In the crimson gloom, the two men looked at each other with a dawning hope. Then Pat said slowly: “I’m sure that’s the explanation. Perhaps our luck’s beginning to turn.”
He glanced at his watch, and did a quick mental calculation.
“The sun’s rising over the Sea about now. Base will have the dust-skis out looking for us, and they must know our approximate position. Ten to one they’ll find us in a few hours.”
“Should we tell the Commodore?”
“No, let him sleep. He’s had a harder day than any of us. This news can wait until morning.”
When McKenzie had left him, Pat tried to resume his interrupted sleep. But he could not do so; he lay with eyes open in the faint red glow, wondering at this strange turn of fate. The dust that had swallowed and then had threatened to broil them had now come to their aid, as its convection currents swept their surplus heat up to the surface. Whether those currents would continue to flow when the rising sun smote the Sea with its fall fury, he could not guess.
Outside the wall, the dust still whispered past, and suddenly Pat was reminded of an antique hourglass he had once been shown as a child. When you turned it over, sand poured through a narrow constriction into the lower chamber, and its rising level marked the passage of the minutes and the hours.
Before the invention of clocks, myriads of men must have had their days divided by such falling grains of sand. But none until now, surely, had ever had his life span metered out by a fountain of rising dust.
Chapter 7
In Clavius City, Chief Administrator Olsen and Tourist Commissioner Davis had just finished conferring with the Legal Department. It had not been a cheerful occasion; much of the time had been spent discussing the waivers of responsibility which the missing tourists had signed before they boarded Selene. Commissioner Davis had been much against this when the trips were started, on the grounds that it would scare away customers, but the Administration’s lawyers had insisted. Now he was very glad that they had had their way.
He was glad, also, that the Port Roris authorities had done the job properly; matters like this were sometimes treated as unimportant formalities and quietly ignored. There was a full list of signatures for _Selene’s_ passengers–with one possible exception that the lawyers were still arguing about.
The incognito Commodore had been listed as R. S. Hanson, and it looked very much as if this was the name he had actually signed. The signature was, however, so illegible that it might well have been “Hansteen.” Until a facsimile was radioed from Earth, no one would be able to decide this point. It was probably unimportant. Because the Commodore was traveling on official business, the Administration was bound to accept some responsibility for him. And for all the other passengers, it was responsible morally, if not legally.
Above all, it had to make an effort to find them and give them a decent burial. This little problem had been placed squarely in the lap of Chief Engineer Lawrence, who was still at Port Roris.
He had seldom tackled anything with less enthusiasm. While there was a chance that the _Selene’s_ passengers were still alive, he would have moved heaven, Earth, and Moon to get at them. But now that they must be dead, he saw no point in risking men’s lives to locate them and dig them out. Personally, he could hardly think of a better place to be buried than among these eternal hills.
That they were dead, Chief Engineer Robert Lawrence did not have the slightest doubt; all the facts fitted together too perfectly. The quake had occurred at just about the time Selene should have been leaving Crater Lake, and the gorge was now half blocked with slides. Even the smallest of those would have crushed her like a paper toy, and those aboard would have perished within seconds as the air gushed out. If, by some million-to-one chance, she had escaped being smashed, her radio signals would have been received. The tough little automatic beacon had been built to take any reasonable punishment, and if _that_ was out of action, it must have been some crack-up.
The first problem would be to locate the wreck. That might be fairly easy, even if it was buried beneath a million tons of rubble. There were prospecting instruments and a whole range of metal detectors that could do the trick. And when the hull was cracked, the air inside would have rushed out into the lunar near-vacuum; even now, hours later, there would be traces of carbon dioxide and oxygen that might be spotted by one of the gas detectors used for pinpointing spaceship leaks. As soon as the dust-skis came back to base for servicing and recharging, he’d get them fitted with leak detectors and would send them sniffing round the rockslides.
No–_finding_ the wreck might be simple–but getting it out might be impossible. He wouldn’t guarantee that the job could be done for a hundred million. (And he could just see the C.A.’s face if he mentioned a sum like that.) For one thing, it was a physical impossibility to bring heavy equipment into the area–the sort of equipment needed to move thousands of tons of rubble. The flimsy little dust-skis were useless. To shift those rockslides, one would have to float moondozers across the Sea of Thirst, and import whole shiploads of gelignite to blast a road through the mountains. The whole idea was absurd. He could understand the Administration’s point of view, but he was damned if he would let his overworked Engineering Division get saddled with such a Sisyphean task.
As tactfully as possible–for the Chief Administrator was not the sort of man who liked to take no for an answer–he began to draft his report. Summarized, it might have read: “A. The job’s almost certainly impossible. B. If it can be done at all, it will cost millions and may involve further loss of life. C. It’s not worth doing anyway.” But because such bluntness would make him unpopular, and he had to give his reasons, the report ran to over three thousand words.
When he had finished dictating, he paused to marshal his ideas, could think of nothing further, and added: “Copies to Chief Administrator, Moon; Chief Engineer, Farside; Supervisor, Traffic Control; Tourist Commissioner; Central Filing. Classify as Confidential.”
He pressed the transcription key. Within twenty seconds all twelve pages of his report, impeccably typed and punctuated, with several grammatical slips corrected, had emerged from the office telefax. He scanned it rapidly, in case the electrosecretary had made mistakes. She did this occasionally (all electrosees were “she”), especially during rush periods when she might be taking dictation from a dozen sources at once. In any event, no wholly sane machine could cope with all the eccentricities of a language like English, and every wise executive checked his final draft before he sent it out. Many were the hilarious disasters that had overtaken those who had left it all to electrOnics.
Lawrence was halfway through this task when the telephone rang.
“Lagrange II on the line, sir,” said the operator–a human one, as it happened. “A Doctor Lawson wants to speak to you.”
Lawson? Who the devil’s that? the C.E.E. asked himself. Then he remembered; that was the astronomer who was making the telescopic search. Surely someone had told him that it was useless.
The Chief Engineer had never had the dubious privilege of meeting Dr. Lawson. He did not know that the astronomer was a very neurotic and very brilliant young man–and, what was more important in this case, a very stubborn one.
Lawson had just begun to dismantle the infrared scanner when he stopped to consider his action. Since he had practically completed the blasted thing, he might as well test it, out of sheer scientific curiosity. He prided himself, rightly, as a practical experimenter; this was something unusual in an age when most so-called astronomers were really mathematicians who never went near an observatory.
He was now so tired that only sheer cussedness kept him going. If the scanner had not worked the first time, he would have postponed testing it until he had had some sleep. But by the good luck that is occasionally the reward of skill, it _did_ work; only a few minor adjustments were needed before the image of the Sea of Thirst began to build up upon the viewing screen.
It appeared line by line, like an old-fashioned TV picture, as the infrared detector scanned back and forth across the face of the Moon. The light patches indicated relatively warm areas, the dark ones, regions of cold. Almost all the Sea of Thirst was dark, except for a brilliant band where the rising sun had already touched it with fire. But in that darkness, as Tom looked closely, he could see some very faint tracks, glimmering as feebly as the paths of snails through some moonlit garden back on Earth.