TASK to LUNA by ALFRED COPPEL Two rocketships bit into lunar dust. Two men--a Yankee, a Russian--dueled in nightmare shadow and glare, each eager to destroy the Enemy. What cosmic joke made them drop their weapons and die laughing? [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories January 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The rockets started almost simultaneously. From two widely separated points on the great curving surface of Earth they reached upward and outward--toward the Moon. It wasn't really so strange a coincidence. Space navigation is governed by mathematics and logic, not politics. The fact that man-carrying spaceships happened to be developed concurrently on two sides of an iron curtain meant little to the Universe. It happened, that's all. And there is a proper time to launch such missiles. When that time came, they were launched. In a manner of speaking it was a race. A race wherein the prizes were such things as: "gravity gauge" and "surveillance point" and "impregnable launching sites." The contestants were earnest, capable men; each certain that the Moon must not fall into the hands of the opponent. It made a stirring and patriotic picture, vivid with nationalistic fervor. It was thrilling with its taste of high adventure and self-sacrifice. For each rocket pilot it was a personal crusade against the thing he had been raised to regard as _the enemy_.... But somehow under the steady, cold scrutiny of the eternal stars, they must have looked a little ridiculous ... perhaps just a tiny bit tragic, too. * * * * * Harsh was the moon. There was black and there was white. Great jagged cliffs and razor-backed mountains slashed the pocked surface of the crater floor, humping themselves at the huge unwinking stars. The sun was a stark disc of fire, incredibly white, hung in the black sky. The shadows were bottomless pools. Within them there was nothing. In the sunlight, the pumice soil glared white. The Russian rocket had crashed on landing. Randick could see the tiny, buckled shape of it high on the mountain. No doubt the pilot was dead, but he had to be sure. The risks were too great for any unsupported assumptions. He had to go up there and see for himself.