A Fall of Moondust

CHAPTER 10

Dr. Tom Lawson, so Chief Engineer Lawrence had decided, was an exception to the old saying “To know all is to forgive all.” The knowledge that the astronomer had passed a loveless, institutionalized childhood and had escaped from his origins by prodigies of pure intellect, at the cost of all other human qualities, helped one to understand him — but not to like him. It was singular bad luck, thought Lawrence, that he was the only scientist within three hundred thousand kilometers who happened to have an infrared detector, and knew how to use it.

He was now sitting in the observer's seat of Duster Two, making the final adjustments to the crude but effective lash-up he had contrived. A camera tripod had been fixed on the canopy of the ski, and the detector had been mounted on this, in such a way that it could pan in any direction.

It seemed to be working, but that was hard to tell in this small, pressurized hangar, with a confused jumble of heat sources all around it. The real test could come only out in the Sea of Thirst.

“It's ready”, said Lawson presently to the Chief Engineer. “I have a word with the man who's going to run it.”

The C. E. E. looked at him thoughtfully, still trying to make up his mind. There were strong arguments for and against what he was considering now, but whatever he did, he must not let his personal feelings intrude. The matter was far too important for that.

“You can wear a space suit, can't you?” he asked Lawson.

“I've never worn one in my life. They're only needed for going outside — and we leave that to the engineers.”

“Well, now you have a chance of learning”, said the C. E. E., ignoring the jibe. (If it was a jibe; much of Lawson's rudeness, he decided, was indifference to the social graces rather than defiance of them.) “There's not much to it, when you're riding a ski. You'll be sitting still in the observer's seat and the autoregulator takes care of oxygen, temperature, and the rest. There's only one problem —”

“What's that?”

“How are you for claustrophobia?”

Tom hesitated, not liking to admit any weakness. He had passed the usual space tests, of course, and suspected — quite rightly — that he had had a very close call on some of the psych ratings. Obviously he was not an acute claustrophobe, or he could never have gone aboard a ship. But a spaceship and a space suit were two very different things.

“I can take it”, he said at last.

“Don't fool yourself if you can't”, Lawrence insisted. “I think you should come with us, but I'm not trying to bully you into false heroics. All I ask is that you make up your mind before we leave the hangar. It may be a little too hate to have second thoughts when we're twenty kilometers out to Sea.”

Tom looked at the ski and bit his lip. The idea of skimming across that infernal lake of dust in such a flimsy contraption seemed crazy — but these men did it every day. And if anything went wrong with the detector, there was at least a slight chance that he could fix it.

“Here's a suit that's your size”, said Lawrence. “Try it on — it may help you to make up your mind.”

Tom struggled into the flaccid yet crinkly garment, closed the front zipper, and stood, still helmetless, feeling rather a fool. The oxygen flask that was buckled to his harness seemed absurdly small, and Lawrence noticed his anxious glance.

“Don't worry; that's merely the four-hour reserve. You won't be using it at all. The main supply's on the ski. Mind your nose — here comes the helmet.”

Tom could tell, by the expressions of those around him, that this was the moment that separated the men from the boys. Until that helmet was seated, you were still part of the human race; afterward, you were alone, in a tiny mechanical world of your own. There might be other men only centimeters away, but you had to peer at them through thick plastic, talk to them by radio. You could not even touch them, except through double layers of artificial skin. Someone had once written that it was very lonely to die in a space suit. For the first time, Tom realized how true that must be.

The Chief Engineer's voice sounded suddenly, reverberantly, from the tiny speakers set in the side of the helmet.

“The only control you need worry about is the intercom — that's the panel on your right. Normally you'll be connected to your pilot. The circuit will be live all the time you're both on the ski, so you can talk to each other whenever you feel hike it. But as soon as you disconnect, you'll have to use radio — as you're doing now to listen to me. Press your Transmit button and talk back.”

“What's that red Emergency button for?” asked Tom, after he had obeyed this order.

“You won't need it — I hope. That actuates a homing beacon and sets up a radio racket until someone comes to find you. Don't touch any of the gadgets on the suit without instructions from us — especially that one.”

“I won't”, promised Tom. “Let's go.”

He walked, rather clumsily — for he was used to neither the suit nor the lunar gravity — over to Duster Two and took his place in the observer's seat. A single umbilical cord, plugged inappropriately into the right hip, connected the suit to the ski's oxygen, communications, and power. The vehicle could keep him alive, though hardly comfortable, for three or four days, at a pinch.

The little hangar was barely large enough for the two dustskis, and it took only a few minutes for the pumps to exhaust its air. As the suit stiffened around him, Tom felt a touch of panic. The Chief Engineer and two pilots were watching, and he did not wish to give them the satisfaction of thinking that he was afraid. No man could help feeling tense when, for the first time in his life, he went into vacuum.

The clamshell doors pivoted open. There was a faint tug of ghostly fingers as the last vestige of air gushed out, plucking feebly at his suit before it dispersed into the void. And then, flat and featureless, the empty gray of the Sea of Thirst stretched out to the horizon.

For a moment it seemed impossible that here, only a few meters away, was the reality behind the images he had studied from far out in space. (Who was hooking through the hundredcentimeter telescope now? Was one of his colleagues watching, even at this moment, from his vantage point high above the Moon?) But this was no picture painted on a screen by flying electrons; this was the real thing, the strange, amorphous stuff that had swallowed twenty-two men and women without trace. And across which he, Tom Lawson, was about to venture on this insubstantial craft.

He had little time to brood. The ski vibrated beneath him as the fans started to spin; then, following Duster One, it glided slowly out onto the naked surface of the Moon.

The low rays of the rising sun smote them as soon as they emerged from the long shadow of the Port buildings. Even with the protection of the automatic filters, it was dangerous to look toward the blue-white fury in the eastern sky. No, Tom corrected himself, this is the Moon, not Earth; here the sun rises in the west. So we're heading northeast, into the Sinus Roris, along the track Selene followed and never retraced.

Now that the low domes of the Port were shrinking visibly toward the horizon, he felt something of the exhilaration and excitement of all forms of speed. The sensation lasted only for a few minutes, until no more landmarks could be seen and they were caught in the illusion of being poised at the very center of an infinite plain. Despite the turmoil of the spinning fans, and the slow, silent fall of the dust parabolas behind them, they seemed to be motionless. Tom knew that they were traveling at a speed that would take them clear across the Sea in a couple of hours, yet he had to wrestle with the fear that they were lost light-years from any hope of salvation. It was at this moment that he began, a little late in the game, to feel a grudging respect for the men he was working with.

This was a good place to start checking his equipment. He switched on the detector, and set it scanning back and forth over the emptiness they had just crossed. With calm satisfaction, he noted the two blinding trails of light stretching behind them across the darkness of the Sea. This test, of course, was childishly easy; Selene's fading thermal ghost would be a million times harder to spot against the waxing heat of dawn. But it was encouraging. If he had failed here, there would have been no point in continuing any further.

“How's it working?” said the Chief Engineer, who must have been watching from the other ski.

“Up to specification”, replied Tom cautiously. “It seems to be behaving normally.” He aimed the detector at the shrinking crescent of Earth; that was a slightly more difficult target, but not a really hard one, for it needed little sensitivity to pick up the gentle warmth of the mother world when it was projected against the cold night of space.

Yes, there it was — Earth in the far infrared, a strange and at first glance baffling sight. For it was no longer a clean-cut, geometrically perfect crescent, but a ragged mushroom with its stem lying along the equator.

It took Tom a few seconds to interpret the picture. Both Poles had been chopped off. That was understandable, for they were too cold to be detected at this setting of the sensitivity. But why that bulge across the unilluminated night side of the planet? Then he realized that he was seeing the warm glow of the tropical oceans, radiating back into the darkness the heat that they had stored during the day. In the infrared, the equatorial night was more brilliant than the polar day.

It was a reminder of the fact, which no scientist should ever forget, that human senses perceived only a tiny, distorted picture of the Universe. Tom Lawson had never heard of Plato's analogy of the chained prisoners in the cave, watching shadows cast upon a wall and trying to deduce from them the realities of the external world. But here was a demonstration that Plato would have appreciated: Which Earth was “real”? The perfect crescent visible to the eye, the tattered mushroom glowing in the far infrared — or neither?

The office was small, even for Port Roris — which was purely a transit station between Earthside and Farside, and a jumping-off point for tourists to the Sea of Thirst. (Not that any looked like jumping off in that direction for some time.) The Port had had a brief moment of glory thirty years before, as the base used by one of the Moon's few successful criminals — Jerry Budker, who had made a small fortune dealing in fake pieces of Lunik II. He was hardly as exciting as Robin Hood or Billy the Kid, but he was the best that the Moon could offer.

Maurice Spenser was rather glad that Port Roris was such a quiet little one-dome town, though he suspected that it would not stay quiet much longer, especially when his colleagues at Clavius woke up to the fact that an I. N. Bureau Chief was lingering here unaccountably, and not hurrying southward to the lights of the big (pop. 52,647) city. A guarded cable to Earth had taken care of his superiors, who would trust his judgment and would guess the story he was after. Sooner or later, the competition would guess it, too — but by that time, he hoped to be well ahead.

The man he was conferring with was Auriga's still-disgruntled skipper, who had just spent a complicated and unsatisfactory hour on the telephone with his agents at Clavius, trying to arrange transshipment of his cargo. McIver, McDonald, Macarthy and McCulloch, Ltd. seemed to think it was his fault that Auriga had put down at Roris. In the end, he had hung up after telling them to sort it out with the head office. Since it was now early Sunday morning in Edinburgh, this should hold them for a while.

Captain Anson mellowed a little after the second whisky; a man who could find Johnnie Walker in Port Roris was worth knowing, and he asked Spenser how he had managed it.

“The power of the press”, said the other with a laugh. “A reporter never reveals his sources; if he did, he wouldn't stay in business for long.”

He opened his brief case, and pulled out a sheaf of maps and photos.

“I had an even bigger job getting these at such short notice — and I'd be obliged, Captain, if you would say nothing at all about this to anyone. It's extremely confidential, at least for the moment.”

“Of course. What's it about — Selene?”

“So you guessed that, too? You're right. It may come to nothing, but I want to be prepared.”

He spread one of the photos across the desk. It was a view of the Sea of Thirst, from the standard series issued by the Lunar Survey and taken from low-altitude reconnaissance satellites. Though this was an afternoon photograph, and the shadows thus pointed in the opposite direction, it was almost identical with the view Spenser had had just before landing. He had studied it so closely that he now knew it by heart.

“The Mountains of Inaccessibility”, he said. “They rise very steeply out of the Sea to an altitude of almost two thousand meters. That dark oval is Crater Lake —”

“Where Selene was lost?”

“Where she may be lost: there's now some doubt about that. Our sociable young friend from Lagrange has evidence that she's actually gone down in the Sea of Thirst — round about this area. In that case, the people inside her may be alive. And in that case, Captain, there's going to be one hell of a salvage operation only a hundred kilometers from here. Port Roris will be the biggest new center in the solar system.”

“Phew! So that's your game. But where do I come in?”

Once again Spenser placed his finger on the map.

“Right here, Captain. I want to charter your ship. And I want you to land me, with a cameraman and two hundred kilos of TV equipment, on the western wall of the Mountains of Inaccessibility.”

“I have no further questions, your Honor”, said Counsel Schuster, sitting down abruptly.

“Very well”, replied Commodore Hansteen. “I must order the witness not to leave the jurisdiction of the Court.”

Amid general laughter, David Barrett returned to his seat. He had put on a good perfonnance; though most of his replies had been serious and thoughtful, they had been enlivened with flashes of humor and had kept the audience continuously interested. If all the other witnesses were equally forthcoming, that would solve the problem of entertainment, for as long as it had to be solved. Even if they used up all the memories of four lifetimes in every day — a complete impossibility, of course — someone would still be talking when the oxygen container gave its last gasp.

Hansteen looked at his watch. There was still an hour to go before their frugal lunch. They could revert to Shane, or start (despite Miss Morley's objections) on that preposterous historical novel. But it seemed a pity to break off now, while everyone was in a receptive mood.

“If you all feel the same way about it”, said the Commodore, “I'll call another witness.”

“I'll second that” was the quick reply from Barrett, who now considered himself safe from further inquisition. Even the poker players were in favor, so the Clerk of the Court pulled another name out of the coffeepot in which the ballot papers had been mixed.

He looked at it with some surprise, and hesitated before reading it out.

“What's the matter?” said the Court. “Is it your name?”

“Er — no”, replied the Clerk, glancing at learned Counsel with a mischievous grin. He cleared his throat and called: “Mrs. Myra Schuster!”

“Your Honor — I object!” Mrs. Schuster rose slowly, a formidable figure even though she had lost a kilogram or two since leaving Port Roris. She pointed to her husband, who looked embarrassed and tried to hide behind his notes. “Is it fair for him to ask me questions?”

“I'm willing to stand down”, said Irving Schuster, even before the Court could say “objection sustained.”

“I am prepared to take over the examination”, said the Commodore, though his expression rather belied this. “But is there anyone else who feels qualified to do so?”

There was a short silence; then, to Hansteen's surprised relief, one of the poker players stood up.

“Though I'm not a lawyer, your Honor, I have some slight legal experience. I'm willing to assist.”

“Very good, Mr. Harding. Your witness.”

Harding took Schuster's place at the front of the cabin, and surveyed his captive audience. He was a well-built, tough-looking man who somehow did not fit his own description, that he was a bank executive. Hansteen had wondered, fleetingly, if this was the truth.

“Your name is Myra Schuster?”

“Yes.”

“And what, Mrs. Schuster, are you doing on the Moon?”

The witness smiled.

“That's an easy one to answer. They told me I'd weigh only twenty kilos here — so I came.”

“For the record, why did you want to weigh twenty kilos?”

Mrs. Schuster looked at Harding as if he had said something very stupid.

“I used to be a dancer once”, she said, and her voice was suddenly wistful, her expression faraway. “I gave that up, of course, when I married Irving.”

“Why 'of course,' Mrs. Schuster?”

The witness glanced at her husband, who stirred a little uneasily, looked as if he might raise an objection, but then thought better of it.

“Oh, he said it wasn't dignified. And I guess he was right — the kind of dancing I used to do.”

This was too much for Mr. Schuster. He shot to his feet, ignoring the Court completely, and protested: “Really, Myra! There's no need —”

“Oh, vector it out, Irv!” she answered, the incongruously oldfashioned slang bringing back a faint whiff of the nineties. “What does it matter now? Let's stop acting and be ourselves. I don't mind these folks knowing that I used to dance at the 'Blue Asteroid' — or that you got me off the hook when the cops raided the place.”

Irving subsided, spluttering, while the Court dissolved in a roar of laughter which his Honor did nothing to quell. This release of tensions was precisely what he had hoped for; when people were laughing, they could not be afraid.

And he began to wonder still more about Mr. Harding, whose casual yet shrewd questioning had brought this about. For a man who said he was not a lawyer, he was doing pretty well. It would be interesting to see how he performed in the witness box, when it was Schuster's turn to ask the questions.