“I’m damned if I know what’s happened,” he said. “But I’m sure of this–we’re not done for yet, by several light-years. We may have sunk a little farther, but our friends on the raft will soon catch up with us. This will mean a slight delay–that’s all. There’s certainly nothing to worry about.”
“I don’t want to be an alarmist, Captain,” said Barrett, “but suppose the raft has sunk as well? What then?”
“We’ll know as soon as I get the radio fixed,” replied Pat, glancing anxiously at the wires dangling from the roof cable duct. “And until I get this spaghetti sorted out, you’ll have to put up with the emergency lighting.”
“I don’t mind,” said Mrs. Schuster. “I think it’s rather cute.”
Bless you, Mrs. S., said Pat to himself. He glanced quickly around the cabin; though it was hard to see all their expressions in this dim lighting, the passengers seemed calm enough.
They were not quite so calm a minute later; that was all the time it took to discover that nothing could be done to repair the lights or radio. The wiring had been ripped out far down inside the conduit, beyond reach of the simple tools available here.
“This is rather more serious,” reported Pat. “We won’t be able to communicate, unless they lower a microphone to make contact with us.”
“That means,” said Barrett, who seemed to like looking on the dark side of things, “that they’ve lost touch with us. They won’t understand why we’re not answering. Suppose they assume that we’re all dead–and abandon the whole operation?”
The thought had flashed through Pat’s mind, but he had dismissed it almost at once.
“You’ve heard Chief Engineer Lawrence on the radio,” he answered. “He’s not the sort of man who’d give up until he had absolute proof that we’re no longer alive. You needn’t worry on _that_ score.”
“What about our air?” asked Professor Jayawardene anxiously. “We’re back on our own resources again.”
“That should last for several hours, now the absorbers have been regenerated. Those pipes will be in place before then,” answered Pat, with slightly more confidence than he felt. “Meanwhile, we’ll have to be patient and provide our own entertainment again. We did it for three days; we should be able to manage for a couple of hours.”
He glanced again around the cabin, looking for any signs of disagreement, and saw that one of the passengers was rising slowly to his feet. It was the very last person he would have expected–quiet little Mr. Radley, who had uttered perhaps a dozen words during the entire trip.
Pat still knew no more about him than that he was an accountant, and come from New Zealand–the only country on Earth still slightly isolated from the rest of the world, by virtue of its position. It could be reached, of course, as quickly as any other spot on the planet, but it was the end of the line, not a way station to somewhere else. As a result, the New Zealanders still proudly preserved much of their individuality. They claimed, with a good deal of truth, to have salvaged all that was left of English culture, now that the British Isles had been absorbed into the Atlantic Community.
“You want to say something, Mister Radley?” asked Pat. Radley looked around the dim-lit cabin, rather like a schoolmaster about to address a class.
“Yes, Captain,” he began. “I have a confession to make. I am very much afraid that this is all my fault.”
When Chief Engineer Lawrence broke off his commentary, Earth knew within two seconds that something had gone wrong–though it took several minutes for the news to reach Mars and Venus. But what had happened, no one could guess from the picture on the screen. For a few seconds there had been a flurry of frantic but meaningless activity, but now the immediate crisis seemed to be over. The space-suited figures were huddled together, obviously in conference–and with their telephone circuits plugged in, so that no one could overhear them. It was very frustrating to watch that silent discussion, and to have no idea of what it was about.
During those long minutes of agonizing suspense, while the studio was trying to discover what was happening, Jules did his best to keep the picture alive. It was an extremely difficult job, handling such a static scene from a single camera position. Like all cameramen, Jules hated to be pinned down in one spot. This site was perfect, but it was fixed, and he was getting rather tired of it. He had even asked if the ship could be moved, but as Captain Anson put it, “I’m damned if I’ll go hopping back and forth over the mountains. This is a spaceship, not a–a chamois.”
So Jules had to ring the changes on pans and zooms, though he used the latter with discretion, because nothing upset viewers more quickly than being hurled back and forth through space, or watching scenery explode in their faces. If he used the power-zoom flat out, Jules could sweep across the Moon at about fifty thousand kilometers an hour–and several million viewers would get motion sickness.
At last that urgent, soundless conference was breaking up; the men on the raft were unplugging their telephones. Now, perhaps, Lawrence would answer the radio calls that had been bombarding him for the last five minutes.
“My God,” said Spenser, “I don’t believe it! Do you see what they’re doing?”
“Yes,” said Captain Anson, “and I don’t believe it either. But it looks as if they’re abandoning the site.”
Like lifeboats leaving a sinking ship, the two dust-skis, crowded with men, were pulling away from the raft.
Chapter 26
Perhaps it was well that _Selene_ was now out of radio contact; it would hardly have helped morale if her occupants had known that the skis, heavily overloaded with passengers, were heading away from the site. But at the moment, no one in the cruiser was thinking of the rescue effort; Radley *as holding the center of the dimly lit stage.
“What do you mean–this is all your fault?” asked Pat in the baffled silence that followed the New Zealander’s statement– only baffled as yet; not hostile, because no one could take such a remark seriously.
“It’s a long story, Captain,” said Radley, speaking in a voice that, though it was oddly unemotional, had undertones that Pat could not identify. It was almost like listening to a robot, and it gave Pat an unpleasant feeling somewhere in the middle of his spine. “I don’t mean to say that I _deliberately_ caused this to happen. But I’m afraid it is deliberate, and I’m sorry to have involved you all. You see–they are after me.”
This is all we need, thought Pat. We really seem to have the odds stacked against us. In this small company we’ve got a neurotic spinster, a drug addict–and now a maniac. What other freaks are going to reveal themselves before we’re finished?
Then he realized the unfairness of his judgment. The truth was that he had been very lucky. Against Radley, Miss Morley, and Hans Baldur (who had given no trouble after that single, never-mentioned incident), he had the Commodore, Dr. McKenzie, the Schusters, little Professor Jayawardene, David Barrett–and all the others who had done as they were asked, without making a fuss. He felt a sudden surge of affection– even of love–toward them all, for giving him their active or passive support.
And especially toward Sue, who was already one jump ahead of him, as she always seemed to be. There she was, moving unobtrusively about her duties at the back of the cabin. Pat doubted if anyone noticed–certainly Radley did not–as she opened the medicine chest and palmed one of those cigarettesized cylinders of oblivion. If this fellow gave trouble, she would be ready.
At the moment, trouble seemed the furthest thing from Radley’s mind. He appeared to be completely self-possessed and perfectly rational; there was no mad gleam in his eye, or any other of the clichés of insanity. He looked exactly what he was–a middle-aged New Zealand accountant taking a holiday on the Moon.
“This is very interesting, Mister Radley,” said Commodore Hansteen in a carefully neutral voice, “but please excuse our ignorance. Who are ‘they,’ and why should they be after you?”
“I am sure, Commodore, that you’ve heard of flying saucers?”
Flying _what?_ Pat asked himself. Hansteen seemed better informed than he was.
“Yes, I have,” he answered a little wearily. “I’ve come across them in old books on astronautics. They were quite a craze, weren’t they, about eighty years ago?”
He realized that “craze” was an unfortunate word to use, and was relieved when Radley took no offense.
“Oh,” he answered, “they go back much further than that, but it was only in the last century that people started to take notice of them. There’s an old manuscript from an English abbey dated 1290 that describes one in detail–and that isn’t the earliest report, by any means. More than ten thousand flying saucer sightings have been recorded prior to the twentieth century.”