Captain Future 27 - Birthplace of Creation (May 1951) by Edmond Hamilton Page B

chamber with the glassite dome through which the sunlight poured. He peered with a scientist’s fascinated wonder at the laboratory apparatus of various sorts in that and the smaller chambers which opened off it until he came to what of all things he was looking for — the heavy locked door of a vault, sunk deep in the lunar rock.
    Garrand worked for a long time over that door. The silence was beginning to get to him and the uneasy knowledge that he was where he had no right to be. He began to listen for the voices and the steps of those who might come in and find him.
    They were far away and Garrand knew that he was safe.
    But he was not a criminal by habit and now that the challenge to his skill was past he began to feel increasingly guilty and unclean. Personal belongings accused him, an open book, a pair of boots, beds and chests and clothing. If it had been merely a laboratory he would not have minded so much — but it was also a dwelling place and he felt like a common thief.
     
    THAT feeling was forgotten when he entered the vault. There were many things in that vast lunar cavern, but Garrand had no more than a passing glance for any of them except the massive file-racks where the recorded data which related to voyages were spooled and kept.
    Under the clear light that had come on of itself with the opening of the door Garrand searched the racks, puzzling out the intricate filing system. He had taken off his helmet. His hands shook visibly and his breathing was loud and irregular but these were only secondary manifestations.
    His mind, faced with a difficult problem to solve, slipped by long habit into calculating-machine efficiency and it was not long before he found what he wanted.
    He took the spool in his two hands, as tenderly as though it were made of the delicate stuff of dreams and apt to shatter at a breath. He carried it to the large table that stood by the racks and fed the end of the tape into a reader. His face had grown pale and quite rigid except that his mouth twitched a little at the corners. He set up his last piece of equipment beside the reader, a photo-sonic recorder used to make copies of a master spool, synchronized them and then closed the switches.
    The two spools unwound, one giving, the other receiving, and Garrand remained motionless over the viewer, seeing visions beyond price and listening to the voices that spoke of cosmic secrets. When the spool was finished it was a long time before he moved. His eyes were still busy with their visions and they were strangely dull and shining all at once, shining and far away.
     
    AT LAST he shook himself and laughed, small gasping sound that might well have been a sob. He replaced the original in the rack and put the second spool into a special pouch on his belt. In the vault he left everything exactly as he had found it and when he came out again onto the Moon’s surface he reset the hidden trigger that guarded the outer door.
    As he had penetrated the defenses on the plain, so he went back through them again, in a double agony lest now, when he had the thing he had taken such incredible chances for, he should blunder and be killed. The shadows of the crater edge were crawling toward him, sharp and black. The last premonitory clicking of the detector, the last fading of the warning pip from red to white and he was safe, running toward the ship into the knife-edged darkness of the shadow.
    Long before night came, Garrand was gone, plunging across the narrow gulf to Earth. He did not know how to give vent to the wildness of his exultation, so he held it in, but it burned in his face and eyes.
    “Tomorrow,” he said aloud to himself, over and over. “Tomorrow we’ll be on our way.” He laughed, addressing someone who was not present. “You said I couldn’t do it, Herrick. You said I couldn’t!”
    Behind him the darkening face of the Moon looked after him.
     

     
    Chapter 2: Cosmic Secret
     
    FOUR came home to the Moon after many days.