A Fall of Moondust (27 page)

During those long minutes of agonising suspense, while the studio was trying to discover
what was happening, Jules did his best to keep the picture alive. It was an extremely
difficult job, handling such a static scene from a single camera position. Like all
cameramen, Jules hated to be pinned down in one spot. This site was perfect—but it
was fixed, and he was getting rather tired of it. He had even asked if the ship could
be moved, but as Captain Anson put it, “I’m damned if I’ll go hopping back and forth
over the mountains. This is a spaceship, not a—a chamois.”

So Jules had to ring the changes on pans and zooms, though he used the latter with
discretion, because nothing upset viewers more quickly than being hurled back and
forth through space, or watching scenery explode in their faces. If he used the power-zoom
flat out, Jules could sweep across the Moon at about fifty thousand kilometres an
hour—and several million viewers would get motion sickness.

At last that urgent, soundless conference was breaking up; the men on the raft were
unplugging their telephones. Now, perhaps, Lawrence would answer the radio calls that
had been bombarding him for the last five minutes….

“My God,” said Spenser. “I don’t believe it! Do you see what they’re doing?”

“Yes,” said Captain Anson, “and I don’t believe it either. But it looks as if they’re
abandoning the site.”

Like lifeboats leaving a sinking ship, the two dust-skis, crowded with men, were pulling
away from the raft.

Perhaps it was well that
Selene
was now out of radio contact; it would hardly have helped morale if her occupants
had known that the skis, heavily overloaded with passengers, were heading away from
the site. But at the moment no one in the cruiser was thinking of the rescue effort;
Radley was holding the centre of the dimly-lit stage.

“What do you mean—this is all
your
fault?” asked Pat in the baffled silence that followed the New Zealander’s statement.
Only baffled as yet; not hostile, because no one could take such a remark seriously.

“It’s a long story, Captain,” said Radley, speaking in a voice which, though it was
oddly unemotional, had undertones that Pat could not identify. It was almost like
listening to a robot, and gave Pat an unpleasant feeling somewhere in the middle of
his spine. “I don’t mean to say that I
deliberately
caused this to happen. But I’m afraid it is deliberate, and I’m sorry to have involved
you all. You see—
they
are after me.”

This is all we need, thought Pat. We really seem to have the odds stacked against
us. In this small company we’ve got a neurotic spinster, a drug addict—and now a maniac.
What other freaks are going to reveal themselves, before we’re finished?

Then he realised the unfairness of his judgement. The truth was that he had been very
lucky. Against Radley, Miss Morley, and Hans Baldur (who had given no trouble after
that single, never-mentioned incident) he had the Commodore, Dr. McKenzie, the Schusters,
little Professor Jayawardene, David Barrett—and all the others who had done as they
were asked, without making a fuss. He felt a sudden surge of affection—even of love—towards
them all, for giving him their active or passive support.

And especially to Sue, who was already one jump ahead of him, as she always seemed
to be. There she was, moving unobtrusively about her duties at the back of the cabin.
Pat doubted if anyone noticed—certainly Radley did not—as she opened the medicine
chest and palmed one of those cigarette-sized cylinders of oblivion. If this fellow
gave trouble, she would be ready.

At the moment, trouble seemed the furthest thing from Radley’s mind. He appeared to
be completely self-possessed and perfectly rational; there was no mad gleam in his
eye, or any other of the
clichés
of insanity. He looked exactly what he was—a middle-age New Zealand accountant taking
a holiday on the Moon.

“This is very interesting, Mr. Radley,” said Commodore Hensteen in a carefully neutral
voice, “but please excuse our ignorance. Who are ‘they’, and why should they be after
you?”

“I am sure, Commodore, that you’ve heard of Flying Saucers?”

Flying
what
Pat asked himself. Hansteen seemed better informed than he was.

“Yes, I have,” he answered a little wearily. “I’ve come across them in old books on
astronautics. They were quite a craze, weren’t they, about eighty years ago?”

He realised that ‘craze’ was an unfortunate word to use, and was relieved when Radley
took no offence.

“Oh,” he answered, “they go back much further than
that
, but it was only in the last century that people started to take notice of them.
There’s an old manuscript from an English abbey dated 1290 that describes one in detail—and
that isn’t the earliest report, by any means. More than ten thousand Flying Saucer
sightings have been recorded prior to the twentieth century.”

“Just a minute,” interrupted Pat. “What the devil do you mean by ‘Flying Saucer’?
I’ve never heard of them.”

“Then I’m afraid, Captain, that your education has been neglected,” answered Radley
in a sorrowful voice. “The term ‘Flying Saucer’ came into general use after 1947 to
describe the strange, usually disc-shaped vehicles that have been investigating our
planet for centuries. Some people prefer to use the phrase Unidentified Flying Objects.”

That aroused a few faint memories in Pat’s mind. Yes, he had heard that term in connexion
with the hypothetical Outsiders. But there was no concrete evidence, of course, that
alien space-vessels had ever entered the Solar System.

“Do you
really
believe,” said one of the other passengers sceptically, “that there are visitors
from space hanging round the Earth?”

“Much more than that,” answered Radley. “They’ve often landed and made contact with
human beings. Before we came here, they had a base on Farside, but they destroyed
it when the first survey rockets started taking close-ups.”

“How do you know all this?” asked someone else. Radley seemed quite indifferent to
the scepticism of his audience; he must have grown used to this response long ago.
He radiated a kind of inner faith which, however ill-founded it might be, was oddly
convincing. His insanity had exalted him into the realm beyond reason, and he was
quite happy there.

“We have—contacts,” he answered with an air of great importance. “A few men and women
have been able to establish telepathic communication with the Saucer people. So we
know a good deal about them.”

“How is it that no one else does?” asked another disbeliever. “If they’re really out
there, why haven’t our astronomers and space-pilots seen them?”

“Oh, but they have,” Radley answered with a pitying smile, “and they’re keeping quiet.
There’s a conspiracy of silence among the scientists; they don’t like to admit that
there are intelligences out in space so much superior to ours. So when a pilot does
report a saucer, they make fun of him. Now, of course, every astronaut keeps quiet
when he meets one.”

“Have
you
ever met one, Commodore?” asked Mrs. Schuster, obviously half convinced. “Or are
you in the—what did Mr. Radley call it—conspiracy of silence?”

“I’m very sorry to disappoint you,” said Hansteen. “You’ll have to take my word for
it that all the spaceships I’ve ever met have been on Lloyd’s Register.”

He caught Pat’s eye, and gave a little nod that said, “Let’s go and talk this over
in the air-lock.” Now that he was quite convinced that Radley was harmless, he almost
welcomed this interlude. It had, very effectively, taken the passenger’s minds off
the situation in which they now found themselves. If Radley’s brand of insanity could
keep them entertained, then good luck to it.

“Well, Pat,” said Hansteen, when the air-lock door had sealed them off from the argument,
“what do you think of him?”

“Does he
really
believe that nonsense?”

“Oh yes—every word of it. I’ve met his type before.”

The Commodore knew a good deal about Radley’s peculiar obsession; no one whose interest
in astronautics dated back to the twentieth century could fail to do so. As a young
man, he had even read some of the original writings on the subject—works of such brazen
fraudulence or childish naïveté that they had shaken his belief that men were rational
beings. That such a literature could ever have flourished was a disturbing thought—though
it was true that most of these books had been published in that psychotic era, the
Frantic Fifties.

“This is a very peculiar situation,” complained Pat. “At a time like
this
—all the passengers are arguing about Flying Saucers.”

“I think it’s an excellent idea,” answered the Commodore. “What else would you suggest
they do? Let’s face it—we’ve got to sit here and wait, until Lawrence starts knocking
on the roof again.”

“If he’s still here. Barrett may be right—perhaps the raft has sunk.”

“I think that’s very unlikely—the disturbance was only a slight one. How far would
you imagine we went down?”

Pat thought this over. Looking back on the incident, it seemed to have lasted a long
time. The fact that he had been in virtual darkness, and had been fighting that jet
of dust, still further confused his memory. He could only hazard a guess.

“I’d say—ten metres.”

“Nonsense! The whole affair only lasted a couple of seconds. I doubt if we dropped
more than two or three metres.”

Pat found this very hard to believe, but he hoped that the Commodore was right. He
knew that it was extremely difficult to judge weak accelerations, particularly when
one was under stress. Hansteen was the only man aboard who could have had any experience
of this; his verdict was probably correct—and was certainly encouraging.

“They may never have felt a thing on the surface,” continued Hansteen, “and they’re
probably wondering why they can’t contact us. Are you sure there’s nothing we can
do about the radio?”

“Quite sure; the whole terminal block’s come loose at the end of the cable conduit.
There’s no way of reaching it from inside the cabin.”

“Well, I suppose that’s that. We might as well go back and let Radley try to convert
us—if he can.”

Jules had tracked the overcrowded skis for a hundred metres before he realised that
they were not as overcrowded as they should have been. They carried seven men—and
there were eight on the site.

He panned swiftly back to the raft, and by the good luck or precognition that separates
the brilliant cameraman from the merely adequate one, he arrived there just as Lawrence
broke his radio silence.

“C.E.E. calling,” he said, sounding as tired and frustrated as would any man who had
just seen his carefully-laid plans demolished. “Sorry for the delay, but as you’ll
have gathered we have an emergency. There appears to have been another cave-in; how
deep it was, we don’t know—but we’ve lost physical contact with
Selene
, and she’s not answering our radio.

“In case there’s another subsidence, I’ve ordered my men to stand-by a few hundred
metres away. The danger’s very slight—we hardly felt that last tremor—but there’s
no point in taking chances. I can do everything that’s necessary for the moment without
any help.

“I’ll call again in a few minutes. C.E.E. out.”

With the eyes of millions upon him, Lawrence crouched at the edge of the raft, reassembling
the probe with which he had first located the cruiser. He had twenty metres to play
with; if she had gone deeper than that, he would have to think of something else.

The rod sank into the dust, moving more and more slowly as it approached the depth
where
Selene
had rested. There was the original mark—fifteen point one five metres—just disappearing
through the surface. The probe continued to move, like a lance piercing into the body
of the Moon. How much further? whispered Lawrence to himself, in the murmurous silence
of his spacesuit.

The anticlimax was almost laughable, except that this was no laughing matter. The
probe penetrated an extra metre and a half—a distance he could comfortably span without
straining his arms.

Far more serious was the fact that
Selene
had not sunk evenly, as Lawrence discovered after a few additional probings. She
was much lower at the stern, being now tilted at an angle of about thirty degrees.
That alone was enough to wreck his plan; he had relied upon the caisson making a flush
contact with the horizontal roof.

He put that problem aside for the moment; there was a more immediate one. Now that
the cruiser’s radio was silent—and he had to pray that it was a simple power failure—how
could he tell if the people inside were still alive? They would hear his probe, but
there was no way in which they could communicate with him.

But of course there was. The easiest and most primitive means of all, that could be
so readily overlooked after a century and a half of electronics….

Lawrence got to his feet and called the waiting skis.

“You can come back,” he said. “There’s no danger. She only sank a couple of metres.”

He had already forgotten the watching millions. Though his new plan of campaign had
still to be drawn up, he was going into action again.

When Pat and the Commodore returned to the cabin, the debate was still going full
blast. Radley, who had said so little until now, was certainly making up for lost
time. It was as if some secret spring had been touched, or he had been absolved from
an oath of secrecy. That was probably the explanation; now that he was convinced that
his mission was discovered, he was only too happy to talk about it.

Commodore Hansteen had met many such believers—indeed, it was in sheer self-defence
that he had waded through the turgid literature of the subject. The approach was almost
always the same; first would be the suggestion that, “Surely, Commodore, you’ve seen
some very strange things during your years in space?” Then, when his reply was unsatisfactory,
there would be a guarded—and sometimes not so guarded—hint that he was either afraid
or unwilling to speak. It was a waste of energy denying the charge; in the eyes of
the faithful, that only proved that he was part of the conspiracy.