First On The Moon - free ebook by Jeff Sutton

FIRST on the MOON

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SUICIDE RACE TO LUNA

The four men had been scrutinized, watched, investigated, and intensively trained for more than a year. They were the best men to be found for that first, all-important flight to the Moon—the pioneer manned rocket that would give either the East or the West control over the Earth. Yet when the race started, Adam Crag found that he had a saboteur among his crew ... a traitor! Such a man could give the Reds possession of Luna, and thereby dominate the world it circled. Any one of the other three c

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PROLOGUE

One of the rockets was silver; three were ashen gray. Each nested in a different spot on the great Western Desert. All were long, tapered, sisters except for color. In a way they represented the first, and last, of an era, with exotic propellants, a high mass ratio and three-stage design. Yet they were not quite alike. One of the sisters had within her the artifacts the human kind needed for life—a space cabin high in the nose. The remaining sisters were drones, beasts of burden, but beasts whic

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CHAPTER I

The room was like a prison—at least to Adam Crag. It was a square with a narrow bunk, a battered desk, two straight-back chairs and little else. Its one small window overlooked the myriad quonsets and buildings of Burning Sands Base from the second floor of a nearly empty dormitory. There was a sentry at the front of the building, another at the rear. Silent alert men who never spoke to Crag—seldom acknowledged his movements to and from the building—yet never let a stranger approach the weathere

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CHAPTER 2

Crag woke with a start, sensing he was not alone. The sound came again—a key being fitted into a lock. He started from bed as the door swung open. "Easy. It's me—Gotch." Crag relaxed. A square solid figure took form. "Don't turn on the light." "Okay. What gives?" "One moment." Gotch turned back toward the door and beckoned. Another figure glided into the room—a shadow in the dim light. Crag caught the glint of a uniform. Air Force officer, he thought. Gotch said crisply; "Out of bed." He climbed

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CHAPTER 3

The great red sun was just breaking over the desert horizon when Crag got his last good look at earth. Its rays slanted upward, shadows fled from the sage; the obsidian sky with its strewn diamonds became slate gray and, in moments, a pale washed blue. Daybreak over the desert became a thunder of light. Tiny ants had removed the last of the metal framework encompassing the rocket. Other ants were visible making last minute cheeks. He returned his attention to the space cabin. Despite long months

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CHAPTER 4

The communicator came to life with data on Pickering. The satelloid was moving higher, faster than the Aztec, riding the rim of the exosphere where the atmosphere is indistinguishable from absolute space. Crag felt thankful he hadn't been tabbed for the job. The satelloid was a fragile thing compared to the Aztec—a moth compared to a hawk. It was a relative handful of light metals and delicate electronic components, yet it moved at frightful speeds over the course the armchair astronauts had dub

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CHAPTER 5

"Alpine wants a private confab," Prochaska said. His voice was ominous. "Probably another stinker." "Again?" Crag plugged in his ear insert microphone thinking he wasn't going to like what he'd hear. Just when things had started looking smooth too. He cut Prochaska out of the system and acknowledged. "Crag?" Gotch's voice was brittle, hard. He looked sideways at Prochaska, who was studiously examining one of the instruments, trying to give him the privacy demanded. He shifted his head. Larkwell

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CHAPTER 6

The U. S. Navy's Space Scan Radar Station No. 5 picked up the new rocket before it was fairly into space. It clung to it with an electromagnetic train, bleeding it of data. The information was fed into computers, digested, analyzed and transferred to Alpine Base, and thence telemetered to the Aztec where it appeared as a pip on the analog display. The grid had automatically adjusted to a 500-mile scale with the positions of the intruder and Aztec separated by almost the width of the instrument f

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CHAPTER 7

If Colonel Michael Gotch were worried, he didn't show it. He puffed complacently on his black briar pipe watching and listening to the leathery-faced man across from him. His visitor was angular, about sixty, with gray-black hair and hard-squinted eyes. A livid scar bit deep into his forehead; his mouth was a cold thin slash in his face. He wore the uniform of a Major General in the United States Air Force. The uniform did not denote the fact that its wearer was M.I.—Military Intelligence. His n

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CHAPTER 8

At a precise point in space spelled out by the Alpine computers Crag applied the first braking rockets. He realized that the act had been an immediate tip-off to the occupants of the other rocket. No matter, he thought. Sooner or later they had to discover it was the drone they had destroyed. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, their headlong flight was slowed. He nursed the rockets with care. There was no fuel to spare, no energy to waste, no room for error. Everything had been worked out long before

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CHAPTER 9

There is no dawn on the moon, no dusk, no atmosphere to catch and spread the light of the sun. When the lunar night ends—a night two earth weeks long—the sun simply pops over the horizon, bringing its intolerable heat. But the sky remains black—black and sprinkled with stars agleam with a light unknown on earth. At night the temperature is 250 degrees below zero; by day it is the heat of boiling water. Yet the sun is but an intense circle of white aloft in a nigrescent sky. It was a world such a

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CHAPTER 10

"Gordon Nagel?" The professor turned the name over in his mind. "Yes, I believe I recall him. Let's see, that would have been about...." He paused, looking thoughtfully into space. The agent said, "Graduated in '55. One of your honor students." "Ah, yes, how could I have forgotten?" The Professor folded his hands across his plump stomach and settled back in his chair. "I seem to recall him as sort of an intense, nervous type," he said at last. "Sort of withdrawn but, as you mentioned, quite bril

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CHAPTER 11

"Commander!" Crag came to with a start Prochaska was leaning over him. Urgency was written across his face. "Come quick!" The Chief stepped back and motioned with his head toward the instrument corner. Crag sprang to his feet with a sense of alarm. Richter and Larkwell were still asleep. He glanced at the master chrono, 0610, and followed him into the electronics corner. Nagel was standing by the scope, a frightened look on his face. "What's up?" "Nagel woke me at six. I came in to get ready for

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CHAPTER 12

"Max Prochaska was a real well-liked boy," Mrs. Arthur Bingham said firmly, "friendly with everyone in town. Of course, Vista was just a small place then," she added reminiscently. "Not like now, especially since the helicopter factory moved in. I do declare, a soul wouldn't recognize the place any longer, with all the housing tracts and the new supermarket—" "Certainly," the agent interjected, "but about Max Prochaska." "Yes, of course." Mrs. Bingham bit her lip reflectively. "My husband always

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CHAPTER 13

"You're in trouble." Gotch spoke like a man carefully choosing his words. "Intelligence informs us that another rocket's been fired from east of the Caspian. BuNav's got a track on it." Crag waited. "There are two possibilities," Gotch continued. "The first and most logical assumption is that it's manned. We surmise that from the fact that their first manned rocket was successful—that is, as far as reaching the moon is concerned. The assumption is further borne out by its trajectory and rate of

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CHAPTER 14

"Adam Crag was not a God-fearing man," the minister stated. His tone implied that Crag had been just the opposite. "Not a bit like his parents. The best family guidance in the world, yet he quit Sunday school almost before he got started. I doubt that he's ever been to church since." He looked archly at the agent. "Perhaps a godless world like the moon is just retribution." A garage mechanic, a junk dealer and the proprietor of a tool shop had a lot to say about Adam Crag. So did the owner of a

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CHAPTER 15

Crag sighted the Red Dog party immediately—three figures plodding in single file toward Drone Baker. He saw with satisfaction that they had discarded the rocket launcher. He took that as a sign they believed the Aztec crew dead. He found a halfway comfortable sitting position, and settled back to await developments. The distant figures moved across the plain with maddening slowness. From time to time he returned his eyes to the enemy rocket. It showed no signs of life. Once he debated taking the

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CHAPTER 16

Crag studied the scene. He lay at one end of the great crescent of rock forming Backbone Ridge, the other end of which ended about half a mile from Red Dog. The floor of the crater between the rocket and the nearest rock formations was fairly level and unbroken. The arced formation itself was a veritable jungle of rocks of every type—gnarled, twisted rock that hugged the ground, jutting black pinnacles piercing the sky, bizarre bubble formations which appeared like weird ebony eskimo cities, and

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CHAPTER 17

"Martin Larkwell was a good boy," the superintendent said reminiscently, "and of course we're highly pleased he's made his mark in the world." He looked at the agent and beamed. "Or should I say the moon?" The agent smiled dutifully. "Young Martin was particularly good with his hands. Not that he wasn't smart," he added hurriedly. "He was very bright, in fact, but he was fortunate in that he coupled it with an almost uncanny knack of using his hands." The superintendent rambled at length. The ag

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CHAPTER 18

Colonel Michael Gotch looked at the agent across the narrow expanse of his battered desk, then his eyes fell again to the dockets. Four dockets, four small sheaves of paper, each the capsuled story of a man's life. The names on the dockets were literally burned into his mind: Adam Philip Crag, Martin LeRoy Larkwell, Gordon Wells Nagel, Max Edward Prochaska. Four names, four men, four separate egos who, by the magic of man, had been transported to a bleak haven on another world. Four men whose ta

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CHAPTER 19

The earth was no longer a round full ball. It was a gibbous mass of milk-white light, humpbacked, a twisted giant in the sky whose reflected radiance swept the lunar night and dimmed even the brightest of the stars. Its beacon swept out through space, falling in Crater Arzachel with a soft creamy sheen, outlining the structures of the plain with its dim glow. Larkwell and Nagel had finished the airlock. The rocket had been tested and, despite a few minute leaks they had failed to locate, the spa

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CHAPTER 20

The day of the warhead arrived. The earth was a thin crescent in the sky whose light no longer paled the stars. They gleamed, hard and brittle against the purple-black of space, the reds and yellows and brilliant hot blues of suns lying at unimaginable distances in the vast box of the universe. Night still gripped Crater Arzachel with its intolerable cold, but a zodiacal light in the sky whispered of a lunar dawn to come. Measured against the incalculable scale of space distances the rocket had

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SCIENCE-FICTION AT ITS BEST Luna Was The Goal, Earth The Prize

It was a top secret, and yet the enemy knew. They knew that the Americans were about to send a manned rocket to the moon and thereby claim it for Old Glory. They knew also that whoever held the moon would command the Earth ... and they were determined to stop us at all costs! When assassination and sabotage failed to stop the take-off, they'd have to use even more drastic measures. There might be an H-bomb loaded rocket missile, there could be a Red spaceship with a suicide crew, and there was a

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