above the surface of the Moon. Below them was a vast and uneven surface of barren and pitted rock, round craters and jagged peaks stretching to the horizon in all directions. Larry realized now how uneven the surface of the satellite really was, how different from the orange-peel appearance it had when seen through a telescope from Earth. All the crew were at landing stations. Ripon had adjusted his controls to hold the ship steady in space, and now he stepped back.

"There's no use bothering with helicopters," he said. "Since there's no atmosphere here, they'd be useless. That's probably what wrecked the ships before us--you can't make an easy landing with rockets alone, and we have no padded landing platform."

"Can't you lower her down easy with your magnetic control?" Larry asked.

"That's what I hope to do, but we're not experienced and there may be a jolt. Cut off the reserve air tanks, and have all hands put on space suits."

The crew of the _Sky Maid_ looked like a group of fantastic monsters in the metal-cloth space suits with their round helmets of duro-glass. Designed for use by emergency repair crews aboard stratholiners in case of trouble, the space suits would keep a man alive and warm in an airless atmosphere for a great many hours. Small containers of chemicals kept the air purified, and earphones made communication possible.

"Stand by for a landing!" Ripon's voice buzzed in the ear phones as Larry reported all hands ready. "We're going down!"

The _Sky Maid_ went down in a series of jerky drops. With eventual refinement, a ship equipped with the Ripon Magnetic Control would probably be able to come down as gently as a falling leaf, but this first apparatus was crude and experimental. Just at the end one of Ripon's elbows touched the wrong switch. The rocky surface swept up to meet them at high speed. He shouted hoarsely and spun compensating dials, but before he could check the momentum they struck with a heavy crash. The ship heeled over, and all the lights went out. As Larry was flung off his feet he heard a sharp hiss of escaping air.

* * * * *

Momentarily half stunned, Larry lay on the floor in a corner of the control room with the body of another of the crew across his legs. Then he saw a bulky, space-suited figure heave to its feet across the room and heard Ripon's voice in his ear phones.

"Leaping ray-blasts, what a crash! But I seem to be alive and in one piece. How about the rest of you?"

Other men struggled to their feet and answered their names. One had his helmet smashed and was already dead in the airless atmosphere that remained after the air had rushed out through the shattered wall of the control room, but the rest had nothing more serious than a few bruises.

"Well," Colton said. "Here we are! And here we're likely to stay."

"It may not be that serious. The first thing is to take stock of our damage."

The _Sky Maid_, they found on making a complete survey, was far less seriously damaged than might have been the case. The wall of the control room was punctured by a jagged splinter of rock, but there were only a few other minor leaks. Many of the compartments had retained their air. Once the hole was patched and the other leaks stopped, their reserve tanks still held enough air to let them make a homeward voyage in safety. The network of wires outside the hull would require considerable reconditioning, but none of the internal magnetic equipment was ruined.

"About five days' work!" Ripon summed up. "And it's primarily a job for the engine room force. Gibson, Colton, the two quartermasters and I will go ashore with several days' supply of chemical capsules for the air conditioners on our helmets. Chief Engineer Masterson remains in command of the ship. Get her back in navigating shape as soon as you can, Chief."

Masterson, a grimy and bullet-headed little man with a drooping mustache and something of the look of a mournful Airedale, slapped the side of his duro-glass helmet in a casual salute. Larry knew that the ship was being left in good hands. He had come to have considerable respect for the taciturn engineer. He did not know why Masterson was on board the _Sky Maid_, very likely because he had been in some trouble similar to Larry's own, but he was certainly an efficient engineer. He wished he felt as sure of the three men who were going ashore with Ripon and himself. Colton he considered thoroughly untrustworthy, and the two quartermasters were a pair of sullen derelicts of the sort that Ripon had picked up off the beach for most of the crew.

"Landing party ashore!" Ripon snapped. "Let's get going! This isn't an ordinary exploring party, and every hour counts."

VII

They stood on a bare expanse of pitted rock. The _Sky Maid_ had crashed on the outer slope of one of the craters, and the ground rose steadily to the jagged rim of the rocky bowl. Other bare peaks were all about them, black teeth against the starry sky. The earth gleamed large and pale above them. The scene was bleak and silent, unutterably desolate and forlorn, and the little group of Earthlings drew closer together. Then Ripon pointed up the ridge.

"We'll go up there and look around. Larry--you carry the radium detector. We mustn't let the exploring fever make us forget our main purpose in having come here."

They toiled slowly up the slope. Walking was difficult. Due to the power of their Earthly muscles on this planet of so much lighter gravity, they had a tendency to bound into the air at each step in spite of the heavy leaden soles on the feet of the space suits. Gradually they learned the necessary muscular control, a sort of sliding step, and then they made better progress.

Ripon was some yards in the lead as they reached the rim of the crater. For a moment the tall scientist was silhouetted against the stars, then he abruptly dropped flat on the rock and motioned back to them to do the same. His voice was a faint whisper in the ear phones.

"Crawl up here slowly, one at a time. Careful!"

Larry was the first to join him, lying flat on the rock at Ripon's side. Together they peered down into the crater. It's flat floor was swarming with some sort of queer animal!

This particular crater was a small one, and the level floor was only some thirty yards below the rim. Larry stared in amazement at the creatures who were coming to sit in long rows around a small mound in the center of the crater. He hardly knew whether to call them men or animals. They had the hard shell and articulated legs of an insect, but their faces had a semi-human appearance in spite of the pair of long antennae that grew out of their foreheads. Their feet made a dry rustling sound as they clambered down over the rock, and they carried metal clubs with spiked heads. Larry saw that they walked with four of their six limbs while the upper pair were equipped with three curved fingers each. On the top of each antenna was a round ball that glowed with a phosphorescent light.

"I thought there wasn't any life on the Moon!" Larry whispered. Ripon grinned at him through the duro-glass of his helmet.

"You thought a lot of things that were wrong, young feller!"

It was a weird scene in the cold pale light of the Earth. Some of the insect men came out of small, dome-shaped mounds that might have been houses. Others came climbing down the far side of the crater. Their glowing antennae bobbed in ceaseless motion, and there was a constant dry clicking. Suddenly Larry realized that the creatures were talking together!

That meant that there was at least some atmosphere on the Moon! Enough to carry sound! Perhaps it had a different composition than the atmosphere of the Earth. It was certainly very thin, for the air in the control room had instantly escaped through the shattered side and the man with the broken helmet had smothered, but there was enough here to sustain these odd creatures. Then Ripon touched him on the arm, and Larry saw something that a group of the insect-men were very ceremoniously carrying to the mound in the center of the crater. It was an ordinary metal chair of a very common and familiar Earthly pattern, the sort of chair to be found in the cabins and mess rooms of any stratholiner.

"One of those old ships must have reached the Moon after all!" Larry whispered. "That chair must be from the wreckage."

"Heaven help the survivors if those many-legged devils got hold of them!"

"They can't be very strong, with the Moon's gravity so slight," Larry said.

"That doesn't prove a thing. They can be light in frame and still very strong. Think how many times his own weight our ant can carry, or how far a flea can jump."

The chair had been placed in the center of the mound, and the Insect-men drew back. Now thin jets of steam or mist began to pour up around the mound, forming a foggy curtain that hid it. The mist only rose a little way, then dropped slowly down again to form an icy film on the cold rocks. The jets ceased, and mist vanished, and Larry Gibson stared in open-mouthed amazement. A dark-haired girl was standing erect on the crest of the mound!

VIII

The girl was white-skinned and lovely, utterly different from the grotesque creatures who surrounded her. Larry was crouching near enough to see her faintly smiling eyes, and the curve of her red lips, and the dark hair that fell to her waist behind. Except for the grotesque metallic helmet on her head, and the fact that she wore no clothing except for a silver loin cloth, she might have been a girl of the sort to be seen along the elevated cross-walks of New York City.

"Do you see her too?" Ripon whispered.

"I do."

"We can't both be that crazy, so she must really be there. But how she breathes in that atmosphere, and how she avoids freezing to death, is more than I can tell you."