Adventure stories; Cold War -- Fiction; Moon -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space flight to the moon -- Fiction; Spy stories
Crag assigned Prochaska the task of monitoring the radio despite his
plea to share in the more arduous work. The knowledge that one of his
crew was a saboteur lay constantly in his mind. He had risked leaving
Prochaska alone before, he could risk it again, but he wasn't willing to
risk leaving any of the others alone in Bandit. Yet, Prochaska hadn't
found the bomb! Larkwell had worked superhumanly at the task of
rebuilding the Aztec--Nagel had saved his life when he could just as
easily have let him die. Neither seemed the work of a saboteur. Yet the
cold fact remained--there was a saboteur!
Richter, too, preyed on his mind. The self-styled Eastern scientist was
noncommittal, speaking only when spoken to. Yet he performed his
assigned duties without hesitation. He had, in fact, made himself so
useful that he almost seemed one of the crew. That, Crag told himself,
was the danger. The tendency was to stop watching Richter, to trust him
farther and farther. Was he planning, biding his time, preparing to
strike? How? When? He wished he knew.
* * * * *
They toppled Red Dog in the dark of the moon.
Larkwell had run two cables to manually operated winches set about
twenty-five yards from the rocket. A second line extended from each
winch to the ravine. The ends of these were weighted with rocks. They
served to anchor the winches during the lowering of the rocket. Finally
a guide line ran from the nose of the rocket to a third winch. Richter
and Nagel manned the lowering winches while Larkwell worked with the
guide line, with only small hand torches to aid them. It was
approximately the same setup used on the Aztec--they were getting good
at it. Crag helped until the moment came to lower the rocket, then there
was little for him to do. He contented himself with watching the
operation, playing his torch over the scene as he felt it was needed.
It was an eery feeling. The rocket was a black monster bathed in the
puny yellow rays of their hand torches. The pale light gave the illusion
of movement until the rocket, the rocks, and the very floor of the
crater seemed to writhe and squirm, playing tricks on the eyes. It was,
he knew, a dangerous moment, one ripe for a saboteur to strike--or ripe
for Richter.
It was dark. Not an ebony dark but one, rather, with the odd color of
milky velvet. The earth was almost full, a gigantic globe whose
reflected light washed out the brilliance of the stars and gave a milky
sheen to Crater Arzachel. It was a light in which the eye detected form
as if it were looking through a murky sea. It detected form but missed
detail. Only the gross structures of the plain were visible: the
blackness of the rocket reaching upward into the night; fantastic
twisted rocks which blotted out segments of the stars; the black blobs
of men moving in heavy space suits, dark shadows against the still
darker night. The eery almost futile beams of the hand torches seemed
worse than useless.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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