Part 1

Stay off the MOON!

By RAYMOND F. JONES

Illustrated by FINLAY

_How do you fill a pipette and measure out a half c.c. of hydrochloric acid into a test tube--from a quarter million miles away?_

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories December 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The real problem, of course, is not quite that simple. You don't literally fill a pipette or use a test tube; you activate metering circuits that force tiny, ground-glass plungers a measured distance into reagent pumps. You send signals that close some valves and open others, and apply heat and adjust temperatures, and filter solutions, and send the product to a spectrometer that determines what you've got and how much.

Then you have to code it and get the information from the moon to earth.

James Cochran had seen the equipment work through hundreds of checkout analyses. But he didn't understand it. He was a chemist, and he had drawn up the specifications for the chemical analyzers of the Prospector, but it had been the electronic boys who dreamed up the remote mechanization and the telemetry equipment that would allow him to sit before a complex panel at the Center and direct his chemical laboratory on the moon to learn what the moon was made of. Some of the light-headed technicians who worked on the project had dubbed it Operation Green Cheese, but Cochran had more respect for the complexity of the effort.

It was Sunday midnight. The beginning of countdown was forty hours away. Cochran's crew had finished the chemical checkout, but in the assembly hangar technicians still swarmed about the Prospector, giving final-check to the power and telemetry components.

Jim Cochran signed off the last of the check reports and dropped them in the slot for delivery to the Project Director. He turned off the lights over his own desk and went out to the hangar. Under the blaze of fluorescent lights the device looked like some monstrous insect. The differential housings over the worm-screw drives gleamed like a red, segmented carapace. The blue appendages of the solar cell boxes were extended as if in some frantic appeal. The radar dish and the helical antenna extended mutely upward. And, like a furious proboscis, the exploratory drill, which would pierce the moon's skin to a depth of five hundred feet, seemed to gnaw at the concrete floor of the hangar.

Sam Jarvis, supervisor of electronic checkout, saw Jim Cochran enter and came over to him with a broad, weary grin. "AOK, so far! This package is going to be perfect. If only the rocket boys will set up a bird that will take it to the moon--"

"They'd better," said Jim. "I don't think I could ever go through this again if they dump the Prospector in the drink."

* * * * *

Sam turned back to look at the robot machine and the swarming technicians. "Yes, you could," he said. "All of us have gone through heartbreak time and again the past five years, watching them blow up, or fall back and burn in the atmosphere because the motors didn't ignite. Or seeing them get all the way to the moon and have some five-dollar transistor conk out. But we always have at it again. You will, too. You're new, but you're one of us now. You never back out when you've come this far."

Watching the Prospector, Jim knew Sam was right. It had taken some persuasion to bring him to this point, however. Until a couple of years ago he had believed he would be content with ivory-tower plastics research for the rest of his life. The persuasion had been applied when Mary's brother, Allan Wright, had made the astronaut team.

Allan and Jim had grown up together. There was no other person Jim felt closer to except Mary and their two children. Allan had dreamed of space when they were kids, and when he was fifteen, he said, "I'm going out there. I don't know how. But, somehow, I'm going out there."

Now, he had been selected to captain the first Apollo voyage. He had been born for that purpose, he said.

But while he was still in the general pool of astronauts he had opened his campaign to get Jim into the space program. "They need the best brains they can get," Allan said. "You haven't got any right to sit in a musty old plastics lab while guys with half your ability try to get us into space. NASA will take you tomorrow!"

Jim didn't try to tell him that his plastics lab wasn't exactly musty, or that he didn't think of himself as one of the best brains in the country. But Mary sided with Allan; she was almost as excited about space as he was. In the end, Jim went to NASA. Within days, he had been assigned to head the development of the Prospector chemical mechanization.

It had been something of a jolt to pull up all the roots he had so carefully put down for him and his family, and move to the hectic, bustling, space-frontier community of the Center. But he wasn't sorry. It put something new in the blood, something men had never known before.

Space!

The great Saturn lifted slowly, on a vast blossom of fire, with snowy lox streaming down its sides. Then it was gone, a twinkle of fire high above, among the stars. That was all.

Mary and Jim Cochran continued to stare at the fading twinkle, and finally they turned away. Allan had obtained permission to be in the blockhouse during the firing. It hadn't been necessary for Jim to be there. He didn't want to know the instant-by-instant telemetry reports which told whether or not the flight was successful. Sam or Allan would call him when they knew. That would be soon enough for him.

"Let's drive down to the beach and watch the moon from there," said Mary. "We can't just turn around and go home, like--like nothing had happened."

Jim smiled in the darkness. Mary was as eager as he was for the success of the flight. And she didn't have his fear of failure, that kept him from wanting to know the maybe-yes, maybe-no indications that the telemetry would first show.

"Sure," he said, "that's a good place to watch it."

The moon.

* * * * *

They watched its reflection thrashing on the water as the breakers rolled across, under, and around it. It was the same image that men had watched and wondered about and feared--for a half million years. The first creatures that had any semblance of manhood had sat on their haunches on this same shore and watched the same moon and the same water.

And felt the same fears, Jim thought.

He didn't know whether it was fear or not, but there was some sense of awesome mystery that filled him when he looked at the moon. It had been that way all his life. He remembered how it was when he was a boy and he walked through the fields at night on his way home. He had to pass Cramer's Pond, and when the moon was up its light from the sky and its reflection from the pond seemed to fill the whole earth with a cold, silver light. He always hurried past the pond on such nights.

Mary felt it, too. "I wonder why the moon makes people feel the way they do."

"How does it make people feel?"

"Oh, kind of--kind of--_you_ know!"

Jim laughed aloud. This was a typical Mary Cochran explanation. But it told him all he needed to know. What she said was quite true. He _did_ know.

The baying of dogs on a wintery, moonlit night.

The madness called lunacy.

Seeds must be planted just so, in relation to the moon, or the crop will fail.

Men had always felt strange things about the moon. Would a Saturn missile and a mechanical monster in its nose be able to destroy all that?

Jim started the car. "Let's get back. I've _got_ to know how the flight's going!"

* * * * *

They were still in the blockhouse, but the tension was relaxed. They were talking and watching the meters and cathode ray tubes without the strain and fear of failure. Jim knew the answer even before Sam and Allan walked up to him and slapped him on the back.

"Where the devil did you go?" said Sam. "I thought you were going to be right behind me when we fired, and you weren't here at all!"

"It's like your first baby, you want to be there, and you don't. Was it a good shot?"

"Was it a good shot?" Allan's face became ecstatic. "We've never had a better one. On course all the way!"

The Project Director, Emil Hennesey was behind them. His face was bleak. "I expected you to be here for the firing, Cochran," he said. "It seems to display little interest in your end of the project that you didn't feel it necessary to show up."

Jim looked at him steadily and shrugged without answer. Hennesey was one guy whose presence on the space team Jim couldn't figure out. He was an ex-Major, and he had no capacity for dreaming. Men, machines, transistors, rockets--they were all the same thing, merely objects to be made to obey.

"You are aware of your next sequence of duties, I trust?" said Hennesey.

Jim nodded curtly. "I'll be ready."

* * * * *

Sixty-six hours to the moon. That's what it takes with marginal escape velocity and free-fall conditions. But it was really five hundred thousand years and sixty-six hours, Jim thought. Surely there hadn't been a single hour in all that time when someone, somewhere on earth had not felt the longing to solve the secret mystery of the moon.

Now they were about to find the answer. But what would they have when they found it? They would know that the surface dust of the moon consisted of certain percentages of silicates and oxides. They would know that the under layers were composed of rocks, maybe of granite or limestone or basalt. They would determine how much of each.

And then it would be over. The quest of the ages would be answered with a few simple statements that could be obtained in any high-school chemistry lab--if the lab were on the moon.

Jim Cochran felt there _had_ to be more to it than that.

Why do dogs howl at the moon on winter nights?

Why do men say that madness of the mind is lunacy?

Why must planting be done in the right phase of the moon?

Little sleep was had by any of the crew during the next two nights, even though the instrument stage of the ship was now completely inert except for occasional telemetry signals that were fed to the computers for course checking and correction. The ship was simply falling on its own momentum.

Six hours before moonfall, activities in the tracking center accelerated and the tension increased. There was no question of hitting the moon; the landing had to be made safe for the cargo of instruments.

Jim Cochran watched the operators during this period. He told himself he didn't understand it, but he had actually learned a great deal of electronics during the past two years. He had had to in order to design and operate a chemical laboratory 240,000 miles away.

The television screens came on, showing the pock-marked surface of the moon as the ship orbited. The thrill and the fear of the great unknown began to rise in Jim's throat. By the silence in the room, he was sure the others sensed it, too.

Abruptly, the braking command was given and the ship began to fall out of orbit towards the planned landing in the Sea of Rains. On the screens, the images swelled as the ship plummeted faster. In one corner could be seen the spring-loaded extension legs, like those of some great spider. It seemed impossible that these could cushion the violent shock of landing.

The sudden surge of a retro rocket and the blast of moondust blinded the television eye, but there was a sense of crazy, rocking, rolling motion. Then the eye went dead.

Jim almost cried out. The ship couldn't have crashed.

* * * * *

An operator quickly switched controls and the screens came alive again. He turned a dial slowly. The camera eye moved. It swept the craggy horizon and the nearby floor of the Sea of Rains. Others had seen this before, but it was the first time for Jim. He found himself pushing forward, drinking in the sight eagerly.

"The moon--the moon--" he said softly to himself. But the others heard it and they understood.

Signals were sent across space to collapse the landing legs and unfold the sides of the instrument cone like the leaves of a flower. The Prospector lay exposed to the environment for which it was built. Slowly, in response to other signals, the worm-screw drives, which had been retracted against the body of the vehicle, turned through an arc and lowered to the surface. Locked in position, the drive screws began turning slowly. The vehicle moved off the now-useless landing support and became an entity of its own.

The ungainly arms of the solar cells automatically oriented toward the sun; the antennas pointed toward earth. The scanning cameras in the turret of the Prospector took control of the video circuits and the turret slowly turned as the vehicle moved across the face of the moon. The landing support remained behind and slowly dwindled like some useless wreckage.

There was sudden pandemonium in the tracking center control room. The operators laid down their headsets and began pounding each other on the back, while ear-splitting Indian yells filled the air. Jim and Sam found themselves beating each other on the arms and yelling senselessly.

"We made it!" Sam cried. "We made it! We got your little old laboratory up there for you!"

* * * * *

There were hours of testing and calibration yet to be done before the Prospector could be used for its primary mission. Hundreds of electronic circuits had to be checked to see that they survived the takeoff and landing without becoming distorted or inoperative.

Jim went home for the rest of the night. When he returned the next morning Sam reported that all circuits were go, and the Prospector was his.

He had operated the laboratory in the Prospector many times, either on a mock-up or from this control panel while the Prospector was in the hangar. But he couldn't keep the faint tremor from his hand as he reached for the first control that would manipulate the machine on the moon.

The drill had been extended to operating position, but the head had not yet been energized. Jim touched it to the fine dust of the floor of the Sea of Rains. The drill went quickly to a depth of eighteen inches in the dust before it struck something firmer.

"That kills the theory about eighty feet of that stuff, anyway," said Sam as he read the instruments.

Jim was not interested in depth at this time. He fed some of the surface material into the laboratory and set the controls to run the preprogrammed analysis. They waited minutes; then the analysis began to appear in cryptic symbols on a paper tape.

Jim glanced at it and frowned.

"What's the matter? Isn't it working right?" Sam asked anxiously.

Jim hesitated. "It indicates the presence of several silicates, some carbonates, and a high percentage of oxides. These are mostly of sodium, calcium, and iron, as you might expect. But there's something wrong with your calibration. The atomic and molecular characteristics aren't coming through right."

"The boys ran checks on the standard samples aboard the Prospector last night," said Sam. "The results tallied exactly. I'll show you the tapes."

* * * * *

Jim waited, puzzled, while Sam brought up the check tapes. When he saw them, he shook his head. "There's a standard calcium carbonate sample carried aboard the Prospector. Here's a calcium carbonate picked off the surface. You can see the difference yourself. The nominal analysis is the same, but the atomic weights and the energy levels are just slightly different. That doesn't make sense unless your circuits are out of calibration."

"Let's run another standard sample," said Sam.

Within a few minutes the calibration check had been repeated. Jim held up the tape. Sam peered over his shoulder. "Just like the first one," said Sam. "Nothing's wrong with the circuits. Maybe you've got some new stuff there, that's never been identified before."

"That's hardly possible," said Jim. "There aren't any new elements in the places where sodium and calcium and silica are supposed to be. Yet, I don't understand how this can be. If the atomic weights are different, and the energy levels are different, they have to be different elements. It doesn't make sense."

"Well, why don't we push on," said Sam, "that is, if you've completed the surface sampling in this spot. Some samples at lower depths may give other indications."

Jim agreed. He drove the drill deeper into the face of the moon. At ten-foot intervals he removed samples and ran them through the analyzer. The results were the same down to the hundred-foot level. All results showed common chemical elements with slightly variant atomic characteristics.

Which made them _different_ chemical elements!

After six hours, Jim stood up from the console and shook his head wearily. "It's no good, Sam. There's something wrong that I can't put my finger on. If it isn't in the circuits, I don't know where it is. But these readings just aren't right. There's no use going deeper until we find out where the error is."

Sam's face was somber. "There just isn't any error. There can't be. Unless it was made by whoever put the moon together--"

"Please make a complete check of every analyzer and telemetry circuit tonight, and we'll try again tomorrow. I want to think about this."

* * * * *

He thought about it, and he dreamed about it. And along about three o'clock in the morning he sat bolt upright in bed and stared at the dim moonlight on the opposite wall of the bedroom.

It wasn't possible, he told himself audibly. It just wasn't possible!

Mary stirred and leaned on one elbow beside him. "What's the matter. Are you having nightmares?"

"Yeah--yeah, I guess I am. I'll be back in a minute, honey." He got up and padded to the door. "I've got to make a phone call."

"At this time of night?"

But Jim was gone. He turned on the hall light and dialed Sam's number. After a long time Sam answered sleepily.

"Wake up!" said Jim. "I've just figured it out!"

"Who the devil--? Oh, it's you, Jim. Figured out what? Do you know what time it is."

"Do you know the results of your calibration re-check?"

"How would I know that? I've got the night crew on it, but I didn't ask them to report to me in the middle of the night. Go back to bed, and let's talk about it in the morning."

"They're not going to find anything wrong, Sam."

"I could have told you that."

"But the elements of the moon are different--and there's only one explanation."

"What?"

"Think about it a minute, Sam. We take a spectrograph of the sun, and we find the same elements that are here on earth. We turn it on Alpha Centauri and find the same thing. We turn it to the farthest stars we can find that give enough light to record by. Always the same. Calcium is calcium, whether it's on the earth or on a star a half billion light years away."

"So?" Sam's voice was tired, and he sounded as if he was listening only because Jim was too good a friend to tell to go to hell for calling in the middle of the night.

"So? So what?" Sam repeated.

"So we go to the moon," said Jim, "and all of a sudden calcium isn't calcium, and the sodium on the moon isn't the same as the sodium on earth and on the sun and on Alpha Centauri and the stars a half billion light years away. Don't you see what that means!"

"No, I guess not," said Sam dully. "Maybe in the morning--"

"It means the moon just doesn't _belong_, Sam! It means the moon is completely foreign to anything in the Solar System, in the whole galaxy--in any galaxy we have been able to analyze. It means the moon has come from somewhere else, from a region of space where atoms and electrons are not even the same as atoms and electrons here. It must be a somewhere that's so far away it's beyond the edge of space as we know it!"

"I'll get dressed and come over," said Sam.

* * * * *

Mary made chocolate and toast, and they sat around the kitchen table thinking and talking of the awesome implications of Jim's theory.

"If what you say is true," said Sam, "it might be that the slightest contact with any substance of the moon would be sheer poison to a human being. A returning vessel could never be permitted to enter the earth's atmosphere, and decontamination would become one of the major branches of science."

"That's entirely possible. It would complicate enormously the problems of establishing a moon-base. A speck of moondust inside the base might be as lethal as an unshielded reactor."

Mary was looking out the kitchen window toward the thin crescent of moon that was setting over the city. She thought of Allan, who would soon be voyaging to that alien world. "It's like a trap up there in the sky. We should never have tried to reach it."

"No--it's not like that at all," said Jim vigorously. "We'll solve whatever problems we find there. But think of it! We don't have to build a ship capable of crossing billions of light years of space to see what's out there. Something from out there has come to us and parked right in our own front yard. We have a thousand times more reason to go now!"

Sam toyed with his toast and dunked it in the chocolate. "I think you ought to keep it quiet--until we really _know_, don't you."

"Why? I'll run some more tests, sure. I'll plug every loophole there can possibly be. But unless I find something new I'm going to announce it. Why shouldn't I?"

"I don't think Hennesey will like it, for one thing. Too sensational. Even when we actually land there and confirm your analyses by on-the-spot checks--it's still only a theory that the moon doesn't belong to this galaxy. You'll never be able to prove that."

"What we've found already is proof enough!"

"Not for Hennesey. He'll ask to see the shipping manifest by which the moon was transferred here. You know Hennesey."

"Sure, I know Hennesey," said Jim bitterly. "And he doesn't count. Not in something like this. This is big, and important, and I'm going to announce it. I want the credit for discovering it. It'll be called Cochran's Theory, and some University will offer me at least an honorary Ph.D. Is that bad?"

Sam shook his head. "Of course it's not bad. But I wonder what the public reaction will be like, and how about Congress--especially if this business about possible poisoning from moondust turns out to be correct? There might be a lot of pressure to cut funds and maybe cancel the whole moon project."

"If moondust is lethal, there's no better time to be warned against it than right now!"

* * * * *

He spent the following week, eighteen hours a day, at the chemical analysis panel in the tracking station. As long as the moon was above the horizon, day or night, he kept experiments going--checking, re-checking, calibrating, searching for loopholes.

There were no loopholes. There was no malfunction of equipment. The atoms of the moon's elements were not the same as those of the rest of the galaxy.

When Allan next came to visit on leave from his own station, Jim told him what had been found. Allan's face paled a little as he listened in awe to the story. He stood up and paced across the room as Jim finished.

"I always knew there would be something--something extra in this," he said. "You look up at night and you know the moon can't be just another piece of earth. Now--you've found out what it is!

"How far could it have come? How old can it be? Imagine stepping out onto a world so old, from so far away!"

"You haven't heard it all," said Mary tensely.

"There's more?"

"They think perhaps the slightest touch of moon substance may be lethal."