First on the Moon by Jeff Sutton (thriller books to read .TXT) 📗

the gear during flight. He was, after all, their oxygen equipment specialist. He contented himself with keeping a sharp watch on Nagel's activities—a situation Nagel seemed unmindful of. He seemed to have lost some of his earlier fear. His face was alert, almost cheerful at times; yet it held the attitude of watchful waiting.

Despite his liking for Prochaska, Crag couldn't forget that he had failed to find the time bomb in a panel he had twice searched. Still, the console's complex maze of wiring and tubes had made an excellent hiding place. He had to admit he was lucky to have found it himself. He tried to push his suspicions from his mind without relaxing his vigilance. It was a hard job.

By the third day the enemy missile had become a prime factor in the things he found to worry about. The intruder rocket had drawn closer. Alpine warned that the race was neck and neck. It had either escaped earth at a higher speed or had continued to accelerate beyond the escape point. Crag regarded the reason as purely academic. The hard fact was that it would eventually overtake the still decelerating Aztec. Just now it was a pip on the analog, a pip which before long would loom as large as Drone Able, perhaps as close. He tried to assess its meaning, vexed that Alpine seemed to be doing so little to help in the matter.

Later Larkwell spotted the pip made by the East's rocket on the scope. That let the cat out of the bag as far as Crag was concerned. Soberly he informed them of its origin. Larkwell bit his lip thoughtfully. Nagel furrowed his brow, seemingly lost in contemplation. Prochaska's expression never changed. Crag assessed each reaction. In fairness, he also assessed his own feeling toward each of the men. He felt a positive dislike of Nagel and a positive liking for Prochaska. Larkwell was a neutral. He seemed to be a congenial, open-faced man who wore his feelings in plain sight. But there was a quality about him which, try as he would, he could not put his finger on.

Nagel, he told himself, must have plenty on the ball. After all, he had passed through a tough selection board. Just because the man's personality conflicted with his own was no grounds for suspicion. But the same reasoning could apply to the others. The fact remained—at least Gotch seemed certain—that his crew numbered a ringer among them. He was mulling it over when the communicator came to life. The message was in moon code.

It came slowly, widely spaced, as if Gotch realized Crag's limitations in handling the intricate cipher system evolved especially for this one operation. Learning it had caused him many a sleepless night. He copied the message letter by letter, his understanding blanked by the effort to decipher it. He finished, then quickly read the two scant lines:

"Blank channel to Alp unless survival need."

He studied the message for a long moment. Gotch was telling him not to contact Alpine Base unless it were a life or death matter. Not that everything connected with the operation wasn't a life or death matter, he thought grimly. He decided the message was connected with the presence of the rocket now riding astern and to one side of the Aztec and her drone. He guessed the Moon Code had been used to prevent possible pickup by the intruder rather than any secrecy involving his own crew.

He quietly passed the information to Prochaska. The Chief listened, nodding, his eyes going to the analog.

According to his computations, the enemy rocket—Prochaska had dubbed it Bandit—would pass abeam of Drone Able slightly after they entered the moon's gravitational field, about 24,000 miles above the planet's surface. Then what? He pursed his lips vexedly. Bandit was a factor that had to be considered, but just how he didn't know. One thing was certain. The East knew about the load of uranium in Crater Arzachel. That, then, was the destination of the other rocket. Among the many X unknowns he had to solve, a new X had been added; the rocket from behind the Iron Curtain. Something told him this would be the biggest X of all.

CHAPTER 7

If Colonel Michael Gotch were worried, he didn't show it. He puffed complacently on his black briar pipe watching and listening to the leathery-faced man across from him. His visitor was angular, about sixty, with gray-black hair and hard-squinted eyes. A livid scar bit deep into his forehead; his mouth was a cold thin slash in his face. He wore the uniform of a Major General in the United States Air Force. The uniform did not denote the fact that its wearer was M.I.—Military Intelligence. His name was Leonard Telford.

"So that's the way it looks," General Telford was saying. "The enemy is out to get Arzachel at all costs. Failing that, they'll act to keep us from it."

"They wouldn't risk war," Gotch stated calmly.

"No, but neither would we. That's the damnable part of it," the General agreed. "The next war spells total annihilation. But for that very reason they can engage in sabotage and hostile acts with security of knowledge that we won't go to war. Look at them now—the missile attack on the Aztec, the time bomb plant, the way they operate their networks right in our midst. Pure audacity. Hell, they've even got an agent en route to the moon. On our rocket at that."

The Colonel nodded uncomfortably. The presence of a saboteur on the Aztec represented a bungle in his department. The General was telling him so in a not too gentle way.

"I seem to recall I was in Astrakhan myself a few years back," he reminded.

"Oh, sure, we build pretty fair networks ourselves," the General said blandly. He looked at Gotch and a rare smile crossed his face. "How did you like the dancing girls in Gorik's, over by the shore?"

Gotch looked startled, then grinned. "Didn't know you'd ever been that far in, General."

"Uh-huh, same time you were."

"Well, I'll be damned," Gotch breathed softly. There was a note of respect in his voice. The General was silent for a moment.

"But the Caspian's hot now."

"Meaning?"

"Warheads—with the name Arzachel writ large across the nose cones." He eyed Gotch obliquely. "If we secure Arzachel first, they'll blow it off the face of the moon." They looked at each other silently. Outside a jet engine roared to life.

The moon filled the sky. It was gigantic, breath-taking, a monstrous sphere of cratered rock moving in the eternal silence of space with ghostly-radiance, heedless that a minute mote bearing alien life had entered its gravitational field. It moved in majesty along its orbit some 2,300 miles every hour, alternately approaching to within 222,000 miles of its Earth Mother, retreating to over 252,000 miles measuring its strides by some strange cosmic clock.

The Apennines, a rugged mountain range jutting 20,000 feet above the planet's surface, was clearly visible. It rose near the Crater Eratosthenes, running northwest some 200 miles to form the southwest boundary of Mare Imbrium. The towering Leibnitz and Dorfel Mountains were visible near the edge of the disc. South along the terminator, the border between night and day, lay Ptolemaeus, Alphons, and Arzachel.

Crag and Prochaska studied its surface, picking out the flat areas which early astronomers had mistaken for seas and which still bore the names of seas. The giant enclosure Clavius, the lagoon-like Plato and ash-strewn Copernicus held their attention. Crag studied the north-south line along which Arzachel lay, wondering again if they could seek out such a relatively small area in the jumbled, broken, twisted land beneath them.

At some 210,000 miles from earth the Aztec had decelerated to a little over 300 miles per hour. Shortly after entering the moon's gravisphere it began to accelerate again. Crag studied the enemy rocket riding astern. It would be almost abreast them in short time, off to one side of the silver drone. It, too, was accelerating.

"Going to be nip and tuck," he told Prochaska. The Chief nodded.

"Don't like the looks of that stinker," he grunted.

Crag watched the analog a moment longer before turning to the quartz viewport. His eyes filled with wonder. For untold ages lovers had sung of the moon, philosophers had pondered its mysteries, astronomers had scanned and mapped every visible mile of its surface until selenography had achieved an exactness comparable to earth cartography. Scientists had proved beyond doubt that the moon wasn't made of green cheese. But no human eye had ever beheld its surface as Crag was doing now—Crag, Prochaska, Larkwell and Nagel. The latter two were peering through the side ports. Prochaska and Crag shared the forward panel. It was a tribute to the event that no word was spoken. Aside from the Chief's occasional checks on Drone Able and Bandit—the name stuck—the four pairs of eyes seldom left the satellite's surface.

The landing plan called for circling the moon during which they were to maneuver Drone Able into independent orbit. It was Crag's job to bring the Aztec down at a precise point in Crater Arzachel and the Chief's job to handle the drone landings, a task as ticklish as landing the Aztec itself.

The spot chosen for landing was in an area where the Crater's floor was broken by a series of rills—wide, shallow cracks the earth scientists hoped would give protection against the fall of meteorites. Due to lack of atmosphere the particles in space, ranging from dust grains to huge chunks of rock, were more lethal than bullets. They were another unknown in the gamble for the moon. A direct hit by even a grain-sized particle could puncture a space suit and bring instant death. A large one could utterly destroy the rocket itself. Larkwell's job was to construct an airlock in one of the rills from durable lightweight prefabricated plastiblocks carried in the drones. Such an airlock would protect them from all but vertically falling meteorites.

Crag felt almost humble in the face of the task they were undertaking. He knew his mind alone could grasp but a minute part of the knowledge that went into making the expedition possible. Their saving lay in the fact they were but agents, protoplasmic extensions of a complex of computers, scientists, plans which had taken years to formulate, and a man named Michael Gotch who had said:

"You will land on Arzachel."

He initiated the zero phase by ordering the crew into their pressure suits. Prochaska took over while he donned his own bulky garment, grimacing as he pulled the heavy helmet over his shoulders. Later, in the last moments of descent, he would snap down the face plate and pressurize the suit. Until then he wanted all the freedom the bulky garments would allow.

"Might as well get used to it." Prochaska grinned. He flexed his arms experimentally.

Larkwell grunted. "Wait till they're pressurized. You'll think rigor mortis has set in."

Crag grinned. "That's a condition I'm opposed to."

"Amen." Larkwell gave a weak experimental jump and promptly smacked his head against the low overhead. He was smiling foolishly when Nagel snapped at him:

"One more of those and you'll be walking around the moon without a pressure suit." He peevishly insisted on examining the top of the helmet for damage.

Crag fervently hoped they wouldn't need the suits for landing. Any damage that would allow the Aztec's oxygen to escape would in itself be a death sentence, even though death might be dragged over the long period of time it would take to die for lack of food. An intact space cabin represented the only haven in which they could escape from the cumbersome garments long enough to tend their biological needs.

Imperceptibly the sensation of weight returned, but it was not the body weight of earth. Even on the moon's surface they would weigh but one-sixth their normal weight.

"Skipper, look." Prochaska's startled exclamation drew Crag's eyes to the radarscope. Bandit had made minute corrections in its course.

"They're using steering rockets," Crag mused, trying to assess its meaning.

"Doesn't make sense," said Prochaska. "They can't have that kind of power to spare. They'll need every bit they have for landing."

"What's up?" Larkwell peered over their shoulders, eyeing the radarscope. Crag bit off an angry retort. Larkwell sensed the rebuff and returned away. They kept their eyes glued to the scope. Bandit maneuvered to a position slightly behind and to one side of the silver drone. Crag looked out the side port. Bandit was clearly visible, a monstrous cylinder boring through the void with cold precision. There was something ominous about it. He felt the hair prickle at the nape of his neck. Larkwell moved alongside him.

Bandit made another minute correction. White vapor shot from its tail and it began to move ahead.

"Using rocket power," Crag grunted. "Damn if I can figure that one out."

"Looks crazy to me. I should think—" Prochaska's voice froze. A minute pip broke off from Bandit, boring through space