A Fall of Moondust

CHAPTER 25

It had taken Nature a million years to set the trap that had snared Selene and dragged her down into the Sea of Thirst. The second time, she was caught in a trap that she had made herself.

Because her designers had no need to watch every gram of excess weight, or plan for journeys lasting more than a few hours, they had never equipped Selene with those ingenious but unadvertised arrangements whereby spaceships recycle all their water supply. She did not have to conserve her resources in the miserly manner of deep-space vehicles; the small amount of water normally used and produced aboard, she simply dumped.

Over the past five days, several hundred kilos of liquid and vapor had left Selene, to be instantly absorbed by the thirsty dust. Many hours ago, the dust in the immediate neighborhood of the waste vents had become saturated and had turned into mud. Dripping downward through scores of channels, it had honeycombed the surrounding Sea. Silently, patiently, the cruiser had been washing away her own foundations. The gentle nudge of the approaching caisson had done the rest.

Up on the raft, the first intimation of disaster was the flashing of the red warning light on the air purifier, synchronized with the howling of a radio klaxon across all the space-suit wave bands. The howl ceased almost immediately, as the technician in charge punched the cutoff button, but the red light continued to flash.

A glance at the dials was enough to show Lawrence the trouble. The air pipes — both of them — were no longer connected to Selene. The purifier was pumping oxygen into the Sea through one pipe and, worse still, sucking in dust through the other. Lawrence wondered how long it would take to clean out the filters, but wasted no further time upon that thought. He was too busy calling Selene.

There was no answer. He tried all the cruiser's frequencies, without receiving even a whisper of a carrier wave. The Sea of Thirst was as silent to radio as it was to sound.

They're finished, he said to himself; it's all over. It was a near thing, but we just couldn't make it. And all we needed was another hour.

What could have happened? he thought dully. Perhaps the hull had collapsed under the weight of the dust. No — that was very unlikely; the internal air pressure would have prevented that. It must have been another subsidence. He was not sure, but he thought that there had been a slight tremor underfoot. From the beginning he had been aware of this danger, but could see no way of guarding against it. This was a gamble they had all taken, and Selene had lost.

Even as Selene started to fall, something told Pat that this was quite different from the first cave-in. It was much slower, and there were scrunching, squishing noises from outside the hull which, even in that desperate moment, struck Pat as being unlike any sounds that dust could possibly make.

Overhead, the oxygen pipes were tearing loose. They were not sliding out smoothly, for the cruiser was going down stern first, tilting toward the rear. With a crack of splintering Fiberglas, the pipe just ahead of the air-lock galley ripped through the roof and vanished from sight. Immediately, a thick jet of dust sprayed into the cabin, and fanned out in a choking cloud where it hit the floor.

Commodore Hansteen was nearest, and got there first. Tearing off his shirt, he swiftly wadded it into a ball and rammed it into the aperture. The dust spurted in all directions as he struggled to block the flow. He had almost succeeded when the forward pipe ripped loose — and the main lights went out as, for the second time, the cable conduit was wrenched away.

“I'll take it!” shouted Pat. A moment later, also shirtless, he was trying to stem the torrent pouring in through the hole.

He had sailed the Sea of Thirst a hundred times, yet never before had he touched its substance with his naked skin. The gray powder sprayed into his nose and eyes, half choking and wholly blinding him. Though it was as bone dry as the dust from a Pharaoh's tomb — dryer than this, indeed, for it was a million times older than the pyramids — it had a curiously soapy feeling. As he fought against it, Pat found himself thinking: If there is one death worse than being drowned, it's being buried alive.

When the jet weakened to a thin trickle, he knew that he had avoided that fate — for the moment. The pressure produced by fifteen meters of dust, under the low lunar gravity, was not difficult to overcome-though it would have been another story if the holes in the roof had been much larger.

Pat shook the dust from his head and shoulders, and cautiously opened his eyes. At least he could see again; thank heaven for the emergency lighting, dim though it was. The Commodore had already plugged his leak, and was now calmly sprinkling water from a paper cup to lay the dust. The technique was remarkably effective, and the few remaining clouds quickly collapsed into patches of mud.

Hansteen looked up and caught Pat's eye.

“Well, Captain”, he said. “Any theories?”

There were times, thought Pat, when the Commodore's Olympian self-control was almost maddening. He would like to see him break, just once. No — that was not really true. His feeling was merely a flash of envy, even of jealousy — understandable, but quite unworthy of him. He should be ashamed of it, and he was.

“I don't know what's happened”, he said. “Perhaps the people on top can tell us.”

It was an uphill walk to the pilot's position, for the cruiser was now tilted at about thirty degrees from the horizontal. As Pat took his seat in front of the radio, he felt a kind of despairing numbness that surpassed anything he had known since their original entombment. It was a sense of resignation, an almost superstitious belief that the gods were fighting against them, and that further struggle was useless.

He felt sure of this when he switched on the radio and found that it was completely dead. The power was off; when that oxygen pipe had ripped out the roof cable conduit, it had done a thorough job.

Pat swiveled slowly around in his seat. Twenty-one men and women were looking at him, awaiting his news. But twenty of them he did not see, for Sue was watching him, and he was conscious only of the expression on her face. It held an anxiety and readiness — but, even now, no hint of fear. As Pat looked at her, his own feelings of despair seemed to dissolve. He felt a surge of strength, even of hope.

“I'm damned if I know what's happened”, he said. “But I'm sure of this — we're not done for yet, by several light-years. We may have sunk a little farther, but our friends on the raft will soon catch up with us. This will mean a slight delay — that's all. There's certainly nothing to worry about.”

“I don't want to be an alarmist, Captain”, said Barrett, “but suppose the raft has sunk as well? What then?”

“We'll know as soon as I get the radio fixed”, replied Pat, glancing anxiously at the wires dangling from the roof cable duct. “And until I get this spaghetti sorted out, you'll have to put up with the emergency lighting.”

“I don't mind”, said Mrs. Schuster. “I think it's rather cute.”

Bless you, Mrs. S., said Pat to himself. He glanced quickly around the cabin; though it was hard to see all their expressions in this dim lighting, the passengers seemed calm enough.

They were not quite so calm a minute later; that was all the time it took to discover that nothing could be done to repair the lights or radio. The wiring had been ripped out far down inside the conduit, beyond reach of the simple tools available here.

“This is rather more serious”, reported Pat. “We won't be able to communicate, unless they lower a microphone to make contact with us.”

“That means”, said Barrett, who seemed to like looking on the dark side of things, “that they've lost touch with us. They won't understand why we're not answering. Suppose they assume that we're all dead — and abandon the whole operation?”

The thought had flashed through Pat's mind, but he had dismissed it almost at once.

“You've heard Chief Engineer Lawrence on the radio”, he answered. “He's not the sort of man who'd give up until he had absolute proof that we're no longer alive. You needn't worry on that score.”

“What about our air?” asked Professor Jayawardene anxiously. “We're back on our own resources again.”

“That should last for several hours, now the absorbers have been regenerated. Those pipes will be in place before then”, answered Pat, with slightly more confidence than he felt. “Meanwhile, we'll have to be patient and provide our own entertainment again. We did it for three days; we should be able to manage for a couple of hours.”

He glanced again around the cabin, looking for any signs of disagreement, and saw that one of the passengers was rising slowly to his feet. It was the very last person he would have expected — quiet little Mr. Radley, who had uttered perhaps a dozen words during the entire trip.

Pat still knew no more about him than that he was an accountant, and come from New Zealand — the only country on Earth still slightly isolated from the rest of the world, by virtue of its position. It could be reached, of course, as quickly as any other spot on the planet, but it was the end of the line, not a way station to somewhere else. As a result, the New Zealanders still proudly preserved much of their individuality. They claimed, with a good deal of truth, to have salvaged all that was left of English culture, now that the British Isles had been absorbed into the Atlantic Community.

“You want to say something, Mister Radley?” asked Pat. Radley looked around the dim-lit cabin, rather like a schoolmaster about to address a class.

“Yes, Captain”, he began. “I have a confession to make. I am very much afraid that this is all my fault.”

When Chief Engineer Lawrence broke off his commentary, Earth knew within two seconds that something had gone wrong — though it took several minutes for the news to reach Mars and Venus. But what had happened, no one could guess from the picture on the screen. For a few seconds there had been a flurry of frantic but meaningless activity, but now the immediate crisis seemed to be over. The space-suited figures were huddled together, obviously in conference — and with their telephone circuits plugged in, so that no one could overhear them. It was very frustrating to watch that silent discussion, and to have no idea of what it was about.

During those long minutes of agonizing suspense, while the studio was trying to discover what was happening, Jules did his best to keep the picture alive. It was an extremely difficult job, handling such a static scene from a single camera position. Like all cameramen, Jules hated to be pinned down in one spot. This site was perfect, but it was fixed, and he was getting rather tired of it. He had even asked if the ship could be moved, but as Captain Anson put it, “I'm damned if I'll go hopping back and forth over the mountains. This is a spaceship, not a — a chamois.”

So Jules had to ring the changes on pans and zooms, though he used the latter with discretion, because nothing upset viewers more quickly than being hurled back and forth through space, or watching scenery explode in their faces. If he used the power-zoom flat out, Jules could sweep across the Moon at about fifty thousand kilometers an hour — and several million viewers would get motion sickness.

At last that urgent, soundless conference was breaking up; the men on the raft were unplugging their telephones. Now, perhaps, Lawrence would answer the radio calls that had been bombarding him for the last five minutes.

“My God”, said Spenser, “I don't believe it! Do you see what they're doing?”

“Yes”, said Captain Anson, “and I don't believe it either. But it looks as if they're abandoning the site.”

Like lifeboats leaving a sinking ship, the two dust-skis, crowded with men, were pulling away from the raft.