A Fall of Moondust

CHAPTER 20

There was no time now, Lawrence realized, to worry about inflatable igloos and the other refinements of gracious living in the Sea of Thirst. All that mattered was getting those air pipes down into the cruiser. The engineers and technicians would just have to sweat it out in the suits until the job was finished. Their ordeal would not last for long. If they could not manage inside five or six hours, they could turn round and go home again, and leave Selene to the world after which she was named.

In the workshops of Port Roris, unsung and unrecorded miracles of improvisation were now being achieved. A complete air-conditioning plant, with its liquid-oxygen tanks, humidity and carbon-dioxide absorbers, temperature and pressure regulators, had to be dismantled and loaded on to a sledge. So did a small drilling rig, hurled by shuttle rocket from the Geophysics Division at Clavius. So did the specially designed plumbing, which now had to work at the first attempt, for there would be no opportunity for modifications.

Lawrence did not attempt to drive his men; he knew it was unnecessary. He kept in the background, checking the flow of equipment from stores and workshop out to the skis, and trying to think of every snag that could possibly arise. What tools would be needed? Were there enough spares? Was the raft being loaded on to the skis last, so that it could be off-loaded first? Would it be safe to pump oxygen into Selene before connecting up the exhaust line? These, and a hundred other details — some trivial, some vital — passed through his mind. Several times he called Pat to ask for technical information, such as the internal pressure and temperature, whether the cabin relief valve had blown off yet (it hadn't; probably it was jammed with dust), and advice on the best spots to drill through the roof. And each time Pat answered with increasing slowness and difficulty.

Despite all attempts to make contact with him, Lawrence resolutely refused to speak to the newsmen now swarming round Port Roris and jamming half the sound and vision circuits between Earth and Moon. He had issued one brief statement explaining the position and what he intended doing about it; the rest was up to the administrative people. It was their job to protect him so that he could get on with his work undisturbed; he had made that quite clear to the Tourist Commissioner, and had hung up before Davis could argue with him.

He had no time, of course, even to glance at the TV coverage himself, though he had heard that Doctor Lawson was rapidly establishing a reputation as a somewhat prickly personality. That, he presumed, was the work of the Interplanet News man into whose hands he had dumped the astronomer; the fellow should be feeling quite happy about it.

The fellow was feeling nothing of the sort. High on the ramparts of the Mountains of Inaccessibility, whose title he had so convincingly refuted, Maurice Spenser was heading swiftly toward that ulcer he had avoided all his working life. He had spent a hundred thousand stollars to get Auriga here — and now it looked as if there would be no story after all.

It would all be over before the skis could arrive; the suspense-packed, breath-taking rescue operation that would keep billions glued to their screens was never going to materialize. Few people could have resisted watching twenty-two men and women snatched from death; but no one would want to see an exhumation.

That was Spenser's cold-blooded analysis of the situation from the newscaster's viewpoint, but as a human being he was equally unhappy. It was a terrible thing to sit here on the mountain, only five kilometers away from impending tragedy, yet able to do absolutely nothing to avert it. He felt almost ashamed of every breath he took, knowing that those people down there were suffocating. Time and again he had wondered if there was anything that Auriga could do to help (the news value of this did not, of course, escape him), but now he was sure that she could only be a spectator. That implacable Sea ruled out all possibility of aid.

He had covered disasters before, but this time he felt uncommonly like a ghoul.

It was very peaceful now, aboard Selene — so peaceful that one had to fight against sleep. How pleasant it would be, thought Pat, if he could join the others, dreaming happily all around him. He envied them, and sometimes felt jealous of them. Then he would take a few draughts from the dwindling store of oxygen, and reality would close in upon him as he recognized his peril.

A single man could never have remained awake, or kept an eye on twenty unconscious men and women, feeding them oxygen whenever they showed signs of respiratory distress. He and McKenzie had acted as mutual watchdogs; several times each had dragged the other back from the verge of sleep. There would have been no difficulty had there been plenty of oxygen, but that one bottle was becoming rapidly exhausted. It was maddening to know that there were still many kilograms of liquid oxygen in the cruiser's main tanks, but there was no way in which they could use it. The automatic system was metering it through the evaporators and into the cabin, where it was at once contaminated by the now almost unbreathable atmosphere.

Pat had never known time to move so slowly. It seemed quite incredible that only four hours had passed since he and McKenzie had been left to guard their sleeping companions. He could have sworn that they had been here for days, talking quietly together, calling Port Roris every fifteen minutes, checking pulses and respiration, and doling out oxygen with a miserly hand.

But nothing lasts forever. Over the radio, from the world which neither man really believed he would ever see again, came the news they had been waiting for.

“We're on the way”, said the weary but determined voice of Chief Engineer Lawrence. “You only have to hang on for another hour — we'll be on top of you by then. How are you feeling?”

“Very tired”, said Pat slowly. “But we can make it.”

“And the passengers?”

“Just the same.”

“Right — I'll call you every ten minutes. Leave your receiver on, volume high. This is Med Division's idea — they don't want to risk your falling asleep.”

The blare of brass thundered across the face of the Moon, then echoed on past the Earth and out into the far reaches of the solar system. Hector Berlioz could never have dreamed that, two centuries after he had composed it, the soul-stirring rhythm of his “Rakoczy March” would bring hope and strength to men fighting for their lives on another world.

As the music reverberated round the cabin, Pat looked at Dr. McKenzie with a wan smile.

“It may be old-fashioned”, he said, “but it's working.”

The blood was pounding in his veins, his foot was tapping with the beat of the music. Out of the lunar sky, flashing down from space, had come the tramp of marching armies, the thunder of cavalry across a thousand battlefields, the call of bugles that had once summoned nations to meet their destiny. All gone, long ago, and that was well for the world. But they had left behind them much that was fine and noble — examples of heroism and self-sacrifice, proofs that men could still hold on when their bodies should have passed the limits of physical endurance.

As his lungs labored in the stagnant air, Pat Harris knew that he had need of such inspiration from the past, if he was to survive the endless hour that lay ahead.

Aboard the tiny, cluttered deck of Duster One, Chief Engineer Lawrence heard the same music, and reacted in the same fashion. His little fleet was indeed going into battle, against the enemy that Man would face to the end of time. As he spread across the Universe from planet to planet and sun to sun, the forces of Nature would be arrayed against him in ever new and unexpected ways. Even Earth, after all these aeons, still had many traps for the unwary, and on a world that men had known for only a lifetime, death lurked in a thousand innocent disguises. Whether or not the Sea of Thirst was robbed of its prey, Lawrence was sure of one thing — tomorrow there would be a fresh challenge.

Each ski was towing a single sledge, piled high with equipment which looked heavier and more impressive than it really was; most of the load was merely the empty drums upon which the raft would float. Everything not absolutely essential had been left behind. As soon as Duster One had dumped its cargo, Lawrence would send it straight back to Port Rons for the next load. Then he would be able to maintain a shuttle service between the site and Base, so that if he wanted anything quickly he would never have to wait more than an hour for it. This, of course, was taking the optimistic view; by the time he got to Selene, there might be no hurry at all.

As the Port buildings dropped swiftly below the sky line, Lawrence ran through the procedure with his men. He had intended to do a full-dress rehearsal before sailing, but that was another plan that had had to be abandoned through lack of time. The first count-down would be the only one that mattered.

“Jones, Sikorsky, Coleman, Matsul, when we arrive at the marker, you're to unload the drums and lay them out in the right pattern. As soon as that's done, Bruce and Hodges will fix the cross-members. Be very careful not to drop any of the nuts and bolts, and keep all your tools tied to you. If you accidentally fall off, don't panic; you can only sink a few centimeters. I know.

“Sikorsky, Jones, you give a hand with the flooring as soon as the raft framework's fixed. Coleman, Matsui, immediately there's enough working space, start laying out the air pipes and the plumbing. Greenwood, Renaldi, you're in charge of the drilling operation —”

So it went on, point by point. The greatest danger, Lawrence knew, was that his men would get in each other's way as they worked in this confined space. A single trifling accident, and the whole effort would be wasted. One of Lawrence 's private fears, which had been worrying him ever since they left Port Roris, was that some vital tool had been left behind. And there was an even worse nightmare — that the twenty-two men and women in Selene might die within minutes of rescue because the only wrench that could make the final connection had been dropped overboard.

On the Mountains of Inaccessibility, Maurice Spenser was staring through his binoculars and listening to the radio voices calling across the Sea of Thirst. Every ten minutes Lawrence would speak to Selene, and each time the pause before the reply would be a little longer. But Harris and McKenzie were still clinging to consciousness, thanks to sheer will power and, presumably, the musical encouragement they were getting from Clavius City.

“What's that psychologist disc jockey pumping into them now?” asked Spenser. On the other side of the control cabin, the ship's Radio Officer turned up the volume, and the Valkyries rode above the Mountains of Inaccessibility.

“I don't believe”, grumbled Captain Anson, “that they've played anything later than the nineteenth century.”

“Oh yes they have”, corrected Jules Braques, as he made some infinitesimal adjustment to his camera. “They did Khachaturian's 'Sabre Dance' just now. That's only a hundred years old.”

“Time for Duster One to call again”, said the Radio Officer. The cabin became instantly silent.

Right on the second, the dust-ski signal came in. The expedition was now so close that Auriga could receive it directly, without benefit of the relay from Lagrange.

“Lawrence calling Selene. We'll be over you in ten minutes. Are you O. K.?”

Again that agonizing pause; this time it lasted almost five seconds. Then:

“Selene answering. No change here.”

That was all. Pat Harris was not wasting his remaining breath.

“Ten minutes”, said Spenser. “They should be in sight now. Anything on the screen?”

“Not yet”, answered Jules, zooming out to the horizon and panning slowly along its empty arc. There was nothing above it but the black night of space.

The Moon, thought Jules, certainly presented some headaches to the cameraman. Everything was soot or whitewash; there were no nice, soft half tones. And, of course, there was that eternal dilemma of the stars, though that was an aesthetic problem, rather than a technical one.

The public expected to see stars in the lunar sky even during the daytime, because they were there. But the fact was that the human eye could not normally see them; during the day, the eye was so desensitized by the glare that the sky appeared an empty, absolute black. If you wanted to see the stars, you had to look for them through blinkers that cut off all other light; then your pupils would slowly expand, and one by one the stars would come out until they filled the field of view. But as soon as you looked at anything else — phut, out they went. The human eye could look at the daylight stars, or the daylight landscape; it could never see both at once.

But the TV camera could, if desired, and some directors preferred it to do so. Others argued that this falsified reality. It was one of those problems that had no correct answer. Jules sided with the realists, and kept the star gate circuit switched off unless the studio asked for it.

At any moment, he would have some action for Earth. Already the news networks had taken flashes — general views of the mountains, slow pans across the Sea, close-ups of that lonely marker sticking through the dust. But before long, and perhaps for hours on end, his camera might well be the eyes of several billion people. This feature was either going to be a bust, or the biggest story of the year.

He fingered the talisman in his pocket. Jules Braques, Member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, would have been displeased had anyone accused him of carrying a lucky charm. On the other hand, he would have been very hard put to explain why he never brought out his little toy until the story he was covering was safely on the air.

“Here they are!” yelled Spenser, his voice revealing the strain under which he had been laboring. He lowered his binoculars and glanced at the camera. “You're too far off to the right!”

Jules was already panning. On the monitor screen, the geometrical smoothness of the far horizon had been broken at last; two tiny, twinkling stars had appeared on that perfect arc dividing Sea and space. The dust-skis were coming up over the face of the Moon.

Even with the longest focus of the zoom lens, they looked small and distant. That was the way Jules wanted it; he was anxious to give the impression of loneliness, emptiness. He shot a quick glance at the ship's main screen, now tuned to the Interplanet channel. Yes, they were carrying him.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small diary, and laid it on top of the camera. He lifted the cover, which locked into position just short of the vertical — and immediately became alive with color and movement. At the same time a faint gnat-sized voice started to tell him that this was a special program of the Interplanet News Service, Channel One Oh Seven — and We Will Now Be Taking You Over to the Moon.

On the tiny screen was the picture he was seeing directly on his monitor. No — not quite the same picture. This was the one he had captured two and a half seconds ago; he was looking that far into the past. In those two and a halt million microseconds — to change to the time scale of the electronic engineer — this scene had undergone many adventures and transformations. From his camera it had been piped to Auriga's transmitter, and beamed straight up to Lagrange, fifty thousand kilometers overhead. There it had been snatched out of space, boosted a few hundred times, and sped Earthward to be caught by one or another of the satellite relays. Then down through the ionosphere — that last hundred kilometers the hardest of all — to the Interplanet Building, where its adventures really began, as it joined the ceaseless flood of sounds and sights and electrical impulses which informed and amused a substantial fraction of the human race.

And here it was again, after passing through the hands of program directors and special-effects departments and engineering assistants — right back where it started, broadcast over the whole of Earthside from the high-power transmitter on Lagrange II, and over the whole of Farside from Lagrange I. To span the single hand's breadth from Jules's TV camera to his pocket-diary receiver, that image had traveled three quarters of a million kilometers.

He wondered if it was worth the trouble. Men had been wondering that ever since television was invented.