Requiem on the Moon

"I can't stand it, Charlie," John Leonard whispered. "There's no reality left, nothing to hang on to. I'll never last the fourteen days until morning."

The sun had taken an incredibly long time to set and even after it was gone the mountains and the rims of distant craters reflected its white fire for hours. The light was scalding, its brilliance accented by the blackness of the surrounding shadows. The desolate landscape with its pitted deserts and fanged prominences was like a woodcut, all black and white with no gradations of gray in between. But now as the sunlight left the tips of the tallest peaks and true night came, it brought the softening of starlight. There were millions of stars in the jet-black sky, brilliant like nothing ever seen on earth.

Heat was leaving the moon's surface, too. A mile away a cliff, already fractured into countless facets by violent temperature changes, split again as the heat sped from the rock. A large slab sheered away and fell, rotating in a curious slow-motion manner into an unseen abyss beneath. There was no sound, but a moment later John felt the vibrations through the floor of the bubble that housed him.

"But I'll try, Charlie," John said, "if I can only keep track of who I am."

Colonel Charles Milford said nothing, being dead. Nor could he have heard John's voice even had he been living, for he lay in the airless night outside the bubble, his profile delineated by starlight, his hawk nose absurdly repeating the arched line of a distant mountain shoulder. On the moon only the dead could endure direct contact with the void.

A hundred yards beyond Charlie's body was the giant radio telescope, its great parabolic antenna twisted toward the sky like a cupped ear. On a knobby hill to its left was the optical telescope, by no means as large as many on earth, but most certainly the largest on the moon. Both telescopes were operated by remote control from within the bubble, but because they were recent installations, there were still gremlins in the control system. It was in tracking down and eliminating one of these gremlins that Colonel Charles Milford lost his life. An accident. There were certain to be accidents when men were placed in a physical environment that fought with the habits of a lifetime.

Habit had killed Charlie. He'd gone out to correct the circuit in the radio telescope and with the task finished had risen to his feet. But his leg muscles forgot that they were on the moon. Out of habit they exerted the same downward thrust that would have been required on earth, so that instead of merely rising to an upright position, Charlie had leaped into space, striking his helmet against the girder above. The blow flung him sideways and the metal lead to his oxygen tank was punctured by the sharp corner of a protruding bolthead.

Watching from the air lock--for rules forbade more than one man leaving the bubble at a time except in emergencies--John saw the accident and heard Charlie's cry for help over his radio. His own habits completed the disaster. In his urgency John forgot what he'd only barely learned--that to make haste on the moon, one must tread slowly. He tried to run as he'd have run on earth and the result was a leap that took him 15 feet into space, arms flailing and legs kicking. He twisted off balance and sprawled awkwardly on the ground, only to leap up too quickly as Charlie had done, and repeat the same floundering performance. Charlie was unconscious by the time John reached him. John carried him back to the bubble, an easy task on the moon, and then endured an agony of waiting while the pressure built up in the air lock to the point where he could strip off Charlie's space suit and try to revive him. It was too late. Charlie was dead.

For hours John worked over Charlie's body, refusing to admit defeat until the body grew chill beneath his hands and then he fell sobbing onto his bunk, stricken with guilt and a sense of irreparable loss. Charlie was dead and John was alone on the far side of the moon where he'd have to remain another two months until the ship from earth returned with a relief shift. Two months hadn't seemed long while Charlie was alive, but now it loomed ahead like eternity. There was never such a solitary confinement.

The dim landscape that stretched away through the starlight was a nightmare landscape. Nothing lived there--not a blade of grass, not even a patch of lichen. The cold emptiness of space hugged tight against the rock of the planet itself. Charlie lay out there where John had placed him, his face naked to the starlight. During the fortnight of darkness his body would be well preserved.

A nightmare. Not even the heavens were reminiscent of earth. It was February now and the great winter constellations glittered in the velvet sky. High in the south Orion stood with his club poised above the red eye of Taurus while the great dog snarled at his heels. But these familiar patterns were of dream stuff. White Sirius and red Aldebaran gleamed with a brilliance that only Venus could achieve on earth. Worse yet, the stars appeared absolutely stationary. Instead of circling in majestic order around the pole star, they remained for hour after hour with no perceptible change. It would take them a week to pass halfway across the sky.

This stability of the heavens was what made the far side of the moon a perfect site for an observatory. Here the station was completely shielded from any electromagnetic disturbances originating on earth, for earth was never visible. Whatever signals the radio telescope picked up had to come from space. And the optical telescope, rid of earth's distorting atmosphere and able to retain a focus on faint objects for days at a time, could bring into photographic resolution celestial secrets whose existence had never before been suspected.

A systematic mapping of the heavens was the task to which John Leonard and Colonel Charles Milford had been assigned, and as long as the electronic controls functioned, it was a task that one man could complete--providing he remained a man. Charlie could have done it.

"God, Charlie," John whispered, "if we could only change places. That would make it easy. I could relax then, shake off this blankness, stop drifting ..." He broke off, aware that irrationality was creeping into the very efforts he was making to fight it, and conscious also of a disgusting self-pity that made him angry at himself. Momentarily his sense of responsibility and self-possession returned.

He turned from the transparent wall and the sight of Charlie's immobile (continued on page 152)Requiem(continued from page 96) face to turn on the master switch for the radio telescope. The panel responded by blossoming with green lights. All was well. Charlie's last task had been successful and the telescope was operating smoothly again. John set the automatic scanning controls and looked out at the great parabolic antenna. It was beginning to move. Ponderously and as slowly as a sunflower turning its face toward the sun, the big dish tilted to and fro, searching for signals from space that might be interpreted as galactic collisions or a bursting nova or a war between the atoms of matter and antimatter. These long waves of energy, when interpreted as sound, filled the bubble with irregular cracklings and thin pulsing whines like the voices of demented ghouls lost beyond the edge of nothingness.

John turned the sound down to where he could barely hear it. Its lifeless quality brought back the despondency that he had briefly put aside. Everything around him was dead--a dead planet, dead space, dead insensate machines, his dead friend. He needed the reassurance of a human voice, even if it had to be his own.

So he switched on the tape cartridge and picked up the microphone. "This is Major John Leonard reporting," he said. "February twelfth, Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Today Colonel Charles Milford died as a result of an accident. His oxygen line was punctured while he was outside making repairs. I feel that I contributed to his death by failing to reach him quickly enough. However, the work is continuing and I am making precise counts and measurements at regular intervals. For example, there are exactly forty-nine rivets in each laminated arch supporting our control chamber, and since there are fifteen arches, it will be seen that there are seven hundred and thirty-five rivets in all."

John paused to consider the next item of his report, then found he'd forgotten what he'd already said. He reversed the tape, turned up the sound and played his words back to himself, relieved to discover that his voice sounded calm and factual--until he heard the part about the rivets. Then the microphone fell from his hand and he came to his feet in a blind panic. "I'm going mad," he thought, "I'm destroying everything Charlie wanted. I'm killing him twice!" He stared dazedly around the circular enclosure. Only half of the wall space was occupied by the control console. Along the rest of it were bunks, chairs, a miniaturized motion-picture projector, a tiny phonograph with plenty of recordings, Charlie's guitar ... He stared at the guitar, so familiar and yet so out of place among the other transistorized instruments. A touch of reality.

He looked out into the freezing night. Charlie must come in. Charlie was surely getting too cold. He laughed harshly when he found himself starting to leave the bubble without his suit and helmet. That would have been too simple a solution to the whole thing. "You can't quit yet," he told himself savagely. "And Charlie can't quit either."

He brought Charlie in and placed him on his bunk. "You'll think I'm out of my mind," he said, "but I want you to play your guitar." He placed several pillows beneath Charlie's head and shoulders to lift him into a position to play, then he lay the guitar in Charlie's lap. "But I'm not entirely out of my mind. Remember the tape we made two days ago? It's right here."

He stepped to the file, selected a tape and placed it on the cartridge, then turned it on. He sat down opposite Charlie, closed his eyes and waited. Suddenly Charlie was speaking.

"All right, John," Charlie said. "We might as well make an extra buck out of this show. We'll record an impromptu program right here on the spot and split the dough for syndication rights when we get back. Let's call it An Hour on the Moon with Leonard and Milford."

"You should get first billing," John's voice replied. "You outrank me."

"Too late. I've recorded it. First for some questions and answers. What do you see outside, John?"

"Nothing, Charlie. I don't see a thing."

"And will you tell the folks, John, why it is you don't see anything outside?"

"It's simple, folks. The bubble is covered by the radiation shield. It's opaque. If we took it off, the sunlight would cook us. But in another thirty-six hours the sun will be setting and the shield comes off."

"Thank you, John. Now what do you see inside?"

"I see you, Charlie. I see a batch of controls. I see your guitar and I think it's time you gave us a musical number. Charlie has a fine baritone voice, folks, and a very hot rendition of The Whiffenpoof Song. Come on, Charlie, give."

"You've talked me into it, John. And by a strange coincidence I seem to have my guitar right in my lap, all in tune, so there'll be no amateurish delay. Here we go, folks." A guitar chord sounded and then Charlie's voice broke into song.

In his chair John let his eyes open to narrow slits so that he could look across at Charlie. A chill shot along his spine at the illusion of Charlie reclined there singing and playing. It was perfect. John held his gaze, his eyes still slits, until the song was ended and he heard Charlie say, "Now we'd better have a breather while you attend to the instrument readings, John."

"Sure, Charlie," only it wasn't the tape who said it. It was John himself. He was on his feet moving toward the console before he realized it. Then he whirled back and stared at his dead friend, sweat starting from his forehead. This was no way to regain possession of himself. This was only driving him closer to the edge! He dropped back into his chair, his fists pressed against his temples.

"Stand by, folks," Charlie's cheery voice continued, "and we'll see if we can't pick up a few space robins for you. What's on the radio telescope, John?"

John straightened and looked at the cartridge, then stood up and moved toward it. Darkness was coming over him. He almost welcomed it.

"Ah, yes," said Charlie. "I believe we have a faint signal. Sounds like Galaxy MP 13."

And indeed there was a faint signal coming over, but it wasn't Galaxy MP 13. John knew the characteristic swell and fall of that energy source well. This was utterly different from any signal he'd ever heard before. It was a reedy whistle with a definite rhythmic lilt, sounding out a strange melody of half tones and quarter tones on a scale that was only about a third of an octave. He stepped toward the console, listening. The signal was fading. He threw the switch to stop the movement of the great antenna, then turned on manual control and began searching the sky, returning the antenna to the focal position that had first found the signal. It came in again, clearer and clearer as he tightened the focus.

Behind him Charlie's voice said, "There, folks, a radio signal from deep space. But don't get imaginative. Those signals originate in the furnace of creation and not in Station Pi Pi Pi belonging to the beats of Betelgeuse. No one is sending them. They just come."

"Shut up, Charlie!" John whirled and snapped off the tape, then returned to the controls. It was music he was hearing! The focus was sharp now. No accident of nature could produce a signal like this from inanimate matter. It was unlike any music ever heard on earth, nor could it possibly have originated on earth in any case. The mass of the moon blacked out everything from that quarter of the universe. This music was coming from intelligent beings somewhere in distant space. It carried a question and pleaded for an answer. "O listener," the notes seemed to say, "are you there? And if you are there, whoever and wherever you are in this vast cosmos, recognize this as the product of a seeking mind and let us know of your existence if you can!"

John turned to the controls of the optical telescope and synchronized its focus with that of the radio telescope. Using the same remote controls he opened the telescope's shutter so that it would start photographing the region of sky upon which it was focused. A television screen in front of him showed all that he could have seen through the telescope with his eye--merely a faint luminosity. He must wait for a long exposure.

Meanwhile, the music continued. He was beginning to sense its mathematical form now. The notes seemed to be added, multiplied, squared. What they meant he didn't know, but there were those on earth who would find out.

After an hour he turned on the television again to see what the telescope had photographed. Where there had been only dimness before there was now a cluster of stars, most of them mere pin points of light, but one in the exact center of the picture that showed clearly after the long exposure. Even from earth it would have appeared in a photograph made at a large observatory. John checked its position with the astronomical index and was able to identify it as Watkins 346, after the astronomer who first cataloged it. It was a yellowish star of the 19th magnitude. Its distance from earth was estimated at 1300 light-years.

That was all the index had to say about it, but John was now able to add one enormous fact. The star had at least one planet that was the abiding place of intelligent life. Were they men? That was easiest to believe. There was no reason why the forces of evolution wouldn't operate there the same as on earth and produce similar results.

John stood at the transparent wall looking skyward. With his unaided eyes the star was invisible and no telescope ever built would resolve an image of the planet. And even though men had spanned the gap to the moon, they would never bridge the awful chasm of interstellar distance to the source of the music. The music was only a question broadcast through the universe by beings who yearned to know if theirs was the only intelligence among the tiny islands drifting through space. And here on the moon the question had reached at least one of its goals. How joyful the questioners if they could know!

Then John felt a shock as he realized that the makers of the music could never possibly know. The long radio waves had left their transmitters 1300 years ago. The musicians had been the contemporaries of Charles Martel and his Franks who defeated the Arabs at the Battle of Tours. They were as dead as Charlie, yet their music still flowed.

The thought made John walk to where his dead friend still reclined on the bunk with his guitar in his lap. "Let's finish the show, Charlie," John whispered. "Let's finish it right."

He reversed the reel on the recorder and erased everything back to where Charlie said, "Ah, yes. I believe we have a faint signal." John let Charlie say this again, then turned the microphone so that it could pick up the music. He recorded for several minutes and explained the source of the sounds.

"And now, folks," he said, "Charlie is going to sing again and send an answer to the strangers at Watkins 346. Our transmitter can't be as powerful as theirs, but I imagine that during the last 1300 years their scientists may have developed some very sensitive receptors that can pick up signals even as faint as ours. And if they haven't, they'll still have another 1300 years to work at it before our broadcast gets there. So here's Charlie again with his favorite song."

John switched on the transmitter and synchronized its beam with the focus of the two telescopes. Then he backed up the recorder to Charlie's song and played it again, full volume. The people who received the song wouldn't understand the words, but they'd recognize it as the product of a living intelligence. Yes, of course--a living intelligence! For Charlie was singing to generations yet unborn to whom he'd exist for the first time in the remote future. He'd gone space traveling at the speed of light and had taken his guitar along.

The song ended. John would play it again at intervals and fill in the time between with a variety of signals. He had to keep them going a long time to be sure they'd be received. Meanwhile, he was no longer alone. Right out the window he could look off toward Watkins 346, and even though he couldn't see the sun that shone on his neighbors' houses, he had a nice picture of it. And their ancestors would serenade him through the long lunar night.

"I think we're going to make it, Charlie," he said. "I'm sure of it."