Adventure stories; Cold War -- Fiction; Moon -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space flight to the moon -- Fiction; Spy stories
Crag slept. He slept with the airlock closed and the cabin flooded with
oxygen. He slept the sleep of the dead, a luxurious sleep without
thought or dream. When he awakened, he ate and donned the pressure suit,
thinking he would have to get more oxygen from the drone. He opened the
hatch and scrambled out. The plain was light. The sun was an intolerable
circle hanging at the very edge of the horizon. He blinked his eyes to
get them used to the glare.
He studied the plain for a long time, then hefted the rifle and started
toward Bandit before he remembered there was no Bandit. No Bandit? When
he reached the top of the knoll, he knew he was right. Bandit
unaccountably was gone. He searched the area in wide circles. The
question grew in his mind. He found several twisted pieces of metal--a
jagged piece of engine. Abruptly he found Richter.
He was dead. His suit hung limp, airless against his body. He stared at
the object next to Richter. It was a moment before he recognized it as
the rocket launcher.
"_He forgot two things, Commander...._"
Now he understood Richter's words. Now he knew the motive that had
driven him onto the plain in the face of the rock storm. Richter had
used the launcher to destroy Bandit, to destroy the murderer of
Prochaska and Nagel. He marveled that Richter could have carried the
heavy weapon. Once, before, he had watched two men struggle under its
weight Richter must have mustered every ounce of his strength.
He looked at the fallen form for a long time. Richter had crossed his
frontier. At last he turned and started toward Red Dog. Adam Crag, the
Man in the Moon. Now he was really the Man in the Moon. The only Man.
Colonel Crag, Commanding Officer, Pickering Field. General Crag of the
First Moon expeditionary Force. Adam Crag, Emperor of Luna. He
laughed--a mirthless laugh. Damned if he couldn't be anything he wanted
to be--on the Moon.
* * * * *
The sun climbed above the rim of Arzachel transforming the vast
depressed interior of the crater into a caldron of heat and glare. In
the morning of the lunar day the rock structures rising from the plain
cast lengthy black shadows over the ashy floor--a mosaic in black and
white. Crag kept busy. He stripped the drones of their scant amount of
usable supplies--mainly oxygen cylinders from Baker--and set up a new
communication post in Red Dog. In the first hours of the new morning
Gotch named the saboteur. Crag listened, wearily. Just then he wasn't
interested in the fact that an alert intelligence agent had doubted that
a man of 5' 5" could have been a star basketball player, as the
Superintendent of the Maple Hill Orphanage had said. He expressed his
feelings by shutting off the communicator in the middle of the Colonel's
explanation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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