A Fall of Moondust (11 page)

He was now sitting in the observer’s seat of Duster Two, making the final adjustments
to the crude but effective lash-up he had contrived. A camera tripod had been fixed
on the roof of the ski, and the detector had been mounted on this, in such a way that
it could pan in any direction.

It seemed to be working, but that was hard to tell in this small, pressurised hangar,
with a confused jumble of heat sources all around it. The real test could come only
out in the Sea of Thirst.

“It’s ready,” said Lawson presently to the Chief Engineer. “Let me have a word with
the man who’s going to run it.”

The C.E.E. looked at him thoughtfully, still trying to make up his mind. There were
strong arguments for and against what he was considering now, but whatever he did,
he must not let his personal feelings intrude. The matter was far too important for
that.

“You can wear a spacesuit, can’t you?” he asked Lawson.

“I’ve never worn one in my life. They’re only needed for going outside—and we leave
that to the engineers.”

“Well, now you have a chance of learning,” said the C.E.E., ignoring the jibe. (If
it was a jibe; much of Lawson’s rudeness, he decided, was indifference to the social
graces rather than defiance of them.) “There’s not much to it, when you’re riding
a ski. You’ll be sitting still in the observer’s seat and the autoregulator takes
care of oxygen, temperature and the rest. There’s only one problem—”

“What’s that?”

“How are you for claustrophobia?”

Tom hesitated, not liking to admit any weakness. He had passed the usual space tests,
of course, and suspected—quite rightly—that he had had a very close call on some of
the psych ratings. Obviously he was not an acute claustrophobe, or he could never
have gone aboard a ship. But a spaceship and a spacesuit were two very different things.

“I can take it,” he said at last.

“Don’t fool yourself if you can’t,” Lawrence insisted. “I think you should come with
us, but I’m not trying to bully you into false heroics. All I ask is that you make
up your mind before we leave the hangar. It may be a little too late to have second
thoughts, when we’re twenty kilometres out to Sea.”

Tom looked at the ski and bit his lip. The idea of skimming across that infernal lake
of dust in such a flimsy contraption seemed crazy—but these men did it every day.
And if anything went wrong with the detector, there was at least a slight chance that
he could fix it.

“Here’s a suit that’s your size,” said Lawrence. “Try it on—it may help you to make
up your mind.”

Tom struggled into the flaccid yet crinkly garment, closed the front zipper, and stood,
still helmetless, feeling rather a fool. The oxygen flask that was buckled to his
harness seemed absurdly small, and Lawrence noticed his anxious glance.

“Don’t worry; that’s merely the four-hour reserve. You won’t be using it at all—the
main supply’s on the ski. Mind your nose—here comes the helmet.”

He could tell, by the expressions of those around him, that this was the moment that
separated the men from the boys. Until that helmet was seated, you were still part
of the human races; afterwards, you were alone, in a tiny mechanical world of your
own. There might be other men only centimetres away, but you had to peer at them through
thick plastic, talk to them by radio. You could not even touch them, except through
double layers of artificial skin. Someone had once written that it was very lonely
to die in a spacesuit; for the first time, Tom realised how true that must be.

The Chief Engineer’s voice sounded suddenly, reverberantly from the tiny speakers
set in the side of the helmet.

“The only control you need worry about is the intercom—that’s the panel on your right.
Normally you’ll be connected to your pilot; the circuit will be live all the time
you’re both on the ski, so you can talk to each other whenever you feel like it. But
as soon as you disconnect, you’ll have to use radio—as you’re doing now to listen
to me. Press your
TRANSMIT
button and talk back.”

“What’s that red Emergency button for?” asked Tom, after he had obeyed this order.

“You won’t need it—I hope. That actuates a homing beacon and sets up a radio racket
until someone comes to find you. Don’t touch any of the gadgets on the suit without
instructions from us—especially that one.”

“I won’t,” promised Tom. “Let’s go.”

He walked, rather clumsily—for he was used neither to the suit nor the lunar gravity—over
to Duster Two and took his place in the observer’s seat. A single umbilical cord,
plugged inappropriately into the right hip, connected the suit to the ski’s oxygen
communications and power. The vehicle could keep him alive, though hardly comfortable,
for three or four days at a pinch.

The little hangar was barely large enough for the two dust-skis, and it took only
a few minutes for the pumps to exhaust its air. As the suit stiffened around him,
Tom felt a touch of panic. The Chief Engineer and the two pilots were watching, and
he did not wish to give them the satisfaction of thinking that he was afraid. No man
could help feeling tense when, for the first time in his life, he went into vacuum.

The clamshell doors pivoted open; there was a faint tug of ghostly fingers as the
last vestige of air gushed out, plucking feebly at his suit before it dispersed into
the void. And then, flat and featureless, the empty grey of the Sea of Thirst stretched
out to the horizon.

For a moment it seemed impossible that here, only a few metres away, was the reality
behind the images he had studied from far out in space. (Who was looking through the
hundred-centimetre telescope now? Was one of his colleagues watching, even at this
moment, from his vantage point high above the Moon?) But this was no picture painted
on a screen by flying electrons;
this
was the real thing, the strange, amorphous stuff that had swallowed twenty-two men
and women without trace. And across which he, Tom Lawson, was about to venture on
this insubstantial craft.

He had little time to brood. The ski vibrated beneath him as the fans started to spin;
then, following Duster One, it glided slowly out on to the naked surface of the Moon.

The low rays of the rising sun smote them as soon as they emerged from the long shadow
of the Port buildings. Even with the protection of the automatic filters, it was dangerous
to look towards the blue-white fury in the eastern sky. No, Tom corrected himself,
this is the Moon, not Earth; here the sun rises in the west. So we’re heading north-east,
into the Sinus Roris, along the track
Selene
followed and never retraced.

Now that the low domes of the Port were shrinking visibly towards the horizon, he
felt something of the exhilaration and excitement of all forms of speed. The sensation
lasted only for a few minutes, until no more landmarks could be seen and they were
caught in the illusion of being poised at the very centre of an infinite plain. Despite
the turmoil of the spinning fans, and the slow, silent fall of the dust parabolas
behind them, they seemed to be motionless. Tom knew that they were travelling at a
speed that would take them clear across the Sea in a couple of hours yet he had to
wrestle with the fear that they were lost light-years from any hope of salvation.
It was at this moment that he began, a little late in the game, to feel a grudging
respect for the men he was working with.

This was a good place to start checking his equipment. He switched on the detector,
and set it scanning back and forth over the emptiness they had just crossed. With
calm satisfaction, he noted the two blinding trails of light stretching behind them
across the darkness of the Sea. This test, of course, was childishly easy;
Selene
’s fading thermal ghost would be a million times harder to spot against the waxing
heat of dawn. But it was encouraging; if he had failed here, there would have been
no point in continuing any further.

“How’s it working?” said the Chief Engineer, who must have been watching from the
other ski.

“Up to specification,” replied Tom cautiously. “It seems to be behaving normally.”
He aimed the detector at the shrinking crescent of Earth; that was a slightly more
difficult target, but not a really hard one, for it needed little sensitivity to pick
up the gentle warmth of the mother world when it was projected against the cold night
of space.

Yes, there it was—Earth in the far infra-red, a strange and at first glance baffling
sight. For it was no longer a clean-cut, geometrically-perfect crescent, but a ragged
mushroom with its stem lying along the Equator.

It took Tom a few seconds to interpret the picture. Both Poles had been chopped off—that
was understandable, for they were too cold to be detected at this setting of the sensitivity.
But why that bulge across the unilluminated night-side of the planet? Then he realised
that he was seeing the warm glow of the tropical oceans, radiating back into the darkness
the heat that they had stored during the day. In the infra-red, the Equatorial night
was more brilliant than the Polar day.

It was a reminder of the fact, which no scientist should ever forget, that human senses
perceived only a tiny, distorted picture of the Universe. Tom Lawson had never heard
of Plato’s analogy of the chained prisoners in the cave, watching shadows cast upon
a wall and trying to deduce from them the realities of the external world. But here
was a demonstration that Plato would have appreciated; for which Earth was ‘real’—the
perfect crescent visible to the eye, the tattered mushroom glowing in the far infra-red—or
neither?

The office was small, even for Port Roris—which was purely a transit station between
Earthside and Farside, and a jumping-off point for tourists to the Sea of Thirst.
(Not that any looked like jumping off in that direction for some time.) The port had
had a brief moment of glory thirty years before, as the base used by one of the Moon’s
few successful criminals—Jerry Budker, who had made a small fortune dealing in fake
pieces of Lunik II. He was hardly as exciting as Robin Hood or Billy the Kid, but
he was the best that the Moon could offer.

Maurice Spenser was rather glad that Port Roris was such a quiet little one-dome town,
though he suspected that it would not stay quiet much longer, especially when his
colleagues at Clavius woke up to the fact that an I.N. Bureau Chief was lingering
here unaccountably, and not hurrying southwards to the lights of the big (pop. 52,647)
city. A guarded cable to Earth had taken care of his superiors, who would trust his
judgement and would guess the story he was after. Sooner or later, the competition
would guess it too—but by that time, he hoped to be well ahead.

The man he was conferring with was
Auriga
’s still-disgruntled skipper, who had just spent a complicated and unsatisfactory
hour on the telephone with his agents at Clavius, trying to arrange transhipment of
his cargo. McIver, McDonald, Macarthy and McCulloch, Ltd., seemed to think it was
his fault that
Auriga
had put down at Roris; in the end he had hung up after telling them to sort it out
with head office. As it was now early Sunday morning in Edinburgh, this should hold
them for a while.

Captain Anson mellowed a little after the second whisky; a man who could find some
Teacher’s in Port Roris was worth knowing, and he asked Spenser how he had managed
it.

“The power of the Press,” said the other with a laugh. “A reporter never reveals his
sources; if he did, he wouldn’t stay in business for long.”

He opened his brief case, and pulled out a sheaf of maps and photos.

“I had an even bigger job getting these at such short notice—and I’d be obliged, Captain,
if you would say nothing at all about this to anyone. It’s extremely confidential,
at least, for the moment.”

“Of course. What’s it about—
Selene
?”

“So you guessed that, too? You’re right—it may come to nothing, but I want to be prepared.”

He spread one of the photos across the desk; it was a view of the Sea of Thirst, from
the standard series issued by the Lunar Survey and taken from low-altitude reconnaissance
satellites. Though this was an afternoon photograph, and the shadows thus pointed
in the opposite direction, it was almost identical with the view Spenser had had just
before landing. He had studied it so closely that he now knew it by heart.

“The Mountains of Inaccessibility,” he said. “They rise very steeply out of the Sea
to an altitude of almost two thousand metres. That dark oval is Crater Lake—”

“Where
Selene
was lost?”

“Where she may be lost: there’s now some doubt about that. Our sociable young friend
from Lagrange has evidence that she’s actually gone down in the Sea of Thirst—round
about this area. In that case, the people inside her may be alive. And in
that
case, Captain, there’s going to be one hell of a salvage operation only a hundred
kilometres from here. Port Roris will be the biggest news centre in the Solar System.”

“Phew! So that’s your game. But where do I come in?”

Once again Spenser placed his finger on the map.

“Right here, Captain. I want to charter your ship. And I want you to land me, with
a cameraman and two hundred kilos of TV equipment—on the western wall of the Mountains
of Inaccessibility.”

“I have no further questions, your Honour,” said Counsel Schuster, sitting down abruptly.

“Very well,” replied Commodore Hansteen. “I must order the witness not to leave the
jurisdiction of the Court.”

Amid general laughter, David Barrett returned to his seat. He had put on a good performance;
though most of his replies had been serious and thoughtful, they had been enlivened
with flashes of humour and had kept the audience continuously interested. If all the
other witnesses were equally forthcoming, that would solve the problem of entertainment,
for as long as it had to be solved. Even if they used up all the memories of four
life-times in every day—a complete impossibility, of course—someone would still be
talking when the oxygen container gave its last gasp.