Part 5
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.
The light itself came from no definite source, but seemed to emanate from the rocky walls and ceiling, from the clayey ground, and from the general atmosphere. Robin supposed that the source was a natural phosphorescence which he knew was not too uncommon even in Terrestrial caverns.
All around on the soil bordering the flowing water was a forest, a forest with the weirdest vegetation Robin had ever seen. Plants growing in clumps and clusters, plants whose large treelike stalks resembled a whitish-blue bamboo, and which burst into globular blue bulbs which seemed to serve as leaves. Among these tree-sized growths was a rich undergrowth of tight balls of varying yellow and green and purple, growing like thick, squat mushrooms. And everywhere else a thick, lush carpet of green, not grasslike but rather like some oversize moss.
In this forest there were no sounds of birds or animals, but only that of plants swaying in the river breeze, the rushing of the waters, and from somewhere distant in the unseen end of the cavern a strange, steady hissing sound.
The rocket, or what was left of it, lay wedged against a section of the bank, its nose up and its tail swaying in the current. Robin looked at it, amazed to find it so small. All that was left of the rocket was the cargo nose, which was the only part sent off after the last of the rocket sections had discharged their forces and been dropped off. The whole affair was not more than about ten feet long, from the battered, blunted red nose, from which several long, straggling orange cords hung--all that was left of the parachute and its attachments--down to the scraped and battered white cylinder that was the cargo compartment. The compartment ended in a flat plate which bore only a few wires that had once connected it with the break-away mechanism of the last of the atomic blasting chambers. This alone was the load of the eight-story tower of energy which had been the Red Sands experimental rocket.
Robin, without further delay, bent down to the cylinder and began to haul and push it entirely out of the water to the dry ground. He knew he could not afford to risk its loss. To his surprise, moving the rocket head was an easy task. It was extremely light and he found himself possessed of tremendous strength, tired and bruised and sore as he was.
It was, he thought, as he pulled the rocket along, the Moon and its weak gravity. He would only weigh a sixth of his Earth weight here, so would the cargo head, yet he would have the muscles necessary for much more than that weight. He would literally be a superman here--if he could survive.
Survival, he knew, would be the question. He didn't know whether even now he might be inhaling poison from the strange, thin sublunar air. He didn't know what mysterious radioactive rays might be bathing him with their baleful influence. He didn't know whether any of the vegetation in this cavern world would be edible.
Having brought the cargo cylinder to a safe spot many feet from the water, Robin looked for the door that would open the animal compartment. He found it, forced it open. Inside were the two cages. Gently he reached in, unscrewed them from their holdings, and lifted them out.
One of the monkeys was dead, probably killed by some of the jouncing the rocket had taken. The other, looking miserable, was clinging to the bars chattering. Robin looked at it, and the monkey looked back. The young man unlatched the cage, reached in, and took the little brown animal by the back of the neck. But the monkey made no effort to bite. Instead, it twisted around, grabbed Robin's arm, and hung tight.
When his grip was released, the monkey scurried up Robin's arm and clung to his shoulder, recognizing the need for companionship after its frightening experiences.
The rabbits had fared slightly better. One of them was dead, but the other three, while somewhat beaten around, were alive and sniffling their pink noses. Robin saw that there was very little food or water left for the animals.
Here then was the means to test the Moon's capacity to produce food and drink. First, however, Robin decided he would build a pen for the rabbits. If he were lucky, he could breed them and have at least one source of food suited to his system.
He went over to the nearest clump of ball-trees, looked them over, tested his strength on them. They broke easily and quickly when he grasped one by the trunk and pulled. He found that it could be splintered into shreds fairly rapidly and that inside the shell of the stalk was a mass of cottony matter.
He shredded a number of the stalks, and then staked them out in the ground to make a small fenced pen, tying the whole together with one of the long cords hanging from the parachute nose. Into this makeshift pen, he released the three rabbits. He filled the cup from their cage with water from the river, placed it in the pen. The rabbits hopped over, sniffed, and drank. They seemed to suffer no ill effects.
Robin broke open one of the ball-like growths from the tree, found it contained a substance resembling a combination of melon and potato. He offered some of this to the rabbits and after an interval they ate it and seemed to like it.
The monkey was chattering away as Robin did this and suddenly scampered down and snatched a piece of the ball-food, stuffing it into its mouth. Robin had not wanted to use the little creature for a test but the damage was done. However, the monkey seemed to enjoy it.
Robin sat down on the ground and watched. He felt tired, now realized just how tired he was, how sorely he ached from his experience. He felt warm and headachy now that the strain was over. He knew he still had things to do. He wanted to try to make a fire and cook the rabbit that had been killed. He was thirsty as well. He wanted to tie a cord to the monkey so that the animal would not run away into the unknown and possibly dangerous regions of the cavern. He wanted to find a safe place to sleep and hide should there be some sort of animal life around.
But he was growing terribly sleepy and feeling quite sick. He curled up, and before he could stop himself, he was asleep.
The rabbits nibbled on. The monkey sat on a ball in one of the strange trees and watched in silence. Far off, somewhere in the cavern, the mysterious hissing continued.
_8. Robinson Crusoe Carew_
When Robin Carew opened his eyes, he knew he was a very sick man. He felt warm, sticky, and he hurt all over. He tried to sit up, but everything spun dizzily around him. His arms, legs, and body were burning intolerably and there was an itch throughout him that he could do nothing about. He lay back, trying to gain strength.
A little later he managed to crawl to the water's edge, fill the container he had used in the trip from Earth, drag himself back. For a period whose length he could not determine he lay helpless in fever and pain, arousing himself only long enough to drink to soothe his tortured body.
Finally, the fever broke. He sat up, feeling weak but with his mind clear at long last. He dragged himself to his feet, blessing the light gravity, aware that if he were back home his body would not have responded. He felt that he was gaunt, he knew he had been through a terrible siege, and he could only guess at the time he had lain there, tossing about on the strange Lunar ground, unprotected in the queer climate of this unknown cavern. It must, he felt, have been days--Earth days, of course--that his attack had lasted.
Later on he decided that he had suffered from a severe case of space burn. Having traveled through the emptiness of the void between the planets, the vessel had been nearly unprotected from the cosmic rays and the more penetrating of the sun's invisible rays. He considered himself lucky to have survived at all.
He desperately needed food now to rebuild his body. He looked at the rabbit pen. The little animals were there and evidently prospering on the ball-food he had prepared for them before his sickness. It was almost all gone and he broke open and pared more at once. He wondered how long it would be before the animals bred--he knew that rabbits bred fast and abundantly, and hoped it would hold true on the Moon.
There was a sudden chattering in one of the strange trees and he looked up to see a little brown face peering at him. In a moment, the monkey leaped to the ground, then leaped in one tremendous jump to Robin's shoulder and perched there happy at finding companionship again. The monkey looked none the worse for its experience and evidently was getting along nicely on the Lunar vegetation. Thus encouraged, Robin fed himself, first carefully testing everything on the monkey, who objected to nothing.
But somehow the food was not entirely satisfying to the man, who felt that he needed more than that to recover his full energy. He looked again at the rabbits, looked also for the carcass of the dead one. But he found that part of it had rotted and part had been consumed. He looked closely and saw his first glimpse of a Lunar counterpart to animal life.
There were many tiny creatures, a half inch to an inch in length, looking at first like ants but on closer inspection appearing more like three-segmented worms, for they lacked legs and moved in an inchworm's fashion. Instead of antennae, each little worm-ant had on its front segment a single upstanding stalk ending in a little yellow ball. Robin touched one of these and it glowed momentarily. An organ of light, he thought, something like the ones carried by deep-sea fishes. The tiny things were eating the dead rabbit.
Robbin went back and examined the three remaining rabbits. Two were males and the female was evidently heavy with young. Well, he could afford to dispense with one of the males, then, for he knew his body needed meat.
He put the rabbit back though, realizing that first he must make a fire and determine how to cook his meal. He searched his pockets. He was wearing the GI jacket he'd taken from the soldier in Las Cruces. As he had hoped, he dug up a pack of matches in one pocket. He turned it over in thought. When this pack was used up, how could he make fire?
He piled some trunks of dead tree stalks in a cleared spot; he lit them with one of his matches. They caught fire rapidly and soon he had a nice blaze going. He watched the smoke rise and saw that it drifted rapidly away in the same direction the current was flowing--evidence of more caverns somewhere beyond.
He opened his scout knife, hesitated. He'd never cooked a rabbit before. In fact, he'd never had occasion to cook anything for himself. It was meat, he thought, and even if it were eaten raw--well, savages did, so he, too, could manage. He thought about boiling it in water, then realized that the light air pressure might allow water to boil without getting the necessary cooking effects. The best method therefore was to fry it where he could observe the progress.
Steeling himself, he seized the rabbit, killed and skinned it, the latter a process which he found thoroughly unpleasant. Cleaning it of its entrails, another unpleasant task, he cut the meat up into sizable chunks, skewered a couple of pieces on a metal rod which had been part of one of the cages from the rocket, and sat down to cook it over the open fire.
It turned out to be a longer job than he'd thought, and he burned the meat quite thoroughly in the process, but finally he made it edible and chewed it slowly. He needed salt, he realized, and wondered if he could find any. This would have priority when he began his explorations.
He hung the balance of the meat on a ball-tree with a piece of cord. He had seen no evidence of flying insects or creatures, and hoped thereby to be able to preserve the rest of the meat.
Thus fed, he sat down and began to map out his course. I must do things systematically, he told himself. I must keep track of time, set up a regular pattern of living, find a permanent base of operations. I shall have to explore this cavern and those beyond it, find all possible enemies and invent ways and means of defending myself. I shall have to breed my rabbits in quantity, find a way of using their pelts and fur. I shall have to determine a use for everything left from the rocket's material--metals and the like.
For, he continued telling himself, my one aim shall be to stay alive long enough to be found some day by exploring rockets from Earth. I am a Robinson Crusoe of a new world. Crusoe waited twenty-eight years for rescue, I must be as courageous. In his case, he had no evidence that any ship would ever bother to call on him. In my case I know that rockets are being made that will eventually lead to further Moon trips. I know that men are planning to come here. I must wait it out, even for twenty-eight years.
But it was not that simple and he knew it. But first things first, and the first task was to survive.
With the monkey scampering on ahead, he set out to walk to the cavern wall. He found it to be dark and glistening, a lavalike sheet resembling the bubble it was. Leaning against it and looking upward, he saw that it curved gradually up, and that indeed he was in a flaw within a very porous world. Like the inside of a Clark candy bar, he thought, with a wry smile.
Astronomers on Earth had always been puzzled by the lightness of the Moon. They had speculated on it as being mainly pumice. Lately there had been much speculation and opinion holding forth the theory that the Moon was porous, had these bubbles and air pockets all through it, that the Moon's water and atmosphere had all gone underground to be sealed off in these hollow spaces. He now knew they were right.
Most of these Moon bubbles, large enough to hold cities, must be entirely sealed off. But others were linked, sometimes broken into by quakes or the volcanic action which was still going on in the depths of what had once been considered a dead world. This particular cavern was such a bubble.
Robin walked along the outer wall and saw a dark black spot in it, and then others. He came to them, found they were breaks in the surface, pocks caused by smaller bubbles. He looked into one that opened at the base. Using his flashlight, he could see that it was a small, almost entirely spherical cave. He found others pocking the walls of the cavern bubble.
This then was the ideal spot for a permanent home. Not that he needed shielding from the elements, for obviously there were no elements here--no rain, snow, clouds, or weather oddities. Neither was there night or day.
Robin would move his possessions into this cave, simply to have them located and safe. Besides, there might be some larger form of life, some carnivores around--he could not tell. Better to be safe than sorry, he said to himself.
He acted at once, carrying the rocket nose and its stuff to the cave, transferring his rabbits and their pen to a spot just outside the cave door. He would need a bowl for water and, using his screwdriver blade, he finally managed to detach the curved rocket nose and found himself in possession of a deep bowl. He took this down to the water, filled it and carried it back to his cave.
Already he began to feel cheerier. Nothing like work, he thought, to take your mind off your other problems. Suddenly he realized he was tired.
How long had he been at this? He did not know. Now he realized that with no sunrise or sunset visible in his underground world, he could not tell time. He looked at his wrist watch, but it had stopped running, of course. He decided to take a nap; he lay down and fell asleep.
When he woke up, he set his watch at eight o'clock, decided to consider this the beginning of a day. He found the notebook he'd carried in his back pocket, opened it, and set up his new calendar. Using the date of the rocket's take-off, he allowed five days as a probable estimate of the time passed since. He had no means of knowing how long he had been ill, he suspected it had been longer, but decided to let it stand. After arriving at the date, he made the time eight in the morning, laid out the times he expected to eat, to work, to sleep. He would try to live according to a full Terrestrial day, checking the passage of time by his watch.
He then listed all the things he expected would have to be done, and decided to check them off as he completed them. Next he ate breakfast from the fruit of the ball-tree. He spent the rest of that morning trying to find a means of making fire. He had some bits of steel from the rocket, and he tried to strike sparks on everything that resembled rock. After a search, he found some fragments of rock near the water that gave off a spark. Whether these were flints or not, he did not care, so long as they worked for him.
With this discovery he knew he would be free from worry about the problem of matches. His next problem was to secure a weapon. This solved itself rather fast with a bow and arrow. A long, flexible metal tube from the rear connections of the rocket, bent to make a bow when tied with a string of nylon cord, made a satisfactory _twang_ when pulled. He made arrows out of the fibers of the Moontree stalks, and practiced shooting.
The next few days followed the same pattern. Robin enlarged his area of exploration, finding several other kinds of Lunar vegetation and a number of other insect-worms. He found several that were quite large, one as large as a squirrel. It was an odd thing, humping itself along in little bounds--a creature of a dozen ball-like segments, two of which had toothed mouths, although only the ball in front had an eye, a lidless orb set in the center of this ball. But the creature was fringed with the light-rod organs as the tiny worm-ants had been.
Robin tried to cook part of this creature but the monkey refused to touch it and he found it entirely unpalatable. On the other hand, he found that when he removed the little yellow balls from the top of the light stalks on the creature, they remained glowing--even as do the abdomens of fireflies. He therefore diligently set about catching a number of these Moonrats, as he named them, and making a lantern for himself by filling a glass tube with the glow organs. This worked out quite nicely when he experimented in his dark cave-home, emitting a clear, though pale, yellow light.