And without another word, Ali crouched and exploded up into the air. He went up ten, fifteen… twenty feet, sailing in a stupendous arc before he glided back down once again.
Scotty stared. In all his time on the Moon, he had never really done that. He had been so worried about not looking like a stupid tourist or a greenhorn in front of his wife or their coworkers. Where was the simple joy!
How had he cheated himself?
When hyper-competitive, all-business Angelique Chan leaped into the air, sailing like a ballet dancer in slow motion, higher and farther than any Bolshoi prima ballerina had ever dreamed of…
Scotty threw caution to the wind, gathered himself and jumped.
The ground receded below him, a half-dozen gamers staring up at him in stunned surprise… and then suddenly the air was filled with bouncing, bounding gamers, sheer joy in stupendously magnified motion.
Lunies didn’t do this because there was never enough room. Somersaults, handsprings, flying kicks and jumps that made world-class martial artists out of neophytes, Olympic gymnasts from couch potatoes.
Even Asako was gunning her capsule around like a little go-cart, tearing up plants and dirt as she spun and raced about.
The redheaded guide was airborne, too.
And then Angelique screamed: “Where the hell is our sphere?”
In a moment, Scotty’s joy bled out through his fingers and toes, and a sick sinking feeling hit him like a fist in the belly.
It took him three bounces to slow himself down to a walk, and then stand still. All about him, up to his knees, were the red and pink flowers, covering a plain as far as the eye could see.
No sphere. The other gamers were bouncing to a halt as well, and now the nine of them stood in a rough circle, scratching their heads.
“Damn,” Wayne said. “I’d swear it was right over there, to the left. South?”
“I have no idea. What in the world…?”
Angelique closed her eyes, her expression tight with disgust. “We were so busy jumping for joy that we lost track of where we were,” she said. “We lost the sphere. Just like in the original story. Dammit!” She smacked her fist into her palm. “I should have known.”
“What do we do?” Ali asked. “Spread out? Search?”
She shook her head. “We won’t find it. They didn’t.”
Scotty searched his memory, trying to find a wisp of the Wells book, but couldn’t. He unearthed a vague memory of a BBC production, and one of an old herky-jerky stop-motion movie-not one of Harryhausen’s best-but those traces couldn’t be trusted. Could anything? Dammit, why hadn’t he kept up his reading more faithfully?
“What do we do?” Scotty asked.
Angelique held up her hand. “Wait. What’s that sound?”
For a moment he wasn’t sure what the Lore Master was talking about. Her slender, aristocratic Chinese face was intense, momentarily resembled a painting he once saw in the Louvre of a Buddhist nun in prayer.
The air was thin, and slightly cool. There, faintly, the sound of a weak wind fluttering its way through the flowers. What was that? The ground shook… not a single thump like something heavy tumbling down, but almost like a drum stroke.
What?
“I hear it,” Mickey said, and Maud nodded in synchrony.
And now there was more than that thump. A very distant insectile sound, like bees buzzing, or crickets chirping.
Growing closer by the moment. “It might be best,” Angelique said, “if we hide.”
That suggestion required no show of hands. They dove into the flowers, Scotty making sure that Ali got down safely before he hid himself. Chin in the lunar soil, he had to chuckle to himself: Whatever came next, they were in just about the safest place in the entire solar system. If ever he had been paid good money to take a vacation, this was it.
Whatever came next, he was determined to enjoy it.
16
0827 hours
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The ground beneath Wayne shook as with the strokes of a giant hammer, as regularly as clockwork.
The sun was nearing the western horizon. How could they not have noticed that before? The sound seemed to originate not merely beneath them, but off to what Wayne took to be the north. There were jagged mountains in that direction, and he thought that they would be easy to recognize, and that was as good a reason to choose an orientation as any.
They’d already lost the sphere… he could imagine that Xavier had just waited until they were busy bounding, and then distorted the visual field to “disappear” the sphere, a simple magician’s trick aided by their dizziness and disorientation.
Damn. It had happened in the BBC version, as well as the Harryhausen film. Take it as part of the script.
Now the ground itself seemed to be protesting their presence.
Angelique Chan raised her arm, poking it up from under the tangled flowers to Wayne’s left. “Head toward the sound,” she said, and they started to crawl.
Mickey whispered, “I haven’t been able to get down on all fours like this for donkey’s years. This lunar gravity is great for my back!”
Maud chuckled, and then went back to serious crawling.
Mickey was right, of course. Wayne barely felt any pressure on his palms or wrists at all. The slightest flexion of his wrist sent his hands and knees springing up off the ground, thumping back down so lightly it was a joke.
The plants were waxy to the touch. A closer inspection revealed that they had little or no scent, and rooted into some kind of web just beneath the dirt. Were they all part of one life-form, like the mycelial mass beneath a clutch of mushrooms?
Or were they perhaps just manufactured en masse and rolled out like an artificial lawn by the wizards of Dream Park?
He giggled to himself, and concentrated on what he was doing.
Boom… boom… boom…
The ground beneath them trembled. The gigantic circular plate beneath their feet first revolved, then began to slide away.
Gamers crawled backward away from the opening as fast as they could, as the lid retracted like the lens of a crocodile’s eye.
They could peer down into the depths, from which a deeper boom… boom… boom rang hollowly, like Mjollnir striking the anvil of heaven.
All right. Dammit, he should have read the original book. Were they supposed to go down? Was something coming up after them? In the movie the Moon was hollow, all caverns. Was it in the book? And if so, would Xavier confine himself to canon?
He crawled up to the edge and looked down. The tunnel dropped away shallowly, not sharply, a ramp leading up to the surface rather than a vertical mineshaft. The edge of the doorway was about three feet thick, with a series of dull glowing lights pulsing and moaning around the edge. Their low, bone-rattling intensity made his fillings ache.
“What is that sound?” Angelique asked. She was squinting, but seemed to be thinking hard. “Alarm? Alert?”
Before he could answer her, they both received an answer, in the form of a lowing groan behind them.
