Ellen looked uncertain. “I—I don’t know. But—I think perhaps they can. They said something about Olcott forcing them to do it. Olcott has them under control, Temp. He’s using them to get the uranium mines away from us—and the Loonies think he wants the uranium to make bombs!”
“I have heard about that,” Templin said. “From Olcott. Which reminds me—how did you get down here without his knowing about it?”
Ellen said, “I was outside that Coliseum-looking place, up on the surface, and suddenly somebody grabbed me from behind. I was frightened half to death; he carried me down and through a bunch of tunnels to here. And then—why, this voice began talking to me, and it was one of the Loonies. He said—he said he wanted me to help him get rid of Olcott!”
Templin asked, “Why can’t they get rid of him themselves? There are a couple thousand Loonies—and Olcott can’t have more than fifteen or twenty men down here.”
Ellen sighed. “That’s the horrible thing, Temp. You see, these men haven’t a thing to lose. When they came down here, they brought part of the warhead of an atom-rocket along. And they’ve got it assembled in one of the caverns, not far from here—right in the middle of a terrific big lode of uranium ore! Can you imagine what would happen if it went off, Temp? All that uranium would explode—the whole Moon would become a bomb. And that’s what they’re threatening to do if the Loonies try to fight them.”
Templin whistled. He looked around the room they were in reflectively. It was a high-ceilinged, circular affair, cut out of the mother-rock, sparsely furnished with pallets and benches. Loonie living quarters, he thought.
He looked back at the hovering Lunarians, staring blankly at them from the entrance to the chamber. “How do you work this telepathy affair?” he demanded.
“Walk up to them and start talking. The effort of phrasing words is enough to convey the thought to them—as nearly as I can figure it out.”
Templin nodded, looked at them again and walked slowly over. The bulbous heads with the giant eyes confronted him blankly. He said uncertainly, “Hello?”
A SENSATION of mirth reached him, as though someone had laughed silently beside his ear. A voice spoke, and he recognized its kinship to that of the “miner” he had stopped at Hyginus. It had the same curious strangeness, the thing that was not an accent but something more basic. It said, “Hello, Steve Templin. We have spared your life. Now tell us what we are to do with you.”
“Why, I thought—” Steve stumbled. “That is, you’re having trouble with these Earthmen, aren’t you?”
“For sixteen of your years.” There was anger in the thought. “We have not come to like Earthmen, Templin.”
Templin said uncomfortably, “These Earthmen I don’t like myself. Shall we make an alliance, then?”
The thought was direct and sincere. “It was for that that we spared your lives.”
Templin nodded. “Good.” Abruptly his whole bearing changed. He snapped: “Then help us get out of here! Get us back to Hadley Dome or Hyginus. We’ll get help—and come back here and wipe them out!”
Regretfully, the Lunarian’s thought came, “That, Templin, is impossible. Our people can go out into the vacuum unprotected, for short periods, but you cannot. Have you forgotten that your suit will no longr hold air?”
Templin winced. But he said, “Ellen’s will. Let her go for help.”
Wearily the thought came, “Again, no. For if you brought men here to help you the Earthmen who enslave us could not be taken by surprise. And if only one of them should live for just a few moments after the first attack…it would be the death of us all. They have hollowed out a chamber in the midst of a deposit of the metal of fire. They have said that if we act against them they will set off a chain reaction—and, in this, I know that they do not lie.”
The Lunarian hesitated. Almost apologetically he went on: “It was from the metal of fire that the greatness of our race was destroyed many thousands of years ago, Templin. Once we lived on the surface, and had atomic power; because we used it wrongly we ravished the surface of our planet and destroyed nearly all of our people. Now—there are so few of us left, Templin, and we must not see it happen again.”
Templin spread his hands. “All right,” he said shortly. “What you say is true. But what do you suggest we do?”
The thought was sympathetic. “There is only one chance,” it said, “If someone could enter the chamber of the bomb—My own people cannot approach, for it is not allowed. But you are an Earthman; perhaps you could reach it. And if you could destroy the men who are in there—the others we can account for.”
Templin gave it only a second’s thought. He nodded reflectively. “It’s the only chance,” he agreed. “Well—lead the way. I’ll try it.”
THE LUNARIAN peeped out into a corridor, then turned back to Templin. He said in his soundless speech, “The entrance to the room of power is to your right. What you will find there I do not know, for none of us have ever been inside.”
Templin shrugged. “All right,” he said. And to Ellen Bishop, “This is it; if I shouldn’t see you again—it’s been worthwhile, Ellen.”
The girl bit her lip. Impulsively she flung her arms around him, hugged him tight for a second. Then she stepped back and let him go.
Templin stepped out into the corridor. No one was in sight. He patted the bulge of Ellen’s rocket pistol where it was concealed under his clothing—he had taken off his pressure suit, torn the stout fabric of his tunic to match the ragged uniforms he had seen on the pale men—and turned down the traveled path to his right.
Thirty yards along, he came to a metal door.
A man was standing there, looking dreamily at the rock wall of the corridor. He looked incuriously at Templin but made no move to stop him. As Templin passed, the man said something rapid and casual to him in the language of the nation that had waged the Three-Day War.
That was the first hurdle. It didn’t sound like a challenge, Templin thought, wishing vainly that he had learned that language at some time in his life. Apparently the fugitives had not considered the possibility of an inimical human being penetrating to this place.
Templin replied with a non-committal grunt and walked on. The skin between his shoulder-blades crawled, expecting the blast of a rocket-shell from the guard. But it did not come; the thing had worked.
Templin found that he was in a room where half a dozen men sat around, a couple of them playing cards with what looked like a homemade deck, others lying on pallets that had obviously been commandeered from the Loonies.
Along one wall was an involved mechanical affair—a metal tube with bulges along its fifteen-foot length, and a man standing by a push-button monitor control at one end of it. That was his target, Templin knew. Built like an atom-bomb, it would have tiny fragments of uranium-235 or plutonium in it, ready to be hurled together to form a giant, self-detonating mass of atomic explosive at the touch of that button. And once the pieces had come together, nothing under the sun could prevent the blast.
The men were looking up at him, Templin saw. It was time to make his play. The thing was too much like shooting sitting ducks, he thought distastefully—yet he dared not warn them, give them a chance to fight back. Too much was at stake.
He gazed stolidly at the men who were looking at him, and his hand crept to where Ellen’s rocket pistol was concealed inside his tunic.
“Templin!”
The shout was like a pistol-crack in his ears. Templin spun round frantically. And in the door stood Olcott, surprise and rage stamped on his face.