A Fall of Moondust

CHAPTER 16

Chief Engineer Lawrence did not believe that committees ever achieved anything. His views were well known on the Moon, for shortly after the last biannual visit of the Lunar Board of Survey, a notice had appeared on his desk conveying the information: A BOARD IS LONG, HARD, AND NARROW. IT IS MADE OF WOOD.

But he approved of this committee, because it fulfilled his somewhat stringent requirements. He was chairman; there were no minutes, no secretary, no agenda. Best of all, he could ignore or accept its recommendations as he pleased. He was the man in charge of rescue operations, unless the Chief Administrator chose to sack him — which he would do only under extreme pressure from Earth. The committee existed merely to provide ideas and technical knowledge; it was his private brain trust.

Only half of its dozen members were physically present; the rest were scattered over Moon, Earth, and space. The soilphysics expert on Earth was at a disadvantage, for owing to the finite speed of radio waves, he would always be a second and a half in arrears, and by the time his comments could get to the Moon, almost three seconds would have passed. He had accordingly been asked to make notes and to save his views until the end, only interrupting if it was absolutely necessary. As many people had discovered, after setting up lunar conference calls at great expense, nothing hamstrung a brisk discussion more effectively than that three-second time lag.

“For the benefit of the newcomers”, said Lawrence, when the roll call had been completed, “I'll brief you on the situation. Selene is fifteen meters down, on a level keel. She's undamaged, with all her equipment functioning, and the twenty-two people inside her are still in good spirits. They have enough oxygen for ninety hours — that's the deadline we have to keep in mind.

“For those of you who don't know what Selene looks like, here's a one-in-twenty scale model.” He lifted the model from the table, and turned it slowly in front of the camera. “She's just like a bus, or a small aircraft; the only thing unique is her propulsion system, which employs these wide-bladed, variable-pitch fans.

“Our great problem, of course, is the dust. If you've never seen it, you can't imagine what it's like. Any ideas you may have about sand or other materials on Earth won't apply here; this stuff is more like a liquid. Here's a sample of it.”

Lawrence picked up a tall vertical cylinder, the lower third of which was filled with an amorphous gray substance. He tilted it, and the stuff began to flow. It moved more quickly than syrup, more slowly than water, and it took a few seconds for its surface to become horizontal again after it had been disturbed. No one could ever have guessed, by looking at it, that it was not a fluid.

“This cylinder is sealed”, explained Lawrence, “with a vacuum inside, so the dust is showing its normal behavior. In air, it's quite different; it's much stickier, and behaves rather like very fine sand or talcum powder. I'd better warn you — it's impossible to make a synthetic sample that has the properties of the real thing. It takes a few billion years of desiccation to produce the genuine article. If you want to do some experimenting, we'll ship you as much dust as you like; heaven knows, we can spare it.

“A few other points. Selene is three kilometers from the nearest solid land — the Mountains of Inaccessibility. There may be several hundred meters of dust beneath her, though we're not sure of that. Nor can we be quite sure that there will be no more cave-ins, though the geologists think it's very unlikely.

“The only way we can reach the site is by dust-ski. We've two units, and another one is being shipped round from Farside. They can carry or tow up to five tons of equipment; the largest single item we could put on a sledge would be about two tons. So we can't bring any really heavy gear to the site.

“Well, that's the position. We have ninety hours. Any suggestion? I've some ideas of my own, but I'd like to hear yours first.”

There was a long silence while the members of the committee, scattered over a volume of space almost four hundred thousand kilometers across, brought their various talents to bear on the problem. Then the Chief Engineer, Farside, spoke from somewhere in the neighborhood of Joliot-Curie.

“It's my hunch that we can't do anything effective in ninety hours; we'll have to build special equipment, and that always takes time. So — we have to get an air line down to Selene. Where's her umbilical connection?”

“Behind the main entrance, at the rear. I don't see how you can get a line there and couple it up, fifteen meters down. Besides, everything will be clogged with dust.”

“I've a better idea”, someone interjected. “Drive a pipe down through the roof.”

“You'll need two pipes”, pointed out another speaker. “One to pump in oxygen, the other to suck out the foul air.”

“That means using a complete air purifier. And we won't even need it if we can get those people out inside the ninety hours.”

“Too big a gamble. Once the air supply is secure, we can take our time, and the ninety-hour deadline won't worry us.”

“I accept that point”, said Lawrence. “In fact, I've several men working on those lines right now. The next question is: Do we try to raise the cruiser with everyone inside, or do we get the passengers out individually? Remember, there's only one space suit aboard her.”

“Could we sink a shaft to the door, and couple it to the air lock?” asked one of the scientists.

“Same problem as with the air hose. Even worse, in fact, since the coupling would be so much bigger.”

“What about a cofferdam large enough to go round the whole cruiser? We could sink it round her, then dig out the dust.”

“You'd need tons of piles and shorings. And don't forget, the dam would have to be sealed off at the bottom. Otherwise the dust would flow back into it, just as fast as we took it out of the top.”

“Can you pump the stuff?” asked someone else.

“Yes, with the right kind of impeller. But you can't suck it, of course. It has to be lifted. A normal pump just cavitates.”

“This dust”, grumbled the Port Roris Assistant Engineer, “has the worst properties of solids and liquids, with none of their advantages. It won't flow when you want it to; it won't stay put when you want it to.”

“Can I make a point?” said Father Ferraro, speaking from Plato. “This word 'dust' is highly misleading. What we have here is a substance that can't exist on Earth, so there's no name for it in our language. The last speaker was quite correct; sometimes you have to think of it as a nonwetting liquid, rather like mercury, but much lighter. At other times, it's a flowing solid, like pitch — except that it moves much more rapidly, of course.”

“Any way it can be stabilized?” someone asked.

“I think that's a question for Earth”, said Lawrence. “Doctor Evans, would you like to comment?”

Everyone waited for the three seconds, which, as always, seemed very much longer. Then the physicist answered, quite as clearly as if he were in the same room: “I've been wondering about that. There might be organic binders — glue, if you like — that would make it stick together so that it could be handled more easily. Would plain water be any use? Have you tried that?”

“No, but we will”, answered Lawrence, scribbling a note.

“Is the stuff magnetic?” asked the Traffic Control Officer.

“That's a good point”, said Lawrence. “Is it, Father?”

“Slightly; it contains a fair amount of meteoric iron. But I don't think that helps us at all. A magnetic field would pull out the ferrous material, but it wouldn't affect the dust as a whole.”

“Anyway, we'll try.” Lawrence made another note. It was his hope — though a faint one — that out of this clash of minds would come some bright idea, some apparently farfetched but fundamentally sound conception that would solve his problem. And it was his, whether he liked it or not. He was responsible, through his various deputies and departments, for every piece of technical equipment on this side of the Moon — especially when something went wrong with it.

“I'm very much afraid”, said the Clavius Traffic Control Officer, “that your biggest headache will be logistics. Every piece of equipment has to be ferried out on the skis, and they take at least two hours for the round trip — more, if they're towing a heavy load. Before you even start operating, you'll have to build some kind of working platform — like a raft — that you can leave on the site. It may take a day to get that in position, and much longer to get all your equipment out to it.”

“Including temporary living quarters”, added someone. “The workmen will have to stay on the site.”

“That's straightforward; as soon as we fix a raft, we can inflate an igloo on it.”

“Better than that; you won't even need a raft. An igloo will float by itself.”

“Getting back to this raft”, said Lawrence, “we want strong, collapsible units that can be bolted together on the site. Any ideas?”

“Empty fuel tanks?”

“Too big and fragile. Maybe Tech Stores has something.”

So it went on; the brain trust was in session. Lawrence would give it another half-hour, then he would decide on his plan of action.

One could not spend too much time talking, when the minutes were ticking away and many lives were at stake. Yet hasty and ill-conceived schemes were worse than useless, for they would absorb materials and skills that might tilt the balance between failure and success.

At first sight, it seemed such a straightforward job. There was Selene, within a hundred kilometers of a well-equipped base. Her position was known exactly, and she was only fifteen meters down. But that fifteen meters presented Lawrence with some of the most baffling problems of his entire career.

It was a career which, he knew well, might soon terminate abruptly. For it would be very hard to explain his failure if those twenty-two men and women died.

It was a great pity that not a single witness saw Auriga coming down, for it was a glorious sight. A spaceship landing or taking off is one of the most impressive spectacles that Man has yet contrived — excluding some of the more exuberant efforts of the nuclear engineers. And when it occurs on the Moon, in slow motion and uncanny silence, it has a dreamlike quality which no one who has seen it can ever forget.

Captain Anson saw no point in trying any fancy navigation, especially since someone else was paying for the gas. There was nothing in the Master's Handbook about flying a space liner a hundred kilometers — a hundred kilometers, indeed! — though no doubt the mathematicians would be delighted to work out a trajectory, based on the Calculus of Variations, using the very minimum amount of fuel. Anson simply blasted straight up for a thousand kilometers (this qualifying for deep-space rates under Interplanetary Law, though he would tell Spenser about this later) and came down again on a normal vertical approach, with final radar guidance. The ship's computer and the radar monitored each other, and both were monitored by Captain Anson. Any one of the three could have done the job, so it was really quite simple and safe, though it did not look it.

Especially to Maurice Spenser, who began to feel a great longing for the soft green hills of Earth as those desolate peaks clawed up at him. Why had he talked himself into this? Surely there were cheaper ways of committing suicide.

The worst part was the free fall between the successive braking periods. Suppose the rockets failed to fire on command, and the ship continued to plunge Moonward, slowly but inexorably accelerating until it crashed? It was no use pretending that this was a stupid or childish fear, because it had happened more than once.

It was not, however, going to happen to Auriga. The unbearable fury of the braking jets was already splashing over the rocks, blasting skyward the dust and cosmic debris that had not been disturbed in thrice a billion years. For a moment the ship hovered in delicate balance only centimeters off the ground; then, almost reluctantly, the spears of flame that supported her retracted into their scabbards. The widely spaced legs of the undercarriage made contact, their pads tilted according to the contours of the ground, and the whole ship rocked slightly for a second as the shock absorbers neutralized the residual energy of impact.

For the second time inside twenty-four hours, Maurice Spenser had landed on the Moon. That was a claim that very few men could make.

“Well”, said Captain Anson, as he got up from the control board, “I hope you're satisfied with the view. It's cost you plenty — and there's still that little matter of overtime. According to the Space-Workers' Union —”

“Have you no soul, Captain? Why bother me with such trivia at a time like this? But if I may say so without being charged any extra, that was a very fine landing.”

“Oh, it's all part of the day's work”, replied the skipper, though he could not conceal slight signs of pleasure. “By the way, would you mind initialing the log here, against the time of landing.”

“What's that for?” asked Spenser suspiciously.

“Proof of delivery. The log's our prime legal document.”

“It seems a little old-fashioned, having a written one”, said Spenser. “I thought everything was done by nucleonics these days.”

“Traditions of the service”, replied Anson. “Of course, the ship's flight recorders are running all the time we're under power, and the trip can always be reconstructed from them. But only the skipper's log gives the little details that make one voyage different from another — like 'Twins born to one of the steerage passengers this morning' or 'At six bells, sighted the White Whale off the starboard bow.'”

“I take it back, Captain”, said Spenser. “You do have a soul, after all.” He added his signature to the log, then moved over to the observation window to examine the view.

The control cabin, a hundred and fifty meters above the ground, had the only direct-vision windows in the ship, and the view through them was superb. Behind them, to the north, were the upper ramparts of the Mountains of Inaccessibility, ranging across half the sky. That name was no longer appropriate, thought Spenser; he had reached them, and while the ship was here it might even be possible to do some useful scientific research, such as collecting rock samples. Quite apart from the news value of being in such an outlandish place, he was genuinely interested in what might be discovered here. No man could ever become so blase that the promise of the unknown and the unexplored completely failed to move him.

In the other direction, he could look across at least forty kilometers of the Sea of Thirst, which spanned more than half his field of view in a great arc of immaculate flatness. But what he was concerned with was less than five kilometers away, and two below.

Clearly visible through a low-powered pair of binoculars was the metal rod that Lawrence had left as a marker, and through which Selene was now linked with the world. The sight was not impressive — just a solitary spike jutting from an endless plain — yet it had a stark simplicity that appealed to Spenser. It would make a good opening; it symbolized the loneliness of man in this huge and hostile Universe that he was attempting to conquer. In a few hours, this plain would be far from lonely, but until then that rod would serve to set the scene, while the commentators discussed the rescue plans and filled in the time with appropriate interviews. That was not his problem; the unit at Clavius and the studios back on Earth could handle it in their stride. He had just one job now — to sit here in his eagle's nest and to see that the pictures kept coming in. With the big zoom lens, thanks to the perfect clarity of this airless world, he could almost get close-ups even from here, when the action started.

He glanced into the southwest, where the sun was lifting itself so sluggishly up the sky. Almost two weeks of daylight, as Earth counted time, still lay ahead. No need, then, to worry about the lighting. The stage was set.