A Fall of Moondust

CHAPTER 7

In Clavius City, Chief Administrator Olsen and Tourist Commissioner Davis had just finished conferring with the Legal Department. It had not been a cheerful occasion; much of the time had been spent discussing the waivers of responsibility which the missing tourists had signed before they boarded Selene. Commissioner Davis had been much against this when the trips were started, on the grounds that it would scare away customers, but the Administration's lawyers had insisted. Now he was very glad that they had had their way.

He was glad, also, that the Port Roris authorities had done the job properly; matters like this were sometimes treated as unimportant formalities and quietly ignored. There was a full list of signatures for Selene's passengers — with one possible exception that the lawyers were still arguing about.

The incognito Commodore had been listed as R. S. Hanson, and it looked very much as if this was the name he had actually signed. The signature was, however, so illegible that it might well have been “Hansteen.” Until a facsimile was radioed from Earth, no one would be able to decide this point. It was probably unimportant. Because the Commodore was traveling on official business, the Administration was bound to accept some responsibility for him. And for all the other passengers, it was responsible morally, if not legally.

Above all, it had to make an effort to find them and give them a decent burial. This little problem had been placed squarely in the lap of Chief Engineer Lawrence, who was still at Port Roris.

He had seldom tackled anything with less enthusiasm. While there was a chance that the Selene's passengers were still alive, he would have moved heaven, Earth, and Moon to get at them. But now that they must be dead, he saw no point in risking men's lives to locate them and dig them out. Personally, he could hardly think of a better place to be buried than among these eternal hills.

That they were dead, Chief Engineer Robert Lawrence did not have the slightest doubt; all the facts fitted together too perfectly. The quake had occurred at just about the time Selene should have been leaving Crater Lake, and the gorge was now half blocked with slides. Even the smallest of those would have crushed her like a paper toy, and those aboard would have perished within seconds as the air gushed out. If, by some million-to-one chance, she had escaped being smashed, her radio signals would have been received. The tough little automatic beacon had been built to take any reasonable punishment, and if that was out of action, it must have been some crack-up.

The first problem would be to locate the wreck. That might be fairly easy, even if it was buried beneath a million tons of rubble. There were prospecting instruments and a whole range of metal detectors that could do the trick. And when the hull was cracked, the air inside would have rushed out into the lunar near-vacuum; even now, hours later, there would be traces of carbon dioxide and oxygen that might be spotted by one of the gas detectors used for pinpointing spaceship leaks. As soon as the dust-skis came back to base for servicing and recharging, he'd get them fitted with leak detectors and would send them sniffing round the rockslides.

No — finding the wreck might be simple — but getting it out might be impossible. He wouldn't guarantee that the job could be done for a hundred million. (And he could just see the C.A.'s face if he mentioned a sum like that.) For one thing, it was a physical impossibility to bring heavy equipment into the area — the sort of equipment needed to move thousands of tons of rubble. The flimsy little dust-skis were useless. To shift those rockslides, one would have to float moondozers across the Sea of Thirst, and import whole shiploads of gelignite to blast a road through the mountains. The whole idea was absurd. He could understand the Administration's point of view, but he was damned if he would let his overworked Engineering Division get saddled with such a Sisyphean task.

As tactfully as possible — for the Chief Administrator was not the sort of man who liked to take no for an answer — he began to draft his report. Summarized, it might have read: “A. The job's almost certainly impossible. B. If it can be done at all, it will cost millions and may involve further loss of life. C. It's not worth doing anyway.” But because such bluntness would make him unpopular, and he had to give his reasons, the report ran to over three thousand words.

When he had finished dictating, he paused to marshal his ideas, could think of nothing further, and added: “Copies to Chief Administrator, Moon; Chief Engineer, Farside; Supervisor, Traffic Control; Tourist Commissioner; Central Filing. Classify as Confidential.”

He pressed the transcription key. Within twenty seconds all twelve pages of his report, impeccably typed and punctuated, with several grammatical slips corrected, had emerged from the office telefax. He scanned it rapidly, in case the electrosecretary had made mistakes. She did this occasionally (all electrosees were “she”), especially during rush periods when she might be taking dictation from a dozen sources at once. In any event, no wholly sane machine could cope with all the eccentricities of a language like English, and every wise executive checked his final draft before he sent it out. Many were the hilarious disasters that had overtaken those who had left it all to electrónics.

Lawrence was halfway through this task when the telephone rang.

“Lagrange II on the line, sir”, said the operator — a human one, as it happened. “A Doctor Lawson wants to speak to you.”

Lawson? Who the devil's that? the C. E. E. asked himself. Then he remembered; that was the astronomer who was making the telescopic search. Surely someone had told him that it was useless.

The Chief Engineer had never had the dubious privilege of meeting Dr. Lawson. He did not know that the astronomer was a very neurotic and very brilliant young man — and, what was more important in this case, a very stubborn one.

Lawson had just begun to dismantle the infrared scanner when he stopped to consider his action. Since he had practically completed the blasted thing, he might as well test it, out of sheer scientific curiosity. He prided himself, rightly, as a practical experimenter; this was something unusual in an age when most so-called astronomers were really mathematicians who never went near an observatory.

He was now so tired that only sheer cussedness kept him going. If the scanner had not worked the first time, he would have postponed testing it until he had had some sleep. But by the good luck that is occasionally the reward of skill, it did work; only a few minor adjustments were needed before the image of the Sea of Thirst began to build up upon the viewing screen.

It appeared line by line, like an old-fashioned TV picture, as the infrared detector scanned back and forth across the face of the Moon. The light patches indicated relatively warm areas, the dark ones, regions of cold. Almost all the Sea of Thirst was dark, except for a brilliant band where the rising sun had already touched it with fire. But in that darkness, as Tom looked closely, he could see some very faint tracks, glimmering as feebly as the paths of snails through some moonlit garden back on Earth.

Beyond doubt, there was the heat trail of Selene; and there also, much fainter, were the zigzags of the dust-skis that even now were searching for her. All the trails converged toward the Mountains of Inaccessibility and there vanished beyond his field of view.

He was much too tired to examine them closely, and in any event it no longer mattered, for this merely confirmed what was already known. His only satisfaction, which was of some importance to him, lay in the proof that another piece of Lawson-built equipment had obeyed his will. For the record, he photographed the screen, then staggered to bed to catch up with his arrears of sleep.

Three hours later he awoke from a restless slumber. Despite his extra hour in bed, he was still tired, but something was worrying him and would not let him sleep. As the faint whisper of moving dust had disturbed Pat Harris in the sunken Selene, so also, fifty thousand kilometers away, Tom Lawson was recalled from sleep by a trifling variation from the normal. The mind has many watchdogs; sometimes they bark unnecessarily, but a wise man never ignores their warning.

Still bleary-eyed, Tom left the cluttered little cell that was his private cabin aboard Lagrange, hooked himself on to the nearest moving belt, and drifted along the gravityless corridors until he had reached the Observatory. He exchanged a surly good morning (though it was now late in the satellite's arbitrary afternoon) with those of his colleagues who did not see him in time to take avoiding action. Then, thankful to be alone, he settled down among the instruments that were the only things he loved.

He ripped the photograph out of the one-shot camera where it had been lying all night, and looked at it for the first time. It was then that he saw the stubby trail emerging from the Mountains of Inaccessibility, and ending a very short distance away in the Sea of Thirst.

He must have seen it last night when he looked at the screen — but he had not noticed it. For a scientist, that was a serious, almost an unforgivable, lapse, and Tom felt very angry with himself. He had let his preconceived ideas affect his powers of observation.

What did it mean? He examined the area closely with a magnifier. The trail ended in a small, diffuse dot, which he judged to be about two hundred meters across. It was very odd — almost as if Selene had emerged from the mountains, and then taken off like a spaceship.

Tom's first theory was that she had blown to pieces, and that this smudge of heat was the aftermath of the explosion. But in that case, there would have been plenty of wreckage, most of it light enough to float on the dust. The skis could hardly have missed it when they passed through this area — as the thin, distinctive track of one showed it had indeed done.

There had to be some other explanation, yet the alternative seemed absurd. It was almost impossible to imagine that anything as large as Selene could sink without trace in the Sea of Thirst, merely because there had been a quake in that neighborhood. He certainly could not call the Moon on the evidence of a single photograph and say, “You're looking in the wrong place.” Though he pretended that the opinion of others meant nothing to him, Tom was terrified of making a fool of himself. Before he could advance this fantastic theory, he would have to get more evidence.

Through the telescope, the Sea was now a flat and featureless glare of light. Visual observation merely confirmed what he had proved before sunrise: there was nothing more than a few centimeters high projecting above the dust surface. The infrared scanner was no greater help; the heat trails had vanished completely, wiped out hours ago by the sun.

Tom adjusted the instrument for maximum sensitivity, and searched the area where the trail had ended. Perhaps there was some lingering trace that could be picked up even now, some faint smudge of heat that still persisted, strong enough to be detected even in the warmth of the lunar morning. For the sun was still low, and its rays had not yet attained the murderous power they would possess at noon.

Was it imagination? He had the gain turned full up, so that the instrument was on the verge of instability. From time to time, at the very limit of its detecting power, he thought he could see a tiny glimmer of heat, in the exact area where last night's track had ended.

It was all infuriatingly inconclusive — not at all the sort of evidence that a scientist needed, especially when he was going to stick his neck out. If he said nothing, no one would ever know, but all his life he would be haunted by doubts. Yet if he committed himself, he might raise false hopes, become the laughingstock of the solar system, or be accused of seeking personal publicity.

He could not have it both ways; he would have to make a decision. With great reluctance, knowing that he was taking a step from which there could be no turning back, he picked up the Observatory phone.

“Lawson here”, he said. “Get me Luna Central — priority.”