William Tenn: Project Hush

They both nodded. As far as they were concerned, the command decision had been made. But I was sitting under two inches of sweat.

“One question,” Tom said. “Why did you pick Monroe for the scout?”

“I was afraid you’d ask that,” I told him. “We’re three extremely unathletic Ph.D’s who have been in the Army since we finished our schooling. There isn’t too much choice. But I remembered that Monroe is half Indian—Arapahoe, isn’t it, Monroe?—and I’m hoping blood will tell.”

“Only trouble, Colonel,” Monroe said slowly as he rose, “is that I’m one-fourth Indian and even that… Didn’t I ever tell you that my great-grandfather was the only Arapahoe scout who was with Custer at the Little Big Horn? He’d been positive Sitting Bull was miles away. However, I’ll do my best. And if I heroically don’t come back, would you please persuade the Security Officer of our section to clear my name for use in the history books? Under the circumstances, I think it’s the least he could do.”

I promised to do my best, of course.

After he took off, I sat in the dome over the telephone connection to Tom and hated myself for picking Monroe to do the job. But I’d have hated myself just as much for picking Tom. And if anything happened and I had to tell Tom to blast off, I’d probably be sitting here in the dome all by myself after that, waiting …

“Broz negglel” came over the radio in Monroe’s resonant voice. He had landed the single-seater.

I didn’t dare use the telephone to chat with Tom in the ship, for fear I might miss an important word or phrase from our scout. So I sat and sat and strained my ears. After a while, I heard “Mishgashul” which told me that Monroe was in the neighborhood of the other dome and was creeping toward it under cover of whatever boulders were around.

And then, abruptly, I heard Monroe yell my name and there was a terrific clattering in my headphones. Radio interference! He’d been caught, and whoever had caught him had simultaneously jammed his suit transmitter with a larger transmitter from the alien dome.

Then there was silence.

After a while, I told Tom what had happened. He just said, “Poor Monroe.” I had a good idea of what his expression was like.

“Look, Tom,” I said, “if you take off now, you still won’t have anything important to tell. After capturing Monroe, whatever’s in that other dome will come looking for us, I think. I’ll let them get close enough for us to learn something of their appearance—at least if they’re human or non-human. Any bit of information about them is important. I’ll shout it up to you and you’ll still be able to take off in plenty of time. All right?”

“You’re the boss, Colonel,” he said in a mournful voice. “Lots of luck.”

And then there was nothing to do but wait. There was no oxygen system in the dome yet, so I had to squeeze up a sandwich from the food compartment in my suit. I sat there, thinking about the expedition. Nine years, and all that careful secrecy, all that expenditure of money and mind-cracking research—and it had come to this. Waiting to be wiped out, in a blast from some unimaginable weapon. I understood Monroe’s last request. We often felt we were so secret that our immediate superiors didn’t even want us to know what we were working on. Scientists are people—they wish for recognition, too. I was hoping the whole expedition would be written up in the history books, but it looked unpromising.

Two hours later, the scout ship landed near the dome. The lock opened and, from where I stood in the open door of our dome, I saw Monroe come out and walk toward me.

I alerted Tom and told him to listen carefully. “It may be a trick—he might be drugged…”

He didn’t act drugged, though—not exactly. He pushed his way past me and sat down on a box to one side of the dome. He put his booted feet up on another, smaller box. “How are you, Ben?” he asked. “How’s every little thing?” I grunted. “Well?” I know my voice skittered a bit.

He pretended puzzlement. “Well what? Oh, I see what you mean. The other dome—you want to know who’s in it. You have a right to be curious, Ben. Certainly. The leader of a top-secret expedition like this—Project Hush they call us, huh, Ben—finds another dome on the Moon. He thinks he’s been the first to land on it, so naturally he wants to—”

“Major Monroe Gridley!” I rapped out. “You will come to attention and deliver your report. Now!” Honestly, I felt my neck swelling up inside my helmet.

Monroe just leaned back against the side of the dome. “That’s the Army way of doing things,” he commented admiringly. “Like the recruits say, there’s a right way, a wrong way and an Army way. Only there are other ways, too.” He chuckled. “Lots of other ways.”

“He’s off,” I heard Tom whisper over the telephone. “Ben, Monroe has gone and blown his stack.”

“They aren’t extraterrestrials in the other dome, Ben,” Monroe volunteered in a sudden burst of sanity. “No, they’re human, all right, and from Earth. Guess where.”

“I’ll kill you,” I warned him. “I swear I’ll kill you, Monroe. Where are they from—Russia, China, Argentina?”

He grimaced. “What’s so secret about those places? Go on!—guess again.”

I stared at him long and hard. “The only place else—”

“Sure,” he said. “You got it, Colonel. The other dome is owned and operated by the Navy. The goddam United States Navy!”