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  The Metal Moon

  By EVERETT C. SMITH and R. F. STARZL

  Based upon the Fourth Prize ($10.00) winning plot of the Interplanetary Plot Contest won by Everett C. Smith, 116 East St., Lawrence, Mass

  [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Wonder Stories Quarterly Winter 1932. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

  The ship was now coming close to the vast curve of thecrystal city. The earthmen became aware that the part below the citylevel was a dull ugly black.]

  * * * * *

  EVERETT C. SMITH]

  R. F. STARZL]

  In this story, the joint product of two imaginative minds, we get a very unusual picture of some of the possibilities of interplanetary exploration.

  We know that as soon as interplanetary travel is possible, expeditions from the earth will be ranging the length and breadth of the solar system searching out the thousands of wonders that are to be discovered.

  It is quite possible that some of the explorers, whether through accident or desire, may colonize the other planets and develop under new and unusual conditions a new branch of the human race. It is doubtlessly true that if each of the solar planets were to be colonized, at the end of several hundred centuries there would be nine races of human beings who might differ radically from each other and in fact might not recognize each other as members of the same human stock.

  In this story we do not see nine races but we do see four of them and Mr. Starzl has united the four in a gripping narrative of the great spaces.

  THE METAL MOON

  The three men in the tiny space ship showed their apprehension as theywatched the gravity meters. Something was distinctly wrong with theship.

  "Are you sure that there isn't some undiscovered moon of Jupiter?" askedthe youngest of them. He was only about 25, which was very young indeedwhen his scientific attainments were considered, even for the humanrace's stage of intellectual development in 1,000,144 A. D. His figurewas stocky, powerful, his face rather thin, bold, with piercing blackeyes. He was naked, save for short, brilliantly red trunks of metalsilk.His name, "Sine," followed by a numerical identification code, wastattooed indelibly in thin, sharp characters on his broad, bronze-hardchest.

  The man at the ampliscope removed his head from the eyepiece and shookhis head impatiently. His body was bronzed and spare, but the completeabsence of hair on his head made him look older than the 48 yearsindicated by the code following the name on his chest, "Kass."

  "I tell you, Sine, this pull is no gravity effect. No body of such masscould be invisible, unless it were composed entirely of protons. Andeven then it would yank Jupiter out of shape, making it look like apear, but there--"

  Jupiter presented its usual appearance. The solar system's largestplanet seemed enormous at this distance of only a few million miles. Itshowed its usual marked depression at the poles, but no distortion suchas might be caused by a nearby body of enormous mass.

  "What do you think, Lents?" Kass turned to the third occupant of thelittle space ship. Lents raised his broad placid face from the pad uponwhich he had been figuring a complicated equation. He was a large man,slow-moving, and fat. He was sensitive to that fact, so that, besidesthe usual trunks, he also wore a toga-like garment. His brown eyesblinked in folds of flesh.

  "No doubt you're right, Kass," Lents rumbled in a deep voice. "I can'tsee how such a body could exist without pulling all of Jupiter's moonsto itself. No, we seem to be specially honored by its attention."

  They looked at one another soberly.

  "The question is, can it out-pull us?" Sine remarked.

  "You ought to know," Kass said. "You designed and built her."

  Sine made his way forward. It was no longer necessary to use thehandholds, for the pull of the mysterious body was already so powerfulthat it entirely eliminated the free floating so familiar to spacetravelers. Sine looked through the grated outlook windows, past thegracefully curved bow of the ship. At the very tip was the ether screwof his invention, resembling the screws used for water propulsion inancient times, except that the pitch was extremely sharp. The tachometershowed that the screw had slowed down to 50,000 revolutions a minute,although the thermometer indicated that the molecular bearings werestill reasonably cool. But how long could she stand the strain? Howlong, indeed, could the sturdy little atomic motor keep those bladesturning? It was designed to pull directly away at a distance of only amillion miles from the sun, and yet it was being beaten far out here inspace by an object as yet invisible.

  "What a crash that'll be!" Sine murmured, watching the agony of torturedmetal.

  Amidship, Kass was again studying the eyepiece of the ampliscope.Suddenly he stiffened.

  "I see it! Why, it can't be over a couple of hundred feet in diameter.Cylindrical, I think. Head on to us now."

  They crowded around him. Lents, with hasty computations, determined thatthey were still about three thousand miles from the object.

  "No chance to pull away from it, if we pull straight," and his heavyvoice was full of energy as his sleepiness vanished with the need foraction. "Set her over, Sine, about 40 degrees. Try for a circular orbitaround it--if we can get up enough speed centrifugal force will saveus!"

  Sine did as he was told, and the ship heeled over so that it presentedits side to the sinister object, which was still invisible to theunassisted eye. While Kass watched it through the ampliscope, hiscompanions stared through the thick ports at the velvet, gem-studdedfirmament. They could feel the attraction growing with terrifying speed.

  "It's turning with us," Kass announced, "and getting closer. If we canswing around it, it will be a very sharp ellipse indeed!"

  "Try and see if you can get a few more revs out of the screw," Lentssuggested, and Sine crept forward, his powerful muscles strainingagainst the pull. He lifted the leaden weight of his arm to the lever.He _must_ get a little more power out of the motor, or they would crashto their deaths in a few minutes! A fine ending for their daring dash toJupiter--the first space flight since the great comet swarm of 800,768A. D.

  Sine pulled back hard on the lever, and the motor gamely responded,moaned and shuddered under the tremendous overload. The tachometerneedle quivered, began to climb, 52,000, 55,000, 56,000----

  The ship gave a lurch--there was a dull grinding, a hollow, metallicgroan. The men picked themselves up from the floor--realizing at oncethe fatal significance of the lack of effort required. Their movementcarried them off the floor--made them grasp handholds. Floating free!That meant falling free!

  Sine glanced at the tachometer. The dead needle stood at zero. Throughthe forward window he could see one of the four screw blades, black,motionless.

  Lents, obeying the habits of a lifetime, elbow hooked in a handhold, wasfiguring the time required for them to strike. He looked up with apuzzled frown.

  "We should have struck about right now! Check on that body's position,will you, Kass?"

  * * * * *

  The bald-headed scientist pulled himself to the ampliscope. But it waspossible to see the object through the ports now, quite plainly. It wasblack, cylindrical, glinting dully in the sun's light. The space shipwas tumbling end over end, lazily, bringing the thing into view first atone port--then another.

  "No acceleration!" Kass reported, amazement mingling with hope. "Samespeed--we may still hit--but no evidence of gravity. We're fallingtoward it on momentum
alone!"

  Lents' brown eyes twinkled with perplexity in their pits of fat.

  "The force, whatever it is, doesn't seem like anything in nature. But ifwe're traveling on momentum alone we can pull away with our emergencyrockets--though I hate to waste the fuel."

  Sine leaped to the rocket controls. "Grab handholds!" he snapped overhis shoulder. The men rolled into the padded niches provided for thatpurpose. Sine's niche was so placed that it would not be necessary tolift a hand against the tremendous pressure of rocket acceleration. Alateral swing of the lever along its quadrant operated the rockets.

  "Oof!" came a smothered exclamation from Lents as the ship seemed topause, to leap forward in space again. The star-studded heavens as seenthrough the ports were hidden by a curtain of flame, electric blue andas stiff seeming as a steel bar--the trail of the forward rockets.

  For some minutes there was no sound save the subdued thunder of the hullas it trembled under the tug of the rockets. Then a light flashed redlyand a gong sounded. The signal that meant, "fuel half gone." Sine shutoff the power, crawled out stiffly. His first glance out of a portshowed that they were still falling toward the mysterious cylindricalspace wanderer.

  Kass wiped the sweat from his bald head.

  "No use wasting any more effort," he said hoarsely. "That thing is aspace ship, and there are men in it. The force they have been using onus is some kind of gravity beam--probably it's also their means of spacepropulsion. They mean to capture us, no doubt----"

  "And they've reversed the beam!" Lents puffed as he turned away from theampliscope, pulling his sweat-soaked toga away from his fat body withthumb and forefinger. "We're decelerating fast, but we can't feel itbecause the force acts on every particle of our bodies exactly the sameas on the ship----"

  "Proving," added Sine, looking out of the port curiously, "that it's atrue gravity beam!"

  The utter stillness of their ship gave the illusion that she wasmotionless, and that the sinister stranger was drifting toward them.

  "It _is_ a ship!" Lents rumbled. "Look at her ports. But they'reshuttered."

  "Not a bad idea," Sine agreed. "Protection against pin-point meteorites,anyway." They saw now that the cylinder was slightly rounded at eachend, and the end presented to them had at its nose a circularprojection, not unlike a very large button, that glowed with a lavenderlight, which they guessed to be the source of the gravity beam.

  They were torn between the excitement of discovery and a very naturalapprehension. In the dim past, more than 200,000 years ago, there hadbeen a regular commerce between Earth and the Jovian colonies. But thecomet swarm, coming out of the mysterious depths of space, had releasedto the solar system such swarms of meteorites as to make interplanetarytravel in the spatial belt between Mars and Jupiter utterly suicidal. Itrequired the passing of two thousand centuries to thin them outsufficiently to permit the voyage of exploration in which these threemen were engaged.

  What would these children of Earth look like after 200,000 years ofJovian evolution? Would they be friendly?

  They must, at any rate, be curious people. The great cylinder waspassing over them, and they had a better conception of its size. It wasat least twice as big as the 200-foot diameter Kass had estimated, andfully 1500 feet long. A section of its hull slid open, and thescientists felt the tug of mysterious forces on their own little vessel.They drifted up into the opening, knew that the hatch had closed by theshutting out of the solar glare. But there was no lack of light. Theycould see the welded plates of the hull by an intense saffron light thatcame from oval plates set in the wall. More of the gravity buttons wereranged around the room. It appeared that they were regularly used inhandling freight. Now, as the little captive ship was tugged here andthere, the prisoners could see flashes of that penetrating lavenderlight that seemed somehow solid.

  "Get ready, men!" Sine said, breaking off his absorbed contemplation oftheir surroundings. "Strap on your belts, and be sure your disintegratortubes are in their clips."

  Lents was already lifting his toga and snapping his weapon belt aroundhis ample waist. A mere strip of flexible metal with pockets for theatobombs and a clip for the delicate little tube--it might easily betaken for a mere ornamental article of apparel.

  "Hope they're friendly," Kass remarked, patting the buckle shut over hisflat diaphragm, "but if they aren't we can give 'em a thing or two tothink about."

  The quartz ports, kept free from frost on the inside by a curtain of hotdry air blown over them through a slit, suddenly misted over on theoutside, became opaque with a milky glaze of frost. This told theprisoners that their captors were "bleeding" air into the hold, whichdid double duty as an airlock. They heard vague clanging of metal onmetal, transmitted to them through the hull of their ship. Then a sharpblade scraped away the ice from one of the ports, and a face peered in.

  They looked at one another for a few moments, these cousins of the humanrace, separated by 200,000 years of time and impassable meteor-strewnwastes of space. The man at the port turned and beckoned to others, whoalso surveyed the prisoners.

  Then the first one, evidently the chief of this massive space vessel,motioned to the prisoners, to open their manports.

  "Keep together now!" Sine admonished his companions. "If they actunfriendly we'll let them have the ray. Then you two slip back into yourown ship while I grab this vacuum suit out of the lock. With that on Ican carve a way out, and disable them, too."

  "It would be a shame!" Kass said as he whirled the handwheel of theinner manport, "but----"

  The valve opened, and a few minutes later the three Earthmen stepped outto confront the Jovians.

  There were half a dozen of them, standing firmly, by virtue of theartificial gravity, somehow produced. They were not far different fromEarthmen, except that they were shorter, being barely five feet tall.Their tremendous muscles told of the race's adaptation to the superiorgravity of Jupiter. Their feet, encased in slippers of some burnishedmaterial, were unusually large.

  They were dressed in an armor of overlapping scales that covered everypart of their bodies, even their fingers. But their heads, instead ofbeing armored, were protected by a thin, transparent membrane thatfollowed the shape of their features closely. The Earthmen recognizedthe protective covering used before the comet swarm as a defense againstthe then used heat ray. So the Jovians had developed no new weapon! Sinethought comfortably of his little disintegrator tube. He could makethose armored men vanish like puffs of smoke.

  But they made no hostile move, and Sine had leisure to notice theirfaces. If their bodies were too heavily muscled for grace, their headsatoned for that defect. These were truly Jovian, god-like, combiningintense virility, dominance, courage. But there was also about them anexpression of intolerance, of ruthlessness, of selfishness. Here weremen, it could be seen, who would not be too scrupulous in attainingtheir ends. But men, too, who could be charming companions.

  Their leader, the man who had first looked into the port, now detachedhimself from the group and came forward, his hand outstretched in theold Earth gesture of friendliness. His appearance had all thecharacteristics of his companions, but in a more striking degree. He wastaller than they, more than five feet, and his broad shoulders had theconfident bearing of accustomed command. He spoke, in a pleasant,vibrant baritone:

  "Welcome, men of Earth. Sorry for our little misunderstanding."

  Sine gripped his hand, returned the muscular grip.

  "It took us a little while to know what you were. And I may add that I'mpleasantly surprised that we can still understand each other."

  The Jovian shrugged his shoulder:

  "Canned speech. No chance for a language to evolve when it'smechanically recorded. But come up to my cabin. It's chilly here, andyour manner of dress----"

  "_That_ has changed!" Sine smiled. "Lents and Kass, will you go ahead?"