Peyton considered another aphorism for possible inclusion in his testament: There is nothing so conducive to an appearance of innocence as the triumphant lack of an alibi.
On July 30, as on July 30 of every year, Louis Peyton took the 9:15 A.M. non-grav stratojet at New York and arrived in Denver at 12:30 P.M. There he lunched and took the 1:45 P.M. semi-grav bus to Hump’s Point, from which Sam Leibman took him by ancient ground car-full grav!-up the trail to the boundaries of his property. Sam Leibman gravely accepted the ten-dollar tip that he always received, touched his hat as he had done on July 30 for fifteen years.
On July 31, as on July 31 of every year, Louis Peyton returned to Hump’s Point in his non-grav aeroflitter and placed an order through the Hump’s Point general store for such supplies as he needed for the coming month. There was nothing unusual about the order. It was virtually the duplicate of previous such orders.
MacIntyre, manager of the store, checked gravely over the list, put it through to Central Warehouse, Mountain District, in Denver, and the whole of it came pushing over the mass-transference beam within the hour. Peyton loaded the supplies onto his aeroflitter with Maclntyre’s help, left his usual ten-dollar tip and returned to his house.
On August 1, at 12:01 A.M., the force field that surrounded his property was set to full power arid Peyton was isolated.
And now the pattern changed. Deliberately he had left himself eight days. In that time he slowly and meticulously destroyed just enough of his supplies to account for all of August. He used the dusting chambers which served the house as a garbage-disposal unit. They were of an advanced model capable of reducing all matter up to and including metals and silicates to an impalpable and undetectable molecular dust. The excess energy formed in the process was carried away by the mountain stream that ran through his property. It ran five degrees warmer than normal for a week.
On August 9 his aeroflitter carried him to a spot in Wyoming where Albert Cornwell and a spaceship waited. The spaceship, itself, was a weak point, of course, since there were men who had sold it; men who had transported it and helped prepare it for flight. All those men, however, led only as far as Cornwell, and Cornwell, Peyton thought – with the trace of a smile on his cold lips – would be a dead end. A very dead end.
On August 10 the spaceship, with Peyton at the controls and Cornwell – and his map – as passenger, left the surface of Earth. Its non-grav field was excellent. At full power, the ship’s weight was reduced to less than an ounce. The micropiles fed energy efficiently and noiselessly, and without flame or sound the ship rose through the atmosphere, shrank to a point, and was gone.
It was very unlikely that there would be witnesses to the flight, or that in these weak,,piping times of peace there would be a radar watch as in days of yore. In point of fact, there was none.
Two days in space; now two weeks on the Moon. Almost instinctively Peyton had allowed for those two weeks from the first. He was under no illusions as to the value·of homemade maps by non-cartographers. Useful they might be to the designer himself, who had the help of memory. To a stranger, they could be nothing more than a cryptogram.
Cornwell showed Peyton the map for the first time only after takeoff. He smiled obsequiously. ‘After all, sir, this was my only trump.’
‘Have you checked this against the lunar charts?’
‘I would scarcely know how, Mr Peyton. I depend upon you.’
Peyton stared at him coldly as he returned the map. The one certain thing upon it was Tycho Crater, the site of the buried Luna City.
In one respect, at least, astronomy was on their side. Tycho was on the daylight side of the Moon at the moment. It meant that patrol ships were less likely to be out, they themselves less likely to be observed.
Peyton brought the ship down in a riskily quick non-grav landing within the safe, cold darkness of the inner shadow of a crater. The sun was past zenith and the shadow would grow no shorter.
Cornwell drew a long face. ‘Dear, dear, Mr Peyton. We can scarcely go prospecting in the lunar day.’
‘The lunar day doesn’t last forever,’ said Peyton shortly. ‘There are about a hundred hours of sun left. We can use that time for acclimating ourselves and for working out the map.’
The answer came quickly, but it was plural. Peyton studied the lunar charts over and over, taking meticulous measurements, and trying to find the pattern of craters shown on the homemade scrawl that was the key to – what?
Finally Peyton said, ‘The crater we want could be any one of three: GC-3, GC-5, or MT-10.’
‘What do we do, Mr Peyton?’ asked Cornwell anxiously.
‘We try them all,’ said Peyton, ‘beginning with the nearest.’
The terminator passed and they were in the night shadow. After that, they spent increasing periods on the lunar surface, getting used to the eternal silence and blackness, the harsh points of the stars and the crack of light that was the Earth peeping over the rim of the crater above. They left hollow, featureless footprints in the dry dust that did not stir or change. Peyton noted them first when they climbed out of the crater into the full light of the gibbous Earth. That was on the eighth day after their arrival on the moon.
The lunar cold put a limit to how long they could remain outside their ship at any one time. Each day, however, they managed for longer. By the eleventh day after arrival they had eliminated GC-5 as the container of the Singing Bells.
By the fifteenth day, Peyton’s cold spirit had grown warm with desperation. It would have to be GC-3. MT-10 was too far away. They would not have time to reach it and explore it and still allow for a return to Earth by August 31.
On that same fifteenth day, however, despair was laid to rest forever when they discovered the Bells.
They were not beautiful. They were merely irregular masses of gray rock, as large as a double fist, vacuum-filled and feather-light in the moon’s gravity. There were two dozen of them and each one after proper polishing, could be sold for a hundred thousand dollars at least.
Carefull , in dou?le handfifls, they carried the Bells to the ship, bedded them m excelsior, and returned for more. Three times they made the trip both ways over ground that would have worn them out on Earth but which, under the Moon’s lilliputian gravity, was scarcely a barrier.
Cornwell passed the last of the Bells up to Peyton, who placed them carefully within the outer lock.
‘Keep them clear, Mr Peyton,’ he said, his radioed voice sounding harshly m the other’s ear. ‘I’m coming up.’
He crouched for the slow high leap against lunar gravity, looked up, and froze in panic. His face, clearly visible through the hard carved lusilite of his helmet, froze in a last grimace of terror. ‘No, Mr Peyton. Don’t—’
Peyton’s fist tightened on the grip of the blaster he held. It fired. There was an unbearably brilliant flash and Cornwell was a dead fragment of a man, sprawled amid remnants of a spacesuit and flecked with freezing blood.
Peyton paused to stare somberly at the dead man, but only for a second. Then he transferred the last of the Bells to their prepared containers, removed his suit, activated first the non-grav field, then the micropiles, and, potentially a million or two richer than he had been two weeks earlier, set off on the return trip to Earth.
On the twenty-ninth of August, Peyton’s ship descended silently, stem bottomward, to the spot in Wyoming from which it had taken off on August 10. The care with which Peyton had chosen the spot was not wasted. His aeroflitter was still there, drawn within the protection of an enclosing wrinkle of the rocky, tortuous countryside.
He moved the Singing Bells once again, in their containers, into the deepest recess of the wrinkle, covering them, loosely and sparsely, with earth. He returned to the ship once more to set the controls and make last adjustments. He climbed out again and two minutes later the ship’s automatics took over.
Silently hurrying, the ship bounded upward and up, veering to westward somewhat as the Earth rotated beneath it. Peyton watched, shading his narrow eyes, and at the extreme edge of vision there was a tiny gleam of light and a dot of cloud against the blue sky.
Peyton’s mouth twitched into a smile. He had judged well. With the cadmium safety-rods bent back into uselessness, the micropiles had plunged past the unit-sustaining safety level and the ship had vanished in the heat of the nuclear explosion that had followed.
‘Iwenty minutes later, he was back on his property. He was tired and his muscles ached under Earth’s gravity. He slept well.
Twelve hours later, in the earliest dawn, the police came.
The man who opened the door placed his crossed hands over his paunch and ducked his smiling head two or three times in greeting. The man who entered, H. Seton Davenport of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation, looked about uncomfortably.
