A Fall of Moondust (24 page)

“I’ve never tried.”

“It’s very simple—wait until I find the medicine chest.”

When Pat had collected the resuscitator, he demonstrated on the nearest subject, who
happened to be Irving Schuster.

“Push the tongue out of the way and slip the tube down the throat. Now squeeze this
bulb—slowly. Keep up a natural breathing rhythm. Got the idea?”

“Yes, but how long shall I do it?”

“Five or six deep breaths should be enough, I’d guess; we’re not trying to revive
them, after all—we just want to get the stale air out of their lungs. You take the
front half of the cabin—I’ll do the rear.”

“But there’s only one resuscitator.”

Pat grinned, without much humour.

“It’s not necessary,” he answered, bending over his next patient.

“Oh,” said McKenzie. “I’d forgotten
that
.”

It was hardly chance that Pat had headed straight to Sue, and was now blowing into
her lips in the ancient—and highly effective—mouth-to-mouth method. But to do him
justice, he wasted no time on her when he found that she was breathing normally.

He was just starting on his third subject when the radio gave another despairing call.

“Hello,
Selene
—is there anyone there?”

Pat took a few seconds off to grab the mike.

“Harris calling—we’re O.K. We’re applying artificial respiration to the passengers.
No time to say more—we’ll call you later. I’ll remain on receive. Tell us what’s happening.”

“Thank God you’re O.K.—we’d given you up. You gave us a hell of a fright when you
unscrewed that drill.”

Listening to the Chief Engineer’s voice while he blew into the peacefully sleeping
Mr. Radley, Pat had no wish to be reminded of that incident. He knew that, whatever
happened, he would never live it down. Yet it had probably been for the best; most
of the bad air had been siphoned out of
Selene
in that hectic minute or so of decompression. It might even have lasted longer than
that, for it would have taken two or three minutes for a cabin of this size to lose
much of its air, through a tube only four centimetres in diameter.

“Now listen,” continued Lawrence, “because you’ve been overheating badly, we’re letting
you have your oxygen just as cold as we think it’s safe. Call us back if it gets too
chilly, or too dry.

“In five or ten minutes we’ll be sinking the second pipe to you, so that we’ll have
a complete circuit and can take over your entire air-conditioning load. We’ll aim
this pipe for the rear of the cabin, just as soon as we’ve towed the raft a few metres.

“We’re moving now. Gall you back in a minute.”

Pat and the doctor did not relax until they had pumped the foul air from the lungs
of all their unconscious companions. Then, very tired, yet feeling the calm joy of
men who see some great ordeal approach its triumphant end, they slumped to the floor
and waited for the second drill to come through the roof.

Ten minutes later, they heard it bang against the outer hull, just forward of the
airlock. When Lawrence called to check its position, Pat confirmed that this time
it was clear of obstructions. “And don’t worry,” he added. “I won’t touch that drill
until you tell me.”

It was now so cold that he and McKenzie had put on their outer clothing once more,
and had draped blankets over the sleeping passengers. But Pat did not call a halt;
as long as they were not in actual distress, the colder the better. They were driving
back the deadly heat that had almost cooked them—and, even more important, their own
air-purifiers would probably start working again, now that the temperature had dropped
so drastically.

When that second pipe came through the roof, they would be doubly safeguarded. The
men on the raft could keep them supplied with air indefinitely, and they would also
have several hours—perhaps a day’s—reserve of their own. They might still have a long
wait here beneath the dust, but the suspense was over.

Unless, of course, the Moon arranged some fresh surprises.

“Well, Mr. Spenser,” said Captain Anson, “looks as if you’ve got your story.”

Spenser felt almost as exhausted, after the strain of the last hours, as any of the
men out on the raft, two kilometres below him. He could see them there on the monitor,
on medium close-up. They were obviously relaxing—as well as men could relax, when
they were wearing spacesuits.

Five of them, indeed, appeared to be trying to get some sleep, and were tackling the
problem in a startling but sensible manner They were lying beside the raft, half-submerged
in the dust, rather like floating rubber dolls. It had not occurred to Spenser that
a spacesuit was much too buoyant to sink in this stuff. By getting off the raft, the
five technicians were not only providing themselves with an incomparably luxurious
couch; they were leaving a greatly enlarged working space for their companions.

The three remaining members of the team were moving slowly around, adjusting and checking
equipment—especially the rectangular bulk of the air-purifier and the big lox spheres
coupled to it. At maximum optical and electronic zoom, the camera could get within
ten metres of all this gear—almost close enough to read the gauges. Even at medium
magnification, it was easy to spot the two pipes going over the side and leading down
to the invisible
Selene
.

This relaxed and peaceful scene made a startling contrast with that of an hour ago.
But there was nothing more to be done here, until the next batch of equipment arrived.
Both of the skis had gone back to Port Roris; that was where all the activity would
now be taking place, as the engineering staff tested and assembled the gear which,
they hoped, would enable them to reach
Selene
. It would be another day at least before that was ready. Meanwhile—barring accidents—the
Sea of Thirst would continue to bask undisturbed in the morning sun, and the camera
would have no new scenes to throw across space.

From one and a half light seconds away, the voice of the programme director back on
Earth spoke inside
Auriga
’s control cabin.

“Nice work, Maurice, Jules. We’ll keep taping the picture in case anything breaks
at your end, but we don’t expect to carry it live until the 06.00 News-spot.”

“How’s it holding up?”

“Supernova rating. And there’s a new angle—every crackpot inventor who ever tried
to patent a new paperclip is crawling out of the woodwork with ideas. We’re rounding
up a batch of them at 06.15; it should be good fun.”

“Who knows—perhaps one of them may have something.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. The sensible ones won’t come near our programme, when they
see the treatment the others are getting.”

“Why—what are you doing to them?”

“Their ideas are being analysed by your scientist friend Dr. Lawson. We’ve had a dummy
run with him; he skins them alive.”

“Not
my
friend,” protested Spenser. “I’ve only met him twice. The first time I got ten words
out of him; the second time, he fell asleep on me.”

“Well, he’s developed since then, believe it or not. You’ll see him in—oh, forty-five
minutes.”

“I can wait. Anyway, I’m only interested in what Lawrence plans to do. Has he made
a statement? You should be able to get at him, now the pressure’s off.”

“He’s still furiously busy and won’t talk. We don’t think the Engineering Department
has made up its mind yet, anyhow; they’re testing all sort of gadgets at Port Roris,
and ferrying in equipment from all over the Moon. We’ll keep you in touch if we learn
anything new.”

It was a paradoxical fact, which Spenser took completely for granted, that when you
were covering a story like this you often had no idea of the big picture. Even when
you were in the centre of things, as he was now. He had started the ball rolling,
but now he was no longer in control. It was true that he and Jules were providing
the most important video coverage—or would be, when the action shifted back here—but
the pattern was being shaped at the news centres on Earth and in Clavius City. He
almost wished he could leave Jules and hurry back to headquarters.

That was impossible, of course, and even if he did so, he would soon regret it. For
this was not only the biggest scoop of his career; it was, he suspected, the last
time he would ever be able to cover a story out in the field. By his own success,
he would have doomed himself irrevocably to an office chair—or, at best, a comfortable
little viewing booth behind the banked monitor screens at Clavius Central.

It was still very quiet aboard
Selene
, but the quietness was now that of sleep, not of death. Before long, all these people
would be waking, to greet a day few of them could really have expected to see.

Pat Harris was standing somewhat precariously on the back of a seat, mending the break
in the overhead lighting circuit. It was fortunate that the drill had not been five
millimetres to the left; then it would have taken out the radio as well, and the job
would have been very much worse.

“Throw in Number Three circuit breaker, Doc,” he called, winding up his insulating
tape. “We should be in business now.”

The main lights came on, blindingly brilliant after the crimson gloom. At the same
time, there was a sudden, explosive sound, so unexpected and alarming that it shocked
Pat off his unstable perch.

Before he reached the floor, he identified it. It was a sneeze.

The passengers were starting to waken—and he had, perhaps, slightly overdone the refrigeration,
for the cabin was now extremely cold.

He wondered who would be the first to return to consciousness. Sue, he hoped, because
then they would be able to talk together without interruption, at least for a little
while. After what they had been through together, he did not regard Dave McKenzie’s
presence as any interference—though perhaps Sue could hardly be expected to see it
that way.

Beneath the covering of blankets, the first figure was stirring. Pat hurried forward
to give assistance; then he paused, and said under his breath: “Oh,
no
!”

Well, you couldn’t win all the time, and a captain had to do his duty, come what may.
He bent over the scrawny figure that was struggling to rise, and said solicitously:
“How do you feel, Miss Morley?”

To have become a TV property was at once the best and the worst thing that could have
happened to Dr. Lawson. It had built up his self-confidence, by convincing him that
the world which he had always affected to despise was really interested in his special
knowledge and abilities. (He did not realise how quickly he might be dropped again,
as soon as the
Selene
incident was finished.) It had given him an outlet for expressing his genuine devotion
to astronomy, somewhat stultified by living too long in the exclusive society of astronomers.
And it was also earning him satisfactory quantities of money.

But the programme in which he was now involved might almost have been designed to
confirm his old view that the men who weren’t brutes were mostly fools. This, however,
was hardly the fault of Interplanet News, which could not resist a feature that was
a perfect fill-in for the long periods when nothing would be happening out at the
raft.

The fact that Lawson was on the Moon and his victims were on Earth presented only
a minor technical problem, which the TV technicians had solved long ago. The programme
could not go out live; it had to be taped beforehand, and those annoying two-and-a-half
second pauses while the radio waves flashed from planet to satellite and back again
had to be sliced out. They would upset the performers—nothing could be done about
that
—but by the time a skilled editor had anachronised the tape, the listener would be
unable to tell that he was hearing a discussion that spanned almost four hundred thousand
kilometres.

Chief Engineer Lawrence heard the programme as he lay flat on his back in the Sea
of Thirst, staring up into the empty sky. It was the first chance of resting he had
had for more hours than he could remember, but his mind was too active to let him
sleep. In any event, he had never acquired the knack of sleeping in a suit, and saw
no need to learn it now, for the first of the igloos was already on the way from Port
Roris. When that arrived, he would be able to live in well-earned, and much-needed,
comfort.

Despite all the claims of the manufacturers, no one can function efficiently in a
spacesuit for more than twenty-four hours—for several obvious reasons, and several
that are not so obvious. There is, for example, that baffling complaint known as spaceman’s
itch, affecting the small of the back—or even less accessible spots—after a day’s
incarceration in a suit. The doctors claim that it is purely psychological, and several
heroic spacemedicos have worn suits for a week or more to prove it. The demonstration
had done nothing to affect the incidence of the disease.

The mythology of spacesuits is a vast, complex and frequently ribald subject, with
a nomenclature all of its own. No one is quite sure why one famous model of the 1970s
was known as the Iron Maiden, but any astronaut will gladly explain why the 2010’s
Mark XIV was called the Chamber of Horrors. There seems little truth, however, in
the theory that it was designed by a sadistic female engineer, determined to inflict
a diabolical revenge upon the opposite sex.

But Lawrence was reasonably at ease in his model, as he listened to these enthusiastic
amateurs put forward their ideas. It was just possible—though very unlikely—that one
of these uninhibited thinkers might come up with an idea that could be of practical
use. He had seen it happen before, and was prepared to listen to suggestions rather
more patiently than Dr. Lawson—who, it was obvious, would never learn to suffer fools
gladly.

He had just demolished an amateur engineer from Sicily, who wanted to blow the dust
away by means of strategically-placed air-jets. The scheme was typical of those put
forward; even where there was no fundamental scientific flaw, most of these ideas
fell to pieces when examined quantitatively. You
could
blow the dust away—if you had an unlimited supply of air. While the voluble flow
of Italian-English was proceeding, Lawson had been doing some rapid calculations.
“I estimate, Signor Gusalli,” he said, “that you would need at least five tons of
air a minute to keep open a hole large enough to be useful. It would be quite impossible
to ship such quantities out to the site.”