When the moon fell

by Morrison Colladay

I taxied up the gently sloping top of the mountain to a position where we would have room for the take-off. Then we went over it inch by inch without finding anything wrong. I tuned up the engine and it ran as smoothly as a tabby cat purring. We had food enough for several weeks and fuel to carry us about fifteen hundred miles.

When we had satisfied ourselves that we could leave when we wanted to, Jim and I sat down on the rocks and lighted our pipes. We had become skilful in doing that in a driving rain even when the tobacco was damp. There had been no opportunity to dry clothes, and we did not care to wear wet ones even in that steaming temperature. Sickness was one thing we could not afford to risk. Deprived of his normal senses it does not take man long to revert to savagery. As it happened, after the first feeling of strangeness, going without clothes seemed a perfectly natural and sensible thing to do.

Other inhibitions carried over from the destroyed world were harder to get rid of, as our conscientious lawmakers found out later, when they began to reconstruct a civilization based on reason alone. However, such considerations were far enough from the thoughts of Jim and me as we sat there, looking at the sky where the clouds were beginning to break away.

"The rain's stopping," I said. "We won't be able to stay here much longer." Even as I spoke there was a gleam of sunshine.

"That means we've got to decide exactly what we'd better do," said Jim.

"Yes, and we can't afford to make a mistake. If we had enough fuel we might try for Norway. Extreme northern Europe had a better chance of surviving than the rest of the world. No use talking about that, though."

Jim was silent for a minute. "You'll have to decide what's best yourself. Whatever it is will be all right with me."

It seemed likely that if any concerted effort to escape had been made by persons who had access to airplanes and dirigibles—and I had no doubt there had been such an effort—they would have laid a course for Greenland. Settlements on the coast of that great island had doubtless been destroyed by the tidal waves, but the interior would have been a refuge for anyone able to reach it. As far as I could remember, there was not much known of the interior, except that it was mountainous and permanently covered with glaciers. Even an ice covering like that could not long survive the temperatures we were now experiencing. It was possible that it would now be entirely habitable and that there we might find refugees from the United States.

The nearest settlement on Greenland to our present location was Frederiksdal, at the southern point of the island. I had not much hope that it had escaped destruction, and I decided to set a course that would bring us to one of the northern settlements. I outlined my plans to Jim and he agreed that there was nothing to be done that seemed more promising.

I remember that I had a feeling almost of panic as the plane arose and sailed over the strange, turbulent steaming ocean. I felt as if we had been carried back to the early days of the world, before continents were formed and life emerged from chaos.