A Fall of Moondust (14 page)

With all his heart, he wished that Lawrence would leave this treacherous, insubstantial
ocean of dust for the safety of the land. “Head for the mountains!” he found himself
whispering. “Head for the mountains!”

There is no privacy in a spacesuit—when the radio is switched on. Fifty metres away,
Lawrence heard that whisper and knew exactly what it meant.

One does not become Chief Engineer for half a world without learning as much about
men as about machines. I took a calculated risk, thought Lawrence, and it looks as
if it hasn’t come off. But I won’t give in without a fight; perhaps I can still de-fuse
this psychological time-bomb before it goes off….

Tom Lawson never noticed the approach of the second ski; he was already too lost in
his own nightmare. But suddenly he was being violently shaken—so violently that his
forehead banged against the lower rim of his helmet. For a moment his vision was blinded
by tears of pain; then, with anger—yet at the same time with an inexplicable feeling
of relief—he found himself looking straight into the determined eyes of Chief Engineer
Lawrence, and listening to his voice reverberate from the suit speakers.

“That’s enough of this nonsense,” said the C.E.E. “And I’ll trouble you not to be
sick in one of our spacesuits. Every time that happens it costs us five hundred stollars
to put it back into commission—and even then it’s never quite the same again.”

“I wasn’t going to be sick—” Lawson managed to mutter. Then he realised that the truth
was much worse, and felt grateful to Lawrence for his tact. Before he could add anything
more, the other continued, speaking firmly but more gently: “No one else can hear
us, Tom—we’re on the suit circuit now. So listen to me, and don’t get mad. I know
a lot about you, and I know you’ve had a hell of a rough deal from life. But you’ve
got a brain—a damn good brain—so don’t waste it by behaving like a scared kid. Sure—we’re
all scared kids at some time or other—but this isn’t the time for it. There are twenty-two
lives depending on you. In five minutes, we’ll settle this business one way or the
other. So keep your eye on that screen, and forget about everything else. I’ll get
you out of here all right—don’t you worry about
that
.”

Lawrence slapped the suit—gently, this time—without taking his eyes off the young
scientist’s stricken face. Then, with a vast feeling of relief, he saw Lawson slowly
relax.

For a moment the astronomer sat quite motionless, obviously in full control of himself
but apparently listening to some inner voice. What was it telling him? wondered Lawrence.
Perhaps that he was part of mankind, even though it had condemned him to that unspeakable
orphans’ home when he was a child. Perhaps that, somewhere in the world, there might
be a person who could care for him, and who would break through the ice that had encrusted
his heart….

It was a strange little tableau, here on this mirror-smooth plain, between the Inaccessible
Mountains and the rising sun. Like ships becalmed on a dead and stagnant sea, Duster
One and Duster Two floated side by side, their pilots playing no part in the conflict
of wills that had just taken place, though they were dimly aware of it. No one watching
from a distance could have guessed the issues that had been at stake, the lives and
destinies that had trembled in the balance; and the two men involved would never talk
of it again.

Indeed, they were already concerned with something else. For in the same instant,
they had both become aware of a highly ironic situation.

All the time they had been standing here, so intent upon their own affairs that they
had never looked at the screen of the infra-red scanner, it had been patiently holding
the picture they sought.

When Pat and Sue had completed their inventory and emerged from the air-lock-cum-kitchen,
the passengers were still far back in Restoration England. Sir Isaac’s brief physics
lecture had been followed, as might easily have been predicted, by a considerably
longer anatomy lesson from Nell Gwynn. The audience was thoroughly enjoying itself,
especially as Barrett’s English accent was now going full blast.

“‘Forsooth, Sir Isaac, you are indeed a man of great knowledge. Yet, methinks, there
is much that a woman might teach you.’

“‘And what is that, my pretty maid?’

“Mistress Nell blushed shyly.

“‘I fear,’ she sighed, ‘that you have given your life to the things of the mind. You
have forgotten, Sir Isaac, that the body, also, has much strange wisdom.’

“‘Call me “Ike”’, said the sage huskily, as his clumsy fingers tugged at the fastenings
of her blouse.

“‘Not here—in the palace!’ Nell protested, making no effort to hold him at bay. ‘The
King will be back soon!’

“‘Do not alarm yourself, my pretty one. Charles is roistering with that scribbler
Pepys. We’ll see naught of him tonight—’”

If we ever get out of here, thought Pat, we must send a letter of thanks to the seventeen-year-old
schoolgirl on Mars who is supposed to have written this nonsense. She’s keeping everyone
amused, and that’s all that matters now.

No; there was someone who was definitely
not
amused. He became uncomfortably aware that Miss Morley was trying to catch his eye.
Recalling his duties as skipper, he turned towards her and gave her a reassuring but
rather strained smile.

She did not return it; if anything, her expression became even more forbidding. Slowly
and quite deliberately, she looked at Sue Wilkins and then back at him.

There was no need for words. She had said, as clearly as if she had shouted it at
the top of her voice: “I know what
you’ve
been doing, back there in the air-lock.”

Pat felt his face flame with indignation—the righteous indignation of a man who had
been unjustly accused. For a moment he sat frozen in his seat, while the blood pounded
in his cheeks. Then he muttered to himself: “I’ll show the old bitch.”

He rose to his feet, gave Miss Morley a smile of poisonous sweetness, and said just
loudly enough for her to hear: “Miss Wilkins! I think we’ve forgotten something. Will
you come back to the air-lock?”

As the door closed behind them once more, interrupting the narration of an incident
that threw the gravest possible doubts upon the paternity of the Duke of St. Albans,
Sue Wilkins looked at him in puzzled surprise.

“Did you see that?” he said, still boiling.

“See what?”

“Miss Morley—”

“Oh,” interrupted Susan. “Don’t worry about her, poor thing. She’s been eyeing you
ever since we left Base. You know what her trouble is.”

“What?” asked Pat, already uncomfortably sure of the answer.

“I suppose you could call it ingrowing virginity. It’s a common complaint, and the
symptoms are always the same. There’s only one cure for it.”

The ways of love are strange and tortuous. Only ten minutes ago, Pat and Sue had left
the air-lock together, mutually agreed to remain in a state of chaste affection. But
now the improbable combination of Miss Morley and Nell Gwynn, and the feeling that
one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb—as well as, perhaps, the instinctive
knowledge of their bodies that, in the long run, love was the only defence against
death—had combined to overwhelm them. For a moment they stood motionless in the tiny,
cluttered space of the galley; then, neither knowing who moved first, they were in
each other’s arms.

Sue had time to whisper only one phrase before Pat’s lips silenced her.

“Not
here
,” she whispered, “in the palace!”

Chief Engineer Lawrence stared into the faintly glowing screen, trying to read its
message. Like all engineers and scientists, he had spent an appreciable fraction of
his life looking at the images painted by speeding electrons, recording events too
large or too small, too bright or too faint, for human eyes to see. It was more than
a hundred years since the cathode ray tube had placed the invisible world firmly in
man’s grasp; already he had forgotten that it had ever been beyond his reach.

Two hundred metres away, according to the infra-red scanner, a patch of slightly greater
warmth was lying on the face of this dusty desert. It was almost perfectly circular,
and quite isolated; there were no other sources of heat in the entire field of view.
Though it was much smaller than the spot that Lawson had photographed from Lagrange,
it was in the right area. There could be little doubt that it was the same thing.

There was no proof, however, that it was what they were looking for. It could have
several explanations; perhaps it marked the site of an isolated peak, jutting up from
the depths almost to the surface of the Sea. There was only one way to find out.

“You stay here,” said Lawrence. “I’ll go forward on Duster One. Tell me when I’m at
the exact centre of the spot.”

“D’you think it will be dangerous?”

“It’s not very likely, but there’s no point in us both taking a risk.”

Very slowly, Duster One glided across to that enigmatically glowing patch—so obvious
to the infra-red scanner, yet wholly invisible to the eye.

“A little to the left,” Tom ordered. “Another few metres—you’re nearly there—whoa!”

Lawrence stared at the grey dust upon which his vehicle was floating. At first sight,
it seemed as featureless as any other portion of the Sea; then, as he looked more
closely, he saw something that raised the goose-pimples on his skin.

When examined very carefully, as he was examining it now, the dust showed an extremely
fine pepper-and-salt pattern.
That
pattern was moving; the surface of the Sea was creeping very slowly towards him, as
if blown by an invisible wind
.

Lawrence did not like it at all. On the Moon, one learned to be wary of the abnormal
and the unexplained; it usually meant that something was wrong—or soon would be. This
slowly crawling dust was both uncanny and disturbing; if a boat had sunk here once
already, anything as small as a ski might be in even greater danger.

“Better keep away,” he advised Duster Two. “There’s something odd here—I don’t understand
it.” Carefully, he described the phenomenon to Lawson, who thought it over and answered
almost at once: “You say it looks like a fountain in the dust? That’s exactly what
it is. We already know there’s a source of heat here—it’s powerful enough to stir
up a convection current.”

“What could do that? It can’t be
Selene
.”

He felt a wave of disappointment sweep over him. It was all a wild-goose chase, as
he had feared from the beginning. Some pocket of radioactivity, or an outburst of
hot gases released by the quake, had fooled their instruments and dragged them to
this desolate spot. And the sooner they left it the better—it might still be dangerous.

“Just a minute,” said Lawson. “A vehicle with a fair amount of machinery and twenty-two
passengers—that must produce a good deal of heat. Three or four kilowatts, at least.
If this dust is in equilibrium, that might be enough to start a fountain.”

Lawrence thought this was very unlikely, but he was now willing to grasp at the slimmest
straw. He picked up the thin metal probe, and thrust it vertically into the dust.
At first it penetrated with almost no resistance, but as the telescopic extensions
added to its length it became harder and harder to move. By the time he had the full
twenty metres out, it needed all his strength to push it downwards.

The upper end of the probe disappeared into the dust; he had hit nothing—but he had
scarcely expected to succeed on this first attempt. He would have to do the job scientifically,
and lay out a search pattern.

After a few minutes of cruising back and forth, he had crisscrossed the area with
parallel bands of white tape, five metres apart. Like an old-time farmer planting
potatoes, he started to move along the first of the tapes, driving his probe into
the dust. It was a slow job, for it had to be done conscientiously. He was like a
blind man, feeling in the dark with a thin, flexible wand. If what he sought was beyond
the reach of his wand, he would have to think of something else. But he would deal
with that problem when he came to it.

He had been searching for about ten minutes when he became careless. It required both
hands to operate the probe, especially when it neared the limit of its extension.
He was pushing with all his strength, leaning over the edge of the ski, when he slipped
and fell headlong into the dust.

Pat was conscious of the changed atmosphere immediately he emerged from the airlock.
The reading from
The Orange and the Apple
had finished some time ago, and a heated argument was now in progress. It stopped
when he walked into the cabin, and there was an embarrassing silence while he surveyed
the scene. Some of the passengers looked at him out of the corners of their eyes,
whilst the others pretended he wasn’t there.

“Well, Commodore,” he said, “what’s the trouble?”

“There’s a feeling,” Hansteen answered, “that we’re not doing all we could to get
out. I’ve explained that we have no alternative but to wait until someone finds us—but
not everybody agrees.”

It was bound to come sooner or later, thought Pat. As time ran out, and there was
no sign of rescue, nerves would begin to snap, tempers get frayed. There would be
calls for action—
any
action; it was against human nature to sit still and do nothing in the face of death.

“We’ve been through this over and over again,” he said wearily. “We’re at least ten
metres down, and even if we opened the airlock no one could get up to the surface
against the resistance of the dust.”

“Can you be sure of that?” someone asked.

“Quite sure,” Pat answered. “Have you ever tried to swim through sand? You won’t get
very far.”

“What about trying the motors?”

“I doubt if they’d budge us a centimetre. And even if they did, we’d move forward—not
up.”