A Fall of Moondust

  He lay with the icy blast playing across his face, enjoying its refreshing coolness almost as much as its breathability. In a few seconds he was completely alert—though he had a splitting headache—and aware of all that had happened in the last half-hour.

  He nearly fainted again when he remembered unscrewing the bit, and fighting that gusher of escaping air. But this was no time to worry about past mistakes; all that mattered now was that he was alive—and with any luck would stay so.

  He picked up the still-unconscious McKenzie as though he were a limp doll, and laid him beneath the oxygen blast. Its force was much weaker now, as the pressure inside the cruiser rose back to normal; in a few more minutes it would be only a gentle zephyr.

  The scientist revived almost at once, and looked vaguely round him.

  “Where am I?” he said, not very originally. “Oh—they got through to us. Thank God I can breathe again. What’s happened to the lights?”

  “Don’t worry about that—I’ll soon fix them. We must get everyone under this jet as quickly as we can, and flush some oxygen into their lungs. Can you give artificial respiration?”

  “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 humor.

  “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 centimeters 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 meters. We’re moving now. Call 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 air lock. 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 hour, as any of the men out on the raft, two kilometers 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 space suits.

  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 space suit 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 meters 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 program 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 oh six hundred 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 paper clip is crawling out of the woodwork with ideas. We’re rounding up a batch of them at six fifteen. 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 program when they see the treatment the others are getting.”

  “Why—what are you doing to them?”

  “Their ideas are being analyzed by your scientist friend Doctor 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 asl
eep 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 sorts 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 center 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 centers 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  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 millimeters to the left; then it would have taken out the radio as well, and the job would have been 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 Duncan 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 realize 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 program with 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 program 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 anachionized the tape, the listener would be unable to tell that he was hearing a discussion that spanned almost four hundred thousand kilometers.

  Chief Engineer Lawrence heard the program 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 muchneeded, comfort.

  Despite all the claims of the manufacturers, no one can function efficiently in a space suit 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 space medicos have worn suits for a week or more to prove it. The demonstration has done nothing to affect the incidence of the disease.

  The mythology of space suits 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 1970’s was known as the Iron Maiden, but any astronaut will gladly explain why 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. WThile 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.”

  “Ah, but you could collect the air and use it over and over again!”

  “Thank you, Signor Gusalli,” cut in the firm voice of the master of ceremonies. “Now we have Mr. Robertson from London, Ontario. What’s your plan, Mr. Robertson?”

  “I suggest freezing.”

  “Just a minute,” protested Lawson. “How can you freeze dust?”

  “First I’d saturate it with water. Next I’d sink cooling pipes and turn the whole mass into ice. That would hold the dust in place, and then it would be easy to drill through it.”

  “It’s an interesting idea,” admitted Lawson, rather reluctantly. “At least it’s not as crazy as some that we’ve had. But the amount of water needed would be impossibly large. Remember, the cruiser is fifteen meters down—“

  “What’s that in feet?” said the Canadian, in a tone of voice that made it clear that he was one of
the hard-core antimetric school.

  “Fifty feet—as I’m sure you know perfectly well. Now you’d have to deal with a column at least a meter across—yard, to you—so that would involve—ah—approximately fifteen times ten squared times ten to the fourth cubic centimeters, which gives—why, of course, fifteen tons of water. But this assumes no wastage at all; you’d really need several times as much as this. It might come to as much as a hundred tons. And how much do you think all the freezing gear would weigh?”

  Lawrence was quite impressed. Unlike many scientists he had known, Lawson had a firm grasp of practical realities, and was also a rapid calculator. Usually when an astronomer or a physicist did a quick computation, his first attempt was out by a factor of anything from ten to a hundred. As far as Lawrence could judge, Lawson was always right the first time.

  The Canadian refrigeration enthusiast was still putting up a fight when he was dragged off the program, to be replaced by an African gentleman who wanted to use the opposite technique—heat. He planned to use a huge concave mirror, focusing sunlight on the dust and fusing it into an immobile mass.

  It was obvious that Lawson was keeping his temper only with the utmost difficulty; the solar-furnace advocate was one of those stubborn,a self-taught “experts” who refused to admit that he could possibly have made an error in his calculations. The argument was getting really violent when a voice from much closer at hand cut across the program.

  “The skis are coming, Mister Lawrence.”

  Lawrence rolled into a sitting position and climbed aboard the raft. If anything was already in sight, that meant it was practically on top of him. Yes, there was Duster One—and also Duster Three, which had made a difficult and expensive trip from the Lake of Drought, the Sea’s smaller equivalent on Farside. That journey was a saga in itself, which would remain forever unknown except to the handful of men involved.

  Each ski was towing two sledges, piled high with equipment. As they drew alongside the raft, the first item to be unloaded was the large packing case containing the igloo. It was always fascinating to watch one being inflated, and Lawrence had never anticipated the spectacle more eagerly. (Yes, he definitely had spaceman’s itch.) The process was completely automatic; one broke a seal, turned two separate levers—as a safeguard against the disastrous possibility of accidental triggering—and then waited.