A Fall of Moondust

CHAPTER 14

When Mrs. Schuster screamed, Commodore Hansteen's first reaction was: My God — the woman's going to have hysterics. Half a second later, he needed all his will power not to join her.

From outside the hull, where there had been no sound for three days except the whispering of the dust, there was a noise at last. It was unmistakable, and so was its meaning. Something metallic was scraping along the hull.

Instantly, the cabin was filled with shouts, cheers, and cries of relief. With considerable difficulty, Hansteen managed to make himself heard.

“They've found us”, he said, “but they may not know it. If we work together, they'll have a better chance of spotting us. Pat, you try the radio. The rest of us will rap on the hull — the old Morse V sign — DIT DIT DIT DAH. Come on — all together!”

Selene reverberated with a ragged volley of dots and dashes, which slowly became synchronized into one resounding tattoo.

“Hold it!” said Hansteen a minute later. “Everyone listen carefully!”

After the noise, the silence was uncanny — even unnerving. Pat had switched off the air pumps and fans, so that the only sound aboard the cruiser was the beating of twenty-two hearts.

The silence dragged on and on. Could that noise, after all, have been nothing but some contraction or expansion of Selene's own hull? Or had the rescue party — if it was a rescue party — missed them and passed on across the empty face of the Sea?

Abruptly, the scratching came again. Hansteen checked the renewed enthusiasm with a wave of his hand.

“Listen, for God's sake”, he entreated. “Let's see if we can make anything of it.”

The scratching lasted only for a few seconds before being followed once again by that agonizing silence. Presently someone said quietly, more to break the suspense than to make any useful contribution, “That sounded like a wire being dragged past. Maybe they're trawling for us.”

“Impossible”, answered Pat. “The resistance would be too great, especially at this depth. It's more likely to be a rod probing up and down.”

“Anyway”, said the Commodore, “there's a search party within a few meters of us. Give them another tattoo. Once again — all together—”

DIT DIT DIT DAH…

DIT DIT DIT DAH…

Through Selene's double hull and out into the dust throbbed the fateful opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, as a century earlier it had pulsed across Occupied Europe. In the pilot's seat, Pat Harris was saying again and again, with desperate urgency, “Selene calling. Are you receiving? Over”, and then listening for an eternal fifteen seconds before he repeated the transmission. But the ether remained as silent as it had been ever since the dust had swallowed them up.

Aboard Auriga, Maurice Spenser looked anxiously at the clock.

“Dammit”, he said, “the skis should have been there long ago. When was their last message?”

“Twenty-five minutes ago”, said the ship's Communications Officer. “The half-hourly report should be coming in soon, whether they've found anything or not.”

“Sure you're still on the right frequency?”

“You stick to your business and I'll stick to mine”, retorted the indignant radioman.

“Sorry”, replied Spenser, who had learned long ago when to apologize quickly. “I'm afraid my nerves are jumping.”

He rose from his seat, and started to make a circuit of Auriga's little control room. After he had bumped himself painfully against an instrument panel — he had not yet grown accustomed to lunar gravity, and was beginning to wonder if he ever would — he got himself under control once more.

This was the worst part of his job, the waiting until he knew whether or not he had a story. Already, he had incurred a small fortune in expenses. They would be nothing compared with the bills that would soon be accumulating if he gave Captain Anson the order to go ahead. But in that event his worries would be over, for he would have his scoop.

“Here they are”, said the Communications Officer suddenly. “Two minutes ahead of time. Something's happened.”

“I've hit something”, said Lawrence tersely, “but I can't tell what it is.”

“How far down?” asked Lawson and both pilots simultaneously.

“About fifteen meters. Take me two meters to the right. I'll try again.”

He withdrew the probe, then drove it in again when the ski had moved to the new position.

“Still there”, he reported, “and at the same depth. Take me on another two meters.”

Now the obstacle was gone, or was too deep for the probe to reach.

“Nothing there. Take me back in the other direction.”

It would be a slow and tiring job, charting the outlines of whatever lay buried down there. By such tedious methods, two centuries ago, men began to sound the oceans of Earth, lowering weighted lines to the sea bed and then hauling them up again. It was a pity, thought Lawrence, that he had no echosounder that would operate here, but he doubted if either acoustic or radio waves could penetrate through more than a few meters of the dust.

What a fool — he should have thought of that before! That was what had happened to Selene's radio signals. If she had been swallowed by the dust, it would have blanketed and absorbed her transmissions. But at this range, if he really was sitting on top of the cruiser…

Lawrence switched his receiver to the MOONCRASH band — and there she was, yelling at the top of her robot voice. The signal was piercingly strong — quite good enough, he would have thought, to have been picked up by Lagrange or Port Roris. Then he remembered that his metal probe was still resting on the submerged hull; it would give radio waves an easy path to the surface.

He sat listening to that train of pulses for a good fifteen seconds before he plucked up enough courage for the next move. He had never really expected to find anything, and even now his search might be in vain. That automatic beacon would call for weeks, like a voice from the tomb, long after Selene's occupants were dead.

Then, with an abrupt, angry gesture that defied the fates to do their worst, Lawrence switched to the cruiser's own frequency — and was almost deafened by Pat Harris shouting: “Selene calling, Selene calling. Do you receive me? Over.”

“This is Duster One”, he answered. “C. E. E. speaking. I'm fifteen meters above you. Are you all O. K.? Over.”

It was a long time before he could make any sense of the reply, the background of shouting and cheering was so loud. That in itself was enough to tell him that all the passengers were alive, and in good spirits. Listening to them, indeed, one might almost have imagined that they were holding some drunken celebration. In their joy at being discovered, at making contact with the human race, they thought that their troubles were over.

“Duster One calling Port Roris Control”, said Lawrence, while he waited for the tumult to die down. “We've found Selene, and established radio contact. Judging by the noise that's going on inside, everyone's quite O. K. She's fifteen meters down, just where Doctor Lawson indicated. I'll call you back in a few minutes. Out.”

At the speed of light, waves of relief and happiness would now be spreading over the Moon, the Earth, the inner planets, bringing a sudden lifting of the hearts to billions of people. On streets and slideways, in buses and spaceships, perfect strangers would turn to each other and say, “Have you heard? They've found Selene.”

In all the solar system, indeed, there was only one man who could not wholeheartedly share the rejoicing. As he sat on his ski, listening to those cheers from underground and looking at the crawling pattern in the dust, Chief Engineer Lawrence felt far more scared and helpless than the men and women trapped beneath his feet. He knew that he was facing the greatest battle in his life.