A Fall of Moondust (31 page)

The apparatus now being lowered down the shaft looked like an overgrown grease-gun,
or a giant version of those syringes used to put icing on wedding-cakes. This one
held neither grease nor icing, but an organic silicon compound under great pressure.
At the moment it was liquid; it would not remain so for long.

Lawrence’s first problem was to get the liquid between the double hull, without letting
the dust escape. Using a small rivet-gun, he fired seven hollow bolts into
Selene
’s outer skin—one in the centre of the exposed circle, the other six evenly spaced
around its circumference.

He connected the syringe to the centre bolt, and pressed the trigger. There was a
slight hiss as the fluid rushed through the hollow bolt, its pressure opening a tiny
valve in the bullet-shaped nose. Working very swiftly, Lawrence moved from bolt to
bolt, shooting equal charges of fluid through each. Now the stuff would have spread
out almost evenly between the two hulls, in a ragged pancake more than a metre across.
No—not a pancake—a
soufflé
, for it would have started to foam as soon as it escaped from the nozzle.

And a few seconds later, it would have started to set, under the influence of the
catalyst injected with it. Lawrence looked at his watch; in five minutes, that foam
would be rock-hard, though as porous as pumice—which, indeed, it would very closely
resemble. There would be no chance of more dust entering this section of the hull;
what was already there was frozen in place.

There was nothing he could do to shorten that five minutes; the whole plan depended
upon the foam setting to a known consistency. If his timing and positioning had been
faulty, or the chemists back at Base had made an error, the people aboard
Selene
were already as good as dead.

He used the waiting period to tidy up the shaft, sending all the equipment back to
the surface. Soon only Lawrence himself was left at the bottom, with no tools at all
but his bare hands. If Maurice Spenser could have smuggled his camera into this narrow
space—and he would have signed any reasonable contract with the Devil to have done
so—his viewers would have been quite unable to guess at Lawrence’s next move.

They would have been still more baffled, when what looked like a child’s hoop was
slowly lowered down the shaft. But this was no nursery toy; it was the key that would
open
Selene
.

Susan had already marshalled the passengers to the front, and now much higher, end
of the cabin. They were all standing there in a tightly-packed group, looking anxiously
at the ceiling and straining their ears for every encouraging sound.

Encouragement, thought Pat, was what they needed now. And he needed it more than any
of them, for he alone knew—unless Hansteen or McKenzie had guessed it—the real magnitude
of the danger they were facing.

The fire was bad enough, and could kill them if it broke through into the cabin. But
it was slow-moving, and they could fight it, even if only for a while. Against explosion,
however, they could do nothing.

For
Selene
was a bomb, and the fuse was already lit. The stored-up energy in the power-cells
that drove her motors and all her electrical devices could escape as raw heat, but
it could not detonate. That was not true, unfortunately, of the liquid oxygen tanks….

They must still hold many litres of the fearfully cold, violently reactive element.
When the mounting heat ruptured those tanks, there would be both a physical and a
chemical explosion. A small one, it was true—perhaps equivalent to a hundred kilogrammes
of T.N.T. But that would be quite enough to smash
Selene
to pieces.

Pat saw no point in mentioning this to Hansteen, who was already planning his barricade.
Seats were being unscrewed from the rows near the front of the cabin, and jammed between
the rear row and the toilet door. It looked as if the Commodore was preparing for
an invasion rather than a fire—as indeed he was. The fire itself, because of its nature,
might not spread beyond the power-cell compartment, but as soon as that cracked and
blistered wall finally gave way, the dust would come flooding through.

“Commodore,” said Pat, “while you’re doing this, I’ll start organising the passengers.
We can’t have twenty people trying to get out at once.”

That was a nightmare prospect that had to be avoided at all costs. Yet it would be
hard to avoid panic—even in this well-disciplined community—if a single narrow tunnel
was the only means of escape from a rapidly approaching death.

Pat walked to the front of the cabin; on Earth that would have been a steep uphill
climb, but here a thirty-degree slope was barely noticeable. He looked at the anxious
faces ranged in front of him and said: “We’re going to be out of here very soon. When
the ceiling opens, a rope ladder will be dropped down. The ladies will go first, then
the men—all in alphabetical order. Don’t bother to use your feet. Remember how little
you weigh here, and go up hand over hand, as quickly as you can. But don’t crowd the
person in front; you should have plenty of time, and it will take you only a few seconds
to teach the top.

“Susan, please sort everyone out in the right order. Harding, Bryan, Johanson, Barrett—I’d
like you to stand by as you did before. We may need your help—”

He did not finish the sentence. There was a kind of soft, muffled explosion from the
rear of the cabin—nothing spectacular, the popping of a paper bag would have made
more noise. But it meant that the wall was down—while the ceiling, unfortunately,
was still intact.

On the other side of the roof, Lawrence laid his hoop flat against the fibreglass
and started to fix it in position with quick-drying cement. The ring was almost as
wide as the little well in which he was crouching; it came to within a few centimetres
of the corrugated walls. Though it was perfectly safe to handle, he treated it with
exaggerated care. He had never acquired that easy familiarity with explosives that
characterises those who have to live with them.

The ring-charge he was tamping in place was a perfectly conventional specimen of the
art, involving no technical problems. It would make a neat, clean cut of exactly the
desired width and thickness, doing in a thousandth of a second a job that would have
taken a quarter of an hour with a power-saw. That was what Lawrence had first intended
to use; now he was very glad that he had changed his mind. It seemed most unlikely
that he would have a quarter of an hour.

How true that was, he learned while he was still waiting for the foam to set. “The
fire’s through into the cabin!” yelled a voice from overhead.

Lawrence looked at his watch. For a moment it seemed as if the second-hand was motionless,
but that was an illusion he had experienced all his life. The watch had not stopped;
it was merely that Time, as usual, was not going at the speed he wished. Until this
moment it had been passing too swiftly; now, of course, it was crawling on leaden
feet.

The foam should be rock-hard in another thirty seconds. Far better to leave it a little
longer than to risk shooting too soon, while it was still plastic.

He started to climb the rope ladder, without haste, trailing the thin detonating wires
behind him. His timing was perfect. When he had emerged from the shaft, uncrimped
the short-circuit he had put for the sake of safety at the end of the wires, and connected
them to the exploder, there were just ten seconds to go.

“Tell them we’re starting to count down from ten,” he said.

As Pat raced downhill to help the Commodore—though just what he could do now, he had
very little idea—he heard Sue calling in an unhurried voice: “Miss Morley, Mrs. Schuster,
Mrs. Williams…” How ironic it was that Miss Morley would once again be the first,
this time by virtue of alphabetical accident. She could hardly grumble about the treatment
she was getting now.

And then a second and much grimmer thought flashed through Pat’s mind.
Suppose Mrs. Schuster got stuck in the tunnel
and blocked the exit. Well, they could hardly leave her until last. No, she’d go
up all right; she had been a deciding factor in the tube’s design, and since then
she had lost several kilos….

At first glance, the outer door of the toilet still seemed to be holding. Indeed,
the only sign that anything had happened was a slight wisp of smoke curling past the
hinges. For a moment Pat felt a surge of relief; why, it might take the fire half
an hour to burn through the double thickness of fibreglass, and long before that—

Something was tickling his bare feet. He had moved automatically aside before his
conscious mind said, “
What’s that?
”

He looked down. Though his eyes were now accustomed to the dim emergency lighting,
it was some time before he realised that a ghostly grey tide was pouring beneath that
barricaded door—and that the panels were already bulging inwards under the pressure
of tons of dust. It could be only a matter of minutes before they collapsed; even
if they held, it might make little difference. That silent, sinister tide had risen
above his ankles even while he was standing here.

Pat did not attempt to move, or to speak to the Commodore, who was standing equally
motionless a few centimetres away. For the first time in his life—and now, it might
well be, for the last—he felt an emotion of sheer, overwhelming hate. In that moment,
as its million dry and delicate feelers brushed against his bare legs, it seemed to
Pat that the Sea of Thirst was a conscious, malignant entity that had been playing
with them like a cat with a mouse. Every time, he told himself, we thought we were
getting the situation under control, it was preparing a new surprise. We were always
one move behind, and now it is tired of its little game; we no longer amuse it. Perhaps
Radley was right, after all….

The loud-speaker dangling from the air-pipe roused him from his fatalistic reverie.

“We’re ready!” it shouted. “Crowd at the end of the bus and cover your faces. I’ll
count down from ten.

“T
EN
—”

We’re already at the end of the bus, thought Pat. We don’t need all that time. We
may not even have it.

“N
INE
”

I’ll bet it doesn’t work, anyway. The Sea won’t let it, if It thinks we have a chance
of getting out.

“E
IGHT
”

A pity, though, after all this effort. A lot of people have half killed themselves
trying to help us. They deserved better luck.

“S
EVEN
”

That’s supposed to be a lucky number, isn’t it? Perhaps we may make it, after all.
Some of us.

“S
IX
”

Let’s pretend. It won’t do much harm now. Suppose it takes—oh fifteen seconds to get
through—

“F
IVE
”

—and of course to let down the ladder again—they probably rolled that up for safety—

“F
OUR
”

—and assuming that someone goes out every three seconds—no, let’s make it five to
be on the safe side—

“T
HREE
”

—that will be twenty-two times five which is one thousand and, no, that’s ridiculous,
I’ve forgotten how to do simple arithmetic—

“T
WO
”

—say one hundred and something seconds which must be the best part of two minutes
and that’s still plenty time for those lox tanks to blow us all to kingdom come—

“O
NE
”

O
NE
! And I haven’t even covered my face maybe I should lie down even if I have to swallow
this filthy stinking dust—

There was a sudden, sharp
crack
and a brief puff of air; that was all. It was disappointingly anticlimatic, but the
explosives experts had known their job, as is highly desirable that explosives experts
should. The energy of the charge had been precisely calculated and focused; there
was barely enough left over to ripple the dust that now covered almost half the floor-space
of the cabin.

Time seemed to be frozen; for an age, nothing happened. Then there was a slow and
beautiful miracle, breathtaking because it was so unexpected, yet so obvious if one
had stopped to think about it.

A ring of brilliant white light appeared among the crimson shadows of the ceiling.
It grew steadily thicker and brighter—then, quite suddenly, expanded into a complete
and perfect circle as the section of the roof fell away. The light pouring down was
only that of a single glow-tube twenty metres above, but to eyes that had seen nothing
but dim redness for hours it was more glorious than any sunrise.

The ladder came through almost as soon as the circle of roofing hit the floor. Miss
Morley, poised like a sprinter, was gone in a flash. Mrs. Schuster followed—a little
more slowly, but still at a speed of which no one could complain—it was like an eclipse,
only a few stray beams of light now filtered down that radiant road to safety. It
was dark again, as if after that brief glimpse of dawn the night had returned with
redoubled gloom. Mrs. Williams was only a second later.

Now the men were starting to go—Baldur first, probably blessing his position in the
alphabet. There were only a dozen left in the cabin, when the barricaded door finally
ripped from its hinges, and the pent-up avalanche burst forth.

The first wave of dust caught Pat while he was half-way up the slope of the cabin.
Light and impalpable though it was, it slowed his movements until it seemed that he
was struggling to wade through glue. It was fortunate that the moist and heavy air
had robbed it of some of its power, for otherwise it would have filled the cabin with
choking clouds. Pat sneezed and coughed and was partly blinded, but he could still
breathe.

In the foggy gloom he could hear Sue counting—“Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen—Eighteen,
Nineteen—” as she marshalled the passengers to safety. He had intended her to go with
the other women, but she was still down here, shepherding her charges. Even as he
struggled against the cloying quicksand that had now risen almost to his waist, he
felt for Susan a love so great that it seemed to burst his heart. Now he had no possible
doubt. Real love was a perfect balance of desire and tenderness. The first had been
there for a long time, and now the second had come in full measure.