A Fall of Moondust

CHAPTER 19

Until now, Pat had scarcely noticed the man who was sitting with folded arms in window seat 3D, and had to think twice to remember his name. It was something like Builder — that was it, Baldur, Hans Baldur. He had looked like the typical quiet tourist who never gave any trouble.

He was still quiet, but no longer typical — for he was remaining stubbornly conscious. At first sight he appeared to be ignoring everything around him, but the twitching of a cheek muscle betrayed his tenseness.

“What are you waiting for, Mister Baldur?” asked Pat, in the most neutral tone that he could manage. He felt very glad of the moral and physical support ranged behind him; Baldur did not look exceptionally strong, but he was certainly more than Pat's Moon-born muscles could have coped with — if it came to that.

Baldur shook his head, and remained staring out of the window for all the world as if he could see something there besides his own reflection.

“You can't make me take that stuff, and I'm not going to”, he said, in heavily accented English.

“I don't want to force you to do anything”, answered Pat. “But can't you see it's for your own good — and for the good of everyone else? What possible objection do you have?”

Baldur hesitated and seemed to be struggling for words.

“It's — it's against my principles”, he said. “Yes, that's it. My religion won't allow me to take injections.”

Pat knew vaguely that there were people with such scruples. Yet he did not for a moment believe that Baldur was one of them. The man was lying. But why?

“Can I make a point?” said a voice behind Pat's back.

“Of course, Mister Harding”, he answered, welcoming anything that might break this impasse.

“You say you won't permit any injections, Mister Baldur”, continued Harding, in tones that reminded Pat of his crossexamination of Mrs. Schuster. (How long ago that seemed!) “But I can tell that you weren't born on the Moon. No one can miss going through Quarantine — so, how did you get here without taking the usual shots?”

The question obviously left Baldur extremely agitated.

“That's no business of yours”, he snapped.

“Quite true”, said Harding pleasantly. “I'm only trying to be helpful.” He stepped forward and reached out his left hand. “I don't suppose you'd let me see your Interplanetary Vaccination Certificate?”

That was a damn silly thing to ask, thought Pat. No human eye could read the magnetically inscribed information on an IVC. He wondered if this would occur to Baldur, and if so, what he would do about it.

He had no time to do anything. He was still staring, obviously taken by surprise, at Harding's open palm when Baldur's interrogator moved his other hand so swiftly that Pat never saw exactly what happened. It was like Sue's conjuring trick with Mrs. Williams — but far more spectacular, and also much deadlier. As far as Pat could judge, it involved the side of the hand and the base of the neck — and it was not, he was quite sure, the kind of skill he ever wished to acquire.

“That will hold him for fifteen minutes”, said Harding in a matter-of-fact voice, as Baldur crumpled up in his seat. “Can you give me one of those tubes? Thanks.” He pressed the cylinder against the unconscious man's arm; there was no sign that it had any additional effect.

The situation, thought Pat, had got somewhat out of his control. He was grateful that Harding had exercised his singular skills, but was not entirely happy about them.

“Now what was all that?” he asked, a little plaintively.

Harding rolled up Baldur's left sleeve, and turned the arm over to reveal the fleshy underside. The skin was covered with literally hundreds of almost invisible pinpricks.

“Know what that is?” he said quietly.

Pat nodded. Some had taken longer to make the trip than others, but by now all the vices of weary old Earth had reached the Moon.

“You can't blame the poor devil for not giving his reasons. He's been conditioned against using the needle. Judging from the state of those scars, he started his cure only a few weeks ago. Now it's psychologically impossible for him to accept an injection. I hope I've not given him a relapse, but that's the least of his worries.”

“How did he ever get through Quarantine?”

“Oh, there's a special section for people like this. The doctors don't talk about it, but the customers get temporary deconditioning under hypnosis. There are more of them than you might think; a trip to the Moon's highly recommended as part of the cure. It gets you away from your original environment.”

There were quite a few other questions that Pat would have liked to ask Harding, but they had already wasted several minutes. Thank heavens all the remaining passengers had gone under. That last demonstration of judo, or whatever it was, must have encouraged any stragglers.

“You won't need me any more”, said Sue, with a small, brave smile. “Goodby, Pat — wake me when it's over.”

“I will”, he promised, lowering her gently into the space between the seat rows. “Or not at all”, he added, when he saw that her eyes were closed.

He remained bending over her for several seconds before he regained enough control to face the others. There were so many things he wanted to tell her, but now the opportunity was gone, perhaps forever.

Swallowing to overcome the dryness in his throat, he turned to the five survivors. There was still one more problem to deal with, and David Barrett summed it up for him.

“Well, Captain”, he said. “Don't leave us in suspense. Which of us do you want to keep you company?”

One by one, Pat handed over five of the sleep tubes.

“Thank you for your help”, he said. “I know this is a little melodramatic, but it's the neatest way. Only four of those will work.”

“I hope mine will”, said Barrett, wasting no time. It did. A few seconds later, Harding, Bryan, and Johanson followed the Englishman into oblivion.

“Well”, said Dr. McKenzie, “I seem to be odd man out. I'm flattered by your choice — or did you leave it to luck?”

“Before I answer that question”, replied Pat, “I'd better let Port Roris know what's happened.”

He walked to the radio and gave a brief survey of the situation. There was a shocked silence from the other end. A few minutes later, Chief Engineer Lawrence was on the line.

“You did the best thing, of course”, he said, when Pat had repeated his story in more detail. “Even if we hit no snags, we can't possibly reach you in under five hours. Will you be able to hold out until then?”

“The two of us, yes”, answered Pat. “We can take turns using the space-suit breathing circuit. It's the passengers I'm worried about.”

“The only thing you can do is to check their respiration, and give them a blast of oxygen if they seem distressed. We'll do our damnedest from this end. Anything more you want to say?”

Pat thought for a few seconds.

“No”, he said, a little wearily. “I'll call you again on each quarter-hour. Selene out.”

He got to his feet — slowly, for the strain and the carbon-dioxide poisoning were now beginning to tell heavily upon him — and said to McKenzie: “Right, Doc — give me a hand with that space suit.”

“I'm ashamed of myself. I'd forgotten all about that.”

“And I was worried because some of the other passengers might have remembered. They must all have seen it, when they came in through the air lock. It just goes to prove how you can overlook the obvious.”

It took them only five minutes to detach the absorbent canisters and the twenty-four-hour oxygen supply from the suit; the whole breathing circuit had been designed for quick release, in case it was ever needed for artificial respiration. Not for the first time, Pat blessed the skill, ingenuity, and foresight that had been lavished on Selene. There were some things that had been overlooked, or that might have been done a little better — but not many.

Their lungs aching, the only two men still conscious aboard the cruiser stood staring at each other across the gray metal cylinder that held another day of life. Then, simultaneously, each said: “You go first.”

They laughed without much humor at the hackneyed situation, then Pat answered, “I won't argue” and placed the mask over his face.

Like a cool sea breeze after a dusty summer day, like a wind from the mountain pine forests stirring the stagnant air in some deep lowlands valley — so the flow of oxygen seemed to Pat. He took four slow, deep breaths, and exhaled to the fullest extent, to sweep the carbon dioxide out of his lungs. Then, like a pipe of peace, he handed the breathing kit over to McKenzie.

Those four breaths had been enough to invigorate him, and to sweep away the cobwebs that had been gathering in his brain. Perhaps it was partly psychological — could a few cubic centimeters of oxygen have had so profound an effect? — but whatever the explanation, he felt like a new man. Now he could face the five — or more — hours of waiting that lay ahead.

Ten minutes later, he felt another surge of confidence. All the passengers seemed to be breathing as normally as could be expected — very slowly, but steadily. He gave each one a few seconds of oxygen, then called Base again.

“Selene here”, he said. “Captain Harris reporting. Doctor McKenzie and I both feel quite fit now, and none of the passengers seem distressed. I'll remain listening out, and will call you again on the half-hour.”

“Message received. But hold on a minute, several of the news agencies want to speak to you.”

“Sorry”, Pat answered. “I've given all the information there is, and I've twenty unconscious men and women to look after. Selene out.”

That was only an excuse, of course, and a feeble one at that; he was not even sure why he had made it. He felt, in a sudden and uncharacteristic burst of rancor: Why, a man can't even die in peace nowadays! Had he known about that waiting camera, only five kilometers away, his reaction might have been even stronger.

“You still haven't answered my question, Captain”, said Dr. McKenzie patiently.

“What question? Oh — that. No, it wasn't luck. The Commodore and I both thought you'd be the most useful man to have awake. You're a scientist, you spotted the overheating danger before anyone else did, and you kept quiet about it when we asked you to.”

“Well, I'll try to live up to your expectations. I certainly feel more alert than I've done for hours. It must be the oxygen we're sniffing. The big question is: How long will it last?”

“Between the two of us, twelve hours. Plenty of time for the skis to get here. But we may have to give most of it to the others, if they show signs of distress. I'm afraid it's going to be a very close thing.”

They were both sitting cross-legged on the floor, just beside the pilot's position, with the oxygen bottle between them. Every few minutes they would take turns with the inhaler — but only two breaths at a time. I never imagined, Pat told himself, that I should ever get involved in the number-one cliché of the TV space operas. But it had occurred in real life too often to be funny any more — especially when it was happening to you.

Both Pat and McKenzie — or almost certainly one of them — could survive if they abandoned the other passengers to their fate. Trying to keep these twenty men and women alive, they might also doom themselves.

The situation was one in which logic warred against conscience. But it was nothing new; certainly it was not peculiar to the age of space. It was as old as Mankind, for countless times in the past, lost or isolated groups had faced death through lack of water, food, or warmth. Now it was oxygen that was in short supply, but the principle was just the same.

Some of those groups had left no survivors; others, a handful who would spend the rest of their lives in self-justification. What must George Pollard, late captain of the whaler Essex, have thought as he walked the streets of Nantucket, with the taint of cannibalism upon his soul? That was a two-hundred-year-old story of which Pat had never heard; he lived on a world too busy making its own legends to import those of Earth. As far as he was concerned, he had already made his choice, and he knew, without asking, that McKenzie would agree with him. Neither was the sort of man who would fight over the last bubble of oxygen in the tank. But if it did come to a fight…

“What are you smiling at?” asked McKenzie.

Pat relaxed. There was something about this burly Australian scientist that he found very reassuring. Hansteen gave him the same impression, but McKenzie was a much younger man. There were some people you knew — that you could trust, whom you were certain would never let you down. He had that feeling about McKenzie.

“If you want to know”, he said, putting down the oxygen mask, “I was thinking that I wouldn't have much of a chance if you decided to keep the bottle for yourself.”

McKenzie looked a little surprised; then he too grinned.

“I thought all you Moon-born were sensitive about that”, he said.

“I've never felt that way”, Pat answered. “After all, brains are more important than muscles. I can't help it that I was bred in a gravity field a sixth of yours. Anyway, how could you tell I was Moon-born?”

“Well, it's partly your build. You all have that same tall, slender physique. And there's your skin color — the U. V. lamps never seem to give you the same tan as natural sunlight.”

“It's certainly tanned you”, retorted Pat with a grin. “At night, you must be a menace to navigation. Incidentally, how did you get a name like McKenzie?”

Having had little contact with the racial tensions that were not yet wholly extinct on Earth, Pat could make such remarks without embarrassment — indeed, without even realizing that they might cause embarrassment.

“My grandfather had it bestowed on him by a missionary when he was baptized. I'm very doubtful if it has any — ah — genetic significance. To the best of my knowledge, I'm a fullblooded abo.”

“Abo?”

“Aboriginal. We were the people occupying Australia before the whites came along. The subsequent events were somewhat depressing.”

Pat's knowledge of terrestrial history was vague; like most residents of the Moon, he tended to assume that nothing of great importance had ever happened before 8 November 1967, when the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution had been so spectacularly celebrated.

“I suppose there was war?”

“You could hardly call it that. We had spears and boomerangs; they had guns. Not to mention T. B. and V. D., which were much more effective. It took us about a hundred and fifty years to get over the impact. It's only in the last century — since about nineteen forty — that our numbers started going up again. Now there are about a hundred thousand of us — almost as many as when your ancestors came.”

McKenzie delivered this information with an ironic detachment that took any personal sting out of it, but Pat thought that he had better disclaim responsibility for the misdeeds of his terrestrial predecessors.

“Don't blame me for what happened on Earth”, he said. “I've never been there, and I never will — I couldn't face that gravity. But I've looked at Australia plenty of times through the telescope. I have some sentimental feeling for the place — my parents took off from Woomera.”

“And my ancestors named it; a woomera's a booster stage for spears.”

“Are any of your people”, asked Pat, choosing his words with care, “still living in primitive conditions? I've heard that's still true, in some parts of Asia.”

“The old tribal life's gone. It went very quickly, when the African nations in the U. N. started bullying Australia. Often quite unfairly, I might add — for I'm an Australian first, and an aboriginal second. But I must admit that my white countrymen were often pretty stupid; they must have been, to think that we were stupid! Why, away into the last century some of them still thought we were Stone Age savages. Our technology was Stone Age, all right — but we weren't.”

There seemed nothing incongruous to Pat about this discussion, beneath the surface of the Moon, of a way of life so distant both in space and time. He and McKenzie would have to entertain each other, keep an eye on their twenty unconscious companions, and fight off sleep, for at least five more hours. This was as good a way as any of doing it.

“If your people weren't in the Stone Age, Doc — and just for the sake of argument, I'll grant that you aren't — how did the whites get that idea?”

“Sheer stupidity, with the help of a preconceived bias. It's an easy assumption that if a man can't count, write, or speak good English, he must be unintelligent. I can give you a perfect example from my own family. My grandfather — the first McKenzie — lived to see the year two thousand, but he never learned to count beyond ten. And his description of a total eclipse of the Moon was 'Kerosene lamp bilong Jesus Christ he bugger-up finish altogether.'

“Now, I can write down the differential equations of the Moon's orbital motion, but I don't claim to be brighter than Grandfather. If we'd been switched in time, he might have been the better physicist. Our opportunities were different — that's all. Grandfather never had occasion to learn to count; and I never had to raise a family in the desert — which was a highly skilled, full-time job.”

“Perhaps”, said Pat thoughtfully, “we could do with some of your grandfather's skills here. For that's what we're trying to do now — survive in a desert.”

“I suppose you could put it that way, though I don't think that boomerang and fire stick would be much use to us. Maybe we could use some magic — but I'm afraid I don't know any, and I doubt if the tribal gods could make it from Arnhem Land.”

“Do you ever feel sorry”, asked Pat, “about the breakup of your people's way of life?”

“How could I? I scarcely knew it. I was born in Brisbane, and had learned to run an electronic computer before I ever saw a corroboree —”

“A what?”

“Tribal religious dance — and half the participants in that were taking degrees in cultural anthropology. I've no romantic illusions about the simple life and the noble savage. My ancestors were fine people, and I'm not ashamed of them, but geography had trapped them in a dead end. After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization. In the long run, it was a good thing that the white settlers arrived, despite their charming habit of selling us poisoned flour when they wanted our land.”

“They did that?”

“They certainly did. But why are you surprised? That was a good hundred years before Belsen.”

Pat thought this over for a few minutes. Then he looked at his watch and said, with a distinct expression of relief: “Time I reported to Base again. Let's have a quick look at the passengers first.”