Read Ebook: Goddess of the Moon by Reynolds John Murray Morey Leo Illustrator

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Ebook has 311 lines and 21083 words, and 7 pages

ubject to a matter of a few liens and some faulty hull insulation and a very good chance of never coming back to port again after I start on my voyage. Have a drink, young feller!"

"How else do you think I bought her?" Ripon grinned. "I'll concede that, if the world had shown a proper appreciation for my varied talents, I'd be a millionaire many times over, but I happen to be almost broke. You appear to be a promising lad, young feller. How about signing on for a trip to the Moon?"

"So you're the crazy man who is talking of going to the Moon," Larry grinned. Ripon glowered at him from under his heavy brows for a minute, then grinned in return.

"Be more careful with your language, young feller, or I'll bust this bottle over your head! I may be eccentric, but I'm a lot saner than those pedants who claim the trip can't be made."

Ripon was sprawled back at his ease, a smoldering pipe in one hand and his glass in the other. He was smiling at Larry's startled expression, but he seemed to be serious. Vague memories were stirring in Larry Gibson's mind, memories of things he had read and heard in the old days before he became a drifter whose main effort was to avoid thinking at all. Crispin Gillingwater Ripon! He had heard the name before, though it had been in connection with abstract science rather than with practical rocket-ship flying. Somehow, his memory of the name was connected with failure, with public derision, and with rumors of outright charlatanism.

"I think I've heard of you," he said cautiously.

"In that case you have heard no good!" Ripon said cheerfully. "I am at present the problem child of the scientific world. The horrible example! A laughing stock for seedy professors and callow students. Mention of my name produces hoarse guffaws of mirth in scientific circles at the moment, young feller, but it will be different when I return from my successful trip to the Moon. Better come along."

"Why are you going at this time?"

"Because there are radium salts on the Moon, I am convinced. This world hasn't treated me with much respect, young feller, but I've had a good time on it for my sixty-odd years and I'm fond of the old place. I want to make the trip and get back before the Gray Death wipes out our population--including myself!"

"But you can't take a rocket-ship to the Moon," Larry protested. "Professor Staunton's attempt proved that thirty years ago."

When he looked back at it later, Larry had only a hazy recollection of the rest of that evening. The rum got to him. The one thing that did stick in his mind was a snatch of song that he and Ripon had sung over and over again, pounding their glasses on the table while the other men in the dingy little barroom stared at them in good-natured derision.

"There's only a few of us left, And we never were worth a damn, But I'll follow my vagrant star, That's the kind of a guy I am! That's the kind of a guy I am!"

Larry Gibson awoke the next morning to the sound of many hammers beating on a steel shell. There was also a sharp and comprehensive ache that started at the top of his head, which felt as though someone had been hitting him with the butt of a ray-gun, and spread all down through his body. He groaned and sat up.

He lay in a bunk, in a steel-walled cabin. Evidently the officers' quarters on some strathoship. Across the white painted ceiling, where flakes of red rust were showing through the dirty paint, the word CONDEMNED had been stenciled in black. Sitting upright on the edge of his bunk, Larry momentarily dropped his head in his hands. Then he stood up and left the cabin, grinding his teeth at the ceaseless pound of the hammers on the steel shell.

At intervals, as Larry went slowly down the corridor, he passed the word CONDEMNED stenciled on the walls and bulk-heads. When the government inspectors decided that a a rocket-ship was no longer safe for flights through the vast emptiness of the strathosphere, they made the fact very evident! He climbed a ladder to an open manhole, and emerged into the bright sunlight of a winter morning. For an instant he filled his smoke-tainted lungs with deep gulps of fresh air. Then he looked about him.

He stood atop the red-painted hull of a rocket-ship. It was an old V-39, a type that had been first built some thirty years before and was now obsolete. The weathered paint was badly rust streaked, and the worst spots had been touched up with bright red lead so that they looked like livid scars. The ship was lying in a corner of the airport, and a gang of men were busy at what appeared to be an attempt at general reconditioning. After one look Larry didn't think it would do much good.

Turning forward along the top of the super-structure, Larry met a man in a faded blue uniform that bore the two stripes of a second officer. He was a lean, swarthy-faced man with a meticulously pointed mustache that contrasted strangely with his otherwise down-at-the-heels appearance.

"Morning," he said shortly. "I'm Colton, the second officer. Guess you're the new first mate."

"If so, it's news to me!" Larry said grimly. "Where's the madman that commands this decrepit craft?"

"When I want your advice I'll ask for it," Larry said. Colton's eyes blinked momentarily, but then he smiled and Larry immediately marked him down as a man to be watched. He didn't trust people who smiled when they were insulted.

"Suit yourself," Colton said as he turned away.

Crispin Gillingwater Ripon was bent over a set of strange diagrams spread out on the chart table in the control room. Thick smoke swirled from the short pipe clenched in his teeth. His face was deeply lined this morning, and there were wrinkled hollows under his eyes, but he looked up with a broad grin as Larry came into the dusty control room. His reckless eyes were bright and cheerful in spite of being bloodshot.

"Cheerio, young feller!" he boomed. "How's the pride of the strathosphere this morning?"

"All right," Larry said shortly. "It seems that I owe you thanks for a night's lodging. But what's this about my being first mate of this hulk?"

"Accepting your unspoken apology for having maligned my ship," Ripon said severely, "the statement is correct. You signed on last night. I have your signature to prove it--although it's a bit shaky because I had to guide your hand which seemed unable to hold the pen."

"Do you know who I am?" Larry asked grimly.

"Do I know who you are?" Ripon's lean, brown face suddenly crinkled into a smile. "Good Lord, young feller, you spent two hours last night telling me your life's history while you cried into your beer."

"And ever since you've been going around feeling sorry for yourself!" Ripon's voice cut sharply through the mists of Larry's bitterness. "Hell, young feller, I've been disgraced worse than that more than once. I just don't pay any attention to it. Forget it. I need a first officer on this trip, and I believe your story that the disaster wasn't your fault, and there's an end to it! You're coming along."

"But I haven't even a license any more."

"That doesn't matter. Governmental regulations don't apply to a trip to the Moon. They don't license a man for what they think is suicide, you know! Go ashore and get some breakfast to steady you down. Then, when you feel better, come back and I'll go over the details of the trip with you."

For a long moment Larry stared at Ripon. Then he began to laugh.

"Better people than you have called me that, young feller," he said cheerfully. "They've been expecting me to get myself killed for years. But Crispin Gillingwater Ripon is still alive and healthy--albeit somewhat battered. Follow my star and you'll have plenty of excitement, even though it may get you nothing more than a broken head."

He found Ripon still in the vessel's dusty control room. Much of the equipment had been ripped out when the ship was first condemned. The missing articles had been hastily replaced with second-hand equipment which was often of a slightly different pattern from the original, so that the whole room had a makeshift appearance. The lean scientist looked up from the clouds of blue and vile-smelling smoke that swirled upward from his pipe.

"Well, young feller!" he boomed in his deep voice that could easily carry above the dull roar of rocket motors. "How do you feel now? Ready to go to work?"

"Listen!" Larry said. He had intended to be sharp and sarcastic, but he was grinning in spite of himself. It was hard to stay angry with anyone as irresponsibly cheerful as Crispin Gillingwater Ripon. "Seriously! You couldn't take the best rocket-ship on Earth to the Moon, let alone this old derelict. Not if you want to come back alive. It's been proven that, by the time you reach the velocity of escape to get away from the Earth's attraction, you have a speed too great for our present knowledge of rocket-ship technique to brake in time to prevent disaster...."

"You're like all the rest," Ripon grumbled. "Always jumping to conclusions based on a few scraps of evidence. No man on Earth really knows how a rocket-ship would behave in interplanetary travel, because it hasn't yet been done. There is a great mass of unproven theories that are generally accepted as true--but those are not facts. It was once generally accepted that the Earth was flat. However--I have a new method of propulsion for this ship, by means of the amplification of magnetic currents, and I expect to supplement the rockets with that new equipment."

"I think you're crazy," Larry said, "but I'll go along with you anyway."

"Now you show the proper spirit, even if not good sense," Ripon said cheerfully.

"Well--we'll be off in a few minutes!" the swarthy second officer said.

"Wonder if we'll ever come back."

"Lord knows!" Colton shrugged, and his dark eyes were somber. "The police of half a dozen countries are looking for me anyway. I've had my fingers crossed the whole time we've been refitting this craft."

"Why tell me all this?" Larry asked. Colton shrugged again, and his smile was half a sneer.

"Your own reputation isn't much better, Gibson. I figure that if this trip works out it may give us both a chance to square ourselves, and if it doesn't we're not much worse off than we are now."

"You may have something there," Larry admitted.

The drive of the rockets carried them into the belt of clouds. For a few seconds the glass ports were veiled by gray mist. Then they were above the clouds and zooming upward in the cold light of the Moon. The crew were released from their launching stations as the ship settled down to a smooth routine, and Larry took over the watch. A minute later he was alone in the darkened control room with the dim glow of the varied instrument panels to keep him company. Already the air was starting to thin out, so he closed the ports and turned on the vessel's air-conditioning system. The atmosphere took on the faintly chemical odor characteristic of travel in a sealed ship in the high places.

From somewhere nearby Larry could hear a deep voice lifted in song, a voice that rose above the pulsating throb of the rockets. The words were familiar:

"There's only a few of us left, And we never were worth a damn, But I'll follow my vagrant star...."

Larry wondered if Ripon was hitting the bottle again. They were in a bad spot if he was, for certainly no one else on board understood the new equipment that Ripon had installed to solve the difficulties that had blocked previous attempts at interplanetary travel.

In Larry's mind there was a steadily strengthening conviction that this whole expedition was destined to failure from the start. It was too makeshift. Too poorly organized and planned, too lightly financed. Ill-manned and poorly equipped, led by a drunken genius on a rickety ship that wasn't really fit to navigate at all, they were probably sailing to their doom somewhere in the cold reaches of outer space. If they reached the Moon at all, it would likely be as a twisted wreck dropped on the cold slope of one of that body's barren craters. Larry shrugged. He had made his decision, and he did not regret it.

Ripon came out into the control room a little later, a faded uniform cap pushed to the back of his graying head and his empty pipe clenched in his teeth.

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