A Fall of Moondust (22 page)

A single man could never have remained awake, or kept an eye on twenty unconscious
men and women, feeding them oxygen whenever they showed signs of respiratory distress.
He and McKenzie had acted as mutual watchdogs; several times each had dragged the
other back from the verge of sleep. There would have been no difficulty had there
been plenty of oxygen, but that one bottle was becoming rapidly exhausted. It was
maddening to know that there were still many kilograms of liquid oxygen in the cruiser’s
main tanks, but there was no way in which they could use it. The automatic system
was metering it through the evaporators and into the cabin, where it was at once contaminated
by the now almost unbearable atmosphere.

Pat had never known time to move slowly. It seemed quite incredible that only four
hours had passed since he and McKenzie had been left to guard their sleeping companions.
He could have sworn that they had been here for days, talking quietly together, calling
Port Roris every fifteen minutes, checking pukes and respiration, and doling out oxygen
with a miserly hand.

But nothing lasts for ever. Over the radio, from the world which neither man really
believed he would ever see again, came the news they had been waiting for.

“We’re on the way,” said the weary but determined voice of Chief Engineer Lawrence.
“You only have to hang on for another hour—we’ll be on top of you by then. How are
you feeling?”

“Very tired,” said Pat slowly. “But we can make it.”

“And the passengers?”

“Just the same.”

“Right—I’ll call you every ten minutes. Leave your receiver on, volume high. This
is Med Division’s idea—they don’t want to risk you falling asleep.”

The blare of brass thundered across the face of the Moon, then echoed on past the
Earth and out into the far reaches of the Solar System. Hector Berlioz could never
have dreamed that, two centuries after he had composed it, the soul-stirring rhythm
of his Rákóczy March would bring hope and strength to men fighting for their lives
on another world.

As the music reverberated round the cabin, Pat looked at Dr. McKenzie with a wan smile.

“It may be old-fashioned,” he said, “but it’s working.”

The blood was pounding in his veins, his foot was tapping with the beat of the music.
Out of the lunar sky, flashing down from space, had come the tramp of marching armies,
the thunder of cavalry across a thousand battlefields, the call of bugles that had
once summoned nations to meet their destiny. All gone, long ago, and that was well
for the world. But they had left behind them much that was fine and noble—examples
of heroism and self-sacrifice, proofs that men could still hold on when their bodies
should have passed the limits of physical endurance.

As his lungs laboured in the stagnant air, Pat Harris knew that he had need of such
inspiration from the past—if he was to survive the endless hour that lay ahead.

Aboard the tiny, cluttered deck of Duster One, Chief Engineer Lawrence heard the same
music, and reacted in the same fashion. His little fleet was indeed going into battle,
against the enemy that Man would face to the end of time. As he spread across the
universe from planet to planet and sun to sun, the forces of nature would be arrayed
against him in ever new and unexpected ways. Even Earth, after all these aeons, still
had many traps for the unwary, and on a world that men had known for only a lifetime,
death lurked in a thousand innocent disguises. Whether or not the Sea of Thirst was
robbed of its prey, Lawrence was sure of one thing—tomorrow there would be a fresh
challenge.

Each ski was towing a single sledge, piled high with equipment which looked heavier
and more impressive than it really was; most of the load was merely the empty drums
upon which the raft would float. Everything not absolutely essential had been left
behind; as soon as Duster One had dumped its cargo, Lawrence would send it straight
back to Port Roris for the next load. Then he would be able to maintain a shuttle
service between the site and Base, so that if he wanted anything quickly he would
never have to wait more than an hour for it. This, of course, was taking the optimistic
view; by the time he got to
Selene
, there might be no hurry at all….

As the Port buildings dropped swiftly below the skyline, Lawrence ran through the
procedure with his men. He had intended to do a full-dress rehearsal before sailing,
but that was another plan that had had to be abandoned through lack of time. The first
count-down would be the only one that mattered.

“Jones, Sikorsky, Coleman, Matsui—when we arrive at the marker, you’re to unload the
drums and lay them out in the right pattern. As soon as that’s done, Bruce and Hodges
will fix the cross-members. Be very careful not to drop any of the nuts and bolts,
and keep all your tools tied to you. If you accidentally fall off, don’t panic; you
can only sink a few centimetres. I know.

“Sikorski, Jones—you give a hand with the flooring, as soon as the raft framework’s
fixed. Coleman, Matsui—immediately there’s enough working space, start laying out
the air-pipes and the plumbing. Greenwood, Renaldi,—you’re in charge of the drilling
operation—”

So it went on, point by point. The greatest danger, Lawrence knew, was that his men
would get in each other’s way as they worked in this confined space. A single trifling
accident, and the whole effort would be wasted. One of Lawrence’s private fears, which
had been worrying him ever since they left Port Roris, was that some vital tool had
been left behind. And there was an even worse nightmare—that the twenty-two men and
women in
Selene
might die within minutes of rescue, because the only wrench that could make the final
connexion had been dropped overboard….

On the Inaccessible Mountains, Maurice Spenser was staring through his binoculars
and listening to the radio voices calling across the Sea of Thirst. Every ten minutes
Lawrence would speak to
Selene
, and each time the pause before the reply would be a little longer. But Harris and
McKenzie were still clinging to consciousness, thanks to sheer will-power and, presumably,
the musical encouragement they were getting from Clavius City.

“What’s that psychologist disc-jockey pumping into them now?” asked Spenser. On the
other side of the control cabin, the ship’s radio officer turned up the volume—and
the Valkyries rode above the Mountains of Inaccessibility.

“I don’t believe,” grumbled Captain Anson, “that they’ve played anything later than
the nineteenth century.”

“Oh, yes they have,” corrected Jules Braque, as he made some infinitesimal adjustment
to his camera. “They did Khatchaturian’s
Sabre Dance
just now. That’s only a hundred years old.”

“Time for Duster One to call again,” said the radio officer. The cabin became instantly
silent.

Right on the second, the dust-ski signal came in. The expedition was now so close
that
Auriga
could receive it directly, without benefit of the relay from Lagrange.

“Lawrence calling
Selene
. We’ll be over you in ten minutes. Are you O.K.?”

Again that agonising pause; this time it lasted almost five seconds. Then—

“
Selene
answering. No change here.”

That was all. Pat Harris was not wasting his remaining breath.

“Ten minutes,” said Spenser. “They should be in sight now. Anything on the screen?”

“Not yet,” answered Jules, zooming out to the horizon and panning slowly along its
empty arc; there was nothing above it but the black night of space.

The Moon, thought Jules, certainly presented some headaches to the cameraman. Everything
was soot or whitewash; there were no nice, soft half-tones. And, of course, there
was that eternal dilemma of the stars, though that was an aesthetic problem, rather
than a technical one.

The public expected to see stars in the lunar sky even during the daytime, because
they were there. But the fact was that the human eye could not normally see them;
during the day, the eye was so desensitised by the glare that the sky appeared an
empty, absolute black. If you wanted to see the stars, you had to look for them through
blinkers that cut off all other light; then your pupils would slowly expand, and one
by one the stars would come out until they filled the field of view. But as soon as
you looked at anything else—
phut
, out they went. The human eye could look at the daylight stars,
or
the daylight landscape; it could never see both at once.

But the TV camera could, if desired, and some directors preferred it to do so. Others
argued that this falsified reality; it was one of those problems that had no correct
answer. Jules sided with the realists, and kept the Star Gate circuit switched off
unless the studio asked for it.

At any moment, he would have some action for Earth. Already the news networks had
taken flashes—general views of the mountains, slow pans across the Sea, close-ups
of that lonely marker sticking through the dust. But before long, and perhaps for
hours on end, his camera might well be the eyes of several billion people. This feature
was either going to be a bust—or the biggest story of the year.

He fingered the talisman in his pocket. Jules Braque, Member of the Society of Motion
Picture and Television Engineers, would have been very displeased had anyone accused
him of carrying a lucky charm. On the other hand, he would have been very hard put
to explain why he never brought out his little toy until the story he was covering
was safely on the air.

“Here they are!” yelled Spenser, his voice revealing the strain under which he had
been labouring. He lowered his binoculars and glanced at the camera. “You’re too far
off to the right!”

Jules was already panning. On the monitor screen, the geometrical smoothness of the
far horizon had been broken at last; two tiny, twinkling stars had appeared on that
perfect arc dividing Sea and space. The dust-skis were coming up over the face of
the Moon.

Even with the longest focus of the zoom lens, they looked small and distant. That
was the way Jules wanted it; he was anxious to give the impression of loneliness,
emptiness. He shot a quick glance at the ship’s main screen, now tuned to the Interplanet
Channel. Yes, they were carrying him.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small diary, and laid it on top of the camera.
He lifted the cover, which locked into position just short of the vertical—and immediately
became alive with colour and movement. At the same time a faint gnat-sized voice started
to tell him that this was a special programme of the Interplanet News Service, Channel
One Oh Seven—and We Will Now Be Taking You Over To The Moon.

On the tiny screen was the picture he was seeing directly on his monitor. No—not
quite
the same picture. This was the one he had captured two and a half seconds ago; he
was looking that far into the past. In those two and a half million microseconds—to
change to the time-scale of the electronic engineer—this scene had undergone many
adventures and transformations. From his camera it had been piped to
Auriga
’s transmitter, and beamed straight up to Lagrange, fifty thousand kilometres overhead.
There it had been snatched out of space, boosted a few hundred times, and sped Earthwards
to be caught by one or other of the satellite relays. Then down through the ionosphere—that
last hundred kilometres the hardest of all—to the Interplanet Building, where its
adventures really began, as it joined the ceaseless flood of sounds and sights and
electrical impulses which informed and amused a substantial fraction of the human
race.

And here it was again, after passing through the hands of programme directors and
special effects departments and engineering assistants—right back where it started,
broadcast over the whole of Earthside from the high-power transmitter in Lagrange
II, and over the whole of Farside from Lagrange I. To span the single hand’s breadth
from Jules’ TV camera to his pocket-diary receiver, that image had travelled three
quarters of a million kilometres.

He wondered if it was worth the trouble. Men had been wondering that ever since television
was invented.

Lawrence spotted
Auriga
while he was still fifteen kilometres away; he could scarcely have failed to do so,
for she was a conspicuous object, as the sunlight glistened from her plastic and metal.

“What the devil’s that?” he asked himself, and answered the question at once. It was
obviously a ship, and he remembered hearing vague rumours that some news-network had
chartered a flight to the mountains. That was not his business, though at one time
he himself had looked into the question of landing equipment there, to cut out this
tedious haul across the Sea. Unfortunately, the plan wouldn’t work. There was no safe
landing-point within five hundred metres of ‘sea’-level; the ledge that had been so
convenient for Spenser was at too great an altitude to be of use.

The Chief Engineer was not sure that he liked the idea of having his every move watched
by long-focus lenses up in the hills—not that there was anything he could do about
it. He had already vetoed an attempt to put a camera on his ski—to the enormous relief,
though Lawrence did not know it, of Interplanet News, and the extreme frustration
of the other services. Then he realised that it might well be useful having a ship
only a few kilometres away. It would provide an additional information channel, and
perhaps they could utilise its services in some other way. It might even provide hospitality
until the igloos could be ferried out.

Where was the marker? Surely it should be in sight by now! For an uncomfortable moment
Lawrence thought that it had fallen down and disappeared into the dust. That would
not stop them finding
Selene
, of course, but it might delay them five or ten minutes at a time when every second
was vital.