Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (16 page)

Krasnin bent down beside the body of his
colleague and lifted it effortlessly against the low gravity. He fingered the
shattered fragments of the plastic helmet, and shook his head in perplexity.

‘What could have happened to him?’ he said.
‘It almost looks as if the plant did it, but that’s ridiculous.’

The green enigma stood there on the
no-longer barren plain, tantalising us with its promise and its mystery. Then
Henderson said slowly, as if thinking aloud:

‘I believe I’ve got the answer. I’ve just
remembered some of the botany I did at school. If Surov designed this plant for
lunar conditions, how would he arrange for it to propagate itself? The seeds
would have to be scattered over a very wide area in the hope of finding a few
suitable places to grow. There are no birds or animals here to carry them, in
the way that happens on Earth. I can only think of one solution – and some of
our terrestrial plants have already used it.’

He was interrupted by my yell. Something had
hit with a resounding clang against the metal waistband of my suit. It did no
damage, but it was so sudden and unexpected that it took me utterly by
surprise.

A seed lay at my feet, about the size and
shape of a plum stone. A few yards away, we found the one that had shattered
Surov’s helmet as he bent down. He must have known that the plant was ripe, but
in his eagerness to examine it had forgotten what that implied. I have seen a
cactus throw its seed a quarter of a mile under the low lunar gravity. Surov
had been shot at point-blank range by his own creation.

This is really Commander Vandenburg’s story,
but he is too many millions of miles away to tell it. It concerns his
geophysicist, Dr Paynter, who was generally believed to have gone to the moon
to get away from his wife.

At one time or other, we were all supposed
(often by our wives) to have done just that. However, in Paynter’s case, there
was just enough truth to make it stick.

It was not that he disliked his wife; one
could almost say the contrary. He would do anything for her, but unfortunately
the things that she wanted him to do cost rather too much. She was a lady of
extravagant tastes, and such ladies are advised not to marry scientists – even
scientists who go to the moon.

Mrs Paynter’s weakness was for jewellery,
particularly diamonds. As might be expected, this was a weakness that caused
her husband a good deal of worry. Being a conscientious as well as an
affectionate husband, he did not merely worry about it – he did something about
it. He became one of the world’s leading experts on diamonds, from the
scientific rather than the commercial point of view, and probably knew more
about their composition, origin, and properties than any other man alive.
Unfortunately, you may know a lot about diamonds without ever possessing any,
and her husband’s erudition was not something that Mrs Paynter could wear
around her neck when she went to a party.

Geophysics, as I have mentioned, was Dr
Paynter’s real business; diamonds were merely a side line. He had developed
many remarkable surveying instruments which could probe the interior of the
Earth by means of electric impulses and magnetic waves, so giving a kind of
X-ray picture of the hidden strata far below. It was hardly surprising,
therefore, that he was one of the men chosen to pry into the mysterious
interior of the moon.

He was quite eager to go, but it seemed to
Commander Vandenburg that he was relucant to leave Earth at this particular
moment. A number of men had shown such symptoms; sometimes they were due to
fears that could not be eradicated, and an otherwise promising man had to be
left behind. In Paynter’s case, however, the reluctance was quite impersonal.
He was in the middle of a big experiment – something he had been working on all
his life – and he didn’t want to leave Earth until it was finished. However,
the first lunar expedition could not wait for him, so he had to leave his
project in the hands of his assistants. He was continually exchanging cryptic
radio messages with them, to the great annoyance of the signals section of Space
Station Three.

In the wonder of a new world waiting to be
explored, Paynter soon forgot his earthly preoccupations. He would dash hither
and yon over the lunar landscape on one of the neat little electric scooters
the Americans had brought with them, carrying seismographs, magnetometers,
gravity meters, and all the other esoteric tools of the geophysicist’s trade.
He was trying to learn, in a few weeks, what it had taken men hundreds of years
to discover about their own planet. It was true that he had only a small sample
of the moon’s fourteen million square miles of territory to explore, but he
intended to make a thorough job of it.

From time to time he continued to get
messages from his colleagues back on Earth, as well as brief but affectionate
signals from Mrs P. Neither seemed to interest him very much; even when you are
not so busy that you hardly have time to sleep, a quarter of a million miles
puts most of your personal affairs in a different perspective. I think that on
the moon Dr Paynter was really happy for the first time in his life; if so, he
was not the only one.

Not far from our base there was a rather
fine crater pit, a great blowhole in the lunar surface almost two miles from
rim to rim. Though it was fairly close at hand, it was outside the normal area
of our joint operations, and we had been on the moon for six weeks before
Paynter led a party of three men off in one of the baby tractors to have a look
at it. They disappeared from radio range over the edge of the moon, but we
weren’t worried about that because if they ran into trouble they could always
call Earth and get any message relayed back to us.

Paynter and his men were gone forty-eight
hours, which is about the maximum for continuous working on the moon, even with
booster drugs. At first their little expedition was quite uneventful and
therefore quite unexciting; everything went according to plan. They reached the
crater, inflated their pressurised igloo and unpacked their stores, took their
instrument readings, and then set up a portable drill to get core samples. It
was while he was waiting for the drill to bring him up a nice section of the
moon that Paynter made his second great discovery. He had made his first about
ten hours before, but he didn’t know it yet.

Around the lip of the crater, lying where
they had been thrown up by the great explosions that had convulsed the lunar
landscape three hundred million years before, were immense piles of rock which
must have come from many miles down in the moon’s interior. Anything he could
do with his little drill, thought Paynter, could hardly compare with
this
.
Unfortunately, the mountain-sized geological specimens that lay all around him
were not neatly arranged in their correct order; they had been scattered over
the landscape, much farther than the eye could see, according to the arbitrary
violence of the eruptions that had blasted them into space.

Paynter climbed over these immense slag
heaps, taking a swing at likely samples with his little hammer. Presently his
colleagues heard him yell, and saw him come running back to them carrying what
appeared to be a lump of rather poor quality glass. It was some time before he
was sufficiently coherent to explain what all the fuss was about – and some
time later still before the expedition remembered its real job and got back to
work.

Vandenburg watched the returning party as it
headed back to the ship. The four men didn’t seem as tired as one would have
expected, considering the fact that they had been on their feet for two days.
Indeed, there was a certain jauntiness about their movements which even the
space suits couldn’t wholly conceal. You could see that the expedition had been
a success. In that case, Paynter would have two causes for congratulation. The
priority message that had just come from Earth was very cryptic, but it was
clear that Paynter’s work there – whatever it was – had finally reached a
triumphant conclusion.

Commander Vandenburg almost forgot the
message when he saw what Paynter was holding in his hand. He knew what a raw diamond
looked like, and this was the second largest that anyone had ever seen. Only
the Cullinan, tipping the scales at 3,026 carats, beat it by a slender margin.
‘We ought to have expected it,’ he heard Paynter babble happily. ‘Diamonds are
always found associated with volcanic vents. But somehow I never thought the
analogy would hold here.’

Vandenburg suddenly remembered the signal,
and handed it over to Paynter. He read it quickly, and his jaw dropped. Never
in his life, Vandenburg told me, had he seen a man so instantly deflated by a
message of congratultion. The signal read: WE’VE DONE IT. TEST 541 WITH
MODIFIED PRESSURE CONTAINER COMPLETE SUCCESS. NO PRACTICAL LIMIT TO SIZE. COSTS
NEGLIGIBLE.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Vandenburg, when
he saw the stricken look on Paynter’s face. ‘It doesn’t seem bad news to me,
whatever it means.’

Paynter gulped two or three times like a
stranded fish, then stared helplessly at the great crystal that almost filled
the palm of his hand. He tossed it into the air, and it floated back in that
slow-motion way everything has under lunar gravity.

Finally he found his voice.

‘My lab’s been working for years,’ he said,
‘trying to synthesise diamonds. Yesterday this thing was worth a million
dollars. Today it’s worth a couple of hundred. I’m not sure I’ll bother to
carry it back to Earth.’

Well, he
did
carry it back; it seemed
a pity not to. For about three months, Mrs P. had the finest diamond necklace
in the world, worth every bit of a thousand dollars – mostly the cost of cutting
and polishing. Then the Paynter Process went into commercial production, and a
month later she got her divorce. The grounds were extreme mental cruelty; and I
suppose you could say it was justified.

It was quite a surprise to discover, when I
looked it up, that the most famous experiment we carried out while we were on
the moon had its beginnings way back in 1955. At that time, high-altitude
rocket research had been going for only about ten years, mostly at White Sands,
New Mexico. Nineteen fifty-five was the date of one of the most spectacular of
those early experiments, one that involved the ejection of sodium onto the
upper atmosphere.

On Earth, even on the clearest night, the
sky between the stars isn’t completely dark. There’s a very faint background
glow, and part of it is caused by the fluorescence of sodium atoms a hundred
miles up. Since it would take the sodium in a good many cubic miles of the
upper atmosphere to fill a single matchbox, it seemed to the early
investigators that they could make quite a fireworks display if they used a
rocket to dump a few pounds of the stuff into the ionosphere.

They were right. The sodium squirted out of
a rocket above White Sands early in 1955 produced a great yellow glow in the
sky which was visible, like a kind of artificial moonlight, for over an hour,
before the atoms dispersed. This experiment wasn’t done for fun (though it
was
fun) but for a serious scientific purpose. Instruments trained on this glow
were able to gather new knowledge about the upper air – knowledge that went
into the stockpile of information without which space flight would never have
been possible.

When they got to the moon, the Americans
decided that it would be a good idea to repeat the experiment there, on a much
larger scale. A few hundred kilograms of sodium fired up from the surface would
produce a display that would be visible from Earth, with a good pair of field
glasses, as it fluoresced its way up through the lunar atmosphere.

(Some people, by the way, still don’t
realise that the moon
has
an atmosphere. It’s about a million times too
thin to be breathable, but if you have the right instruments you can detect it.
As a meteor shield, it’s first-rate, for though it may be tenuous it’s hundreds
of miles deep.)

Everyone had been talking about the
experiment for days. The sodium bomb had arrived from Earth in the last supply
rocket, and a very impressive piece of equipment it looked. Its operation was
extremely simple; when ignited, an incendiary charge vaporised the sodium until
a high pressure was built up, then a diaphragm burst and the stuff was squirted
up into the sky through a specially shaped nozzle. It would be shot off soon
after nightfall, and when the cloud of sodium rose out of the moon’s shadow
into direct sunlight it would start to glow with tremendous brilliance.

Nightfall, on the moon, is one of the most
awe-inspiring sights in the whole of nature, made doubly so because as you
watch the sun’s flaming disc creep so slowly below the mountains you know that it
will be fourteen days before you see it again. But it does not bring darkness –
at least, not on this side of the moon. There is always the Earth, hanging
motionless in the sky, the one heavenly body that neither rises nor sets. The
light pouring back from her clouds and seas floods the lunar landscape with a
soft, blue-green radiance, so that it is often easier to find your way around
at night than under the fierce glare of the sun.

Even those who were not supposed to be on
duty had come out to watch the experiment. The sodium bomb had been placed at
the middle of the big triangle formed by the three ships, and stood upright
with its nozzle pointing at the stars. Dr Anderson, the astronomer of the
American team, was testing the firing circuits, but everyone else was at a
respectful distance. The bomb looked perfectly capable of living up to its
name, though it was really about as dangerous as a soda-water siphon.