FIVE

The Shadow Over the Moon

Prologue

THIS MESSAGE IS FOR Jocelyn Peabody. Joe—that is, Colonel Joe Muldoon—and Professor Dyer, I am trusting you to pass it on, as appropriate.

Hi, Jocelyn! Your honorary Aunt Magnolia here. Yes, the one who killed your flesh-and-blood Aunt Mabel, but that’s all in the past now. I hope.

Anyhow, I will probably be dead in an hour.

Jocelyn, if you want to look all this up, the stuff that’s in the public domain at least, go to the library and check out “transient lunar phenomena.” Oh, and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Don’t believe a word they wrote, though. All science-fiction writers are liars and propagandists.

Why an hour? Well, you see, once we turned those darned missile launch keys we only had an hour, and that’s running out. I thought I’d take the chance to tell you what happened to me up here.

Although George has a twinkle in his ape eye. I wonder if he’s planning something?

The date is Thursday, September 11, 1969. My name is Magnolia Jones. I was born on a cotton farm in Atlanta, Georgia. And I flew a Mercury spacecraft to the Moon, in order to save the world. I guess it was the most extraordinary thing I ever did.

Even more than killing Yuri Gagarin.

I

For me it began when Joe Muldoon called me on Tuesday, July 22, this year, 1969, and summoned me to Florida.

A day after Neil Armstrong didn’t walk on the Moon.

I had been in Alabama, Marshall Space Flight Center. That same day I got on a flight to Tampa, Florida. Then I hired a car and drove out fifteen miles to a location called Stones Hill.

You don’t refuse a call from Joe Muldoon. But from the beginning the timing surprised me.

Look, I was in the space program myself—the dark program, at any rate. At the time I was working on post-Moon military applications of Apollo technology. I was one of the Blue Gemini 21, a bunch of women pilots, like the Mercury 13, who had been covertly trained for spaceflight, initially as a test study. Turned out we had a role to play. The faces of the Mercury 7 men have been on the cover of Time magazine since 1960. Nobody knew who we were. These are dark times. As Cthulhu stirs and various eldritch threats loom, a secret source of pilot-astronauts is useful.

Anyhow, I was insider enough to know that Joe Muldoon was in the Apollo 11 backup crew. If Buzz Aldrin had broken his ankle a week ago, it would have been Joe supposedly up there on the Moon right now. And during a flight itself, the backup crew is always in demand, as capcoms, or running simulators if anything fouls up. So, in the middle of that supremely historic flight, why was Joe Muldoon wasting his time on me?

And why had he told me to read Jules Verne on the flight over?

I parked maybe half a mile from Stones Hill itself. I walked in.

It was July, and it was hot and wet. But it was quiet. I don’t know Florida, away from the Cape, but the trees looked bare to me, the ground covered by a kind of damp ash. A blasted heath that reminded me of another I had seen, years before, in Arkham, England. Not a reassuring sight.

The hill itself looked like a pus-filled blister pushing out of the damp Florida ground. The summit had been leveled off across maybe half a mile or more, the ground heavily worked. Waiting for me there were two men, one tall and upright, one short and shambling. They didn’t wave to me, and I didn’t wave back.

I made my way toward them, scouting out the ground structure as I went. A circular working at the center, mostly concrete and stone, roughly packed, around a ragged shaft maybe nine feet wide that had been plugged with iron.

This was at the center of a much wider ring of structures I saw five or six hundred yards back. Forges, hundreds of them. The source of all that iron.

I didn’t go too close to that central shaft. Something about it—a trick of the light, the damp sunlight catching on a kind of mist, an elusive color—dug deep into my memory.

I recognized the two men as I approached. Joe Muldoon was in a battered USAF leather flight jacket, tall, crewcut blond, a real straight arrow. The other I knew from newspapers and book covers. He was a small man with a mop of black hair cut to a fringe. He wore a grubby red cravat, loud check trousers, and an elderly looking frock coat. This was William Dyer, professor of geology at Miskatonic University. His face deeply lined, he might have been in his late forties, but I knew he had to be older.

The two of them together were like Clint Eastwood and Mel Brooks.

It was Dyer who first welcomed me, with a surprisingly strong handshake. “Major Jones.”

“I’m glad to meet you, professor. I read about the missions you led to the Antarctic and Australia—the alien cities you found there.”

He grunted. “Some call them cities. Some call them alien. The fact is the Yithians who left those traces in Australia, and some other species, have been around on the Earth for a very long time, major. Perhaps the ‘alien’ is humanity.”

I knew he had led those famous expeditions over thirty years before. Yet, as I said, he didn’t look over fifty. If he was using a hair dye it was a good one.

“I did have trouble swallowing the idea that your Yithians could travel in time, professor.”

He sniffed. “Indiscriminately across time and space. Well, Einstein has shown that time can be reduced to a mere dimension. As for evidence, there are many compelling accounts of ‘possession’ of the classic Peaslee kind in the historical record. And if you had seen the city we exposed—”

“We can discuss all this later. Thanks for coming out here, Jones.” Muldoon, businesslike, stepped forward for a handshake in turn. “I can tell you’ve boned up on your Lovecraft since the Zarya flight.”

During which I had mercy-killed an eldritch-possessed Yuri Gagarin. Long story.

“I take it you read the Verne too. You recognize this place?”

“From the Earth to the Moon, you told me to read. This is where the Baltimore Gun Club built the Columbiad—the great cannon that fired a crewed projectile to the Moon, right? Impey Barbicane.”

Dyer smiled, mischievously. “That’s the cover story. What actually happened . . .”

“There was a natural well here,” Muldoon spoke up, “surprisingly maybe, on this hill. Used by the local Indians, the Seminole. Then, in 1865 . . .”

Suddenly I got it. A damaged old well. An elusive mist, the strange shades. “There was a Color Incursion,” I said. “An infestation from space. Like the one I dealt with on the Zarya. Right here.”

The Color—an entity of some kind, amorphous, a thing of mist and elusive spectrum shades. It comes from out in space, delivered by a peculiar form of evaporating meteorite; and then, once landed, it feeds on local life-forms until, replete, it has the energy to fire itself back out to space again. I had encountered an incursion of my own, when a fragment of the Color had gotten lodged in a Soviet space station called Zarya, and consumed what it found within.

I walked around the rim of the shaft, trying to take this in. “So, for a hundred years, Jules Verne’s most famous book has actually been a cover for a Color event?”

“The locals stopped up the well with iron,” Dyer said. “In recent times the HPL investigated. Found little. Verne gave the right date, by the way. It began with a meteor strike, like the classic 1880s incursion near Arkham, which Lovecraft described, like others we know of. This may have been one of the earliest incursions, given there was evidence of some kind of interstellar transport behind the 1882 event.

“This one was poorly observed, since the European population was still so sparse. And given the lack of animal and human flesh for it to feed on, the final eruption may have been a long time coming.”

“Verne’s book was a cover-up.”

Muldoon nodded curtly. “A good story will plant an alternative explanation in people’s minds. Works better than a simple denial. Nowadays we have TV and the movies, of course, and you can explain away an eldritch invasion as a special effect. Or fake a cover. Like the Apollo 11 thing.”

I looked at him sharply. “What Apollo 11 thing?”

He actually winked at me.

Dyer nodded. “Of course, all this, the Verne event, was a few years before Lovecraft was even born. But already it was a reflex of governments to sedate their populations in the face of strangeness.”

Muldoon looked at me. “Think it through, Jones. Why did Verne write the story up as he did? Why the Moon?”

I remembered. “The huge ‘cannon shot’ that witnesses must have seen was actually the Color escaping, I guess. But then the projectile was tracked by the telescopes all the way to the Moon. Is that it? Are you saying that from this particular incursion, the Color flew up to the Moon? And Verne covered it all up as some kind of manned shot?”

Dyer sighed. “You have it. It seems that since then, if not before, the Moon has been infested with the Color, in parts at least. As we should have guessed, perhaps, even before the League researchers uncovered this site. Why, as Lovecraft describes, the meteor casing of the Color has a peculiar affinity for silicate rocks, particularly olivine, and as the Moon is thought to consist of little but silicate rocks—”

I faced Muldoon. “Where? The Sea of Tranquility?”

He grinned. “Not there, Jones. But we never sent anybody there. If you looked up transient lunar phenomena like I told you—”

“Aristarchus,” Dyer said gently. “A magnificent crater in the Imbrium Ocean, the right eye of the man in the Moon. For centuries there have been odd observations of apparent changes there. Even in 1866, a year after Verne’s ‘Moon shot’—”

“And more recently,” Muldoon cut in, “in 1963. A couple of guys at Lowell in Arizona reported some very odd phenomena in that crater. The Cthulhu Investigation Division quickly concluded that Aristarchus was the site of a major Color infestation.”

“And not just Color-related,” Dyer said. “Arguably. The infestation, I mean. I myself have analyzed images of the crater floor, which are reminiscent of aerial shots taken of that region of the Great Sandy Desert of Australia where I discovered the Yithian archive-city. This is controversial even in Lovecraftian circles—the idea that there are Yithians on the Moon. . . . But, of course, the Color in the Moon must feed on something.”

I nodded. “Okay. So what’s this got to do with me?”

“The fact is, Major Jones, there are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things,” Dyer said grimly. “Things which act against everything that we believe in. They must be fought. And now great Cthulhu himself is restless.”

“It’s like we’re in some vast mental asylum, Jones,” Muldoon added. “The biggest of the bad guys is rattling his cage, but the rest are stirred up too.”

“Such as Mabel Peabody’s Azathoth?”

“I read your debrief. So even while we try to contain Cthulhu, we are securing other flanks.”

“How do you ‘secure’ Aristarchus?”

“The Lowell guys reported their anomaly on October 29, 1963. On January 29, 1964, we launched a guy called Francis Spender to the Moon.”

That was the first time I had heard that name. I just stared. “That’s impossible. Apollo was barely off the drawing board.”

“We did it anyhow. Officially it was the first uncrewed test of the Saturn I rocket. And a couple of months later we sent up another guy. Robert Hamilton. Another ‘uncrewed test.’”

“So what do you want of me?”

“Well, my dear,” Dyer said, not unkindly, “since Aristarchus is evidently not secured—German astronomers are reporting new transient phenomena even as we speak—they, NASA, the government, and the HPL, want to send you up there to find out what went wrong, for Spender and Hamilton. And to fix it.”

“Why me?”

Muldoon shrugged. “You’re an astronaut. You survived Zarya. You’re as well qualified as anyone.”

“I’m afraid the clock is ticking,” Dyer said. “There is to be a solar eclipse. And as you know, the Color seems to become—agitated—during such events.”

I asked, “When?”

Muldoon grinned. “You busy in September?”

II

We dumped my rental car, and Muldoon drove the three of us back to the Cape.

Look, if you’re an astronaut, even of the female persuasion, you generally fly yourself in on a T-38 and make straight for the NASA facilities. Now I was at ground level, and I saw a different side to the Cape. In between the bars and hotels with names like The Satellite Bar and The Orbit Room, we drove past withered orange plantations, stunted palms, blighted crops.

Dyer murmured, “This is the stuff they don’t brag about to the press. Nobody knows if the blight you see is a product of all that noxious rocket exhaust, or—something subtler. The natural order, perhaps, breached.”

Muldoon, being Muldoon, was waved through security fences until we drove right up to one of the launch control buildings. Generally, once a manned spacecraft has cleared its launch tower, control is handed over to the Manned Spaceflight Center at Houston. But today, Muldoon said, the control rooms were given over to shadowing Houston and their communications with the Apollo astronauts on the Moon.

“Or not,” he said briskly, as we walked over tarmac.

“I’m still having trouble believing that the whole Apollo program has been a fake.”

“Not all of it. Only since it started to fail. Look, the technology was always too complex. The capsule fire in ’67 was only the start of it. We had failures on orbit, failed re-entries, and every crew that ventured beyond the Earth’s magnetic field got zapped by solar flares.” He eyed me. “I know you claim the Brits put a man on Mars back in the 1950s.”

“Only by accident. Do you read all my mail?”

He paused before entering the building, and looked up at a sun-blasted sky. “No, we never got Apollo to the Moon. But what we do have is a constellation.”

“A constellation?”

“If you know where to look, at a given time of day.” He pointed up at the washed-out sky, to the east. “Merril, Connolly, Woodward. Apollo 6. Stuck up there until their high orbit decays, a century from now.” Point. “Pokrovski, Maiakovski, Brodisnek. A failed Voskhod, similarly.” Point. “Prokrovna, second Soviet woman in space.” He looked at me with those blue eyes like empty windows. “A constellation of dead astronauts. Meantime, come see the real space program.”

He led me and Dyer into one of the launch control subsidiary suites. Here, big screens designed to carry telemetry from the workings of mighty rockets showed images of two astronauts apparently bouncing around on the Moon. Neil and Buzz, I presumed.

Evidently this was a raw, unedited recording of yesterday’s “Moonwalk,” and some kind of postmortem was going on. The film kept being paused, and there was a teleconference, with NASA technicians and managers in the room arguing with screen images of chain-smoking guys in suits.

As we watched, Buzz Aldrin, carrying a sample box, went bounding over a dusty surface.

“Cut! Take two! Christ, Aldrin is such a ham . . .”

Buzz stopped, and staggered backward toward his mark, holding the box. But he tripped on something. He bent clumsily to pick it up—it was a Coke bottle. He threw it down, snarled something incomprehensible on the radio link, tripped again—and he turned upside down and hovered in the air, evidently suspended in some harness intended to give the illusion of low lunar gravity.

“Freeze!” The screen cut to a suited, very tall, very bald man, who was livid with rage—and very English. “After all these years of my shows you can still see the bloody strings!”

I frowned. “Do I know that guy?”

Muldoon murmured, “Makes TV puppet shows for kids. On Saturday mornings the astronauts would sit around nursing hangovers, watching one called Fireball . . . something.”

I stared. “So you’re faking the Moonwalks with a kids’ show producer? Why not use Stanley Kubrick? I mean, 2001—”

Dyer tutted. “Communist brother.”

“Not officially,” Muldoon said laconically. “Besides, this guy has cover. Publicly he’s set up in an MGM studio in England, working on a live-action show about organ-legger aliens from space.”

“Very Lovecraftian,” Dyer said.

“The final Moonwalk edit was watched by a billion people. Everyone from the Pope to the Queen, from Lapland to Australia. What a snafu.”

“Let’s hope nobody notices the bloopers,” I said. “But I’m guessing this isn’t what I’m here for.”

“No.” Muldoon beckoned. “Follow me.”

You wouldn’t think a modern NASA control facility, all concrete and glass and computers, would have a cellar.

This one did.

On the face of it, it was another mission operations control room, just like the setting for the fake upstairs. Big screens, rows of seats, consoles. There were just three people in this big room. One was asleep, another was reading a comic book. I had the impression this place had been here a long, long time.

On the screens at the front another lunar plain was portrayed, but this one showed no humans, no sign of any movement. The plain was strewn with bits of technology. I strained to see more clearly.

I made out what looked like a Mercury capsule resting on a big four-legged frame. Cylindrical booster tanks lay on the ground, loosely covered over with lunar dirt. There were plenty of crisp footprints, I saw.

Over the big screens was an engraved sign:

BY THE GRACE OF GOD, AND IN THE NAME OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, I TAKE POSSESSION OF THIS PLANET ON BEHALF OF AND FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL MANKIND.

FRANCIS E. SPENDER, FEBRUARY 1, 1964

Muldoon grunted. “Welcome to Lunarville 1. That’s what we need you to go fix.”

It had all come out of the panicky days of the late 1950s, Muldoon explained.

There had been covert spaceflights pretty much from World War II, from both sides of the Iron Curtain. But from 1957 the Soviets had gone public, and space had started to look like an arena for conflict between the powers.

“I was around then. In the USAF,” said Muldoon. “We feared the Russians would grab the high ground by reaching the Moon first. The Air Force started talking up plans for a nuclear weapons base on the Moon as early as 1958. Von Braun got involved, and it got bogged down in the usual inter-service infighting.”

“But then,” Dyer said, “Hoover’s Human Protection League people looked at the transient lunar phenomena at Aristarchus, and joined the dots with the Verne incursion at Florida, and we decided we needed to get people up there quickly. Armed with a few weapons.”

“And luckily,” Muldoon said dryly, “America had a plan.”

The engineers from Bell Aerosystems who dreamed it up, as an emergency Moon-race measure in 1962, had called it the “One-Way Space Man.” The astronauts called it “Project Poor Slob.”

Muldoon ticked off the stages. “You send up a Surveyor lander probe. Use it as a radar beacon to attract the landing of shelters—‘chuckwagons,’ we called them—on uncrewed boosters. Finally you send up an astronaut . . .”

A poor slob who rode a Mercury capsule on top of a Saturn booster, all the way to the Moon.

Dyer eyed me. “You may be reminded of the recent space movie Countdown. Or the book it was based on. More hiding in the open.”

“In the event, we sent up two guys. Two Mercury shots.”

“What about the radiation? The solar flares?”

Muldoon shrugged. “We hardened the Mercury capsule. Heaped-up lunar dust keeps the crew protected on the surface. More robust than Apollo, actually. It just couldn’t bring you home again. The chuckwagons had to be docked together, covered with lunar soil, then a silo dug out for the nuclear missiles . . .”

“Not ICBMs,” Dyer said. “Lunar gravity is gentle, remember. Small rockets would suffice to deliver a lethal payload anywhere on the lunar surface.”

“Of course the nukes could have been turned on the Soviets, if they ever got there,” Muldoon added. “As opposed to the eldritch threat. That was the deal that got the USAF to cooperate.”

“I’ve been in space. I can’t believe two guys could do all that work.”

“They had—help,” Muldoon said. “Need to know, Jones.”

“And then what? They just wait? For months, years?”

“They do their duty,” Muldoon said sternly. Then he hesitated. “Inconveniently, the lunar base itself is situated in Aristarchus.”

I gaped. “At ground zero?”

Dyer shrugged. “J. Edgar Hoover had to—negotiate—with the air force. Who could not be told the whole truth, of course. It was the best we could do.”

“And if the missiles are launched—”

“There’s a time delay of an hour,” Muldoon said. “That’s enough time to get to safety. You can run a few miles in an hour. Even on the Moon. There’s even a secondary shelter out there.”

I just stared. “Terrific. And, anyhow, it’s all gone belly up. Right?”

Muldoon sighed. “Three problems. One: The guys stopped talking to us. Well, we betrayed them. They were supposed to be picked up by Apollo after a couple of years. But we never built Apollo. Two: We think one of them died, which is bad because it takes two personnel to launch the missiles. Hamilton, we think. Various fragments of evidence, including the lack of any medical telemetry. But Spender, if he survived, wasn’t talking to us. And, three: Now we can’t talk to them at all.”

“Because of Yog-Sothoth,” said Dyer. “We think.”

“Another eldritch,” I guessed. “You think.”

“You already know about him,” Dyer said sadly. “Everybody does. At midday GMT on January 1, 1964, every telephone in the world began to ring. Remember that?”

“That was Yog-Sothoth?”

Dyer sighed. “Offspring of Azathoth, possibly. And a crucial bridge between the other realms and ours. ‘Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet . . .’ According to Armitage’s translation of the Necronomicon. Well.

“But we know this one likes patterns. It’s long been known he can be attracted by the right incantation, for example—as Armitage demonstrated during the 1928 ‘Dunwich Horror’ episode. And Yog can inhabit, it seems, the networks of the modern human world. He’s thought to have infested the London Underground, last year. And in 1964—”

“The telephone network.”

Dyer said, “Arthur C. Clarke covered up that one for us.”

They speculated a little more about this. About how the Human Protection League had been pushing for the development of electronic comms networks as a way of enabling human interaction that circumvented Cthulhu’s growing telepathic powers. And how the bad guys, such as the Olde Fellowes or The Esoteric Order of Dagon, may also have been covertly supporting such developments for the precise opposite reason—to let in the likes of this Yog-Sothoth.

“It is an appalling thought,” Dyer said, “that the eldritch threat may be evolving, seeking vulnerabilities of our modern world undreamed of in Lovecraft’s time. Maybe a key organization like NASA, itself a network, could somehow be—possessed.”

“Anyhow, we think Yog-Sothoth managed to get into what we were beginning to call the Deep Space Network,” Muldoon continued. “Turning it against us. So we had to shut it down.”

“So how do you talk to your astronauts at all?”

“We risk simple point-to-point radio messages. Otherwise, we’ve set up a visual coding system. Speech converted to light pulses, with sodium flares. But it does make communication with a rebellious astronaut a little tricky.”

“So what is it you want me to do?”

“Recover the situation. See who is alive. Check out the nuke silo. If necessary, if we send up the confirming order, hit Aristarchus before the solar eclipse in September reaches its height.”

I thought it over. “And if I fail?”

“Then we’ll send up another poor slob. And another, until we get it done.”

Which told me all I needed to know about my mode of transport to the Moon.

“I never trained on Mercury, Joe.”

Muldoon shrugged. “We still have the simulators in Hangar S. It’s simpler than Gemini. And anyhow it’s spam in a can—we could fly you automated all the way to the Moon. Even if you didn’t have help.”

“Help? Need to know?”

“We promise we’ll bring you back,” said William Dyer.

“Some day,” added Joe Muldoon.

Well, I accepted the mission, Jocelyn. I think you would have. We all have our duty.

But I caught Joe wistfully looking at the desolate Moon base on the screen. He had got no closer to the Moon than being a backup for a nonexistent Apollo mission. I had the feeling, Jocelyn, that he envied this poor slob.

III

I was to be launched from the Cape on September 7, 1969, with a landing on a nearly new Moon on the 10th. A day before what Dyer anticipated being the day of the crisis—solar eclipse day, September 11. They thought that the closer to the crisis I landed, the less time I’d have to get killed before dealing with it. Also, unless I secured life-support from the poor slob base, I wouldn’t last more than twenty-four hours anyhow.

I slogged through a couple of months of training.

NASA had indeed kept their old Mercury simulator. It stank of the Mercury 7 heroes, of aftershave, hangover fumes, and crotch. But I ignored it all, and got on with the training.

Muldoon hadn’t lied when he said Mercury was simple, mostly, compared to flying Gemini. I remembered the first two flights were by chimps, called Ham and Enos, who had nothing but puzzle-buttons to press—and that was a memory that would come back to haunt me.

I rehearsed the most-sweaty-palm moment of the whole mission, the landing on the Moon, over and over. The automatics ought to bring me down. If not, I’d have to do it myself.

Anyhow, my launch day rolled around, as it always does.

It is a Sunday in September, clear and bright.

I ride the gantry elevator, climbing past the flank of the booster. The Saturn I is a hundred and fifty feet tall, the biggest beast I ever rode. As I rise up, I can see for miles. The coast of Merritt Island is marshy, the water shining in the morning sun that hangs low over the ocean. From here I can’t see any of the poisoned vegetation.

It takes me some effort, with the aid of a pad rat, to get inside the capsule. Mercury is small, small, a cone a little more than six feet tall, six feet wide. It is, after all, a spacecraft designed to fit on top of primitive early-1960s ICBMs; it is a hollowed-out nuclear shell into which they stuff an astronaut. Once you are in, you can barely move.

Meanwhile, the booster stack creaks and sways below me, as its mass of liquid fuel is loaded. It is a relief when the countdown winds to its finish.

At first there is a shudder, a rumble far below. I start my mission clock, like setting an oven timer. The Saturn’s first stage burns with a million and a half pounds of thrust, but so great is the mass that there is barely a sense of acceleration at first. Still, the press on my chest builds up. The capsule shakes like we’ve hit a bumpy road as we smash through the sound barrier.

The big first stage booster shuts down after only a couple of minutes. The thrust of the second stage is harder, and I lie back and endure it. Eight minutes. Bang. I’m pressed back, even harder, by the rattly, ragged burn of the third stage.

After which, I have been hurled direct onto my trajectory to the Moon.

I look out of the Mercury’s small window. The Earth is a pool of light behind me. And I see the spent S-V upper stage tumbling away like a spent July 4 skyrocket.

Joe Muldoon is my Capcom, at Houston. “You are through the gate, Melody 7.” The first time my call sign has been used.

Through the gate.

The gate to what?

That was Sunday.

Monday, Tuesday, I cruised to the Moon.

Look, I could barely move. I spent a lot of my waking time exercising, as much as I could, the muscle groups in turn: my neck, deltoids, biceps, abdomen, thighs, calves. I’d done three-day stretches in the simulator. This wasn’t so bad. At least I was going somewhere.

But I had too much time to think. Jocelyn, I kept remembering John Glenn’s first orbital flight. The whole world was watching on TV. Flying in secret, I felt remarkably alone.

Of course I wasn’t, as I was soon to find out.

By Wednesday, the Moon, nearly new, was a pit of darkness in the sky ahead of my little ship.

And we came to my last abort window.

Either I fired my first stage landing rocket—it was a Polaris booster, a cut-down missile—a brief burn to start my descent to the Moon, or I didn’t. And if I didn’t fire my Polaris rocket, I would just swing around the Moon and fall back to Earth.

We went through the checklist briskly. I had a go to fire the Polaris. I pushed the button.

Polaris fired.

So I had sailed through another gate. And I was committed to the Moon.

Now, an anticlimax. There was a blank in my checklist. I knew that a parcel of Earth re-entry gear—the Mercury’s heat shield and flotation bags and life raft and so forth, stuff that was never going to be used now—was going to be dumped, to save weight. I had never inquired how that was to be achieved—I assumed some automatic system.

At first, what followed was only faintly alarming. There were thumps and bangs and rattles around this big garbage can in which I rode. Out through my window I saw chunks of gear spinning away in the raw sunlight.

It was when I clearly heard an angry hoot—“Hoo!”—transmitted through the hull that I started to grow curious.

“Houston, Melody 7. I heard that, Joe.”

A long time-delayed sigh. “Melody 7, Houston. I guess we hoped you guys would get acquainted on the lunar surface. George, you’d better show your face.”

And, through my window, he did.

An ape’s face, through layers of glass. I recoiled, shocked.

A gloved finger pressed a pad on its chest where letters lit up, like a computer display.

HELLO BOSS.

GEORGE. ME.

HAM AND ENOS NOT ONLY MERCURY SPACE CHIMPS.

And he pressed his faceplate to the window, and again I could hear that muffled laugh. “Hoo!”

Turned out he had flown with me all the way up from the Cape, inside the cowling that had sheltered my landing rockets. Suited up all the way. But what a suit.

George was indeed a chimp. And he was a smart chimp. Nobody had actually known how smart chimps were until NASA had had a few taken from their mothers in Africa, and shipped them to an air force base in New Mexico, and trained them to fly in space. Trained—they used a technique called “operant conditioning,” where you get punished for getting stuff wrong, mostly by electric shocks to the soles of your feet.

Smart, yes. Smart enough, some of them, to use sign language, even touch-key systems, with a few brain-jolting electrical enhancements. Smart enough to remember what had been done to them, and to take revenge on their handlers, if they got the chance. But too smart not to be useful.

Simps.

After Ham and Enos, highly trained but unmodified chimps who rode Mercury capsules in a blaze of publicity, the program at Holloman AFB went dark.

“Hence, the super-chimps,” Joe Muldoon admitted to me over the radio.

A super-chimp in a super-suit. George wore a kind of glassy spacesuit, a collection of tubes of a thermoplastic acrylic resin encasing his torso, head, and limbs. Inside with him I could see electronics, wires, motors, and bulbs, all lit up. He wore extraordinary boots, clearly meant to allow his feet to grip—they were more like flexible glassy gloves—but they were lined with metal insoles, panels that I guessed were there to deliver those electric shocks.

And in there too were packets of green stuff—blue-green algae. Together, I learned, chimp and algae made up a closed life-support system, the algae cracking carbon dioxide from George’s breath back to oxygen. It was super-efficient, but would only last a few days before replenishment. Or the simp was disposed of, whichever suited the mission plan.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Now I know how Lunarville 1 got built.”

“And a lot of other stuff, yes. Of course, the whole thing was deflected from public attention with fiction, as usual. Planet of the Apes. The man-apes in 2001 . . .”

I looked into George’s wary eyes. “Can you hear me, George?”

A thumbs-up.

“What do you remember?”

A rattle of keys. AFRICA. HOME. MOTHER. CAGE. BOAT. PAIN. FEET. BURN. HAM. ENOS.

Then he screeched, laughed, and rolled out of sight.

After all that, the landing itself felt like an anticlimax.

Lunarville 1 was a hundred miles or so inside the western walls of Aristarchus Crater. I just needed to lock onto the Surveyor radar beacon, around which the base had been assembled in the first place.

I acquired the beacon two thousand feet up.

You have to imagine my Mercury capsule upright now, with me inside lying on my back, sitting on a frame like a four-legged dining table, which in turn sat on the cylindrical fuselage of the Polaris. My big Polaris engine was firing again, and the lander shuddered this way and that as the thrusters gimbaled. I was riding a missile, I thought, flying down on its tail of flame, to the dusty ground.

Seven hundred feet up. The horizon flattened out toward dusty gray mountains. This was the night side of the Moon, but I could see a surprising amount thanks to the Earthlight, forty times as bright as a full Moon. And, lying on my back, I had a periscope so I could see the landing site. Nests of craters like bullet-holes. Cylindrical habitats buried in the dirt like worm casts. And I saw a matrix of shining, sparking lights. That was the sodium-flare communicator array through which I am speaking to you now, Jocelyn.

And on the close horizon—something elusive. Almost like mist. An odd color, an elusive shade.

I knew immediately that the HPL was right about this place, about the infestation of Aristarchus. And I was coming down right in the middle of it.

I looked away. Concentrated on the landing, which I had yet to survive.

Two hundred and fifty feet. We were kicking up dust already. Two hundred. The Polaris coughed, shuddered, and fell away. Now a much smaller engine was guiding us into the Moon’s forgiving gravity for our final landing. I had my hand on a joystick, ready to take over manual control if all else failed.

I had no idea where George was. Clinging to the frame, probably.

At twenty feet, a dangling probe found the ground, and a contact light shone. The engine cut, and we fell and landed with the softest of jolts.

It was just past midnight, Thursday, September 11. Eclipse day.

There was a clatter from the hull exterior. Still lying on my back, I glanced out of my window to see George—a chimpanzee knuckle-walking across the surface of the Moon.

I got to work.

IV

I closed up my suit, popped my hatch, and struggled for a while, until George came over to help me out of the capsule. Help—that’s a word that doesn’t really cut it. Look, chimps are strong and limber, but they ain’t gentle. George just got an arm under my shoulders and hauled me out onto the dirt.

When I got to my feet, I took my first step in that low gravity, and I fell over. I got up, took another step, and sailed up from the ground, wriggling. And so forth.

George hooted laughter.

Then he pointed, and tapped his chest unit. BASE.

“Agreed. We have to get to the base.” Lunarville 1, which was maybe two hundred yards from where we had set down.

I glanced up at the full Earth. I couldn’t yet see the Moon’s shadow touching that glowing dish of light, but the eclipse would start soon. Also, I needed life-support from the base supplies. One way or another we didn’t have a lot of time.

We set off, me stumble-hopping, the simp loping easily.

Moon dust is rock flour, ground by impacts. It took a boot-print well. And, as there is no weather on the Moon, boot-prints and vehicle tracks last a long time. I could see how the base had been built. We crossed a lot of sled-marks, cut into the dirt. The trails led back to a bunch of fallen rockets, which littered the surface in a rough, wide circle around the base. I knew they were cargo pallets, fired up here over five long years. The contents had been industriously dragged into the center—probably mostly by simps, I thought. I couldn’t tell which tracks were fresh, and which were five years old.

We came to the main camp.

Nobody around, no sign of Spender or Hamilton.

The chuckwagons—imagine four fat cylinders, each ten feet wide and thirty feet long, like big storm drains—were laid down in a trench, lined up end to end, and covered, very roughly, with lunar dirt, for radiation shielding. In places the dust had drifted off the hulls, and I saw the logos of NASA, and Boeing, and Bell, and a few other suppliers. This was home, for Spender and Hamilton.

At one end of this complex the dirt was much disturbed, and I guessed that was where the missile silo had been dug out. That was for later; we’d check out the base first. We made for the other end.

Here we found a big red wheel that George enthusiastically turned to open a hatch. We clambered through into a poky little airlock that quickly pressurized, and then opened another red-wheel hatch.

And we entered the first chuckwagon.

Dim light. A cluttered space, enclosed by green-painted, curving walls. It was like being in a torpedo tube. And it was crowded with equipment—metal boxes, and trestle tables, and ducts, and pipes, and cables.

The two astronauts were kept supplied from Earth, but they’d had to recycle their air and water. That was what we saw now, the life-support system, with pipes leading from the other compartments into this nest of stuff, where fans and compressors and condensers and filters worked with a steady hum. I knew that the power came from a nuke plant, buried in the dirt somewhere.

The first thing I did was check the little air-quality sensor pack the NASA boffins had attached to the chest of my suit. Then, cautiously, I cracked my helmet seal and lifted it off my head. To my relief the air was warm, and it smelled of nothing worse than oil, and metal, and ozone.

George followed my lead, opening a window in his faceplate. Those big nostrils quivered, and his teeth were bared.

Through another hatch, we came to a kind of locker room.

We picked our way through cautiously. I recognized the basic layout from the engineering diagrams I’d been shown—there was a bunk down one side of the space and a table down the other, and a small sink and a chemical toilet, filthy and gaping open. It was a man’s room, stuffed with a man’s garbage, and it smelled that way—of wet socks and urine. And I quickly figured out this was Spender’s quarters. I saw his name on some of the stuff, old checklists on the table, tags on scattered clothing. On the walls, photographs, taped up—a wife, Spender in college football kit, Playboy centerfolds.

We knew that Spender and Hamilton had taken one chuckwagon each as a private room, separated by a shared facility. So, Spender and Hamilton had lodged in wagons two and four of the row. Logical.

The odd thing was, though the place was evidently in use, the bunk didn’t look slept in. It was covered by heaps of papers, and clothes, and stuff that had been there so long it had collected a decent patina of dust. So where, I wondered, did Spender sleep?

George, huge in this cramped space, seemed nervous. I guessed he had a right to be nervous of being shut up in any enclosure that smelled so bad of human. I took his hand, his gloved palm against mine, and I led him through the wagon to the far end, and another red-wheel hatch.

And, when we opened it, out spilled a stench of decay, a buzz of flies.

And a heap of chimp body parts.

I slammed my helmet down on its seal.

I guessed this chuckwagon, the third of four, had once been a multipurpose space. It had tables, work surfaces, sinks, power outlets, a shower. A mix of kitchen, bathroom, workshop, and radio shack. And, I supposed, a neutral space for two guys cooped up together in here for years.

Now, in one corner, I saw a heap of ape heads, eyes glassy, teeth bared, wrapped in a big plastic sheet. It was like the shop of some idiot butcher. There was blood all over the surfaces, dried to a brown crust.

And on one of the tables we found an unfinished job—a chimp’s body, partly dismembered. The limbs and torsos had been crudely hacked, as if with a meat-cleaver. At first I wondered if this might have been a logical, if cold-blooded, element of a mission plan—if the food runs out, eat the simps. But, looking closer, it really wasn’t much like butchery for food. The chimp was decapitated, its limbs detached from the torso, but there seemed to have been no effort to skin the parts or to cut away the meat.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

But George did, evidently. To my relief, he seemed glacially calm. He just tapped his chest, indicating the electronics inside.

And he lifted an arm, and for the first time I saw it was encased in a kind of frame, metal poles and wires fixed to the hair-covered flesh. Screwed in, and presumably fixed to the bone. When he moved there was a whir of motors, clearly audible in the thick air.

“Cybernetic augmentation,” I said. “My God, George. They made you a cyborg. As if you weren’t strong enough already.”

He tapped his chest. TEST.

“Yes. You, all the simps, were experiments, right? Uplifted cognition, those wires they stuck in your skull. And now this.” I shook my head.

HURTS.

“I bet it does. . . . Oh. I get it. Whoever did this killed the simps for their cyber parts. For their suits. Not their meat.”

HURTS. HURTS. HURTS.

“And I bet it hurt even more when the stuff was taken away.” I took a breath. “Okay, George. We’re done in here. One more chuckwagon to go. And it can’t be any worse than this, right?”

I was wrong. Dead wrong.

When I opened the next hatch, Bob Hamilton came out to kill me.

He—it—just burst out of the doorway.

You could only tell it had once been human at all because of a NASA jumpsuit, blue, stained and scuffed, and ripped open by the swelling of what had once been flesh. And you could only tell it had been Hamilton because of the name tag.

But it had hands, still, one withered to the bone, one bloated and blackened, hands that now grasped me around the neck. I was wearing my pressure suit with the helmet sealed. But even through the suit layers those fingers pressed and pushed, and I felt my throat close, and my lungs strained for air.

Its head was in front of me. The face a distorted mask on a skull that had swollen to the size of a watermelon, like a puffball fungus. Eyes buried deep, glittering. A mouth that could barely open, so distorted was the flesh around it.

And yet it spoke, a guttural sound wrenched from a distorted throat: “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

I knew what this was. I knew what was killing me—not Hamilton, not any more. It had tried to kill me before. This was the Color—that strange, amorphous entity that had once infested a farm in Maine, as Lovecraft described; and a hill in Florida, and a Soviet space station, and locations in England and Russia and other places we will probably never know about. Dyer and the rest had been right. It was here, in Lunarville 1—trapped within the base’s metal walls, maybe even deliberately contained by Spender, who had escaped what it did to Hamilton—until we, inadvertently, released it.

And this was what it did to life, organic, terrestrial life, which it infested, and distorted, and turned, so that it could absorb the life force. It turned humans like this, with body parts swollen or withered, and yet still driven by a kind of life, even by a memory of who they had once been.

Those hands tightened further. I was dying. I was losing the strength to put up any kind of fight. Hamilton opened that awful mouth wide, the jaw dangling slack, as if broken. A kind of mist emerged from his gullet, pulsing into my face. And I saw that Color, the phenomenon for which this entity had been named, that strange elusive shade which has no human label.

I thought the Color would be the last thing I ever saw.

Until George, with one tremendous cyborg punch, took the head off the Hamilton thing.

Even headless, it thrashed and squirmed. Even voiceless, it seemed to scream. But its hands released my throat, arms flapping, one withered, one swollen.

And one flailing leg kicked me in the stomach. I folded over.

I felt George pulling me back, back away from the open hatch. The pain in my belly was extraordinary.

Mercifully or otherwise, I blacked out.

V

When I came to I was back in Melody 7, my Mercury capsule. The hatch was shoved back in place, the cabin unpressurized, my suit still closed.

For a heartbeat I thought I was still in space. Like I’d imagined the whole thing, the whole surface nightmare. But then that gentle lunar gravity settled on my bones.

I pushed at the hatch. It gave; it wasn’t sealed.

Strong gloved hands came down and lifted the whole thing away. I saw the full Earth, a dish of light, and a broad ape face inside a tube of scuffed glass.

“George. You stuffed me in here after the Color attack, right? Like putting me back in the womb. There are worse ideas.”

I lifted up my arms. He bent over, got his enhanced arms under me, and almost tenderly lifted me out of there, and set me down on the lunar ground.

OK, OK, his chest unit flashed. It was a question.

No, I thought. Not okay. My squeezed throat hurt like hell, and my gut ached, and it felt like my back was a mass of bruises.

But when I looked at the Earth again, I saw a clip of shadow at one edge. The eclipse, in progress. Only a couple of hours until it reached its peak.

“What next, George? Do we search for Spender?”

SILO FIRST.

“Yeah. You’re right. The nukes. That’s why we’re here. Spender can wait. Come on.” I began loping over that way. “Let’s hope there’s a way in that doesn’t take us through that damn shelter again . . .”

We stumbled across the surface. I felt dizzy, even in the low gravity. The only time I’d opened my suit since we landed was inside the shelter, briefly. I had a nipple inside my helmet that dispensed water at a disgusting warm temperature. Didn’t make me feel any better, but it was the best I could do.

Turned out there was indeed a way into the silo from outside, just a hatch set in the ground. Maybe the crew had built the silo first, to make the base operational as quickly as possible; hence the independent entrance.

George opened the hatch. I looked down into a wide steel tube, with rungs bolted to the metal wall.

George went down first. Limber as all hell, he just scrambled down that tube and out of sight.

I followed more cautiously. And I lowered that big hatch after us. When it closed over, lights came on, little bulbs illuminating the shaft.

I followed the simp down the ladder. I found it was easier to let myself drop from step to step. The suit was stiff, and it was hard to bend my legs to catch each rung. Also, my stomach still hurt like hell where it had been kicked.

We passed an airlock door. Looking through a small window, I could make out a kind of logistics center: a computer installation, whirring tapes, flashing lights, and screens and keyboards. Everything looked clean and undamaged and functional. I left it alone.

A few yards farther down we came to the missile launch center. It said so on the door.

What puzzled me, though, was that this access shaft went on, farther down. We were already about sixty feet down. The launch center should have been the deepest point of the silo, the design target being to protect the crew from a direct one-megaton nuclear strike. But in the glow of the lights the shaft just went on, the wall rougher, no more steel, just a cut through what looked like broken-up bedrock, with more rungs cemented in.

This was, I reminded myself, a Moon base manned by two stir-crazy, stranded astronauts, and infested by the Color to boot. Anything could be down there. I needed to go take a look.

First things first, though. The control center.

George turned another red wheel to open the airlock door. It took a couple of minutes for us both to pass through.

This was a room made for regular humans. George, bulky in his suit, had to duck under the ceiling. But for me it was a relief to open up my suit at last, and, joy, drink cool water from a spigot on the wall.

Then I looked around.

I had been trained on what to expect. This main chamber was a rough sphere, and in fact, I knew, it was a bubble that had been blown in the rock by a battlefield nuke. The walls were paneled by aluminum and polystyrene. There were bunks, a galley, a bathroom; the design was that a couple of guys could have survived down here for a couple of months, even under attack.

But you know what the main feature was, right? You’ve seen the movies. A couple of consoles set about fifteen feet apart, each with a chair, and buttons, and trigger switches, and a TV monitor, everything duplicated. And there were two keys, on two chains, under two keyholes. To launch the missiles, these keys both had to be turned within a few seconds of each other—the idea being that they were too far apart for one man to reach, so no one crazy guy could launch a strike alone . . .

Of course, all this had been designed to fight a nuclear war, human against human. The whole scheme seemed crazy. Nukes on the Moon? Surely it would take any missile three days to get from the Moon to Earth, just as it had taken us three days to come the other way. But these missiles had been meant as a second strike capability; even if the whole of the United States’ Earth-based forces had been destroyed, still we, or our ghosts, could have hit back with these babies. The insanity of deterrence.

It was almost comforting for me to think that those nukes, a product of human madness, had in the end been turned against the eldritch insanity that seemed to lie under that crater plain.

And today, September 11, might be the day that theory was put to the test, I realized grimly. If I could find Spender. If he was sane enough to work with me on this two-person system to launch the nukes . . . and I might even live, if I could run away fast enough.

I had been given simple system tests to run. I got through that in a few minutes, with George waiting patiently. All was operational.

Then I stood up and faced him. “Okay, George. We need to go find Spender. But first, I think we need to know what’s down below this launch center . . .”

Suits sealed up. Back out to the shaft.

Cautiously, we resumed our climb down. Once we had climbed down past the steel facing, the rough surface under the rungs made climbing harder; I was wary of gashing my suit.

Then I saw light, coming up from below.

We climbed farther down that ladder, and then found ourselves on a kind of shallow ramp, a smooth-cut stone surface—and we walked down that in turn.

And emerged into a tremendous vaulted chamber.

VI

I’ll just describe what I saw next. Jocelyn, if you hear this, make sure Professor Dyer gets to know about it.

Because, you see, he was right. About what he thought he saw in images of Aristarchus.

It was as if we had come down through the dome of some great cathedral. The ramp on which we stood swept down toward a distant floor—distant, but clearly visible. There was light in there, coming from floating glass globes, but there was no air, no obscuring mist.

And as we moved down the ramp, we came out from under that domed “cathedral roof,” and I saw an even more distant ceiling, far above. Titanic pillars of some dark granite were topped by arches. Beneath that roof, buildings hundreds of feet high were set out beside avenues the width of freeways. . . . If the Romans had ever got to the Moon it might have looked like this.

And yet, as well as being awed, I was finding something disturbing about it all.

For a start, I had a feeling the perspective was all wrong. Surely there was no room in the hundred feet or so we had descended from the surface to fit in all this.

And many of the wall surfaces were covered with a kind of hieroglyphic, a graphic lettering that drew my eye yet baffled me, as if I was squinting.

And time seemed to—swim. Or judder, like a film-reel jumping a sprocket. One moment we were on that ramp. The next, we, both of us, were inside one of the buildings, so tall itself that it felt as if we were outdoors. Time-slips, from one moment to the next.

And suddenly we were both inspecting—stuff. In my hands I had a kind of book, I think, sitting inside a metal case. It was big, like a kid’s picture book, and its pages, some kind of thick paper, were covered by more hieroglyphics. Oddly, the pages opened from the top, not the side.

And George, meanwhile, a bulky ape in his glass suit, was inspecting a kind of machine. It was vaguely box-shaped, a foot or so on either side, a couple of feet tall—a pillar of mirrors, and rods, and wheels, centered on one big convex dish at its middle. A real home-workshop kind of thing. Or a clockmaker’s nightmare.

And, just as suddenly, it was over. We were walking out of that building, with our loot—me with my book, George with his gadget.

That was when I saw the corpse.

An alien corpse. It was a cone maybe ten feet tall, lying on a ramp, bloated in parts, withered elsewhere. It had four big limbs, and trailing tentacles, alternately shriveled or bloated. I recognized the symptoms of a Color infestation, even in these circumstances. Even though I had to think what this was a corpse of.

Peaslee, unwilling time-traveler, would have recognized it. A Yithian.

George looked back at me. I looked back at him.

Then we were on that first ramp that led back up to the silo. Holding our trophies, the machine, the book, and looking at each other. Another time-slip.

H. G. Wells, by the way, Jocelyn. He wrote about a society inside the Moon. Wonder how he knew? And who told him to cover it up? I told you. Never trust a science-fiction writer.

Look, Jocelyn, I’ll tell you what I think. And Professor Dyer will, hopefully, back me up.

I think Spender and Hamilton got to the Moon, and they set their simps to dig down deep into the lunar soil, for the silo. Sixty feet deep it had to be, but some of those simps dug on, and on . . . Maybe they didn’t understand the depth measures, or were trying to plant deep foundations—or maybe they knew, somehow, there was something down there to find. . . .

What they found was a city, built by the Great Old Ones of Yith. Just like Dyer found in Australia.

You know the story, or anyhow the version Lovecraft gave. The Yithians had the ability to travel through time and space, by exchanging their minds with creatures on other planets, in other ages. They came to the Earth some time in the deep past, perhaps as much as a billion years ago. They traveled back and forth through Earth’s history—traveled by means of possession of hosts in each era—according to Lovecraft, using just the kind of clunky gadget that George found inside the Moon.

And they created a great archive city in Australia, which Dyer eventually found.

They died out on Earth maybe fifty million years ago, and Dyer imagined they fled to the future. But maybe they fled to the Moon first, for a time anyhow—a place not unlike Australia after all: deep and old and dry and stable, just as good a place to site an archive, a library of past and future.

But—bad news for them—some time in the 19th century the Color came to the Moon, and found them.

I mean, it’s logical. In the Yith the Color found the organic life it needed to fuel its migrant existence. Maybe the Color was even able to browse selectively, here on the Moon. It would take less energy to escape the Moon’s shallow gravity field. Maybe there was a stable arrangement for a while.

Parasite and host.

But maybe the Color of Aristarchus got too greedy. Or the Yith, depleted, fled at last to the future.

And now that hungry colony on Aristarchus is looking toward our Earth with envious eyes.

I might have it all wrong. But as I sit here now, talking to you, I have George’s machine on the console before me, retrieved from that underground city, and my slim archive book. . . . Proof that we found something . . .

We had to get back to work. We clambered back up that rough shaft to the silo launch center.

Where, it turned out, Spender was already waiting for us.

VII

“Who are you? Where’s my damn Apollo, come to take me home?”

Francis Edward Spender, the first human to walk on the Moon.

Spender, the monster.

He had evidently found my Mercury. He was brandishing a chunk of it, a panel of dials and lights and dangling wires, torn from the cabin, held in a glassy glove. Oddly, that was the first thing I noticed about him, that Mercury component.

Odd because he filled that control room. Odd, because when he faced George, it was as if the two of them were distorted images of each other.

Spender had somehow built himself a simp suit.

So here were two glass robots, their carapaces filled with electronic parts and winking lights, and exoskeletal components. Two angry faces glaring: one ape, one human. Spender’s beard was thick, curled up inside the glass.

But whereas George’s suit had been manufactured in some covert NASA workshop, probably at Holloman AFB, and made to fit, the travesty Spender wore was obviously improvised—pieces of several suits bolted and glued, fixed with duct tape. He even wore those glove-like ape boots, like George’s. Behind the glass panels, the electronics were roughly crammed around Spender’s body—and I saw how the exoskeletal supports had been strapped to the man’s limbs.

And in there too were traces of chimp: scraps of dark hair, blood splashes, even flesh, sticking to the glass and the electronics.

George, ominously still, just glowered.

On any other day I would have been boggled. Maybe I was awed out.

“Well,” I said. “I can see why you don’t use your bunk any more. And I guess I know what became of George’s simian buddies. Picked them off one at a time, did you, Spender? To strip them of their cyborg parts?”

He glared at me. “Where’s my Apollo?”

“Apollo’s not ready,” I said as evenly as I could. “I’m a One-Way Space Man, Spender. Like you, like Bob Hamilton. Relying on a pickup some time in the future. Here to do my duty. As you must do yours.”

He sneered, behind the glass. “What duty?”

I tried to tell him. About the Color in Aristarchus. About Cthulhu stirring. About how I was here to secure humanity’s flank in the Eldritch War to come. About how, if we got the order today, he had to sit down with me now, in this launch center, and prepare to fire the nukes he had been babysitting for so long.

He stared at me, incredulous, and laughed. “Are you crazy? Don’t you get it? You’re in the same boat as me now, sister. Those damn nukes are the only leverage we have. Leave them in their silos and those NASA assholes or the air force might come get us some day. Set them off and they certainly won’t.”

“That’s not the deal—”

“And besides, detonate them over Aristarchus and we’d never survive ourselves.”

I frowned. “You know as well as I do that the nukes are on a timer. Turn those keys and we have an hour before launch, an hour to get out of here to the secondary shelter.”

He snorted. “What secondary shelter? Even after the first year we were barely surviving. We went over, me and Bob, and looted the damn place.”

That closed off several options in my head. “All right. And Bob Hamilton?”

“I didn’t touch him,” Spender said quickly. “Hell, we argued, stuck up here.”

“The Color—”

“It got to him in the city. Down below. Went down there once too often, the sap. It was all I could do to shovel him in his cabin and lock the door.” His face, behind the glass, looked anguished, and the words came tumbling out. Too long since he had anyone to talk to, I guess. “Look—who are you? What’s the name on that tag?”

“Magnolia Jones,” I said. “USAF and NASA. One of the Blue Gemini 21.”

His eyes widened. “I never believed you existed.”

“I never knew you existed.”

He shook his head. “You got to see how it was up here, for me, Jones. And for Bob, I guess. We were both military. From military families. And we never got a decent war to fight. My father fought in World War II. Fighter ace. Why, even some of the Mercury guys got to fight in Korea. I was already in the space program when Vietnam came along . . . I should be out there swinging. Instead, I wasted my life stuck in a hole in the ground, on the Moon. You got to see how it was. You got to see . . .”

“You had your duty. That’s how I see it.”

CHIMPS.

Somehow George’s glowing sign was louder than either of our voices.

Spender sneered. “What’s that, Cheetah?”

CHIMPS. STOLE.

Spender glanced down at himself. “Oh, you mean my tailoring?” He grinned, in George’s face. “After I lost Bob, what was I supposed to do? I needed more strength, more than one man’s, to keep the place running. You can’t rely on these damn dirty apes. So—”

STOLE.

“He’s right. You stole their lives, Spender.”

“And I was right,” Spender said.

George stood straight.

“I had the right. I’m human, they weren’t.” Spender’s glass-coated fists clenched with a scrape. He walked up to George, and faced him. “You want to discuss this further?”

And suddenly I had a vision of these two cyborgs smashing up each other, and this launch center. “Gentlemen. You can’t fight in here! This is a nuclear silo!”

But George signed, NO NEED. NO FIGHT. He reached out with one finger, and tapped an exposed button on Spender’s glass-covered torso.

There was a blue glow around Spender’s feet.

He jumped in the air, jolted, cried out—and toppled like a statue. Out cold.

George just looked down at him. SORE FEET. DANCE LIKE MONKEY.

He faced me. NOW WHAT.

I looked at George, and the unconscious Spender, and at those double keys.

“Now what? Now nothing. It takes two to launch those damn nukes. Spender could have turned one of the keys. But even if you haven’t killed him, he’ll surely be out for hours.”

CHIMPS NOT TURN KEY.

I nodded sagely. “Chimps aren’t supposed to turn the keys, right. I imagine you guys have some kind of conditioning to stop you messing with nuclear missiles. Makes sense.”

George shrugged. CONDITIONING. NOT TURN KEY. CONDITIONING. NOT HIT SPENDER. He gave Spender a solid kick in the glassed-over ribs. And he reached up and flicked a launch key with one finger. GEORGE ONE SMART CHIMP. CONDITION THAT.

I marveled.

NOW WHAT, he flashed again.

“Now,” I said, “if they tell us to, we save the world.”

He sat down at one console, and flicked that dangling key again.

Epilogue

So, Jocelyn, nearly an hour ago . . .

Time was running out.

We had images from surface cameras. I could see how the eclipse was progressing.

And as seen by the big telescopes around the world, the surface of Aristarchus was starting to boil, as the biggest Color Incursion we’re ever likely to see prepared to launch itself at the fragile Earth. Talk about a transient lunar phenomenon.

We had our duty.

And we called Houston, and got our orders. Confirm to launch.

I didn’t think about the consequences, for me. Or George. We just did it.

There’s a kind of dance to launching a nuclear strike. With the verbal order came a coded signal that made a box on my console light up with a code: CAP-811, if you want to know. This is called a “c-cubed code.” There are paper records in here with us, a slip of paper coded for each day of the first fifty years of the base’s operation. I found today’s slip, and it bore a matching code. CAP-811.

We punched that in. Now we had authorization; we had control of the nukes.

Then we had to go through a number of technical steps. We went to standby status, which enabled us to power up our missiles. Then we went through a pre-launch sequence, like this was a miniature Canaveral—checks of the electronics and the guidance systems. We had to enter the final targeting data into the missiles’ memories.

And then we turned our two keys, one ape hand, one human.

The whole place shuddered when the missiles went up.

Soon six megatons will be raining down on Aristarchus, hopefully scrambling and sealing that nest of Color for a goodly time.

And scrambling us. There’s no point running, even; there’s no shelter to take us.

Unless, unless . . .

You see, we have our souvenirs, here with us. From the Yithian city. My archive book and George’s glassy machine. And he’s tinkering with it. Lovecraft says that machines just like this were used to move Yithians, or at least their minds. Professor Dyer agreed. The Yithians could move indiscriminately across time and space, he said.

Maybe so. Maybe we have a way out after all.

You know, Jocelyn, your aunt Mabel wasn’t evil. Her head was turned by dreams of Azathoth. She was like poor Spender, in a way. A soldier without a decent, clean war to fight. And who knows what lies ahead for you, once this Eldritch War is over? For all wars end, you know.

One way or another, though, this might be the end of humans on the patient Moon. Strange to think that we, and the Yithians, and the Color might in the end be nothing more than transient lunar phenomena.

The date is Thursday, September 11, 1969. My name is Magnolia Jones. I was born on a cotton farm in Atlanta, Georgia. And I flew a Mercury spacecraft to the Moon, in order to save the world. I guess it was the most extraordinary thing I ever did.

Until now . . .