Part 2
"We don't know," said Jim hastily. "It's a thought that Sam advanced. But I think it's quite possible. We won't know until we can run animal tests. But special precautions will have to be taken to decontaminate the Apollo after you re-enter with your space-suits."
"This will mean engineering changes. Are they under way?"
"I haven't announced my theory yet. But the necessary changes to provide for decontamination will have to be made."
"I wanted this as much as you," said Mary. "But now it's gone all wrong. We should have gone on dreaming about the moon and let it be a dream that never came true. I'm afraid of it now. No man should set foot on something so alien and so different."
Allan put an arm around her shoulders and shook her gently. "Sis! What kind of talk is that? You're talking to the guy who's going to be the first one to put his foot on the moon."
* * * * *
From the mountain of data accumulated in his experiments, Jim wrote his paper. Hennesey could control the publication of any material based on space experiments to the extent that they affected national security. But even he could not find a means to extend a security blanket to cover a theory of extra-galactic origin of the moon.
He raged at Jim, however. "You'll make a laughing stock of us in every scientific center of the world! You can't publish a ridiculous thing like this!"
"No one will laugh if he reads the data I've got to present," said Jim. "Every member of our staff who knows the subject has verified that the data are correct. The conclusion is inescapable."
"I can't forbid publication, Cochran," said Hennesey, "but I think it is very unwise for you to go ahead. Very unwise."
"I'll take that risk," said Jim.
He sent the paper to the Journal of Astro-physics. At the same time he sent an announcement to the major news services.
He had expected some sensationalism in the reporting. There was more than he bargained for. Some of the headlines that followed were:
"Savant Says Moon is Messenger from Outer Space."
"Moon Will Poison Earth."
"Moon Trip--One Way only."
The reactions in the upper echelons of NASA were almost as bad--in their own way. No thought had ever been given to a need for complete decontamination of astronauts and equipment after exposure on the moon. The requirement, if admitted, would threaten the entire program in the minds of some of the engineers. Others admitted it was tough, but thought they could solve it in an extra year or so. Rumblings were heard echoing down from Congressional halls. Why hadn't the stupid scientists known in the beginning that this was necessary? Always bungling things--
In the end, it was Alan himself who came up with a proposal that kept the project from bogging down and still provided some measure of protection against the possible menace. He suggested a plastic outer suit to be fitted over the space-suit and discarded as the astronaut re-entered the space vehicle. With care, such a procedure could prevent direct contact with moondust. In the meantime, it was hoped that robot vehicles could bring back moon samples before the Apollo was sent out.
This rather mild proposal did much to calm the furor in NASA and contractor engineering circles and soon the press had abandoned it for other, more sensational stories. But Hennesey and a number of other officials didn't forget. Some of them believed Jim Cochran was a charlatan at worse and an incompetent at best. They considered he had degraded American science with his fantastic theory.
Scientific judgement was being held in abeyance until actual moon samples were available on earth. For the present, at least one of Jim's predictions had come true. The hypothesis was becoming known as Cochran's Theory. That it was also called Cochran's Idiocy by a few didn't matter.
Jim continued his own sixteen-hour stints at the analyzer controls, probing in a wide pattern over the floor of the Sea of Rains, and striking deeper toward the heart of the moon with each probe.
Probing to such great depths was made possible by a development that didn't even exist when the Prospector design was begun. Then, it was hoped that penetration to a foot and a half of the moon's surface might be possible. Five-hundred-foot holes were only a madman's nightmare. How could you carry such drilling equipment all the way to the moon?
Then, in the last months of Prospector design, laser devices had been produced, capable of burning holes in a diamond. It was only a small step, then, to the design of a drilling head which mounted a cluster of laser beams. These would literally burn their way toward the heart of the moon.
* * * * *
The laser drilling head was lowered on five hundred feet of minute cable, which had tremendous tensile strength. The vaporized moon substance boiled out of the hole and condensed above the surface, settling as fine dust. As the hole deepened, the condensation products coated the upper portions of the hole and the cable. To keep the hole from thus being closed, the cable was vibrated at a frequency that shook loose the condensing rock products, and the laser head was raised with beams shooting upward to clear the hole.
Jim found that a very special technique was required to raise and lower the head at the proper intervals to keep the hole clear and prevent loss of the drilling head. A spare was carried, but he didn't want to face the loss of even one. After three weeks, he felt confident in his operation and began lowering the drilling head to depths of two hundred and three hundred feet.
As he had expected, along with the lunar geologists who were participating, the moon showed a definite pattern of stratification. But the differences between the layers seemed slight. Chalky, calcium compounds were abundant. Some were powdery; others were pressed into brittle limestone formations. No really hard rocks such as granite were encountered, however. The boundaries between layers were ill-defined. No one knew what to make of it. The observations were interesting. Explanations were wholly lacking.
Then, after five weeks of probing, on the edge of the four-hundred-foot level, Jim found something new. He sought out Sam at the end of the day.
"A few years ago," he said, "scientists were startled to find chemicals that were the product of life, inside meteors from outer space."
"I understand they've even found bacteria which they have been able to bring to life," said Sam.
Jim nodded. "More than four hundred feet deep on the moon I've found the same kind of chemicals--hydrocarbons that must be the product of living cells."
"Four hundred feet deep on the moon--" said Sam musingly. "And maybe the moon came from billions of billions of light years across space. So wherever it came from there was something living. What is it? Traces of bacteria, or chemical remains of plant life like our coal mines?"
Jim shook his head. "I don't know yet. I'm not sure we can find out until we go there. But, as you say, it means the moon was once the scene of life--wherever it came from."
"One thing I haven't understood," said Sam, "is why the moon stopped here if it had been traveling through space for so long. Why didn't it keep on going?"
"It was just a combination of factors," said Jim. "The moon happened to be traveling at just the right speed. The earth was in just the right place at the right time. As a result, the moon fell into an orbit around the earth. Pure accident."
"A lucky accident!" said Sam.
Jim looked up at the pale moon above their heads as they walked toward the parking lot. "I hope so," he said. "We will soon know whether it was a lucky or an unlucky accident."
* * * * *
The moon laboratory had not been designed for extensive organic chemical analysis. There were only a few things it could do with organic compounds. But these were sufficient to convince Jim that the moon had once been the scene of life.
Why so deep? he wondered. Nothing had been found in the upper levels, unless he had missed it--he would have to check that out later.
As the drilling head moved slowly downward, the evidence of fossil hydrocarbons increased. There seemed to be an almost geometric increase in concentration after he passed the four-hundred-foot level. He was certain the drill was penetrating a bed of fossil remains of some form of life that flourished the little planet that the moon must have been incalculable eons ago.
The more he thought about his theory, however, the more difficult it became to explain all the factors. If the moon had actually been a planet of some far distant system, what had torn it loose from its parent sun and sent it careening through space? Had its sun exploded, blasting whatever planets the system held into the depths of space? Such an occurrence might explain the sterility of the moon's surface, but why was the evidence of life buried so deep? Perhaps the upper layers of the moon's surface consisted of debris blasted from the exploding sun. Such debris would have been molten, flowing about the moon's surface, cremating everything living. Finally, it would have shrunk in the cold depths of space and wrinkled into the vast mountains and cracks that laced the moon's surface.
It was one way it could have happened, but it seemed so fantastic that Jim had difficulty in convincing himself that it was true.
He doubted the accuracy of his analyses. There were so many tenuous links between the substance on the moon and his own senses that an error in any one of them could destroy the accuracy of the results. But he had no reason to doubt.
He began making calibration checks before and after every analysis. It added scores of hours to his work. Sam sat beside him, checking and verifying the accuracy of the telemetering circuits constantly. The operation was as foolproof as their science could make it.
"You've got to believe what you find," said Sam. "There's no other answer."
And then, one day, Jim found an answer that was utterly impossible to believe. His mind balked and closed up completely at the thought.
Sam had been watching him for almost three hours, aware that something had perturbed Jim exceedingly. Sam kept his mouth shut and leaned quietly against the desk of his own console, keeping check on the circuits while he watched Jim grow more and more distressed. Sam didn't understand the processes, but he was aware that Jim had been going over and over the same analysis for almost two hours. At last Jim's face seemed to go utterly white, and his hands became motionless on the console.
Sam waited a long time. Then he asked, "What is it, Jim? What's the matter?"
Jim continued to stare at the panels of the console, then answered as if from some far nightmare distance. "Two chemicals, Sam," he said. "One of them a big molecule, something like hemoglobin. And neither of them could exist as fossils. Their structure would have broken down long ago. They could exist only in _live_ tissue!"
He continued staring. Neither of them moved. Sam felt as if he had just heard something in a nightmare and had only to wait a minute until he woke up. Then it would be gone.
Jim turned his head at last and faced Sam. He gave a short, harsh bark of a laugh that sounded half-hysterical.
"We'd be off our rockers, wouldn't we Sam? Clear off our rockers to believe there could be something alive five hundred feet inside the moon!"
"Sure--and if it were alive, it wouldn't be sitting still while the laser beams drilled a hole into it. Besides, we just couldn't be lucky enough to lower the drill right smack into some cave where a moon bear was hibernating. All the circuits must have busted down at the same time. We'll fix it tomorrow. Let's get the girls and have a night on the town."
* * * * *
It was a very unsuccessful night on the town. Jim and Mary, and Sam and his wife went to a show and a nightclub.
"You're moving like a zombie. What's the matter?" said Mary as she and Jim danced together.
"Feel like a zombie. Why don't we give it up and go home? I want to get down to the lab by five in the morning."
"That's the trouble. You've done nothing but live in the lab since the Prospector landed. So we're not going home. Sam and Alice are having a good time. You dance with Alice next, and make her think you're enjoying it!"
So Jim didn't go to bed at all, but he _was_ at the lab by five in the morning. The night crew were still at work. He had steered them away from the analyses he was doing so they were unaware of the shattering results he had found.
He took over the controls, and resumed work alone.
There was no doubt about it. If any of the methods they were using were accurate, then he had discovered almost indisputable proof that some living tissue existed five hundred feet below the surface of the moon.
Since the laser drilling head sealed the walls of the hole with a coating of frozen lava, it was necessary to probe horizontally for samples. Small extension drills, capable of reaching five feet on either side of the hole, were carried in the head for this purpose.
Jim lowered the head through the last twenty feet of its drilling limit. Every six inches he sent the horizontal probes to their limits. The tell-tale chemicals existed at every point. He computed the volume he had probed, and felt numb.
By the time Sam had shown up, Jim had withdrawn the probe to the surface and was moving the Prospector slowly across the moon's surface.
Sam saw the motion on the television screen. "Where are you going? I thought we were going to check out the hole we were in."
"It's been checked," said Jim. He hesitated. His original plan had been to move the Prospector a distance of fifty feet and probe again to the five-hundred-foot level. Then, decisively, he pressed the control that kept the Prospector moving. He stopped it a hundred feet from the previous hole and began the long, tedious job of drilling again to the limits of the Prospector's equipment.
* * * * *
Sam spelled him off during the day. By evening, they had hit the four-hundred-and-fifty-foot level. Jim took his first analysis in this hole. The chemicals were there. In greater concentration than at the same level in the previous hole.
Jim turned to Sam. "We have circuits for measuring potential differences on the lunar landscape. Could we make a reading at the bottom of this hole?"
Sam considered. "It'll take some doing, but I think we can manage it. What do you expect to find from that?"
Jim didn't dare tell him what was in his mind. "I don't know," he said. "But it might be worth trying--if there _is_ anything living down there--"
By the following afternoon, Sam had made the necessary equipment arrangements so that potential readings could be obtained in the mass from which the chemical samples were being removed. The telemetered report was connected to a recorder that plotted the variations against a time scale.
As soon as the circuit was set up and calibrated, the recording meter showed a response. A very slow, rhythmic pulsation showed in the inked line on the paper.
Jim felt as if his breathing must have stopped for an infinite length of time. "That's what I thought we'd find," he said at last.
"What?" said Sam. "I don't understand what you're talking about. What do you think those pulsations mean?"
"Did you ever hear of an electroencephalograph?" said Jim, gravely.
"Electro--Sure, brain wave recordings. Jim! You don't think these waves--!"
In silence, the two men stared at the wavering pen and the sheet of recording paper that slowly unrolled beneath it.
* * * * *
Dr. Thomas Banning had been a class mate of Jim Cochran when they were both in their first couple of years of college. Banning had gone on into medicine, specializing in brain studies, while Jim had turned to chemistry. The two had been out of touch for several years.
Tom Banning was the first one Jim thought of, not only because of their old friendship, but because he had read recent papers describing some of Tom's new work on the frontier of electroencephalography. He called first on the phone, then arranged for a personal visit. Sam went with him. They had closed down all Prospector work while they were to be away.
* * * * *
Tom met them and was introduced to Sam as he ushered them into his own modest laboratory. "This isn't the plush sort of surroundings you've become used to," he said as he showed them around. "The Government isn't spending billions these days trying to find out how the human mind works."
Jim could well understand Tom's bitterness. Doing research on the frontiers of the mind, he was forced to spend his own money for much of his laboratory equipment.
"I can sympathize, but that's about all," said Jim. "I just work here myself."
"Tell me about your problem. On the phone, that sounded interesting enough to make a man's day brighter. You said something about an unknown life form with electrical pulses that might be related to brain waves?"
Jim nodded. "That's the way it looks to me."
"But where does this life form exist? Surely it can be identified!"
"If I told you, you'd throw me out or call the paddy wagon. Look at these, first."
Jim and Sam spread out the long folds of chart they had accumulated through days of recording. "Does it look like anything to you?" asked Jim.
Tom Banning frowned. "Well, it certainly _could_ be an EEG record of some kind. The apparatus--"
"The apparatus was nothing but a single electrical probe, and the signal was transmitted under very unsatisfactory conditions."
"Signal transmitted, you say? Just where did this come from, Jim? You didn't come all this way just to pull my leg."
"No," said Jim wearily. "If anybody's leg is being pulled, it's mine. I wanted to see if you could recognize it as having any similarity to an EEG. Then I wanted to ask about your work you reported in your last paper. The one on 'EEG as a Brain Stimulus and Communication Medium'."
"Yes? What did you want to know about that?"
"You've had some success in taking the EEG waves of one person and applying them to the brain of another person so that the latter understood some of the thoughts of the first person while being stimulated by his brain waves."
"Yes."
"Would it be possible to do that with this record?"
Tom studied the record silently. "Any cyclic electric impulse can be applied as a stimulus to the brain. Certainly, this one can. My question still remains, however, what kind of a creature generated these pulses? If it is so alien you can't even identify it, we can't really be sure that these are brain waves. I can only say they may be."
"That's good enough for me," said Jim. "How about setting it up so that we can see if these tell us anything."
"I think I ought to make you tell me where you got these, first."
"Afterwards, please, Tom."
* * * * *
It took the rest of the day to transcribe the record to the format required by Tom's light-intensity reader. They set the following day for the experiment.
Both Sam and Jim were to participate. Tom applied eight electrodes to the skull of each man. They reclined in deep sleep-back chairs, and Tom suggested they close their eyes.
Jim began to feel a sense of apprehension as he heard the first faint whine of the equipment. He knew the transcribed tape was unreeling slowly beneath the photo-electric scanner. The resulting fluctuating current was being amplified, filtered, gated to the proper level, and applied to the electrodes on his skull. He felt nothing.
"Just like a ride on the merry-go-round," he said in disappointment.
Then it struck.
Like a fearful, billowing blackness rising out of the depths of Hell itself, it washed over him. It sucked at his very soul, corroding, destroying, a wind of darkness where the very concept of light was unknown.
He was not conscious of his screaming until he heard his own dying voice and grew slowly aware of the sudden rawness of his throat. He heard another screaming and it sounded like Sam. Dimly, he wondered what had happened to Sam.
Tom was bending over him, patting his face with a cold towel and murmuring, "Wake up, Jim! You're all right now. You're all right."
He opened his eyes and saw Tom, white-faced. He turned and looked at Sam, whose head lolled sluggishly while a low whimpering came from his lips.
"I'm all right," said Jim weakly. "Take care of Sam."
Exhausted, he leaned back and closed his eyes another moment. Sweat oozed from every pore of his skin, cold, fear-inspired sweat.
* * * * *
An hour later, he felt completely recovered from the experience, except that his knees were still a little wobbly when he tried his legs.
"We've got to try it again," Jim said. "Can you cut down the intensity a little? Better still, how about rigging up an intensity control that we can operate for ourselves?"
"Nobody is trying that thing again in my lab," said Tom Banning. "Do you think I want a couple of corpses on my hands? Not to mention the droves of police that your screaming will bring down."
"We've got to _know_," Jim said. "Listen, Tom, I'll tell you where we got this record. Then you can judge for yourself."
Rapidly, he told Tom all that had happened since their first experience with the Prospector. The brain specialist listened impassively until the end of the story.
"So you conclude there's something monstrous on the moon, and this experience you've just had would indicate that it's highly inimical to human life," said Tom.
"That's about it," said Jim.
"What do you expect to do about it?"
"I want to finish what we started here. Then I've got to show the authorities that the moon project has got to stop. We can't go ahead with our moon landings now. If we do, that thing will be stirred out of dormancy into life--and, somehow, it will make its way to earth. I wouldn't be surprised if it could navigate space alone, its own naked being."
Tom turned back to his equipment. "All right, let's go. I want to get a sampling of that before we're through, too."
With a control that he could operate himself, Jim found it endurable. With the control at minimum intensity, he tensed for that first terrible impact of the alien impulses pouring into his own mind.
They were weaker, but still he felt as if the shroud of death had settled over him. He heard a moan from Sam and knew his companion was experiencing the same sensations.
The impulses of evil poured on through the electrodes into his mind. He sensed the immensity and purpose of the thing that had generated them. He sensed that out of some far reach of space, where time and dimension were not the same, the thing had acquired an eternal nature of a kind that knew no birth and could experience no death in the dimensions of man.
He sensed that its nature and its purpose were pure destruction. Destruction of life in any form. It was a thing of death, and life and it could not exist in the same universe.
He sensed how it had come and why it had come, and the partial defeat that had sent it into dormancy because there was no life of the kind it knew in the universe through which it hurtled.
Now--it was once again aware of life.
* * * * *
The three of them went back to the tracking station laboratory together. Jim managed to obtain a clearance for Tom to see what they were doing. "I want to move the Prospector a long distance and try one more hole," he told Sam.
"What do you mean by a long distance?"
"A hundred miles."
"A hun--! You think you'll still find this thing that far away?"
"We'll find out. Can the Prospector travel that far?"
"Sure. If you wait long enough. Its maximum speed is two miles an hour."