In thirty hours, they will detonate, and then we will know.
~ * ~
Later. I have just finished speaking with Earth. I had to look away from Luna while I spoke with Mission Control; a sense of victory had inflamed me, and I wanted to howl and tell them their own destruction was imminent.
“What in hell has been going on?” Mission Control asked.
I struggled to keep my voice human. “Rogers and Pettis are dead.”
There was shock in the reply. “What in God’s name happened?”
“An oxygen tank blew while they were working on it.”
“Jesus.”
I asked them if they could guide us home.
“We can do that from the ground.” There was a pause. “What about the bombs?”
“We got them off,” I said. “Hartnet did his job well.”
I heard a relieved cheer go up in the background. “You fellas don’t worry about a thing. We’ll get you home safe and sound. You’re heroes. You hear?”
“I hear,” I said.
Another pause. “They want me to tell you that your son stabilized, and they’ll be able to try the transfusion on him after you get back.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“We’re all praying for you,” Mission Control said.
“We’re praying, too,” I answered.
~ * ~
Thirty hours later. What more to tell? We left orbit more than twenty-nine hours ago. We are aimed straight at Earth. Since leaving the strong influence of the Moon, we have felt very sluggish. Hartnet and Wyatt are asleep, curled in their sleep restraints. I have slept myself.
But now I am awake. Hartnet told me that a wondrous thing will happen soon. I want to record this moment of history.
I keep thinking of the new life we will have on Earth. When we land at Kramer Air Force Base later tonight, our brethren will swarm around us in triumph. With the unwitting help of Mission Control, we will open the base to attack, and the sacred Song of Blood—for blood gives life, even in death, and in this way death is life—will fill the air.
I want to record that, too.
There are many things I wish to do. I will trample Amy Pettis’s garden. I will free my son. I will help in any way I can to destroy the human race—
There is a barely perceptible flash of light outside. I rise from my couch. Wyatt and Hartnet have awakened, as if summoned to witness the event.
A horrible and wondrous sight meets our eyes. Through the top windows, I see the convulsive shattering of the Moon. It begins as a shudder, and then suddenly the world of our fathers is rent apart, like a toy, bellowing into a billion shards. The area around Aristarchus disintegrates. Howling, I salute those who have perished in the cataclysm, but I know that they would gladly have given their consent, knowing of the millions and millions of their brothers to whom they have given back life.
Mission Control is calling. We are forced to listen while they thank us in tears for the job we have done. “Merry Christmas!” they shout. “Merry Christmas!”
Once again, they call us heroes for turning the Moon into a harmless ring of debris that will settle far from Earth.
They are wrong, of course. With Wyatt and Hartnet’s revision of the detonation, most of the top hundred-foot layer of lunar soil, containing the entirety of our buried civilization, will fall to Earth, leaving the rest of the pulverized core to form a close, bright ring to act with the power of a permanent full Moon upon our new civilization. Soon the Song of Blood will fill the air, and Earth—the new Moon, as of this Christmas—will be free of humanity forever.
It occurs to me that we are heroes, after all. And, as I gather the papers of this record together to prepare for landing, I notice the poem that opened it. Immediately, I understand why I have never been happy with the last lines. I am happy now. Slight revision has brought the poem to perfection. I am filled with a new sense of dedication, and I know that this is but the first of many new poems I will write for my people:
~ * ~
Man of shadows and cratered light:
Alabaster plains,
Seas of tranquil dust—
You know a secret.
What word would you tell
Had you a single cold breath?
What word would it be?
Would it be Death?
Author’s Note
~ * ~
The chapter titles of this book are the titles of poems by Theodore Roethke, to whose work the reader of this book, or any other book for that matter, is directed with enthusiasm.
More obvious inspiration was derived from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, to which the present author bows in gratitude.
For those interested in fact behind fiction, source information on transient lunar phenomena (TLP) can be found in The Moon and the Planets: A Catalog of Astronomical Anomalies compiled by William R. Corliss (The Source Book Project, 1985). Page 129 of that volume reproduces an 1878 sketch of a reported volcanic eruption on the Moon. A good article on Big Dumb Boosters appeared in the August 17, 1987, issue of Newsweek, page 46. A comprehensive, if ultimately dogmatic, discussion of tektites is found in one of the best textbooks the author has ever encountered, Introduction to Planetary Geology by Billy P. Glass, a leading expert on the subject. Carl Sagan has pointed out the pleasing suitability of Glass’s name.
Contrary to popular perception, the Apollo program did not tell us everything we want to know about the Moon. As with any beginning, it created more questions than it answered. The literature on the Moon is vast but uninspiring; a good recent overview is The Book of the Moon by Thomas A. Hockey. The University of Arizona has published a comprehensive set of lunar quadrant maps, available from Sky and Telescope magazine; anyone with access to a well-made telescope might spend a pleasant evening studying the area around Aristarchus for TLP.
As for werewolves…