HE WAS falling fast, very fast, toward the surface of the Moon. It revolved rapidly underneath him in a blur of dark maria and craters and mountain-ranges, but with every revolution of the scene it was closer.
The illusion was so perfect that Fairlie forgot he was watching a screen and hunched forward tensely in his chair. In the darkened room there was no sound except the clicking of the little projector, until Christensen spoke up from beside them.
"That's it, right on the eastern edge of Mare Humorum. See it?"
"The big oval-shaped crater?"
"It's not a crater—it's a mountain-walled plain, strictly speaking. Yes, that's it. Gassendi."
And the vast misshapen oval rushed up toward their eyes, on the screen. No films from this close had been released to the public, and it was fascinating to see this first American landing as the men in the rocket had seen it.
The plunge slowed, and the scene revolved less rapidly. Now to Fairlie's eyes the great crater—he could not think of it as anything else—leaped clear. Most of it was in shadow, for this was the lunar dawn, but the fierce, stark peaks of ragged rock that walled it caught the sunlight and blazed. Great valleys, wells of inky shadow, ran back into the ramparts south and west.
"When our first probe-satellite orbited the Moon," Christensen was saying, "it had a better metals-radiolocator in it than the Russian probe had. Either that, or we were lucky. It spotted metal deposits in Gassendi, and that's why our first landing was there."
Abruptly the screen went dark.
"This next is two days after landing," said Christensen.
The view was a steady one this time, from the floor of the crater. Fairlie saw a bulging dome in the foreground—Dome One of the base—and beyond it the mountains like bright fangs against a black sky of brilliant stars. Men in vac-suits and helmets were running clumsily back toward the dome.
Almost as soon as he took in the scene, it was gone. The next scene was wholly different.
"That was when the first survey party came back," said Christensen. "With the first news of the find. This is twenty-four hours later."
The viewpoint now was from the mouth of one of the valleys that ran back into the mountain rampart. It was brightly illuminated for the sun had lifted above the crater wall behind them and its rays searched the valley. It was more like a great chasm than a valley, and it seemed to run right into the solid cliff and stop there.
Then Fairlie made out a huge opening in the cliff, and something odd about it. "That opening," he said.
But Christensen's voice interrupted. "Wait. This next view is closer."
It was closer, indeed. Fairlie stared with unbelief.
Where the chasm met the cliff there was a gigantic hole or doorway into the rock beyond. Estimating by the comparative size of the vac-suited figures near it, it was at least fifty yards high. It was, or had been, of the shape of a circle with a flattened base, but great forces had been at work here and it was riven and torn. From one side of it hung a vast, buckled slab of dully gleaming metal. Another flat metal mass, that looked as though it had been partly melted, lay sprawled half inside the opening, amid a litter of broken rock and detritus.
"Doors," said Christensen quietly. "Or they were, once. There's a big cavernous space inside the cliff, and there were sliding doors to close it—two sets of them, a giant airlock, in fact."
The projector had stopped on that scene. Now it started whirring again. Christensen said simply, "This is inside."
Floodlights vaguely illuminated a bewildering scene. It had been, once, the symmetrically shaped interior of a vast hollow in the cliff. But it too had been riven and wrecked. There were great splits and gouges in the smooth rock walls, and tumbled masses of broken stone on the floor, and in the foreground amid the rock fragments were gleams of twisted metal plates and girders. Men stood looking at these, their helmets glittering in the light.
"Last, a close-up," said Christensen. "These things were in the wreckage."
This final scene was an anticlimax. It was a close view of two objects—one of them an ordinary-looking metal chair whose standard was badly bent, the other a rod that looked like the broken-off end of a lever, with a grooved grip at its end.
The switches snapped, the lights came on, and DeWitt turned off the small projector he had been operating. They looked at Christensen, and for once even Lisetti was dumb.
"You understand," Christensen said, "these are just a little bit of the filmed material we have. We put these bits together to give you a quick idea of the thing, first."
"And that—all that—has been there in Gassendi for thirty thousand years?" Speer said, finally.
"Yes."
There was a silence, and Fairlie tried to take it in, and could not. Not all of it, not all at once. The mind balked at it. He wondered how the men who had first found this thing had felt. How would Columbus have felt if he had landed in the New World and had found there the ruins of an air-base?
We were all too sure, he thought numbly. Too sure of our knowledge, of our plans. We thought we would know every step of the way we would go. The Moon was to be the first step, the lifeless sphere where we would set up our bases, and then the planets one by one, and for the first time space would be conquered, to the glory of us, forever, amen. And who was to dream that that conquest had been achieved by others long ago? Nobody in the world even yet dreamed such a thing, except a handful of men here in Morrow and up in Gassendi. And the secret they guarded was a bomb that would blow human complacency and pride to rags, when it got out.
Fairlie said, "How can they know it's been so long? I mean—I've read that since there's no air or weather on the Moon, nothing changes."
DeWitt answered that, speaking in a flat voice. "Solar and cosmic radiation has measurable effects on metals. The time since the cavern in Gassendi was shattered can be approximated that way."
"But for God's sake," said Lisetti, "why hasn't there been a peep about this? To hide such a discovery—"
Christensen nodded unhappily. "We all feel that way about it. But this is a security matter. Military security."
They stared at him. Then after a moment, Speer asked, "You said, 'since the cavern in Gassendi was shattered.' What shattered it?"
"Enemy action. The place was a carefully hidden military base, that's for sure. A military base presupposes enemies. And our experts are quite certain that a weapon or weapons of unknown power and nature, striking from above, hit and wrecked that base of the Ur-men."
"The—what?"
"Ur-men. You know, the German prefix meaning an unknown early type of anything. Like the Ur-Hamlet, and so on. It's the provisional name we've given to the builders of that base."
Lisetti said rapidly, "It's not the 'Ur' I'm questioning—it's the 'men.' "
Christensen looked at him. "You saw that chair and that control-lever?"
"Yes, but what do they—" Lisetti stopped. "I see now. That chair was for a human or near-human to sit in."
"That's right. And the lever-grip was grooved for four fingers.
And there have been a lot of other things taken out of the wrecked ships in that cavern base which make it quite certain they were built and used by people of near-human type."
There was a little silence. DeWitt was taking the film out of the projector, carefully putting it into a can which he locked. Christensen got up, as though too restless to sit longer.
"Let me put it this way," he said to them. "There was a war going on, back in that far past. Between the Ur-men, and an enemy or enemies unknown. Both sides had conquered space—interstellar space, we think, and not just interplanetary—and both had weapons of great power. You see how important, militarily, the smashed-up things and ships in that base can be?"
They saw it. Christensen went on, "Because this has to be absolute top-secret, you couldn't be told about it until you were here, inside our Security set-up."
"May I ask just why we are here?" rumbled Bogan.
Christensen shrugged. "I thought maybe you'd have guessed by now why a team of linguists would be pulled into this. Give me those pictures, Glenn."
DeWitt took some glossy photographs out of a briefcase and handed them over. Christensen held one for them to see. It was, Fairlie saw, a greatly enlarged photograph of a small oblong plaque attached to an unidentifiable metal surface.
There was a neatly engraved legend on the plaque. It looked at first sight like wildly distorted Arabic printing, and then it didn't appear so much like it, and then it looked like no writing that Fairlie had ever seen before. A thrill shot through him.
"Their writing?"
Christensen nodded. "That's a plaque attached to a machine in the Gassendi ruins. Glenn's men—he's in charge of analyzing these things—say it was a kind of oxygenator. That's Ur-man writing. We have other such samples, and a lot of records they left when they abandoned the ruined base. We want them deciphered."
The enormity of the suggestion struck them all dumb except for Bogan. He got majestically to his feet, and instead of roaring he spoke to Christensen with a kind of gentle contempt.
"You don't know much about linguistics, do you?"
"Not much," Christensen said cheerfully. "But the four of you have all done noteworthy things in puzzling out ancient languages. We hope you can do it again."
Bogan gave him a look that had for a generation set graduate students cringing.
"Decipher an unknown language with no referents whatever, no possible bilingual comparisons?" he exclaimed.
Christensen nodded. "That's right. It'll probably be tough. But it was tough getting to Gassendi at all. I'm sure you'll work it out,"
Bogan was too outraged for immediate rejoinder to that, and Christensen hurried on before he could be interrupted. "Besides, you won't be completely without referents. The nature, purpose and design of the machines can surely point to the meaning of the inscriptions on them. Glenn will cooperate with you on that."
DeWitt silently nodded.
Christensen went to the door, turned there, and said, "You're drafted, gentlemen. For a job affecting national security in the most vital way. I know you'll do your best and will comply with all Security regulations. Good night." He went on out.
DeWitt put the photographs back into the briefcase, picked up the can of film, and told them, "I'll start going over this stuff with you tomorrow. Hill will show you your quarters and all that."
And he too went out.
The four looked at each other, and Fairlie wondered if his face was as ridiculous in its expression as Lisetti's and Speer's were. They three were like men who had been tossed suddenly into icy cold water and could not get their breath.
Not Bogan. He began to give his opinion of Christensen, of the effrontery of it all, in a flow of the measured, biting phrases for which he was famous. "A manufacturer, an industrialist, telling scholars what they can and can't do!"
They did not have much interest in Bogan's resentment, they were too staggered yet. Fairlie was glad when Hill came in.
"I'll take you to your quarters. In the morning I'll show you the office and other facilities we have for you."
They went out into the windy darkness. Irregular patterns of lights defined the near and distant buildings. It was quiet except for the sound of a truck pulling out of a car-pool off to the left. The wind had a gritty feel to it, bringing sand and dust from the dark flatness around them.
Fairlie looked up at the sky as he followed Hill. Orion strode mightily toward the zenith, followed by the upward-leaping stars of Canis Major, and all the heavens were sown with constellations that wavered wind-bright. He remembered what Christensen had said, that both long-ago enemies had conquered interstellar space, not just interplanetary.
Remembering, it seemed suddenly to Fairlie that the quiet of the starry sky was strange, like the quiet of a deserted battlefield.