A Fall of Moondust (18 page)

“I take it back, Captain,” said Spenser. “You
do
have a soul, after all.” He added his signature to the log, then moved over to the
observation window to examine the view.

The control cabin, a hundred and fifty metres above the ground, had the only direct-vision
windows in the ship, and the view through them was superb. Behind him, to the north,
were the upper ramparts of the Mountains of Inaccessibility, ranging across half the
sky. That name was no longer appropriate, thought Spenser;
he
had reached them, and while the ship was here it might even be possible to do some
useful scientific research, such as collecting rock samples. Quite apart from the
news value of being in such an outlandish place, he was genuinely interested in what
might be discovered here. No man could ever become so
blasé
that the promise of the unknown and the unexplored completely failed to move him.

In the other direction, he could look across at least forty kilometres of the Sea
of Thirst, which spanned more than half his field of view in a great arc of immaculate
flatness. But what he was concerned with was less than five kilometres away, and two
below.

Clearly visible in a low-powered pair of binoculars was the metal rod that Lawrence
had left as a marker, and through which
Selene
was now linked with the world. The sight was not impressive—just a solitary spike
jutting from an endless plain—yet it had a stark simplicity that appealed to Spenser.
It would make a good opening; it symbolised the loneliness of man in this huge and
hostile universe that he was attempting to conquer. In a few hours, this plain would
be very far from lonely, but until then that rod would serve to set the scene, while
the commentators discussed the rescue plans and filled in the time with appropriate
interviews. That was not his problem; the unit at Clavius and the studios back on
Earth could handle it in their stride. He had just one job now—to sit here in his
eagle’s nest, and to see that the pictures kept coming in. With the big zoom lens,
thanks to the perfect clarity of this airless world, he could almost get closeups
even from here, when the action started.

He glanced into the south-west, where the sun was lifting itself so sluggishly up
the sky. Almost two weeks of daylight, as Earth counted time, still lay ahead. No
need, then, to worry about the lighting. The stage was set.

Chief Administrator Olsen seldom made public gestures; he preferred to run the Moon
quietly and efficiently behind the scenes, leaving amiable extroverts like the Tourist
Commissioner to face the newsmen. His rare appearances were, therefore, all the more
impressive—as he intended them to be.

Though millions were watching him, the twenty-two men and women he was really addressing
could not see him at all, for it had not been thought necessary to fit
Selene
with vision circuits. But his voice was sufficiently reassuring; it told them everything
that they wanted to know.

“Hello,
Selene
,” he began, “I want to tell you that all the resources of the Moon are now being
mobilised for your aid. The engineering and technical staffs of my administration
are working round the clock to help you.

“Mr. Lawrence, Chief Engineer, Earthside, is in charge, and I have complete confidence
in him. He’s now at Port Roris, where the special equipment needed for the operation
is being assembled. It’s been decided—and I’m sure you’ll agree with this—that the
most urgent task is to make certain that your oxygen supply can be maintained. For
this reason, we plan to sink pipes to you; that can be done fairly quickly, and then
we can pump down oxygen—as well as food and water, if necessary. So as soon as the
pipes are installed, you’ll have nothing more to worry about. It may still take a
little time to reach you and get you out, but you’ll be quite safe. You only have
to sit and wait for use.

“Now I’ll get off the air, and let you have this channel back so that you can talk
to your friends. I’m sorry about the inconvenience and strain you’ve undergone, but
that’s all over now. We’ll have you out in a day or two. Good luck?”

A burst of cheerful conversation broke out aboard
Selene
as soon as Administrator Olsen’s broadcast finished. It had had precisely the effect
he had intended; the passengers were already thinking of this whole episode as an
adventure which would give them something to talk about for the rest of their lives.
Only Pat Harris seemed a little unhappy.

“I wish,” he told Commodore Hansteen, “the C.A. hadn’t been quite so confident. On
the Moon, remarks like that always seem to be tempting fate.”

“I know exactly how you feel,” the Commodore answered. “But you can hardly blame him—he’s
thinking of our morale.”

“Which is fine, I’d say—especially now that we can talk to our friends and relatives.”

“That reminds me; there’s one passenger who hasn’t received or sent any messages.
What’s more, he doesn’t show the slightest interest in doing so.”

“Who’s that?”

Hansteen dropped his voice still further.

“The New Zealander, Radley. He just sits quietly in the corner over there. I’m not
sure why, but he worries me.”

“Perhaps the poor fellow has no one on Earth he wants to speak to.”

“A man with enough money to go to the Moon must have
some
friends,” replied Hansteen. Then he grinned; it was almost a boyish grin, that flickered
swiftly across his face, softening its wrinkles and crow’s feet. “That sounds very
cynical—I didn’t mean it that way. But I suggest we keep an eye on Mr. Radley.”

“Have you mentioned him to Sue—er, Miss Wilkins?”

“She pointed him out to
me
.”

I should have guessed that, thought Pat admiringly; not much gets past her. Now that
it seemed he might have a future, after all, he had begun to think very seriously
about Sue—and about what she had said to him. In his life he had been in love with
five or six girls—or so he could have sworn at the time—but this was something different.
He had known Sue over a year and from the start had felt attracted to her, but until
now it had never come to anything. What were her real feelings? he wondered. Did she
regret that moment of shared passion, or did it mean nothing to her? She might argue—and
so might he, for that matter—that what had happened in the air-lock was no longer
relevant; it was merely the action of a man and a woman who thought that only a few
hours of life remained to them. They had not been themselves….

But perhaps they had been; perhaps it was the real Pat Harris, the real Susan Wilkins,
that had finally emerged from disguise, revealed by the strain and anxiety of the
past few days. He wondered how he could be sure of this, but even as he did so, he
knew that only time could give the answer. If there was a clear-cut, scientific test
that could tell you when you were in love, Pat had not yet come across it.

The dust that lapped—if that was the word—against the quay from which
Selene
had departed four days ago was only a couple of metres deep, but for this test no
greater depth was needed. If the hastily-built equipment worked here, it would work
out in the open Sea.

Lawrence watched from the Embarkation Building as his space-suited assistants bolted
the framework together. It was made, like ninety per cent of the structures on the
Moon, from slotted aluminium strips and bars. In some ways, thought Lawrence, the
Moon was an engineer’s paradise. The low gravity, the total absence of rust or corrosion—indeed,
of weather itself, with its unpredictable winds and rains and frosts—removed at once
a whole range of problems that plagued all terrestrial enterprises. But to make up
for that, of course, the Moon had a few specialities of its own—like the two-hundred-below-zero
nights, and the dust that they were fighting now.

The light framework of the raft rested upon a dozen large metal drums, which carried
the prominently stencilled words: “Contents Ethyl Alcohol. Please return when empty
to No. 3 Dispatching Centre, Copernicus.” Their contents now were a very high grade
of vacuum; each drum could support a weight of two lunar tons before sinking.

Now the raft was rapidly taking shape. Be sure to have plenty of spare nuts and bolts,
Lawrence told himself. He had seen at least six dropped in the dust, which had instantly
swallowed them. And there went a wrench; make an order that all tools
must
be tied to the raft even when in use, however inconvenient that might be….

Fifteen minutes—not bad, considering that the men were working in vacuum and therefore
hampered by their suits. The raft could be extended in any direction as required,
but this would be enough to start with. This first section alone could carry over
twenty tons, and it would be some time before they unloaded that weight of equipment
on the site.

Satisfied with this stage of the project, Lawrence left the Embarkation Building while
his assistants were still dismantling the raft. Five minutes later (that was one advantage
of Port Roris—you could get anywhere in five minutes) he was in the local engineering
depot. What he found here was not quite so satisfactory.

Supported on a couple of trestles was a two-metre-square mock-up of
Selene
’s roof—an exact copy of the real thing, made from the same materials. Only the outer
sheet of aluminised fabric that served as a sun-shield was missing; it was so thin
and flimsy that it would not affect the test.

The experiment was an absurdly simple one, involving only three ingredients—a pointed
crowbar, a sledge-hammer, and a frustrated engineer who, despite strenuous efforts,
had not yet succeeded in hammering the bar through the roof.

Anyone with a
little
knowledge of lunar conditions would have guessed at once why he had failed. The hammer,
obviously, had only a sixth of its terrestrial weight; therefore—equally obviously—it
was that much less effective.

The reasoning would have been completely false. One of the hardest things for the
layman to understand was the difference between weight and mass, and the inability
to do so had led to countless accidents. For weight was an arbitrary characteristic;
you could change it by moving from one world to another. On Earth, that hammer would
weigh six times as much as it did here; on the Sun, it would be almost two hundred
times heavier—and in space it would weigh nothing at all.

But in all three places, and indeed throughout the universe, its mass or inertia would
be exactly the same. The effort needed to set it moving at a certain speed, and the
impact it would produce when stopped, would be constant through all space and time.
On a nearly gravityless asteroid, where it weighed less than a feather, that hammer
would pulverise a rock just as effectively as on Earth.

What’s the trouble?” said Lawrence.

“The roof’s too springy,” explained the engineer, rubbing the sweat from his brow.
“The crow-bar just bounces back every time it’s hit.”

“I see. But will that happen when we’re using a fifteen metre pipe, with dust packed
all around it? That may absorb the recoil.”

“Perhaps—but look at this.”

They kneeled beneath the mock-up and inspected the underside of the roof. Chalk lines
had been drawn upon it to indicate the position of the electric wiring, which had
to be avoided at all costs.

“This fiberglass is so tough, you can’t make a clean hole through it. When it does
yield, it splinters and tears. See—it’s already begun to star. I’m afraid that if
we try this brute-force approach, we’ll crack the roof.”

“And we can’t risk that,” Lawrence agreed. “Well, drop the idea. If we can’t pile-drive,
we’ll have to bore. Use a drill, screwed on the end of the pipe so it can be detached
easily. How are you getting on with the rest of the plumbing?”

“Almost ready—it’s all standard equipment. We should be finished in two or three hours.”

“I’ll be back in two,” said Lawrence. He did not add, as some men would have done,
“I want it finished by then.” His staff was doing its utmost, and one could neither
bully nor cajole trained and devoted men into working faster than their maximum. Jobs
like this could not be rushed, and the deadline for
Selene
’s oxygen supply was still three days away. In a few hours, if all went well, it would
have been pushed into the indefinite future.

Unfortunately, all was going very far from well.

Commodore Hansteen was the first to recognise the slow, insidious danger that was
creeping up upon them. He had met it once before, when he had been wearing a faulty
spacesuit on Ganymede—an incident he had no wish to recall, but had never really forgotten.

“Pat,” he said quietly, making sure that no one could overhear. “Have you noticed
any difficulty in breathing?”

Pat looked startled, then answered, “Yes, now that you mention it. I’d put it down
to the heat.”

“So did I at first. But I know these symptoms—especially the quick breathing. We’re
running into carbon dioxide poisoning.”

“But that’s ridiculous—we should be all right for another three days—unless something
has gone wrong with the air-purifiers.”

“I’m afraid it has. What system do we use to get rid of the CO
₂
?”

“Straight chemical absorption. It’s a very simple, reliable set-up; we’ve never had
any trouble with it before.”

“Yes, but it’s never had to work under these conditions before. I think the heat may
have knocked out the chemicals. Is there any way we can check them?”

Pat shook his head.

“No; the access hatch is on the outside of the hull.”

“Sue, my dear,” said a tired voice which they hardly recognised as belonging to Mrs.
Schuster, “do you have anything to fix a headache?”

“If you do,” said another passenger, “I’d like some as well.”

Pat and the Commodore looked at each other gravely. The classic symptoms were developing
with text-book precision.