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Read Ebook: Time Trap by Long Frank Belknap Mayan Earl Illustrator
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Ebook has 115 lines and 7658 words, and 3 pages
TIME TRAP
Somebody waited for old Charley Grimes, plodding across that darkside Luna crater--somebody who couldn't exist.
Charley Grimes was a big man who had been everywhere in the Solar System and collected trophies which were as strange and shining as the stories he liked to tell.
His face was as gaunt as the jungle mask and, when he lit a pipe and smoked it, you watched to see where the smoke would drift. It wasn't hard to picture it drifting over the mountains of the moon or across the flat red plains of Mars.
We were sitting around a campfire in the Rockies just as our ancestors must have sat five hundred years in the past. We were swapping yarns to get Charley started, and watching the sun sink to rest on clouds shaped like wild mustangs when the talk drifted to the dark side of the moon.
You know what it's like on the dark side. The brittle stars shine down and the great craters loom up, but when you're flying low in a rocket ship about all you can see through the viewpane is a circle of radiance spotlighting a desolation as bleak as the Siberian Steppes.
You miss so many things you don't dare even think about the earth. If you're an escapist you cover your bunk with pictures of the lush Venusian jungles and pretend you're somewhere else. But if you're a realist you go outside and come to grips with the bleakness in one way or another.
Charley was a realist.
"So I went wandering off just to see what I could find!" Charley said.
We watched him get up, throw another log on the fire and draw his Indian blanket around himself--so tightly he looked like a great swathed mummy swaying in the glare.
"Nothing tremendous ever happens when you go exploring with all the trimmings!" Charley went on. "You've got to be devil-may-care about it. So I just made sure my helmet was screwed on tight and went striding away from the ship like a clockwork orang-outang!
"If you've been on the dark side you know that there's a sensation of bitter cold at all times--even when you're bundled up and in motion. You keep looking back and wishing you hadn't--and before you can count the stars in a square foot of sky you're at the bottom of a valley with glacial sides and the desolation is so awful you want to sit down on the nearest rock and never get up!"
Charley sat down, crossed his long legs and took a deep, slow puff on his pipe.
"I shouted--just to hear the echoes come rolling back. You can talk to yourself that way and get comfort out of it, because what you'll hear will be the giant in yourself. The valley was so big a soaring eagle would have burst its lungs trying to fly out of it.
"But don't get the idea I climbed down over an icy slope on a rope. I simply sat down and let myself slide. Smooth? There wasn't a crevice or a projection until I reached the bottom and picked myself up."
Charley nodded. "I had to lift off my helmet for a minute, to shake off the ice. That's when I shouted and heard the echoes come rolling back.
"I'd clamped the helmet back on, and was adjusting my oxygen intake when I happened to glance down at my big, square feet."
Charley chuckled.
"I've got outsized feet even when I'm as bare as a baby. But I was wearing heavy moon-shoes, and the prints I'd left in the snow were eight inches across!
"There was a straight line of prints, as big and square as my own, leading out across the valley--prints I couldn't possibly have made. I'd stumbled around a bit, of course. But I hadn't budged two yards from the base of the slope.
"The oddest thing about that single trail of prints was the fact that it started right where I was standing!
"An icy wind seemed to blow through me. On the moon you don't slide down a steep slope and land right where someone else has been standing. Not if you're in your right mind, you don't. The moon isn't that thickly populated.
"I was badly shaken, I can tell you! But I didn't sit down and brood over it. When you go into a huddle with yourself on the moon you're apt to wind up looking like an ice-carved replica of Rodin's Thinker.
"I simply shaded my helmet with my palm, to cut down the starshine, and stared across the valley. The valley was about a mile wide, and as smooth as a skating rink over most of its surface. But about halfway across a big mound of blue-gray sandstone broke the monotony by looming up on the frozen plain like an African termite's nest.
"Maybe you've seen some pictures of those big nests in travel books. They were usually photographed with seven-foot natives standing beside 'em, to make you realize what insects could accomplish. Old travel books, of course, because Africa is just one big stone highway now.
"Those nests were huge, weren't they? If my memory doesn't betray me--some of those nests were twelve feet tall.
"Uh ... Uh. But this mound would have dwarfed twenty termite nests in a valley of giants--all tumbled together and piled up in a skyward direction.
"As near as I could make out the footprints ran right up to the base of the mound, and stopped there.
"Well ... you can be sure I didn't just stand in my own prints goggling up at the stars. I followed that impossible trail--straight out into the valley as fast as I could clump.
"It took me about ten minutes to reach the mound. Once or twice I stumbled and almost went sprawling. But whenever I felt the plain slipping out from under me I shot a quick glance at the mound and its sheer massiveness steadied me.
"Close up it had a corrugated, hoary look, as if it had bubbled up out of the ground when the moon had a molten crust and been fused into a mound by fire and earthquake.
"But when I halted directly in front of it I saw that it wasn't as solid as it looked. It was riddled with little dark holes, as though a woodpecker had spent at least a month making a wreck of it. And at its base there was a wide, dark, tunnel-like opening.
"Another man might have thought of a hundred excuses for not crawling through that tunnel on his hands and knees. But when my curiosity is aroused I'm a very special kind of idiot.
"The tunnel was about twenty feet in length. I crawled along through the darkness with my atomic blaster slapping against my hip, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"When the smothering feeling you get in tunnels began to wear thin I knew that it would be safe for me to stand up. You can feel a stone wall arching above you without touching it, and I knew suddenly that I was in the clear.
"When I got to my feet and stared about me I could see the dark end of the tunnel and what appeared to be stone walls hemming me in. The walls arched away into shadows, and were faintly luminous.
"I've spent as many hours underground as there are seeds in a watermelon--so I can take a cave interior in my stride. But the mound wasn't just hollow and cavelike and filled with wavering shadows. It was--occupied!
"He was sitting on a projecting ledge in deep shadows. But the wall behind him glowed, and I could see him clearly. He was wearing a space-suit exactly like my own, but it was all shriveled up over him.
"Take a little monkey--a lemur or a spectral tarsier will do--and put him inside a cumbersome space-suit, and let his bright eyes shine out through the viewpane. Do that--and you'll have as clear a picture of him as I could give you if I rambled on for ten minutes.
"I couldn't see the little fellow's face through the pane. It was all a shadowy blue. But I could see his bright eyes, and I could tell he was little by the way the suit overlapped, and bulged out in the wrong places.
"You know how a kid of eight or ten looks when he puts on a man's suit on Hallowe'en? But this wasn't Hallowe'en, and he wasn't trying to scare anyone!
"He was too scared himself. He was shaking all over and when he saw me his eyes got even brighter, and he started to get up. He was trembling so I had to help him to his feet.
"I steadied him with one arm and lifted off the helmet with my free hand. As you know, you can stay outside a suit on the moon without getting frost-bitten for about half a minute.
"When his face came into view and his eyes looked straight into mine I was so startled that fifteen seconds were lost right at the start--before a single word could be exchanged between us. But at least I had a chance to get a good look at him.
"But I had trouble. The kid's face was just enough like my own to give me a start. But I couldn't really place it--couldn't remember where I had seen it before.
"Then the kid spoke. 'I--I thought you were Pops! But you're not! He's older! Where am I? How did I get here?'
"The voice did something to me. You get a chance to hear yourself talking a lot when you're knee-high to a grasshopper. And I had no kids of my own! But my own father had looked enough like me to be my twin brother, and if this kid thought I was his dad--
"It hit me between the eyes--and like a voice screaming at me through a blur of spinning suns!
"I was staring at myself as I had been long ago--and no tracks made by a dead man in a bog could have been more nerve-shattering.
"He wasn't even a poor little kid in a desperate plight, because you can't feel paternal about yourself! He was a tormented ghost out of the past, and for an instant I had an impulse to blame him and rail at him for returning to torture me.
"I even forgot for a moment how insane the whole thing was. He was gasping for breath, so I put the helmet back on, and gave the oxygen tube a double twist to straighten it out. But an instant before the helmet descended over his mouth he managed to stammer, 'I was up in the attic playing--'
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