The Moon Mistress

Vast riches were at stake in that made chase across the moons desolate surface...


Excerpt

For my own part I felt as if I had suddenly dis¬covered a sharp sword suspended above me by a thread. I half believed that entering this forbidden precinct of La Terre Rouge aroused similar feelings even in old Parks, who was a veteran tramp of the lunar globe.
The room was fairly large. From our position beside the low-arched entrance we could get an excellent view of it. Scattered about the multi colored stone flagging its oval floor were the low tables about each richly carved and upholstered couches were set. Almost every couch had an occupant—some a man and some a woman.

Both sexes were represented in about equal numbers. The patrons sucked smoke from long, thin-stemmed pipes while, with languid, listless movement, as though they lingered on the border¬line of dreamland, they played with tet¬rahedron-formed dice. The several lumps which hung from the barbarically-tooled ceiling cast their subdued light down through a reek of muddy, greenish vapor. The odor sickened me with its overpowering sweetness, and yet it caused tiny bells of pleasure to tinkle in¬side my head. From far above, through a narrow slit of a window, a small segment of the green earth was visible against the black sky.

But these impressions were not of prime import¬ance to us now. Anxiously we scanned each of the half-drugged occupants of the room, searching for one whom we felt certain should be somewhere within this notorious dive of the moon's great radium city.

“He is not here,” Parks told me quietly after several moments.

I glanced at him. His face was calm and impassive as ever. It was a hard, square face, seamed by countless deep wrinkles that were in marked contrast with the coal-blackness of his close-cropped hair, that started low down on his fore¬head. A livid mottled scar covered almost his entire left cheek. A leak in a space suit somewhere out on the lunar plains had caused that. I had guessed.

His dingy grey suit, wrinkled and unpressed bulged sloppily from his squat bear-like body. Queer, rough, old intellectual Parks was talkative and laconic by turns.In the two days that I had known him, I had found some slight reason to doubt the honesty of his motives, and yet I had already come to like him.

I was painfully conscious that the suspicious Oriental eyes of several of the patrons were on us. But it was easy to see that those worthies were too far gone with drugs to pay much real attention to us.

"We've got to find the kid!" I whispered with hoarse emphasis. "It isn't only his neck. It's the secret that they lured him here to get . . . the mine . . . radium . . ."

Parks waved a horny hand toward me in a silencing gesture. "I know all that better than you do," he said. "And we'll find him if we can."

A thin-limbed attendant clad in a loin cloth and turban approached us and asked with stiff politeness if the Sahibs desired pipes. His speech be¬trayed his Indian ancestry.

"We have important business now," Parks told him. "Here is one who seeks admittance to the cult of Mu-Lo. We would see the Master."

My companion handed the Indian the tiny golden figure of a repulsive insect¬like creature, which had been the pass that had admitted us to this inner cham¬ber where few were permitted to enter. The man took it and scrutinized it closely, searching for the minute mark which verified its authenticity. Satisfied, he returned it, and mo¬tioned us to a divan along the wall. Without a word he circled around to the other side of the room and entered a curtained doorway.

Having seated myself on the soft cushions, I undertook the difficult task of straightening out one of the most involved puzzles I had ever encountered. A short time before, Russell Joywater, an old friend of mine, had died at Cleveland back on Earth. His sole heir was his son Jack, who had not yet reached his majority. I was placed in charge of the small estate.

During the last few months of his life, Joywater had done considerable exploring in the little known region of the moon which lies far to the southeast of the lunar colonial city of Tycho, and on that hemisphere which is invisible from the earth. Joywater's death came suddenly after his return to his native planet. There was a hint foul play.

Among the personal effects was found a hastily- sketched map showing a large portion of a vast deposit of radium. There were also several samples of the ore, and no more than a hasty test was necessary to show that at was of un-precedented richness. To modern civilization radium is almost life, for it is the catalytic agent which makes atomic energy possible. At the time of which I write, there was only enough radium available to keep in service five space ships of the safe modern type.