THE R-404 hounded through the night in pursuit of yesterday's daylight. There was darkness beneath with infrequent lights, and dark skies above with scattered stars, and the plane could not quite outrace the turning earth so it could not catch the daylight. But it tried.
Fairlie sat cramped in his bucket-seat and worried. His rump ached, and the belt chafed his middle, and he was cold. "Why in the world would they want me out there? It doesn't make sense!"
The study of language was a science. To Fairlie, it was a thrilling one, the delving into man's known and forgotten tongues, the shape of human speech and thought for ages. But what could it have to do with Morrow?
He puzzled over it, trying to remember all that he could about the whole lunar project. He found that he didn't remember much, it was too far out of his field. Like most people he'd been startled when the first Sputnik went up, back in 1957. The newspaper headlines had kept one informed of the race for space, the American Atlas rocket of 1958, the Russian New Year's moon-shot that missed, the first manned satellite flights, and finally the first landings on the Moon.
Russian and American parties had made it almost simultaneously. Now the Soviets had two bases, one in Kepler crater and one in Encke crater, and the Americans had one base, in Gassendi crater. It had been, of course, a tremendous sensation at first. But just as had been the case with atomic energy, the wonder of it had soon faded out in a dull and dreary mess of charges and countercharges. There had been a Neutralization Agreement in which all nations promised not to use the Moon for military purposes. And the Soviets were filling the UN with charges that the United States was fortifying Gassendi as a missile base. If they weren't, why wouldn't the Americans allow qualified observers to inspect Gassendi? If warmongering capitalist powers tried to carry their plots to the Moon . . . .
That was about all Fairlie could remember, the colorful stories of the first landings and the wrangle about Gassendi that had been going on ever since. He had not been too greatly interested. He had always believed, like the chap in Scott Fitzgerald's novel, that life was best seen through the single window of your own special interest and that the most limited of persons was the all-round man.
He flushed a little when he remembered how he had said that at a discussion of the landings and what old Hodgkins of Psychology had said to him in answer.
"You know what, Fairlie? You're not interested in anything outside philology because you're afraid. You retreat into your nook of scholarly research because you dislike and fear the real world, real people."
Fairlie had resented that. He wasn't a scholarly prig, just because he liked his work and was absorbed in it. He just didn't have time to devote to every sensation that came along. But he wished now that he had learned a little more about this lunar business. It might give him some clue as to why they had sent a fast jet to bring him to Morrow.
He looked at his watch. No need to wonder about it. He would soon find out.
Time passed. And finally Kwolek turned his head and nodded, his lips forming a word.
Morrow.
The door to the Moon, the gateway into space. From here men stepped off into the cold black vacuum to take supplies out to Gassendi. Fairlie craned forward to see.
The jet tilted and turned and then through the cockpit transparency he saw a pattern of lights in the darkness below, rushing past and falling behind them. The lights clotted and clustered more brightly around long barny metal buildings that looked like airplane hangars, and then a tall control tower with many-colored lamps on it flashed by them.
Darkness again, then far ahead a glimpse of a skeletonal tower, a looming scaffolding of girders and behind it, touching it, the sheer shining curve of something tall and arrogant and awesome. That too dropped back out of sight and as Kwolek swung the jet down on a sharper turn, Fairlie saw two other distant glittering towers far, far, in the darkness. Of a sudden he realized that they were rockets and their gantries.
He felt an unexpected electric thrill of excitement. It was one thing to read newspaper stories about the lunar project, to watch telenews pictures of rockets blasting off, to discuss seriously the political implications of the space age. But to swoop out of darkness and glimpse the majesty of the rockets themselves, poised for their leap into infinity, to see the shining shapes that had perhaps been out there and back and had the scars of another world still upon their sides, that was another thing completely.
When the jet touched ground and he finally climbed down out of it, Fairlie turned to look back. But the towering rockets had receded miles away in those few moments and were now only distantly visible. Closer to him were the barny structures and their lights. Closer still was a small cluster of lights around several low, flat buildings.
The air was surprisingly light, dry and warm, so sharply different from a March night in Boston or Washington that it recalled Fairlie to the strangeness of being here at all.
Fairlie turned to Kwolek. "Now what?"
Kwolek nodded toward the headlights of a car that was coming toward them. "Now it's up to them. All I have to do is deliver you here."
The headlights were those of a jeep that pulled up beside them. A civilian, a blond, alert young man, got down from it and said "Okay" to Kwolek. Then to Fairlie he said, "Hello, Mr. Fairlie, my name's Hill. I'll take you on in."
"I'd like," Fairlie began stiffly, "some explanation of why"
"Of course, they'll explain everything," Hill broke in soothingly. "My job is just to check you in. Get in, please."
As the jeep took them away from the plane, Fairlie asked, "Check me in?"
"Security, you know," said Hill. "But since Withers checked you at the other end, it's only routine."
Fairlie, clinging to the edge of the seat as the jeep bounced over the field, felt a little shock. "Then Withers was a Security man? But I thought—" Withers had said that he represented the Smithsonian. Then that was a big fat lie? But why would the Smithsonian lend itself to such a thing?
The New Mexican landscape looked dark and lonesome under the stars, the lights scattered out ahead of them and beyond in the distance the blur of low, dark hills. They were heading, not toward the barny buildings or the far-off rockets, but toward the flat structures.
"Administration," said Hill, nodding ahead.
He stopped the jeep in front of a long, low stuccoed building with a veranda in front.
"This is a building for special personnel," he told Fairlie. "Now if you'll just come along with me."
He opened a door and light poured out. Fairlie walked inside and then stopped. He had expected some kind of an office. This was a not-too-large and rather ratty-looking lounge room. There were three men talking in one corner of it and they turned as Fairlie entered.
"Please wait—they'll be over from Administration in just a little while," said Hill, behind him.
The door closed, and Fairlie turned around but Hill was gone. He turned back as his name was spoken.
"Bob Fairlie. I'll be damned, they got you in on this too?"
One of the three men in the lounge was coming toward him. Fairlie knew him at once. Jim Speer. Doctor James Speer of Pacific University, Department of Linguistics. They were good friends although they saw each other infrequently. Speer was fortyish, stocky and plumper than Fairlie remembered him. "Fatter" was the right word. His round pink face was creased with lines of surprise.
"Got me in on what?" Fairlie said, as he shook hands. "What's this all about, Jim?"
Speer laughed. "What a question. I've been asking it for six hours now, since I got here. So have Bogan and Lisetti since they got here. But wait, do you know them?"
Fairlie felt a shock. He recognized the other two men now. He had watched them and listened to them at more than one philological convention. They were big men, in his field. The biggest.
Doctor John Bogan was the dean of American philologists, and he knew it. A massive old man with a saturnine face and a great mane of white hair, he had all the arrogance of a "grand old man" of anything. He merely grunted at Fairlie.
But Lisetti was a different type. He was a famous linguist who looked like the polished villain of an old stage melodrama. He was over fifty but his dapper black hair and mustache made him look younger, and he almost hissed in theatrical fashion as he asked Fairlie, "What did they tell you—I mean, to get you here?"
Fairlie, still bewildered, told about the Smithsonian.
"Ha!" said Lisetti. "We all got a fairy story like that. Important research problem, need you at once—and then we find them bringing us here to Morrow. And nobody tells us why. Now why would they want four linguists at Morrow?"
"I still say it's a code," said Speer.
Fairlie looked at him. "A code?"
"It stands to reason," said Speer. "There's a big tiff going on between us and the Russians over Gassendi. All those charges. They'd want to know what instructions the Russians are sending out to their lunar bases. Ten to one, we've been brought here to crack a Russian code."
The rumbling voice of Bogan interrupted them. "Three hours. And not a word from anybody. I shall have something to say about this high-handed—"
Bogan, in turn, was interrupted by the opening of the door. Hill came back in and said hastily, "Gentlemen, let me introduce—"
But the foremost of the two men behind Hill shouldered past him, saying, "That's all right, Hill, I'll take it from here."
Hill went out and shut the door, fast, as though he was glad to get out of there.
The man who had spoken to him told them genially, "I'm Nils Christensen, the chief of Lunar Project. This is Glenn DeWitt, formerly of the Air Force, now my assistant in charge of Special Research."
Christensen's face was perfectly familiar to Fairlie, as it had been to everyone since he had been taken out of his place at the head of a great electronics corporation to become the czar of Lunar Project. A slightly idealized portrait of him had twice adorned the cover of Time Magazine. But Fairlie hadn't expected the man to be so big. He was well over six feet and looked like a ruddy, cheerful Viking, but a Viking who wore glasses and who was getting just a little gray at the edges.
DeWitt, the other man, was younger, and beside Christensen he was rather ordinary-looking, a chunky, dark man of forty with a tight face. Suddenly Fairlie remembered that face too, it had been in the newspapers a few years ago. Colonel DeWitt, who had angrily resigned from the Air Force to protest its slowness in developing space-missiles, or something . . .
Christensen shook hands with each of them, repeating their names, and then said, "Please sit down. You are entitled to an explanation, and I'll give it to you fast."
Bogan began a premonitory rumble, but Christensen went on quickly. "To get right down to it, you know the row the Soviets are making over Gassendi, their charges that we have a military missile-base up there?"
They nodded, all except Bogan. Christensen said, "Maybe you've wondered why we simply don't let a Soviet inspection-team look at Gassendi, to disprove the charges?"
Lisetti answered him. "I have wondered. Everybody has wondered."
Christensen said, "Well, I'll tell you why we haven't. We haven't because we can't. There is a military base in Gassendi."
The information was stunning. Speer was the first to speak, and he said incredulously, "You mean—we've broken the Neutralization Agreement, and built a missile-base there?"
Christensen shook his head. "I didn't say that. I said there is a military base, or what's left of it, in Gassendi. But we didn't build it. It was there before either the Americans or the Russians reached the Moon. We just found it."
They stared. Lisetti asked, "But who—how long ago?"
"How long was it there before we got there?" Christensen paused. "As nearly as we can estimate, it's been there for around thirty thousand years."