Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

Behind him loomed the enormous half-globe of the hangar, like a phosphorescent mushroom in the blackness. One section of the halfglobe was flattened; and here were the gigantic inner and outer portals where a liner’s rocket-propelled life shells could enter the dome. The great doors of this, the main airlock, reared halfway to the top of the hangar, and weighed several hundred tons apiece.

Before him was the face of the Moon: sharp angles of rock; jagged, tremendous mountains; sheer, deep craters; all picked out in black and white from the reflected light of Earth.

A desolate prospect. . . . Hartigan started on.

The ash beside him suddenly seemed to explode, soundlessly but with great violence. It spouted up like a geyser to a distance of a hundred feet, hung for an instant over him in a spreading cloud, then quickly began to settle.

A meteor! Must have been a fair-sized one to have made such a splash in the volcanic dust.

“Close call,” muttered Hartigan, voice sepulchral in his helmet. “A little nearer and they’d be sending a new man to the lunar emergency dome.”

But he only grimaced and went on. Meteors were like the lightning back on Earth. Either they hit you or they missed. There was no warning till after they struck; then it was too late to do anything about it.

Hartigan stumbled over something in the cloud of ash that was sifting down around him. Looking down, he saw a smooth, round object, black-hot, about as big as his head.

“The meteor,” he observed. “Must have hit a slanting surface at the bottom of the ash heap and ricocheted up and out here. I wonder—”

He stooped clumsily toward it. His right “hand,” which was a heavy pincer arrangement terminating the right sleeve of his suit, went out, then his left, and with some difficulty he picked the thing up. Now and then a meteor held splashes of previous metals. Sometimes one was picked up that yielded several hundred dollars’ worth of platinum or iridium. A little occasional gravy with which the emergency-landing exiles could buy amusement when they got back home.

Through the annoying shower of ash he could see dimly the light of the hangar. He started back, to get out of his suit and analyze the meteor for possible value.

It was the oddest-looking thing he had ever seen come out of the heavens. In the first place, its shape was remarkable. It was perfectly round, instead of being irregular as were most meteors.

“Like an old-fashioned cannon ball,” Hartigan mused, bending over it on a workbench. “Or an egg—”

Eyebrows raised whimsically, he played with the idea.

“Jupiter! What an egg it would be! A hundred and twenty pounds if it’s an ounce and it smacked the Moon like a bullet without even cracking! I wouldn’t want it poached for breakfast.”

The next thing to catch his attention was the projectile’s odd color, or, rather, the odd way in which the color seemed to be changing. It had been dull, black-hot, when Hartigan brought it in. It was now a dark green, and was getting lighter swiftly as it cooled!

The big clock struck a mellow note. Tiime for the dome keeper to make his daily inspection of the main doors.

Reluctantly Hartigan left the odd meteor, which was now as green as grass and actually seemed to be growing transparent, and walked toward the big airlock.

He switched on the radio power unit. There was no power plant of any kind in the hangar; all power was broadcast by the Spaceways central station. He reached for the contact switch which poured the invisible Niagara of power into the motor that moved the ponderous doors.

Cr-r-rack!

Like a cannon shot the sound split the air in the huge metal dome, echoing from wall to wall, to die at last in a muffled rumbling.

White-faced, Hartigan was running long before the echoes died away. He ran toward the workbench he had recently quitted. The sound seemed to have come from near there. His thought was that the hangar had been crashed by a meteor larger than its cunningly braced beams, tough metal sheath, and artful angles of deflection would stand.

That would mean death, for the air supply in the dome would race out through a fissure almost before he could don his space suit.

However, his anxious eyes, scanning the vaulting roof, could find no crumpled bracing or ominous download bulges. And he could hear no thin whine of air surging in the hangar to the almost nonexistent pressure outside.

Then he glanced at the workbench and uttered an exclamation. The meteor he had left there was gone.

“It must have rolled off the bench,” he told himself. “But if it’s on the floor, why can’t I see it?”

He froze into movelessness. Had that been a sound behind him? A sound here, where no sound could possibly be made save by himself?

He whirled—and saw nothing. Nothing whatever, save the familiar expanse of smooth rock floor lighted with the cold white illumination broadcast on the power band.

He turned back to the workbench where the meteor had been, and began feeling over it with his hands, disbelieving the evidence of his eyes.

Another exclamation burst from his lips as his fingers touched something hard and smooth and round. The meteor. Broken into two halves, but still here. Only, now it was invisible!

“This,” said Hartigan, beginning to sweat a little, “is the craziest thing I ever heard of!”

He picked up one of the two invisible halves and held it close before his eyes. He could not see it at all, though it was solid to the touch. Moreover, he seemed able to see through it, for nothing on the other side was blotted out.

Fear increased within him as his fingers told him that the two halves were empty, hollow. Heavy as the ball had been, it consisted of nothing but a shell about two inches thick. Unless—

“Unless something did crawl out of it when it split apart.”

But that, of course, was ridiculous.

“It’s just an ordinary metallic chunk,” he told himself, “that split open with a loud bang when it cooled, due to contraction. The only thing unusual about it is its invisibility. That is strange.”

He groped on the workbench for the other half of the thick round shell. With a half in each hand, he started toward the stock room, meaning to lock up this odd substance very carefully. He suspected he had something beyond price here. If he could go back to Earth with a substance that could produce invisibility, he could become one of the richest men in the universe.

He presented a curious picture as he walked over the brilliantly lighted floor. His shoulders sloped down with the weight of the two pieces of meteor. His bare arms rippled and knotted with muscular effort. Yet his hands seemed empty. So far as the eye could tell, he was carrying nothing whatever.

“What—”

He dropped the halves of the shell with a ringing clang, and began leaping toward the big doors. That time he knew he had heard a sound, a sound like scurrying steps! It had come from near the big doors.

When he got there, however, he could hear nothing. For a time the normal stillness, the ghastly phenomenal stillness, was preserved. Then from near the spot he had just vacated, he heard another noise. This time it was a gulping, voracious noise, accompanied by a sound that was like that of a rock crusher or a concrete mixer in action.

On the run, he returned, seeing nothing all this while, nothing, but smooth rock floor and plain, metal-ribbed walls, and occasional racks of instruments.

He got to the spot where he had dropped the parts of the meteor. The parts were no longer there. This time it was more than a question of invisibility. They had disappeared actually as well as visually.

To make sure, Hartigan got down on hands and knees and searched every inch of a large circle. There was no trace of the thick shell.