They, or their suits at least, were android. Bipeds with arms. They showed no signs of either hostility or friendliness. They simply advanced, and a detachment of two or three moved between him and the rocket.
His mind raced. Men—or things—in suits on an airless planet meant one of two things: survivors of an elder race, driven to an artificial underground or doomed existence by the deaeration of the planet and venturing forth thus protected on its surface; or explorers, rocket visitants like himself, but from what strange world? Here in the alien void to meet yet other aliens—
He was outnumbered. And worse, he was unarmed, without even his W.B.I. weapon; and it was doubtful if the alien explorers adhered to anything like the code of Devarupa.
But they made no move to harm him. They simply encircled him. Their heavy awkward bodies moved with surprising agility—a clue that they, too, came from a world of heavier gravity. They flowed about him in utter silence, like an ameba engulfing a meal. Then they flowed off again, away from the rocket, and Gan Garrett perforce flowed in their midst.
Garrett had once seen at the museum a showing of the silent flat pictures which were the seed from which epics were to grow. This procession was like that, save that the silent movement was smooth and unjerking, and as unreal as those relics of the past. It was like a continuation of his brandy dream, without its fine exaltation.
He flowed along lightly with the alien creatures, across the barren ground and on into an equally barren but more civilized region. There were roads here, and domes. Survivors of the elder race, then, in all probability, rather than explorers. Somehow that made them more reassuring. Aliens upon the alien world, alienness squared, so to speak, would be too much.
The men under the dome wore no suits. He had thought “men” rather than “creatures” involuntarily. For they were exceedingly like men. Their costumes were strange, their hair was weirdly and—he guessed—symbolically arranged, and the tint of their skins ranged through half a dozen unearthly shades; but men they did seem to be. They talked to each other, and he wished he were adept at lip reading. The sounds looked not unlike earthly ones in formation.
Then he was led through a hall and into a small room, where only half a dozen of his captors followed. And there he decided that this was merely a continuation of the brandy dream after all.
For there, facing him, sat a woman identical in every feature with the girl who used to call them swizards.
She made a calmly efficient gesture and said something. His suited guards withdrew. Numbly, his mind aswirl, he snagged the ring of his right glove on the hook at his belt and jerked off the glove. Now with a hand capable of free manipulation he could undo his other vents.
The gesture had bared his identification bracelet, and the lovestonite plesiosaur dangling from it. His eyes had never left the woman, and now, even with his scant ability at lip reading, he could swear that she exclaimed, “The swizard! It’s you!” and he thought she added, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
When he had got his helmet off, the girl was extending to him what looked like an ordinary bottle of terrene brandy, such as he had had on the trip. “Here,” she said in perfectly familiar speech. “Hesketh said you like this. That’s why he had one smuggled into the rocket for you. He tried to smuggle in one of your popguns, but they’re impossible to get hold of. Drink it up. And leave me a drop. But you— I can’t get over it. If it wasn’t for the swizard I’d think you had a double. The nice prim academician—”
“Look,” said Gan Garrett. “This isn’t real. It can’t be.” But the brandy undeniably was. “Will you tell me what’s going on? And while you’re at it, you might please fix that screw at the back. I’m not used to these things.”
“Sure,” said the girl. Her hands were nimble. “Well,” she said from behind his back, “Hesketh told us that a W.B.I. man was being framed into a one-way trip and there wasn’t any legal hope of saving him. So we—”
“Wait a minute. Questions first. Where am I? Or before that—more important question—what’s your name?”
She came back in front of him, and he shucked himself out of the suit. “Maureen Furness. I’m in charge of public relations at Metropolis—and other things.” The skin crinkled around her blue eyes. “I’m glad it’s important.”
“Maureen . . . I like it. We can discuss the Furness part later. Now where am I?”
“On the Moon, of course. Didn’t you recognize it?”
Garrett kicked himself. The relative gravity, the absence of atmosphere, the pitted desert— “But I’ve never been here before, and what with rockets and dormitol and the vanishing of all sense of time, I—”
Maureen laughed. It was a good, clear laugh. “So you thought you were an interplanetary discoverer? Fun. And what on Earth—or off it—did you think we were:
“Things,” he confessed.
“Swell. Maw Riin, the Wicked Queen of Alpha Centauri. I love the role.”
“But the Moon,” he began. “The Moon doesn’t have a satel— Oh—” he ended lamely, remembering the familiar shape of its outlines.
“Of course. When we’re facing away from the Sun, the Earth looks like an enormous moon. Amazing effect, isn’t it?”
“And how did I get here and what are you doing and— I never heard of a one-way trip ending on the Moon before.”
“It never did. This wasn’t any accident. But the engineer who fires off the one-way rockets is one of us. He aimed it here. We not only wanted to save you from the frame-up. We thought a trained W.B.I. man might come in very useful in the next few days on
