They were both sitting cross-legged on the floor, just beside the pilot’s position, with the oxygen bottle between them. Every few minutes they would take turns with the inhaler– but only two breaths at a time. I never imagined, Pat told himself, that I should ever get involved in the number-one cliche of the TV space operas. But it had occurred in real life too often to be funny any more–especially when it was happening to you.
Both Pat and McKenzie–or almost certainly one of them– could survive if they abandoned the other passengers to their fate. Trying to keep these twenty men and women alive, they might also doom themselves.
The situation was one in which logic warred against conscience. But it was nothing new; certainly it was not peculiar to the age of space. It was as old as Mankind, for countless times in the past, lost or isolated groups had faced death through lack of water, food, or warmth. Now it was oxygen that was in short supply, but the principle was just the same.
Some of those groups had left no survivors; others, a handful who would spend the rest of their lives in self-justification. What must George Pollard, late captain of the whaler _Essex_, have thought as he walked the streets of Nantucket, with the taint of cannibalism upon his soul? That was a two-hundredyear-old story of which Pat had never heard; he lived on a world too busy making its own legends to import those of Earth. As far as he was concerned, he had already made his choice, and he knew, without asking, that McKenzie would agree with him. Neither was the sort of man who would fight over the last bubble of oxygen in the tank. But if it _did_ come to a fight–
“What are you smiling at?” asked McKenzie.
Pat relaxed. There was something about this burly Australian scientist that he found very reassuring. Hansteen gave him the same impression, but McKenzie was a much younger man. There were some people you knew -that you could trust, whom you were certain would never let you down. He had that feeling about McKenzie.
“If you want to know,” he said, putting down the oxygen mask, “I was thinking that I wouldn’t have much of a chance if you decided to keep the bottle for yourself.”
McKenzie looked a little surprised; then he too grinned.
“I thought all you Moon-born were sensitive about that,” he said.
“_I’ve_ never felt that way,” Pat answered. “After all, brains are more important than muscles. I can’t help it that I was bred in a gravity field a sixth of yours. Anyway, how could you tell I was Moon-born?”
“Well, it’s partly your build. You all have that same tall, slender physique. And there’s your skin color–the U.V. lamvs never seem to give you the same tan as natural sunlight.”
“It’s certainly tanned _you_,” retorted Pat with a grin. “At night, you must be a menace to navigation. Incidentally, how did you get a name like McKenzie?”
Having had little contact with the racial tensions that were not yet wholly extinct on Earth, Pat could make such remarks without embarrassment–indeed, without even realizing that they might cause embarrassment.
“My grandfather had it bestowed on him by a missionary when he was baptized. I’m very doubtful if it has any–ah– genetic significance. To the best of my knowledge, I’m a fullblooded abo.”
“Abo?”
“Aboriginal. We were the people occupying Australia before the whites came along. The subsequent events were somewhat depressing.”
Pat’s knowledge of terrestrial history was vague; like most residents of the Moon, he tended to assume that nothing of great importance had ever happened before 8 November 1967, when the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution had been so spectacularly celebrated.
“I suppose there was war?”
“You could hardly call it that. We had spears and boomerangs; they had guns. Not to mention T.B. and V.D., which were much more effective. It took us about a hundred and fifty years to get over the impact. It’s only in the last century– since about nineteen forty–that our numbers started going up again. Now there are about a hundred thousand of us– almost as many as when your ancestors came.”
McKenzie delivered this information with an ironic detachment that took any personal sting out of it, but Pat thought that he had better disclaim responsibility for the misdeeds of his terrestrial predecessors.
“Don’t blame me for what happened on Earth,” he said. “I’ve never been there, and I never will–I couldn’t face that gravity. But I’ve looked at Australia plenty of times through the telescope. I have some sentimental feeling for the place– my parents took off from Woomera.”
“And my ancestors named it; a woomera’s a booster stage for spears.”
“Are any of your people,” asked Pat, choosing his words with care, “still living in primitive conditions? I’ve heard that’s still true, in some parts of Asia.”
“The old tribal life’s gone. It went very quickly, when the African nations in the U.N. started bullying Australia. Often quite unfairly, I might add–for I’m an Australian first, and an aboriginal second. But I must admit that my white countrymen were often pretty stupid; they must have been, to think that we were stupid! Why, ‘way into the last century some of them still thought we were Stone Age savages. Our technology was Stone Age, all right–but we weren’t.”
There seemed nothing incongruous to Pat about this discussion, beneath the surface of the Moon, of a way of life so distant both in space and time. He and McKenzie would have to entertain each other, keep an eye on their twenty unconscious companions, and fight off sleep, for at least five more hours. This was as good a way as any of doing it.
“If your people weren’t in the Stone Age, Doc–and just for the sake of argument, I’ll grant that _you_ aren’t–how did the whites get that idea?”
“Sheer stupidity, with the help of a preconceived bias. It’s an easy assumption that if a man can’t count, write, or speak good English, he must be unintelligent. I can give you a perfect example from my own family. My grandfather–the first McKenzie–lived to see the year two thousand, but he never learned to count beyond ten. And his description of a total eclipse of the Moon was ‘Kerosene lamp bilong Jesus Christ he bugger-up finish altogether.’
“Now, I can write down the differential equations of the Moon’s orbital motion, but I don’t claim to be brighter than Grandfather. If we’d been switched in time, he might have been the better physicist. Our opportunities were different-that’s all. Grandfather never had occasion to learn to count; and I never had to raise a family in the desert–which was a highly skilled, full-time job.”
“Perhaps,” said Pat thoughtfully, “we could do with some of your grandfather’s skills here. For that’s what we’re trying to do now–survive in a desert.”
“I suppose you could put it that way, though I don’t think that boomerang and fire stick would be much use to us. Maybe we could use some magic–but I’m afraid I don’t know any, and I doubt if the tribal gods could make it from Arnhem Land.”
“Do you ever feel sorry,” asked Pat, “about the breakup of your people’s way of life?”
“How could I? I scarcely knew it. I was born in Brisbane, and had learned to run an electronic computer before I ever saw a corroboree–”
“A what?”
“Tribal religious dance–and half the participants in _that_ were taking degrees in cultural anthropology. I’ve no romantic illusions about the simple life and the noble savage. My ancestors were fine people, and I’m not ashamed of them, but geography had trapped them in a dead end. After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization. In the long run, it was a good thing that the white settlers arrived, despite their charming habit of selling us poisoned flour when they wanted our land.”
“They did _that?_”
“They certainly did. But why are you surprised? That was a good hundred years before Belsen.”
Pat thought this over for a few minutes. Then he looked at his watch and said, with a distinct expression of relief: “Time I reported to Base again. Let’s have a quick look at the passengers first.”
Chapter 20
There was no time now, Lawrence realized, to worry about inflatable igloos and the other refinements of gracious living in the Sea of Thirst. All that mattered was getting those air pipes down into the cruiser. The engineers and technicians would just have to sweat it out in the suits until the job was finished. Their ordeal would not last for long. If they could not manage inside five or six hours, they could turn round and go home again, and leave _Selene_ to the world after which she was named.
In the workshops of Port Roris, unsung and unrecorded miracles of improvisation were now being achieved. A complete air-conditioning plant, with its liquid-oxygen tanks, humidity and carbon-dioxide absorbers, temperature and pressure regulators, had to be dismantled and loaded on to a sledge. So did a small drilling rig, hurled by shuttle rocket from the Geophysics Division at Clavius. So did the specially designed plumbs ing, which now had to work at the first attempt, for there would be no opportunity for modifications.