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Authors: Arthur C. Clarke

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He let himself fall most of the way, checking his speed from time to time by grabbing
at the ladder. On the Moon it was quite safe to do this; well,
almost
safe. Lawrence had seen men killed because they had forgotten that even this gravity
field could accelerate one to a lethal speed in less than ten seconds.

This was like Alice’s fall into Wonderland (so much of Carroll might have been inspired
by space-travel) but there was nothing to see on the way down except the blank concrete
wall, so close that Lawrence had to squint to focus upon it. And then, with the slightest
of bumps, he had reached the bottom.

He squatted down on the little metal platform, the size and shape of a manhole cover,
and examined it carefully. The trapdoor-valve that had been open during the piston’s
descent through the dust was leaking very slightly, and a trickle of grey powder was
creeping round the seal. It was nothing to worry about, but Lawrence could not help
wondering what would happen if the valve opened under the pressure from beneath. How
fast would the dust rise up the shaft, like water in a well? Not as fast, he was quite
certain, as he could go up that ladder….

Beneath his feet now, only centimetres away, was the roof of the cruiser, sloping
down into the dust at that maddening thirty degrees. His problem now was to mate the
horizontal end of the shaft with the sloping roof of the cruiser—and to do it so well
that the coupling would be dust-tight.

He could see no flaw in the plan; nor did he expect to, for it had been devised by
the best engineering brains on Earth and Moon. It even allowed for the possibility
that
Selene
might shift again, by a few centimetres, while he was working here. But theory was
one thing—and as he knew all too well, practice was another.

There were six large thumbscrews spaced round the circumference of the metal disc
on which Lawrence was sitting, and he started to turn them one by one, like a drummer
tuning his instrument. Connected to the lower side of the platform was a short piece
of concertina-like tubing, almost as wide as the caisson, and now folded flat. It
formed a flexible coupling large enough for a man to crawl through, and was now slowly
opening as Lawrence turned the screws.

One side of the corrugated tube had to stretch through forty centimetres to reach
the sloping roof; the other had to move scarcely at all. Lawrence’s chief worry had
been that the resistance of the dust would prevent the concertina from opening, but
the screws were easily overcoming the pressure.

Now none of them could be tightened any further; the lower end of the coupling must
be flush against
Selene
’s roof, and sealed to it, he hoped, by the rubber gasket round its rim. How tight
that seal was, he would very soon know.

Automatically checking his escape route, Lawrence glanced up the shaft. He could see
nothing past the glare of the floodlight hanging two metres above his head, but the
rope ladder stretching past it was extremely reassuring.

“I’ve let down the connector,” he shouted to his invisible colleagues. “It seems to
be flush against the roof. Now I’m going to open the valve.”

Any mistake now, and the whole shaft would be flooded, perhaps beyond possibility
of further use. Slowly and gently, Lawrence released the trapdoor which had allowed
the dust to pass through the piston while it was descending. There was no sudden upwelling;
the corrugated tube beneath his feet was holding back the Sea.

Lawrence reached through the valve—and his fingers felt the roof of
Selene
, still invisible beneath the dust but now only a hand’s-breadth away. Few achievements
in all his life had ever given him such a sense of satisfaction. The job was still
far from finished—
but he had reached the cruiser
. For a moment he crouched in his little pit, feeling as some old-time miner must
have done when the first nugget of gold gleamed in the lamp-light.

He banged three times on the roof; immediately, his signal was returned. There was
no point in striking up a Morse conversation, for if he wished, he could talk directly
through the microphone circuit, but he knew the psychological effect that his tapping
would have. It would prove to the men and women in
Selene
that rescue was now only centimetres away.

Yet there were still major obstacles to be demolished, and the next one was the manhole
cover on which he was sitting—the face of the piston itself. It had served its purpose,
holding back the dust while the caisson was being emptied, but now it had to be removed
before anyone could escape from
Selene
. This had to be done, however, without disturbing the flexible coupling that it had
helped to place in position.

To make this possible, the circular face of the piston had been built so that it could
be lifted out, like a saucepan lid, when eight large bolts were unscrewed. It took
Lawrence only a few minutes to deal with these and to attach a rope to the now loose
metal disc; then he shouted, “Haul away!”

A fatter man would have had to climb the shaft while the circular lid came up after
him, but Lawrence was able to squeeze against the wall while the metal plate, moving
edgeways, was hoisted past him. There goes the last line of defence, he told himself,
as the disc vanished overhead. Now it would be impossible to seal the shaft again,
if the coupling failed and the dust started to pour in.

“Bucket!” he shouted. It was already on its way down.

Forty years ago, thought Lawrence, I was playing on a Californian beach with bucket
and spade, making castles in the sand. Now here I am on the Moon—Chief Engineer, Earthside,
no less—shovelling in even deadlier earnest, with the whole human race looking over
my shoulder.

When the first load was hoisted up, he had exposed a considerable area of
Selene
’s roof. The volume of dust trapped inside the coupling-tube was quite small, and
two more bucketfuls disposed of it.

Before him now was the aluminised fabric of the sun-shield, which had long ago crumpled
under the pressure. Lawrence cut it away without difficulty—it was so fragile that
he could tear it with his bare hands—and exposed the slightly roughened fibreglass
of the outer hull. To cut through that with a small power saw would be easy; it would
also be fatal.

For by this time
Selene
’s double hull had lost its integrity; when the roof had been damaged, the dust would
have flooded into the space between the two walls. It would be waiting there, under
pressure, to come spurting out as soon as he made his first incision. Before he could
enter
Selene
, that thin but deadly layer of dust would have to be immobilised.

Lawrence rapped briskly against the roof; as he had expected, the sound was muffled
by the dust. What he did not expect was to receive an urgent, frantic tattoo in reply.

This, he could tell at once, was no reassuring “I’m O.K.” signal from inside the cruiser.
Even before the men overhead could relay the news to him, Lawrence had guessed that
the Sea of Thirst was making one final bid to keep its prey.

Because Karl Johanson was a nucleonics engineer, had a sensitive nose, and happened
to be sitting at the rear of the bus, he was the one who spotted the approach of disaster.
He remained quite still for a few seconds, nostrils twitching, then said, “Excuse
me,” to his companion in the aisle seat, and strolled quietly to the washroom. He
did not wish to cause alarm if there was no need, especially when rescue seemed so
near. But in his professional lifetime he had learned, through more examples than
he cared to remember, never to ignore the smell of burning insulation.

He was in the wash room for less than fifteen seconds; when he emerged he was walking
quickly, but not quickly enough to cause panic. He went straight to Pat Harris, who
was deep in conversation with Commodore Hansteen, and interrupted them without ceremony.

“Captain,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “We’re on fire. Go and check in the toilet.
I’ve not told anyone else.”

In a second, Pat was gone, and Hansteen with him. In space, as on the sea, no one
stopped to argue when he heard the word “Fire”. And Johanson was not the sort of man
to raise a false alarm; like Pat, he was a Lunar Administration tech, and had been
one of those whom the Commodore had selected for his riot squad.

The toilet was typical of that on any small vehicle of land, sea, air or space; one
could touch every wall without changing position. But the rear wall, immediately above
the washbowl, could no longer be touched at all. The fibreglass was blistered with
heat, and was buckling and bulging even while the horrified spectators looked at it.

“My God!” said the Commodore. “That will be through in a minute. What’s causing it?”

But Pat had already gone. He was back a few seconds later, carrying the cabin’s two
small fire-extinguishers under his arms.

“Commodore,” he said, “go and report to the raft. Tell them we may only have a few
minutes. I’ll stay here in case it breaks through.”

Hansteen did as he was told. A moment later Pat heard his voice calling the message
into the microphone, and the sudden turmoil among the passengers that followed. Almost
immediately the door opened again, and he was joined by McKenzie.

“Can I help?” asked the scientist.

“I don’t think so,” Pat answered, holding the extinguisher at the ready. He felt a
curious numbness, as if this was not really happening to him, but was all a dream
from which he would soon awaken. Perhaps by now he had passed beyond fear; having
surmounted one crisis after another, all emotion had been wrung out of him. He could
still endure, but he could no longer react.

“What’s causing it?” asked McKenzie, echoing the Commodore’s unanswered question and
immediately following it with another. “What’s behind this bulkhead?”

“Our main power supply. Twenty heavy-duty cells.”

“How much energy in them?”

“Well, we started with five thousand kilowatt-hours. We probably still have half of
it.”

“There’s your answer. Something’s shorting out our power supply. It’s probably been
burning up ever since the overhead wiring got ripped out.”

The explanation made sense, if only because there was no other source of energy aboard
the cruiser. She was completely fireproof, so could not support an ordinary combustion.
But there was enough electrical energy in her power-cells to drive her at full speed
for hours on end, and if this dissipated itself in raw heat the results would be catastrophic.

Yet this was impossible; such an overload would have tripped the circuit-breakers
at once—unless, for some reason, they had jammed.

They had not, as McKenzie reported after a quick check in the air-lock.

“All the breakers have jumped,” he said. “The circuits are as dead as mutton. I don’t
understand it.”

Even in this moment of peril, Pat could hardly refrain from smiling. McKenzie was
the eternal scientist; he might be about to die, but he would insist on knowing how.
If he was being burned at the stake—and a similar fate might well be in store—he would
ask his executioners, “What kind of wood are you using?”

The folding door creased inwards as Hansteen came back to report.

“Lawrence says he’ll be through in ten minutes,” he said. “Will that wall hold until
then?”

“God knows,” answered Pat. “It may last for another hour—it may go in the next five
seconds. Depends how the fire’s spreading.”

“Aren’t there automatic fire-fighting appliances in that compartment?”

“There’s no point in having them—this is our pressure bulkhead, and there’s normally
vacuum on the other side. That’s the best fire-fighter you can get.”

“That’s it!” exclaimed McKenzie. “Don’t you see? The whole compartment’s flooded.
When the roof tore, the dust started to work its way in. It’s shorting all the electrical
equipment.”

Pat knew, without further discussion, that McKenzie was right. By now all the sections
normally open to space must be packed with dust. It would have poured in through the
broken roof, flowed along the gap between the double-hull, slowly accumulated around
the open bus-bars in the power compartment. And then the pyrotechnics would have started:
there was enough meteoric iron in the dust to make it a good conductor. It would be
arcing and shorting in there like a thousand electric fires.

“If we sprinkled water on that wall,” said the Commodore, “would it help matters—or
would it crack the fibreglass?”

“I think we should try it,” answered McKenzie, “but very carefully—not too much at
a time.” He filled a plastic cup—the water was already hot—and looked enquiringly
at the others. As there were no objections, he began to splash a few drops on the
slowly blistering surface.

The cracklings and poppings that resulted were so terrifying that he stopped at once.
It was too big a risk; with a metal wall it would have been a good idea, but this
non-conducting plastic would shatter under the thermal stresses.

“There’s nothing we can do in here,” said the Commodore. “Even those extinguishers
won’t help much. We’d better get out and block off this whole compartment. The door
will act as a fire-wall, and give us some extra time.”

Pat hesitated. The heat was already almost unbearable, but it seemed cowardice to
leave. Yet Hansteen’s suggestion made excellent sense; if he stayed here until the
fire broke through, he would probably be gassed at once by the fumes.

“Right—let’s get out,” he agreed. “We’ll see what kind of barricade we can build behind
this door.”

He did not think they would have much time to do it; already he could hear, quite
distinctly, a frying, blistering sound from the wall that was holding the inferno
at bay.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The news that
Selene
was on fire made no difference at all to Lawrence’s actions. He could not move any
faster than he was doing now; if he attempted it, he might make a mistake, just when
the trickiest part of the entire job was coming up. All he could do was to forge ahead,
and hope that he would beat the flames.

BOOK: A Fall of Moondust
4.61Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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