Arthur C. Clarke - A Fall of moondust

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A FALL OF MOONDUST
by Arthur C. Clarke
Copyright 1961 by Arthur C. Clarke
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage
and retrieval system, without pemlission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN 0-15-630110-5
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-12345
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To Liz and Mike
Chapter 1
To be the skipper of the only boat on the Moon was a distinction that Pat Harris enjoyed.
As the passengers filed aboard „Selene”, jockeying for window seats, he wondered what sort of trip
it would be this time. In the rear-view mirror he could see Miss Wilkins, very smart in her blue
Lunar Tourist Commission uniform, putting on her usual welcome act. He always tried to think of
her as "Miss Wilkins," not Sue, when they were on duty together; it helped to keep his mind on
business. But what she thought of him, he had never really discovered.
There were no familiar faces; this was a new bunch, eager for their first cruise. Most of
the passengers were typical tourists--elderly people, visiting a world that had been the very
symbol of inaccessibility when they were young. There were only four or five passengers on the low
side of thirty, and they were probably technical personnel on vacation from one of the lunar
bases. It was a fairly good working rule, Pat had discovered, that all the old people came from
Earth, while the youngsters were residents of the Moon.
But to all of them, the Sea of Thirst was a novelty. Beyond „Selene's” observation
windows, its gray, dusty surface marched onward unbroken until it reached the stars. Above it hung
the waning crescent Earth, poised forever in the sky from which it had not moved in a billion
years. The brilliant, blue-green light of the mother world flooded this strange land with a cold
radiance--and cold it was indeed, perhaps three hundred below zero on the exposed surface.
No one could have told, merely by looking at it, whether the Sea was liquid or solid. It
was completely flat and featureless, quite free from the myriad cracks and fissures that scarred
all the rest of this barren world. Not a single hillock, boulder, or pebble broke its monotonous
uniformity. No sea on Earth--no millpond, even--was ever as calm as this.
It was a sea of dust, not of water, and therefore it was alien to all the experience of
men; therefore, also, it fascinated and attracted them. Fine as talcum powder, drier in this
vacuum than the parched sands of the Sahara, it flowed as easily and effortlessly as any liquid. A
heavy object dropped into it would disappear instantly, without a splash, leaving no scar to mark
its passage. Nothing could move upon its treacherous surface except the small, two-man dust-skis--
and „Selene” herself, an improbable combination of sledge and bus, not unlike the Sno-cats that
had opened up the Antarctic a lifetime ago.
„Selene's” official designation was Dust-Cruiser, Mark I, though to the best of Pat's
knowledge, a Mark II did not exist even on the drawing board. She was called "ship," "boat," or
"moon bus," according to taste; Pat preferred "boat," for it prevented confusion. When he used
that word, no one would mistake him for the skipper of a spaceship--and spaceship captains were,
of course, two a penny.
"Welcome aboard „Selene”," said Miss Wilkins, when everyone had settled down. "Captain
Hams and I are pleased to have you with us. Our trip will last four hours, and our first objective
will be Crater Lake, a hundred kilometers east of here, in the Mountains of Inaccessibility
Pat scarcely heard the familiar introduction; he was busy with his count-down. „Selene”
was virtually a grounded spaceship; she had to be, since she was traveling in a vacuum, and must
protect her frail cargo from the hostile world beyond her walls. Though she never left the surface
of the Moon, and was propelled by electric motors instead of rockets, she carried all the basic
equipment of a full-fledged ship of space-- and all of it had to be checked before departure.
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Oxygen--O.K. Power--O.K. Radio--O.K. ("Hello, Rainbow Base, „Selene” testing. Are you
receiving my beacon?") Inertial navigator--zeroed. Air-lock safety--On. Cabin-leak detector--O.K.
Internal lights--O.K. Gangway--disconnected. And so on for more than fifty items, every one of
which would automatically call attention to itself in case of trouble. But Pat Harris, like all
spacemen hankering after old age, never relied on autowamings if he could carry out the check
himself.
At last he was ready. The almost silent motors started to spin, but the blades were still
feathered, and „Selene” barely quivered at her moorings. Then he eased the port fan into fine
pitch, and she began to curve slowly to the right. When she was clear of the embarkation building,
he straightened her out and pushed the throttle forward.
She handled very well, when one considered the complete novelty of her design. There had
been no millennia of trial and error here, stretching back to the first neolithic man who ever
launched a log out into a stream. „Selene” was the very first of her line, created in the brains
of a few engineers who had sat down at a table and asked themselves: "How do we build a vehicle
that will skim over a sea of dust?"
Some of them, harking back to Ole Man River, had wanted to make her a stern-wheeler, but
the more efficient submerged fans had carried the day. As they drilled through the dust, driving
her before them, they produced a wake like that of a high-speed mole, but it vanished within
seconds, leaving the Sea unmarked by any sign of the boat's passage.
Now the squat pressure-domes of Port Roris were dropping swiftly below the sky line. In
less than ten minutes, they had vanished from sight: „Selene” was utterly alone. She was at the
center of something for which the languages of mankind have no name.
As Pat switched off the motors and the boat coasted to rest, he waited for the silence to
grow around him. It was always the same; it took a little while for the passengers to realize the
strangeness of what lay outside. They had crossed space and seen stars all about them; they had
looked up--or down--at the dazzling face of Earth, but this was different. It was neither land nor
sea, neither air nor space, but a little of each.
Before the silence grew oppressive--if he left it too long, someone would get scared--Pat
rose to his feet and faced his passengers.
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," he began. "I hope Miss Wilkins has been making you
comfortable. We've stopped here because this is a good place to introduce you to the Sea--to give
you the feel of it, as it were."
He pointed to the windows, and the ghostly grayness that lay beyond.
"Just how far away," he asked quietly, "do you imagine our horizon is? Or, to put it in
another way, how big would a man appear to you if he was standing out there where the stars seem
to meet the ground?"
It was a question that no one could possibly answer, from the evidence of sight alone.
Logic said, "The Moon's a small world--the horizon „must” be very close." But the senses gave a
wholly different verdict. "This land," they reported, "is absolutely fiat, and stretches to
infinity. It divides the Universe in twain; for ever and ever, it rolls onward beneath the stars.
. . ."
The illusion remained, even when one knew its cause. The eye has no way of judging
distances when there is nothing for it to focus upon. Vision slipped and skidded helplessly on
this featureless ocean of dust. There was not even--as there must always be on Earth--the
softening haze of the atmosphere to give some hint of nearness or remoteness. The stars were
unwinking needle points of light, clear down to that indeterminate horizon.
"Believe it or not," continued Pat, "you can see just three kilometers--or almost two
miles, for those of you who haven't been able to go metric yet. I know it looks a couple of light.
years out to the horizon, but you could walk there in twenty minutes, if you could walk on this
stuff at all."
He moved back to his seat, and started the motors once more.
"Nothing much to see for the next sixty kilometers," he called over his shoulder, "so
we'll get a move on."
„Selene” surged forward. For the first time, there was a real sensation of speed. The
boat's wake became longer and more disturbed as the spinning fans bit fiercely into the dust. Now
the dust itself was being tossed up on either side in great ghostly plumes; from a distance,
„Selene” would have looked like a snowplow driving its way across a winter landscape, beneath a
frosty moon. But those gray, slowly collapsing parabolas were not snow, and the lamp that lit
their trajectory was the planet Earth.
The passengers relaxed, enjoying the smooth, almost silent ride. Every one of them had
traveled hundreds of times faster than this, on the journey to the Moon. But in space one was
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never conscious of speed, and this swift glide across the dust was far more exciting. When Pat
swung „Selene” into a tight turn, so that she orbited in a circle, the boat almost overtook the
falling veils of powder her fans had hurled into the sky. It seemed altogether wrong that this
impalpable dust should rise and fall in such clean-cut curves, utterly unaffected by air
resistance. On Earth it would have drifted for hours--perhaps for days.
As soon as the boat had straightened out on a steady course and there was nothing to look
at except the empty plain, the passengers began to read the literature thoughtfully provided for
them. Each had been given a folder of photographs, maps, souvenirs ("This is to certify that
Mr./Mrs./Miss -- has sailed the Seas of the Moon, aboard Dust-Cruiser „Selene”"), and informative
text. They had only to read this to discover all that they wanted to know about the Sea of Thirst,
and perhaps a little more.
Most of the Moon, they read, was covered by a thin layer of dust, usually no more than a
few millimeters deep. Some of this was debris from the stars--the remains of meteorites that had
fallen upon the Moon's unprotected face for at least five billion years. Some had flaked from the
lunar rocks as they expanded and contracted in the fierce temperature extremes between day and
night. Whatever its source, it was so finely divided that it would flow like a liquid, even under
this feeble gravity.
Over the ages, it had drifted down from the mountains into the lowlands, to form pools and
lakes. The first explorers had expected this, and had usually been prepared for it. But the Sea of
Thirst was a surprise; no one had anticipated finding a dustbowl more than a hundred kilometers
across.
As the lunar "seas" went, it was very small; indeed, the astronomers had never officially
recognized its title, pointing out that it was only a small portion of the Sinus Roris--the Bay of
Dew. And how, they protested, could part of a bay be an entire sea? But the name, invented by a
copywriter of the Lunar Tourist Commission, had stuck despite their objections. It was at least as
appropriate as the names of the other so-called seas--Sea of Clouds, Sea of Rains, Sea of
Tranquillity. Not to mention Sea of Nectar.
The brochure also contained some reassuring information, designed to quell the fears of
the most nervous traveler, and to prove that the Tourist Commission had thought of everything.
"All possible precautions have been taken for your safety," it stated. "„Selene” carries an oxygen
reserve sufficient to last for more than a week, and all essential equipment is duplicated. An
automatic radio beacon signals your position at regular intervals, and in the extremely improbable
event of a complete power failure, a dust-ski from Port Roris would tow you home with little
delay. Above all, there is no need to worry about rough weather. No matter how bad a sailor you
may be, you can't get seasick on the Moon. There are never any storms on the Sea of Thirst; it is
always a flat calm."
Those last comforting words had been written in all good faith, for who could have
imagined that they would soon be proved untrue?
As „Selene” raced silently through the earthlit night, the Moon went about its business.
There was a great deal of business now, after the aeons of sleep. More had happened here in the
last fifty years than in the five billion before that, and much more was to happen soon.
In the first city that Man had ever built outside his native world, Chief Administrator
Olsen was taking a stroll through the park. He was very proud of the park, as were all the
twentyfive thousand inhabitants of Port Clavius. It was small, of course--though not as small as
was implied by that miserable TV commentator who'd called it "a windowbox with delusions of
grandeur." And certainly there were no parks, gardens, or anything else on Earth where you could
find sunflowers ten meters high.
Far overhead, wispy cirrus clouds were sailing by-or so it seemed. They were, of course,
only images projected on the inside of the dome, but the illusion was so perfect that it sometimes
made the C.A. homesick. Homesick? He corrected himself; „this” was home.
Yet in his heart of hearts, he knew it was not true. To his children it would be, but not
to him. He had been born in Stockholm, Earth; they had been born in Port Clavius. They were
citizens of the Moon; he was tied to Earth with bonds that might weaken with the years, but would
never break.
Less than a kilometer away, just outside the main dome, the head of the Lunar Tourist
Commission inspected the latest returns, and permitted himself a mild feeling of satisfaction. The
improvement over the last season had been maintained; not that there „were” seasons on the Moon,
but it was noticeable that more tourists came when it was winter in Earth's northern hemisphere.
How could he keep it up? That was always the problem, for tourists wanted variety, and you
couldn't give them the same thing over and over again. The novel scenery, the low gravity, the
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view of Earth, the mysteries of Farside, the spectacular heavens, the pioneer settlements (where
tourists were not always welcomed, anyway)--after you'd listed those, what else did the Moon have
to offer? What a pity there were no native Selenites with quaint customs and quainter physiques at
which visitors could click their cameras. Alas, the largest life form ever discovered on the Moon
needed a microscope to show it--and its ancestors had come here on Lunik H, only a decade ahead of
Man himself.
Commissioner Davis riffled mentally through the items that had arrived by the last
telefax, wondering if there was anything there that would help him. There was, of course, the
usual request from a TV company he'd never heard of, anxious to make yet another documentary on
the Moon--if all expenses were paid. The answer to that one would be "No"; if he accepted all
these kind offers, his department-would soon be broke.
Then there was a chatty letter from his opposite number in the Greater New Orleans Tourist
Commission, Inc., suggesting an exchange of personnel. It was hard to see how that would help the
Moon, or New Orleans either, but it would cost nothing and might produce some good will. And--this
was more interesting--there was a request from the water-skiing champion of Australia, asking if
anyone had ever tried to ski on the Sea of Thirst.
Yes--there was definitely an idea here; he was surprised that someone had not tried it
already. Perhaps they had, behind „Selene” or one of the small dust-skis. It was certainly worth a
test; he was always on the lookout for new forms of lunar recreation, and the Sea of Thirst was
one of his pet projects.
It was a project that, within a very few hours, was going to turn into a nightmare.
Chapter 2
Ahead of „Selene”, the horizon was no longer a perfect, unbroken arc; a jagged line of
mountains had risen above the edge of the Moon. As the cruiser raced toward them, they seemed to
climb slowly up the sky, as if lifted upon some gigantic elevator.
"The Mountains of Inaccessibility," announced Miss Wilkins. "So called because they're
entirely surrounded by the Sea. You'll notice, too, that they're much steeper than most lunar
mountains."
She did not labor this, since it was an unfortunate fact that the majority of lunar peaks
were a severe disappointment. The huge craters which looked so impressive on photographs taken
from Earth turned out upon close inspection to be gently rolling hills, their relief grossly
exaggerated by the shadows they cast at dawn and sunset. There was not a single lunar crater whose
ramparts soared as abruptly as the streets of San Francisco, and there were very few that could
provide a serious ohstacle to a determined cyclist. No one would have guessed this, however, from
the publications of the Tourist Commission, which featured only the most spectacular cliffs and
canyons, photographed from carefully chosen vantage points.
"They've never been thoroughly explored, even now," Miss Wilkins continued. "Last year we
took a party of geologists there, and landed them on that promontory, but they were only able to
go a few kilometers into the interior. So there may be „anything” up in those hills; we simply
don't know."
Good for Sue, Pat told himself; she was a first-rate guide, and knew what to leave to the
imagination and what to explain in detail. She had an easy relaxed tone, with no trace of that
fatal singsong that was the occupational disease of so many professional guides. And she had
mastered her subject thoroughly; it was very rare for her to be asked a question that she could
not answer. Altogether, she was a formidable young lady, and though she often figured in Pat's
erotic reveries, he was secretly a little afraid of her.
The passengers stared with fascinated wonder at the approaching peaks. On the still-
mysterious Moon, here was a deeper mystery. Rising like an island out of the strange sea that
guarded them, the Mountains of Inaccessibility remained a challenge for the next generation of
explorers. Despite their name, it was now easy enough to reach them--but with millions of square
kilometers of less difficult territory still unexamined, they would have to wait their turn.
„Selene” was swinging into their shadows; before anyone had realized what was happening,
the low-hanging Earth had been eclipsed. Its brilliant light still played upon the peaks far
overhead, but down here all was utter darkness.
"I'll turn off the cabin lights," said the stewardess, "so you can get a better view."
As the dim red background illumination vanished, each traveler felt he was alone in the
lunar night. Even the reflected radiance of Earth on those high peaks was disappearing as the
cruiser raced farther into shadow. Within minutes, only the stars were left--cold, steady points
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of light in a blackness so complete that the mind rebelled against it.
It was hard to recognize the familiar constellations among this multitude of stars. The
eye became entangled in patterns never seen from Earth, and lost itself in a glittering maze of
clusters and nebulae. In all that resplendent panorama, there was only one unmistakable landmark--
the dazzling beacon of Venus, far outshining all other heavenly bodies, heralding the approach of
dawn.
It was several minutes before the travelers realized that not all the wonder lay in the
sky. Behind the speeding cruiser stretched a long, phosphorescent wake, as if a magic finger had
traced a line of light across the Moon's dark and dusty face. „Selene” was drawing a comet tail
behind her, as surely as any ship plowing its way through the tropical oceans of Earth.
Yet there were no microorganisms here, lighting this dead sea with their tiny lamps. Only
countless grains of dust, sparking one against the other as the static discharges caused by
„Selene's” swift passage neutralized themselves. Even when one knew the explanation, it was still
beautiful to watch--to look back into the night and to see this luminous, electric ribbon
continually renewed, continually dying away, as if the Milky Way itself were reflected in the
lunar surface.
The shining wake was lost in the glare as Pat switched on the searchlight. Ominously close
at hand, a great wall of rock was sliding past. At this point the face of the mountain rose almost
sheer from the surrounding sea of dust; it towered overhead to unknown heights, for only where the
racing oval of light fell upon it did it appear to flash suddenly into real existence.
Here were mountains against which the Himalayas, the Rockies, the Alps were newborn
babies. On Earth, the forces of erosion began to tear at all mountains as soon as they were
formed, so that after a few million years they were mere ghosts of their former selves. But the
Moon knew neither wind nor rain; there was nothing here to wear away the rocks except the
immeasurably slow flaking of the dust as their surface layers contracted in the chill of night.
These mountains were as old as the world that had given them birth.
Pat was quite proud of his showmanship, and had planned the next act very carefully. It
looked dangerous, but was perfectly safe, for „Selene” had been over this course a hundred times
and the electronic memory of her guidance system knew the way better than any human pilot.
Suddenly, he switched off the searchlight--and now the passengers could tell that while they had
been dazzled by the glare on one side, the mountains had been stealthily closing in upon them from
the other.
In almost total darkness, „Selene” was racing up a narrow canyon--and not even on a
straight course, for from time to time she zigged and zagged to avoid invisible obstacles. Some of
them, indeed, were not merely invisible, but nonexistent; Pat had programmed this course, at slow
speed and in the safety of daylight, for maximum impact on the nerves. The "Ah's" and "Oh's" from
the darkened cabin behind him proved that he had done a good job.
Far above, a narrow ribbon of stars was all that could be seen of the outside world; it
swung in crazy arcs from right to left and back again with each abrupt change of „Selene's”
course. The Nig-ht Ride, as Pat privately called it, lasted for about five minutes, but seemed
very much longer. When he once again switched on the floods, so that the cruiser was moving in the
center of a great pool of light, there was a sigh of mingled relief and disappointment from the
passengers. This was an experience none of them would forget in a huny.
Now that vision had been restored, they could see that they were traveling up a steep-
walled valley or gorge, the sides of which were slowly drawing apart. Presently the canyon had
widened into a roughly oval amphitheater about three kilometers across-the heart of an extinct
volcano, breached aeons ago, in the days when even the Moon was young.
The crater was extremely small, by lunar standards, but it was unique. The ubiquitous dust
had flooded into it, working its way up the valley age after age, so that now the tourists from
Earth could ride in cushioned comfort into what had once been a cauldron filled with the fires of
Hell. Those fires had died long before the dawn of terrestrial life, and would never wake again.
But there were other forces that had not died, and were merely biding their time.
When „Selene” began a slow circuit of the steeply walled amphitheater, more than one of
her passengers remembered a cruise in some mountain lake at home. Here was the same sheltered
stillness, the same sense of unknown depths beneath the boat. Earth had many crater lakes, but the
Moon only one--though it had far more craters.
Taking his time, Pat made two complete circuits of the lake, while the floodlights played
upon its enclosing walls. This was the best way to see it; during the daytime, when the sun
blasted it with heat and light, it lost much of its magic. But now it belonged to the kingdom of
fantasy, as if it had come from the haunted brain of Edgar Allan Poe. Ever and again one seemed to
glimpse strange shapes moving at the edge of vision, beyond the narrow range of the lights. It was
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pure imagination, of course; nothing moved in all this land except the shadows of the Sun and
Earth. There could be no ghosts upon a world that had never known life.
It was time to turn back, to sail down the canyon into the open sea. Pat aimed the blunt
prow of „Selene” toward the narrow rift in the mountains, and the high walls enfolded them again.
On the outward journey he left the lights on, so that the passengers could see where they were
going; besides, that trick of the Night Ride would not work so well a second time.
Far ahead, beyond the reach of „Selene's” own illumination, a light was growing, spreading
softly across the rocks and crags. Even in her last quarter, Earth still had the power of a dozen
full moons, and now that they were emerging from the shadow of the mountains, she was once more
the mistress of the skies. Every one of the twenty-two men and women aboard „Selene” looked up at
that blue-green crescent, admiring its beauty, wondering at its brilliance. How strange that the
familiar fields and lakes and forests of Earth shone with such celestial glory when one looked at
them from afar! Perhaps there was a lesson here; perhaps no man could appreciate his own world
until he had seen it from space.
And upon Earth, there must be many eyes turned toward the waxing Moon--more than ever
before, now that the Moon meant so much to mankind. It was possible, but unlikely, that even now
some of those eyes were peering through powerful telescopes at the faint spark of „Selene's”
floodlights as it crept through the lunar night. But it would mean nothing to them when that spark
flickered and died.
For a million years the bubble had been growing, like a vast abscess, below the root of
the mountains. Throughout the entire history of Man, gas from the Moon's not yet wholly dead
interior had been forcing itself along lines of weakness, accumulating in cavities hundreds of
meters below the surface. On nearby Earth, the ice ages had marched past, one by one, while the
buried caverns grew and merged and at last coalesced. Now the abscess was about to burst.
Captain Harris had left the controls on autopilot and was talking to the front row of
passengers when the first tremor shook the boat. For a fraction of a second he wondered if a fan
blade had hit some submerged obstacle; then, quite literally, the bottom fell out of his world.
It fell slowly, as all things must upon the Moon. Ahead of „Selene”, in a circle many
acres in extent, the smooth plain puckered like a navel. The Sea was alive and moving, stirred by
the forces that had waked it from its age-long sleep. The center of the disturbance deepened into
a funnel, as if a giant whirlpool were forming in the dust. Every stage of that nightmare
transformation was pitilessly illuminated by the earthlight, until the crater was so deep that its
far wall was completely lost in shadow, and it seemed as if „Selene” were racing into a curving
crescent of utter blackness--an arc of annihilation.
The truth was almost as bad. By the time that Pat had reached the controls, the boat was
sliding and skittering far down that impossible slope. Its own momentum and the accelerating flow
of the dust beneath it were carrying it headlong into the depths. There was nothing he could do
but attempt to keep on an even keel, and to hope that their speed would carry them up the far side
of the crater before it collapsed upon them.
If the passengers screamed or cried out, Pat never heard them. He was conscious only of
that dreadful, sickening slide, and of his own attempts to keep the cruiser from capsizing. Yet
even as he fought with the controls, feeding power first to one fan, then to the other, in an
effort to straighten „Selene's” course, a strange, nagging memory was teasing his mind. Somewhere,
somehow, he had seen this happen before.
That was ridiculous, of course, but the memory would not leave him. Not until he reached
the bottom of the funnel and saw the endless slope of dust rolling down from the crater's star-
fringed lip did the veil of time lift for a moment.
He was a boy again, playing in the hot sand of a forgotten summer. He had found a tiny
pit, perfectly smooth and symmetrical, and there was something lurking in its depths--something
completely buried except for its waiting jaws. The boy had watched, wondering, already conscious
of the fact that this was the stage for some microscopic drama. He had seen an ant, mindlessly
intent upon its mission, stumble at the edge of the crater and topple down the slope.
It would have escaped easily enough--but when the first grain of sand had rolled to the
bottom of the pit, the waiting ogre had reared out of its lair. With its forelegs, it had hurled a
fusillade of sand at the struggling insect, until the avalanche had overwhelmed it and brought it
sliding down into the throat of the crater.
As „Selene” was sliding now. No ant lion had dug this pit on the surface of the Moon, but
Pat felt as helpless now as that doomed insect he had watched so many years ago. Like it, he was
struggling to reach the safety of the rim, while the moving ground swept him back into the depths
where death was waiting. A swift death for the ant, a protracted one for him and his companions.
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The straining motors were making some headway, but not enough. The falling dust was
gaining speed--and, what was worse, it was rising outside the walls of the cruiser. Now it had
reached the lower edge of the windows; now it was creeping up the panes; and at last it had
covered them completely. Pat cut the motors before they tore themselves to pieces, and as he did
so, the rising tide blotted out the last glimpse of the crescent Earth. In darkness and in
silence, they were sinking into the Moon.
Chapter 3
In the banked communications racks of Traffic Control, Earthside North, an electronic
memory stirred uneasily. The time was one second past twenty hundred hours GMT: a pattern of
pulses that should arrive automatically on every hour had failed to make its appearance.
With a swiftness beyond human thought, the handful of cells and microscopic relays looked
for instructions. "WAIT FIVE SECONDS," said the coded orders. "IF NOTHING HAPPENS, CLOSE CIRCUIT
10011001."
The minute portion of the traffic computer as yet concerned with the problem waited
patiently for this enormous period of time--long enough to make a hundred million twenty-figure
additions, or to print most of the contents of the Library of Congress. Then it closed circuit
10011001.
High above the surface of the Moon, from an antenna which, curiously enough, was aimed
directly at the face of the Earth, a radio pulse launched itself into space. In a sixth of a
second it had flashed the fifty thousand kilometers to the relay satellite known as Lagrange II,
directly in the line between Moon and Earth. Another sixth of a second and the pulse had returned,
much amplified, flooding Earthside North from pole to equator.
In terms of human speech, it carried a simple message. "HELLO, SELENE," the pulse said. "I
AM NOT RECEIVING YOUR BEACON. PLEASE REPLY AT ONCE."
The computer waited for another five seconds. Then it sent out the pulse again, and yet
again. Geological ages had passed in the world of electronics, but the machine was infinitely
patient.
Once more, it consulted its instructions. Now they said: "CLOSE CIRCUIT 10101010." The
computer obeyed. In Traffic Control, a green light flared suddenly to red, a buzzer started to saw
the air with its alarm. For the first time, men as well as machines became aware that there was
trouble, somewhere on the Moon.
The news spread slowly at first, for the Chief Administrator took a very poor view of
unnecessary panic. So, still more strongly, did the Tourist Commissioner; nothing was worse for
business than alerts and emergencies--even when, as happened in nine cases out of ten, they proved
to be due to blown fuses, tripped cutouts, or oversensitive alarms. But on a world like the Moon,
it was necessary to be on one's toes. Better be seared by imaginary crises than fail to react to
real ones.
It was several minutes before Commissioner Davis reluctantly admitted that this looked
like a real one. „Selene's” automatic beacon had failed to respond on one earlier occasion, but
Pat Harris had answered as soon as he had been called on the cruiser's assigned frequency. This
time, there was silence. „Selene” had not even replied to a signal sent out on the carefully
guarded MOONCRASH band, reserved solely for emergencies. It was this news that brought the
Commissioner hurrying from the Tourist Tower along the buried glideway into Clavius City.
At the entrance to the Traffic Control center, he met the Chief Engineer, Earthside. That
was a bad sign; it meant that someone thought that rescue operations would be necessary. The two
men looked at each other gravely, each obsessed by the same thought.
"I hope you don't need me," said Chief Engineer Lawrence. "Where's the trouble? All I know
is that a Mooncrash signal's gone out. What ship is it?"
"It's not a ship. It's „Selene”; she's not answering, from the Sea of Thirst."
"My God--if anything's happened to her out there, we can only reach her with the dust-
skis. I always said we should have two cruisers operating, before we started taking out tourists."
"That's what I argued--but Finance vetoed the idea. They said we couldn't have another
until „Selene” proved she could make a profit."
"I hope she doesn't make a headline instead," said Lawrence grimly. "You know what „I”
think about bringing tourists to the Moon."
The Commissioner did, very well; it had long been a bone of contention between them. For
the first time, he wondered if the Chief Engineer might have a point.
It was, as always, very quiet in Traffic Control. On the great wall maps, the green and
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amber lights flashed continuously, their routine messages unimportant against the clamor of that
single, flaring red. At the Air, Power, and Radiation consoles, the duty officers sat like
guardian angels, watching over the safety of one quarter of a world.
"Nothing new," reported the Ground Traffic officer. "We're still completely in the dark.
All we know is that they're „somewhere” out in the Sea."
He traced a circle on the large-scale map.
"Unless they're fantastically off course, they must be in that general area. On the
nineteen hundred hours check, they were within a kilometer of their planned route. At twenty
hundred, their signal had vanished, so whatever happened took place in that sixty minutes."
"How far can „Selene” travel in an hour?" someone asked.
"Flat out, a hundred and twenty kilometers," replied the Commissioner. "But she normally
cruises at well under a hundred. You don't hurry on a sight-seeing tour."
He stared at the map, as if trying to extract information from it by the sheer intensity
of his gaze.
"If they're out in the Sea, it won't take long to find them. Have you sent out the dust-
skis?"
"No, sir; I was waiting for authorization."
Davis looked at the Chief Engineer, who outranked anyone on this side of the Moon except
Chief Administrator Olsen himself. Lawrence nodded slowly.
"Send them out," he said. "But don't expect results in a hurry. It will take awhile to
search several thousand square kilometers--especially at night. Tell them to work over the route
from the last reported position, one ski on either side of it, so that they sweep the widest
possible band."
When the order had gone out, Davis asked unhappily: "What do you think could have
happened?"
"There are only a few possibilities. It must have been sudden, because there was no
message from them. That usually means an explosion."
The Commissioner paled; there was always the chance of sabotage, and no one could ever
guard against that. Because of their vulnerability, space vehicles, like aircraft before them,
were an irresistible attraction to a certain type of criminal. Davis thought of the Venus-bound
liner „Argo”, which had been destroyed with two hundred men, women, and children aboard, because a
maniac had a grudge against a passenger who scarcely knew him.
"And then there's collision," continued the Chief Engineer. "She could have run into an
obstacle."
"Harris is a very careful driver," said the Commissioner. "He's done this trip scores of
times."
"Everyone can make mistakes; it's easy to misjudge your distance when you're driving by
earthlight."
Commissioner Davis barely heard him; he was thinking of all the arrangements he might have
to make if the worst came to the worst. He'd better start by getting the Legal Branch to check the
indemnity forms. If any relatives started suing the Tourist Commission for a few million dollars,
that would undo his entire publicity campaign for the next year--even if he won.
The Ground Traffic officer gave a nervous cough.
"If I might make a suggestion," he said to the Chief Engineer. "We could call Lagrange.
The astronomers up there may be able to see something."
"At night?" asked Davis skeptically. "From fifty thousand kilometers up?"
"Easily, if her searchlights are still burning. It's worth trying."
"Excellent idea," said the Chief Engineer. "Do that right away."
He should have thought of that himself, and wondered if there were any other possibilities
he had overlooked. This was not the first occasion he had been forced to pit his wits against this
strange and beautiful world, so breath-taking in her moments of magic--so deadly in her times of
peril. She would never be wholly tamed, as Earth had been, and perhaps that was just as well. For
it was the lure of the untouched wilderness and the faint but ever-present hint of danger that now
brought the tourists as well as the explorers across the gulfs of space. He would prefer to do
without the tourists--but they helped to pay his salary.
And now he had better start packing. This whole crisis might evaporate, and „Selene” might
turn up again quite unaware of the panic she had caused. But he did not think this would happen,
and his fear deepened to certainty as the minutes passed. He would give her another hour; then he
would take the suborbital shuttle to Port Roris and to the realm of his waiting enemy, the Sea of
Thirst.
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When the PRIORITY RED signal reached Lagrange, Thomas Lawson, Ph.D., was fast asleep. He
resented the interruption; though one needed only two hours' sleep in twenty-four when living
under zero gravity, it seemed a little unfair to lose even that. Then he grasped the meaning of
the message, and was fully awake. At last it looked as if he would be doing something useful here.
Tom Lawson had never been very happy about this assignment; he had wanted to do scientific
research, and the atmosphere aboard Lagrange II was much too distracting. Balanced here between
Earth and Moon, in a cbsmic tightrope act made possible by one of the obscurer consequences of the
law of gravitation, the satellite was an astronautical maid-of-all-work. Ships passing in both
directions took their fixes from it, and used it as a message center--though there was no truth in
the rumor that they stopped to pick up mail. Lagrange was also the relay station for almost all
lunar radio traffic, because the whole earthward-facing side of the Moon lay spread beneath it.
The hundred-centimeter telescope had been designed to look at objects billions of times
farther away than the Moon, but it was admirably suited for this job. From so close at hand, even
with the low power, the view was superb. Tom seemed to be hanging in space immediately above the
Sea of Rains, looking down upon the jagged peaks of the Apennines as they glittered in the morning
light. Though he had only a sketchy knowledge of the Moon's geography, he could recognize at a
glance the great craters of Archimedes and Plato, Aristillus and Eudoxus, the dark scar of the
Alpine Valley, and the solitary pyramid of Pico, casting its long shadow across the plain.
But the daylight region did not concern him; what he sought lay in the darkened crescent
where the sun had not yet risen. In some ways, that might make his task simpler. A signal lamp--
even a hand torch--would be easily visible down there in the night. He checked the map co-
ordinates, and punched the control buttons. The burning mountains drifted out of his field of
view, and only blackness remained, as he stared into the lunar night that had just swallowed more
than twenty men and women.
At first he could see nothing-certainly no winking signal light, flashing its appeal to
the stars. Then, as his eyes grew more sensitive, he could see that this land was not wholly dark.
It was glimmering with a ghostly phosphorescence as it lay bathed in the earthlight, and the
longer he looked, the more details he could see.
There were the mountains to the east of Rainbow Bay, waiting for the dawn that would
strike them soon. And there--my God, what was that star shining in the darkness? His hopes soared,
then swiftly crashed. That was only the lights of Port Roris, where even now men would be waiting
anxiously for the results of his survey.
Within a few minutes, he had convinced himself that a visual search was useless. There was
not the slightest chance that he could see an object no bigger than a bus, down there in that
faintly luminous landscape. In the daytime, it would have been different; he could have spotted
„Selene” at once by the long shadow she cast across the Sea. But the human eye was not sensitive
enough to make this search by the light of the waning Earth, from a height of fifty thousand
kilometers.
This did not worry Tom. He had scarcely expected to see anything, on this first visual
survey. It was a century and a half since astronomers had had to rely upon their eyesight; today,
they had far more delicate weapons--a whole armory of light amplifiers and radiation detectors.
One of these, he was certain, would be able to find „Selene”.
He would not have been so sure of this had he known that she was no longer upon the
surface of the Moon.
Chapter 4
When „Selene” came to rest, both crew and passengers were still too stricken by
astonishment to utter a sound. Captain Harris was the first to recover, perhaps because he was the
only one who had any idea of what had happened.
It was a cave-in, of course; they were not rare, though none had ever been recorded in the
Sea of Thirst. Deep down in the Moon, something had given way; possibly the infinitesimal weight
of „Selene” had itself triggered the collapse. As Pat Harris rose shakily to his feet, he wondered
what line of talk he had better use to the passengers. He could hardly pretend that everything was
under control and that they'd be on their way again in five minutes; on the other hand, panic was
liable to set in if he revealed the true seriousness of the situation. Sooner or later he would
have to, but until then it was essential to maintain confidence.
He caught Miss Wilkins' eye as she stood at the back of the cabin, behind the expectantly
waiting passengers. She was very pale, but quite composed; he knew that he could rely on her, and
flashed her a reassuring smile.
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"We seem to be in one piece," he began in an easy, conversational style. "We've had a
slight accident, as you'll gather, but things could be worse." (How? a part of his mind asked him.
Well, the hull could have been fractured. . . . So you want to prolong the agony? He shut off the
interior monologue by an effort of will.) "We've been caught in a landslip-a moonquake, if you
like. There's certainly no need to be alarmed; even if we can't get out under our own power, Port
Roris will soon have someone here. Meanwhile, I know that Miss Wilkins was just going to serve
refreshments, so I suggest you all relax while I--ah--do whatever proves necessary."
That seemed to have gone over quite well. With a silent sigh of relief, he turned back to
the controls. As he did so, he noticed one of the passengers light a cigarette.
It was an automatic reaction, and one that he felt very much like sharing. He said
nothing; that would have destroyed the atmosphere his little speech had created. But he caught the
man's eye just long enough for the message to go home; the cigarette had been stubbed out before
he resumed his seat.
As he switched on the radio, Pat heard the babble of conversation start up behind him.
When a group of people were talking together, you could gather their mood even if you could not
hear the individual words. He could detect annoyance, excitement, even amusement--but, as yet,
very little fear. Probably those who were speaking did not realize the full danger of the
situation; the ones who did were silent.
And so was the ether. He searched the wave bands from end to end, and found only a faint
crackle from the electrified dust that had buried them. It was just as he had expected. This
deadly stuff, with its high metallic content, was an almost perfect shield. It would pass neither
radio waves nor sound; when he tried to transmit, he would be like a man shouting from the bottom
of a well that was packed with feathers.
He switched the beacon to the high-powered emergency setting, so that it automatically
broadcast a distress signal on the MOONCRASH band. If anything got through, this would; there was
no point in trying to call Port Roris himself, and his fruitless efforts would merely upset the
passengers. He left the receiver operating on Selene's assigned frequency, in case of any reply,
but he knew that it was useless. No one could hear them; no one could speak to them. As far as
they were concerned, the rest of the human race might not exist.
He did not brood over this setback for very long. He had expected it, and there was too
much else to do. With the utmost care, he checked all the instruments and gauges. Everything
appeared to be perfectly normal, except that the temperature was just a shade high. That also was
to be expected, now that the dust blanket was shielding them from the cold of space.
His greatest worry was the thickness of that blanket, and the pressure it was exerting on
the boat. There must be thousands of tons of the stuff above „Selene”--and her hull had been
designed to withstand pressure from within, not from without. If she went too deep, she might be
cracked like an eggshell.
How deep the cruiser was, he had no idea. When he had caught his last glimpse of the
stars, she was about ten meters below the surface, and she might have been carried down much
farther by the suction of the dust. It would be advisable-- even though it would increase their
oxygen consumption--to put up the internal pressure and thus take some of the strain off the hull.
Very slowly, so that there would be no telltale popping of ears to alarm anyone, he
boosted the cabin pressure by twenty per cent. When he had finished, he felt a little happier. He
was not the only one, for as soon as the pressure gauge had stabilized at its new level, a quiet
voice said over his shoulder: "I think that was a very good idea."
He twisted around to see what busybody was spying on him, but his angry protest died
unborn. On his first quick inspection, Pat had recognized none of the passengers; now, however, he
could tell that there was something vaguely familiar about the stocky, gray-haired man who had
come forward to the driver's position.
"I don't want to intrude, Captain--you're the skipper here. But I thought I'd better
introduce myself in case I can help. I'm Commodore Hansteen."
Pat stared, slack-jawed, at the man who had led the first expedition to Pluto, who had
probably landed on more virgin planets and moons than any explorer in history. All he could say to
express his astonishment was "You weren't down on the passenger list!"
The Commodore smiled.
"My alias is Hanson. Since I retired, I've been trying to do a little sight-seeing without
quite so much responsibility. And now that I've shaved off my beard, no one ever recognizes me."
"I'm very glad to have you here," said Pat, with deep feeling. Already some of the weight
seemed to have lifted from his shoulders; the Commodore would be a tower of strength in the
difficult hours--or days--that lay ahead.
"If you don't mind," continued Hansteen, with that same careful politeness, "I'd
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