I moved forward and sat in the window, one leg outside, my Swift under my left arm. I plucked a flash grenade set for five seconds from my belt, pulled the fuse and tossed it across the fissure, almost hard enough to reach the opposite wall.
I looked down, my Swift swinging like my gaze.
The fissure lit up like a boulevard. Across from me I knew the flare was dropping dreamily, but I wasn’t looking that way. Right below me, two hundred feet down, I saw a transparent helmet with something green and round and crested inside and with shoulders under it.
Just then I heard the scratching again, quite close.
I fired at once. My shell made a violet burst and raised a fountain of dust twenty feet from the crusoe. I scrambled back into my bubble, switching on my searchlight. Another spider was coming in on the opposite side, its legs moving fast. I jumped for the top-hole and grabbed its rim with my free hand. I’d have dropped my Swift if I’d needed my other hand, but I didn’t. As I pulled myself up and through, I looked down and saw the spider straight below me eyeing me with its uptilted opalescent eyes and doubling its silver legs. Then it straightened its legs and sprang up toward me, not very fast but enough against Luna’s feeble gravitational tug to put it into this upper room with me. I knew it mustn’t touch me and I mustn’t touch it by batting at it. I had started to shift the explosive shell in my gun for a slug, and its green-banded body was growing larger, when there was a green blast in the window below and its explosion-front, booming my suit a little, knocked the spider aside and out of sight before it made it through the trap door of my new bubble. Yet the spider didn’t explode, if that was what had happened to the first one; at any rate there was no second green flash.
My new bubble had a top hole too and I went through it the same way I had the last. The next five bubbles were just the same too. I told myself that my routine was getting to be like that of a circus acrobat—except who stages shows inside black solidity?—except the gods maybe with the dreams they send us. The lava should be transparent, so the rim-wall peaks could admire.
At the same time I was thinking how if the biped humanoid shape is a good one for medium-size creatures on any planet, why so the spider shape is a good one for tiny creatures and apt to turn up anywhere and be copied in robots too.
The top hole in the sixth bubble showed me the stars, while one half of its rim shone white with sunlight.
Panting, I lay back against the rock. I switched off my searchlight. I didn’t hear any scratching.
The stars. The stars were energy. They filled the universe with light, except for hidey holes and shadows here and there.
Then the number came to me. With the butt of my Swift I rapped out five. No answer. No scratching either. I rapped out five again.
Then the answer came, ever so faintly. Five knocked back at me.
Six five five—Planck’s Constant, the invariant quantum of energy. Oh, it should be to the minus 29th power, of course, but I couldn’t think how to rap that and, besides, the basic integers were all that mattered.
I heard the scratching . . .
I sprang and caught the rim and lifted myself into the glaring sunlight . . . and stopped with my body midway.
Facing me a hundred feet away, midway through another top-hole—he must have come very swiftly by another branch of the bubble ladder—he’d know the swiftest ones—was my green-crested crusoe. His face had a third eye where a man’s nose would be, which with his crest made him look like a creature of mythology. We were holding our guns vertically.
We looked like two of the damned, half out of their holes in the floor of Dante’s hell.
I climbed very slowly out of my hole, still pointing my gun toward the zenith. So did he.
We held very still for a moment. Then with his gun butt he rapped out ten. I could both see and also hear it through the rock.
I rapped out three. Then, as if the black bubble-world were one level of existence and this another, I wondered why we were going through this rigamarole. We each knew the other had a suit and a gun (and a lonely hole?) and so we knew we were both intelligent and knew math. So why was our rapping so precious?
He raised his gun—I think to rap out one, to start off pi.
But I’ll never be sure, for just then there were two violet bursts, close together, against the fissure wall, quite close to him.
He started to swing the muzzle of his gun toward me. At least I think he did. He must know violet was the color of my explosions. I know I thought someone on my side was shooting. And I must have thought he was going to shoot me—because a violet dagger leaped from my Swift’s muzzle and I felt its sharp recoil and then there was a violet globe where he was standing and moments later some fragment twinged lightly against my chest—a playful ironic tap.
He was blown apart pretty thoroughly, all his constants scattered, including—I’m sure—Planck’s.
It was another half hour before the rescue ship from Circumluna landed. I spent it looking at earth low on the horizon and watching around for the spider, but I never saw it. The rescue party never found it either, though they made quite a hunt—with me helping after I’d rested a bit and had my batteries and oxy replenished. Either its power went off when its master died, or it was set to “freeze” then, or most likely go into a “hide” behavior pattern. Likely it’s still out there waiting for an incautious earthman, like a rattlesnake in the desert or an old, forgotten land mine.
I also figured out, while waiting in Gioja crater, there near the north pole on the edge of Shackleton crater, the only explanation I’ve ever been able to make, though it’s something of a whopper, of the two violet flashes which ended my little mathematical friendship-chant with the crusoe. They were the first two shells I squeezed off at him— the ones that skimmed the notch. They had the velocity to orbit Luna, and the time they took—two hours and five minutes—was right enough.
Oh, the consequences of our past actions!
Fritz Leiber is the original S-F man. By which I mean any number of things, beginning with his beginning in the field a good thirty years ago (which would make him Senior Writer for the volume if it were not for Alfred Jarry antedating everybody.) Nor is it simply seniority, but also scope. Leiber began as a Lovecraft disciple, went from fantasy for Unknown, to s-f for Astounding, and then to popular-science writing and editing. In Leiber’s case, S is not just for Science, or Satire, or Speculation, though they are all there, but for Snakes as well as Spiders (the Time-Change stories), and for Shakespeare (“Four Ghosts in Hamlet” in last year’s FSSF), and Sword-and-Sorcery. (F, of course, is for Fafhrd and the Mouser.) And this year he has expanded his range a bit more, by writing the first authorized post-Burroughs Tarzan book (Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, Ballantine, 1966).
What started me on all this, really, was snakes. Looking through the odds and ends set aside for these notes, I found an undated news item which I had clipped and never mailed, headlined: SNAKES, TOOLS OF WAR, STILL IN DEMAND DESPITE YEMEN TRUCE. Seems you can always tell when fighting will break out down there by following the dips and rises in snake stocks. The snakes are neither weapons nor “native superstition.” They are kept as pets by desert fighters because they are the most reliable and effective eye-wipers in a sandstorm: A guerilla with sand in his eye grabs his pet serpent firmly and inserts its twitching tail into the corner of his eye to remove the source of irritation.