A Fall of Moondust (12 page)

Hansteen looked at his watch; there was still an hour to go before their frugal lunch.
They could revert to
Shane
, or start (despite Miss Morley’s objections) on that preposterous historical novel.
But it seemed a pity to break off now, while everyone was in a receptive mood.

“If you all feel the same way about it,” said the Commodore, “I’ll call another witness.”

“I’ll second that,” was the quick reply from Barrett, who now considered himself safe
from further inquisition. Even the poker players were in favour, so the Clerk of the
Court pulled another name out of the coffee-pot in which the ballot papers had been
mixed.

He looked at it with some surprise, and hesitated before reading it out.

“What’s the matter?” said the Court. “Is it
your
name?”

“Er—no,” replied the Clerk, glancing at learned Counsel with a mischievous grin. He
cleared his throat and called: Mrs. Myra Schuster!”

“Your Honour—I object!” Mrs. Schuster rose slowly, a formidable figure even though
she had lost a kilogramme or two since leaving Port Roris. She pointed to her husband,
who looked embarrassed and tried to hide behind his notes. “Is it fair for
him
to ask me questions?”

“I’m willing to stand down,” said Irving Shuster, even before the Court could say
“Objection sustained”.

“I am prepared to take over the examination,” said the Commodore, though his expression
rather belied this. “But is there anyone else who feels qualified to do so?”

There was a short silence; then, to Hansteen’s surprised relief, one of the poker
players stood up.

“Though I’m not a lawyer, your Honour, I have some slight legal experience. I’m willing
to assist.”

“Very good, Mr. Harding.
Your
witness.”

Harding took Schuster’s place at the front of the cabin, and surveyed his captive
audience. He was a well-built, tough-looking man who somehow did not fit his own description
as a bank executive; Hansteen had wondered, fleetingly, if this was the truth.

“Your name is Myra Shuster?”

“Yes.”

“And what, Mrs. Schuster, are you doing on the Moon?”

The witness smiled.

“That’s an easy one to answer. They told me I’d weigh only twenty kilos here—so I
came.”

“For the record,
why
did you want to weigh twenty kilos?”

Mrs. Schuster looked at Harding as if he had said something very stupid.

“I used to be a dancer once,” she said—and her voice was suddenly wistful, her expression
faraway. “I gave that up, of course, when I married Irving.”

“Why ‘of course’, Mrs. Schuster?”

The witness glanced at her husband, who stirred a little uneasily, looked as if he
might raise an objection, but then thought better of it.

“Oh, he said it wasn’t dignified. And I guess he was right—the kind of dancing
I
used to do.”

This was too much for Mr. Schuster. He shot to his feet, ignoring the Court completely,
and protested: “Really, Myra! There’s no need—”

“Oh, vector it out, Irv!” she answered, the incongruously old-fashioned slang bringing
back a faint whiff of the nineties. “What does it matter now? Let’s stop acting and
be ourselves. I don’t mind these folk knowing that I used to dance at the ‘Blue Asteroid’—
or
that you got me off the hook when the cops raided the place.”

Irving subsided, spluttering, while the Court dissolved in a roar of laughter which
His Honour did nothing to quell. This release of tensions was precisely what he had
hoped for; when people were laughing, they could not be afraid.

And he began to wonder still more about Mr. Harding, whose casual yet shrewd questioning
had brought this about. For a man who said he was not a lawyer, he was doing pretty
well. It would be very interesting to see how he stood in the witness box—when it
was Schuster’s turn to ask the questions.

At last there was something to break the featureless flatness of the Sea of Thirst.
A tiny but brilliant splinter of light had edged itself above the horizon, and as
the dust-skis raced forward it slowly climbed against the stars. Now it was joined
by another—and a third. The peaks of the Inaccessible Mountains were rising over the
edge of the Moon.

As usual, there was no way of judging their distance; they might have been small rocks
a few paces away—or not part of the Moon at all, but a giant, jagged world, millions
of kilometres out in space. In reality, they were fifty kilometres distant; the dust-skis
would be there in half an hour.

Tom Lawson looked at them with thankfulness. Now there was something to occupy his
eye and mind; he felt he would have gone crazy, staring at this apparently infinite
plain for much longer. He was annoyed with himself for being so illogical; he knew
the horizon was really very close and that the whole Sea was only a small part of
the Moon’s quite limited surface. Yet as he sat here in his spacesuit, apparently
getting nowhere, he was reminded of those horrible dreams in which you struggled with
all your might to escape from some frightful peril—but remained stuck helplessly in
the same place. Tom often had such dreams, and worse ones.

But now he could see that they were making progress, and that their long, black shadow
was not frozen to the ground, as it sometimes seemed. He focused the detector on the
rising peaks, and obtained a strong reaction. As he had expected, the exposed rocks
were almost at boiling point where they faced the sun; though the lunar day had barely
started, the mountains were already burning. It was much cooler down here at ‘Sea’
level; the surface dust would not reach its maximum temperature until noon, still
seven days away. That was one of the biggest points in his favour; though the day
had already begun, he still had a sporting chance of detecting any faint source of
heat before the full fury of the day had overwhelmed it.

Twenty minutes later, the mountains dominated the sky, and the skis slowed down to
half-speed.

“We don’t want to overrun their track,” explained Lawrence. “If you look carefully,
just below that double peak on the right, you’ll see a dark vertical line. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the gorge leading to Crater Lake. The patch of heat you detected is three
kilometres to the west of it, so it’s still out of sight from here, below our horizon.
Which direction do you want to approach from?”

Lawson thought this over. It would have to be from the north or the south. If he came
in from the west, he would have those burning rocks in his field of view; the eastern
approach was even more impossible, for that would be into the eye of the rising sun.

“Swing round to the north,” he said. “And let me know when we’re within two kilometres
of the spot.”

The skis accelerated once more; though there was no hope of detecting anything yet,
he started to scan back and forth over the surface of the Sea. This whole mission
was based upon one assumption—that the upper layers of dust were normally at a uniform
temperature, and that any thermal disturbance was due to man. If this was wrong—

It was wrong. He had miscalculated completely. On the viewing screen, the Sea was
a mottled pattern of light and shade—or rather, of warmth and coldness. The temperature
differences were only fractions of a degree, but the picture was hopelessly confused.
There was no possibility at all of locating any individual source of heat in that
thermal maze.

Sick at heart, Tom Lawson looked up from the viewing screen and stared incredulously
across the dust. To the unaided eye, it was still absolutely featureless—the same
unbroken grey it had always been. But by infra-red, it was as dappled as the sea during
a cloudy day on Earth, when the waters are covered with shifting patterns of sunlight
and shadow.

Yet there were no clouds here to cast their shadows on this arid sea; this dappling
must have some other cause. Whatever it might be, Tom was too stunned to look for
the scientific explanation. He had come all the way to the Moon, had risked neck and
sanity on this crazy ride—and at the end of it all, some quirk of nature had ruined
his carefully planned experiment. It was the worst possible luck, and he felt very
sorry for himself.

Several minutes later, he got round to feeling sorry for the people aboard
Selene
.

“So,” said the skipper of the
Auriga
, with exaggerated calm. “You would like to land on the Mountains of Inaccessibility.
That’s a verra interesting idea.”

It was obvious to Spenser that Captain Anson had not taken him seriously; he probably
thought he was dealing with a crazy newsman who had no conception of the problems
involved. That would have been correct twelve hours before, when the whole plan was
only a vague dream in Spenser’s mind. But now he had all the information at his finger-tips,
and knew exactly what he was doing.

“I’ve heard you boast, Captain, that you could land this ship within a metre of any
given point. Is that right?”

“Well—with a little help from the computer.”

“That’s good enough. Now take a look at this photograph.”

“What is it? Glasgow on a wet Saturday night?”

“I’m afraid it’s badly over-enlarged, but it shows all we want to know. It’s a blow-up
of this area—just below the western peak of the Mountains. I’ll have a much better
copy in a few hours, and an accurate contour map—Lunar Survey’s drawing one now, working
from the photos on their files. My point is that there’s a wide ledge here—wide enough
for a dozen ships to land. And it’s fairly flat, at least at these points here—and
here. So a landing would be no problem at all, from your point of view.”

“No
technical
problem, perhaps. But have you any idea what it would cost?”

“That’s my affair, Captain—or my network’s. We think it may be worthwhile, if my hunch
comes off.”

Spenser could have said a good deal more, but it was bad business to show how much
you needed someone else’s wares. This might well be the news-theory of the decade—the
first space-rescue that had ever taken place literally under the eyes of the TV cameras.
There had been enough accidents and disasters in space, heaven knows, but they had
lacked all element of drama or suspense. Those involved had died instantly, or had
been beyond all hope of rescue when their predicament was discovered. Such tragedies
produced headlines, but not sustained, human-interest stories like the one he sensed
here.

“There’s not only the money,” said the captain (though his tone implied that there
were few matters of greater importance). “Even if the owners agree, you’ll have to
get special clearance from Space Control, Earthside.”

“I know—someone is working on it now. That can be organised.”

“And what about Lloyd’s? Our policy doesn’t cover little jaunts like this.”

Spenser leaned across the table, and prepared to drop his city-buster.

“Captain,” he said slowly, “Interplanet News is prepared to deposit a bond for the
insured value of the ship—which I happen to know is a somewhat inflated Six Million
Four Hundred and Twenty Five Thousand and Fifty Sterling Dollars.”

Captain Anson blinked twice, and his whole attitude changed immediately. Then looking
very thoughtful, he poured himself another drink.

“I never imagined I’d take up mountaineering at my time of life,” he said. “But if
you’re fool enough to plonk down six million stollars—then my heart’s in the highlands.”

To the great relief of her husband, Mrs. Schuster’s evidence had been interrupted
by lunch. She was a talkative lady, and was obviously delighted at the first opportunity
she had had in years of letting her hair down. Her career, such as it was, had not
been particularly distinguished when fate and the Chicago police had brought it to
a sudden close—but she had certainly got around, and had known many of the great performers
at the turn of the century. To not a few of the older passengers, her reminiscences
brought back memories of their own youth, and faint echoes from the songs of the nineteen-nineties.
At one point, without any protest from the Court, she led the entire company in a
rendering of that durable favourite,
Spacesuit Blues
. As a morale-builder, the Commodore decided, Mrs. Schuster was worth her weight in
gold—and that was saying a good deal.

After lunch (which some of the slower eaters managed to stretch to half an hour, by
chewing each mouthful fifty times) book-reading was resumed, and the agitators for
The Orange and the Apple
finally got their way. The theme being English, it was decided that Mr. Barrett was
the only man for the job; he protested with vigour, but all his objections were shouted
down.

“Oh, very well,” he said reluctantly. “Here we go. Chapter One. Drury Lane. 1665….”

The author certainly wasted no time. Within three pages, Sir Isaac Newton was explaining
the law of gravitation to Mistress Gwynn, who had already hinted that she would like
to do something in return. What form that appreciation would take, Pat Harris could
readily guess, but duty called him. This entertainment was for the passengers; the
crew had work to do.

“There’s still one emergency locker I’ve not opened,” said Miss Wilkins, as the airlock
door thudded softly behind them, shutting off Mr. Barrett’s carefully clipped accents.
“We’re low on crackers and jam, but the compressed meat is holding out.”

“I’m not surprised,” answered Pat. “Everyone seems to be getting sick of it. Let’s
see those inventory sheets.”

The stewardess handed over the typed sheets, now much annotated with pencil marks.

“We’ll start with this box. What’s inside it?”

“Soap and paper towels.”

“Well, we can’t eat
them
. And this one?”

“Candy; I was saving it for the celebration—when they find us.”

“That’s a good idea, but I think you might break some of it out this evening. One
piece for every passenger, as a night-cap. And this?”