Page:Weird Tales v33n05 (1939-05).djvu/21

sure from within the planet, out—out into space itself. They are iridescent, shimmering, mother-of-pearl—no, they are like the shifting glimmer that inhabits the moonstone. They seem to reflect the changes in the shifting of sound in the mighty diapason of the organ-chord of the air rushing up the crater shaft from the very center of the moon.

We have spoken together, clinging to each other here just where the onward sweep of air might still be resisted. From the terrific force of that upward current we believe it rushes out into space with sufficient velocity to bear our bodies (it may be and we pray) beyond the reach of the moon's gravity-pull. To wander out on the airless surface of the moon—that was merely suicide, and hardly worth while. Le Noir himself suggested it; I think he would have captured us and dragged us back; perhaps not even dead—perhaps there is, after all, enough air out there to sustain existence for a little while. In any case he would have brought us back—our bodies, if we died there. And there would be the fate of Galen, whose corpse we saw in the horrible jaws of the tittering monster. . . .

No. This way, ahead, lies hope—hope of a death that is clean. We have prayed that our surmise may be right. We hope only for this—escape, clasped in each other's arms, into the utterly lifeless void between the planets—there to be for ever unknown, unguessed, undreamed of—frozen meteors that were a man and woman, locked together. . . .

I am about to wrap the twine which I still carry, and which is very strong, about us, hoping that it will help us cling together as die mighty current sweeps us into space. We want to stay together, as we are going.

Valerie suggests that I fling my finely written and now completed manuscript ahead of us, corked in the flat gin bottle which I have all this time carried, with the ball of twine. No reason; only to watch its going, as a little preliminary before we ourselves go.

The ball of twine! Last time I used it, it was to save Lisa's life, by tying it to a limpet and forcing the limpet down her throat, after she had swallowed poison; I pulled the twine and saved her life—and now she is back there in the space-ship, as she preferred—she and Gibby half believing in Le Noir because it is the easiest thing to do. . . .

Like Valerie, I am sorrier for them than for us. I think we have found a clean death—and there have been other lovers commemorated in the sky as constellations. We will not be exactly that—and no one will know of our fate—but it is not an ignoble one.

And so I will proceed to seal this within the bottle, and hurl it into the outward-bound cyclone—and locked in each other's arms, we will walk forward until it takes us. . . .

Speculation will be rife concerning the foregoing document. Michael Sydney's is too prominent a name to be discredited in the world of letters, whatever be the material appended to it. Yet the foregoing is of a nature utterly unparalleled, even in the world of imaginative fiction, to which many will wish to consign this against the author's express denial that it is anything but the truth—Sydney's graphic account of the deadly space-sickness from gravity shifting; his description of a world within a hollow moon; his account of an upward geyser of air escaping into space with such force that human bodies are borne by it beyond the reach of the moon's gravity attraction—and, to link Sydney's foregoing story