“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 therr 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.
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 oblect 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.
“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.