Anti-Ice

9 IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON

Traveling at several hundred miles each hour, it took the Phaeton twenty days to journey from the Earth to the environs of the Moon.

On the eighteenth day I joined Traveller on his Bridge. The Moon lay dead ahead of the craft, so that it was poised directly above the glass dome of the Bridge. We were already so close to the sister world that it was barely possible to make out the edges of her glowing round face, and the closer we approached the more it seemed that the Moon was flattening into a landscape above us. But it was a strange, inverted landscape. Razor-edged lunar mountains hung above me like stalactites, or unlikely chandeliers which poured ghostly reflected sunlight into our Bridge. My Earth-trained perspective refused to allow me to perceive myself as hanging upside-down above the Moon; it was as if those mountains, those bowls of dust which were the lunar seas, those plains pocked by craters and laced by white rays, were about to tumble down about my defenseless ears.

I looked down at the navigation table, reconfigured now by Traveller to show the Moon. The path of the hapless Phaeton, delineated by little flags, had been heading past the limb of the satellite; now it curved gracefully toward the Moon, so that, if undisturbed, the ship would pass around the lunar perimeter. At first I had imagined that these changes in our path had been due to the firing of our rocket engines, but Traveller explained that the rockets had done little but tweak our path in the required direction; far from the influence of Earth, we were now being pulled across the sky by the gravity of the lunar rocks themselves.

“So, Ned,” Traveller called, and I turned to see him in his throne-chair, bathed in harsh, sharp radiance. “What an adventure awaits us.”

“Sir Josiah, I understand that gravity is pulling us into this orbit toward the Moon. But will gravity pull us all the way down to the surface?”

“No, Ned; if we do not fire the rockets again we will follow a hyperbolic path around the hidden hemisphere of the Moon and be flung away from her.”

“Then let us be flung away, if it is anywhere in the direction of our homeworld! Sir, the Moon is indeed magnificent, but it was surely never designed to sustain human life. Is it truly necessary for us to descend to its surface?”

Traveller sighed and, to my discomfiture, he reached up and removed the platinum nose from his face; with one thumb he rubbed the rim of the dark cavity so revealed, and then replaced the nose into his skull. “Ned, every time I discern some glimmering of intelligence in that bullet-shaped cranium of yours I am disappointed by a crass remark. I have explained this to you at least twice.”

“Then I apologize, sir, for the point is still unclear to me.”

“Is specific impulse such a difficult concept? Dear God… Very well, Ned. To enable the Phaeton to come so far our Monsieur Bourne has severely depleted our supply of reaction mass—of water. Even if we could somehow bend our trajectory to return to Earth, we should surely burn like toast as we hurtled uncontrolled through the atmosphere, with our remnants smashing into oblivion in the ground. So we need more water.”

“A cheerful prospect. But if it is so impossible to land on Earth, how can we hope to land safely on the Moon?”

Traveller’s face was turned up to the Moon, and I imagined him struggling for patience. “Because the pull of gravity is only one-sixth that at Earth’s surface. And so our enfeebled rockets can bring us safely out of orbit and to a soft landing on the lunar plains long before we run out of water.”

I turned my face up to the Moon; I let its pale light fill my eyes, and I voiced my darkest fear. “Sir Josiah, let us face the truth. The Moon is a desolate, airless planet; we are no more likely to find water down there, frozen or otherwise, than we are to find a Cockney urchin selling hot chestnuts.”

Traveller snorted laughter, his nose giving the sound a disconcerting metallic ring. “Forgive me, Professor Lord Ned; I did not realize you were such an expert on lunar and planetary theories.”

“I am not, sir,” I said with some dignity, “but nor am I a fool; and I am capable of following the newspapers.”

“Very well. There are three counters to your objections to my plan. First, that we have no alternative! There is nowhere else accessible to us which offers even the prospect of water, or any other suitable liquid. So it is the Moon or nothing, Ned.

“Second, the opinion of the savants on the composition of the lunar surface is not as united as you appear to believe.”

“But surely the accepted wisdom is that the Moon is barren, inert, lifeless, and without atmosphere.”

“Pah!” Traveller snorted. “And what observations are such theories based on? For every sighting of a sharp occultation of a star by the limb of the Moon—’demonstrating’ by the absence of dimming or refraction, you see, that there is no air—I can quote another in direct contradiction. Only twenty years ago the Frenchman Laussedat noted a refraction of the solar disc during an eclipse.” Traveller, lying prone in his couch, held out his arms as if to embrace the lunar goddess above him. “I accept that our own eyes show us now that the Moon cannot have a blanket of atmosphere as thick as that of Earth; for surely if she did, her mountains and valleys would be hidden by a swirling layer of clouds and haze. And the lighter gravity, so advantageous to us in other ways, does not lend itself to the retention of a heavy atmosphere. But it is surely not beyond the bounds of possibility that we may find pockets of air in the deeper valleys, or even that a rarefied air might linger over the entire surface?

“And besides, recall that we have only observed one side of the Moon. The satellite dances about the Earth, keeping one face modestly turned away. Even from this vantage point we have not yet seen the hidden face, Ned! Who knows what we may find?”

“Craters, and mountains, and seas of dust.”

“Mr. Wickers, your mind is like a shriveled prune, dry and incapable of surprise. What if the theories of Hansen are verified? Eh?” Hansen, it emerged, was a Danish astronomer who had suggested that the Moon had been pulled, by Earth’s gravity, into an egg-shape, and circled the Earth with the fatter end averted; and that a layer of thick atmosphere had accumulated over this heavier hemisphere, conveniently hidden from the view of inquisitive astronomers.

“Well, Sir Josiah,” I said, “we must wait and see.”

He snorted again. “Spoken like a feeble scientist, lad. You must learn to think like an engineer! To a scientist nothing is proven until it is demonstrated, every way up, before the eyes of a dozen of his sober-suited peers. But an engineer seeks what is possible. I don’t care if this theory is right or wrong; I ask instead what I can do with it.”

“Sir Josiah, you listed three counters to my objection. What is the third?”

Now he twisted in his chair and craned his neck; his deformed face, half-silhouetted by the moonlight, was alive with excitement. “Ah, Ned, the third counter is simply this: whether we live or die, what fun it will be to walk among the mountains of the Moon!”

I peered up at the forbidding world rotating slowly above me and wished I could find it in my young heart to share Traveller’s enthusiasm for the exotic and the spectacular; but, at that moment, I would have given all my astonishing experiences to be safely back in the snug bar of a Manchester club.

After the excitement of the reclaiming of the Bridge we had returned to our settled routine—with the exception that poor Bourne sat in his chair in the Cabin now, a silent, resentful specter—and the remaining hours of our voyage wore away rapidly.

But at last I awoke, as usual with the homely smell of Pocket’s toast and tea in my nostrils, knowing instantly that this was the twentieth day of our flight—the day on which Sir Josiah Traveller would land us on the surface of the Moon itself, or else take us to our deaths!

Traveller had assured us that we would land at around eight in the morning; and so Pocket awoke us a little earlier than usual, at five. We washed quickly and ate a healthy breakfast. Traveller insisted on this, even though I for one could scarcely swallow a mouthful. I fed Bourne and allowed him to wash sketchily. Pocket climbed through the hatch to bring Traveller this last breakfast at his station on the Bridge.

With the meal completed and the debris hastily stowed away, we prepared for our descent. Traveller had explained to us that at ten minutes past seven his engines would fire one almighty burst, designed to knock us into a path which must inevitably meet the lunar surface.

I ensured that Bourne was correctly restrained by his safety straps. The Frenchman’s feet and hands were also knotted together by leather belts; pale, obviously frightened, he averted his eyes with a trace of defiance. I pushed away from him, reached my own seat, and began to haul the straps around me—and then, with an oath, pulled myself across the Cabin once more and, with fingers stiffened by anger, loosened the bindings around Bourne’s wrists. Bourne neither aided nor abetted me.

Holden, already in his place, shouted angrily, “Ned! What in God’s name are you doing? Will you loose that animal amongst us, at such a moment?”

I turned on him, feeling my face flush with fury. “He is not an animal, George. He is a human being, a brother to any of us here. We may be going to our deaths today. Whatever his crimes, Bourne deserves to meet his fate with dignity.”

Holden made to protest further, but Pocket, strapped tightly in his own chair, called out, “Please postpone your debate, sirs, for I fear that the engines are about to ignite, and the young gentleman will be injured if he does not resume his seat forthwith.”

A glance at Traveller’s Great Eastern clock, still sitting proudly in its case at the center of the Cabin after all our adventures, showed me that it was already eight minutes past the hour. So with haste I returned to my chair and strapped myself in. We sat for long seconds; I avoided the others’ eyes for fear of finding only the reflections of my own terror…

Then the great engines spoke once more.

I was pressed deep into my seat, and I envisaged our precious water being thrust as freezing steam into space. The rockets fired for perhaps two minutes—and then, as suddenly as they had awoken, they fell silent. An ominous quiet descended on the Cabin, and we stared at each other wildly.

From the Bridge there was no sound.

“Holden, what has happened?” I hissed. “Do you think it worked? Are we heading to the Moon?”

Holden bit his lip, his round face red and moist with fear. “The engines fired on cue, at any rate,” he said. “But as to the rest, I am scarcely qualified to judge. As with so much of this horrible adventure, we are reduced to waiting and seeing.”

The minutes stretched out without event, and my fear became supplemented by boredom and irritation. “I say, Holden, I know Traveller is a great man—and that one must expect such chaps to display the odd eccentricity—but all the same, it seems inhuman to keep us sitting down here in suspense like this.”

Holden turned to the servant. “Pocket? Do you think we should check if Sir Josiah is well?”

Pocket shook his thin head, and I saw how sweat beaded over the bristles of hair at his neck. The manservant, restrained by circumstance from his customary round of chores, seemed the most nervous of all of us. “Sir Josiah doesn’t like to be disturbed at his work, sir.”

I ground my fist into the palm of my hand. “But this is scarcely a normal time, damn it.”

Holden said, “I think we had best let Traveller get on with his work, Ned, and try to be patient.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” I cast about the Cabin, seeking diversion from my own thoughts, and lit on the unhappy figure of Bourne; the Frenchman sat with his head lolling against his chest, a prisoner even within this prison. I said, “I have to say again, Holden, it’s damn heartless of you to have wanted to keep this poor chap restrained still. What further damage can the fellow do?”

Holden glared at Bourne. “He is an Anarchist, Ned; and as such cannot be trusted.”

Now Bourne looked up with some defiance; in his heavily accented English he said, “I am no Anarchist. I am a Frenchman.”

I studied his thin, proud features. “You told me you took the Phaeton because of the tricolore. What did you mean?”

He fixed me with a condescending stare. “That you need to ask such a question, English, is sufficient answer.”

I felt angry that my overtures, friendly enough in the circumstances, should be treated in this way. “What the devil is that supposed to mean? Look here—”

“You won’t get any civility out of that one, Ned,” Holden said wearily. “The tricolore—the flag of their Revolution in which the rabble murdered their anointed rulers, and then turned on each other; the tricolore—which the upstart Corsican carried all over Europe; the tricolore—symbol of blood, chaos and murder—”

“Yes, but what’s it got to do with the Phaeton?”

“Think about it, Ned; try to see the last few decades from your Frenchie’s point of view. His famous Emperor is thrashed by Wellington and carted off to exile. The Congress of Vienna, which has settled the Balance of Power in Europe for all time, and which seems such a noble achievement to us, is invidious to him; for no more can he count on the division of his foes in order to spread his creed of lawlessness and riot across Europe—”

Bourne laughed softly. “I point out that we are now ruled by an Emperor, not by a Robespierre.”

“Yes,” said Holden with disdain, “by Louis Napoleon, who calls himself the bastard son of Bonaparte—”

“The nephew,” interjected Bourne. “But—despite the legitimacy of Louis’ original election to power—your King would have the Emperor replaced, would he not, by a restoration of the old monarchy?” He laughed again.

Holden ignored this. “Ned, your Frenchman has, this century, been thwarted in his ambitions of greed and lawlessness. He has been forced to witness the influence of Britain extend still further across the Continent—and the world—buttressed by the robust nature of our constitutional settlement, and the power of our industrial economy. And his resentment has grown.”

Bourne continued to laugh quietly.

Holden snapped, “Do you deny this?”

Bourne became still. “I do not deny your hegemony in Europe,” he said. “But it is based on one thing, and one thing alone: anti-ice, and your monopoly on the substance. Thus you lay your anti-ice Rails across our fields, and build your stations with English names into which English goods are brought for sale.

“And worse—worse than all this—is your hidden threat to use anti-ice as a final weapon of war. Where is your Balance of Power now, Mr. Holden?”

“There is no such intention,” Holden said stiffly.

“But you have deployed such weapons of terror already,” Bourne said, “against the Russians in the Crimea. We know what you are capable of. You British talk, and act, as if anti-ice was some supernatural outcropping of your racial superiority. It is not; your possession of it is no more than a historical accident, and yet you use this transient superiority to impose your ways, your policies, your very thinking, on the rest of mankind.”

Now it was Holden’s turn to laugh, but I sat quietly, thinking over Bourne’s words. I will admit that even a month earlier I would instinctively have sided with Holden in this debate, but now, hearing the cold, precise words of this Frenchie—no, of this man, a man about my own age—I found my old certitudes more fragile than I had supposed. “But,” I asked Bourne, “what if this is true? Is the British way so bad? Holden has described the Congress of Vienna; Britain’s diplomats have striven for a just peace—”

“I am French, not British,” he said. “We want to find our own destiny, not follow you to yours. The Prussians, and the rest of the Germans, too; if history says that fragmented nation is to unify, who is Britain to stand in the way? And even—even if our nations wish to go to war, then it is not for you to say ‘no’.” His face was pale, but his eyes were clear and steady.

“Then your taking of the Phaeton—perhaps ultimately at the expense of your own life—”

“—was an act designed to waste a few more pounds of the wretched anti-ice. To remove the reckless genius-criminal Traveller. It is known already that your stock of the substance is running low. There is no nobler way for a Frenchman to spend his life than to speed this process.”

Despite the starkness of this statement, I was irresistibly reminded of Traveller’s remarks to the effect that his purpose in building such great devices as the Albert was to distract the politicians and generals from the military exploitation of anti-ice! Was Bourne’s analysis of the situation really so different from that of the great Englishman?

I frowned. “Holden thinks you are a saboteur.”

He shook his head, smiling thinly. “No. I am a franc-tireur.”

“A what?”

“A free-shooter. A new type of soldier; a soldier in a gentleman’s clothes, who fights to free his homeland with any tools available.”

“Damn pretty sentiments,” Holden said with loathing and contempt. “And when the anti-ice is all gone—wasted by such acts as this—then what? Will you rise and murder us in our beds?”

Bourne’s smile widened. “You are so afraid, aren’t you, English? You fear even your own mobs, who perhaps might become infected by ours. And you understand so little.

“I heard Sir Josiah call himself an Anarchist.” He spat. “And in the same breath describe how each man will know his ‘place.’ Traveller and his like do not know the meaning of the words ‘free man.’ Was it not the industrialists who, in 1849, overturned Shaftesbury’s working conditions reforms of a few years earlier?”

I looked blankly at Holden, who raised a hand dismissively. “He means some aberrant pieces of legislation, Ned, long since thrown out and forgotten. Shaftesbury introduced a ten-hour working day limit, for example. Conditions on the use of women in the mines. That sort of thing.”

I was puzzled. “But industry could not function under such restraints. Could it?”

“Of course not! And so the ‘reforms’ were discarded.”

“But,” said Bourne, “at what cost to your British souls. Eh? Vicars, do you remember an English writer called Dickens?”

“Who?”

Again Holden explained, impatiently. Charles Dickens had turned out pot-boilers in the 1840s, achieving a brief popularity. Holden sighed briefly. “Do you remember Little Nell, Pocket?”

The manservant’s face creased to a smile. “Ah, yes, sir. Everyone followed the serials then, didn’t they? And when Nell died there was scarce a dry eye in the country, I dare say.”

“Dickens. I never heard of the fellow,” I admitted. “What happened to him?”

“About 1850 he began a new serial,” Holden remembered. “David Copperfield. Another heavy, weepy work. It flopped completely, being utterly removed from the mood of the day. Ned, it was in that same year of 1850 that the first Light Rail, between Liverpool and Manchester, was opened! People were excited by the future—by change, enterprise, possibilities. They didn’t want to read this dreary stuff about the plight of the shiftless.”

“So,” said Bourne, “Dickens left Britain for good. He lived and worked in America, where his social awareness had long been appreciated; he campaigned on a variety of reform issues right up to his recent death.”

“What is your point?” I demanded coolly.

“That your British hearts are riven by internal contradiction—the same contradiction which expelled such a good man as Dickens from your body politic, leaving you the colder and the poorer. The contradiction which allows Traveller to believe that his Anarchism can be validly founded on a heap of laboring, disenfranchised poor. A contradiction which, in the end, will tear you apart—and a contradiction which now drives you to meddle in the affairs of other nations. Do you not fear that nationalism will erupt out of France and across Europe, disrupting your Balance of Power for ever—and do your mothers still frighten you as children with tales of how ‘Boney’ will get you if you misbehave?”

I laughed—for my own mother had done precisely that—but Bourne, excited, continued now in a harsher voice. “Ned, there is a strain of modern Englishmen called the Sons of Gascony. Are you familiar with their theories?”

“I have heard of them,” I admitted stiffly.

“The Sons are the distillation of your national character, in some ways; for, constantly aware of the past, they live in constant fear of it—and constantly plan revenge. After the Norman Conquest a series of forts, each twenty or so miles apart, was built across England and Wales, the purpose being to subdue the conquered English. These forts have now been absorbed into your great castles—Windsor, the London Tower. And the north of England was razed.”

I frowned. “But that’s eight centuries ago. Who cares about such matters now?”

Bourne laughed. “To the Sons it is as yesterday. The tides of history since, with all their flotsam of ancient victories and defeats, only add to their fears. They brood on Gascony, which was an English domain from the Conquest to the sixteenth century, when the final fragment—Calais—was lost by Mary Tudor.

“Vicars, the Sons plan a final solution to the ancient ‘problem’ of the French. Again boats will cross the Channel; again there will be a Conquest—and again, every few miles, the terrible forts will be thrown up. But this time guns powered by anti-ice will loom from their turrets; and this time it will be the regions of France which will be ground underfoot.”

“But that’s monstrous,” I said, stunned.

“Ask Holden,” Bourne snapped. “Well, sir? Do you deny the existence of such a movement? And do you deny your own sympathy for its aims?”

Holden opened his mouth to reply—but he was not given the chance; for at that moment a terrible cry emanated from the open hatchway above our heads.

We looked at each other in horror; for it had been Traveller, our only pilot as we hurtled toward the Moon, and he had sounded in mortal distress!

Strapped helplessly into my seat, I looked up at the open hatchway to the Bridge. A shaft of Moonlight raked down through the hatch and shone in the smoky air of the Cabin. I felt oddly resentful at this turn of events; if only, I reflected, I had been allowed to sit in this cozy Cabin and debate politics until it was all over… one way or the other.

But, it seemed, I could no longer hide from events.

I looked at Holden. “What do you think we should do, George?”

Holden chewed at his nail. “I’ve no idea.”

“But he must be in some sort of difficulty up there. Why else would he cry out so?… But in that case, wouldn’t he call for help?”

Pocket said, “That wouldn’t be Sir Josiah’s way, sir. He’s not one to admit weakness.”

Holden snorted. “Well, in a situation like this that’s a damned irresponsible attitude.”

“Unless,” I breathed, “he’s been disabled completely. Perhaps he is lying up there unconscious—or even dead! In which case the Phaeton is without a pilot—”

Only Bourne, slumped within himself, appeared unmoved by this lurid speculation.

“Now, Ned, we shouldn’t get carried away,” Holden said, his voice tight with tension.

“I think one of us should go up there,” I said.

Pocket said, “I wouldn’t advise it, sir. Sir Josiah wouldn’t like—”

“Damn his likes and dislikes. I’m talking about saving all our lives, man!”

“Ned, think on,” Holden said nervously. “What if Traveller ignites the motors while you are between decks? You could be dashed against the bulkhead, hurt or killed. No, I think we should sit and wait.”

I shook my head. If Holden had lost his nerve—well, he had my sympathy, and I did not remark on the fact. Instead I opened up my restraints and pushed my way out of the chair. I said, “Gentlemen, I propose to ascend. If all is well with Traveller, then the worst that will happen is that I will be the target of a few ripe insults. And if something amiss has occurred—well, perhaps I will be able to offer assistance.

“I think you should stay strapped into your seats.” And with those words, and feeling their helpless eyes on my back, I launched myself into the air and pulled through the hatch to the Bridge.

The Moon hung over the Phaeton like the battered underside of the sky. The rotation of the ship had been stilled now, and the Sun lay somewhere to our left-hand side, so that the shadows of the lunar features were long and sharp, like splashes of ink over a glowing white surface. The ragged peaks and crater rims slid from right to left past the Bridge windows, showing that we were already traveling close around the curve of this world, toward its night side.

I stared in fascination. I knew that no man, even armed with the mightiest telescope on Earth, had before seen the sister world in such dazzling detail.

I observed with interest how the larger craters, which looked from this angle more like circular walled encampments, appeared to contain a central peak, while the smaller craters were smooth within; and I saw too how craters overlaid craters, so that it was as if the Moon had been bombarded by a hail of meteors or other objects not once, in some wild remote past of the Solar System, but many times, again and again. And the sharpness of the smaller craters’ rims attested to their newness, implying that this bombardment continued even in the present day.

Now a new feature hove into view, a mountainous ridge very like a crater wall—except that, in this world of circles, this wall was virtually straight, traveling from top to bottom of our window. The area beyond the wall appeared oddly free of craters, although the ground was very broken up. I pushed myself away from the deck and floated up to the nose of the Bridge dome. As I looked across the surface of the Moon and deeper into the dark side, I could make out no limit to this strange craterless region. The delimiting wall was now receding behind the ship, and I was startled to see that the wall was not straight after all: it curved inwards around the shattered region in a mighty sweep, and I realized of a sudden that we were flying over the interior of an immense crater; so immense indeed that the curve of its walls almost dwarfed the curve of the satellite itself!

Now I knew that we must have reached the side of the Moon hidden from Earth, for this monstrous crater must cover most of a hemisphere, overshadowing by far the great walled plains of the Earth- facing side such as Copernicus and Ptolemaeus.

Soon the boundary wall of the giant crater had receded from view behind the curve of the planet, but the far wall was still nowhere to be seen, and I peered up in wonder at hundreds of square miles of desolation—desolation, that is, even by lunar standards.

There was a soft groan behind me. I turned in the air, suddenly mindful of my mission. Poor Traveller lay strapped to his throne-couch with his face buried in his huge hands; his stovepipe hat floated in the air beside him, and wisps of white hair orbited his cranium. A fat notebook was strapped, open, to his right thigh; into this, I knew, he had over the last few days been entering painstaking details of the schedule—the maneuvers, the rocket bursts—which would deliver us safely to the surface.

I did a graceful somersault, kicked against the windows, and settled gently to the deck at Traveller’s side. I took his arm and shook it urgently. “Sir Josiah, what is troubling you?”

He lifted his face from his hands. His expression was a mixture of anger and despair, and his eyes were pinpoints of blue in Moon shadows. “Ned, we are done for. Done for! To have come so far, to have endured so much, only to be betrayed by the folly of that pompous Danish idiot!”

“…To which Dane do you refer?” I asked cautiously.

“Hansen, of course, and his absurd breakfast-egg theory of the lunar shape. Look at it!” He shook a fist at the shattered landscape which loomed over us. “It’s as clear as day that the Moon is a perfect sphere after all, that the mass must be uniformly distributed, that the backside of the wretched world must be as devoid of air as the face!”

I stared up at the lunar desolation. There were sparkles and glints deep in the shadow of the fragments of the shattered land, showing the possibility of granite, perhaps, or quartz. Traveller’s sudden loss of spirit, I decided, stemmed not from despair or fear, but from a feeling of betrayal—by the Moon itself, by the Creator for having the temerity to design a world so unsuited to Traveller’s purposes, and even by this poor chap Hansen, who, of the three, was surely the most blameless!

Traveller lay back in his couch and stared up at the Moon, muttering.

I was bewildered. Even if the lunar landing was a fruitless exercise, I reflected, we had no choice but to continue with it; and only Traveller could bring our journey to a successful conclusion. But it was clear that Traveller had retreated into himself, and was, at this moment, quite incapable of piloting the craft.

I had to do something, or we should all be killed after all.

With some hesitation I reached out and touched his arm. “Sir Josiah, not long ago you accused me of lacking imagination. Now I feel obliged to identify the same fault in yourself. Was it not you who explained that, come success or failure, life or death, we should be in for some terrific fun?”

His face was heavily scored by Moon shadows, and for the first time since I had met him he looked his true age. He said quietly, “I had banked on Hansen’s crackpot theories, Ned. With the banishment of my hopes of finding water, I find little fun in the prospect of a certain death.”

He sounded old, frail, frightened and surprisingly vulnerable; I felt privileged to see behind the bluff mask to the true man. But at this moment I needed the old Traveller, the wild, the supremely confident, the arrogant!

I pointed above my head. “Then, sir, at least you have surely not lost your wonder! Look at that crater floor above us. We have discovered the mightiest feature on the Moon—a fitting monument to your achievements—and, if our story is ever told by future generations, they shall surely name it after the great Josiah Traveller!”

He looked vaguely interested at that, and he raised his beak of a platinum nose to the silver landscape. “Traveller Crater. Perhaps. No doubt some bastardized Latin version will be used.”

“And,” I said, “think of the impact which must have caused such a monstrous scar. It must have come close to splitting the damn Moon in two.”

He stroked his chin and inspected the huge crater with an appraising eye. “And yet it is scarcely possible to envisage a meteorite impact of such a magnitude… No, Ned; I suspect the explanation for that vast feature is still more exotic.”

“What do you mean?”

“Anti-ice! Ned, if that remarkable compound has been discovered on the surface of the Earth, what is to stop it being available on other planets and satellites?

“I envisage a comet-like body falling in to the Solar System, perhaps from the stars, largely or wholly composed of anti-ice. As the Sun’s heat touches it I imagine little pockets of the ice exploding, and the wretched body being twisted and spun this way and that.

“At last, though, blazing and glowing, it falls close to the Earth—only to find the inert form of Earth’s patient companion in its way.

“The detonation is astounding—as you say, almost enough to split the Moon in two. Crater walls roll across the tortured surface like waves across a sea. And one must imagine millions of tons of pulverized lunar rock and dust being hurled into space—with fragments of the original anti-ice comet embedded within it. And so, perhaps, some fragments reached even the surface of the Earth itself.”

I stared up at that desolate craterscape and shivered, imagining it superimposed on a map of Europe. “Then we must be grateful to the Moon that the comet never reached Earth, Sir Josiah.”

“Indeed.”

“And do you suppose the wretched Professor Hansen could have been right after all? Could there have been an air-covered area of the Moon—perhaps inhabited, but now laid waste by the anti-ice explosion?”

He shook his head, a little wistfully. “No, lad; I fear the good Dane was wrong all the way; for the geometry of the Moon itself does not support his egg-shape theory. Our chances of finding the water we need to save our lives remain negligible.”

In desperation I turned my face up to the darkling landscape over which we flew, inverted. So my diplomatic skills had succeeded in bringing Traveller out of his funk—but not to the extent that he might lift a finger to save our lives.

…And then I noticed once more, twinkling like a hundred Bethlehem stars, bright, glassy sparkles amid the tumbled lunar mountains. I cried out and pointed. “Traveller! Before you sink completely into despair, look above you. What do you see, shining in the last of the Sun’s rays?”

Again he rubbed his chin, but he looked closely. “It could be nothing, lad,” he said gently. “Outcroppings of quartz or feldspar—”

“But it could be water, frozen pools of it shining in the sunlight!”

He turned to me almost kindly, and I sensed he was about to launch into an extended lecture on the source of my latest misapprehension—and then, like the reappearance of the Sun from a cloudbank, his face lit up with determination. “By God, Ned, you could be right. Who knows? And it’s certain we will never find out if we let ourselves fall helplessly to that tumbled surface. Enough of this! We have a world to conquer.” And he grabbed his stovepipe hat out of the air and screwed it down over his cranium.

I was filled with elation. I said, “Will you resume the plan you have written in your little book?”

He looked down at the notebook still tied to his knee. “What, this? I have moped my way into too great a deviance from the schedule, I fear.” He tore the book from his knee and hurled it, spinning, into the shadows of the Bridge. “It is too late for calculation. Now we must pilot the Phaeton as she was meant to be piloted—with our hands, our minds, our eyes. Hold on, Ned!”

And he hauled back his levers; the anti-ice rockets roared, and I was hurled bodily to the deck.

The next several minutes were a nightmarish blur. Traveller kept the rockets shouting, and the deck of the Bridge—an uneven series of riveted plates—pressed into my face and chest. I could do nothing but cling to whatever purchase I could find—like the iron pillars which supported Traveller’s couch—and reflect that it was typical of Traveller to neglect utterly the well-being of those he was trying to save. Surely a delay of a few seconds to allow me to regain my seat in the Cabin would not have mattered one way or the other.

After some minutes the quality of the Moonlight seemed to change. The shadow of my head shifted and lengthened across the deck; and at last I was plunged into a darkness broken only by the dim glow of Traveller’s Ruhmkorff coils. I surmised that the ship had been turned around, so that our nose now pointed away from the Moon.

Then, blessed relief!—the motors reduced. Though the rockets continued to fire at a subdued level, it was as if a vast weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I cautiously pushed my face away from the floor, got to my hands and knees, and then to my feet—and surprised myself to find I was standing!

“Sir Josiah! We are no longer floating…”

He lay in his couch, lightly playing his control levers. “Oh, hullo, Ned; I’d quite forgotten you were there. No, we are no longer in free fall. I decided that boldness was the best course of action. So I launched us directly at the lunar surface, from which we were in any event a mere few thousand miles—”

“I was quite crushed against the plates.”

He looked at me in some surprise. “Were you? But the thrust was only a little more than a terrestrial gravity.” His look turned to sternness. “You have become weakened by the floating condition,” he said. “I warned you that you should maintain your exercise regime, as I have done; it is a wonder your bones, reduced to brittleness, did not crumble to dust.”

I framed a reply, which would have touched on the reasons for my abandonment of his routine—namely the several days I had spent as an invalid following my supposedly heroic jaunt into space—but I forbore. I said, “And then you turned the ship around.”

“Yes; now we are falling backside first toward the Moon,” he confirmed cheerfully. “The thrust you feel is about the gravitational acceleration we should experience on the surface of the Moon, which has been computed to be a sixth part of Earth’s. I have reduced our speed to an acceptably low level, and now I am firing the rockets in order to keep our speed constant.” He fixed me with a quizzical eye. “I presume you understand the dynamics of our situation?—that the equality of lunar gravity and the rocket thrust is no coincidence?”

“Perhaps we could go over the theory later,” I said drily. I raised myself to my toes and bounced up and down on the deck; in my enfeebled state even this fractional gravity felt significant, but I was able to jump easily into the air. “So this is how it would feel if one could walk around on the Moon?”

“Quite so.” Now he craned back his neck and peered into his periscope. “Now I must fix on our landing site. We will land amid lunar mountains, during a sunset.”

Clinging to the couch I turned to look through the windows. The sky above, away from the Sun, was utterly dark; and as we were descending toward the Moon’s hidden face Earth herself was concealed from us now. All around us gaunt fingers of rock, shattered in that ancient explosion, reached serrated edges toward us, and shadows pooled like spilt blood.

I asked, “Why not land in a daylit area? Those shadows must make a choice of a safe landing spot virtually impossible.”

With some impatience Traveller replied, “But the Phaeton has not been designed for extended jaunts on the lunar surface, Ned! Recall that while she is in space the craft must rotate continually to avoid one side or the other overheating in the Sun’s rays. Here, such rotation will not be possible—yet the solar rays will be just as intense as between worlds. I would hope that our stay here, if the Lord allows us to survive our landing, will not encompass more than a few hours; but even that length of time in the pitiless glare of the Sun would rapidly cause our fragile vessel to burn up. And in the lunar night we would freeze solid. No; our best hope is that I can place us with some fraction of our surface in shadow, and the rest in the sunlight, so that we attain some balance between fire and ice.”

We sank into the lunar landscape. Tumbled mountains rose around us, and wisps of dust fled from beneath us, agitated by the nearness of our rocket nozzles.

I began to believe I might live through this.

The sound of the rockets, which had been a steady, deep-chested roar, now coughed uncertainly and died away. I turned with a wild hope. Were we down? Then I stared at my feet, for, to my horror, they were leaving the deck. “Traveller!” I screamed. “I am floating once more!”

“Our fuel is gone, Ned,” he said calmly. “We are falling freely toward the lunar surface. I have done my best; now we can only pray.”

The lunar landscape rushed to meet us, tilting.

A thousand questions washed through my mind. How far had we been from the surface when the engines failed? And how quickly would one accrue speed, falling through the Moon’s enfeebled gravity? What size of impact could the Phaeton withstand before she split open like an egg and tumbled us all, warm and soft and helpless, out on to the cruel lunar rocks?

There was a grind of metal on rock.

I was hurled to the deck once more. I heard a smashing of glass, a ripping of cloth and leather. The deck tilted crazily, and I slid along it for several feet, fetching up at last against a bank of instruments. Then the deck came back to a level. I pressed my face to the riveted floor, waiting for the moment when the hull burst and the air was sucked for the final time from my lungs…

But the noise of our impact died away; the ship settled a little further into whatever rocky cradle it had carved for itself. A great hush fell over the craft. But there was no rush of air, no more tearing of metal; I was still alive, and breathing as comfortably as I ever had.

I climbed slowly to my feet, mindful of the weak lunar gravity. Traveller stood on his couch, abandoned restraints coiled around his feet; with hands on hips and stovepipe hat fixed jauntily in place, he peered out at his new domain.

I climbed up beside him, with little effort; I saw how his frock coat had been torn down the back, and how blood seeped steadily down his wrinkled cheek from a cut to the temple.

A city of rock lay all around us. Shadows fled from a Sun which was barely hidden behind a distant peak. The place was airless, desolate, utterly forbidding of human life—and yet conquered.

“Dear God, Traveller, you have brought us to the Moon. I could compliment your skill as a pilot, your genius as an engineer—but surely it is your sheer nerve, your audacious vision, which shines out above all.”

He grunted dismissively. “Pretty speeches are for funerals, Ned. You and I are very much alive, and we have work to do.” He pointed to the Sun. “Another six to eight hours, I should say, and that Sun will be hidden behind the spire, not to reappear for a full fortnight, and we shall slowly but surely freeze solid. We need water, Ned; and the sooner we get out there and bring it in the sooner Pocket can brew us a healthy pot of tea and we can set off for Mother Earth!”

Despite the feebleness of the gravity I felt as if I should fall, so weak did every one of my joints become. For once more Traveller had looked ahead in a manner which evaded me. Even if bucketfuls of precious water lay just behind those rocks over there, one of us would have to leave the craft and fetch it in. And I knew that could only be me!