Kerrigan was a legend of his own life-time. He was the kind of electric personality around whom strange stories accumulate like iron filings dancing towards a magnet. When Kerrigan failed to return from a special mission in 2178 the stories grew wilder. Some of his crew refused to believe he was dead, others went to look for him. By 2180 it was as fashionable to go to Lunar Base to look for Kerrigan as it had been fashionable to hunt monsters in Loch Ness two centuries before.
His brother Harry was open minded about the stories, even a little sickened by the transport companies who were cashing in on Kerrigan's disappearance. Then Harry met Susan Croft and his opinions of the transport companies changed a little. Susan was a telepath and she believed that Kerrigan was trying to contact her. Lunar, however, is a big, empty, dusty place and it was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Then one day they saw Kerrigan, or something that looked like Kerrigan...
Release date:
August 28, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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WOLFE KERRIGAN laughed as he buckled the suit around him. It was a big suit and it had been purposely tailored to the man inside. Kerrigan’s laughing grey eyes twinkled out from behind the visor as he lowered the helmet, and began a routine check of the essential controls. Max looked at his chief.
“Everything O.K.?”
“Sure, Max. When wasn’t it?” Wolfe’s enormous hand descended on Max Bernard’s shoulder. A spaceman had to have a technician who was as efficient as a machine and as loyal as a sheep dog. Max Bernard was just that kind of man. He and Wolfe had been together for some considerable time. Wolfe was just thinking that if Max hadn’t been quite so efficient they wouldn’t have been together for such a considerable time. Spacemen with inefficient technicians don’t last.
Wolfe went to the dome’s observation panel and looked out. Lunar Base resembled a crop of mushrooms—huge mushrooms without stalks. They grew out of the white dust of the lunar surface. But these were mushrooms of plastic; man-made mushrooms; living domes; laboratories; administration centres. Not far across the crater floor Wolfe Kerrigan could see the jagged outlines of the mountain ring. Much closer a rocket stood on its launching ramp, poised on its base like a winkle poised on a pinnacle of rock. The rocket’s nose pointing up into the lunar sky and into the space beyond it, like a signpost, like some strange, metallic finger board.
One of the other members of the base party, Wolfe Kerrigan couldn’t quite see who, was walking slowly around the rocket, apparently inspecting it. At the other side of the plastic mushroom Wolfe knew that his skimmer waited. He had a rather uneasy feeling about this job. He grinned at Max Bernard.
“See ya,” he said shortly.
“Sure thing! Take care of yourself.”
“I’ll try,” said Kerrigan. “I’ll certainly try.”
It seemed like routine already, he thought, as he pressed the lock-opening mechanism. Routine! That was a laugh. He thought about the calendar, 2178—Lunar Base had been established something like 200 years. There was still an incredible amount of exploration to be done. He thought again about the special mission on which he was going, that top-secret mystery which he hadn’t even shared with his old friend, Max Bernard.
The lock was open, and Wolfe Kerrigan stepped out into the dry, powdery dust of Lunar. He sank his boots into the fine white powder. He felt like a fly wandering across a lady’s dressing table, a fly which had inadvertently set its foot in a powder bowl. The idea struck him as incongruous and funny. He chuckled to himself.
Wolfe Kerrigan was a man to whom life was rich in humour. The lock closed behind him. He turned and saw Max Bernard’s face peering through the visiport. There were two visiports in this particular mushroom. One was looking away towards the rocket ship; the other was situated quite close to the lock. Wolfe climbed aboard his skimmer; the engine started at a touch. It was a sealed-unit engine, sealed being the operative word, for the more-than-mildly abrasive lunar dust had a nasty habit of helping engines to find their way to the scrap yard long before their manufacturers felt that they ought to have gone. Even with the vastly reduced lunar gravity, a man didn’t indulge in long, space-suited walks if he could avoid it. Wolfe got into the skimmer, took the steering bar in his hand, and sent the redoubtable little craft flitting across the dusty flatness of the crater bed. He paused and glanced over his shoulder once or twice. The mushroom crop that was Lunar Base grew smaller as he neared the edge of the mountain range. The old pioneers had blasted out passes to the wide flat plain of the Mare Imbrium beyond. Wolfe headed for the nearest of these artificial passes and the skimmer glided between the towering pinnacles of rock as the ship of Odysseus, millennia before, had avoided the twin perils of Scilla and Charybdis. Kerrigan reached the Mare Imbrium beyond the crater and set out towards the unexplored area near the Melican crater, which was the local point of the special mission upon which he had been sent. The journey itself was long but uneventful, and when his auto-navigator told him that he had reached the point in the sealed orders he had previously opened, memorised and burnt, he parked the skimmer and alighted.
The area ahead of him was one that was marked by characteristic radial-cracks—some of them no more than a few inches across, others deep chasms into which a man could descend. From the panniers of the skimmer, Wolfe Kerrigan extracted a long coil of plastic rope. It was tougher than a steel hawser and as flexible as silk. Securing one end firmly to the harness clips of his space suit, he fastened the other to the parked skimmer. He gave an experimental tug and the skimmer moved. That, he reflected, was one of the disadvantages of the reduced gravity.
He pressed the anchor control and the skimmer’s pseudo-grav came into operation. It was an additional safety factor. Kerrigan threw out a brace of grapples. At his next experimental tug the skimmer did not move. He threw the coiled rope down into the blackness; one more tug to reassure himself that the skimmer was holding fast, and Wolfe Kerrigan began to descend like a human spider. The abrasive surfaces of the metal gauntlets held the rope like a vice. It was far easier climbing down in a space suit than it would have been to climb the rope with bare hands.
Wolfe’s torch, strapped to his belt with one or two other pieces of equipment, cut a swathe through the darkness as he descended. The light swung from one side of the fissure to the other; occasionally his descending body would disturb dust on the small shelves on the inside of the fissure. The particles would travel strangely and unnaturally in the light gravity. Wolfe looked up. There was a thin crack of daylight above his head; the rest was darkness save for the swinging, stabbing beam of the torch at his belt. He continued to descend, wondering as he did so whether the rope would be long enough. The fissure was growing narrower; he paused in his descent and stretched out his other arm. He could almost touch the far side now. It couldn’t have been more than four and a half feet across at this point. He kept on climbing down; the fissure grew narrower still. The crack of light above his head grew more slender until it became only a tiny ribbon of light. He kept on descending….
Where there were irregularities in the wall of the fissure his back and occasionally his heel would move out a little too far and kick the wall behind. The rope gave out with a gentle tug at his belt. He hesitated only for a moment, for the fissure was now narrow enough to be climbed in the way that an experienced rock-face expert climbs a ‘chimney’. Wolfe unfastened the rope from his harness, took a small spare light unit from his tunic pocket and hung it from the harness clip of the rope. He had no desire to spend the rest of his life at the bottom of the fissure. He looked at the dial of his oxygen tank; there was a good twelve hours in hand. Wolfe Kerrigan began to descend the fissure. It was awkward and, even in the reduced gravity, it was a highly dangerous proceeding. Some of those little shelves were as sharp as knife edges, as jagged as the day they had been torn apart by the volcanic upheavals which Wolfe believed had made the fissure in the first place.
He continued descending. The torch at his belt swung down and revealed the floor of the fissure strangely flattened. He frowned and paused; this hardly seemed natural. It certainly didn’t seem right. The fissures that he had explored previously had not ended like this.
The bottom of a fissure was usually ‘V’ shaped in cross-section. The danger to a space-suited explorer was getting a boot wedged, and suffering a suit leak at the ankle in a desperate endeavour to free it. He knew that more than one good man had been depressurised in that way. It was not a pleasant death…. Those who disliked Wolfe Kerrigan—and there were plenty who did—had forecast a number of interesting exits for him, but there were few even of these that he fancied less than he fancied the prospect of dying of de-pressurization down there at the bottom of this fissure!
Flat floor! It might almost have been an artefact, if he hadn’t known better. Or was this the sinister purpose underlying this Special Mission on which he had been sent? Could it be that the legends which had crept around Lunar Base for the last two hundred years were ultimately coming to fruition? Were they more than legends, those things that some of the old space men had claimed to see in the pioneer days? Was it possible that with the solar system conquered and with long-term star ships already on their way to Arcturus and Proxima Centauri, the nearest of Earth’s heavenly neighbours should hold a secret more strange and sinister than the more distant worlds?
Wolfe Kerrigan trod firmly, decisively and purposefully along the flattened floor of the fissure. The light at his waist showed him that this peculiarly flattened floor went on for some considerable distance. He paused, thinking. Perhaps it was a reflection. It couldn’t have been anything else. But Kerrigan had led an adventurous life, and he was not prepared to take any unnecessary risks. The ability to distinguish the necessary risk from the unnecessary risk is one of the chief points of demarcation between the hero and the imbecile. Kerrigan flattened himself against the wall of the fissure and switched off his torch. Slowly he eased himself forward from the wall; the gauntleted hands pressed hard against the rock face behind his back. He glanced through the visor of the space suit as he walked. Some distance ahead, forty or fifty yards ahead, maybe a little more, something gleamed in the darkness of the fissure.
“Well, I’m damned!” muttered Kerrigan. Without using the torch and with his hands hovering close to the butts of the big blaster he always wore, he walked slowly forward towards the light. Perhaps that was some hitherto natural, unexplained phenomenon, he thought, and then again, perhaps it wasn’t! If it wasn’t, then it tied in all too well with the floor, that floor that shouldn’t have been flat—but was!
He kept on moving. The light was apparently stationary. It was an odd, pale, greenish-white, flecked with a trace of yellow. It had a rather cold, sinister appearance. Wolfe was within ten yards of it now, and he realised that it was coming through an opening in the side of the fissure. As he looked at that opening and edged closer until he was only five yard. . .
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