A Fall of Moondust (17 page)

Chief Engineer Lawrence did not believe that committees ever achieved anything. His
views were well known on the Moon, for shortly after the last biannual visit of the
Lunar Board of Survey a notice had appeared on his desk conveying the information:
A BOARD IS LONG, HARD AND NARROW. IT IS MADE OF WOOD
.

But he approved of this committee, because it fulfilled his somewhat stringent requirements.
He was chairman; there were no minutes, no secretary, no agenda. Best of all, he could
ignore or accept its recommendations as he pleased. He was the man in charge of rescue
operations, unless the Chief Administrator chose to sack him—which he would do only
under extreme pressure from Earth. The committee existed merely to provide ideas and
technical knowledge; it was his private Brains Trust.

Only half of its dozen members were physically present; the rest were scattered over
Moon, Earth and space. The soil physics expert on Earth was at a disadvantage, for
owing to the finite speed of radio waves he would always be a second and a half in
arrears—and by the time his comments could get to the Moon, almost three seconds would
have passed. He had accordingly been asked to make notes and to save up his views
until the end, only interrupting if it was absolutely necessary. As many people had
discovered, after setting up lunar conference calls at great expense, nothing hamstrung
a brisk discussion more effectively than that three-second time-lag.

“For the benefit of the newcomers,” said Lawrence, when the roll-call had been completed,
“I’ll brief you on the situation.
Selene
is fifteen metres down, on a level keel. She’s undamaged, with all her equipment
functioning, and the twenty-two people inside her are still in good spirits. They
have enough oxygen for ninety hours—
that’s
the dead-line we have to keep in mind.

“For those of you who don’t know what
Selene
looks like, here’s a one-in-twenty scale model.” He lifted the model from the table,
and turned it slowly in front of the camera. “She’s just like a bus, or a small aircraft;
the only thing unique is her propulsion system, which employ these wide-bladed, variable-pitch
fans.

“Our great problem, of course, is the dust. If you’ve never seen it, you can’t imagine
what it’s like. Any ideas you may have about sand or other materials on Earth won’t
apply here; this stuff is more like a liquid. Here’s a sample of it.”

Lawrence picked up a tall vertical cylinder, the lower third of which was filled with
an amorphous grey substance. He tilted it—and the stuff began to flow. It moved more
quickly than syrup, more slowly than water, and it took a few seconds for its surface
to become horizontal again after it had been disturbed. No one could ever have guessed,
by looking at it, that it was not a fluid.

“This cylinder is sealed,” explained Lawrence, “with a vacuum inside, so the dust
is showing its normal behaviour. In air, it’s quite different; it’s much stickier,
and behaves rather like very fine sand or talcum powder. I’d better warn you—it’s
impossible to make a synthetic sample that has the properties of the real thing; it
takes a few billion years of desiccation to produce the genuine article. If you want
to do some experimenting, we’ll ship you as much dust as you like; heaven knows, we
can spare it.

“A few other points.
Selene
is three kilometres from the nearest solid land—the Mountains of Inaccessibility.
There may be several hundred metres of dust beneath her, though we’re not sure of
that. Nor can we be quite sure that there will be no more cave-ins, though the geologists
think it’s very unlikely.

“The only way we can reach the site is by dust-ski. We’ve two units, and another one
is being shipped round from Farside. They can carry or tow up to five tons of equipment;
the largest single item we could put on a sledge would be about two tons. So we can’t
bring any really heavy gear to the site.

“Well, that’s the position. We have ninety hours. Any suggestions? I’ve some ideas
of my own, but I’d like to hear yours first.”

There was a long silence while the members of the committee, scattered over a volume
of space almost four hundred thousand kilometres across, brought their various talents
to bear on the problem. Then the Chief Engineer, Farside, spoke from somewhere in
the neighbourhood of Joliot-Curie.

“It’s my hunch that we can’t do anything effective in ninety hours; we’ll have to
build special equipment, and that always takes time. So—we have to get an air-line
down to
Selene
. Where’s her umbilical connexion?”

“Behind the main entrance—at the rear. I don’t see how you can get a line there and
couple it up, fifteen metres down. Besides, everything will be clogged with dust.”

“I’ve a better idea,” someone interjected. “Drive a pipe down through the roof.”

“You’ll need two pipes,” pointed out another speaker. “One to pump in oxygen, the
other to suck out the foul air.”

“That means using a complete air-purifier. And we won’t even need it, if we can get
those people out inside the ninety hours.”

“Too big a gamble. Once the air-supply is secure, we can take our time, and the ninety-hour
deadline won’t worry us.”

“I accept that point,” said Lawrence. “In fact, I’ve several men working on those
lines right now. The next question is—do we try to raise the cruiser with everyone
inside, or do we get the passengers out individually? Remember, there’s only one spacesuit
aboard her.”

“Could we sink a shaft to the door, and couple it to the air lock?” asked one of the
scientists.

“Same problem as with the air-hose. Even worse, in fact, since the coupling would
be so much bigger.”

“What about a coffer-dam large enough to go round the whole cruiser? We could sink
it round her, then dig out the dust.”

“You’d need tons of piles and shorings. And don’t forget—the dam would have to be
sealed off at the bottom. Otherwise the dust would flow back into it, just as fast
as we took it out of the top.”

“Can you pump the stuff?” asked someone else.

“Yes, with the right kind of impeller. But you can’t suck it, of course. It has to
be lifted. A normal pump just cavitates.”

“This dust,” grumbled the Port Roris Assistant Engineer, “has the worst properties
of solids and liquids, with none of their advantages. It won’t flow when you want
it to; it won’t stay put when you want it to.”

“Can I make a point?” said Father Ferraro, speaking from Plato. “This word ‘dust’
is highly misleading. What we have here is a substance that can’t exist on Earth,
so there’s no name for it in our language. The last speaker was quite correct; sometimes
you have to think of it as a non-wetting liquid, rather like mercury, but much lighter.
At other times it’s a flowing solid, like pitch—except that it moves much more rapidly,
of course.”

“Anyway it can be stabilised?” someone asked.

“I think that’s a question for Earth,” said Lawrence. “Dr. Evans—would you like to
comment?”

Everyone waited for the three seconds which, as always, seemed very much longer. Then
the physicist answered, quite as clearly as if he were in the same room: “I’ve been
wondering about that. There might be organic binders—glue, if you like—that would
make it stick together so that it could be handled more easily. Would plain water
be any use? Have you tried that?”

“No, but we will,” answered Lawrence, scribbling a note.

“Is the stuff magnetic?” asked the Traffic Control Officer.

“That’s a good point,” said Lawrence. “Is it, Father?”

“Slightly; it contains a fair amount of meteoric iron. But I don’t think that helps
us at all. A magnetic field would pull out the ferrous material, but it couldn’t affect
the dust as a whole.”

“Anyway, we’ll try,” Lawrence made another note. It was his hope—though a faint one—that
out of this clash of minds would come some bright ideas, some apparently far-fetched
but fundamentally sound conception, that would solve his problem. And it was his,
whether he liked it or not. He was responsible, through his various deputies and departments,
for every piece of technical equipment on this side of the Moon. Especially when something
went wrong with it.

“I’m very much afraid,” said the Clavius Traffic Control Officer, “that your biggest
headache will be logistics. Every piece of equipment has to be ferried out on the
skis, and they take at least two hours for the round trip—more, if they’re towing
a heavy load. Before you even start operating, you’ll have to build some kind of working
platform—like a raft—that you can leave on the site. It may take a day to get that
in position, and much longer to get all your equipment out to it.”

“Including temporary living quarters,” added someone. “The workmen will have to stay
on the site.”

“That’s straightforward; as soon as we fix a raft, we can inflate an igloo on it.”

“Better than that; you won’t even need a raft. An igloo will float by itself.”

“Getting back to this raft,” said Lawrence, “we want strong, collapsible units that
can be bolted together on the site. Any ideas?”

“Empty fuel tanks?”

“Too big and fragile. Maybe Tech Stores has something.”

So it went on; the Brains Trust was in session. Lawrence would give it another half-hour,
then he would decide on his plan of action.

One could not spend too much time talking, when the minutes were ticking away and
many lives were at stake. Yet hasty and ill-conceived schemes were worse than useless,
for they would absorb materials and skills that might tilt the balance between failure
and success.

At first sight, it seemed such a straightforward job. There was
Selene
, within a hundred kilometres of a well-equipped base. Her position was known exactly,
and she was only fifteen metres down. But that fifteen metres presented Lawrence with
some of the most baffling problems of his entire career.

It was a career which, he knew very well, might soon terminate abruptly. For it would
be very hard to explain his failure, if those twenty-two men and women died.

It was a great pity that not a single witness saw
Auriga
coming down, for it was a glorious sight. A spaceship landing or taking off is one
of the most impressive spectacles that man has yet contrived—excluding some of the
more exuberant efforts of the nuclear engineers. And when it occurs on the Moon, in
slow motion and uncanny silence, it has a dream-like quality which no one who has
seen it can ever forget.

Captain Anson saw no point in trying any fancy navigation, especially as someone eke
was paying for the gas. There was nothing in the Master’s Handbook about flying a
space liner a hundred kilometres—a
hundred
kilometres, indeed!—though no doubt the mathematicians would be delighted to work
out a trajectory, based on the Calculus of Variations, using the very minimum amount
of fuel. Anson simply blasted straight up for a thousand kilometres (thus qualifying
for deep-space rates under Interplanetary Law, though he would tell Spenser about
this later) and came down again on a normal vertical approach, with final radar guidance.
The ships’ computer and the radar monitored each other, and both were monitored by
Captain Anson. Any one of the three could have done the job, so it was really quite
simple and safe—though it did not look it.

Especially to Maurice Spenser, who began to feel a great longing for the soft green
hills of Earth as those desolate peaks clawed up at him. Why had he talked himself
into this? Surely there were cheaper ways of committing suicide….

The worst part was the free-fall between the successive braking periods. Suppose the
rockets failed to fire on command, and the ship continued to plunge moonwards, slowly
but inexorably accelerating until it crashed? It was no use pretending that this was
a stupid or childish fear, because it had happened more than once.

It was not, however, going to happen to
Auriga
. The unbearable fury of the braking jets was already splashing over the rocks, blasting
skywards the dust and cosmic debris that had not been disturbed in thrice a billion
years. For a moment the ship hovered in delicate balance only centimetres off the
ground; then, almost reluctantly, the spears of flame that supported her retracted
into their scabbards. The widely-spaced legs of the undercarriage made contact, their
pads tilted according to the contours of the ground, and the whole ship rocked slightly
for a second as the shock-absorbers neutralised the residual energy of Impact.

For the second time inside twenty-four hours, Maurice Spenser had landed on the Moon.
That was a claim that very few men could make.

“Well,” said Captain Anson, as he got up from the control board. “I hope you’re satisfied
with the view. It’s cost you plenty—and there’s still that little matter of overtime.
According to the Space-worker’s Union—”

“Have you no soul, Captain? Why bother me with such trivia at a time like this? But
if I may say so without being charged any extra—that was a very fine landing.”

“Oh, it’s all part of the day’s work,” replied the skipper, though he could not conceal
slight signs of pleasure. “By the way—would you mind initialling the log here, against
the time of landing.”

“What’s
that
for?” asked Spenser suspiciously.

“Proof of delivery. The log’s our prime legal document.”

“It seems a little old-fashioned, having a written one,” said Spenser. “I thought
everything was done by nucleonics these days.”

“Traditions of the service,” replied Anson. “Of course, the ship’s flight-recorders
are running all the time we’re under power, and the trip can always be reconstructed
from them. But only the skipper’s log gives the little details that make one voyage
different from another—like ‘Twins born to one of the steerage passengers this morning’
or ‘At six bells, sighted the White Whale off the starboard bow.’”