Part Three: Beneath the Surface

Among the many discoveries made on the fourth of April, 1911, was that the soil of the Moon is an oily, gluey sludge, freely flowing along surfaces but deeply, stubbornly resistant to motion through itself. I may be among the few still living who first made that discovery, as I ascended the ladder out of the crater which our impact with the Lunar surface had dug.

The stone beneath our capsule was porous and crunched slightly under our boots as we alighted from within. As we had rehearsed, the first men out detached folding ladders from the curving surface of our capsule. We had expected three men to be necessary to swing the ladder to the crater’s rim, but although we were aware that the gravity on the Moon was far weaker than our own, we had been unable to practice with ladders as truly lightweight as ours now were. In the event, by the time I sprang the latches holding my assigned ladder in place, two others had already been thrown into position, each by the first man to grasp hold of it.

Six ladders studded the circumference of our tiny capsule. Two, I saw, had bent or been otherwise damaged in the descent, and could not be freed from their clamps. We had prepared for that, and rehearsed every combination of circumstances. The men assigned to the damaged ladders moved confidently to their alternative points of ascent.

I waited for assistance, unlike my counterparts, and together the three of us made short work of erecting the ladder. I was the first to rise over the crater edge; the effort needed to heave my space-suited body and its massive knapsack of equipment upward was shockingly meager. I nearly flew off the final rung, grasping it only at the last extremity so that I pivoted around my gloved hand, swinging toward the ground in an eerie, dreamlike slowness.

My arms and legs were not flailing in any way slowly, however. We had been warned that the Lunar soil would be as hot as a stove when we landed. Having a day equal to its year, that is, 28 days in duration, a given spot on the Moon was bathed in sunlight for 14 days at a time, followed by the equivalent period of night. Even in Earthly summer, the additional two or three hours of daylight raises the temperature quite significantly. One can imagine the effect of another five hundred hours on the hapless surface.

Our boot-soles were heavily insulated against contact with the frying-hot soil; we had tested them by walking crabwise, like ice-skaters, across red-hot slabs of steel fresh from the furnaces of Pittsburgh. But our entire space-suits could not be so thickened, not and allow us any freedom of movement; so we were cautioned to walk like fat men on a slippery sidewalk, in deliberate slow motion, so as not to fall over. For if we did, we would have to catch ourselves with our gloves, or fall full on our faces, sides or backs, all of which were unequal to the temperature they would suddenly encounter.

(Had we landed during the night, the case would be worse, for the soil would be colder than any place in Siberia. It was six of one, half a dozen of the other, with the added disadvantage that we would not be able to see each other, or the enemy.)

Thus it was by good fortune that I landed generally feet-downward. If the crater had been a foot deeper, I would have landed full on my back, which among other things held the mechanical chiller which kept my enclosure temperate, and also, my air-supply.

My feet broke the pale-amber crust and sank straight down into a bottomless volume of sticky, slippery dust, as dense and tenacious as oatmeal. Fortunately, I was not falling with my accustomed celerity, or I would have been buried in a trice. As it was, the rebounding viscous material took several distinct, agonizingly anxious seconds to close over my helmeted head.

"I can't breathe!" was my first thought. Panic shot through my spine.

But of course, my helmet was intact, still filled with oxygenated air. I could, in fact, breathe.

"I can't see!"

That much was true. The slippery dust had completely enclosed my helmet; its tempered-glass viewing plate showed solid black. Upon my wrist was a control to light my Edison lamp, mounted miner-wise upon my head. I manipulated the control back and forth; heat on my scalp testified that something was being activated, but no illumination did it shed.

My boots touched bedrock. Apparently I had been sinking for several seconds (at least; it seemed much longer, in the event) at an unknown rate. How far down was I? I wondered.

Not that it mattered, I thought. My oxygen supply was good for six hours, less the time it had taken to debus the capsule and fall into the dust. (My watch was, presumably, ticking away dutifully in my vest pocket, invisible even were I to hold it to my face, as the helmet’s glass and the watchglass curved in opposite directions.) So I had time to extricate myself, free of the drowner’s pitiless clock imposed by the volume of his lungs.

I jumped. The dust offered slighter resistance than water would have done, but presently I felt rock beneath my boots again. I tried harder, and even considered removing the mass of equipment that our planners, intoxicated by the weight-lessening potential of the Moon’s gravitation, had loaded upon all of us. But although I had no way of knowing how far I was jumping, there was no hint at all that I was nearing the surface. Dumping my impedimentia and leaping for freedom would remain an option, but I need not exhaust myself before pursuing other possibilities.

My boots were becoming cold.

I have said that fully half the weight on my back was an electro-chemical chiller, based on a British design. It was meant to counteract the blazing heat of the unfiltered Sun, and more so the torrid surface of rock baked for a week unbroken by night. But here, below the opacity of the dust, the Sun never intruded. The stone I stood upon might not have been warmed by daylight for thousands – perhaps millions – of years.

The cold that gripped my heart was only partially emotional, then.

The Sun heats by radiation, but heat transfers ever so much quicker by conduction, when a hot body is in direct contact with a colder one. The exact rate at which temperature equalizes, the hot becoming colder and the cold hotter, is a complex function of both bodies’ density, insulating properties, and chemical composition, as well as their sheer mass. In this case, my three hundred-odd pounds of flesh and machinery, kept through mechanical labor at seventy-two degrees, was in contest with the rocky mass of the Moon itself, incalculable millions of tons of dense, probably metal-rich rock, simmering at a temperature far, far below that of Polar ice.

I was heating the Moon. But the Moon was killing me.

I flexed my toes and ankles, denying the stiffness creeping upon them. I waved my arms; the dust did not impede them overmuch. I could walk, then, with some effort.

But where?

It seemed to me that the dust was, perhaps because of its exceptionally tiny particles, extremely slippery. Indeed, that first step turned into a glide, but fortunately the surface upon which I stood was uneven in the extreme. My foot fetched up on an outcrop and ceased its motion before I was precipitated onto my back.

My heart came close to its normal rate after a moment and I continued my line of reasoning. If the dust was indeed slippery, in some ways like a liquid, then it would resist being piled into hills. A volume of dust would, even under the gentle urging of the Moon’s weight, settle into a level surface.

But the rock underneath was under no such constraint. Indeed, I had proof under my boot (to the degree I could still feel it, for the biting cold had faded to an ominous numbness) that the surface was indeed subject to rises and falls. If I followed the rock uphill, it might break the surface of the dust at some point, or at least shallow enough that I could see where I needed to go.

I started out, feeling the way with a toe. My back foot slipped once, dumping me on my knee, but I did not tear my space-suit and was able to wrestle my load upright once more. The motion seemed to hold my gathering numbness at bay, although its replacement was tingling pain – far better than what awaited me in the dark, should my oxygen run out before I found escape!

Presently I concluded, by comparing front and back feet and their angles, that I was heading downhill rather than the reverse. I carefully, like the blind man I was, reversed myself and returned to my place of origin, or near enough. I knew that nearby was the crater our capsule had dug when it struck the Lunar surface; its walls definitely reached above the dust, and if I could locate it, I would know which way safety lay.

The crater was sharply sloped within, but without, it retained the lay of the land before we had arrived. I did not detect the gradual rise until the dust parted before my faceplate.

I was within a few paces of the crater’s edge. On the side facing me, it was cracked gravel and crumbly, pumice-like spongestone, with dust in every crevice. It was difficult to climb.

A helmeted head arose on the lip, and a jointed rope descended. Hidden hands hauled me to the edge, and I looked out at the Moon, squinting against the full daylight.

Where I had emerged, the dust was dark gray, almost black. The Sun had not baked the dust beneath the surface to the whiteness of the top. A surprising distance away was the larger dark spot I had made falling into the surface. Ridges of black and gray marked my laborious passage from that spot to this; evidently I had disturbed the dust enough that some of the surface fell and was mixed with the underlayers.

I also saw several other dark spots, widely scattered, around the ladders leading out of our crater. I divined at once that these were other soldiers, who like myself had leapt out from the crater wall and sunk over their heads.

No one man can carry all the equipment necessary to fire an artillery gun, even on the Moon. My particular load was surveying gear and ammunition (everyone had some ammunition to carry, and it was still by no means all we would have liked), not poles or lines. But others of our number, still within the crater, had these items. With poles to probe the dust and lines to tie about our own space-suits, rescuing our fellows before they suffocated seemed well within our power.

I looked about for anyone bearing the chevrons of rank. One fellow seemed to have the single bent stripe of a first-class private, but upon closer inspection I descried bits of red clinging to his sleeve above it, where the additional chevrons of a higher rank should have appeared. I brushed at my own chevron (I was a first-class private myself) with a gloved forefinger, and saw the red paint, so thickly applied back home, crumble like sand. The pigment, long dried though it was, had boiled in the vacuum like so much coffee-water.

The sergeant, or corporal, or whatever he was, gestured to us in the deaf-and-dumb sign language we all knew. I replied that several of our men were still stranded in the dust, but that we could easily retrieve them. He detailed me and another man to take some supplies and do so, while the majority of our half-battery set to unpacking and assembling our Lunar-specialized screw-guns.

I and the other fellow, about whom I knew nothing whatever save that his frame was tall and wide-shouldered, took up our poles and coils of line and ascended a ladder again. He had several stakes and a rock hammer, which would be helpful in anchoring our rescue-line, while I had had the presence of mind to retrieve a pneumatic line-thrower, intended for difficult mountaineering but superbly adapted to the present purpose. We decided (strictly speaking I should have ordered and he obeyed, my rank being higher, but the absence of the usual shouting of sergeants on the airless Moon had wonderfully cured our military habits in that regard) that he would probe with a pole, or several poles fastened together, until he encountered a body. He would maintain the contact, in case the man should move from his detected spot, while I fired the line-thrower at the spot, then used the line to convey myself hand-over-hand to our comrade’s position. If the trapped man could tie the rope around himself, so much the simpler, but we did not reckon on all of our fellows having an instant command of the situation. I did not know if my companion had been lost in the dust as I had, but given my experience I could well imagine that they might not be in the most collected frame of mind.

It was there on the crater’s rim, as we sorted out our things, that we beheld the sputtering lights descending from the sky. Each flare of brilliance made the falling star fall a bit slower; clearly, the newcomers were using combustion to slow their rate of descent. Equally clearly, no Earthly navy possessed the technical knowledge to do so to the degree the incomers demonstrated.

For the second time, the Martians were coming to invade a world held by men. They had very nearly beaten us to its surface, but we were here now, and however recent our arrival on the Lunar globe, here we meant to stay.

Part Two: From the Earth to the Moon

A facility with mathematics had placed me in the artillery during the Invasion, although I never fired a shot at a Martian before they collapsed. Like so much of the rest of the world, the United States were unprepared for war in a material sense, though I am proud to say we overcame our moral deficiencies in short order. The Martians had chosen points along the coast for their initial landings, perhaps in the mistaken belief that, as on their own waterless world, the great prairies were the heart of our civilization and the coastal areas mere wilderness. Thus they landed among the great industrial cities of the Northeast, doing great damage, but through some fortunate chance they chose spots between the great ports of the South.

This allowed our forces time to concentrate. The Martians were slow to recognize the tremendous organizing power of our railways, which allowed entire states to gather their militia at a single spot in a few days’ time. Telegraph and telephone wires ran along every track, even in the desolate West. The lines along which the conquering Union had laid waste the Confederacy had become rail lines, at first to support the blue-coated armies and then to serve the cities that rose in their train.

So it was that no Martian could move more than fifty miles without coming across a railroad line, along which, if we chose, the United States could gather thousands of troops. Not that we, in the first instance, had thousands of troops to move. But as in that great spasm of violence at midcentury, American manhood rapidly put aside the civilian and adopted the soldier, even if for the duration of the conflict most of them wore no uniform save dust.

Our mobility was the downfall of the Regular Army, for it was the first to engage the Martians and, therefore, to perish. But enough escaped those early-summer debacles to command and organize the vast host of citizen-soldiers, armed with explosives manufactured in a thousand pharmacies and photography-shops across the Mississippi valley.

Eventually, the sinews of war began to arrive from hastily-converted or newly-built factories in remote places beyond the Martians’ reach. For though the entirety of our world lay vulnerable to their descent from the sky, once here they could not move about on our surface more quickly than our trains, although their more versatile vehicles were not limited to predetermined tracks. Nor could they easily transport re-enforcements from distant Mars, and when they did do so, their landing points were often wildly at variance with the needs of the developing battle.

Our Major, a former Confederate, opined that as an artilleryman he was unsurprised by the odd Martian re-enforcement decisions. He believed that it was evident from their dispositions that the invaders were unable to communicate with their fellows upon Mars; that the voyage across the space between us was not called upon by the Martians among us, but made according to previously-drawn-up plans, which neither the Martians on Earth nor on Mars were at liberty to vary, because of the lack of communication between themselves. The Martians, he said, no doubt had carefully planned their campaign in North America to the last detail, deciding that so-and-so-many days after landing they would need three more war machines in Iowa, and a half-dozen along the Alleghany River. But they were wrong in their estimation of our powers of resistance, and perhaps even in their own war-making potential; for it might have been many, many years since they had fought, not a map incapable of reasoning, but a living enemy whose stratagems  would constantly come as a fresh surprise to its foe.

By the time, then, that our battery was equipped with splendid new six-inch rifled cannon, the Invasion was over. The Martians, as everyone knows, slipped into a torpor which deepened rapidly into death, overcome by the micro-organisms responsible for the (apparently uniquely) Earthly phenomena of decay and disease. We fired some shells for practice, there being unending trainloads of them available, and became proficient with our arms; but no enemy did we engage, there being none remaining.

The Artillery, for reasons I have described above, became the dominant arm of the United States Army, merging in an unprecedented way with our counterparts in the Naval Bureau of Ordnance. For it was cannon, or the lineal descendants of cannon, which we used to bombard and planned to use to invade the Red Planet. Great guns launched loads of timber and steel into orbit, shot food and water to feed the laborers in our aerial siege-works, lofted arms and ammunition to provision the great invasion. We, as the Martians before us, would be unable to adapt our assault to the tides of the moment; as no fewer than fifty million miles would ever separate us from Mars (and at maximum, nearly five times as many), our invasion must be launched days or weeks before the first foot bit into red soil. If we faltered in one spot, our generals could not call for more troops from distant Earth, nor, even if they could, would the rescuers arrive before weeks had passed, during which the issue would most probably have been decided.

True, the French had proposed firing some capsules, not directly at the surface of Mars, but into an orbit around it, as a sort of floating reserve; and preparations were being made to devise projectiles capable of descending where they would. Indeed, all our invasion projectiles (it seems false to call them “vessels” as they were as helpless to affect their trajectory as a falling stone, and for the same reasons) could have been made with this capability. In that case, we could have filled the Martian sky with our soldiers, dropping them into places were our foe was weakest.

But such a projectile would of necessity be more complicated than a simple one-way ballistic conveyance. Being more complicated, it would demand more effort and labor to construct it. And the supply of effort and labor, though very large despite the damage done by the invaders, was not unlimited.

For the same effort it required to assemble one self-steering capsule, nine or ten of the simpler model could be constructed. This, most nations chose to do. For because our invasion of Mars would have to be planned in advance, with no allowance for the mischances of war, our planners concluded there were only two ways to assure its success: one mathematical, the other moral.

If we could not conclude where the invading Earthmen would do well, and where they would falter, we would have to ensure that no matter what terrible reversals we suffered, there would be ample troops on hand to overcome them. Therefore, we would rely on sheer numbers, sending as many of our soldiers aloft as we could possibly manage. It would mean postponing our counter-stroke some years while the launchers and capsules were gathered, but our blow would be all the stronger for having been delayed.

Even so, we could not hope to convey even one per cent of our strength under arms across the gulf of space. Therefore, we would choose our best, through tests, challenges, competitions and mock combats, so that the quality of the force which went out from Earth would be as high as our unstinting efforts could make it. With some years to learn the craft of war, we would strive to make that comparative sliver of humanity’s millions which would face the enemy, equal to this most unprecedented of challenges.

It is only with the greatest humility, and a suspicion that somewhere in the vast administrative machinery the Army had blundered, that I admit I was chosen as one of this corps d’elite which would avenge the Earth.

Part One: Upward

In the final years of the Nineteenth Century, the pitiless intellects of Mars were moved by desperation to attack our own warm world in the hopes of adding it to their domain. For the inhabitants of the Earth, they had few firm intentions; we would supply their conquest in its early stages, then pass from the scene. Their eyes were on our water, and the heat of our mutual Sun.

The story of how the invaders came to grief is well known. The equatorial regions were too hot, their plant and microbial life too variegated, for the Martian physiognomy to cope with. Cooler regions in Europe and East Asia were held by great numbers of organized humans, who fought with relatively primitive weapons against plasma bloom and corrosive vapor. Only the vast empty lands rimming the Arctic Circle, in Siberia and Canada, offered a foothold to the invaders, and those only a temporary respite as the aroused fury of the Americans, Europeans and, to everyone’s surprise, Japanese mounted colossal armies to reduce the Martian strongholds with the furious implacability of advancing ice.

From equipment, the partial diagrams used by the Martians’ mechanical servants, and the instructions they issued their human captives, we determined the means by which they had come here. We could not duplicate it in reverse, to visit a hundredfold on their homes what they had done to ours. For the gravitation in effect on Mars’ surface is barely more than a third of what we daily endure; and by the cold equations of ballistics, a voyage in the other direction must necessarily begin with an acceleration not merely three times as great, but nine, being the square of three. No human frame, however cushioned, could survive such a shock as that.

So we built, and studied, and explored alternatives. Our population we estimated at tens of thousands that of ancient, withering Mars, albeit the mechanical energy they could bring to their tasks was at least our equal. All Earthmen united in the common goal; so long as Mars was free to strike us, they might do so at any moment, until the sword was struck from their hand by main force.

So we schemed, and probed the secrets of nature, and armed for their return, and our eventual own. And as by the process of criticizing every stratagem, airing and debating every doubt, we winnowed out the best of all alternative courses, and slowly and surely drew our plans against them.

As with any artillery, the entire impetus of the vessel carrying astronauts across the deeps had to be transmitted in the very first moment of the voyage. Our enemies had used some form of flameless propulsion to hurl themselves from their planet’s edge. We were restricted to the fuels and explosives which chemistry allowed. A projectile sturdy enough to survive the shock of launching could, it appeared, just be devised given the utmost refinement in metallurgy and assembly; but it could not carry any one or anything, being of its required nature completely solid.

Although the projectile thus fired would pass between our worlds for several months at a sedate speed (so-called only by comparison with the immense distances involved), as it neared the target world, Mars’ own gravitation would go to work, speeding the projectile faster and faster until, at its eventual impact, its velocity would be equal to that of those minuscule stones which form the shooting stars of which astronomers are fond. But shooting stars become visible as friction with our Earth’s air heats and boils them; Mars has barely any of that same armour against missiles from above. The collision between our projectile and the Martian surface would resemble the detonation of a trainload of high explosive, all concentrated in one place. Some savants opined it would be closer to a shipload than a trainload.

Compared to the area of a world, such destruction would be nugatory indeed. Which is why every telescope was trained on Mars, for every nighttime instant she was visible above the horizon. And by the time the flashes of light against the rugose plains announced our enemy’s intention to try again, those selfsame flashes, measured and cross-checked, told us where to aim the greatly-multiplying siege engines across the equatorial territories, and so the rain of retaliation from the Earth commenced.

Various means of eluding the cold equations of ballistics were proposed, and some were tested, with dreadful results in a few cases. What the British Empire deemed too risky, the French, or the Americans, might try, and what even those venturesome republics thought too far from the pale of reason, the Russian Czar or the German Kaiser might well dare. The Empire of Japan agreed to build and develop what Europe had devised, as did Italy, Austro-Hungary, and other minor scientific states. For it was science, not sheer numbers, military might, wealth in specie or credit, nor even the high level of civilization a nation possessed, which made them useful to the great crusade.

It was the Austro-Hungarians, with their tradition of small, sidewise steps toward great goals, who hit upon the only practical way to convey our avengers across the gap. The bulk of the shock on our voyagers would be incurred in hurling them loose from the surface of our planet, into the upper atmosphere. From there, they would assume an orbit like that of our Moon, eternally falling yet remaining aloft. And from that apparently self-contradictory condition, it remained only to impart a velocity sufficient to traverse the gap between worlds in a short enough time that provisions might hold out, yet not so swift that their impact at the far end should render all aboard unable to fulfill their tasks.

What these tasks were to be, come the day, had yet to be decided. But there was ample time for lively debate, while in British India, French Africa, South America and the German Pacific, the mortars to hurl our astronauts into orbit were constructed, and the anchorage in the sky from which the invasion fleets were to sally was nightly taking shape above our heads, visible to the merest glass or set of hand-held lenses.

Nor was there but one synthetic star in the heavens which we and the Martians contested. For no agreement was reached over the proper design of the anchorage, with seven separate efforts mounted in parallel by various nations. That of France was quickly abandoned by her fickle administration, which had an even better idea at an average of every six months. One effort begun by the United States was let languish, then sold to the British Empire, as the Americans pursued another idea with redoubled vigor. 

This was to base construction of the invasion fleet, not in orbit above the Earth, but upon the Moon, whose feeble gravitation would scarcely impede the long journey's start but whose ready supply of minerals might save much labour and effort. For every pound which went into the invasion vessels' construction must needs be lifted from the Earth, at great cost in propellant, but also of time, for only a finite number of such launches could be cast aloft each day. On the Moon, so the argument ran, metal and stone were free for the taking, and if there be ice under the lunar surface, water and air would be much easier to extract than to haul labouriously aloft.

On the mathematical surface, the Lunar initiative had everything to recommend it. Leave alone that no reliable method for smelting metal from ore in the absence of an atmosphere had yet been devised; we would devise one here, under the surface of our lakes and oceans. Set aside the imponderables of working with heavy machinery while garbed in an air-tight garment; we would adapt the clothing of deep-sea divers, and test them in chambers emptied of air for the purpose in our many universities. And let alone all clamour over the prodigious amount of heat required, for fuel, to burn, must have air, and plentiful air at that. These problems had existed in the internal-combustion engine, which was on its way to being perfected, and would yield to painstaking measurement, careful computation, and hard-headed practicality.

In short, the very characteristics in which the Martians excelled all mankind.

We should not have been surprised, then, when the thinking of the great brains of Mars paralleled our own. When their second invasion failed more swiftly than the first, they reckoned the great disparity of their means to ours, and resolved to redress the balance by removing their base of operations much closer to their target. They, too, would extract their essential minerals from the soil of a dead world, but not from their own, but one even further along the path to senescence than the red mausoleum from which they proposed to flee. They, too, would husband their resources on a nearby astronomical island, before rushing the final gap with at least locally overwhelming force. And they, too, would strain every effort, as before they had only imagined themselves to have done, to secure victory over the only portion of the celestial universe on which life as we both defined it could comfortably endure.

They, too, would require the Moon for their purpose. Who controlled the Moon, would control the Earth.