A Fall of Moondust

CHAPTER 26

Perhaps it was well that Selene was now out of radio contact; it would hardly have helped morale if her occupants had known that the skis, heavily overloaded with passengers, were heading away from the site. But at the moment, no one in the cruiser was thinking of the rescue effort; Radleyas holding the center of the dimly lit stage.

“What do you mean — this is all your fault?” asked Pat in the baffled silence that followed the New Zealander's statement — only baffled as yet; not hostile, because no one could take such a remark seriously.

“It's a long story, Captain”, said Radley, speaking in a voice that, though it was oddly unemotional, had undertones that Pat could not identify. It was almost like listening to a robot, and it gave Pat an unpleasant feeling somewhere in the middle of his spine. “I don't mean to say that I deliberately caused this to happen. But I'm afraid it is deliberate, and I'm sorry to have involved you all. You see — they are after me.”

This is all we need, thought Pat. We really seem to have the odds stacked against us. In this small company we've got a neurotic spinster, a drug addict — and now a maniac. What other freaks are going to reveal themselves before we're finished?

Then he realized the unfairness of his judgment. The truth was that he had been very lucky. Against Radley, Miss Morley, and Hans Baldur (who had given no trouble after that single, never-mentioned incident), he had the Commodore, Dr. McKenzie, the Schusters, little Professor Jayawardene, David Barrett — and all the others who had done as they were asked, without making a fuss. He felt a sudden surge of affection — even of love — toward them all, for giving him their active or passive support.

And especially toward Sue, who was already one jump ahead of him, as she always seemed to be. There she was, moving unobtrusively about her duties at the back of the cabin. Pat doubted if anyone noticed — certainly Radley did not — as she opened the medicine chest and palmed one of those cigarettesized cylinders of oblivion. If this fellow gave trouble, she would be ready.

At the moment, trouble seemed the furthest thing from Radley's mind. He appeared to be completely self-possessed and perfectly rational; there was no mad gleam in his eye, or any other of the cliches of insanity. He looked exactly what he was — a middle-aged New Zealand accountant taking a holiday on the Moon.

“This is very interesting, Mister Radley”, said Commodore Hansteen in a carefully neutral voice, “but please excuse our ignorance. Who are 'they,' and why should they be after you?”

“I am sure, Commodore, that you've heard of flying saucers?”

Flying what? Pat asked himself. Hansteen seemed better informed than he was.

“Yes, I have”, he answered a little wearily. “I've come across them in old books on astronautics. They were quite a craze, weren't they, about eighty years ago?”

He realized that “craze” was an unfortunate word to use, and was relieved when Radley took no offense.

“Oh”, he answered, “they go back much further than that, but it was only in the last century that people started to take notice of them. There's an old manuscript from an English abbey dated 1290 that describes one in detail — and that isn't the earliest report, by any means. More than ten thousand flying saucer sightings have been recorded prior to the twentieth century.”

“Just a minute”, interrupted Pat. “What the devil do you mean by 'flying saucer'? I've never heard of them.”

“Then I'm afraid, Captain, that your education has been neglected”, answered Radley in a sorrowful voice. “The term 'flying saucer' came into general use after 1947 to describe the strange, usually disc-shaped vehicles that have been investigating our planet for centuries. Some people prefer to use the phrase 'unidentified flying objects.'”

That aroused a few faint memories in Pat's mind. Yes, he had heard that term in connection with the hypothetical Outsiders. But there was no concrete evidence, of course, that alien space vessels had ever entered the solar system.

“Do you really believe”, said one of the other passengers skeptically, “that there are visitors from space hanging round the Earth?”

“Much more than that”, answered Radley. “They've often landed and made contact with human beings. Before we came here, they had a base on Farside, but they destroyed it when the first survey rockets started taking close-ups.”

“How do you know all this?” asked someone else.

Radley seemed quite indifferent to the skepticism of his audience; he must have grown used to this response long ago. He radiated a kind of inner faith which, however ill-founded it might be, was oddly convincing. His insanity had exalted him into the realm beyond reason, and he was quite happy there.

“We have — contacts”, he answered with an air of great importance. “A few men and women have been able to establish telepathic communication with the saucer people. So we know a good deal about them.”

“How is it that no one else does?” asked another disbeliever. “If they're really out there, why haven't our astronomers and space pilots seen them?”

“Oh, but they have”, Radley answered with a pitying smile, “and they're keeping quiet. There's a conspiracy of silence among the scientists; they don't like to admit that there are intelligences out in space so much superior to ours. So when a pilot does report a saucer, they make fun of him. Now, of course, every astronaut keeps quiet when he meets one.”

“Have you ever met one, Commodore?” asked Mrs. Schuster, obviously half convinced. “Or are you in the — what did Mister Radley call it-conspiracy of silence?”

“I'm very sorry to disappoint you”, said Hansteen. “You'll have to take my word for it that all the spaceships I've ever met have been on Lloyd's Register.”

He caught Pat's eye, and gave a little nod that said, “Let's go and talk this over in the air lock.” Now that he was quite convinced that Radley was harmless, he almost welcomed this interlude. It had, very effectively, taken the passengers' minds off the situation in which they now found themselves. If Radley's brand of insanity could keep them entertained, then good luck to it.

“Well, Pat”, said Hansteen, when the air-lock door had sealed them off from the argument, “what do you think of him?”

“Does he really believe that nonsense?”

“Oh yes — every word of it. I've met his type before.”

The Commodore knew a good deal about Radley's peculiar obsession; no one whose interest in astronautics dated back to the twentieth century could fail to. As a young man, he had even read some of the original writings on the subject — works of such brazen fraudulence or childish naivety that they had shaken his belief that men were rational beings. That such a literature could ever have flourished was a disturbing thought, though it was true that most of those books had been published in that psychotic era, the Frantic Fifties.

“This is a very peculiar situation”, complained Pat. “At a time like this — all the passengers are arguing about flying saucers.”

“I think it's an excellent idea”, answered the Commodore. “What else would you suggest they do? Let's face it, we've got to sit here and wait until Lawrence starts knocking on the roof again.”

“If he's still here. Barrett may be right — perhaps the raft has sunk.”

“I think that's very unlikely. The disturbance was only a slight one. How far would you imagine we went down?”

Pat thought this over. Looking back on the incident, it seemed to have lasted a long time. The fact that he had been in virtual darkness, and had been fighting that jet of dust, still further confused his memory. He could only hazard a guess.

“I'd say — ten meters.”

“Nonsense! The whole affair only lasted a couple of seconds. I doubt if we dropped more than two or three meters.”

Pat found this hard to believe, but he hoped that the Commodore was right. He knew that it was extremely difficult to judge weak accelerations, particularly when one was under stress. Hansteen was the only man aboard who could have had any experience of this; his verdict was probably correct — and was certainly encouraging.

“They may never have felt a thing on the surface”, continued Hansteen, “and they're probably wondering why they can't make contact with us. Are you sure there's nothing we can do about the radio?”

“Quite sure. The whole terminal block's come loose at the end of the cable conduit. There's no way of reaching it from inside the cabin.”

“Well, I suppose that's that. We might as well go back and let Radley try to convert us — if he can.”

Jules had tracked the overcrowded skis for a hundred meters before he realized that they were not as overcrowded as they should have been. They carried seven men — and there had been eight on the site.

He panned swiftly back to the raft, and by the good luck or precognition that separates the brilliant cameraman from the merely adequate one, he arrived there just as Lawrence broke his radio silence.

“C. E. E. calling”, Lawrence said, sounding as tired and frustrated as would any man who had just seen his carefully laid plans demolished. “Sorry for the delay, but as you'll have gathered, we have an emergency. There appears to have been another cave-in; how deep it is, we don't know — but we've lost physical contact with Selene, and she's not answering our radio.

“In case there's another subsidence, I've ordered my men to stand by a few hundred meters away. The danger's very slight — we hardly felt that last tremor — but there's no point in taking chances. I can do everything that's necessary for the moment without any help.

“I'll call again in a few minutes. C. E. E. out.”

With the eyes of millions upon him, Lawrence crouched at the edge of the raft, reassembling the probe with which he had first located the cruiser. He had twenty meters to play with; if she had gone deeper than that, he would have to think of something else.

The rod sank into the dust, moving more and more slowly as it approached the depth where Selene had rested. There was the original mark — fifteen point one five meters — just disappearing through the surface. The probe continued to move, like a lance piercing into the body of the Moon. How much farther? whispered Lawrence to himself, in the murmurous silence of his space suit.

The anticlimax was almost laughable, except that this was no laughing matter. The probe penetrated an extra meter and a half — a distance he could comfortably span without straining his arms.

Far more serious was the fact that Selene had not sunk evenly, as Lawrence discovered after a few additional probings. She was much lower at the stern, being now tilted at an angle of about thirty degrees. That alone was enough to wreck his plan; he had relied upon the caisson making a flush contact with the horizontal roof.

He put that problem aside for the moment; there was a more immediate one. Now that the cruiser's radio was silent — and he had to pray that it was a simple power failure — how could he tell if the people inside were still alive? They would hear his probe, but there was no way in which they could communicate with him.

But of course there was. The easiest and most primitive means of all, which could be so readily overlooked after a century and a half of electronics.

Lawrence got to his feet and called the waiting skis.

“You can come back”, he said. “There's no danger. She only sank a couple of meters.”

He had already forgotten the watching millions. Though his new plan of campaign had still to be drawn up, he was going into action again.