The Moon Mistress — Raymond Z. Gallun

Vast riches were at stake in that made chase across the moons desolate surface


excerpt

For my own part I felt as if I had suddenly dis¬covered a sharp sword suspended above me by a thread. I half believed that entering this forbidden precinct of La Terre Rouge aroused similar feelings even in old Parks, who was a veteran tramp of the lunar globe.


The room was fairly large. From our position beside the low-arched entrance we could get an excellent view of it. Scattered about the multi colored stone flagging its oval floor were the low tables about each richly carved and upholstered couches were set. Almost every couch had an occupant -- some a man and some a woman.


Both sexes were represented in about equal numbers. The patrons sucked smoke from long, thin-stemmed pipes while, with languid, listless movement, as though they lingered on the borderline of dreamland, they played with tetrahedron-formed dice. The several lumps which hung from the barbarically-tooled ceiling cast their subdued light down through a reek of muddy, greenish vapor. The odor sickened me with its overpowering sweetness, and yet it caused tiny bells of pleasure to tinkle inside my head. From far above, through a narrow slit of a window, a small segment of the green earth was visible against the black sky.


But these impressions were not of prime importance to us now. Anxiously we scanned each of the half-drugged occupants of the room, searching for one whom we felt certain should be somewhere within this notorious dive of the moon's great radium city.


“He is not here,” Parks told me quietly after several moments.


I glanced at him. His face was calm and impassive as ever. It was a hard, square face, seamed by countless deep wrinkles that were in marked contrast with the coal-blackness of his close-cropped hair, that started low down on his forehead. A livid mottled scar covered almost his entire left cheek. A leak in a space suit somewhere out on the lunar plains had caused that. I had guessed.


His dingy grey suit, wrinkled and unpressed bulged sloppily from his squat bear-like body. Queer, rough, old intellectual Parks was talkative and laconic by turns.In the two days that I had known him, I had found some slight reason to doubt the honesty of his motives, and yet I had already come to like him.


I was painfully conscious that the suspicious Oriental eyes of several of the patrons were on us. But it was easy to see that those worthies were too far gone with drugs to pay much real attention to us.


"We've got to find the kid!" I whispered with hoarse emphasis.  "It isn't only his neck. It's the secret that they lured him here to get . . . the mine . . . radium . . ."


Parks waved a horny hand toward me in a silencing gesture.  "I know all that better than you do," he said. "And we'll find him if we can."


A thin-limbed attendant clad in a loin cloth and turban approached us and asked with stiff politeness if the Sahibs desired pipes. His speech betrayed his Indian ancestry.


"We have important business now," Parks told him. "Here is one who seeks admittance to the cult of Mu-Lo. We would see the Master."


My companion handed the Indian the tiny golden figure of a repulsive insect-like creature, which had been the pass that had admitted us to this inner chamber where few were permitted to enter.  The man took it and scrutinized it closely, searching for the minute mark which verified its authenticity. Satisfied, he returned it, and motioned us to a divan along the wall. Without a word he circled around to the other side of the room and entered a curtained doorway.