A Fall of Moondust

CHAPTER 27

When Pat and the Commodore returned to the cabin, the debate was still going full blast. Radley, who had said so little until now, was certainly making up for lost time. It was as if some secret spring had been touched, or he had been absolved from an oath of secrecy. That was probably the explanation; now that he was convinced that his mission was discovered, he was only too happy to talk about it.

Commodore Hansteen had met many such believers — indeed, it was in sheer self-defense that he had waded through the turgid literature of the subject. The approach was almost always the same. First would be the suggestion that “Surely, Commodore, you've seen some very strange things during your years in space?” Then, when his reply was unsatisfactory, there would be a guarded — and sometimes not so guarded-hint that he was either afraid or unwilling to speak. It was a waste of energy denying the charge; in the eyes of the faithful, that only proved that he was part of the conspiracy.

The other passengers had no such bitter experience to warn them, and Radley was evading their points with effortless ease. Even Schuster, for all his legal training, was unable to pin him into a corner; his efforts were as futile as trying to convince a paranoiac that he was not really being persecuted.

“Does it seem reasonable”, Schuster argued, “that if thousands of scientists know this, not one of them will let the cat out of the bag? You can't keep a secret that big! It would be like trying to hide the Washington Monument!”

“Oh, there have been attempts to reveal the truth”, Radley answered. “But the evidence has a way of being mysteriously destroyed — as well as the men who wanted to reveal it. They can be utterly ruthless when it's necessary.”

“But you said that — they — have been in contact with human beings. Isn't that a contradiction?”

“Not at all. You see, the forces of good and evil are at war in the Universe, just as they are on Earth. Some of the saucer people want to help us, others to exploit us. The two groups have been struggling together for thousands of years. Sometimes the conflict involves Earth; that is how Atlantis was destroyed.”

Hansteen was unable to resist a smile. Atlantis always got into the act sooner or later — or, if not Atlantis, then Lemuria or Mu. They all appealed to the same type of unbalanced, mystery-mongering mentality.

The whole subject had been thoroughly investigated by a group of psychologists during — if Hansteen remembered correctly — the 1970's. They had concluded that around the midtwentieth century a substantial percentage of the population was convinced that the world was about to be destroyed, and that the only hope lay in intervention from space. Having lost faith in themselves, men had sought salvation in the sky.

The flying saucer religion flourished among the lunatic fringe of mankind for almost exactly ten years; then it had abruptly died out, like an epidemic that had run its course. Two factors, the psychologists had decided, were responsible for this: the first was sheer boredom; the second was the International Geophysical Year, which had heralded Man's own entry into space.

In the eighteen months of the IGY, the sky was watched and probed by more instruments, and more trained observers, than in the whole of previous history. If there had been celestial visitors poised above the atmosphere, this concentrated scientific effort would have revealed them. It did nothing of the sort; and when the first manned vehicles started leaving Earth, the flying saucers were still more conspicuous by their absence.

For most men, that settled the matter. The thousands of unidentified flying objects that had been seen over the centuries had some natural cause, and with better understanding of meteorology and astronomy there was no lack of reasonable explanations. As the Age of Space dawned, restoring Man's confidence in his own destiny, the world lost interest in flying saucers.

It is seldom, however, that a religion dies out completely, and a small body of the faithful kept the cult alive with fantastic “revelations”, accounts of meetings with extraterrestrials, and claims of telepathic contacts. Even when, as frequently happened, the current prophets were proved to have faked the evidence, the devotees never wavered. They needed their gods in the sky, and would not be deprived of them.

“You still haven't explained to us”, Mr. Schuster was now saying, “why the saucer people should be after you. What have you done to annoy them?”

“I was getting too close to some of their secrets, so they have used this opportunity to eliminate me.”

“I should have thought they could have found less elaborate ways.”

“It is foolish to imagine that our limited minds can understand their mode of thinking. But this would seem like an accident; no one would suspect that it was deliberate.”

“A good point. Since it makes no difference now, could you tell us what secret you were after? I'm sure we'd all like to know.”

Hansteen shot a quick glance at Irving Schuster. The lawyer had struck him as a rather solemn, humorless little man; irony seemed somewhat out of character.

“I'd be glad to tell you”, answered Radley. “It really starts back in nineteen fifty-three, when an American astronomer named O'Neill observed something very remarkable here on the Moon. He discovered a small bridge on the eastern border of the Mare Crisium. Other astronomers, of course, laughed at him — but less prejudiced ones confirmed the existence of the bridge. Within a few years, however, it had vanished. Obviously, our interest had alarmed the saucer people, and they had dismantled it.”

That “obvious”, Hansteen told himself, was a perfect example of saucerite logic — the daring non sequitur that left the normal mind helplessly floundering several jumps behind. He had never heard of O'Neill's Bridge, but there had been scores of examples of mistaken observations in the astronomical records. The Martian canals were the classic case; honest observers had reported them for years, but they simply did not exist — at least not as the fine spider web that Lowell and others had drawn. Did Radley think that someone had filled in the canals between the time of Lowell and the securing of the hrst clear photographs of Mars? He was quite capable of it, Hansteen was sure.

Presumably O'Neill's Bridge had been a trick of the lighting, or of the Moon's perpetually shifting shadows — but such a simple explanation was not, of course, good enough for kadley. And, in any event, what was the man doing here, a couple of thousand kilometers from the Mare Crisium?

Someone else had thought of that, and had put the same question. As usual, Radley had a convincing answer at the tip of his tongue.

“I'd hoped”, he said, “to divert their suspicions by behaving like an ordinary tourist. Because the evidence I was looking for lay on the western hemisphere, I went east. I planned to get to the Mare Crisium by going across Farside; there were several places there that I wanted to look at, too. But they were too clever for me. I should have guessed that I'd be spotted by one of their agents — they can take human form, you know. Probably they've been following me ever since I landed on the Moon.”

“I'd like to know”, said Mrs. Schuster, who seemed to be taking Radley with ever-increasing seriousness, “what they're going to do to us now.”

“I wish I could tell you, ma'am”, answered Radley. “We know that they have eaves deep down inside the Moon, and almost certainly that's where we're being taken. As soon as they saw that the rescuers were getting close, they stepped in again. I'm afraid we're too deep for anyone to reach us now.”

That's quite enough of this nonsense, said Pat to himself. We've had our comic relief, and now this madman is starting to depress people. But how can we shut him up?

Insanity was rare on the Moon, as in all frontier societies. Pat did not know how to deal with it, especially with this confident, curiously persuasive variety. There were moments when he almost wondered if there might be something in Radley's delusion. In other circumstances, his natural, healthy skepticism would have protected him, but now, after these days of strain and suspense, his critical faculties were dimmed. He wished there was some neat way of breaking the spell that this glib-tongued maniac was undoubtedly casting.

Half ashamed of the thought, he remembered the quick coup de grace that had put Hans Baldur so neatly to sleep. Without intending to do se-at least, to his conscious knowledge — he caught Harding's eye. To his alarm, there was an immediate response; Harding nodded slightly and rose slowly to his feet. No! said Pat — but only to himself. I don't mean that; leave the poor lunatic alone; what sort of man are you, anyway?

Then he relaxed, very slightly. Harding was not attempting to move from his seat, four places from Radley. He was merely standing there, looking at the New Zealander with an unfathomable expression. It might even have been pity, but in this dim lighting Pat could not be sure.

“I think it's time to make my contribution”, Harding said. “At least one of the things our friend was telling you is perfectly true. He has been followed — but not by saucemites. By me.

“For an amateur, Wilfred George Radley, I'd like to congratulate you. It's been a fine chase — from Christchurch to Astrograd to Clavius to Tycho to Ptolemy to Plato to Port Roris — and to here, which I guess is the end of the trail, in more ways than one.”

Radley did not seem in the least perturbed. He merely inclined his head in an almost regal gesture of acknowledgment, as if he recognized Harding's existence, but did not wish to pursue his acquaintance.

“As you may have guessed”, continued Harding, “I'm a detective. Most of the time I specialize in fraud. Quite interesting work, though I seldom have a chance of talking about it. I'm quite grateful for this opportunity.

“I've no interest — well, no professional interest — in Mister Radley's peculiar beliefs. Whether they're true or not doesn't affect the fact that he's a very smart accountant, earning a good salary back in N. Z. Though not one good enough to pay for a month on the Moon.

“But that was no problem — because, you see, Mister Radley was senior accountant at the Christchurch branch of Universal Travel Cards, Incorporated. The system is supposed to be foolproof and double checked, but somehow he managed to issue himself a card — Q Category — good for unlimited travel anywhere in the solar system, for hotel and restaurant billings, for cashing checks up to five hundred stoilars on demand. There aren't many Q cards around, and they're handled as if they're made of plutonium.

“Of course, people have tried to get away with this sort of thing before; clients are always losing their cards, and enterprising characters have a fine time with them for a few days before they're caught. But only a few days. The UTC central billing system is very efficient — it has to be. There are several safeguards against unauthorized use, and until now, the longest run anyone's had was a week.”

“Nine days”, Radley unexpectedly interjected.

“Sorry — you should know. Nine days, then. But Radley had been on the move for almost three weeks before we spotted him. He'd taken his annual leave, and told the office he'd be vacationing quietly on the North Island. Instead, he went to Astrograd and then on to the Moon, making history in the process. For he's the first man — and we hope the last one — to leave Earth entirely on credit.

“We still want to know exactly how he did it. How did he bypass the automatic checking circuits? Did lie have an accomplice in the computer programing section? And similar questions of absorbing interest to UTC, Inc. I hope, Radley, you'll let down your hair with me, just to satisfy my curiosity. I think it's the least you can do in the circumstances.

“Still, we know why you did it — why you threw up a good job to go on a spree that was bound to land you in jail. We guessed the reason, of course, as soon as we found you were on the Moon. UTC knew all about your hobby, but it didn't affect your efficiency. They took a gamble, and it's been an expensive one.”

“I'm very sorry”, Radley replied, not without dignity. “The firm's always treated me well, and it did seem a shame. But it was in a good cause, and if I could have found my evidence —”

But at that point everyone, except Detective Inspector Harding, lost interest in Radley and his saucers. The sound that they had all been anxiously waiting for had come at last.

Lawrence 's probe was scratching against the roof.