The Moon Trogs - Part 3
As they went, they chatted to the moon trogs, who now seemed quite friendly and conversational, and the humanoids told them something about themselves and their reason for being there, in the corridor, where they’d found the dehydrated Tharians.
They were a repair party who regularly patrolled the tunnels and caverns around their homelands, maintaining and repairing the airlocks that safeguarded the entire moon against catastrophic decompression. All airlocks were connected to a central monitoring room by lengths of optical fibre that ran up to the surface. Normally, sunlight entering the optical fibre on the surface was prevented from reaching its other end in the monitoring room by a break in the fibre in the airlock door, but if a section of corridor became decompressed, the raising of the red flag in the airlock’s window brought the two ends of the broken fibre together, allowing sunlight to travel along its entire length. A moon trog in the monitoring room would then see one of the thousands of ends of optical fibre light up and would know that a section of corridor had become decompressed, whereupon a repair crew would be sent to investigate.
“That worm creature that attacked us!” said Diana in delight. “I knew it had to be serving a higher purpose. You see how well the Gods are looking after us?”
“You must mean the bore worm,” said Ban-Chin. “Those creatures are the greatest threat to our existence here. We hunt them mercilessly, but there are always more. It is impossible to count the number of people who have been killed when they decompress one of our living areas.”
“How come the city hasn’t been affected by them?” asked Thomas. “They’ve destroyed most of their airlocks. A single one of those creatures could decompress the whole city.”
“The Lifegiver, the magical artifact that provides the city’s food, air and gravity, also generates a field of energy that the worms cannot stand,” explained the moon trog. “A sort of worm repellent, if you like. No worm will approach the city of its own free will.”
“Handy,” mused Thomas thoughtfully. “Pity your living areas don’t have the same kind of protection.”
“If a senior wizard examined the Lifegiver, he might find a way to duplicate the repelling spells,” suggested Lirenna.
“You could do that?” asked Ban-Chin hopefully.
“Not us,” replied the demi shae. “We’re only very junior wizards. Very junior indeed. Those who taught us probably could, though, if they had a chance to study the problem.”
“You must mention it to the Dallak when you see them,” said the moon trog. “If there’s even a possibility of ending the worm threat we must seize it with all four hands.”
Great! thought Thomas hopefully. Now they’ve got an interest in getting us safely back home. At long last we’re among friends. They all cheered up considerably after that, and the Tharians began to feel relaxed and reasonably happy for the first time since coming to the smallest moon.
The moon trogs led them along tunnels and through caverns and back up towards the surface, explaining, when Thomas asked, that all the routes downwards led nowhere in this part of Kronos. Their main population centres were indeed deep underground, about halfway to the centre of Kronos, but to get there they first had to travel several miles close to the surface to where the vertical shafts were. The vertical shafts they’d passed so far led only to the deep mines, where the iron ore was more densely concentrated, and those caverns were dark, empty and lifeless.
Shaun, who’d been the one keenest on the idea of going down, blushed in embarrassment and apologised to the others, who laughed and told him not to worry about it.
They were going up one particularly steep tunnel when it opened out into a tunnel larger than any they’d seen before. It was all of thirty feet wide with a flat floor, upright walls and a gently arching ceiling with a triple row of lights that were just beginning to shine again as Kronos’s orbit brought the surface above them back into sunlight. The tunnel ran as straight as a ruler for two hundred yards in both directions before being blocked by walls containing thirteen airlocks in a hexagonal array, all of them standing open so that they could see the huge tunnel continuing beyond them. The tunnel contained not a scrap of vegetation, being kept meticulously clean and spotless, giving them the impression that this was a new tunnel, just recently constructed.
It was impressive as hell and Thomas began to get a whole new understanding of just what sort of people the moon trogs really were. For no particularly good reason, he’d had the idea that they were a rather primitive people, living simply in the tunnels and caverns like the human renegades, but now he got a glimpse of the truth. They were a sophisticated people, capable of engineering feats that would have impressed even the ancient Agglemonians.
As the moon trogs led them off down the tunnel, they demonstrated their greater skill at moving in low gravity by the great speed and accuracy with which they were able to travel along it. They launched themselves along the tunnel at an angle that took them towards the opposite wall where, reaching it, they pushed themselves back towards the first wall and so zig zagged down the tunnel, thereby being able to alter their speed and direction with every contact. They were able to reach a great speed in this way and had reached the airlocks within moments, where they had to stop and wait for the Tharians, who were still clinging grimly to the handholds and pulling themselves along as though they were climbing a ladder. The moon trogs scowled in annoyance at this, and decided to spend a few minutes teaching the Tharians to travel the same way they did. The Kronosian equivalent of running.
Lirenna got the hang of it very quickly, her natural grace and balance soon enabling her to travel as fast and effortlessly as the moon trogs themselves, but for the others it was rather more difficult. It took a lot of nerve to push themselves out into empty space, especially when they were half way up the wall, and their every instinct kept screaming at them that they would fall the ten feet to the hard ground. They tried starting out closer to the ground, but the tiny moon's feeble gravity pulled them down before they were all the way across, causing them to bruise a shoulder on one of the handholds set in the floor. In the end they simply had to brace themselves to resist the fear of falling as they kicked off higher above the ground, after which they were able to travel with a little more speed, although they were never able to match the speed of the moon trogs, who still had to slow down for them.
A couple of times other moon trogs came flying down the tunnel, faster than running speed. They angled their bounces off the walls to bring them close to the Tharians, at whom they stared curiously as they passed before continuing on to fly with flawless accuracy through the airlocks without touching the sides. When they reached the airlocks themselves, Thomas saw with amusement that the doorframes were padded with furs and soft leather. Evidently, some moon trogs were more adept at ‘running’ than others.
Ban-Chin told them that, had they been travelling alone, they would have arrived at the end of the tunnel within the hour, but with the Tharians slowing them down it was more like five hours before they came to the junction where several tunnels came together. It was a cavern a hundred feet across with three tunnels entering it horizontally. Another tunnel led upwards from the ceiling at an angle of about forty five degrees and another sloped away through the floor. It was these two sloping tunnels that were busiest, with a steady stream of moon trogs ‘running’ downwards from the top tunnel into the bottom, miraculously avoiding collisions with another stream travelling in the opposite direction. It seemed to be a major commuter route.
“Bosh!” swore Ban-Chin. “We’ve arrived in the middle of a shift change. Wait a minute and it’ll quieten down.”
They waited, therefore, and sure enough the stream of moon trogs soon abated, with only the occasional individual still moving one way or the other.
“The place we’re taking you to is down there,” he said, pointing down the down sloping tunnel. “However, there’s something I’d like to show you first, up there.”
He pointed up the up sloping tunnel. He was grinning with eagerness, and Thomas was forced to grin back. He’s got another engineering marvel to show us, he thought. He saw our reaction to the tunnel, and now he’s got something even better to show us. He’s just a big kid really. They followed him up, therefore, all of them curious to know what they’d find at the top.
The tunnel went up for about fifty yards before coming to another wall of airlocks. Unlike the others, though, these were all closed, and they had to go through them one door at a time, closing them behind them as they went. When Thomas asked Ban-Chin why this was, the moon trog just grinned wider and said that they’d soon see for themselves.
“We must be pretty close to the surface by now, aren’t we?” asked Diana. Ban-Chin just grinned wider still.
The tunnel continued on for about twenty yards on the other side of the airlocks, but instead of being simply carved out of the moonrock, as all the other tunnels had been, this one had a layer of metal on walls, floor and ceiling. The same strange moon metal that had puzzled them earlier, its surface roughened by tiny grooves and ridges to allow passing moon trogs to get a grip on it. This confirmed their suspicions that they were now very close to the surface. Close enough that the surrounding rock contained tiny cracks and fissures that would have allowed the air to leak out if it hadn’t been for the layer of metal. Thomas wondered whether the tunnel actually opened out onto the surface and, if it did, whether it had windows in it that would allow them to see the surface itself.
His question was answered a moment later when the tunnel turned a forty five degree angle to run parallel to the ground. There were no lights in the ceiling here. Instead, shady green light dappled with large, leafy shapes shone in from the end of the tunnel where it opened out into a vast open space. They saw huge leafy plants towering up from the ground, growing so closely together that they couldn’t see the source of the light, and the air was filled with the moist, organic aroma of a tropical greenhouse. Lirenna gave a cry of delight and hurried forward to see what it was, leaving the others behind and ignoring their cries to wait for them.
A jungle of the strange plants grew all around the tunnel’s entrance, limiting their range of visibility. They towered over their heads, growing tall and spindly in the low gravity, their stems twining around each other and linking tendrils to form a single tangle of vegetation laden with luscious fruits and fleshy leaves that the plants would never have been able to support in normal Tharian gravity. The lazy buzzing of pollinating insects filled the air, and sunlight filtered down from somewhere overhead. Real sunlight coming in through an actual window of some kind although it was out of sight above all the dense greenery, confirming their suspicion that they were actually on the surface of the tiny moon.
Lirenna’s face was shining with wonder as the others caught up with her. “It’s wonderful!” she exclaimed in delight. “What is it?”
“A farm dome,” replied Ban-Chin, beaming happily at her reaction. “I work here when I’m not on airlock repair duty. It’s a dome about half a mile across made of panes of transparent crystal held together by a tallium framework. One of many in which we grow most of our food.”
He pointed at several moon trogs climbing amongst the foliage high above their heads. They were holding onto a branch with one hand, picking fruit with another and putting it into a sack which they held in their other two hands. They watched one moon trog with a full sack let go of his handhold and float gently downwards under Kronos’s feeble gravity. He guided his progress as he went by pushing against stems and leaves as he passed them by and landed next to a wooden building on the ground which he entered, emerging a moment later with an empty sack and jumping back up into the mass of fruit thirty yards above.
“As you can see,” continued Ban-Chin, “this dome specialises mainly in fruit, but other domes concentrate on grain, root crops or livestock.”
“What kind of livestock?” asked Jerry.
“Apes, monkeys, chickens,” He laughed at the expressions on their faces. “Ah yes. In the old stories, down on Tharia, the chicken is a flightless bird, confined to fluttering around on the ground. Up here, though, the hen is a capable and acrobatic flier. Much better than canaries, sparrows and thrushes whose wings are over developed for this environment.”
“Can we see the dome itself, please?” asked Thomas eagerly.
“Certainly. Please follow me. This way.”
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