The rearview display strip seized her mind. She spun on her heel for a direct look. Close to the pylon nearest her, the loaded gondola was swinging in ever wilder arcs. The column shuddered. Several meters beyond, a stone hit, spurted its own little dust cloud and gouged its own little crater. Another struck a boulder, glanced off, and skittered murderously low above the regolith.
The dust began to fall. Renewed blindness fell with it. Dagny felt impact after impact somewhere hard by. She stood fast and fumbled in a pouch after her scrub cloth. Perhaps it was to stave off panic that there passed through her: Power joints in spacesuits were fine, took the curse off interior air pressure, but when would the engineers develop tactile amplifiers for the gloves and let you properly feel what you were doing?
The Moon accelerates objects downward slowly, but has no atmosphere to hinder them. Within a minute, sixty mortal seconds, the local bombardment had ended and she could wipe her faceplate clean.
Relief flooded her in a wave, a sob, a looseness in the knees as if she would fall on them. Nothing worse than dust seemed to have reached the camp or the mine. Well, of course the odds had always favored that, else this operation would have been impossible, though nobody expected anything so big to strike in any given vicinity, not for hundreds or thousands of years—Her gaze traveled onward and stopped. She strangled a scream.
The pylon stood warped. The cable held but was drawn line-taut and immobile, the engine at this end surely badly damaged. The gondola lay on its side, three meters distant. Its mad gyrations had unhooked it and strewn its load afar. Metallic chunks were piled and tumbled throughout Dagny’s worksite.
Somebody cried out, a hoarse and jagged noise of agony. It broke a hammerstruck silence; suddenly the radio band clamored. Dagny switched her transmitter to full power. “Hold on!” she made her voice go overriding. “Shut up! We’ve got rescue to do!”
Meanwhile she bounded back to the scene. A dim part of her wondered how she dared take charge, she who’d never met anything like this. Classes and simulations at the academy felt unreal. But the leadership, the duty was hers.
Then she was too busy for doubts or fears.
“Names, by the numbers.” They snapped in her earphones, one after the next. Janice Bye sprawled dead, her helmet split open, her face ghastly under the long sunlight. Two people appeared to be in shock, slumped useless and shivering. And Joe, Joe Packer was on his back, right leg buried under a heap of heavy chunks.
Dagny knelt beside him. After the first animal shriek he had gone silent, apart from the gasping breath. His skin looked more gray than brown, studded with sweat that sparkled like dew. Against it his eyeballs stood appallingly white around dark irises and dilated pupils. Did Earth tinge them faintly blue? Dagny caught both his hands in hers. “How are you, Joe?” The question came forth steady.
He fought for the same control. “Like I’m choking,” he mumbled. “Doesn’t hurt … much … any more … but dizzy and—uh-h—”
The spacesuit leg must have been ruptured, she decided, probably at the knee joint. Air would have gushed out, more than the reserve tank could replenish, before enough gunk oozed tree and hardened to plug a nole that size. Oxygen-starved on top of trauma, his heart might fail at any instant.
“Greenbaum, fetch an air bottle and coupling,” Dagny snapped. You had to tell everybody exactly what to do, or they’d fall over each other’s feet. “Royce, Olson, see to Etcheverry and Graf,” the shock cases. “The rest of you, crowbars, spades, get this junk off of Joe. Carefully!”
“Bloody ‘ell, ‘ere, stand aside,” she heard. It was a rumbling bass, startlingly like Anson Guthrie’s but the English accented. In her rearview she saw the speaker loom above her. Behind him, another man carried something. They must be the geologists. Nobody from the main camp or the mine could have made it here this fast.
You couldn’t let just anybody prong in. “What do you want?” Dagny demanded.