Anti-Ice Read online

  I frowned. “Holden thinks you are a saboteur.”

  He shook his head, smiling thinly. “No. I am a franc-tireur.”

  “A what?”

  “A free-shooter. A new type of soldier; a soldier in a gentleman’s clothes, who fights to free his homeland with any tools available.”

  “Damn pretty sentiments,” Holden said with loathing and contempt. “And when the anti-ice is all gone—wasted by such acts as this—then what? Will you rise and murder us in our beds?”

  Bourne’s smile widened. “You are so afraid, aren’t you, English? You fear even your own mobs, who perhaps might become infected by ours. And you understand so little.

  “I heard Sir Josiah call himself an Anarchist.” He spat. “And in the same breath describe how each man will know his ‘place.’ Traveller and his like do not know the meaning of the words ‘free man.’ Was it not the industrialists who, in 1849, overturned Shaftesbury’s working conditions reforms of a few years earlier?”

  I looked blankly at Holden, who raised a hand dismissively. “He means some aberrant pieces of legislation, Ned, long since thrown out and forgotten. Shaftesbury introduced a ten-hour working day limit, for example. Conditions on the use of women in the mines. That sort of thing.”

  I was puzzled. “But industry could not function under such restraints. Could it?”

  “Of course not! And so the ‘reforms’ were discarded.”

  “But,” said Bourne, “at what cost to your British souls. Eh? Vicars, do you remember an English writer called Dickens?”

  “Who?”

  Again Holden explained, impatiently. Charles Dickens had turned out pot-boilers in the 1840s, achieving a brief popularity. Holden sighed briefly. “Do you remember Little Nell, Pocket?”

  The manservant’s face creased to a smile. “Ah, yes, sir. Everyone followed the serials then, didn’t they? And when Nell died there was scarce a dry eye in the country, I dare say.”

  “Dickens. I never heard of the fellow,” I admitted. “What happened to him?”

  “About 1850 he began a new serial,” Holden remembered. “David Copperfield. Another heavy, weepy work. It flopped completely, being utterly removed from the mood of the day. Ned, it was in that same year of 1850 that the first Light Rail, between Liverpool and Manchester, was opened! People were excited by the future—by change, enterprise, possibilities. They didn’t want to read this dreary stuff about the plight of the shiftless.”

  “So,” said Bourne, “Dickens left Britain for good. He lived and worked in America, where his social awareness had long been appreciated; he campaigned on a variety of reform issues right up to his recent death.”

  “What is your point?” I demanded coolly.

  “That your British hearts are riven by internal contradiction—the same contradiction which expelled such a good man as Dickens from your body politic, leaving you the colder and the poorer. The contradiction which allows Traveller to believe that his Anarchism can be validly founded on a heap of laboring, disenfranchised poor. A contradiction which, in the end, will tear you apart—and a contradiction which now drives you to meddle in the affairs of other nations. Do you not fear that nationalism will erupt out of France and across Europe, disrupting your Balance of Power for ever—and do your mothers still frighten you as children with tales of how ‘Boney’ will get you if you misbehave?”

  I laughed—for my own mother had done precisely that—but Bourne, excited, continued now in a harsher voice. “Ned, there is a strain of modern Englishmen called the Sons of Gascony. Are you familiar with their theories?”

  “I have heard of them,” I admitted stiffly.

  “The Sons are the distillation of your national character, in some ways; for, constantly aware of the past, they live in constant fear of it—and constantly plan revenge. After the Norman Conquest a series of forts, each twenty or so miles apart, was built across England and Wales, the purpose being to subdue the conquered English. These forts have now been absorbed into your great castles—Windsor, the London Tower. And the north of England was razed.”

  I frowned. “But that’s eight centuries ago. Who cares about such matters now?”

  Bourne laughed. “To the Sons it is as yesterday. The tides of history since, with all their flotsam of ancient victories and defeats, only add to their fears. They brood on Gascony, which was an English domain from the Conquest to the sixteenth century, when the final fragment—Calais—was lost by Mary Tudor.

  “Vicars, the Sons plan a final solution to the ancient ‘problem’ of the French. Again boats will cross the Channel; again there will be a Conquest—and again, every few miles, the terrible forts will be thrown up. But this time guns powered by anti-ice will loom from their turrets; and this time it will be the regions of France which will be ground underfoot.”

  “But that’s monstrous,” I said, stunned.

  “Ask Holden,” Bourne snapped. “Well, sir? Do you deny the existence of such a movement? And do you deny your own sympathy for its aims?”

  Holden opened his mouth to reply—but he was not given the chance; for at that moment a terrible cry emanated from the open hatchway above our heads.

  We looked at each other in horror; for it had been Traveller, our only pilot as we hurtled toward the Moon, and he had sounded in mortal distress!

  Strapped helplessly into my seat, I looked up at the open hatchway to the Bridge. A shaft of Moonlight raked down through the hatch and shone in the smoky air of the Cabin. I felt oddly resentful at this turn of events; if only, I reflected, I had been allowed to sit in this cozy Cabin and debate politics until it was all over… one way or the other.

  But, it seemed, I could no longer hide from events.

  I looked at Holden. “What do you think we should do, George?”

  Holden chewed at his nail. “I’ve no idea.”

  “But he must be in some sort of difficulty up there. Why else would he cry out so?… But in that case, wouldn’t he call for help?”

  Pocket said, “That wouldn’t be Sir Josiah’s way, sir. He’s not one to admit weakness.”

  Holden snorted. “Well, in a situation like this that’s a damned irresponsible attitude.”

  “Unless,” I breathed, “he’s been disabled completely. Perhaps he is lying up there unconscious—or even dead! In which case the Phaeton is without a pilot—”

  Only Bourne, slumped within himself, appeared unmoved by this lurid speculation.

  “Now, Ned, we shouldn’t get carried away,” Holden said, his voice tight with tension.

  “I think one of us should go up there,” I said.

  Pocket said, “I wouldn’t advise it, sir. Sir Josiah wouldn’t like—”

  “Damn his likes and dislikes. I’m talking about saving all our lives, man!”

  “Ned, think on,” Holden said nervously. “What if Traveller ignites the motors while you are between decks? You could be dashed against the bulkhead, hurt or killed. No, I think we should sit and wait.”

  I shook my head. If Holden had lost his nerve—well, he had my sympathy, and I did not remark on the fact. Instead I opened up my restraints and pushed my way out of the chair. I said, “Gentlemen, I propose to ascend. If all is well with Traveller, then the worst that will happen is that I will be the target of a few ripe insults. And if something amiss has occurred—well, perhaps I will be able to offer assistance.

  “I think you should stay strapped into your seats.” And with those words, and feeling their helpless eyes on my back, I launched myself into the air and pulled through the hatch to the Bridge.

  * * *

  The Moon hung over the Phaeton like the battered underside of the sky. The rotation of the ship had been stilled now, and the Sun lay somewhere to our left-hand side, so that the shadows of the lunar features were long and sharp, like splashes of ink over a glowing white surface. The ragged peaks and crater rims slid from right to left past the Bridge windows, showing that we were already traveling close around the curve of t
his world, toward its night side.

  I stared in fascination. I knew that no man, even armed with the mightiest telescope on Earth, had before seen the sister world in such dazzling detail.

  I observed with interest how the larger craters, which looked from this angle more like circular walled encampments, appeared to contain a central peak, while the smaller craters were smooth within; and I saw too how craters overlaid craters, so that it was as if the Moon had been bombarded by a hail of meteors or other objects not once, in some wild remote past of the Solar System, but many times, again and again. And the sharpness of the smaller craters’ rims attested to their newness, implying that this bombardment continued even in the present day.

  Now a new feature hove into view, a mountainous ridge very like a crater wall—except that, in this world of circles, this wall was virtually straight, traveling from top to bottom of our window. The area beyond the wall appeared oddly free of craters, although the ground was very broken up. I pushed myself away from the deck and floated up to the nose of the Bridge dome. As I looked across the surface of the Moon and deeper into the dark side, I could make out no limit to this strange craterless region. The delimiting wall was now receding behind the ship, and I was startled to see that the wall was not straight after all: it curved inwards around the shattered region in a mighty sweep, and I realized of a sudden that we were flying over the interior of an immense crater; so immense indeed that the curve of its walls almost dwarfed the curve of the satellite itself!

  Now I knew that we must have reached the side of the Moon hidden from Earth, for this monstrous crater must cover most of a hemisphere, overshadowing by far the great walled plains of the Earth- facing side such as Copernicus and Ptolemaeus.

  Soon the boundary wall of the giant crater had receded from view behind the curve of the planet, but the far wall was still nowhere to be seen, and I peered up in wonder at hundreds of square miles of desolation—desolation, that is, even by lunar standards.

  There was a soft groan behind me. I turned in the air, suddenly mindful of my mission. Poor Traveller lay strapped to his throne-couch with his face buried in his huge hands; his stovepipe hat floated in the air beside him, and wisps of white hair orbited his cranium. A fat notebook was strapped, open, to his right thigh; into this, I knew, he had over the last few days been entering painstaking details of the schedule—the maneuvers, the rocket bursts—which would deliver us safely to the surface.

  I did a graceful somersault, kicked against the windows, and settled gently to the deck at Traveller’s side. I took his arm and shook it urgently. “Sir Josiah, what is troubling you?”

  He lifted his face from his hands. His expression was a mixture of anger and despair, and his eyes were pinpoints of blue in Moon shadows. “Ned, we are done for. Done for! To have come so far, to have endured so much, only to be betrayed by the folly of that pompous Danish idiot!”

  “…To which Dane do you refer?” I asked cautiously.

  “Hansen, of course, and his absurd breakfast-egg theory of the lunar shape. Look at it!” He shook a fist at the shattered landscape which loomed over us. “It’s as clear as day that the Moon is a perfect sphere after all, that the mass must be uniformly distributed, that the backside of the wretched world must be as devoid of air as the face!”

  I stared up at the lunar desolation. There were sparkles and glints deep in the shadow of the fragments of the shattered land, showing the possibility of granite, perhaps, or quartz. Traveller’s sudden loss of spirit, I decided, stemmed not from despair or fear, but from a feeling of betrayal—by the Moon itself, by the Creator for having the temerity to design a world so unsuited to Traveller’s purposes, and even by this poor chap Hansen, who, of the three, was surely the most blameless!

  Traveller lay back in his couch and stared up at the Moon, muttering.

  I was bewildered. Even if the lunar landing was a fruitless exercise, I reflected, we had no choice but to continue with it; and only Traveller could bring our journey to a successful conclusion. But it was clear that Traveller had retreated into himself, and was, at this moment, quite incapable of piloting the craft.

  I had to do something, or we should all be killed after all.

  With some hesitation I reached out and touched his arm. “Sir Josiah, not long ago you accused me of lacking imagination. Now I feel obliged to identify the same fault in yourself. Was it not you who explained that, come success or failure, life or death, we should be in for some terrific fun?”

  His face was heavily scored by Moon shadows, and for the first time since I had met him he looked his true age. He said quietly, “I had banked on Hansen’s crackpot theories, Ned. With the banishment of my hopes of finding water, I find little fun in the prospect of a certain death.”

  He sounded old, frail, frightened and surprisingly vulnerable; I felt privileged to see behind the bluff mask to the true man. But at this moment I needed the old Traveller, the wild, the supremely confident, the arrogant!

  I pointed above my head. “Then, sir, at least you have surely not lost your wonder! Look at that crater floor above us. We have discovered the mightiest feature on the Moon—a fitting monument to your achievements—and, if our story is ever told by future generations, they shall surely name it after the great Josiah Traveller!”

  He looked vaguely interested at that, and he raised his beak of a platinum nose to the silver landscape. “Traveller Crater. Perhaps. No doubt some bastardized Latin version will be used.”

  “And,” I said, “think of the impact which must have caused such a monstrous scar. It must have come close to splitting the damn Moon in two.”

  He stroked his chin and inspected the huge crater with an appraising eye. “And yet it is scarcely possible to envisage a meteorite impact of such a magnitude… No, Ned; I suspect the explanation for that vast feature is still more exotic.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Anti-ice! Ned, if that remarkable compound has been discovered on the surface of the Earth, what is to stop it being available on other planets and satellites?

  “I envisage a comet-like body falling in to the Solar System, perhaps from the stars, largely or wholly composed of anti-ice. As the Sun’s heat touches it I imagine little pockets of the ice exploding, and the wretched body being twisted and spun this way and that.

  “At last, though, blazing and glowing, it falls close to the Earth—only to find the inert form of Earth’s patient companion in its way.

  “The detonation is astounding—as you say, almost enough to split the Moon in two. Crater walls roll across the tortured surface like waves across a sea. And one must imagine millions of tons of pulverized lunar rock and dust being hurled into space—with fragments of the original anti-ice comet embedded within it. And so, perhaps, some fragments reached even the surface of the Earth itself.”

  I stared up at that desolate craterscape and shivered, imagining it superimposed on a map of Europe. “Then we must be grateful to the Moon that the comet never reached Earth, Sir Josiah.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And do you suppose the wretched Professor Hansen could have been right after all? Could there have been an air-covered area of the Moon—perhaps inhabited, but now laid waste by the anti-ice explosion?”

  He shook his head, a little wistfully. “No, lad; I fear the good Dane was wrong all the way; for the geometry of the Moon itself does not support his egg-shape theory. Our chances of finding the water we need to save our lives remain negligible.”

  In desperation I turned my face up to the darkling landscape over which we flew, inverted. So my diplomatic skills had succeeded in bringing Traveller out of his funk—but not to the extent that he might lift a finger to save our lives.

  …And then I noticed once more, twinkling like a hundred Bethlehem stars, bright, glassy sparkles amid the tumbled lunar mountains. I cried out and pointed. “Traveller! Before you sink completely into despair, look above you. What do you see, shining in the last of the Sun�
��s rays?”

  Again he rubbed his chin, but he looked closely. “It could be nothing, lad,” he said gently. “Outcroppings of quartz or feldspar—”

  “But it could be water, frozen pools of it shining in the sunlight!”

  He turned to me almost kindly, and I sensed he was about to launch into an extended lecture on the source of my latest misapprehension—and then, like the reappearance of the Sun from a cloudbank, his face lit up with determination. “By God, Ned, you could be right. Who knows? And it’s certain we will never find out if we let ourselves fall helplessly to that tumbled surface. Enough of this! We have a world to conquer.” And he grabbed his stovepipe hat out of the air and screwed it down over his cranium.

  I was filled with elation. I said, “Will you resume the plan you have written in your little book?”

  He looked down at the notebook still tied to his knee. “What, this? I have moped my way into too great a deviance from the schedule, I fear.” He tore the book from his knee and hurled it, spinning, into the shadows of the Bridge. “It is too late for calculation. Now we must pilot the Phaeton as she was meant to be piloted—with our hands, our minds, our eyes. Hold on, Ned!”

  And he hauled back his levers; the anti-ice rockets roared, and I was hurled bodily to the deck.

  The next several minutes were a nightmarish blur. Traveller kept the rockets shouting, and the deck of the Bridge—an uneven series of riveted plates—pressed into my face and chest. I could do nothing but cling to whatever purchase I could find—like the iron pillars which supported Traveller’s couch—and reflect that it was typical of Traveller to neglect utterly the well-being of those he was trying to save. Surely a delay of a few seconds to allow me to regain my seat in the Cabin would not have mattered one way or the other.

  After some minutes the quality of the Moonlight seemed to change. The shadow of my head shifted and lengthened across the deck; and at last I was plunged into a darkness broken only by the dim glow of Traveller’s Ruhmkorff coils. I surmised that the ship had been turned around, so that our nose now pointed away from the Moon.