One Against the Moon

by Donald A. Wollheim

Robin carefully jotted down each new sound or word he could identify in the Glassie's speech and Korree in turn seemed anxious to imitate the English.

It took about four months before they had a working interchange of ideas. Robin found that the Glassie's language was quite limited in many ways, though having a great many variations of verb form—a typical characteristic of primitive tongues. Finally, however, Robin heard Korree's story.

His people lived many bubbles away, possibly many months of travel, though the Glassie idea of time was very vague and seemed hedged around by all sorts of untranslatable mystic conditions. There were maybe several hundred of them and they formed one big tribe or family.

There were many such tribes, usually one to a bubble-cavern. Korree indicated that somewhere—he pointed downward—were greater caverns where many tribes lived, tribes of great strength or magic or knowledge. Robin could not decide which was meant—probably all three. But Korree had never been there. These downward regions were taboo to his people.

Robin's suspicion was that the Glassies from Korree's group had been forced to live in the less desirable outer areas by the stronger and more advanced races who had seized the better regions.

Korree indicated that there were many bubbles that were not inhabited because of great terrors, either by heat or cold. Robin assumed he meant caverns of jungle and caverns more exposed to the surface temperatures.

Korree himself had broken some sort of tribal rule or magic and had been chased out of his home. He was a lonely outcast. That was why he had gone with Robin when Robin had given him food. This symbolized acceptance into Robin's tribe. And though Robin looked to him like a very strange sort of man indeed—a solid man, a "rock" man was the way Korree explained Robin's nontransparent flesh and his tremendous strength—Korree had been glad to find acceptance anywhere.

Carefully questioning Korree about the surface, Robin found that the Glassie had apparently no conception of what sort of a world the Moon really was. To him it was a place of many enclosed spaces. The surface he had neither seen nor even dreamed of. That there could be a place where the enclosures ended and the world "dropped off" into nothing, this was something he could not imagine.

Robin then asked questions about the upward regions. Korree indicated that these were less and less habitable, that his people strove always to go down, never up. Robin twisted his questions around, trying to determine if the Glassies had ever seen anything that might signify the surface. He described the sun and the Earth to Korree but the Glassie seemed unable to understand. But when he spoke of the sun as being a bright glowing thing so bright that it hurt the eyes to look at it, Korree seemed to remember something.

Carefully the Glassie told Robin that he had heard of a tribe that lived somewhere in the upper regions, where in one part of their bubble there sometimes came a terrible white-hot light that hurt when one looked upon it. This light was not always there, but shone through the top of the cavern, which Korree explained was like the substance of his arm—that is, semi-transparent.