Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (15 page)

Our badly needed supplies were five hundred
feet above our heads, and in a few hours night would be falling. What was to be
done?

About fifteen people made the same
suggestion at once, and for the next few minutes there was a great scurrying
about as we rounded up all the nylon line on the base. Soon there was more than
a thousand yards of it coiled in neat loops at Trevor’s feet while we all
waited expectantly. He tied one end to his arrow, drew the bow, and aimed it
experimentally straight toward the stars. The arrow rose a little more than
half the height of the cliff; then the weight of the line pulled it back.

‘Sorry,’ said Trevor. ‘I just can’t make it.
And don’t forget – we’d have to send up some kind of grapnel as well, if we
want the end to stay up there.’

There was much gloom for the next few
minutes, as we watched the coils of line fall slowly back from the sky. The
situation was really somewhat absurd. In our ships we had enough energy to
carry us a quarter of a million miles from the moon – yet we were baffled by a
puny little cliff. If we had time, we could probably find a way up to the top
from the other side of the hill, but that would mean travelling several miles.
It would be dangerous, and might well be impossible, during the few hours of
daylight that were left.

Scientists were never baffled for long, and
too many ingenious (sometimes overingenious) minds were working on the problem
for it to remain unresolved. But this time it was a little more difficult, and
only three people got the answer simultaneously. Trevor thought it over, then
said noncommittally, ‘Well, it’s worth trying.’

The preparations took a little while, and we
were all watching anxiously as the rays of the sinking sun crept higher and
higher up the sheer cliff looming above us. Even if Trevor could get a line and
grapnel up there, I thought to myself, it would not be easy making the ascent
while encumbered with a space suit. I have no head for heights, and was glad
that several mountaineering enthusiasts had already volunteered for the job.

At last everything was ready. The line had
been carefully arranged so that it would lift from the ground with the minimum
of hindrance. A light grapnel had been attached to the line a few feet behind
the arrow; we hoped that it would catch in the rocks up there and wouldn’t let
us down – all too literally – when we put our trust in it.

This time, however, Trevor was not using a
single arrow. He attached four to the line, at two-hundred-yard intervals. And
I shall never forget that incongruous spectacle of the space-suited figure,
gleaming in the last rays of the setting sun, as it drew its bow against the
sky.

The arrow sped toward the stars, and before
it had lifted more than fifty feet Trevor was already fitting the second one to
his improvised bow. It raced after its predecessor, carrying the other end of
the long loop that was now being hoisted into space. Almost at once the third
followed, lifting its section of line – and I swear that the fourth arrow, with
its section, was on the way before the first had noticeably slackened its
momentum.

Now that there was no question of a single
arrow lifting the entire length of line, it was not hard to reach the required
altitude. The first two times the grapnel fell back; then it caught firmly
somewhere up on the hidden plateau – and the first volunteer began to haul
himself up the line. It was true that he weighed only about thirty pounds in
this low gravity, but it was still a long way to fall.

He didn’t. The stores in the freight rocket
started coming down the cliff within the next hour, and everything essential
had been lowered before nightfall. I must confess, however, that my
satisfaction was considerably abated when one of the engineers proudly showed
me the mouth organ he had had sent from Earth. Even then I felt certain that we
would all be very tired of that instrument before the long lunar night had
ended….

But that, of course, was hardly Trevor’s
fault. As we walked back to the ship together, through the great pools of
shadow that were flowing swiftly over the plain, he made a proposal that, I am
sure, has puzzled thousands of people ever since the detailed maps of the first
lunar expedition were published.

After all, it does seem a little odd that a
flat and lifeless plain, broken by a single small mountain, should now be
labelled on all the charts of the moon as Sherwood Forest.

I am very sorry, now that it’s too late,
that I never got to know Vladimir Surov. As I remember him, he was a quiet
little man who could understand English but couldn’t speak it well enough to
make conversation. Even to his colleagues, I suspect he was a bit of an enigma.
Whenever I went aboard the
Ziolkovski
, he would be sitting in a corner
working on his notes or peering through a microscope, a man who clung to his
privacy even in the tight and tiny world of a spaceship. The rest of the crew
did not seem to mind his aloofness; when they spoke to him, it was clear that
they regarded him with tolerant affection, as well as with respect. That was
hardly surprising; the work he had done developing plants and trees that could
flourish far inside the Arctic Circle had already made him the most famous
botanist in Russia.

The fact that the Russian expedition had
taken a botanist to the moon had caused a good deal of amusement, though it was
really no odder than the fact that there were biologists on both the British
and American ships. During the years before the first lunar landing, a good
deal of evidence had accumulated hinting that some form of vegetation might
exist on the moon, despite its airlessness and lack of water. The president of
the USSR Academy of Science was one of the leading proponents of this theory,
and being too old to make the trip himself had done the next best thing by
sending Surov.

The complete absence of any such vegetation,
living or fossil, in the thousand or so square miles explored by our various
parties was the first big disappointment the moon had reserved for us. Even
those sceptics who were quite certain that no form of life could exist on the
moon would have been very glad to have been proved wrong – as of course they
were, five years later, when Richards and Shannon made their astonishing
discovery inside the great walled plain of Eratosthenes. But
that
revelation still lay in the future; at the time of the first landing, it seemed
that Surov had come to the moon in vain.

He did not appear unduly depressed, but kept
himself as busy as the rest of the crew studying soil samples and looking after
the little hydroponic farm whose pressurised, transparent tubes formed a
gleaming network around the
Ziolkovski
. Neither we nor the Americans had
gone in for this sort of thing, having calculated that it was better to ship
food from Earth than to grow it on the spot – at least until the time came to
set up a permanent base. We were right in terms of economics, but wrong in
terms of morale. The tiny airtight greenhouses inside which Surov grew his
vegetables and dwarf fruit trees were an oasis upon which we often feasted our
eyes when we had grown tired of the immense desolation surrounding us.

One of the many disadvantages of being
commander was that I seldom had much chance to do any active exploring; I was
too busy preparing reports for Earth, checking stores, arranging programmes and
duty rosters, conferring with my opposite numbers in the American and Russian
ships, and trying – not always successfully – to guess what would go wrong
next. As a result, I sometimes did not go outside the base for two or three
days at a time, and it was a standing joke that my space suit was a haven for
moths.

Perhaps it is because of this that I can
remember all my trips outside so vividly; certainly I can recall my only
encounter with Surov. It was near noon, with the sun high above the southern
mountains and the new Earth a barely visible thread of silver a few degrees
away from it. Henderson, our geophysicist, wanted to take some magnetic
readings at a series of check points a couple of miles to the east of the base.
Everyone else was busy, and I was momentarily on top of my work, so we set off
together on foot.

The journey was not long enough to merit
taking one of the scooters, especially because the charges in the batteries
were getting low. In any case, I always enjoyed walking out in the open on the
moon. It was not merely the scenery, which even at its most awe-inspiring one
can grow accustomed to after a while. No – what I never tired of was the
effortless, slow-motion way in which every step took me bounding over the
landscape, giving me the freedom that before the coming of space flight men
only knew in dreams.

We had done the job and were halfway home
when I noticed a figure moving across the plain about a mile to the south of us
– not far, in fact, from the Russian base. I snapped my field glasses down
inside my helmet and took a careful look at the other explorer. Even at close
range, of course, you can’t identify a man in a space suit, but because the
suits are always coded by colour and number that makes no practical difference.

‘Who is it?’ asked Henderson over the
short-range radio channel to which we were both tuned.

‘Blue suit, Number 3 – that would be Surov.
But I don’t understand.
He’s by himself
.’

It is one of the most fundamental rules of
lunar exploration that no one goes anywhere alone on the surface of the moon.
So many accidents can happen, which would be trivial if you were with a
companion – but fatal if you were by yourself. How would you manage, for
example, if your space suit developed a slow leak in the small of the back and
you couldn’t put on a repair patch? That may sound funny; but it’s happened.

‘Perhaps his buddy has had an accident and
he’s going to fetch help,’ suggested Henderson. ‘Maybe we had better call him.’

I shook my head. Surov was obviously in no
hurry. He had been out on a trip of his own, and was making his leisurely way
back to the
Ziolkovski
. It was no concern of mine if Commander Krasnin
let his people go out on solo trips, though it seemed a deplorable practice.
And if Surov was breaking regulations, it was equally no concern of mine to
report him.

During the next two months, the men often
spotted Surov making his lone way over the landscape, but he always avoided them
if they got too near. I made some discreet inquiries, and found that Commander
Krasnin had been forced, owing to shortage of men, to relax some of his safety
rules. But I couldn’t find out what Surov was up to, though I never dreamed
that his commander was equally in the dark.

It was with an ‘I told you so’ feeling that
I got Krasnin’s emergency call. We had all had men in trouble before and had
had to send out help, but this was the first time anyone had been lost and had
not replied when his ship had sent out the recall signal. There was a hasty
radio conference, a line of action was drawn up, and search parties fanned out
from each of the three ships.

Once again I was with Henderson, and it was
only common sense for us to backtrack along the route that we had seen Surov
following. It was in what we regarded as ‘our’ territory, quite some distance
away from Surov’s own ship, and as we scrambled up the low foothills it
occurred to me for the first time that the Russian might have been doing
something he wanted to keep from his colleagues. What it might be, I could not
imagine.

Henderson found him, and yelled for help
over his suit radio. But it was much too late; Surov was lying, face down, his
deflated suit crumpled around him. He had been kneeling when something had
smashed the plastic globe of his helmet; you could see how he had pitched
forward and died instantaneously.

When Commander Krasnin reached us, we were
still staring at the unbelievable object that Surov had been examining when he
died. It was about three feet high, a leathery, greenish oval rooted to the
rocks with a widespread network of tendrils. Yes – rooted; for it was a plant.
A few yards away were two others, much smaller and apparently dead, since they
were blackened and withered.

My first reaction was: ‘So there
is
life on the moon, after all!’ It was not until Krasnin’s voice spoke in my ears
that I realised how much more marvellous was the truth.

‘Poor Vladimir!’ he said. ‘We knew he was a
genius, yet we laughed at him when he told us of his dream. So he kept his
greatest work a secret. He conquered the Arctic with his hybrid wheat, but
that
was only a beginning. He has brought life to the moon – and death as well.’

As I stood there, in that first moment of
astonished revelation, it still seemed a miracle. Today, all the world knows
the history of ‘Surov’s cactus’, as it was inevitably if quite inaccurately
christened, and it has lost much of its wonder. His notes have told the full
story, and have described the years of experimentation that finally led him to
a plant whose leathery skin would enable it to survive in vacuum, and whose
far-ranging, acid-secreting roots would enable it to grow upon rocks where even
lichens would be hard put to thrive. And we have seen the realisation of the
second stage of Surov’s dream, for the cactus which will forever bear his name
has already broken up vast areas of the lunar rock and so prepared a way for
the more specialised plants that now feed every human being upon the moon.