Danger Moon

3

TWENTY-FOUR hours later, according to the big Terrestrial clock that hung in the ebony sky, Templin stood space-suited at the portal of the mine and watched the first monocar-load of uranium ore come out. On the ground at his feet was a flat black box, the size of an overnight bag. When the hoist crews had unloaded the glittering fragments of ore and stowed them in the hold of a freight rocket, Templin said over the radio: “Hold it up, Culver; don’t send the monorail back down. I want to take another look at Gallery Eight.”

Culver, supervising the unloading, said, “Sure, Temp; I’ll tag along with you.” He sprang lightly into the monorail. Templin, picking up the black box, followed and they braced themselves for the acceleration.

As the car picked up speed, they hurtled down the winding mine tunnels, lighted only by the headlights of the car itself. Though there was no air to carry sound, they could feel the vibration of the giant wheels on the single metal track as a deep, shuddering roar. Then the roar changed pitch as the car’s brakes were set by the braking switch at the end of the line. The car slowed and stopped.

They got off and stepped down the rough-hewn gallery to where eight workmen were half-heartedly trying to clear the rock from the pinned Mark VII digging machine.

They stopped work to look at Templin. Templin said, “Go ahead, boys; we’re just looking around.” He moved toward the Mark VII, Culver following, studying the cave-in. Gallery Eight was seven hundred feet below the surface of the Moon, which meant that, even under the light gravity conditions prevailing on the satellite, there were many millions of tons of rock over their heads.

Frowning, Templin saw that there were strain-cracks on the tunnel walls—deep, long cracks that ran from floor to ceiling. They seemed to radiate from the point where the digging machine had been pinned down.

One of the workmen drifted over, watching Templin curiously. Templin glanced at the man, then turned to Culver. “Take a look at this,” he ordered.

Culver looked indifferently. “Yeah. That’s where the rock cracked and pinned down the machine.”

“Uh-uh.” Templin shook his head. “You’ve got the cart before the horse. Those cracks start at the mining machine. First the machine broke through, then the walls cracked.”

Culver gaped at him through the transparent dome of his pressure suit. “So what?”

Templin grinned, “I don’t know yet,“ he confessed; “but I aim to find out.”

He picked up the case he had been carrying, opened it. Inside was a conglomeration of instruments—dials, meters, what looked like an old-fashioned portable radio, complete with earphones. These Templin disconnected, plugging the earphone lead into a socket on his collar-plate that led to his suit radio.

Culver’s eyes narrowed curiously, then his expression cleared. “Oh, I get it,” he said. “That’s a sound-ranging gadget. You think—”

“I think maybe there’s something wrong below,” Templin cut in. “As I said yesterday, it looks to me as though there’s a rock fault underneath here. That machine broke through the floor of the tunnel. When you consider how light it is, here on the Moon, that means that there was one damn thin shell of rock underneath it. Or else—well, I don’t know what else it could be.”

Culver laughed. “You’d better start thinking of something, Temp. That floor was solid; I know, because I handled the drilling on this gallery, and I was pretty careful not to let the Mark Seven come in until I’d sound-ranged the rock myself. Look—I’ve got the graphs back in the office. Come back and I’ll show them to you.”

Templin hesitated, then shook his head. “You might have made a mistake, Culver. I—I might as well tell you, I checked up on you. I looked over the sound-ranging reports last night. According to them, it’s solid rock, all right—but still and all, the Mark Seven crashed through.” He bent down, flipped the starting switch on his detection device. “Anyway, this will settle the question once and for all.”

INSIDE THE satchel-like instrument, an electronic oscillator began sending out a steady beat, which was picked up by a sound-reflector and beamed out in a straight line. An electric “ear” in the machine listened for echoes, timed them against the sending impulse and in that way was able to locate very accurately the distance and direction of any flaw in the rock surrounding them.

The machine was sensitive enough to tell the difference between dry and oil-bearing strata of sand—it had been used for that work on Earth. And for it to recognize a cave in the solid rock of the Moon was child’s play. So simple, and so hard to mistake, that Templin avoided the question of how the first reports, based on Culver’s tests, could have been wrong. The machine could not be mistaken, Templin knew. Could the men who operated it have been treacherous?

Templin pointed the reflector of the instrument at the rock under the trapped Mark VII and reached for the control that would permit him to listen in on the tell-tale echoes from below.

Culver, watching Templin idly, saw the abrupt beginnings of a commotion behind him. The eight workmen who were clustered around the Mark VII suddenly dropped their tools and began to stampede toward them, puffy arms waving wildly and soundlessly.

“What the devil!” ejaculated Culver. Templin glanced up.

Then they felt it, too. Through the soles of their metal-shod feet they felt a growing vibration in the rock. Something was happening—something bad. They paused a second, then the workmen in their panicky flight came within range of their suit radios and they heard the words, “Cave-in!”

Templin straightened up. Ominously, the cracks in the wall were widening; there was a shuddering uneasiness in the feel of the rock floor beneath them that could mean only one thing. Somehow, the rock-slide that had wrecked the Mark VII earlier was being repeated. Somewhere beneath their feet a hole in the rock was being filled—and it might well be their bodies that would fill it.

Cursing, Templin jumped aside to let the panic-stricken workmen dash by. Then, half-dragging the paralyzed Culver, he leaped for the monorail car to the surface. They were the last ones on, and they were just barely in time. The stampeding miners had touched the starting lever, and the monorail began to pick up speed under them as they scrambled aboard.

Looking dazedly behind as the monorail sped upward, Templin saw the roof of the tunnel shiver crazily, then drop down, obliterating the wrecked Mark VII from sight. Luckily, the cave-in spread no farther, but it was a frightful spectacle, that soundless, gigantic fall of rock.

And all the more so because, just as the roof came down on the digging machine, Templin saw a figure in pressure suit and opaque miner’s helmet dash from the back of the machine to a sheltering cranny in the gallery wall. The man was trapped; even if there had been a way to stop the monorail and go back for a rescue try, there was no way of getting to him, through the thousands of cubic yards of rock that fell between, in time to save a life…

UP IN THE office, Templin was a caged tiger, raging as he paced back and forth. His stride was a ludicrous slow-motion shamble in the light gravity, but there was nothing ludicrous about his livid face.

He stopped and whirled on Culver. “Eight men down in that pit—and only seven of them got out! One of our men killed—half a million dollars worth of equipment buried—and why? Because some fool okayed the digging of a shaft directly over an underground cave!”

Culver shifted uncomfortably. “Wait a second, Temp,” he begged. “I swear to you, there wasn’t any cave there! Take a look at the sound-ranger graphs yourself.”

Templin dragged in viciously on a cigarette. He exhaled a sharply cut-off plume of smoke, and when he answered his voice was under control again. “You’re right enough, Culver,” he said. “I’ve looked at the things. Only—there was a cave there, or else the miner wouldn’t have fallen through. And how do you explain that?”

The door to the office opened and the personnel clerk stuck a worried head in. “I checked the rosters, Mr. Templin,” he said.

Templin’s jaw tensed in anticipation. “Who was missing?” he asked.

“That’s the trouble, sir; no one is missing!”

“What!” Templin stared. “Look, Henkins, don’t talk through your hat. There were eight miners down in that pit. Only seven came out. I saw one of them left behind, and there isn’t a doubt in the world that he’s still there dead. Who is it?”

The clerk said defensively, “I’m sorry, Mr. Templin. There are four men in the powerplant, five guards patrolling the shaft and area and two men on liberty at Tycho City. Every one of them is checked and accounted for. Everybody else is right here in the building.” He went on hastily, before Templin could explode: “But I took the liberty of talking to one of the miners who was down there with you, Mr. Templin. Like you, he said there were eight of them. But one man, he said, wasn’t part of the regular crew. He didn’t know who the odd man was. In fact—” Henkins hesitated—“he thought it was you!”

“Me? Oh, for the good Lord’s sake!” Templin glared disgustedly. “Look, Henkins, I don’t care what your friend says—that man was part of the regular crew. At least he was a miner from this project—he had an opaque miner’s helmet on; I saw it myself. You find out who he was, and don’t come back here until you know.”

“Yes, Mr. Templin,” said Henkins despairingly, and he closed the door gently behind him.

Templin threw away his cigarette. “I would give five years’ pay,” he said moodily, “to be back on Mercury now. There I didn’t have any troubles. All I had to worry about was keeping from falling into lava pits, and staying within sight of the ship.”

Culver leaned back against the steel wall of the office. “Sounds fun,” he said.

A buzzer sounded. Wearily Templin spoke into the teletone on his desk. “Hello, hello,” he growled.

The voice that came out was the worried voice of Sam Bligh. It said, “Trouble, Templin. Something’s happened to our energy reserves. The power leads are short-circuited. Can’t tell what caused it yet—but it looks like sabotage.”

THE GIANT parabolic mirrors were motionless as Culver and Templin approached them, pointed straight at the wide disk of the Earth hanging overhead. The two men glanced at them in passing, and hastened on to the low-roofed power building. Bligh was waiting for them inside. With a sweep of his arm he indicated the row of power meters that banked the wall.

“Look!” he said. “Every power pack we had in reserve—out. There isn’t a watt of power in the project, except what’s in the operating condensers.” Templin followed the direction of his gesture, and saw that the needle on each meter rested against the “zero” pin.

“What happened?” Templin demanded.

Bligh shrugged helplessly. “See for yourself,” he said. He pointed to a window looking down on the generating equipment buried beneath the power shack itself. “Those square contraptions on the right are the mercury-laminate power packs. The leads go from the generators to them; then we tap the packs for power as we need it. Somehow the leads were cut about five minutes ago. Right there.”

Templin saw where the heavy insulated cables had been chopped off just at the mixing box that led to the packs. He looked at it for a long moment, eyes grim. “Sabotage. You’re right, Bligh—that couldn’t be an accident. Who was in here?”

Bligh shook his head. “No one—as far as I know. I saw no one. But there wasn’t any special guard; there never is, here. Anyone in the project could have come in and done it.”

Culver cut in, “How long will the power in the condenser last?”

“At our normal rate of use—half a day; if we conserve it—a week. By then the sun will be high enough so that the mirrors will be working again.”

“Working again?” repeated Templin. “But the generators are working now, aren’t they?”

Bligh hesitated. “Well—yes, but there isn’t enough energy available to make much difference. The Moon takes twenty-eight days to revolve, you know—that means we have fourteen days of sunshine. That’s when we get our power. At ‘night’—when the sun’s on the other side—we turn the mirrors on the Earth and pick up some reflected light, but it isn’t enough to help very much.”

Templin’s face was gaunt in concentration. He said, “Order the project to cut down on power. Stretch out our reserves as much as you can, Bligh. Culver—get a crew ready on one of the freight rockets.”

Culver raised his brows. “Where are we going, Temp?”

Templin said, “We’re going to get some more power!”

CULVER SAID tightly over Templin’s shoulder, “You realize, of course, that this is going to get us in serious trouble with the Security Patrol if they find out about it.”

“We’ll try to keep that from happening,” said Templin. “Now don’t bother me for a minute.” His hands raced over the controls of the lumbering freight rocket. Underneath them lay the five-acre crater where they had crash-landed the day before after Olcott’s attack. Templin killed the forward motion of the rocket with the nose jet, brought the nose up and set the ship down gently on the thundering fire of its tail rockets.

“Secure,” he reported. “Are the crew in pressure suits? Good. Get them to work.”

Culver sighed despondently and hurried off, shouting orders to the crew. Templin eased himself into his own suit. A hundred yards away lay the abandoned rocket-launching sites that had devastated a score of cities in the Three-Day War. Templin stepped out of the airlock and hastened after the group of pressure-suited men who were already investigating the ruined installation.

Culver waved to him. His voice over the radio was still disgusted as he said, “There’s the pile, Temp; this is your last chance to back out of this crazy idea.”

“We can’t back out,” Templin told him; “we need power. We can generate power with our own uranium, if we take this atomic pile back with us and start it up again. Maybe it’s illegal, but it’s the only way we can keep the mine going for the next week—and I’m taking the chance.”

“Okay,” said Culver. He gave orders to the men, who began to take the ten-year-old piece of equipment apart. In their ray-proof miners’ suits, they were in no danger from the feeble radioactivity still left after the pile had exploded. But Templin was, and so was Culver; their suits were the lighter surface kind, and they had to keep their distance from the pile itself.

A nuclear-fission pile is an elaborate and clumsy piece of apparatus; it consists of many hundreds of cubes of graphite containing tiny pieces of uranium, stacked together, brick on brick, in the shape of a top. There are cadmium control-strips for checking the speed of the nuclear reaction, delicate instruments that keep tabs on what goes on inside the structure, heavy-metal neutron shields and gamma-ray barriers and enough other items to stock a warehouse.

Looking it over, Culver grumbled: “How the devil can we get that heap of junk into the rocket?”

“We’ll get it in,” promised Templin. He bent down clumsily to pick up a rock, crumbled it in his gauntleted fist. It was like chalk. “Soft,” he said. “Burned up by atomic radiation.”

Culver nodded inside his helmet. “Happened when the pile blew up, during the War.”

“No. It’s like this all over the Moon, as you ought to know by now.” Templin tossed the powdered rock away and brushed it off his space-gauntlets. “There’s something for you to figure out, Culver. I remember reading about it years ago, how the whole surface of the Moon shows that it must have been drenched with atomic rays a couple of thousand years ago. The shape of the craters—the fact that the surface air is all gone—the big cracks in the surface—it all adds up to show that there must have been a terrific atomic explosion here once.”

He glanced again at where the miners were disassembling the pile. “I kind of think,” he said slowly, “that that accounts for a lot of things here on the Moon. For one thing, it might explain what became of the Loonies, after they built their cities—and disappeared.”

Culver said, “You mean that you think the Loonies had atomic power? And—and blew up the Moon with it?”

Templin shrugged, the gesture invisible inside the pressure suit. “Your guess,” he said, “is as good as mine. Meanwhile… here comes the first load of graphite bricks. Let’s give them a hand stowing it in the rocket.”

ONCE THE JOB of setting up the stolen plutonium pile was complete, Templin began to feel as though he could see daylight ahead. There was a moment of hysterical tension when the pile first began to operate with uranium taken from the mine—a split-second of nervous fear as the cadmium safety rods were slowly withdrawn and the atomic fires within the pile began to kindle—but the safety controls still worked perfectly, and Templin drew a great breath of relief. An atomic explosion was bad enough anywhere… but here, in the works of a uranium mine where the ground was honeycombed with veins of raw atomic explosive, it was a thing to produce nightmares.

After two days of operation the power-packs were being charged again and the mine was back in full-scale operation. Culver, seated in the office and looking at the day’s production report, gloated to Templin, “Looks like we’re in the clear now, Temp. Two hundred and fifty kilos of uranium in twenty-four hours—if we can keep that up for a month, maybe Terralune will begin to make some money on this place.”

Templin blew smoke at the white metal ceiling. “Don’t count your dividends before they’re passed,” he advised. “The Mark VII is still out of operation—we won’t be able to start any new shafts until we get a replacement for it, so our production is limited to what we can get out of Gallery Eight. And besides—we took care of our power problem for the time being, all right, but what about taking care of the man who caused it?”

“Man who caused it?” repeated Culver.

“Yeah. Remember what Bligh said—that was sabotage. The leads were short-circuited deliberately.”

“Oh.” Culver’s face fell. “We never found out who the missing miner was, either,” he remembered. “Do you—”

THE TELETONE buzzed, interrupting him. When Templin answered, the voice that came out of the box was crisply efficient. “This is Lieutenant Carmer,” it said. “Stand by for security check.”

“Security check?” said Templin. “What the devil is that?”

The voice laughed grimly. “Tell you in just a moment,” it promised. “Stand by. I’m on my way up.”

The teletone clicked off. Templin faced Culver. “Well?” he demanded. “What is this?”

Culver said placatingly, “It’s just a formality, Temp—at least, it always has been. The Security Patrol sends an officer around every month or so to every outpost on the Moon. All they do is ask a few questions and look to see if you’ve got any war-rocket launching equipment set up. The idea is to make sure that nobody installs rocket projectors to shoot at Earth with, as they did in the Three-Day War.”

“Oh? And what about our plutonium pile?”

Culver said sorrowfully, “That bothers me, a little. But I don’t think we need to worry, because we’ve got the thing in a cave and so far they’ve never looked in the caves.”

“Well,” said Templin, “all right. There’s nothing we can do about it now, anyhow.” He sat down at his desk and awaited his callers.

It only took a minute for the lieutenant to reach the office. But when the door opened Templin sat bolt upright, hardly believing his eyes.

The first man in was a trim, military-looking youth with lieutenant’s bars on his shoulders. And following him, wearing the twin jets of a Security Patrol vice-commander, was the dark, heavy-set man with whom Templin had tangled in Hadley Dome, and whose ship had attacked them on the flight to the mine. Joe Olcott!