Lord of Janissaries (4 page)

They didn’t weigh enough. Nowhere near enough, and this was steady. Rick looked around in surprise, a wild suspicion coming to his mind. Some of the troops were muttering. Corporal Gengrich thoughtfully took a cartridge from his pocket and dropped it, watched it fall slowly.

About one-sixth gravity, Rick thought. There was no hiding that, and no hiding what it meant.

Gengrich shouted it first. “God Almighty, we’re on the friggin’ Moon!”

3

The troopers had little time to react to Gengrich. The compartment door opened, and Corporal Mason came in. His face looked like grey ashes, and he held his right arm against his chest. The compartment door remained open to the entry chamber, but all the other doors were closed.

“Mason—”

“Where the hell you been?”

“What’s wrong, Art? What in hell did they do to you?”

The men were all shouting at once. Sergeant McCleve went over with his medical kit.

“At ease!” Rick shouted. Sergeant Elliot repeated the order more loudly. There were mutters, but the shouting stopped.

Rick joined Mason and McCleve. “What happened?”

“Jesus, Captain, we’re on the Moon,” Mason said. “The bastards brought us to the moon!”

“Yes,” Rick said.

“I saw it all,” Mason said. The troops crowded around to listen.

Rick nodded to himself. It was time the men found out what had happened. He thought he should have told them before.

“Those screen things,” Mason was saying. “It was like TV. We lifted off, straight up, it seemed like, and the world kept getting further and further away until I could see all of it, just like on TV during a space mission.”

“What happened to your arm?” McCleve asked. He slit Mason’s field-jacket sleeve and examined the wound. It looked like a neat round hole, thinner than a pencil, and it went through the jacket, the arm, and out the sleeve on the other side. There was no blood.

“They wouldn’t talk to me,” Mason said.

“Who?” “Who wouldn’t talk?” the troops demanded. Elliot glared at them, but he didn’t try to keep them quiet. He wanted to know too.

“Those critters,” Mason said. “The—Captain, you saw ’em. I don’t know what they are. Not men. Look something like men, but they’re not.”

Now there was a lot of excited babble. “Shut up,” Rick said. “Let Mason tell his story.”

“They wouldn’t talk to me. We kept getting further and further away from the Earth, until I could see it—all of it—up to where I could see daylight and clouds over the ocean, just like on TV from Skylab. And they wouldn’t talk. So I took out my pistol and pointed it at one—the one in the grey suit—and told him if he didn’t tell me where we were going, I’d shoot him.”

“Stupid,” Lieutenant Parsons muttered.

“Yes, sir, it was stupid,” Mason said. “The critter didn’t do anything. Just waved his hand, kind of, and some kind of beam, like a laser beam, came out of the wall. Right out of the wall. I never saw any opening. Just this green light and it burned a hole right through. I dropped the gun and the critter came around and picked it up, and he said I should sit there and I should tell him if I needed medical attention—he talked that way, like a professor. Then he gave me a pill. I thought about it and then I took it, and after that it stopped hurting. And then we came on straight to the Moon. I saw us land. We’re on the back side, Captain. The back side of the Moon. There’s a big cave, and two other ships like this one.”

When Mason stopped talking, the men began again. “You didn’t tell us it was a goddamn flying saucer!” Gengrich shouted. His voice was hostile and accusing. “You said it was a CIA ship!”

“They were in a hurry,” Rick said. “Would you rather be back on the hill waiting for the Cubans? Would any of you?”

They didn’t know what to make of that. Nobody spoke of going back.

“We can always die,” Rick said. “At least we can find out what these—people—want with us.”

“Good advice.” The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. “You will know very soon. The exit port will open and you will please carry all your equipment and weapons out of the ship. You will be told what to do after that. Please be careful. You are, as you have been told, on your planet’s Moon. The air pressure will be lower than you are accustomed to, but there is more than enough air and oxygen for your species if you do nothing violent. Now please gather your equipment.”

Rick felt totally drained of emotion. “Let’s get with it,” he said.

Elliot stood a moment in indecision, then evidently made up his mind. “Get that gear together. Move!” he shouted.

There was a cave beyond the door. Heavy material that looked like thick rubber sealed the door to the cave. The seal, which reminded Rick of the materials wet suits are made of, stretched for twenty meters or so into the cave. Beyond that the tunnel walls were made of rock, but shiny, as if it had been varnished. Rick felt it; the stuff was very hard, and he thought it had been sprayed on—probably to keep the air from leaking out through the rock walls.

When they had unloaded the ship, the entryway door closed, and they had no choice but to go down the tunnel. It went inward and down. They had no difficulty with equipment; everything weighed only a sixth of what it would on Earth, and one man could carry ten mortar bombs without great effort.

The tunnel was lighted, not with glowing walls as the ship had been, but with ordinary fluorescent lights. Rick examined one of the fixtures; it was stamped “Westinghouse.” Common house wire ran from light to light.

As they went deeper into the cave, doors closed behind them. They seemed to be made from the same wet-suit material as the passage from the ship to the cave, and they appeared from the walls in a circle that closed together so tightly that it was difficult to see they weren’t solid.

They reached the bottom of the ramp. Rick estimated that they had come nearly a kilometer. At the ramp’s end was a big cavern, as large as a basketball gymnasium, and furniture. Rick saw tables, chairs, bookcases with books and magazines. Beds and army cots were clustered at one end of the area. A table held a coffee urn and bags of styrofoam cups, and a can of Yuban coffee stood next to the urn. On another table he saw loaves of bread of various American brands; jars of Jiffy peanut butter; cans of Campbell’s soup. Paper plates and cheap plastic forks. Canned milk. Bricks of cheese; Vienna sausage; tins of sardines. There were no signs of fresh foods, meats or vegetables, but Rick was certain they wouldn’t starve.

At the far end of the cavern was a TV set. It looked strange. Rick saw no maker’s marks, unless some curious squiggles on a plate at the bottom meant something. It had no controls at all. A man’s face looked out at them, and from the way his eyes and head moved, Rick thought the man was watching him.

Man. Rick stood staring at the TV. The face on the screen was human. He was certain of it.

“You are in charge?” The figure on the screen spoke without warning. The phrase wasn’t precisely a question, but it did not sound positive either. The voice held a slight accent, but Rick was certain he had never heard anything like it before.

“As much as anyone is,” Rick said.

“Then you are Captain Galloway. I must have information. First, is it true that you voluntarily boarded the ship that brought you here? There was no coercion from the
Shalnuksis
?”

“Shalnuksis?”

“The beings who brought you here. Were you forced to board their ship?”

“Not by them. There were some Cubans who didn’t leave us many choices—”

“That is my second question.” The man’s expression did not change at all. Rick got closer to the set and examined the image carefully.

He saw a man who appeared to be in his forties. He wore a rust-colored upper garment that resembled a tunic, no buttons, a V-neck lined with blue and studded with decorations: a stylized comet and sunburst. The man’s hair was short, and his complexion was darker than Rick’s; about the same hue as an American Indian, but not quite so dark.

“Is it true that you would now be dead if the
Shalnuksi
ship had not taken you aboard?” the man asked.

“It’s likely,” Rick answered.

“One of your men was injured by the
Shalnuksis
. They have said they were merely defending themselves and did the least damage possible to the man. Is this true?”

“Yes—”

“Thank you. We regret that we do not have better accommodations. You are welcome to whatever you find there. You may eat now. We will have more to talk of later.”

“Hey—damn it, what’s going on?” Rick demanded. He was talking to a blank screen.

* * *

They examined their prison. There was a hot plate and an electrical outlet on a long cord. The wire ran into the wall, and the hole it came out of was sealed with the wet-suit material. The hot plate had been made by General Electric. The coffeepot was Japanese, with Japanese labels. Everything in the compartment had come from Earth. Most had come from the United States, but there were articles from many other places. Some of the gear was new, much still in packing cases. Other equipment and stores had been used. There were radios and television sets, but they produced nothing beyond a few random hisses and howls.

After half an hour, they settled in to cook dinner. There was plenty to eat; soup and canned bacon and ham, canned vegetables, and pudding for dessert. André Parsons found a water tap—Kohler of Kohler—near the coffee urn. There was a drain beneath it. Other troops found cases of warm beer and several jugs of wine, enough so that everyone had a beer and a full cup of California red. There was plenty of coffee.

When they had eaten, they all felt better. The troops prowled about restlessly, but eventually began making themselves comfortable, using what was in their packs and whatever else they could find to bed down. Elliot pulled two of the single beds off to one side for Parsons and Rick Galloway. No one had eaten or slept for more than twenty-four hours, and soon most of the troops were sprawled onto beds and cots, or onto air mattresses on the floor.

The floor, Rick found, was uneven at the edges near the walls, but away from the walls it was artificially smooth and flat. It felt warm to the touch.

Rick sat with Parsons at a table near the TV set. They ate in silence. Finally Parsons said, “I see why you did not explain earlier.”

“Yeah. Not that I could have,” Rick said.

Parsons shrugged. “Five hours ago, I was prepared to be killed on that hilltop. Now I have eaten, I have a cup of wine and coffee to follow, and it is warm. No one is shooting me, and there is a comfortable bed. We have been lucky.”

“Maybe.”

“Have you thought of the implications of your television conversation?” André asked. “A human. A human who asks interesting questions. Are we volunteers? How was Corporal Mason injured? Would we be alive if we had not boarded the alien ship? All asked by a human in a voice of authority, as if he had every right to the answers.”

Rick nodded. “I thought of that. It means somebody cares what happens to us. Maybe not a lot, but somebody cares. I keep hoping that’s a good sign.”

“It cannot be a bad one,” André said.

“Dammit, you’re calm enough—”

Parsons laughed. “I would have said the same of you. Rick, I am terrified, but it would do no good to let the men see that. Obviously you must feel the same way.”

“Yeah. But I sure wish they’d let us know what they want with us.”

“Perhaps nothing,” Parsons said. He shrugged again in his expansive French manner. “Perhaps they rescued us for humanitarian reasons. Are we not worth it?” His smile was broad.

* * *

“Captain! Cap’n, that TV’s going again. They want you.”

Rick struggled to wakefulness. His watch showed that he had slept five hours. It seemed longer, and he felt far better rested than he would have expected from five hours’ sleep.

A dozen men were crowded around the TV. They were trying to talk to the man—as near as Rick could tell, it was the same one who had spoken to him before—but they had no success. It was only when Rick stood in front of the set that the man responded.

“It is time to discuss your situation,” the screen figure said. “You will not require weapons. Leave them all, and any other large metal objects, and enter the doorway which will open in the wall behind this screen.”