A Fall of Moondust

CHAPTER 23

It was still very quiet aboard Selene, but the quietness was now that of sleep, not of death. Before long, all these people would be waking, to greet a day few of them could really have expected to see.

Pat Harris was standing somewhat precariously on the back of a seat, mending the break in the overhead lighting circuit. It was fortunate that the drill had not been five millimeters to the left; then it would have taken out the radio as well, and the job would have been much worse.

“Throw in number-three circuit breaker, Doc”, he called, winding up his insulating tape. “We should be in business now.”

The main lights came on, blindingly brilliant after the crimson gloom. At the same time, there was a sudden, explosive sound, so unexpected and alarming that it shocked Pat off his unstable perch.

Before he reached the floor, he identified it. It was a sneeze.

The passengers were starting to waken, and he had, perhaps, slightly overdone the refrigeration, for the cabin was now extremely cold.

He wondered who would be the first to return to consciousness. Sue, he hoped, because then they would be able to talk together without interruption, at least for a little while. After what they had been through together, he did not regard Duncan McKenzie's presence as any interference — though perhaps Sue could hardly be expected to see it that way.

Beneath the covering of blankets, the first figure was stirring. Pat hurried forward to give assistance; then he paused, and said under his breath: “Oh, no!”

Well, you couldn't win all the time, and a captain had to do his duty, come what may. He bent over the scrawny figure that was struggling to rise, and said solicitously: “How do you feel, Miss Morley?”

To have become a TV property was at once the best and the worst thing that could have happened to Dr. Lawson. It had built up his self-confidence, by convincing him that the world which he had always affected to despise was really interested in his special knowledge and abilities. (He did not realize how quickly he might be dropped again, as soon as the Selene incident was finished.) It had given him an outlet for expressing his genuine devotion to astronomy, somewhat stultified by living too long in the exclusive society of astronomers. And it was also earning him satisfactory quantities of money.

But the program with which he was now involved might almost have been designed to confirm his old view that the men who weren't brutes were mostly fools. This, however, was hardly the fault of Interplanet News, which could not resist a feature that was a perfect fill-in for the long periods when nothing would be happening out at the raft.

The fact that Lawson was on the Moon and his victims were on Earth presented only a minor technical problem, which the TV technicians had solved long ago. The program could not go out live; it had to be taped beforehand, and those annoying two-and-a-half-second pauses while the radio waves flashed from planet to satellite and back again had to be sliced out. They would upset the performers — nothing could be done about that — but by the time a skilled editor had anachionized the tape, the listener would be unable to tell that he was hearing a discussion that spanned almost four hundred thousand kilometers.

Chief Engineer Lawrence heard the program as he lay flat on his back in the Sea of Thirst, staring up into the empty sky. It was the first chance of resting he had had for more hours than he could remember, but his mind was too active to let him sleep. In any event, he had never acquired the knack of sleeping in a suit, and saw no need to learn it now, for the first of the igloos was already on the way from Port Roris. When that arrived, he would be able to live in well-earned, and muchneeded, comfort.

Despite all the claims of the manufacturers, no one can function efficiently in a space suit for more than twenty-four hours, for several obvious reasons, and several that are not so obvious. There is, for example, that baffling complaint known as spaceman's itch, affecting the small of the back — or even less accessible spots — after a day's incarceration in a suit. The doctors claim that it is purely psychological, and several heroic space medicos have worn suits for a week or more to prove it. The demonstration has done nothing to affect the incidence of the disease.

The mythology of space suits is a vast, complex, and frequently ribald subject, with a nomenclature all of its own. No one is quite sure why one famous model of the 1970's was known as the Iron Maiden, but any astronaut will gladly explain why 2010's Mark XIV was called the Chamber of Horrors. There seems little truth, however, in the theory that it was designed by a sadistic female engineer, determined to inflict a diabolical revenge upon the opposite sex.

But Lawrence was reasonably at ease in his model, as he listened to these enthusiastic amateurs put forward their ideas. It was just possible — though very unlikely — that one of these uninhibited thinkers might come up with an idea that could be of practical use. He had seen it happen before, and was prepared to listen to suggestions rather more patiently than Dr. Lawson — who, it was obvious, would never learn to suffer fools gladly.

He had just demolished an amateur engineer from Sicily, who wanted to blow the dust away by means of strategically placed air jets. The scheme was typical of those put forward; even where there was no fundamental scientific flaw, most of these ideas fell to pieces when examined quantitatively. You could blow the dust away — if you had an unlimited supply of air. While the voluble flow of Italian-English was proceeding, Lawson had been doing some rapid calculations. “I estimate, Signor Gusalli”, he said, “that you would need at least five tons of air a minute to keep open a hole large enough to be useful. It would be quite impossible to ship such quantities out to the site.”

“Ah, but you could collect the air and use it over and over again!”

“Thank you, Signor Gusalli”, cut in the firm voice of the master of ceremonies. “Now we have Mr. Robertson from London, Ontario. What's your plan, Mr. Robertson?”

“I suggest freezing.”

“Just a minute”, protested Lawson. “How can you freeze dust?”

“First I'd saturate it with water. Next I'd sink cooling pipes and turn the whole mass into ice. That would hold the dust in place, and then it would be easy to drill through it.”

“It's an interesting idea”, admitted Lawson, rather reluctantly. “At least it's not as crazy as some that we've had. But the amount of water needed would be impossibly large. Remember, the cruiser is fifteen meters down —”

“What's that in feet?” said the Canadian, in a tone of voice that made it clear that he was one of the hard-core antimetric school.

“Fifty feet — as I'm sure you know perfectly well. Now you'd have to deal with a column at least a meter across — yard, to you — so that would involve — ah — approximately fifteen times ten squared times ten to the fourth cubic centimeters, which gives — why, of course, fifteen tons of water. But this assumes no wastage at all; you'd really need several times as much as this. It might come to as much as a hundred tons. And how much do you think all the freezing gear would weigh?”

Lawrence was quite impressed. Unlike many scientists he had known, Lawson had a firm grasp of practical realities, and was also a rapid calculator. Usually when an astronomer or a physicist did a quick computation, his first attempt was out by a factor of anything from ten to a hundred. As far as Lawrence could judge, Lawson was always right the first time.

The Canadian refrigeration enthusiast was still putting up a fight when he was dragged off the program, to be replaced by an African gentleman who wanted to use the opposite technique — heat. He planned to use a huge concave mirror, focusing sunlight on the dust and fusing it into an immobile mass.

It was obvious that Lawson was keeping his temper only with the utmost difficulty; the solar-furnace advocate was one of those stubborn, self-taught “experts” who refused to admit that he could possibly have made an error in his calculations. The argument was getting really violent when a voice from much closer at hand cut across the program.

“The skis are coming, Mister Lawrence.”

Lawrence rolled into a sitting position and climbed aboard the raft. If anything was already in sight, that meant it was practically on top of him. Yes, there was Duster One — and also Duster Three, which had made a difficult and expensive trip from the Lake of Drought, the Sea's smaller equivalent on Farside. That journey was a saga in itself, which would remain forever unknown except to the handful of men involved.

Each ski was towing two sledges, piled high with equipment. As they drew alongside the raft, the first item to be unloaded was the large packing case containing the igloo. It was always fascinating to watch one being inflated, and Lawrence had never anticipated the spectacle more eagerly. (Yes, he definitely had spaceman's itch.) The process was completely automatic; one broke a seal, turned two separate levers — as a safeguard against the disastrous possibility of accidental triggering — and then waited.

Lawrence did not have to wait for long. The sides of the box fell flat, revealing a tightly packed, convoluted mass of silvery fabric. It stirred and struggled like some living creature. Lawrence had once seen a moth emerging from the chrysalis, with its wings still crumpled, and the two processes bore an uncanny similarity. The insect, however, had taken an hour to reach its full size and splendor, but the igloo took only three minutes.

As the air generator pumped an atmosphere into the flaccid envelope, it expanded and stiffened in sudden jerks, followed by slow periods of consolidation. Now it was a meter high, and was spreading outward rather than upward. When it had reached the limits of its extension, it started to go upward again, and the air lock popped away from the main dome. The whole operation, one felt, should be accompanied by laborious wheezings and puffings; it seemed quite wrong that it was happening in utter silence.

Now the structure had nearly reached its final dimensions, and it was obvious that “igloo” was the only possible name for it. Though they had been designed to provide protection against a very different — though almost equally hostile — environment, the snow houses of the Eskimos had been of exactly the same shape. The technical problem had been similar; so was the solution.

It took considerably longer to install the fittings than to inflate the igloo, for all the equipment — bunks, chairs, tables, cupboards, electronic gear — had to be carried in through the air lock. Some of the larger items barely made it, having been designed with only centimeters to spare. But at last there was a radio call from inside the dome. “We're open for business!” it said. “Come on in!”

Lawrence wasted no time in accepting the invitation. He began to undo the fittings of his suit while he was still in the outer section of the two-stage air lock, and had the helmet off as soon as he could hear voices from inside the dome, reaching him through the thickening atmosphere.

It was wonderful to be a free man again, to be able to wriggle, scratch, move without encumbrance, talk to your fellows face to face. The coffin-sized shower removed the stink of the space suit and made him feel fit for human society once more. Then he put on a pair of shorts — all that one ever wore in an igloo — and sat down to a conference with his assistants.

Most of the material he had ordered had come in this consignment; the rest would be arriving on Duster Two in the course of the next few hours. As he checked the supply lists, he felt himself much more the master of the situation. Oxygen was assured — barring catastrophe. Water had been getting short down there; well, he could supply that easily enough. Food was a little more difficult, though it was merely a matter of packing. Central Catering had already supplied samples of chocolate, compressed meat, cheese, and even elongated French rolls — all packed into cylinders three centimeters wide. Presently he would shoot them down the air pipes, and give morale in Selene a big boost.

But this was less important than the recommendations of his brains trust, embodied in a dozen blueprints and a terse sixpage memorandum. Lawrence read it extremely carefully, nodding agreement from time to time. He had already come to the same general conclusions, and he could see no way of escaping from them.

Whatever happened to her passengers, Selene had made her last voyage.