A Fall of Moondust (26 page)

Now the second section was upended and mated to the first one. They were clamped together,
and once again Lawrence gave the order to lower away.

The resistance of the dust was increasing, but the caisson continued to sink smoothly
under its own weight.

“Eight metres gone,” said Lawrence, “that means we’re just past the half-way mark.
Number Three Section coming up.”

After this, there would only be one more—though Lawrence had provided a spare section,
just in case. He had a hearty respect for the Sea’s ability to swallow equipment So
far, only a few nuts and bolts had been lost, but if that piece of caisson slipped
from the hook, it would be gone in a flash. Though it might not sink very far, especially
if it hit the dust broadside-on, it would be effectively out of reach even if it was
only a couple of metres down. They had no time to waste salvaging their own salvage
gear.

There went Number Three, its last section moving with almost imperceptible slowness.
But it was still moving; in a few minutes, with any luck at all, they would be knocking
on the cruiser’s roof.

“Twelve metres down,” said Lawrence. “We’re only three metres above you now,
Selene
. You should be able to hear us at any minute.”

Indeed they could, and the sound was wonderfully reassuring. More than ten minutes
ago Hansteen had noticed the vibration of the oxygen inlet pipe as the caisson scraped
against it. You could tell when it stopped, and when it started moving again.

There was that vibration once more, accompanied this time by a delicate shower of
dust from the roof. The two airpipes had now been drawn up so that about twenty centimetres
of their lengths projected through the ceiling, and the quick-drying cement which
was part of the emergency kit of all space vehicles had been smoothed around their
points of entry. It seemed to be working loose, but that impalpable rain of dust was
far too slight to cause alarm. Nevertheless, Hansteen thought that he had better mention
it to the skipper, who might not have noticed.

“Funny,” said Pat, looking up at the projecting pipe. “That cement should hold, even
if the pipe is vibrating.”

He climbed up on a seat, and examined the airpipe more closely. For a moment he said
nothing; then he stepped down, looking puzzled and annoyed—and more than a little
worried.

“What’s the trouble?” Hansteen asked quietly. He knew Pat well enough now to read
his face like an open book.

“That pipe’s pulling up through the roof,” he said. “Someone up on the raft’s being
mighty careless—it’s shortened by at least a centimetre, since I fixed that plaster.”
Then Pat stopped, suddenly aghast. “My God,” he whispered. “Suppose it’s our own fault—
suppose we’re still sinking
.”

“What if we are?” said the Commodore, quite calmly. “You’d expect the dust to continue
settling beneath our weight—that doesn’t mean we’re in danger. Judging by that pipe,
we’ve gone down one centimetre in twenty-four hours. They can always give us some
more tubing if we need it.”

Pat laughed, a little shame-facedly.

“Of course—that’s the answer. I should have thought of it before. We’ve probably been
sinking slowly all the time, but this is the first chance we’ve had of proving it.
Still, I’d better report to Mr. Lawrence—it may affect his calculations.”

Pat started to walk towards the front of the cabin; but he never made it.

It had taken Nature a million years to set the trap that had snared
Selene
and dragged her down into the Sea of Thirst. The second time, she was caught in a
trap that she had made herself.

Because her designers had no need to watch every gram of excess weight, or plan for
journeys lasting more than a few hours, they had never equipped
Selene
with those ingenious but un-advertised arrangements whereby spaceships recycle all
their water supply. She did not have to conserve her resources in the miserly manner
of deep-space vehicles; the small amount of water normally used and produced aboard,
she simply dumped.

Over the past five days, several hundred kilos of liquid and vapour had left
Selene
, to be instantly absorbed by the thirsty dust. Many hours ago, the dust in the immediate
neighbourhood of the waste vents had become saturated and had turned into mud. Dripping
downward through scores of channels, it had honeycombed the surrounding Sea. Silently,
patiently, the cruiser had been washing away her own foundations. The gentle nudge
of the approaching caisson had done the rest.

Up on the raft, the first intimation of disaster was the flashing of the red warning-light
on the air-purifier, synchronised with the howling of a radio-klaxon across all the
spacesuit wavebands. The howl ceased almost immediately, as the technician in charge
punched the cut-off button, but the red light continued to flash.

A glance at the dials was enough to show Lawrence the trouble. The air-pipes—both
of them—were no longer connected to
Selene
. The purifier was pumping oxygen into the Sea through one pipe and, worse still,
sucking in dust through the other. Lawrence wondered how long it would take to clean
out the filters, but wasted no further time upon that thought. He was too busy calling
Selene
.

There was no answer. He tried all the cruiser’s frequencies, without receiving even
a whisper of a carrier wave. The Sea of Thirst was as silent to radio as it was to
sound.

They’re finished, he said; it’s all over. It was a near thing, but we just couldn’t
make it. And all we needed was another hour….

What could have happened? he thought dully. Perhaps the hull had collapsed under the
weight of the dust. No—that was very unlikely; the internal air-pressure would have
prevented that. It must have been another subsidence; he was not sure, but he thought
that there had been a slight tremor underfoot. From the beginning he had been aware
of this danger, but could see no way of guarding against it. This was a gamble they
had all taken, and
Selene
had lost.

Even as
Selene
started to fall, something told Pat that this was quite different from the first
cave-in. It was much slower, and there were scrunching, squishing noises from outside
the hull which, even in that desperate moment, struck Pat as being unlike any sounds
that dust could possibly make.

Overhead, the oxygen pipes were tearing loose. They were not sliding out smoothly,
for the cruiser was going down stern first, tilting towards the rear. With a crack
of splintering fibreglass, the pipe just ahead of the airlock-galley ripped through
the roof and vanished from sight. Immediately, a thick jet of dust sprayed into the
cabin, and fanned out in a choking cloud where it hit the floor.

Commodore Hansteen was nearest, and got there first. Tearing off his shirt, he swiftly
wadded it into a ball and rammed it into the aperture. The dust spurted in all directions
as he struggled to block the flow; he had almost succeeded when the forward pipe ripped
loose—and the main lights went out as, for the second time, the cable conduit was
wrenched away.

“I’ll take it!” shouted Pat. A moment later, also shirtless, he was trying to stem
the torrent pouring in through the hole.

He had sailed the Sea of Thirst a hundred times—yet never before had he touched its
substance with his naked skin. The grey powder sprayed into his nose and eyes, half
choking and wholly blinding him. Though it was as bone-dry as the dust from a Pharaoh’s
tomb—dryer than this, indeed, for it was a million times older than the Pyramids—it
had a curiously soapy feeling. As he fought against it, Pat found himself thinking:
“If there is one death worse than being drowned—it’s being buried alive.”

When the jet weakened to a thin trickle, he knew that he had avoided that fate—for
the moment. The pressure produced by fifteen metres of dust, under the low lunar gravity,
was not difficult to overcome—though it would have been another story if the holes
in the roof had been much larger.

Pat shook the dust from his head and shoulders, and cautiously opened his eyes. At
least he could see again; thank heaven for the emergency lighting, dim though it was.
The Commodore had already plugged his leak, and was now calmly sprinkling water from
a paper cup to lay the dust. The technique was remarkably effective, and the few remaining
clouds quickly collapsed into patches of mud.

Hansteen looked up and caught Pat’s eye.

“Well, Captain,” he said. “Any theories?”

There were times, thought Pat, when the Commodore’s Olympian self-control was almost
maddening. He would like to see him break, just once. No—that was not really true.
His feeling was merely a flash of envy, even of jealousy—understandable, but quite
unworthy of him. He should be ashamed of it, and he was.

“I don’t know
what
’s happened,” he said. “Perhaps the people on top can tell us.”

It was an uphill walk to the pilot’s position, for the cruiser was now tilted at about
thirty degrees to the horizontal. As Pat took his seat in front of the radio, he felt
a kind of despairing numbness that surpassed anything he had known since their original
entombment. It was a sense of resignation—an almost superstitious belief that the
Gods were fighting against them, and that further struggle was useless.

He felt sure of this when he switched on the radio and found that it was completely
dead. The power was off; when that oxygen pipe had ripped out the roof cable-conduit,
it had done a thorough job.

Pat swivelled slowly round in his seat. Twenty-one men and women were looking at him,
awaiting his news. But twenty of them he did not see, for Susan was watching him,
and he was conscious only of the expression on her face. It held anxiety and readiness—but
even now, no hint of fear. As Pat looked at her, his own feelings of despair seemed
to dissolve away. He felt a surge of strength, even of hope.

“I’m damned if I know what’s happened,” he said. “But I’m sure of this—we’re not done
for yet, by several lightyears. We may have sunk a little further, but our friends
on the raft will soon catch up with us. This will mean a slight delay—that’s all.
There’s certainly nothing to worry about.”

“I don’t want to be an alarmist, Captain,” said Barrett, “but suppose the raft has
sunk as well? What then?”

“We’ll know as soon as I get the radio fixed,” replied Pat, glancing anxiously at
the wires dangling from the roof cable-duct. “And until I get this spaghetti sorted
out, you’ll have to put up with the emergency lighting.”

“I don’t mind,” said Mrs. Schuster. “I think it’s rather cute.”

Bless you, Mrs. S., said Pat to himself. He glanced quickly round the cabin; though
it was hard to see all their expressions in this dim lighting, the passengers seemed
calm enough.

They were not quite so calm a minute later; that was all the time it took to discover
that nothing could be done to repair the lights or radio. The wiring had been ripped
out far down inside the conduit, beyond reach of the simple tools available here.

“This is rather more serious,” reported Pat. “We won’t be able to communicate, unless
they lower a microphone to make contact with us.”

“That means,” said Barrett, who seemed to like looking on the dark side of things,
“that they’ve lost touch with us. They won’t understand why we’re not answering. Suppose
they assume that we’re all dead—and abandon the whole operation?”

The thought had flashed through Pat’s mind, but he had dismissed it almost at once.

“You’ve heard Chief Engineer Lawrence on the radio,” he answered. “He’s not the sort
of man who’d give up until he had absolute proof that we’re no longer alive. You needn’t
worry on
that
score.”

“What about our air?” asked Professor Jayawardene anxiously. “We’re back on our own
resources again.”

“It should last for several hours now the absorbers have been regenerated. Those pipes
will be in place before then,” answered Pat, with slightly more confidence than he
felt. “Meanwhile, we’ll have to be patient and provide our own entertainment again.
We did it for three days; we should be able to manage for a couple of hours.”

He glanced around the cabin, looking for any signs of disagreement, and saw that one
of the passengers was rising slowly to his feet. It was the very last person he would
have expected—quiet little Mr. Radley, who had uttered perhaps a dozen words during
the entire trip.

Pat still knew no more about him than that he was an accountant, and came from New
Zealand—the only country on Earth still slightly isolated from the rest of the world
by virtue of its position. It could be reached, of course, as quickly as any other
spot on the planet, but it was the end of the line, not a way-station to somewhere
else. As a result, the New Zealanders still proudly preserved much of their individuality.
They claimed, with a good deal of truth, to have salvaged all that was left of English
culture, now that the British Isles had been absorbed into the Atlantic Community.

“You want to say something, Mr. Radley?” asked Pat.

Radley looked round the dim-lit cabin, rather like a schoolmaster about to address
a class.

“Yes, Captain,” he began. “I have a confession to make. I am very much afraid that
this is all my fault.”

When Chief Engineer Lawrence broke off his commentary, Earth knew within two seconds
that something had gone wrong—though it took several minutes for the news to reach
Mars and Venus. But what had happened, no one could guess from the picture on the
screen. For a few seconds there had been a flurry of frantic but meaningless activity,
but now the immediate crisis seemed to be over. The spacesuited figures were huddled
together, obviously in conference—and with their telephone circuits plugged in, so
that no one could overhear them. It was very frustrating to watch that silent discussion,
and to have no idea of what it was about.