He felt his captors drop him ungently on a rock floor. They were close to the lights now, he realized…
The hiss of air in his ears was gone. And he was still alive. Templin dazedly comprehended a miracle, for the air in his helmet and suit had leaked out until, somehow, it had established a balance. And that meant—
“Air!” He said it aloud, and the word was a prayer of thanksgiving. It was no less than a miracle that there should be air here, under the surface of the Moon—a miracle for which Templin was deeply and personally grateful.
Someone laughed above him. He scrambled to his feet uncertainly, looking up. It was Olcott, pressure-suited but holding his helmet in his hand, laughing at him.
Olcott nodded in grim humor. “Yes,” he said, his voice coming thinly to Templin through his own helmet, “it’s air all right. But it won’t matter to you, because you aren’t going to live to enjoy it. My friends here will take care of that!”
Olcott jerked a thumb toward the lights. Templin followed with his eyes.
The lights were crude, old-fashioned electrics, grouped in front of a pit that descended into the floor of the cavern. And beyond the lights, standing in a stoic, silent group, were a dozen lean figures, big-eyed, big-headed, wearing brief loin-cloths of some mineral material that glistened in the illumination.
Templin stared. For they were not human, those figures. They were—the lean, questing figures that were carved in the ancient Lunarian stone.
TEMPLIN FORCED himself to turn to Olcott. He glanced at those who had captured him, half-expecting that they would be more of the ancient, supposedly extinct Lunarians. But again he was surprised, for the half-dozen men behind him were as human as himself, though pale and curiously flabby-looking. They wore shredded rags of cloth that seemed to Templin to be the remnants of a military uniform that had disappeared from the face of the Earth years before.
Groping for understanding, Templin turned back to Olcott. Then his mind cleared. There was one question to which he had to know the answer.
“Where’s Ellen Bishop?” he demanded.
Olcott raised his heavy brows. “I was about to ask you that,” he said. “Don’t try to deceive me, Templin. Is she hiding?”
Templin shrugged without replying.
Olcott waved. “It doesn’t matter. She can’t get away. My patrols will pick her up—the Loonies are very good at that.”
Templin looked at the dark man’s eyes. It was impossible to read his expression, but Templin decided that he was telling the truth. There was no reason, after all, for him to lie.
Templin said shortly, “I don’t know where she is.” He pointed to the silent, watching figures beyond the lights. “What are they?”
Olcott chuckled richly. “They’re the inhabitants, Templin. The original Lunarians. There aren’t very many of them left—a thousand or so—but they’re all mine.”
Templin shook his head. Hard to believe, that the ancient race had survived for so long underground—yet he could not doubt it, when his eyes provided him with evidence. He said, “What do you mean, they’re all yours?”
“They work for me,” said Olcott easily. He gestured sharply, and the scarecrow-like figures bowed and began to descend into the pit, by a narrow spiral ramp around its sides. “They’re rather useful, in fact. As you should know, considering how much they’ve helped me at Hyginus Cleft.”
“Sabotage—you mean—these things were—”
Olcott nodded, almost purring in satisfaction. “Yes. The—accidents—to your equipment, the damage to your generators and a good many other things, were taken care of for me by the Loonies. For instance, it was one of them who located your plutonium pile for me.”
Templin scowled. “Wearing one of my miners’ pressure-suits, wasn’t he? I begin to see.” He looked at the group of pallid humans who had captured him. “They Loonies too?” he demanded.
Olcott shook his head. “Only by adoption,” he said. “You see, they had the misfortune to be on the wrong side in the Three-Day War. In fact, they were some of the men who were operating the rocket projectors that were so annoying to the United Nations. And when your—our—compatriots began atom-blasting the rocket-launching sites, a few of them found their way down here.” Olcott gazed at them benevolently. “They are very useful to me, too. They control the Loonies, you see—I think they must have been rather cruel to the Loonies when they first came, because the Loonies are frightened to death of them now. And I control them.”
Templin stiffened. “Rocket projectors,” he repeated. “You mean these are the men who bombed Detroit?”
Olcott waved. “Perhaps,” he said. “I don’t know which targets they chose. This may have been the crew that blasted Paris—or Memphis—or Stalingrad.”
Templin looked at them for a long moment. “I’ll remember,” he said softly. “My family—Never mind. What are you going to do with me?”
“I am very likely to kill you, Templin. Unless I turn you over to the Loonies for sport.”
Templin nodded. “I see,” he said. “Well, I—thought as much.”
Olcott looked at him curiously. Then he issued a quick order to the pale, silent men behind him. It was not in English.
To Templin he said, “You shouldn’t have gotten in my way. I need the uranium that your company owns; I plan to get it.”
“Why?”
Olcott pursed his lips. “I think,” he said, “that we will start the rocket projectors again. Only this time, there will be no slip-ups. As a high-ranking officer in the Security Patrol, I will make sure that we are not interfered with.”
The pale men gripped Templin, carried him to the edge of the pit into which the Loonies had disappeared. Olcott said. “Good-by, Templin. I’m turning you over to the Loonies. What they will do to you I don’t know, but it will not be pleasant. They hate human beings.” He smirked, and added, “With good reason.”
He nodded to the men; they picked Templin up easily, dropped him into the pit.
It was not very deep. Templin dropped lightly perhaps twenty feet, landed easily and straightened to face whatever was coming.
He was surrounded by the tall, tenuous Lunarians, a dozen of them staring at him with their huge, cryptic eyes. Silently they gestured to him to move down a shaft in the rock. Templin shrugged and complied.
He was in a rabbit-warren of tunnels, branching and forking out every few yards. Inside of a handful of minutes Templin was thoroughly confused.
They came to a vaulted dome in the rock. Still silent, the Lunarians gestured to Templin to enter. He did.
Someone came running toward him, crying: “Temp! Thank Heaven you’re safe!”
Pressure-suit off, dark hair flying as she ran to him, was Ellen,
TEMPLIN HELD her to him tightly for a long moment. When finally she stepped back he saw that her eyes were damp. She said: “Oh, Temp, I thought you were gone this time for sure! The Loonies told me that Olcott had captured you—I was so worried!”
Templin stared. “Told you? You mean these things can talk?”
“Well, no, not exactly. But they told me, all the same. It’s mental telepathy, I suppose, Temp, or something very much like it. Oh, they can’t read minds—unless you try to convey a thought—but they can project their own thoughts to another person. It sounds just like someone talking…but you don’t hear it with your ears.”
Templin nodded. “I begin to understand things,” he said. “That miner at Hyginus—I thought I talked to him, and yet my radio was broken, so I couldn’t have. And then, he abandoned his suit. Can the Loonies get along on the surface without pressure suits?”