Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930, Anthony Pelcher [essential reading TXT] 📗

or two. Then all of us in the turret were startled. Transfixed. From below came a sudden hiss. It sounded in the turret: it came from shifting-room call-grid. The hissing of the pneumatic valves of the plate-shifters in the lower control room. The valves were opening; the plates automatically shifting into neutral, and disconnecting!

An instant of startled silence. Miko may have realized the significance of what had happened. Certainly Snap and I did. The hissing ceased. I gripped the emergency plate-shifter switch which hung over my head. Its disc was dead! The plates were dead in neutral. In the positions they were only placed while in port! And their shifting mechanisms were imperative!

I was on my feet. "Snap! Good God, we're in neutral!"

Miko, if he had not realized it before, was aware if it now. The Moon-disc moved visibly as the Planetara lurched. The vault of the heavens was slowly swinging.

Miko ripped out a heavy oath. "Haljan! What is this?"

He stood up, still holding Anita. But there was nothing that he could do in this emergency. "Haljan—what—"

The heavens turned with a giant swoop. The Moon was over us. It swung in dizzying arc. Overhead, then back past our stern; under us, then appearing over our bow.

The Planetara had turned over. Upending. Rotating, end over end.

For a moment or two I think all of us in that turret stood and clung. The Moon-disc, the Earth, Sun and all the stars were swinging past our windows. So horribly dizzying. The Planetara seemed lurching and tumbling. But it was an optical effect only. I stared with grim determination at my feet. The turret seemed to steady.

Then I looked again. That horrible swoop of all the heavens! And the Moon, as it went past, seemed expanded. We were falling! Out of control, with the Moon-gravity pulling us inexorably down!

"That accursed Hahn—" Miko, stricken with his lack of knowledge of these controls, was wholly confused.[93]

A moment only had passed. My fancy that the Moon-disc was enlarged was merely the horror of my imagination. We had not fallen far enough yet for that.

But we were falling. Unless I could do something, we would crash upon the Lunar surface.

Anita, killed in this Planetara turret. The end of everything for us.

Action came to me. I gasped, "Miko, you stay here! The controls are dead! You stay here—hold Anita."

I ignored Moa's weapon which she was still clutching mechanically. Snap thrust her away.

"Sit back! Let us alone! We're falling! Don't you understand?"

This deadly danger, to level us all! No longer were we captors and captured. Not brigands for this moment. No thought of Grantline's treasure! Trapped humans only! Leveled by the common, instinct of self-preservation. Trapped here together, fighting for our lives.

Miko gasped. "Can you—check us? What happened?"

"I don't know. I'll try."

I stood clinging. This dizzying whirl! From the audiphone grid Coniston's voice sounded.

"I say, Haljan, something's wrong! Hahn doesn't signal."

The look-out in the forward tower was clinging to his window. On the deck below our turret a member of the crew appeared, stood lurching for a moment, then shouted, and turned and ran, swaying, aimless. From the lower hull-corridors our grids sounded with the tramping of running steps. Panic among the crew was spreading over the ship. A chaos below decks.

I pulled at the emergency switch again. Dead....

But down below there was the manual controls.

"Snap, we must get down. The signals."

"Yes."

Coniston's voice came like a scream from the grid. "Hahn is dead—the controls are broken! Hahn is dead!"

We barely heard him. I shouted, "Miko—hold Anita! Come on, Snap!"

We clung to the ladders. Snap was behind me. "Careful, Gregg! Good God!"

This dizzying whirl. I tried not to look. The deck under me was now a blurred kaleidoscope of swinging patches of moonlight and shadow.

We reached the deck. Ran, swaying, lurching.

It seemed that from the turret Anita's voice followed us. "Be careful!"

Within the ship our senses steadied. With the rotating, reeling, heavens shut out, there were only the shouts and tramping steps of the panic-stricken crew to mark that anything was amiss. That, and a pseudo-sensation of lurching caused by the pulsing of gravity—a pull when the Moon was beneath our hull to combine its force with our magnetizers; a lightening when it was overhead. A throbbing, pendulum lurch—that was all.

We ran down to the corridor incline. A white-faced member of the crew, came running up.

"What's happened? Haljan, what's happened?"

"We're falling!" I gripped him. "Get below. Come on with us!"

But he jerked away from me. "Falling?"

A steward came running. "Falling? My God!"

Snap swung at them. "Get ahead of us! The manual controls—our only chance—we need all you men at the compressor pumps!"

But it was an instinct to try and get on deck, as though here below we were rats caught in a trap. The men tore away from me and ran. Their shouts of panic resounded through the dim, blue-lit corridors.

Coniston came lurching from the control room. "I say—falling! Haljan, my God, look at him!"

Hahn was sprawled at the gravity-[94]plate switchboard. Sprawled, head-down. Dead. Killed by something? Or a suicide?

I bent over him. His hands gripped the main switch. He had ripped it loose. And his left hand had reached and broken the fragile line of tubes that intensified the current of the pneumatic plate-shifters. A suicide? With his last frenzy determined to kill us all?

Then I saw that Hahn had been killed! Not a suicide! In his hand he gripped a small segment of black fabric, a piece torn from an invisible cloak? Was it?

The questions were swept away by the necessity for action. Snap was rigging the hand-compressors. If he could get the pressure back in the tanks....

I swung on Coniston. "You armed?"

"Yes." He was white-faced and confused, but not in a panic. He showed me his heat-ray cylinder. "What do you want me to do?"

"Round up the crew. Get all you can. Bring them here to man these pumps."

He dashed away. Snap shouted after him. "Kill them down if they argue!"

Miko's voice sounded from the turret call grid: "Falling! Haljan, you can see it now! Check us!"

I did not answer that. I pumped with Snap.

Desperate moments. Or was it an hour? Coniston brought the men. He stood over them with menacing weapon.

We had all the pumps going. The pressure rose a little in the tanks. Enough to shift a bow-plate. I tried it. The plate slowly clicked into a new combination. A gravity repulsion just in the bow-tip.

I signaled Miko. "Have we stopped swinging?"

"No. But slower."

I could feel it, that lurch of the gravity. But not steady now. A limp. The tendency of our bow was to stay up.

"More pressure, Snap."

"Yes."

One of the crew rebelled, tried to bolt from the room. "God, we'll crash, caught in here!"

Coniston shot him down.

I shifted another bow-plate. Then two in the stern. The stern-plates seemed to move more readily than the others.

"Run all the stern-plates," Snap advised.

I tried it. The lurching stopped. Miko called. "We're bow down. Falling!"

But not falling free. The Moon-gravity pull upon us was more than half neutralized.

"I'll go up, Snap, and try the engines. You don't mind staying down? Executing my signals?"

"You idiot!" He gripped my shoulders. His eyes were gleaming, his face haggard, but his pale lips twitched with a smile.

"Maybe it's good-by, Gregg. We'll fall—fighting."

"Yes. Fighting. Coniston, you keep the pressure up."

With the broken set-tubes it took nearly all the pressure to maintain the few plates I had shifted. One slipped back to neutral. Then the pumps gained on it, and it shifted again.

I dashed up to the deck. Ah, the Moon was so close now! So horribly close! The deck shadows were still. Through the forward bow windows the Moon surface glared up at us.

I reached the turret. The Planetara was steady. Pitched bow-down, half falling, half sliding like a rocket downward. The scarred surface of the Moon spread wide under us.

These last horrible minutes were a blur. And there was always Anita's face. She left Miko. Faced with death, he sat clinging. Ignoring her, Moa, too, sat apart. Staring—

And Anita crept to me. "Gregg, dear one. The end...."

I tried the electronic engines from the stern, setting them in the reverse.[95] The streams of their light glowed from the stern, forward along our hull, and flared down from our bow toward the Lunar surface. But no atmosphere was here to give resistance. Perhaps the electronic streams checked our fall a little. The pumps gave us pressure, just in the last minutes, to slide a few of the hull-plates. But our bow stayed down. We slid, like a spent rocket falling.

I recall the horror of that expanding Lunar surface. The maw of Archimedes yawning. A blob. Widening to a great pit. Then I saw it was to one side. Rushing upward.

A phantasmagoria of uprushing crags. Black and gray. Spires tinged with Earth-light.

"Gregg, dear one—good-by."

Her gentle arms around me. The end of everything for us. I recall murmuring, "Not falling free, Anita. Some hull-plates are set."

My dials showed another plate shifting, checking us a little further. Good old Snap.

I calculated the next best plate to shift. I tried it. Slid it over. Good old Snap....

Then everything faded but the feeling of Anita's arms around me.

"Gregg, dear one—"

The end of everything for us....

There was an up-rush of gray-black rock.

An impact....