The Fury Out of Time (21 page)

The moon base was enormous. A gigantic dome pimpled with observation bubbles, it lay at the jagged edge of the Mare Imbrium, in the yawning mouth of the great Alpine Valley gorge. At the other end of a connecting tube was a smaller dome, the landing dome, and the complex viewed from above gave the impression of a lopsided dumbbell. Nearby were a number of lesser domes, surmounting a complex network of underground tunnels.

The base was enormous—and virtually empty. At some time in the dim past it had been a thriving city, perhaps a crucial steppingstone in man’s first awkward lurch toward the stars. Now human aspiration had passed it by, and it was as barren and meaningless as a monument to a forgotten battle.

The Overseer and his staff occupied the dome’s two highest levels, and did not need a fraction of that space. The ground level was a supply depot, and much of the remainder of the dome was sealed off. But there were miles of corridors for Karvel to walk, and miles of ramps for him to descend and climb; and when the ghosts of Galdu screamed, and Lieutenant Ostrander’s young face smiled, and clouds obscured the unattainable mountain peaks, Karvel left his sleeping pad to pace the corridors with the long, gliding strides that the moon’s low gravity made possible.

It was another morning after such a sleepless night—a moon base morning but not a moon morning, because outside the base the sun would not rise for more than a week—when Karvel tiredly entered the Overseer’s administration room. Sirgan, the Overseer’s assistant, looked up from a food tray, nodded, and grinned between swallows. As in Dunzalo and the caves of the Unclaimed People, food was always at one’s elbow. The Overseer and his staff members consumed ridiculously small amounts of food several times an hour. They thought Karvel’s custom of eating three meals a day incredible, and the dazzling quantities of food he was able to dispatch at those gargantuan repasts shocked them.

At least the Overseer’s food was genuine food. It dissolved in the mouth, but it had meat in it, and more than an illusion of substance.

“Will you take food?” Sirgan asked.

“Thank you. I’ve already eaten.”

“The Overseer is occupied.”

“I know,” Karvel said curtly. He had heard his laughter booming down the corridor from the women’s quarters.

Karvel circled the vast room and turned away. He hadn’t come there to see anyone. He was merely walking. He had trod down the nerve-wracking visions of the night, and now he was at work on the harsh facts of day—the facts he had acquired since arriving on the moon.

The Overseer had arranged for the compensation of the cities claiming Karvel and the U.O. The U.O. was now the property of the Overseer.

So was Karvel.

The Overseer was as coolly brilliant and as suavely unscrupulous a person as Karvel had ever met, and thus far he had made only one mistake. He had assumed that a man from the Earth’s past would be as blindly naive as the Earth people he was accustomed to dealing with.

Unfortunately, with Karvel virtually a prisoner at the moon base, the mistake was unlikely to cost him anything. Karvel still had his knife and pistol, but he could think of no effective use for them. What he needed was a plan of searching ingenuity.

Sirgan, still gumming his last mouthful of food, overtook him in the corridor. “The Overseer said I was to show you around, if you like, and tell you anything you want to know.”

“Anything?” Karvel asked with a grin. He didn’t believe it, but there was always the possibility that he might be shown, or told, more than was intended. “Let’s go.”

Sirgan was a lesser edition of the Overseer—a younger man, of a medium seven and three-quarters feet in height and the same sturdy build. His eyes were deeply sunken and gleamed a depthless black, as though they had looked upon the aggregate evil of the universe and found it wanting. Like the Overseer, he seemed at his sinister worst when he was trying to appear friendly.

Karvel found little of interest on the administration levels. The reference center was an electronic marvel that occupied a suite of rooms, but it had already failed to answer the one question Karvel wanted to ask. A bank of machines performed the clerical work for a planet. Only in the message center was there human activity. Half of the Overseer’s staff consisted of communications men, and they worked in shifts to handle the supply orders and the claims and complaints of Earth’s cities.

On the lower levels, an overweight villain named Franur ran the supply depot with an assistant, a small crew of Earthmen, and a large number of machines. Franur’s bulk intrigued Karvel, who hadn’t thought that anyone could gain weight on the diet he was experiencing. After a cautious question or two he attributed it to gland trouble.

“The depot handles mostly fuel, fertilizer, and metals,” Sirgan said, “but it has to have a little of almost everything on hand for emergencies. The supplies they don’t get much call for are stored below. Would you like to see them?”

Karvel said no, and Sirgan led him through a long underground tunnel to one of the small domes. A scientific detachment was at work there, three bored individuals wandering about in a maze of instruments.

“They’re studying the sun,” Sirgan said. “It’s part of a galaxy-wide research project—of the known galaxy, that is. Suns of various ages are being studied, and there’ll be experiments to learn to control a sun’s expenditure of energy, or regulate its aging, or some such thing.”

“What will the experiments do to the Earth?”

Sirgan shrugged. “I suppose the people would be removed if any danger developed. An old, exhausted system like this one can’t be maintained forever. Earth has to import too many things. The quantity of soil nutrients needed just to maintain its agriculture is shocking. At present the trade is profitable to us, but this may not always be the case.”

“What does an exhausted planet have to trade?”

Sirgan looked surprised. “Why—people! Earth natives are much in demand. The men make quite the best spaceship crews available—in positions of nonresponsibility, of course. Their self-contained city life conditions them to a crowded existence, I suppose, and they are trained to give complete obedience to whomever owns them. In certain specialized environments they are immeasurably superior to any other people. There is a substantial market for them. Earthwomen are also much in demand. They have a loyalty to their owners that isn’t easily found in women these days.” He grinned. “They have other qualities that are also justly famous, but no doubt you know about those from experience.”

Karvel considered himself anything but a stuffy moralist, and that shocked him. He could only ask weakly, “Don’t the cities of Earth take any interest in what happens to their citizens after they trade them?”

“Of course not.”

“Are there other worlds where people are used in trade?”

Sirgan was thoughtful for a moment. “I don’t know of any. That’s another reason the people of Earth are so much in demand, I suppose. It’s a venerable practice on Earth. They’ve been trading people among themselves for so long that it probably seemed perfectly natural to start trading them away from Earth when Earth’s resources gave out. But all that is ancient history.”

“The one thing I don’t understand is where they get the people. I haven’t seen a child since I arrived.”

“There are no children at Dunzalo. The Unclaimed People are unique in that their women still bear children, but they keep the women and children segregated. Where else have you been? Bribun? I believe there is a small nursery at Bribun, probably a throwback to the time before the cities began to specialize.”

“I wasn’t there long enough to see it.”

“Galdu has one of the largest nurseries on the planet, and fortunately it wasn’t damaged. But you didn’t actually go to Galdu.”

“You make the production of people sound as easy as growing grain. Instead of trading for them, why don’t you grow your own?”

Sirgan regarded him indignantly. “If you’d seen the nurseries, you wouldn’t ask that. It’s a horribly complicated process, the children require many years of highly specialized care, and the environment has to be precisely right if the adult is to be worth anything in trade. Really, it’s much easier to trade for them.”

“And—only the women of the Unclaimed People bear children?”

“The Unclaimed People are strange in many ways. It was once thought that they would make excellent pioneers for the settlement of new planets, but that didn’t work out at all. We even supplied them with those silly nuts they insist on eating, but the entire colony died off. We still don’t know why. Evidently something in their forest environment is lacking elsewhere.”

Karvel nodded. “Trees. What do the Unclaimed People trade?”

“The products of their forests. They need very little themselves—fuel, very rarely a replacement machine or plane. They wouldn’t trade their people even if we had a use for them. Would you like to learn about the sun experiments?”

“No,” Karvel said. “I doubt if I’d understand them anyway. What else is there to see?”

“Very little, unless you’d like to explore the old mine. This was once the most important mine on the moon, which accounts for the size of the base.”

“I suppose it’s exhausted.”

“Long ago. That’s ancient history, too. The legend is that ore from the moon took man to the stars. ‘Wrought of Mother Earth, fired with the strength of Luna,’ an old saga goes. Or something like that. I don’t believe a word of it, but there’s no doubt that the moon once had many rich mineral deposits. The most important mining bases are still here. You can see the locations on the maps in the administration room. Things remain very much the same on the moon, unless man changes them.”

“Is there anything to see in the mine?”

“Nothing but tunnels. I went down there once. It’s a gloomy place.”

“And a long walk, I suppose.”

“Not when it was in use. It was fully automated and there were conveyors everywhere. Of course that was long before Earth had to start importing fuel. Earth’s cities were once fully equipped with conveyors, I’m told, but when fuel became scarce they had to eliminate such luxuries and let their citizens walk. Speaking of walking, we’re going to bring some doctors up to have a look at your leg.”

“What for?”

“To see if they can give you a new one.”

“I’m perfectly satisfied with the one I have.”

“I don’t mean an imitation leg. I mean a real leg. By surgery.”

Karvel stared at him. “Is that possible?”

“Perhaps. It isn’t often done here, because few citizens of Earth ever suffer such a loss. There’s nothing very unusual about it. In your case we don’t know if it’s possible, you being. . .well. . .sort of a different species, and of an uncommon stature. We’ll have to ask the doctors. Earth’s doctors are old-fashioned and naive, but what they’re willing to undertake they do very well. Wouldn’t you like a new leg?”

“Not knowing that such a thing was possible, I’ve never given it a thought. I wouldn’t want an operation that required a long convalescence.”

“You’ll have plenty of time. Headquarters won’t digest
that
report in a hurry.”

They walked back to the administration room, and Karvel refused—again—an invitation to the women’s quarters. “What I’d like to know,” he said, “is something about the government. Does your headquarters supervise a number of worlds, or what is the system?”

Sirgan laughed. “Our headquarters isn’t a government. It’s a trading organization. It’s located—but you wouldn’t know the name of the star. I’ll show you on a star chart if you’re interested. We hold the franchise for the Earth trade.”

He took his leave with a smile, and after he’d gone Karvel went slowly up the ramp to one of the observation bubbles. The Earth was still a beautiful light in the sky, though it was already waning.

“A slave world,” Karvel muttered. “I wonder how long it’s taken for humanity to sink so low.”

An Earth Shuttle dropped slowly across his field of vision, headed for the landing dome. The Overseer’s compact, errand-running spaceships looked like distorted models of the planes he’d seen on Earth, their elongated oval platforms having pressurized cabins attached. The strange craft should have fascinated him, but they did not. His mind was too fully occupied with the winged, headless hallucination from the past to give more than a passing thought to aircraft technology.

Had the Earth once nurtured a powerful civilization of such weird creatures? Some traces of it should have survived; but no doubt there were, even in the twentieth century, large areas of the Earth where such vestiges could have remained undiscovered. Under the Antarctic icecap, for example, or in inaccessible regions of jungle or mountains—or even under the sea.

Wherever it was, he had to go there. He had to reach the creatures before they started bombarding the twentieth century with U.O.’s.

Sirgan interrupted his meditation to announce with a grin, “Here are two old friends of yours.”

“Friends? Of mine?”

“They think harshly of you for running off to the moon and leaving them behind. They say their city ordered them to remain with you. They raised such a fuss that the Shuttle pilot brought them up. As long as they’re here, they might as well stay. Here they are.”

Marnox and Wilurzil stepped into the bubble and looked about curiously. Sirgan stood in the background, still grinning. “Now I see why our women didn’t interest you,” he said. And departed with a wave of his hand.