Assignment Moon Girl (22 page)

“First, to find your father.”

“You still insist he is in this place?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“A prisoner, like ourselves?”

“Yes.”

“Give me one of your grenades, then.”

They moved on down the tunnel toward the stairs Mahmoud had
described. Daylight shone ahead. Two soldiers clattered down the iron steps,
which rose in a spiral up through the mountain rock. They saluted Durell’s
colonel insignia and stared at Tanya with open curiosity. One looked as if he
were about to challenge them, but the other tugged at his arm and they trotted off
toward the barracks room.

“Rank hath its privileges,” Durell murmured. “Even if it’s
stolen.”

The daylight came from an irregular gash in the rock wall,
opening onto a cunningly concealed viewpoint like a balcony built into the
mountainside. Heat and light struck at them from the morning sun that blazed
over the desert, spread below them like the panorama of a map. Far down the
slope, under camouflage nets, was a transport park filled with trucks, jeeps,
half-tracks, even three medium tanks. Ramsur Sepah, in his role as General
Har-Buri, had planned well. With his troops disguised as regular Iranian Army
units, he would be in command of the capital's strongpoints before an alarm was
raised. There were even some
88’s
visible on wheeled
mounts down there. Durell lifted his head as he heard the thudding chop of a
helicopter. The machine flew high, a glint of metal and bubble canopy, crossing
the brazen sky. It did not hover or come down. He watched it until it vanished on
the other side of the mountain, and then he touched Tanya’s arm.

She did not move. “How can you fight an army, all by
yourself?”

“Perhaps we’re not as alone as I thought.”

She frowned. “It is not scientific, what you try to
do. It is against all logic. What can you hope to accomplish, against this
garrison?”

“Find your father, for one thing.”

“I think we are both going to die, and soon.”

“Yes, if we give up now. Somebody will find Mahmoud.
It’s only a matter of time, and not much of that.”

They went back into the mountain. The steps led them up to
another level that was not much changed from what it had been in olden times.
There was a huge, natural chamber, decorated with mosaics that glinted in
anachronistic splendor against a drably modern table and chairs near one wall.
Giant maps of Teheran, Isfahan, and other major cities had been posted on the
carvings in the rock. Only a few dim lights glowed here. Nobody was in sight.
But from somewhere came the jangling of a telephone, quickly answered. The
antiquities had been damaged. Some of the faded paintings and columns had been
chipped and battered away to fasten electric cables.

Tanya halted in the door. “Wait. I am not sure—my mind has
been confused for so long—but I remember this room.”

“From when?”

“I do not know. Perhaps when I was first brought here.
There is an apartment near, and I was treated well, that first day. A man
questioned me. Several, I think. They wanted to know about my moon
flight. I refused to tell them anything.” She arched her fine brows.
“After all, it is a matter of state security for my country.”

“They didn’t like what you told them?”

“I felt they did not believe me.”

Durell briefly described Ramsur Sepah. “Was he one of
the men who questioned you?”

“Yes. Yes, I think so.”

“And when you refused them the technical details?”

“They put me in the pit, for punishment. If I persisted in
behaving like an animal, he said, I would be treated as one. I was not afraid.
He considered me a very valuable property.” She gave her close-mouthed smile again,
dimpling her chin. “Even when I saw the tiger in the pit, I was not afraid. I
thought this—this Sepah?—would not allow me to come to harm. He simply wanted
me to talk about the moon flight, my training, and about—about my
father.”

“But you didn’t.”

She touched her forehead. “I was very confused.”

“But you’re not confused now?”

“I think not.”

“Can you remember where that apartment was, where they
first imprisoned you?”

“It is this way.”

She walked ahead with sudden assurance, but her face was
pale, as if some inner apprehension had taken command of her. From other rooms
nearby came more ringing telephones, the murmur of men’s voices. Durell caught
snatches of the phrases spoken into the phones.

“Company D at 1600 hours, course 280°—Lieutenant Ahwad to
report to Colonel Mezhabi with duty list—Checkpoint Baker no report—Checkpoint
Zed, no report—1500 rounds on the double to Major Harran . . .”

The girl walked faster. She turned left from the map room,
down a dim corridor, and up a flight of iron stairs that looked newly
installed. Durell guessed that some emergency had taken place in the rebel
command headquarters. He thought he heard the dim crackle of rifle
fire, but he couldn’t be sure. At the top of the stairway, the girl
paused and hit her lip.

“I am not sure now.”

“Where are we?”

“They took me to a very fine apartment, at
first. It must have been General Har-Buri’s personal quarters. Down that
way.”

There should have been sentries on duty here, Durell
thought. He heard booted feet running in a cross-corridor and drew the girl
back into a shadowed niche. A squad of men trotted across the intersecting corridor.
He smelled cigarette smoke and coffee, and heard the distant crash of a tray of
crockery being dropped. Somewhere a bell began to ring with an alarming, brazen
note.

“
Here.
This door,” Tanya said.

It was a wooden door, and it, too, looked freshly installed.
It was locked. The rock wall nearby had been newly tunneled, too, or widened
from the chambers of the old fortress made two thousand years ago. Durell tried
the knob carefully, then stepped back and hit it with controlled strength. It
gave way all at once, and he tumbled forward, with Tanya close behind him.

The girl began to scream.

They were back on the moon again.

Chapter Eighteen

IT WAS as if they had fallen through some strange doorway in
space, from one world into another. They were in the lunar dome. An eerie
effulgence came through the plastic windows of the bubble, reflecting on
the familiar computers and technical equipment. Durell sucked in a sharp
breath. The shock was too great, the transition too sudden. There was Earth,
sailing in pale, blue-green beauty, just above the black horizon of outer
space. The jagged lunar peaks and craters, the long familiar plain he had
studied so hard when he had been here with Professor Ouspanaya, the harness-chairs,
suits, helmets, banks of dials and counters—it was all here, untouched, just as
it had been at that moment when, seized by madness, he had broken through the
airlock and tumbled back—

To earth.

Tanya screamed again. She stood with her arms rigid at her
sides, her eyes wide and showing white all around the pale irises. Durell
jumped for the door and pulled it shut, and managed to drop a lock-bar across the
broken knob. It might gain them a few seconds against an assault. Then he spun
to Tanya’s paralyzed figure and clapped a hand over her mouth to shut off
another scream. Her face reflected pure agony of mind and soul. Her eyes
were blinded by the storms sweeping her mind. She struggled with him. Her body
was strong with her madness, and he had a hard time holding her. They reeled
across the floor of the lunar bubble, crashed into one of the harness chairs,
ricocheted oil the bank of computer dials. The control board collapsed with a
splintering of flimsy wood and card board. Tanya bit him and clawed at
the plastic, curved wall of the dome. Her fingernails ripped at it and it
came down in a billowing sheet of
Pliofilm
and
latticework, entangling them in its folds. They fell out onto what had looked
like the surface of the moon. The “horizon” was only twelve feet away.

“Tanya!”

He slapped her hard and she bit at his hand, her eyes
utterly wild, and he hit her again, not wanting to knock her out, but desperate
to shock her back into control of herself again.

“Tanya, look around you!”

“Let me go!”

“I will. I want to. But please—”

He pinned her to the dusty, pebbly floor outside the shattered
dome. She twisted under him, and he kept his hand over her mouth; her nostrils
flared and the wildness that showed in her eyes went farther beyond reason.

“Tanya, it was all a fake! Don’t you see? Don’t you understand?”

She spat at him. He did not know what to do with her. He
said quickly, “It‘s a cardboard moon, a plastic dome, a training device that
used hypnotic drugs and a few props to convince you that the program was real.
. . .”

He paused. A bell rang loudly somewhere.

“Tanya, they’ll come in after us soon.”

As she stared up at him then, the lunatic glare slowly faded
from her eyes. She began to shiver under him. And then, astonishingly, great
tears suddenly welled up and spilled down her cheeks. She went limp under him.

“Do you understand what I just said?”

“Yes . . . it was all false.”

“Didn’t you suspect it?”

“Lately. The second time, in the pit, before they brought
you, I did some thinking. I tried to apply—scientific principles to what
I could recall—of my experience. You can let me up now."

“Are you sure?”

“I am all right now. I apologize. It was not rational of
me.”

“You couldn’t help it. I was shocked, too.”

“But you were prepared for it?”

“More or less.”

“You suspected this—-this stage business, from the start?”

“I thought it had to be something like this.”

“Then—then I was never on the moon?”

“Never.”

“Nor you?”

“I was here, in this place, with your father.”

She frowned. “But I couldn’t have been.” She stood up slowly
and hugged herself, shivering, and stared at the wreckage caused by their brief
struggle. “I was at the Lunar Space Base, in the
Turkonian
Republic—”

“I know. This is just a hasty replica, thrown up for my
benefit, to put me through the same experience and destroy my ability to
cope with what I was learning. Also, to demonstrate the whole thing to
Har-Buri.”

Her voice hardened. “Then I was used as a laboratory animal?
A guinea pig? Heartlessly deceived, driven half mad? To what purpose?”

“To train you for a trip to the moon, originally.”

“But this-this stage set—would fool no one.”

“Not without the hypnotic syringes they pumped into both of
us.”

The alarm bell clamored more loudly now through the
labyrinth of the mountain fortress. Durell heard the muffled crunch and thud of
a mortar shell striking nearby. Dust trickled down from the ceiling where they stood,
and even the floor vibrated. Several pieces of lath and plastic slid from
the fake control board they had smashed.

Looking at it now, he saw how cleverly, if hastily, the
illusion had been created. The whole effect had been achieved in an area less
than a couple of hundred square feet. The cyclorama of the moonscape, as seen from
the “lunar dome," was an effective deception in perspective, helped with
hidden lights that caused sharp shadow and brilliance on the “set.” The dome itself,
except for the solid padded chairs, was flimsy and unreal as he stared at
it. Tanya walked across the chamber to the horizon wall and touched the blue-green
orb painted there to represent earth, which she had thought once was shimmering
at a quarter of a million miles away through space.

She turned back with cold anger in her eyes. “But why was I
so deceived?”

“I suppose it was necessary. Maybe it was a short cut to
train you for a lunar landing. Probably no one, not even your father, who
designed this, expected it to have the traumatic effect that it had. Maybe it
was the drugs they used on us. You had no idea that it was all a fake?”

“None at all. I was a dedicated worker in the program . . .”
Her voice started to rise in anger. She felt humiliated. “I think I can
remember more of it, now. I recall I—thought something had gone wrong in the dome.
I suppose it was to study my reaction to an alien environment. I—I’m afraid I
was the victim of simple panic.”

“Not so simple. I did the same, and broke out. But they were
ready for me, after their experience with you, and clobbered me and put me in
the pit, afterward.”

“Yes, it must have been so.” She paused. He could have
explained it in more detail, but he wanted her to work it out for herself.
Tanya walked back to the dome and kicked at its wreckage, and grimaced bitterly.
“I truly went out of my mind. I escaped from the base and wandered like a
madwoman, going anywhere. I can’t remember those details. I ran and hid and
lived in the fields, stealing food where I found it. I could not understand
anything. I suppose I wandered across the border that way. Perhaps strangers
picked me up, gave me lifts here and there. Somehow, I got to Teheran. And the
rest you know.”

“Yes.”

“Naturally, my government and the space-program managers did
not want to release the truth about me to the world press.”

“They should have. But security becomes a blindfold to
bureaucrats,” Durell said.

“Which made me valuable to others, like Ta-Po and General
Har-Buri, who saw me as a commodity to sell to Peking in exchange for aid in
this—this rebellion he plans.”

“It’s started already,” Durell said.

“Do you hear gunfire?”

He nodded. “The mountain is under attack.”

She said calmly, “And we are trapped here?”

“We’ll find a way out, with luck.”

“No,” Tanya murmured. “I think we are going to die in this
place. We’ll never get out now.”