Sprockets by Alexander Key

Author:Alexander Key
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

8

He Visits the Dark Side

For a while everyone kept rushing from one side of the saucer to the other to flatten his nose against the transparent wall and stare, first at the retreating Earth, then at the swiftly approaching Moon. As the Moon grew bigger and brighter they forgot the cloudy Earth and peered wonderingly at the great peaks and craters coming closer second by second.

“Look!” cried Jim, stuffing another plum into his mouth. “We’re flying over the Mare Imbrium. It isn’t really a sea, Sprockets. It’s only a desert that looks like a sea.”

“Yes,” said Sprockets, who was well informed about Moon matters from his learning tapes. “You are eating entirely too many plums.”

“I’m not either. Wow! Look at that big crater. It must be Archimedes.”

“It is,” said Sprockets. “And you are, too, eating too many plums.”

“No, I’m not! I like plums.” Jim put another pebble and a plum into the atomic transmuter, and dozens of new plums spilled over the transmuter’s tray. He selected one, popped it into his mouth, and bubbled: “What a place! We’re almost there, and I’m going to be the first boy ever to set foot on it!”

“Not at the piggy rate you’re going,” Sprockets declared.

“Aw, what’s a plum or two?”

“If you don’t stop eating them,” Sprockets warned, “you are going to have a terrigenous humdinger of a stomach-ache.”

“But I’ve only eaten a few!”

“You have eaten exactly sixty-nine plums in the seventeen and a half minutes since we left home,” Sprockets reminded him. “How are you going to hunt for quantic moonstones with a stomach-ache?”

“If quantic moonstones will cure purple dimness, they ought to cure a stomachache.” Jim ate three more plums, then exclaimed: “Say, do you suppose there are people on the dark side of the Moon? Why don’t you ask Ilium?”

“There are no people left on the Moon,” Sprockets told him, after a musical exchange with Ilium. “They flew away a million years ago. But Ilium says there are things.”

“Huh?” Jim dropped a plum and stared at him. “What kind of things?”

“They are dark things, because they live on the dark side. Their exact nature is unknown, but Ilium says they are closely related to some life forms of nonmatter.”

“Huh?” Jim clutched his stomach. “Life forms of nonmatter? That doesn’t sound so good.”

“I understand it is even worse to see them, especially if one has a stomach-ache.”

“Ugh.” Jim was turning a little green. Suddenly he sat down on the floor with his head against the atomic transmuter and clutched his stomach.

“Sir,” Sprockets said to the doctor, “Jim has a stomach-ache. I think it’s a plum-dinger of a plumdilly.”

“Naturally,” said the doctor. “But he’ll just have to ache. My degrees are in science, not in medicine. Bless me! It didn’t take us any time to get here—we’re over the Appenine Mountains already. Ask Ilium how fast the saucer can travel, and what makes it go.”

“It can travel much faster than light,” Sprockets translated. “And, at maximum, it approaches the speed of thought. At

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